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im Feeny stood in the cold wind, a tuque on his bald head and duck hunting boots on his feet—his Mackinaw was open and he had visible gooseflesh.
“Thanks for coming.” he said, “You were the only one I could think of who might know anything about this.”
Feeny was a retired Detective Captain from Philadelphia PD. We’d met when I was doing some consulting on occult-related crimes for them.
Philadelphia has a serious occult underground—Gypsies, various immigrant groups with bogies of their own, and strange cults, the worst of them being MOVE, that militant and totally insane group that scared the police enough to drop a sizable aerial bomb on their homemade citadel and burn down about ten square blocks.
Feeny had inherited a very luxurious hunting lodge from an Uncle with no family of his own, and moved in full time several years ago. He had a Land Rover, satellite TV and ’net service, his own low head hydro power. Jim was sick of the human race in general. The life of a hermit suited him very well indeed.
We went inside. He offered me tea, and we sat down in the living room.
“I tramp these woods every day the weather’s nice,” he told me, “take a little game time to time. Fish a good deal and grow my own vegetables—there are fruit trees, too—so I don’t go to town much.
“One part of this parcel is really horrible bush, all thorns and bad footing, poison ivy, rhododendron hells, even the deer don’t go there much.
“You know what a curious sort I am. I’d never have been a good detective if I wasn’t. So I had to go nosing around.
“Nobody had been in there in a long time, maybe not in centuries. It’s really inhospitable, so no one wanted to go in, I guess.
“First few times I went, I didn’t see much beyond a lot of old growth trees, and I was going to just leave it alone. Then I found an old Indian burying ground—there were deer hide mummy bundles on the ground, and even a few in the original platforms.
“You’d have thought they’d be all rotted or eaten away, but I guess there aren’t even that many small animals in there.
“I pushed in deeper, then, and found a sort of a hummock where I didn’t think one belonged, so I poked around some, and this was the first thing I came across.”
He opened a drawer and came to me with a dark metallic object.
“Careful, the damned thing is still sharp.”
It was an ax head, and he was right, it was as keen as a pocket knife blade.
“What’s it made of?” I asked him.
“Copper.” he said, “Tempered copper, which isn’t supposed to be possible.”
“That’s not the only thing I’ve found,” Jim said, “I’ve come across deer carcasses around the edges of that patch. They looked all shrunken and dried out.
“You know how there’s been so much hard rain, last few years?
“Some of the earth has come off of that hummock of late. It’s exposed flat rocks with marking on them, cut deep. A camera doesn’t seem to work there, so I sketched some of them.”
Jim was good at sketching.
One of the glyphs looked like a pair of crossed crescent wrenches, and it tickled my memory.
We kicked it around until well after dark, made no real progress, and went to bed. The next day was going to be hard work.
How hard, I had no idea. The place was as difficult as Central Panama, and that’s plenty difficult. There was black, slick mud that was something like walking on motor oil, even frozen. Everything seemed to have some kind of thorn on it, or be just brittle and sharp—nothing quite as bad as the Black Palm Tree of Panama, but set very close and deeply tangled. I had a short, rectangular bush knife to open our passage, but I had to stop twice to sharpen it. And among the roots, there were beds of rounded, fist sized stones just waiting to turn an ankle or twist a knee.
I got out my flask of Gosling’s Rum, passed it to Jim, and had a jolt for myself. After that, I lit a Cuban Bullet, swore, and plunged ahead. It was a long, hard pull, me bully boys, but by God, we got there.
To see a pile of dirt that might have been a large dung heap—only dung heaps don’t have rough plaques carven with heathenish glyphs set into them. More of them were visible—at least that’s what Jim said, and my digital camera wouldn’t take a single image.
The ground was too uneven and slippery to get too close to the thing without risking serious injury, but I managed to examine it enough to see that there were several good size holes that seemed to go deep into it.
Holes, deep holes, are never good.
We scuffled around a bit, to no good effect, except I chanced upon a palm-sized, rough, roundish chunk of that copper, probably used as a knife—it was as sharp as the Devil, even now.
I dug out a small magnetic compass I always carry, just in case, and it spun like a Cuisinart—I didn’t tell Jim, though, he had to live there, after all.
It was two worn-out old men who came to the lodge that night. Too tired to eat. We went to bed and slept the clock around.
“Stay away from that place.” I told him as I left, next day, “There’s no good going to come from there.”
“Should I call the archaeologists from the University?” he asked me.
“Not until I do a little research.”
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“How was your visit?” Lisa asked me.
“Mystifying,” I told her, and kissed her hello.
