THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS

 

Things go from bad to Nightmare for the Spartan 300

THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS

“Mortal Man, do you know what we of the Gateless Realm call this planet? The Garden of Forking Paths.”

- Darael

 

Taylor, the eternal questioner, had a good one. “How the hell are we supposed to kill that?”

Evans snapped, “Maybe you can pester it to death with questions? Jeez, how is even the Major supposed to know?”

Darael looked astonished at us as we watched with revulsion and awe the many tentacled monstrosity that looked as if a mountain had mated with a squid.

“Why aren’t you all driven mad by the very sight of this Great Old One?”

Rachel rasped, “We met an Old One in that damn Tunnel. It attacked our minds. We survived.”

“Ah,” Darael muttered. 

“It acted as an antigen to your mind, which imitated the mind-infection and primed the mind’s immune system to defend your sanity.”

Rachel flicked angry eyes to me. “Did you understand any of that bollocks?”

“Yes, and you did, too. You just hate to be talked down to.”

“God!” gasped Porkins. “I think I’m going to puke!”

Reese said, “It’s towering in the middle of a lake that wasn’t even there a minute ago.”

Helen, back in her fatigues, said, “Cthulhu is a sea entity and can create sea water out of whole cloth.”

Link gagged. “It is disgusting looking.”

Darael sighed, “You are lucky.”

“Lucky?” laughed Doc Tennyson. “How do you come up with that?”

 “Cthulhu is not the most powerful of the Great Old Ones. There are worse like the Outer Gods: Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, and Azathoth.”

Rachel, more to keep her image as unflappable than anything else, said with an obviously dry mouth. “I dare you to say those names three times quickly.”

My chest tightened. “Where’s Patton?”

Sister Ameal snorted, 

“Now, you think of him? Since his mind was not ‘vaccinated’ as all of yours are, I thanked him for his service and sent him to his cot … where hopefully he will awaken, thinking of all this as some bizarre nightmare.”

“Thanked him for his service?” I frowned.

“Yet again I was feeling nostalgic for the future.”

Mercer had found enough voice to rasp, “Why is it just standing there looking at us?”

Cloverfield said, “Maybe wondering why we aren’t stark raving, drooling maniacs?”

Tennyson muttered, 

“No. You will note that it is not standing stock still but writhing in all of its limbs. I’ve seen patients in terrible pain before. I do believe that horrendous giant is in unspeakable agony.”

Darael beamed a beatific smile. “Brilliant diagnosis for a defrocked physician.”

Tennyson snapped, “Not defrocked. Merely without a state license … for no good reason.”

I doubted that his chased-after nurse felt the same way or the attractive wife of that influential state senator … with no sense of humor at all but with a great deal of jealous rage.

But I had a more pressing question to answer.

Like how could I keep this Elder God from smearing my men and I all over the French landscape?

As with those businessmen when the Stock Market crashed. They did not lose everything when the market crashed. They lost everything when they jumped.

As long as there was life there was a chance to turn things around.

For the life of me, I did not know where to turn or how.

‘Elohim!’ I cried mentally.

‘Oh, so now, you think to cry out to me?’

‘Before it was only my life on the line. Now, others who trust me to be smart will die.’

‘Sorry. No Deux ex machina. This is not some badly written work of fiction. I gave you a brain. Use it, or do not.’

There was a sense of a shutting of a door. Not exactly slamming, mind you. But a very firm closing of one.

Helen became flames again, and her fiery face stunned, gasped, “He – He ….”

“Gave me a brain. Gave me you. Gave me Sister Ameal … such as she is.”

She spun to me, and I smiled, “Just checking to see if you are paying attention.”

“I have attended enough to know that soon we will die a very horrid death.”

“But not right now.”

I looked at Darael.

“He’s suffering from the Bends, isn’t he?”

“Indeed. The Adversary awakened Cthulhu from its non-Euclidean geometry-etched monolith in the sunken city of R'lyeh.”

He shook his lion’s mane of a head.

“So deep was it sunken in antediluvian times that yonder Tiger tank would be twisted into tinfoil pretzels if submerged that low.”

