Cthulhu Unbound 3 Read online

  Cthulhu Unbound 3

  Edited by Brian M. Sammons & David Conyers

  Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.

  This anthology copyright © 2012 Permuted Press

  “Unseen Empire” copyright © 2011 Cody Goodfellow

  “MirrorrorriM” copyright © 2011 D.L. Snell

  “Nemesis Theory” copyright © 2011 Tim Curran

  “The R’lyeh Singularity” copyright © 2011 David Conyers and Brian M. Sammons

  www.PermutedPress.com

  Cover art by Peter Fussey.

  Table of Contents

  UNSEEN EMPIRE by Cody Goodfellow

  MIRRORRORRIM by D.L. Snell

  NEMESIS THEORY by Tim Curran

  THE R’LYEH SINGULARITY by David Conyers & Brian M. Sammons

  Other Books You May Enjoy

  UNSEEN EMPIRE

  Cody Goodfellow

  March 13, 1900

  Fort Sill, Oklahoma

  Gray dust clouds rose up like weary ghosts off the flat, fallow fields around the Comanche reservation. Doors swung in the wind and slammed into the clapboard walls of the shacks as the cavalry troopers rode through. Except for a three-legged dog hell-bent on eating itself, they saw no sign of life.

  “I sorely wish I knew where they went, Major,” said Oliver Stickney, the Indian station agent. “It’s not like there’s anywhere for them to go, anymore.”

  Major Cawthorne looked fit to break Stickney’s reedy neck, but he turned his fury instead on the silent rider who stopped his painted horse and dismounted beside the slanting shacks that whistled like tuneless flutes in the wind.

  “These are your people, Hull!” snarled Cawthorne. “If they’ve gone off the reservation again, it won’t be the old warpath! They’ll be tracked and put down like dogs!”

  Inigo Hull stood motionless with his eyes roving the horizon in the failing purple-gray light. His long braided hair, the color of steel dust, brushed back by the wind, revealed the gruesome scars where other men had ears. One weathered, steady hand rested upon the hilt of one of the twin coffin-handled bowie knives in his belt. The other hung perilously close to his sidearm, a .36-caliber, twelve-shot Navy revolver. His finely wrinkled copper face and deep green eyes were unreadable. The words from his unmoving lips galvanized Cawthorne like gunpowder in the Major’s brain.

  “If you’d have my help finding them, Major, you’ll treat them just like human beings. But never call them my people.”

  Cawthorne spurred his horse to ride up on Hull, but seemed to choose his next words very carefully. “You’ve been paid well enough to ignore my bad manners, Hull. Mr. Stickney has a peapod for a pecker,” the Major acknowledged the Indian station agent with the slightest of nods, “but he’s right. There’s no frontier to light out for, anymore, so they’re bound to go raiding, again. And hell itself will be shamed by my vengeance, if those goddamned savages spill a single drop of white blood on my watch.”

  Hull turned and regarded Cawthorne with a crooked smile. If the Kotsotekas of old had gone on the warpath again, they wouldn’t need Hull to find them. The smoke from their raiding would block out the sun from here to Matamoros. If they had horses and weapons and hope; if they were not two hundred sick old men and women and hungry children who had never known the open plains, then nothing but the whole Union army would stop them. But nothing remained of the proud Comanche band that once ruled the southern plains, only stories in books, and this open grave of a reservation.

  Stickney slipped from his stirrups and hurried over to Hull as the irate Major snapped orders at his men. “Please don’t take it hard, Mr. Hull. The Major doesn’t understand them—”

  “And you do?”

  Stickney flushed and puffed up. “Sir, I love them as I would my own children! The government gives me less every year, but I try to do right by them. They have schools and churches, and land to farm, if they’d only apply themselves to it. I’ve done everything I could to make this a home…”

  Hull turned away to look in the unglassed window of the nearest shack. Tin plates and the remains of a day-old hardtack and mush supper sat on the table. In a corner, a bow and a bunch of long, slender arrows leaned against a cracked and faded portrait of Jesus. Piles of discarded clothing—ugly undyed homespun cotton and wool agency garments—lay on the floor, like shed cocoons.

