The endless beating of the tired calloused feet continued, pounding out an appeasement to their half-dreamed Ometéotlitztl, and accompanying the sound were those faint notes of a pipe, reverberating off the stone walls, calling out with arms held wide. Their singing was like no song Noah had ever heard. The language was impenetrable—grunts and clicks as if Nature herself were in revolt, throwing off her suffocating yoke. Still more figures spilled forth from the ruins, multiplying in the burning height of day, each one solidifying into a grey, mud-covered mockery of humanity. But none were shaped like children. None were his Eli.
The discordant music elicited an orgiastic fury from the Tletliztlii, their cracked flesh drumming the world into submission. Every note, every image served to further dwindle Noah’s rationality until he doubted the truth of what he witnessed. All his anchors were gone, abandoning him when he needed them most, leaving him to stare at events his sun-stroked mind could not fathom. Nothing on the heath could be trusted. Nothing on the heath could be real. There were familiar screams, but in the chaos of impossible events they retreated into moorless oblivion. A scattering of ashes, motes of dark dust, filled the air. Lifeless, shapeless piñatas vibrated, painted-on faces distorted by the blaze. Fire raged white and pure inside his skull, and yet Noah felt the cold fear of being trapped in an elaborate Goldbergian web of events. He sweated profusely as before his eyes the twisted figures danced harder, faster, and from within their multiplying childless numbers the terrified screaming resurfaced, demanding his flailing attention. It was a voice he knew frighteningly well.
Rachel was as naked as the mob that dragged her struggling from the ruins, her body covered in streaks of colored paint radiating from her swollen pregnancy, and they held her high above their heads. Noah opened his mouth wide, but nothing emerged, all sound lost somewhere inside his dried throat. He was trapped in an ever-worsening nightmare, far beyond his breaking point, and yet could do nothing but watch the woman he loved, the mother of his unborn child, as she was carried across the baked earth and placed onto that cloven altar the petrified tree loomed over. Noah stared impotently as Muñoz appeared, covered in the same cracked grey mud, and bound Rachel’s hands over and over with thick loops of rope. The chanting of the others grew louder as Muñoz wrapped the rope between Rachel’s arms and pulled so tight her hands slammed together. He then threw the other end over the worn branch of the petrified tree where other muddy hands waited to receive it, clamoring for a grip. Noah tried to will himself to stand, to scream for help, to do anything to disrupt the nightmare that was unfolding, but his paralysis held firm, the drone of the plaster creatures overpowering him. With a sudden jerk of the rope by the dancing Tletliztlii, Rachel was hoisted violently from the ground to hang from the branch of the tree, her mouth contorted in a drawn-out scream that Noah could not hear. Rachel’s legs kicked and thrashed, her round belly thrust forward by the angle, and Noah wanted to call out to her with his every fiber, but his bruised and broken body would not comply. Even his tears dried before they emerged. He was held fast to the spot, rooted by ineffectuality and torment.
The village danced in chaotic ecstasy to the tribal rhythms and to Rachel’s feeble kicking, while around them the rows of plaster piñatas continued to vibrate from the pounding of so many villagers shaking the rocky terrain. Noah felt it slipping up into his body as he lay powerlessly immobile. Each of those dead-eyed creatures stared at the proceedings, and in his sunbaked delirium Noah wished they would act, do what he could not and stop the horror. But though the piñatas shook, they took no action, not even when, from the depths of the crowd, a lone muddy figure appeared. She moved differently from the others, her limbs flailing as though in the throes of deep spasm, as though the stifling heat was consuming her from within. From beneath the tangles of mud-caked auburn hair her face flashed, revealing a darkly painted countenance blacker than was possible. And yet, within that empty void two bright eyes burned; he did not have to see them to know their owner. His battered body bucked with the strange sensation running its length, crawling into his pelvis, shrinking him in terror. “No,” he rasped as Sonia’s darting hand grabbed hold of Rachel’s face and smeared the colored paint into chaos, her fingers leaving wet black streaks in their wake. Then Sonia stretched her head back and screamed a word into the black night, a word that echoed across the heath, a word that seemed to fracture the very air. It was a word so large Noah’s mind could not comprehend it. Tears finally erupted from his eyes as though to cleanse them of the unholy blasphemies they had witnessed, but did nothing more than streak his dusty face. Sonia raised her arms toward the orb burning above and for an instant it went dark, became its antithesis, a solid ball of pure emptiness, of burning space and countless overlapping aeons. The sun burned bright, burned black, and the sound itself was like thunder rolling across the heavens. Then a glint from Sonia’s upheld hands filled the sky, bursting through walls and shores like an exploding sun, and from that flash her arms emerged, swinging down in a purposed arc, one hand over the other, so swiftly Noah did not know where they had gone until Rachel’s swollen belly burst open, blood and flesh spraying, the grue of his unborn child tumbling forth soundlessly to die on the heat of the ancient pedestal.
