The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [117]
Cal was screaming, yelling something over and over, but through the agony that my body had been consumed by, I couldn’t understand his pleadings.
The leader of the ghouls landed in front of me, dropping from the tunnel roof, twisting his horrible glistening body in midair. He was stocky, with a smushed face like a Chinese dog, and stood on his hind legs while he scented, deep and drafty. His mouth opened in a grin and he gibbered to his fellows.
“This one tastes like fresh meat. Whiter’n a dead thing, her skin.”
I choked in terror, tears of pain dribbling down my face. The ghoul’s speech sounded like that of the drunkards on the last jitney to Uptown in the evenings, but to hear speech coming from that razor-tipped mouth stirred a bleak horror in me greater than any viral creature I’d yet witnessed. The ghouls weren’t mindless, like the shoggoth. I knew from endless lanternreels and lectures that they were intelligent pack hunters, and they’d brought us to bay.
“Let me taste her, Tanner.” A thin one with a spotty hide slid forward. “Been so long in a cage. So long since we had anything live.”
“Get off, you.” The one named Tanner swatted at the upstart with a paw the size of a dinner plate. “You can have the chitterlings that smell like death. The soft one’s meat is for me.”
I couldn’t hold my vision steady any longer, and I ground the heel of my palm into my forehead in an attempt to drive out the pain. Beyond the scraping of the ghoul’s guttural snarls there was something in my head, something cold and swelling to bursting. Black whirlpools formed in front of my eyes and my breath caught.
Perhaps I would faint, and wake up with the wandering things in the mists, the corpse-drinkers. Perhaps I’d wake up in the star-home of R’lyeh, with the Great Old Ones.
Either way, the cold knowledge that I was about to perish cut through the pain in my head, and on its heels came the desperate thrashing desire to stay alive.
I heard a slow ticking, the clockwork of my heartbeat. It quickened even as everything around me went fuzzy, loose and slow from pain and panic.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tock.
Everything went very still, hard and cold inside of me. This wasn’t like the owl in the library, a sudden burst of Weird ripped free by the root, leaving a bleeding hole. I died for a split second, and in that time something living in me silently until that moment uncoiled, wrapped itself around my mind and squeezed.
My Weird blossomed again and I allowed it to spread all through me like molten ore. I felt the iron of the gate mesh with the iron in my blood, the clockwork of the mechanism turning wheels and gears inside my head. It didn’t feel like madness or pain, or anything like the necrovirus that had gripped me after the shoggoth bite.
It felt like I had put on clockwork wings and learned how to make them fly.
And then I could see again. My breath scraped in and out, my lungs burning like I’d dunked my head in a swimming pool. The pain was gone and in its place was a pinpoint of cold, tingling sensation that I recognized from stepping through the hexenring. Enchantment was riding my blood, and my Weird was demanding to be set free.
The ghouls snarled at me, their hungry mouths inches from my flesh.
I was freezing, and under my fingertips I felt iron, even though I wasn’t touching anything but air. I breathed in and out, and I could feel the parts of Graystone protecting the tunnel respond.
The gate snapped shut behind the ghouls, rusted mechanism shrieking protest at the speed.
Tanner, the enormous ghoul, levered his heavy head around like a wrecking ball. “What’s going on? My blood’s burning!”
It wasn’t enough. The creatures were still in the tunnel with me and Cal and could still harm us. I reached out, pushing the spear of the Weird out from my mind, and found gear wheels and metal teeth lying in wait all around us. I tugged at them, feeling the resultant stab of agony through my chest and heart. With a rumble and a groan, Graystone’s majestic machine woke from its slumber.