We caught up on the lost three days—I was glad for the new Velcro wrist restrains, I think I might have looked like the victim of a cougar attack otherwise.
When she was asleep, curled up like a kitten and utterly at peace with the world, I quietly sat down at the computer, and started sending mail, scanning the sketches from the hummock and forwarding them to people I knew.
Then I got back into bed.
Lisa mumbled and snuggled, still asleep, and I quickly joined her.
Not so many people know about the Great Old Ones—not really—and most of those people know each other.
H. P. Lovecraft, the horror writer, was a victim of the dreadful designs of the first masters of Earth. They sent him dreams and touched his talent but made sure that his work remained in the pulp fiction magazines.
There were two purposes to this diabolical and underhanded plot agreed to in far-flung exile courts. First, Lovecraft was to make the lore of the eternal enemies available to the masses, to replenish the dwindling numbers of the cult. The Great War and the Spanish ’flu had taken a lot of the believers away, and hands were needed to do the dark work of these creatures.
The other purpose was more subtle. The stories made the lore of the horrors explicable as harmless fiction, made the scholars of this ancient knowledge seem foolish and ridiculous.
But make no mistake, the evil power is still there.
The Axis coterie of occult lore experts tapped into the dark influences, and fed them with ghastly sacrifice on an industrial scale—but even the Dark Powers cannot control the movements of the stars.
We can be thankful for that. The Japanese had begun to contact some of the hideous and secretive entities that inhabit the Pacific Ocean.
The study of these ancient and hidden matters has never quite recovered from effects of the tumultuous Twentieth Century, not to mention the denial of the subject by tyrannical Science.
Emails and the fat envelopes with the foreign stamps began to arrive. One missive was from Dr. Primitivo Jose Lopez-Mendoza, an academic in Guatemala.
Things began to make more sense after I read it, but it wasn’t comforting. |
The dank, strangling jungles of Central America have hidden cruel secrets, far older than even the inhabitation of man.
Death and overwhelming evil has flourished there, even to this day.
But here’s the very well written and carefully researched information he sent.
“. . . after many years of study, including visits to the actual sites of Mayan cities, I feel confident in asserting that the insignia you have drawn is the sign of Zotz, or Camazotz, the Bat-God who ruled darkness, death and sacrifice.
These are crossed bones—sometimes a skull is present, sometimes not—of course, symbolizing death and the grave, as the skull and thigh bones are the last parts of a cadaver to decay.
Zotz ruled the House of Bats, where the mythic Hero Twins contended with evil and death—and his name is sometimes rendered as ‘sudden blood letter’ or ‘snatch-bat’, this was indeed a powerful and feared entity—the Death Bat.
The cult of Zotz seems to somewhat predate the birth of Our Savior, and to have migrated among Meso-American Native cultures for more than a thousand years.
Up to now, there has been no evidence to suggest that the Cahokia people had any contact with the Maya or indeed that Mound Builders had penetrated East of Ohio.
I will await further news of your discoveries. . . .”
Then the Thunderbirds appeared. Not the cheesy marionettes, but reports of huge flying things at night, and not far from Feeny’s mound.
A woman reported seeing something, “Big as an airplane” fly over her, circle and swoop at her. She was the worse for drink, but when a policeman saw something similar two weeks later at four AM, the reports were taken more seriously.
Trooper Norman Gratz said that he saw something big fly in a circle over his cruiser.
“I thought it might be some idiot with a hang glider. It seemed to be about the right size. But then it seemed to flap its wings and climb.”
It was good for a laugh, but then, the headless corpse of a drifter who’d been camped out in the woods nearby was found. Of his head, there was no sign, but the coroner’s report said it seemed to have been torn off, not severed with a blade.
I pondered these things for several days.
The good Doctor must have subscribed to a clipping service, because I got a hastily typed message (riddled with typos and lapses into Spanish) from him a few days later.
He wrote:
“. . . Zotz was said to be able to rip off the head of a grown man, indeed, he beheaded one of the Hero Twins in just this manner. However, his brother fashioned him a new head from a squash, and they went on to triumph in the Sacred Ball Game.
“Caramba! señors, this is directly related to the legends written out in the Popul Vuh and the other scanty codices available to us today. . . .”
Yippee, the Death-Bat was my new neighbor. |
Lisa was not idle during this time—she applied her formidable research skills to the problem.
“Thunder-birds,” she said to me. “Pennsylvania has a lot of reports of big flying things, going back a long time.
“Some of them could be large vultures or eagles. From a distance size is hard to judge. But the reports persist.
