But Kayla MacDoyle, MI37 field agent, misanthrope, dangerous psychopath, and virtual superhero is lying on the ground whimpering, while I’m stuck with defending us from a reality gone awry.
Untethered nightmares come at me. Balls of blades, steely and sharp; beings of arms and bone, scratching, clawing; creeping insectile horrors; nuns with switchblades; rats the size of terriers; tentacular masses, sticky, viscous, and clutching. I scavenge weapons, improvise barriers. I duck blades, catch punches, wrestle limbs. I am beaten, blackened, bruised. I come up with something in my teeth. I am an animal. I am pissing terrified.
Space ripples and changes about us. Maybe we are traveling, some dream logic carrying us along like a current through rooms of living flesh, of bone, of chitin, rooms threatening to drown us, rooms I cannot bring myself to describe.
I can feel it slipping in behind my eyes. After-images of travesties that clamber into my brain and breed. I lose track of what is real in a place where everything is unreal. And I need to pull back. I need to get him good and grounded. But there is no ground. There is just Kayla, just me. Circling. Falling. Falling again.
I land. A plain. Some tundra. A dust cloud on the horizon. I pick myself up. And Kayla is still there, right next to me. And I know something big is coming. I just need to get to him, to get us both away. I start to run, but dream rules apply. My limbs do not obey me. Each step is a tottering nightmare of minimal increments.
And the cloud. The cloud is fast, is impossible in its speed. Closing. Closing. And in the dust I get an impression of hooves, of horns, of teeth.
“Kayla,” I yell. “Kayla!” I’m begging her. She has to help. I was never built to be the man alone.
Finally I am at her side. I steel my courage, slap her, shake her. Her head lolls. Her eyes roll. “Come back,” I whisper. The cloud comes closer.
She is not going to snap out of it. She is gone. I am alone.
I gather her up in my arms. I stagger. Another step of glacial slowness. The cloud’s thunder shakes this world.
And it would be so easy to slip away, to give in, to let the madness take me, to be consumed by this reality.
But there is a home, a place to get back to, friends and family. And Kurt Russell movie marathons. And bacon.
And screw this. Kayla and I are getting out of here with Nyarlathotep’s head on a bloody platter.
I turn. I face the cloud. It’s almost on me now. Massive. Thundering.
Just a cloud, I tell myself. Just dust and wind. I don’t know the rules of this place, but I know the rules of dreams. Of nightmares. And I pray that they apply.
The cloud breaks over me. Just dust. Just wind. It scours my cheeks. Hoofbeats crash around me. Just echoes. Just the boom of the wind.
And then peace. Then a breeze. I open my eyes. The cloud has blown away. I still hold Kayla.
Reality slips. I stand in a corridor full of doors. I can hear scampering about and above me. And I know I can hear the rats in the walls.
I am still afraid. I would still favor flight over fight. But fight I will. Because I can face my fear. Because now, Nyarlathotep, you get bloody yours.
The Nyarlathotep Event :: Case File #8 :: Interrogation
I never thought I’d say it, but once you get used to a dimension of fear and chaos, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Yes, it’s driven my co-worker, Kayla, insane, and yes, it does keep trying to kill me with more and more depraved horrors, but, well it could be worse.
Take the field of flying knives I have to traverse. Blades whirl, shearing life from plants, small rodents, the odd offensive-looking rock. But a little concentration on my part, and I manifest a titanium steel umbrella and, with Kayla balanced on my shoulder, I cross the place in relatively safety.
Nightmare logic.
And when I reach a river of blood leeches—each creature a foot long, each with a spine-filled maw reaching for me—I just think hard and then I have wings. Kayla and I sail over them easy as blinking.
Seriously, I’m like the Green bloody Lantern in this reality. It’s awesome.
Really the only serious fly in the ointment is that if I don’t find its ruler, Nyarlathotep, in the next fifteen minutes or so, all of regular reality is going to be permanently buggered. And I have no idea where I’m going.
Fortunately I’ve always been more of a beta male, so stopping to ask for directions isn’t a serious dilemma. If only I could stop people trying to kill me long enough to ask.
I finally strike gold in a castle that drips gore and is chock-full of tiny gremlin-like creatures armed with stilettos. An old-school suit of armor makes maneuvering difficult but renders their attempted stabbings utterly ineffective. After a few attempts I finally seize one around the midriff and heft it to eye height. It kicks and spits with its full eight-inch frame. Really, if it wasn’t so full of bile it’d be quite adorable.
“I’m looking for Nyarlathotep,” I inform it.
It lunges for my eyes, hurling its blades at the grills in my armored mask. I flinch back and fling it away. Possibly a little too hard. It hits a wall and becomes an ugly stain.
I keep the next one further from my face.
“Which way to Nyarlathotep?”
It suggests some awful things I should do to my mother.
“I’m not a violent man,” I tell it, “but I can apparently crush you like an insect.”
More profanities follow. Small he may be. Easily intimidated he is not.
“Please?” I venture.
Further obscenities. And then my jaw starts to tremble, because all of this abuse is delivered by a voice so high it’s barely in human hearing range. And then I laugh. It doesn’t feel at all appropriate as chunks of viscera rain down the castle walls, but I’m starting to become immune to the shock horror aspects of this place.
As soon as the sound is out of me, the gremlin shrieks and does its best to claw its way out of my hand. I’m so shocked I stop laughing and stare at it. It recovers slowly. I chuckle. It slams its body backwards, wrestling an arm free to cover its ears.
“Nyarlathotep now, or I bust a gut all over you,” I tell it. Not the most threatening thing I’ve ever said, but it has the desired effect. The thing grimaces and screeches, and jabbers, and around me the walls of reality flex and then—
I stand (and Kayla whimpers) on a cliff overlooking a barren, dusty plain. Rising from the center, like red wax dripping toward the sky, is a many-spired citadel.
“Nyarlathotep,” the gremlin gibbers at me. “Nyarlathotep!”
Looks like the sort of place an extradimensional avatar of fear and chaos would call home. I nod my thanks to the gremlin and then throw it over the edge of the cliff.
Seriously, the murderous bastard could have brought us a little closer.
The Nyarlathotep Event :: Case File #9 :: Citadel
As citadels that are the embodiment of sheer terror go, Nyarlathotep’s is pretty imposing.
I mean, to be fair, he benefits from having built it in a nightmare reality based on humanity’s collective fears where things like gravity and physics are apparently spongier than I’m used to, but still, he deserves points for effort. Blood-colored spires, statues that actually scream, non-Euclidean angles—he went the whole nine yards.
Still going to kill the bastard, of course.
I lower Kayla, co-worker, super-woman, and currently dribblingly insane person off my shoulders. I check my watch. If time obeys the same rules here as back home I’ve got about twelve minutes to get this done. Time to take some shortcuts.