Which stops me for a moment, because I didn’t think he did.
A student at the edge of the crowd stops poking at his midriff with a stick and looks at us. He lets out a scream.
The attention of the crowd shifts.
Above our heads the clock’s second hand ticks, once, twice.
Kayla leaps, impossibly high. She lands on the student’s shoulders, sends him crumpling, but is already away, hits the college wall like a spider.
The crowd lurches towards me.
“Any chance you could do this faster?” I don’t mean to be ungrateful, but there are a lot of crazy people charging me.
Kayla starts climbing. The crowd starts running. Kayla reaches the top. The second hand ticks.
Kayla hammers at stone with her blade. Her arms blur. Stonework cracks and creaks.
The crowd hesitates as one. Looks back. Looks up.
Limestone explodes away from Kayla’s blade. Shards shower the crowd. The clock tower leans wildly. The second hand spins away from the clock.
Kayla breaks from her work, steps back, kicks the wobbling stone monument. She smiles. “Timber.”
The Nyarlathotep Event :: Case File #4 :: Portal
Oxford, England. Not a good day.
Some days, I think, I really need to ask for a transfer. You get told you’re going into a department called MI37, and you think, oh that sounds cloak-and-dagger exciting. They charge you with defending the realm from all things supernatural and tentacle-y, and you think, well that could be exciting.
Then you find you find yourself in the middle of Christ Church College facing a pack of yellow-robed cultists standing around a bubbling rip in reality.
“Not good,” I say to Kayla, my equally up-shit-creek co-worker.
The cultists are chanting, of course. Limited options on the daily duties for a cultist, I imagine. Chant or sacrifice. And for all my bitching about my employer, at least working for MI37 isn’t tedious.
Take the portal, for instance. If I don’t close it in the next three minutes, all of Oxford is going to be permanently infected by another reality constructed of humanity’s collective fears.
Likely a suicidal task, but not a boring one.
Unfortunately Kayla and I lack the appropriate color coordination, so cultists catch on to us pretty fast. Three break from the circle, pulling large knives.
I really wish I hadn’t dropped my gun earlier. But things tend to get distracting when an entire city goes insane. Still, this is where Kayla comes in. No need for a gun when the woman next to you can make a champion sushi chef look like a sloppy amateur with a blade.
“All yours,” I say.
Which is when the smoking grenade of crazy gas comes at her. It’s a futile throw, of course. Kayla bats it out of the air without blinking. But the problem with a gas grenade designed to shatter is that it shatters as soon as you hit it.
Kayla disappears in a cloud of red mist. There is a scream from its depths.
“No!”
I step towards it. Then leap back as Kayla emerges. She’s clawing at her face with one hand. She sweeps viciously, blindly back and forth with her sword in the other. I duck a blow, another.
“Kayla!” I yell at her. “Kayla!” But she’s gone, far gone. I don’t think she even hears me.
And at that point, some cultists deign to leave the comfort of their fraternity and come to hand my arse to me.
The first cultist swings at me. I duck, grab a piece of shattered clocktower, use it to shatter most of his jaw.
That gives the other two a good time to sneak round behind me. One slices at me. I roll with it. My jacket takes the hit. The second cultist gets a good kick in. There’s a better range of movement allowed by ragged yellow robes that you’d think. I double over, wheezing.
They come at me from opposite directions, knives held high. I do the best I can and collapse.
Knives whistle over my head. I use the rubble to crush one cultist’s foot. He drops away howling. Meanwhile the other knife comes down and opens up my shoulder so I have some howling of my own to do.
I go at the guy angry then. Fighting is not exactly my forte. I resemble an off-balance ballerina pinwheeling across the Christ Church quad. Fortunately the cultist’s hectic chanting schedule hasn’t left him much time for self-defense classes. He swings the knife low. I stagger-step out of the way. My tie become noticeably shorter, the end fluttering away. The cultist becomes noticeably less conscious, my chunk of rubble colliding with his left ear.
And all that would be great if there were only three cultists. But three more separate from around the circle, which draws tighter.
I close fast. My shoulder connects with one before he gets his dagger free. I step into him, whirling wide with the rubble. A second cultist comes in low and hard, head slamming into my stomach, knife nicking my thigh. I bring my knee up into his nose. He drops away. The other grabs me from behind. The knife comes up. I slam my head backwards. His nose crunches. He drops me. I spin, the rubble held tight in my fist. More of his face crunches.
The guy on the floor is thinking about getting up. Me and my rubble encourage him not to.
Behind me, Kayla is on her knees, sobbing.
Three more cultists, but the circle is tight now and I’m close.
I break into a run, slam past one, spinning round but still moving. One goes to trip me, I hurdle desperately, mis-step, sprawl, roll.
I connect with the legs of a cultist in the circle. He trips, crashes forwards. Forward into the portal.
An ugly ripping sound. Then the cultists are down one member. The chanting falters. The cultists stare in a tiny moment of shocked silence.
Except… Not quite silence.
With a sound like a wet fart, the portal collapses in on itself.
Strike one for the good guys.
Now if only I hadn’t just given twenty angry cultists nothing to do but use me like a pināta…
The Nyarlathotep Event :: Case File #5 :: Nyarlathotep
Christ Church College, Oxford, England
One thing I’ve always liked about Kurt Russell movies is that they end.
That sounds wrong…
I like that they conclude. Evil is defeated. The good guy wins. A sunset is ridden into.
In real life you face down a horde of angry cultists, close an interdimensional portal, get attacked, find out your incapacitated sword-wielding partner is now… capacitated?… watch her get rid of the rest of your problems, and then you find out there’s a seven-foot tall avatar of fear and chaos who’s all pissed about it and manifested behind you when you weren’t looking.
In real life this shit never ends.
Having never faced an interdimensional avatar of fear and chaos before, I go with the nearest weapon to hand and throw a rock at him.
Apparently this avatar—Nyarlathotep is his name—is made of sterner stuff than that.
So: plan B.
It may not be overly heroic to run and hide while getting your friend to do the fighting, but Kayla virtually has superpowers and I don’t, so this may not be as bad as it initially looks.
Kayla smiles. She points her sword at Nyarlathotep. They stand opposite each other, a frozen tableau for just one second, two… Kayla darts forward almost faster than the eye can see.
And then Kayla flies eight feet through the air and lands in a crumpled heap. Sort of the opposite result to the one we were going for there.
God, I wish I’d thought of a plan C.
In its absence, I stick to cowering. Nyarlathotep steps toward Kayla. He stretches out a robed arm. The impression of a hand and its end—a claw, black leather skin, yellow nails—and then gone, or denied. On the floor, Kayla screams.
What would Kurt Russell do? Possibly not the smartest question, but it’s stood me better than you’d imagine in times of need.