“Now, the Thunder-bird was an important god in the Mound Builder’s culture, some people think it was the woodpecker, but the old legends hint at something else, something big that flew, and had power, and could kill.
“Down in Central America, there are stories about the Death-Bat, a big bat that could kill a man—and some stories out of Brazil have pterodactyls still flying around in the deep jungle of the Matto Grosso.”
“Brazil is full of strange beliefs, Lisa. When I was there I saw the Golden Temple of the Flying Saucer Cult, and the bunch that thinks Heaven is a bus station.”
“And I always thought being Catholic was irrational!” she chuckled.
“You still go to mass.”
“I confess, too, when I’m really sorry, but most of the time I’m not.”
Her smile was rueful.
“I am sorry to have offended God, and that’s usually enough to get me absolved—and I hope that the things I don’t feel guilty about don’t send me to Hell.”
“I can only hope you get off with Purgatory.” I said.
“Me too.”
I went back to shopping for boots at the Sportsman’s Guide. The spring was going to have me poking that mound, and if indeed there was some member of the Great Old Ones Thaumaturgical Marching and Chowder Society associated with that pile of dirt, there would be snakes.
There always are.
The Danchinos were good as their word, a kid came over with a bucket of hearts every slaughter day. I bought a crock-pot at Goodwill to cook them in, then we’d mince them and mix them in with the dry food, after pouring a big spoon full of the broth over it all. Sometimes it made the dogs so happy, they’d chase their tails, or roll on their backs and kick their feet in the air. Dogs—who can understand them?
Reports of giant birds and bats kept surfacing, to be scoffed at and subtly mocked in the media.
Headless corpses made the joke lose its sparkle. There were several of those, showing up in Wilkes-Barre, Erie and Uniontown. It was past time to do something.
Then it stopped—just stopped. No new reports for several months.
Feeny went to the mound, and found the holes closed up, and the whole thing just sort of crusted over with mud.
I was perplexed. What to do now?
Central America experienced a sudden outbreak of UFO sightings that summer. They take their flying saucers seriously there, so it was very prominent in the Spanish Language media.
Los White Boys didn’t care much, though.
That summer, Feeny led a group of archeologists to the mound, and watched as they tore into it with pick mattocks and shrill cries of delight.
They made the clods fly and sank into the ground like marmots—after a week or so they entered a stone cyst that contained a fifteen foot slate table and 187 human skulls. Some of them were very fresh—somehow that got overlooked. Funny how that happens.
The UFO stories finally cracked the Anglo market, and even though headless bodies are not all that rare in Mexico and Guatemala, there was a noticeable upsurge in them.
I got a call from someone in Washington, and told them to go suck a light socket—I was not going off to hunt monsters in pestilential swamps and forests any more.
They sent another guy, who never came back.
Then, of course, they called me again.
And I went off to Huehuetenango, a town that, even by the standards of Honduras, was unhondurable. The cigars are good there, though. And I met with Professor Roderigo Mondragon to burn a couple of them up.
He was a withered old party, looking as much like a seed pod as a human, but he was spry, very spry for a man of 92. Age and study had made him a master of the forbidden lore.
“Camazotz,” he said thoughtfully, “The Snatch-bat, ruler of the night. Suddenly he appears about 100 BCE, and he becomes a principal God with a large cult very quickly. I have long suspected that he came to Earth, or returned here from some other planet after a period of exile, perhaps to exploit the disability of the Kings and Downers of Earth and arrogate power to himself.
“He has returned to the former seat of his power, seeking what, I cannot tell, but doubtless there is some source of power here that he desires.”
“Any idea what that might be?” I asked.
“Yes.” he said.
Just then, a man of about the same age as the professor limped into the cafe.
He wore a broad black hat, and his side-locks were well below his jawline. The foaming beard, rooted high on his cheeks, had never known a razor or clipper.
“Sancho!” my host cried, “Here, meet Rabbi Panzer, my colleague and dear friend!”
“Sancho Panzer?”
“My father was a funny man.” the Rabbi said sourly. “Like a Cuban Jew didn’t have enough troubles.”
He ordered a rum, and a cigar.
“Camazotz has returned, Sancho,” said the Professor, “What might he be looking for?”
“You Nicaraguan schmendrick, you know what he wants. The Basalt Dodecahedron. That else would he desire?
“With that, he can enter the Great White Space, and roam the universe at will!”
A priest in a short sleeved shirt and Roman collar came in, and joined us.
“Father Paco Obregon,” he said, extending a square and muscular hand.
I kissed his ring—once you know pure evil exists, you can only hope the opposite also waits out there.