  Oklahoma: a Choctaw name, meaning ‘red people’. For the hundreds of thousands of years the Indian had lived in America, only this dry, sour land between Kansas and Texas had gone unclaimed. The Wichita and Pawnee who passed through these parts had all but forgotten the old legends, but they instinctively avoided it. So naturally, for over fifty years, the white man had tried to dump every Indian here, and forget them.

  But even the Great White Father’s worst promises could only be kept for so long. Less than a hundred miles away, the Oklahoma settlers, with their fat, unprotected ranches and huge stock herds, pressed ever closer into Indian Territory.

  Hull fixed his unblinking eyes on the Indian agent. “A man came from outside and preached, told them stories, taught them new songs.” It was not a question.

  Stickney went pale and nodded. “I didn’t think any harm could come of it, but he—”

  “They went away to dance on a hill last night, and when the morning came, they were gone.”

  “You know this man? Has this happened before?”

  Watching the cavalry troopers ransack the shacks, Hull nodded. “Every time they’ve ridden off the reservation, it was because the land was too small, too sour, to live on, and every time they have been punished with worse land, and less of it. And this summer—”

  “Yes,” Stickney admitted, “there’s to be a land lottery. They won’t farm it, so someone else will. They won’t grow up. I tell you, if only I could make them see. I admire them and I don’t care who knows it, but they’re like damned children! And now, they’ve run off again.”

  “No. They have gone home.”

  Hull turned to look on as Major Cawthorne rode over to speak with a gaunt, graying man in a fringed buckskin coat and a long, deep groove of a scar splitting his sallow face from chin to widow’s peak. The older man tipped his slouch hat to Hull as he heard the Major out.

  “There is no home for them on the Llano Estacado anymore,” Stickney said, “and nothing but fences in every direction. I tried to make them see—”

  “Show me the hill,” Hull said.

  “We tried tracking them, Mr. Hull. There’s no sign of them after they gathered on White Widow Mound.”

  Hull climbed onto his horse and reined it around to face the open plains, where a single perfect dome of a hill rose above the cottonwood trees two miles to the west. “That’s because they never came down.”

  * * *

  Thunderheads rolled down from the north to snuff out the yellow gibbous moon. Searching by lantern light, it took less than an hour to find the hastily buried door into White Widow Mound.

  Major Cawthorne had mustered thirty riders and twenty pack mules carrying ordnance, rations and a Hotchkiss revolving cannon on the shoulder of the steep, strangely barren mound. He sat upon his horse and snapped orders at his men, but there was little to do until the scouts returned from inside the mound.

  A driving rain soaked them and turned the baked red soil to streaming mud. Arguments cropped up among the troopers over whether the squirming black toads everywhere underfoot had wriggled up out of the earth, or fallen with the downpour.

  Hull and Stickney stood away from the others, on the flat summit o
f the mound, watching the circling patterns of dancing footprints dissolve into mud.

  A low, shapeless green-black boulder squatted in the center of the abandoned dancing circle. Eroded down to a humble stub by eons of weather and worshipful hands, the stone bore no sign of its original form or purpose, but Hull stood staring at it in the pelting rain and the guttering light as if he saw much more than a stone, until Cawthorne’s scouts returned, an hour later.

  “Those clever devils,” Cawthorne crowed. Grudging respect for his wily foes made his voice sound almost romantic. “There’s no end to their cunning, is there, Roherty?”

  Tobin Roherty, the scarred man in the buckskin coat, gobbed a lunger down the shaft. “Any slicker, and they’d have a bushwhacker gunning for us from behind, or better yet, right in our midst.” Roherty tipped his hat again to Inigo Hull. “So this hill’s got holes in it. But they ain’t gophers. More than likely, it comes out in a canyon or another such anthill, somewhere in a day’s ride. Have your scouts fan out and run them down.”