Noah found his voice then, but it was too late. And had been before he and Rachel and their unborn child arrived in Astilla de la Cruz. Before Eli had been taken, before Sonia saw any articles. The series stretched back further, each piece, each cog, tumbling in time, lined up one before the other. So far back, there was no beginning, simply causality stretching back into something else, something so distant that were Noah to scream forever the sound of the last dregs of his sanity would never reach it. Instead, they would spew into the aether until his body was burned clean through. But even the sound of his shattered sanity was eclipsed by what followed.
The rock of the blasted heath raised a foot beneath Rachel’s lifeless swinging legs, a jump that shifted the earth beneath so many. The villagers stopped, the drumming ceased, and all were mesmerized by the stained altar. Even Noah, to whom words and noise had recently returned, stared dumbly at the wet mass covering the stone, at what remained of his unborn child and at the petrified tree growing impossibly from rock. The sense in the air dragged down on the world, blanketed everything in oppressive dread, and the group of villagers and their offering of piñatas could do nothing but watch as the distant thunder grew louder. And louder. And louder still. Then, with no warning, a deafening crack. As loud as the world at its end. Everything shook, the Tletliztlii stumbling over themselves in confusion, some dropping to their hands and knees as everything became unstable. The altar fell to thousands of pieces, Noah’s unborn child consumed instantly by the fissure that grew down the middle of the heath, wrenching the earth apart with a horrible sound. The petrified tree tottered, its weight too much for the crumbling, receding earth, and it too fell forward into the widening chasm, the remnants of Rachel’s empty body tumbling alongside. The Tletliztlii stumbled over one another as stable ground collapsed, some swallowed into its depths without a sound.
The rows of piñatas danced on the vibrations, their twisted faces smirking at the destruction. Sonia staggered across the baked uneven ground, screaming incoherently at the sky, covered in Rachel’s blood. Her eyes were wide, crazed, confused by the chaos around her. Other Tletliztlii bumped into her in their mad scramble to escape, but one by one the collapsing ground took them—took Muñoz and Manillo and all the rest—until only Sonia remained. Sonia, and those endless rows of misshapen piñatas. She looked around, desperate for help, but no one was there. No one but Noah, who remained hidden. She stumbled, looking for somewhere safe she could step, and as her eyes scanned the crumbling landscape he froze, convinced she had spotted him in the midst of the brush staring at her. If their eyes locked, it was only for the fraction of a second before the ground beneath her feet wrenched open and swallowed her whole.
Noah’s head continued to swim, faster and faster. Had what he witnessed been real, or had the horror and the heat finally broken him, filling his sight with the impossible? The rocky ground could not be yawning wide, swallowing chunks of the barren heath into its endless void. The ruins could not be crumbling, not after so many years of standing, crushing anything that still remained—everything but those piñatas. Those plaster abominations that shook and rattled but did not fall, not one of them into the ever-widening crack into the center of the world. Instead, they served as silent, multicolored witnesses to what Noah had to endure. He wondered how any of it was possible, any of the death and destruction that lay before him on the thundering ground, and for the briefest instant he felt hope. Perhaps he
was
mad. Perhaps nothing was real, and Rachel and Eli were somewhere else, somewhere far away from the boiling destruction, from the ground bubbling up, throwing rocks outward. Perhaps they were on that beach, relaxing and looking at the animals in the soft clouds. Noah looked up and saw nothing in the sky but a sole burning orb in endless blankness; the only animals left on the ground twisted, ugly and dead inside.