“So,” he said to us, “Camazotz is back?”
“His cult has been gathering followers in the forest, even among the campesinos,” the Rabbi replied. “Of course, the criminals are always ready to do that which is evil, to gather power.”
“And he wants this Dodecahedron?” I asked.
As a reply, the padre produced a leather box from his pocket—it appeared to be shagreen, and was inlaid with a star-stone of Mnar.
He opened it to reveal a 12-sided ball of dull black stone.
I could feel the power of it, like the static charge of a TV screen in the winter time.
“It was found during the Conquest.” the priest said, “and entrusted to a monastery for generations, until the political instability made that too dangerous.
“Since the ’20s, it’s been guarded by a single priest, with a duty to safeguard it at all costs.
“Just opening the box probably alerted Camazotz to its presence.”
“He’ll come for it?” I asked.
“Like ants to sugar, my son, if it should be exposed too long.”
“We have the bait, but no trap!” the Rabbi grumbled.
The thought of Camazotz able to access the Great White Space, that mysterious region outside or perhaps parallel to the space we know, was not comforting—in fact, it loosened my bowels like dysentery.
Most of the Great Old Ones are pent up in their various prisons—some have whole planets, others comets or moons. A few are kept in planes of existence peculiar to them—but they all hate it.
They want Earth, want it badly, so badly that they walked the surface of this planet before it was fully cooled into a solid crust.
Their King, Azathoth, and Hastur, his chief artificer, conspired to fling a body of glowing matter through the still liquid planet and knock out enough to form the Moon—In my minds eye I see them capering and roaring to see this new addition to the night sky, applying unimaginable forces to regulate its orbit.
These ghastly thaumaturges, multiplex of wing and eye, tentacular, squamous and fungoid, ruled and rioted here for aeons—then, battered by wars and vexed by unfavorable astronomical alignments, radically reduced in numbers and potency, they sank into decadence and decline.
They never forgot the Earth.
Yog-Sothoth, the Gate, and the Key to the Gate, waits to emerge into this world, and free his remaining fellows—waits with immortal patience, plotting and planning as alliances among the Great Old Ones shift and recombine on a cosmic scale.
Meanwhile, mankind, created by an accident, goes about his inconsequential affairs, utterly unaware of the true nature of the Universe, ignorant of the vast and envious intelligences that connive at his extermination.
I was about to be reminded of just how powerful they could be. |
We went into the jungle—the jungle is always close, there, to a small Maya ruin not deemed worth the attention of tourists or the government. It was pocked with the holes looters and pot hunters had dug, seeking treasure, and climbed to the top of a dinky, tumbledown pyramid festooned with vines. Those old duffers went up like goats, I puffed and gasped like a dying catfish, the padre did a little better. We got to work with machetes and cleared it enough to lay out our snare.
The Great Old Ones are subject to a bewildering complex of strictures and compulsions—magic is a science to them, a science we don’t understand at all. We know it works, but we have no more idea of the laws and principles involved than a stone-age hunter had about the aerodynamics of his spear or the physics of his atal-atal.
We laid down bits of unusual materials, including crystals of Zeckterite, a mineral so rare it’s only been found a few times—once in Washington State, and in the Urals—a pinkish stone that never became popular for jewelry or anything else.
The idea was to trap Camazotz on the structure, then banish him with a powerful chant from the dread Book of Eibon.
We put the dodecahedron in the center of the trap.
The Sun went down. The Moon came out. The Padre dropped the leather box. I picked it up for him. . . .
And the bats came.
Thousands, millions of bats, fluttering and screeching like a black windstorm sweeping out of the night. They swirled around us striking us and blinding us as we struck at them ineffectually, and they bit us bloody. Then something huge, with leather wings and lambent eyes dive-bombed the stone platform.
Things became even worse as the horror strafed and struck at us in the darkness, the lanterns over set, and the beast shrieked and gibbered, swooping and striking. I heard sucking and cracking noises as the others were beheaded, and I fell into the tangled greenery. My right leg snapped like a Number Two pencil, stars swam before my eyes, and my head hit a thick branch with sickening force. The last thing I saw was a seven-foot figure shoot into the sky like a bottle rocket and vanish with a hideous pop.
In the morning, I made a crude crutch and hiked out to the main road on a broken leg. After that, the rabies shots were no problem. (Yeah, right.)
I think the star stone saved me.
While Lisa nursed me back to health, I would sit on the porch with a cigar and think on the Universe, and the things waiting there, inert but still very much alive, waiting to be awakened and loosed to do harm.
My God, the horror of it! |
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