  “Mr. Hull doesn’t seem to think so,” Cawthorne snapped. “And my scouts couldn’t find any passage but the one that goes down.”

  “This is a remarkable discovery,” Stickney babbled. “I studied anthropology in Chicago, and wrote my dissertation on the Hopewell Mound culture. I postulated contact with southwestern and Aztec cultures, but I never dreamed their empire stretched so far…”

  Hull said, “You have no idea how far this empire stretched, or how deep. You think this land is new and easily won, but it is older than anything you can imagine, and your people have not yet begun to pay for it.”

  Stickney shivered and turned away from Hull, which was just as well. The half-breed had lived with bigotry all his life, but found he had still less patience for those who put the red man on a pedestal.

  Hull had led men he trusted into this darkness before, and always returned alone. If he had to go one last time, he could not ask for better company.

  Hull knew Major Randolph Cawthorne by reputation. Ten years ago in the 7th Cavalry, Cawthorne won a Medal of Honor for his service at Wounded Knee. He must believe history was repeating itself just to make him a colonel.

  Tobin Roherty, the last of the old Texas scalphunters, ran down and harvested more than eight hundred arguably Apache trophies before no less a hand than Geronimo’s had split his face with an axe. They’d both chased the same bounties more than a few times, and Hull had found him to be somewhat less of a blood-simple butcher than legend had it, and maybe even a better shootist. He tracked the infamous Green Gang to their nest in Locustville, but burned them out rather than bring them back for the bounty, when he learned what they really were…but that was a long time ago. Last Hull heard, Roherty was touring Europe with a circus, yet here he was. He probably thought this job would be even easier.

  The Pawnee scouts reported that the tunnel turned in a tight spiral within the mound, and continued downwards on a steep, paved slope, with no branching tunnels. They had turned back when the tunnel abruptly opened on a cavern too large for their torchlight to reach the far wall.

  Cawthorne ordered his men to dismount and lead their horses. The first horse balked, then reared and kicked a handler’s teeth in, when he tried to drag it into the mound. “Smart horse, put him in charge,” someone said. Uneasy laughter ran down the column.

  “Congratulations, ladies,” Cawthorne shouted. “You’ve all been busted down to infantry!”

  Grumbling men stripped the gear off their horses and formed a marching column.

  “We will go down this road on foot to wherever it leads,” Cawthorne barked, “and we will bring the marauding Comanche to heel. We will not be cowed by tall tales or Ghost Dance horseshit from the diligent pursuit of our duty. We will return the fugitives to their homes, or we will leave their scalps at the gates of Hell.”

  The troopers raised a querulous cheer and began to file into the narrow tunnel. The mules brayed and bit each other, but followed the men out of the rain and into the deeper dark.

  Stickney carried a carpetbag and a canteen, but no weapons. “Someone must plead the case of sanity. And if Cawthorne won’t listen, at least he’ll restrain himself, with witnesses present.”

  “You should stay,” Hull said. “Someone will have to stay behind to watch for the preacher when he comes back for more.”

  Stickney shrugged. “Nobody here needs me.”

  Hull led his horse down from the peak and handed its reins to a cavalry sergeant. A pouch of jerky, a stick of chalk and a bandolier of rifle bullets were all he took from his saddlebags.

  His hand went to a blue-gray coin on a rawhide thong around his neck. As Stickney watched it in the moonlight, the star-shaped coin twisted and twirled, and strained towards the open tunnel.

  “After you, Mr. Hull,” Tobin Roherty snarled, cutting a deep bow at the mouth of the tunnel. “I’ll just bet you know the way.”

  * * *

  October 20, 1890

  Mt. Shasta, California

  In the last flare of failing sunlight, the snow-capped flanks of the Trinity Mountains were transformed into a vast black beast, shaggy with pine forests and bristling with claws and fangs of jagged lava rock. Worlds away from the played-out goldfields, the fenced-off ranches and respectable boomtowns downstate, the country here was still so wild, it was the only place where the Union Army was forced to admit it lost a war to redskins. This was no place to live or get rich, but there was no end of places to hide.

