Across Time and Space, at the Mountains of Madness

978

Grendel might have gotten away at the facility. But he couldn’t escape from me forever. And so I tore through time in search of him, revenge the only thing on my mind.

I finally tracked him down to the16th century, in a North American forest. He was just arriving in the time period, still dressed in a Nazi SS uniform.

“Darling!” He said upon seeing me. “I didn’t know you would be here. I just got back from playing with you in Warsaw. What brings you-”

He wasn’t able to keep talking after I ripped his jugular out. Didn’t give him a chance to heal from that. Grabbed his face and slammed it into the ground, then brought down my foot hard enough to crack his skull. He teleported away to recover, but I followed him and kicked him back down. Another Grendel appeared behind me, but I caught him in the nose with a backhand.

“You seem upset.” He said, clutching his nose as it moved back into place. “Perhaps I-”

Punch.

“Honey, why are you-”

Kick.

“Damn it, let me finish a-”

Bite.

That seemed to be enough for Grendel, and he warped away. But I wasn’t done with him yet. Followed him to Newfoundland, 1954. Arrived there a few seconds before him. His face when he saw me already there…. He would have warped away again, but I grabbed him before he could. Rammed his head into a wall, over and over until the wall crumbled. Let go of him for a moment and he warped to Cuba, 1816. Then Mesopotamia, 2000 BC. Then Japan, 1129. Every time, I was waiting for him. I gunned him down in the trenches of Verdun, crushed him in the depths of the Mariana Trench, and burned him in the fires of Pompeii, never stopping, constantly chasing and attacking him wherever he went.

Finally his flight took him to Antarctica, at the foot of an immense mountain. He arrived first that time, and was the one to launch an ambush when I arrived. At least twenty Grendels attacked the moment my foot set down on the snow. Twenty? Hmph. I doubled that. For every one of him, two of me struck back.

When the dust settled, there was only one of each of us. Grendel seemed prepared to run again, but I was faster. Drew a knife and slashed his stomach open, then put a satchel charge in the opening. Warped back a bit, and then detonated it.

Black shadow like substance was raining down for quite a while. Shame about the healing thing. I’d have enjoyed the moment more had Grendel’s pieces not started to put themselves back together as soon as they touched down. His head, shoulders, and right reformed quickly, but I intervened before he could recover more. Grabbed him by the wrist, and lifted him to eye level. For the first time in my memory Grendel looked scared, and I wanted to see that terror up close. There was so much more pain I could inflict on him, so many possible torments running through my head, each eagerly pushing for prominence, until I could barely choose from all the wonderful ideas. I could feel his wrist cracking in my grip, and that only made me squeeze harder, basking in every moment of his suffering….

“Father?” Grendel said.

Looked behind me. No one there. Was he talking to me?

“What?” Wait. That wasn’t my voice. Coughed a few times, tried again. “What?”

Grendel began to laugh. Not his usual, condescending laugh, but something unhinged. His laughter seemed so out of control that I threw him back to the ground, where the shadows began to reform his body.

“Of course it would be you in the end!” He said as he gasped for air between laughs. “You were his first choice, after all! This is the only way it could have turned out!”

“Grendel, are you babbling in the hopes that you’ll confuse me enough that I stop hurting you, or have you really lost it this time?”

He shakily stood up on new legs, and tapped the side of his head. “Can’t you hear him, Darling? Can’t you hear Father’s voice inside you?”

For a moment, those familiar whispers started to rise in my head, but I pushed them aside. “I don’t hear shit, Grendel. Now let’s get back to me killing you.”

“Killing me? Sure! Go right ahead!” He nearly fell over from his laughter, but caught himself. “It doesn’t matter now! If I die here, if my Revolution actually succeeds? Who cares! He’s won! Father’s already won!”

That laughter was really getting on my nerves. “Alright Grendel, I’m starting to get a little tired of the Father bullshit.”  Grabbed him by the throat. “You have been going on and fucking on as long as I’ve been fighting you about Father this and Father that, and for once you are going to stop being so god damn vague and tell me who the hell this Father is!”

He stopped laughing. “You mean… you don’t know? All this time, and you really don’t know? You never questioned any of it? Why we could travel through time and space? What your arm is? Why the Fears are so terrified of us?” He started to laugh again, but stopped when I choked him a little. “Father is the old god, banished to the emptiness of the Quiet by the Fears, who created us. We are his children. Although… perhaps children isn’t the right word. We are not new life begotten from him. No, we are him, given new form.
The imprisonment placed upon him prevents him from escaping the Quiet, but that limitation is not placed upon others. And when two humans happened upon his dungeon, he saw an opportunity. A god, hidden inside the shell of a primate. The consciences of the humans were used as a template for the shell, and then he poured a part of himself into those shells. And with the disguise created, his new forms escaped through the cracks of the Quiet, back into the multiverse.”
He pointed at my left arm. “You have always acted as if your arm was a parasite, some kind of foreign host which forcefully attached itself to your body. But it is the opposite that is true. Your arm is not a parasite; it is part of your true body, which has found its way back home.”

“You still haven’t told me who the hell Father is.”

One word. That’s all he said in reply. But when he said that, I felt something stir inside me. Something old. Something hungry.

“Nyarlathotep.”

There was a power in that name, strong enough to make me let go of Grendel and allow him to recover. “This news… changes some things.” He said. “I may have to talk more with you. The you before you got into this murderous rage, of course.”

He disappeared, but this time, I didn’t follow. I just sat down on the snow, and listened to that name echo through my head.

Nyarlathotep.


I-330