Darael snorted,

“It is no accident that R'lyeh is located at the Pacific oceanic pole of inaccessibility (48°52.6'S 123°23.6'W),

 the point in the ocean farthest from any land – so that no unfortunate mortal would unintentionally disturb this abomination’s slumber.”

Helen frowned,

“It should already be dead then from the bends. What use to bring a mortally wounded horror to face us?”

Darael raised an abnormally long forefinger.

“Ah, you trip over the obvious with the word ‘face,' fledgling. The very sight of Cthulhu was meant to drive us mad not kill us.”

Evans heaved his Stinger with its payload of a thermite missile atop his shoulder. “Well, I can put it out of its misery real quick!”

“No!” shouted Darael. “Mortal weapons have no effect at all on Cthulhu!”

The dying sunlight revealed the roaring missile glancing off Cthulhu’s reptilian chest like a badly thrown knife against a tree trunk.

Darael snapped,

“What part of ‘NO” did you not understand? It is a perfectly simple, short, one syllable, two letter word!”

Evans shrugged. “It was worth a shot.”

“No, moron. It was worth our lives. Cthulhu brought its subjects with It!”

The Stinger missile slammed into the silvery waters. There was a muffled explosion. Immediately, the silver died in the waters to be replaced with eddies of scarlet currents.

The lake began to boil and bubble like the cauldron of Macbeth’s witches.

But I wagered no eye of newt or toe of frog would spring from those dark waters.

Taylor groaned, “Oh, man, we’re in for it now! Major, what do we do?”

“Circle the wagons!” I called out.

Master Sergeant Theo Savalas groaned along with Taylor, but for a different reason.

“Rick, when are you ever going to use correct military …. Oh, to hell with it! CIRCLE THE DAMN WAGONS!”

“Unsling your Sig Saur Spears!” yelled Amos, the fighting rabbi.

The scaly horde that surged out of the rippling waters turned my stomach to see … even in this dim light.

Rubbery lips. Misshapen fangs. Long curved talons at the ends of webbed feet. Slimy, scaled skin, mottled like the skin of a week-old drowned sailor.

And they moved. Merde, how they moved!

 Scuttling like giant, demented fanged worms straight towards us.

I would have cursed Evans right then. But even with the Spears’ sound suppressors, it would have been a waste of breath against that storm of noise.

But since Helen and I were linked, I heard her: ‘I will take the fight to their master.’

‘No! I have one last trick.’

Her aquiline features were a living, flaming question mark.

I was betting Darael and I were linked, too, because of sharing time in Helen’s consciousness.

I turned to him. ‘Ask your brother for his sword.’

‘I have no brother.’

‘Distant cousin, then. I need Michael’s sword.’

‘Oh, no! Michael is not even a very distant, distant cousin. I will not ask that of him.’

Helen was connected to the two of us from our shared experience.

‘No, Richard! I see what is in your mind. Even if you could wield the sword, which you cannot, it would kill you!’

‘But you would live.’

‘NO!’

A blinding light stabbed into my eyes as I felt a huge presence loom over me.

‘Yes.’

I forced open my eyes. Immediately, I wished I had not.

An armored figure, twenty feet tall if an inch, towered over me. I could smell incense and cedar waft from the blond … angel I guess you would call him.

Nothing like Darael.

His cheekbones seemed to be trying to push up and out of his imperial face. His azure eyes were slanted … and a bit pompous.

I have issues with … pompous. I have seen too many innocents die at pompous hands.

“Is it Saint Michael, then?”

“There is no need to kneel.”

“And no wish on my part to do it, either.”

“What?”

Darael shrugged. “He is a bit like me I am afraid, Michael.”

Those striking eyes stabbed into me. And letting me know he could read my mind, he said as gentle as an earthquake.

 “So, I see. And mortal chimpanzee, I have issues with stiff necks.”

I nodded. “So, I, too, see … from the way you hold your chin up so high ... along with your nose.”

It was then that I noticed the world around me, Darael, and Michael was frozen like a still photograph.

“So as not to upset the fledgling when I flay you alive.”

Darael shook his head. “Richard Blaine, have I ever told you what a great way you have with beings of Power?”

“No.”

“You never will … now.”