  “You sure this is the right place?” Captain Boyer shouted back up the pass at the grizzled, silver-haired scout as their posse picked its way down the loose scree and jutting boulders that choked the winding trail into the nameless alpine valley.

  Hull surveyed the mountains rearing up all around them like waves on an angry ocean, and spat tobacco juice at the moon. “This is where it was,” he replied.

  “Well, damn my over-civilized eyes,” Boyer said. He took up his field glasses and lensed the tapering valley below. “I see nothing but dirt.” He said it wonderingly, as if nobody had told him it would be so.

  “See there,” Hull pointed down at the broad, featureless field of raw, red-brown earth, three acres across, and eight deep. “That low place there was the main drag. And that stub of a post with a rag at the top…that’s a flagpole. It was on the roof of the hotel.”

  Captain Boyer lowered his glasses and turned to study Hull the way they all did, the first time they thought he was pulling their leg. Hull made a stone mask of his face, and hoped Boyer had heard the stories about the cavalry officers who had chosen not to believe Inigo Hull.

  When the rest of his platoon had caught up and the pack wrangler had cursed the last of his mules up over the pass, Boyer rode recklessly down the shifting defile and into the empty valley. Hull followed close behind, reining his painted mare back when her hooves sank into the soft, freshly turned earth.

  Unlike everything else in this part of the country, the town of Tolerance was not founded by the victors or victims of the goldfields. No one knew who claimed the land or built the perfect little mountain town, but the whispered word had gone out to every corner of the west, that there was a place where everyone was welcome, and any man or woman who could work would be given a stake. The luckless losers, the mudsills and misfits, children of slaves, the Mex peasants and the Indians fled the dying silver towns and feudal ranches and fenced-in reservations to come start over.

  Never did the name appear in any newspaper or advertising circular, and no map showed the town; but the rumors and gossip set thousands to searching, until the word began to turn sour as most gave up, or were never heard from again. Only last winter did Hull learn from an old fellow cavalry scout that there was such a place, and where it was hidden.

  Hull was hot to get there, but he got waylaid by other work. He was still half-starved and badly frostbitten from hunting the Wendigo of Wind River a week before, but he rode out of Wyoming after a vivid dream of the earth eatin
g a house filled with children. His worst suspicions had been justified, but he feared that this trap had only been sprung by his approach.

  Captain Boyer dismounted and stood at the foot of the half-buried flagpole. He took his hat off, but not to salute the mud-caked rag of Old Glory. He fanned his pale face and swore as Hull dropped from his saddle to join him.

  “Stage driver said the town was gone,” Boyer said, “but I never took it to mean…literally gone…”

  “The mountains hereabouts are hollow,” Hull said, “rotten with lava tubes. The town was buried, but the people have been taken below.”

  “Surely we won’t find survivors down there—”

  “If we move fast, we can pick up their trail.”

  “This wasn’t an Indian raid, Mr. Hull. The Modocs are long gone. It was a landslide. There could be survivors in the hills. Watkins,” he called to his sergeant. “Detail three search parties—”

  Hull spat discreetly and muttered in the Captain’s ear, “You send them out, they’ll never come back.” Boyer turned a withering stare on him, but Hull had felt worse. “Look around you, Captain.” Hull tried to keep the steel from his voice, but his patience was wearing thin, and he couldn’t begin to explain what they were facing. “Look at the peaks and the hills above us. There’ve been no snows and no quakes here, this season. This town was buried.”

  Boyer wisely held his tongue, turning to set a detail digging around the flagpole.

  They had only just plunged their shovels into the soft soil when they heard the tolling of the bell.

  The leaden clangor rolled down the desolate valley like a death-knell for the five hundred and eighteen souls of Tolerance, California, but steadily rose from the measured tones of mourning into an unhinged jangling, to a sustained shriek of metallic insanity.