Noah’s entire body was racked with pain, but as rocks rained down around him he knew he had to escape. He slid his legs to the side, then under him, enough to push himself back up. Exploding lights filled his eyes as he felt the knives of his bones slicing into his insides, but he managed to stand on a pair of unsteady legs. Stand and survey the end of everything before him.
The plaster effigies were vibrating so quickly on the quaking earth that they appeared as blurs, so insubstantial as no longer to be part of the world. Like ghosts, they hovered over the broken ground, and the sound they made was a strange-pitched and deafening howl. Deep black cracks formed across the piñatas, widening and deepening before Noah’s disbelieving eyes, and from those long black cracks dark ichor flowed. It bubbled out, slow and viscous, but instead of falling to the rutted ground it moved unnaturally upward, up and across the plaster backs of the faux animals, and Noah realized it was not blood or liquid that he saw but fire. The piñatas were burning. But the flames were as black as night. They grew higher, burning clean everything they touched, destroying any life that still remained on that rocky barren heath. The brush that surrounded it lit as well, Noah’s hiding spot quickly becoming an inferno, further obscuring his vision.
The flames grew higher, enveloping the entire heath, and in the center of it the deep chasm that had swallowed so many spewed something back to the above world, the world of living. It was small, the size of an orange, burnt black and still afire. The flames, those black burning flames, had destroyed everything to bring it life, and as the cold fire grew so did it. First it doubled its size, then doubled again, growing exponentially before Noah’s fracturing psyche. It grew and metamorphosed as the black fire that enveloped it burned—arms that became a pair of writhing serpents, an encephalitic head perched precariously on sloped shoulders. Along its newly formed ebony back, curved spines jutted in odd patterns, each alight with burning phosphorescence. But its eyes were the most horrifying of all. Deep pits of nothing, they scoured the blasted heath that was its nursery, blind to all the horrors that had transgressed, and as that giant misshapen skull panned toward Noah those two deep wastes stayed. Though the fire burned unfettered, uncontrolled, Noah’s being became ice and he averted his gaze in pain.
There was a wrenching sound then, and the thing bellowed an indescribable noise that echoed across the empty wasteland. It lifted one of its many bent legs out from deep within the earth—a pillar of black fire that filled the sky with the dark storm of night, a storm that lasted forever—and stepped over its father below and into the blistering day. Each footfall struck the ground with the force of the heavens, the first laying waste to the circle of piñatas that had acted as its host. Small bones spilled forth, some very old and some very fresh, many generations of bones all kept, all hoarded for one particular day, one particular set of events, bones no bigger than a child’s. Seeds for the rebirth of an aborted god brought forth to reclaim the future it had lost. And to deliver unto all everything it had promised.
But Noah would know none of it, trapped as he was in the prison of his broken mind. Eli was there, smiling, laughing, dancing in circles around the edges of the world while Noah desperately tried to catch him before the boy was lost forever.
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks to Laird Barron, Richard Gavin, Ives Hovanessian, Stephen Jones, S. T. Joshi, Michael Kelly, John Langan, Gary McMahon, Joseph S. Pulver, Sr., Ian Rogers, and Paul Tremblay for their help, encouragement, inspiration, and support during the writing of these tales.
This book is dedicated to those giants upon whose shoulders I stand: Robert Aickman, Ramsey Campbell, Robert W. Chambers, Thomas Ligotti, and H. P. Lovecraft.
“Dwelling on the Past” was first published in
Chilling Tales: In Words, Alas, Drown I,
edited by Michael Kelly (Edge Publications, 2013).
“Strong as a Rock” was first published in
Phantasmagorium
#1, edited by Laird Barron (2011).
“By Invisible Hands” was first published in
The Grimscribe’s Puppets,
edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (Miskatonic River Press, 2013).
“Thistle’s Find” was first published in
Black Wings III,
edited by S. T. Joshi (PS Publishing, 2013).
“Beyond the Banks of the River Seine” was first published in
A Season in Carcosa,
edited by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. (Miskatonic River Press, 2012).
All other stories are original to this volume.