Chapter 23. Annette #2
“Duke is fine, and there was no earthquake. Don’t worry. You’ll be safe as long as you don’t look directly at the eldritch horror digging a pit below the bar.”
A child began to cry. At least, I assumed it was a child. I suppose my “reassurance” could have driven an already-frightened adult to tears, too.
“Stand back.” I continued my assault. It didn’t take long to hack a foot-wide hole through the door.
“That’s enough big,” someone yelled from the other side.
I peered through and found myself face-to-face with a family of pukwudgies.
The closest—the patriarch of the family, presumably—had a bulbous face with a nose like a potato and a chin like a slightly smaller potato.
His skin was dark green, and he had quills instead of hair.
He wore loose, much-patched blue jeans. Quills on his back poked through the tatters of an old T-shirt.
Most importantly, he was only two and a half feet tall, and he and the others all looked small enough to fit through the opening I’d made.
Without a word, he passed a pukwudgie toddler through the hole. The child was a third the size of the adult, but its quills were sharp as a kitten’s claws. Blood blossomed from the pinpricks it left on my hands and arms.
He handed over a second child before I could finish settling the first. Thankfully, the rest of the family was older and able to climb through on their own.
The ground rumbled again. Another arcade game fell into the pit with a loud splash. Chunks of plaster rained down. I hunched my back, doing what I could to protect the prickly, whimpering children.
“Why happening this?” yelled one of the adults.
That was a good question. If Alex’s goal was to sacrifice the Gauntlet’s supernatural patrons—maybe by feeding them all to the shoggoth?
—then why hadn’t he acted to stop me from rescuing the last of those patrons?
Or if it was a trap, why hadn’t he struck while Jenny and Temple and I were at our most distracted?
The answer came at once. Because it was neither a sacrifice nor a trap. It was a distraction. Alex had lured the three of us out, away from the protections of Second Life Books. Not to kill us but—
The remaining section of floor broke away from the rear wall. It dropped to a forty-five-degree angle, sending me and my two young pukwudgies sliding toward the pit. I hugged the kids to my chest with one hand and stabbed my knife into the floor with the other to stop our fall.
The pukwudgies shivered and cried and nestled against me as I tried to pull myself back up one-handed.
Something slick brushed my leg, then coiled around my ankle.
“Oh, fuck.”
The tentacle—I refused to call something that rubbery an arm, dammit—pulled so hard, it threatened to dislocate my hip.
“Throw us children before you die!” yelled the pukwudgie leader. He stood on the jutting stump of a floor joist a few feet away.
Asshole. But I pried the kids loose and tossed them up.
The floor beneath me creaked. I clung to my knife with both hands, but even if the shoggoth couldn’t pull me loose, it was strong enough to drag this whole section of floor down into its muddy little killing pool.
The muscles in my arms felt like they would tear free from my bones, and my hip was seconds from popping out of its socket.
The thwap of a bowstring was, to my ear, simultaneous with the squelch of an arrow tearing through the tentacle and burying itself in the far side of the pit. A second arrow followed.
The weight on my leg vanished. I pulled myself up onto the joist where Papa Pukwudgie had stood.
A torn black limb was still wrapped around my leg, from my ankle to just past the knee. The end dripped dark, syrupy fluid. My brain suggested the term ichor.
It was grotesque. The smell overloaded my nose like a firehose filling a water balloon.
Through the dust and darkness I could make out a shape the size of an elephant in the murky water below.
Eyeballs caught the light, reflecting red and gold and green, blinking like horrifying Christmas lights.
The sight made me sick to my stomach, but I couldn’t look away.
The eyes . . . some were almost human, while others had pupils like cats or goats, and others were nothing but blackness.
A small hand slapped my face. “Why you stop? You stuck?”
I looked away from the shoggoth, and the weight threatening to shatter my sanity eased. The elder pukwudgie had come back for me. I let out a choked sob of relief.
The pukwudgie peered past me, into the pit.
“Don’t look!” I shouted.
He just cocked his head and squinted his tiny eyes at me. “Hurry.”
Pukwudgies didn’t see well enough to lose their minds at the sight of a shoggoth. Lucky bastards.
I crawled farther from the edge, then hacked the tentacle off my leg. I sliced a bit of my own flesh in the process, but as my granddaughter would say, it was totally worth it.
“Thank you,” I said as we exited what was left of the Gauntlet.
“Welcome,” said the pukwudgie. “Love slapping humans.”
“Half-human.” My heart wasn’t in the protest. “Go. Find someplace safe for you and your family.”
It sagged. “Nowhere safe for pukwudgies.”
I pointed to the growing sinkhole. “Find someplace safer than this.”
“Good thought. That, can do.”
He and his family scurried away, leaving me to tug quills from my chest. My boobs felt like pincushions, and the little brats hadn’t even said thank you.
Thick, cold fog filled the street. The onlookers had mostly fled, and emergency responders hadn’t reached us yet, though I heard sirens in the distance.
I spotted Jenny floating fifteen feet in the air, just past the far edge of the sinkhole. She had an arrow nocked to her bow. Her eyes were shut, but her attention was laser-focused on the darkness.
I heard a faint splash. In that instant, she tilted her head, drew the bowstring, and loosed the arrow.
Temple sat on a bench at a bus stop across the street. He had one hand toward Jenny, presumably keeping her aloft and out of the shoggoth’s reach. His other hand gripped his cane. His eyes were narrowed, and he was mumbling.
“Everyone’s clear,” I shouted.
Jenny nodded without taking her focus off the pit. “We can’t let this thing loose.”
“Have you seen any sign of Alex?” I asked, hoping she’d say yes. Hoping I was wrong about his plans.
“Nothing yet,” she said.
I crossed the street to guard Temple. “What about you? Have you found him yet?”
He waved me off, still muttering to himself in a language I didn’t recognize.
I checked the rooftops and every window I could see.
“I’m down to four arrows,” Jenny shouted.
“Would you people kindly stop interrupting my work?” Temple snapped.
I smothered the urge to toss him into the pit. We were all on edge, and Temple’s work had much more potential to explode and turn us all into zombie butterflies or ashy smears on the nearest wall if he was distracted at the wrong moment.
A sacrifice required ritual. Alex couldn’t just settle down three blocks away with a sniper rifle and put a bullet through Temple’s heart. It had to be done right.
Sending a shoggoth to devour this place was dangerous and chaotic, but there was no ritual. No formality. Even if we hadn’t gotten everyone out of the Gauntlet, their deaths wouldn’t have helped Alex.
He needed a sacrifice powerful enough to attract the attention of a god. We’d assumed that meant one of us.
“Brace yourselves,” yelled Temple.
My skin pimpled and my hair stood on end.
Temple slammed the end of his cane onto the ground.
Lightning stabbed deep into the pit. The thunderclap was a physical blow. I staggered backward, deaf and half-blind.
Steam and ichor and worse erupted from the pit. I saw Jenny fall. Chunks of concrete pelted my body, along with a smoking piece of still-wriggling tentacle. I noticed that none of the debris struck Temple.
He nodded once, clearly satisfied with his work. His mouth moved, but I had no clue what he was saying.
Jenny crawled up from the edge of the pit. She looked over her shoulder, then gave Temple and me a thumbs-up.
“We have to go,” I shouted.
She cocked her head and mouthed the word What?
I squinted at my phone, trying to see the screen through the afterimage of the lightning bolt. With agonizing slowness, I typed a new text to Jenny and Temple: Alex is going to sacrifice the shop.
“Welcome, loyal followers of R’gngyk, to the final ritual.”