The Shoes I Wore This Morning

From Lost Days, Last Nights

Lost Days, Last Nights

You may have heard the rumor that I dabble in fiction here and there. Over the years, I’ve garnered the occasional award nomination and other acclaim for my science fiction, mysteries, fantasies, and nightmare-tales.

Now, some of my best and strangest short story work from the last fifteen years is collected in a single volume of apocalypses, romances, and Gothic mysteries. Each tale chronicles a tragic misstep, a missed opportunity, or a miraculous epiphany brought about by the most uncanny, otherworldly means. These are tales that will haunt your dreams, fuel your nightmares, and whisper hope to you from beyond the darkness.

As a foretaste, I invite you to enjoy this tale of adventure and ruin set in the nineteenth century Amazon, where a rubber baron chasing a lost treasure discovers a terrible, ancient secret…

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The Shoes I Wore This Morning

IT WASN’T RAINING in Manaus. In the high part of the rainy season, this struck many of the locals as unusual, even odd, as a number of them remarked when I trudged my weary way from the docks.

I, of course, knew why it was not raining. And I knew the storms would come again, soon. An hour, maybe. Storms the like of which even God has not seen since he flooded the world.

This storm would bring no flood. It proceeded from an entirely different source.

I was here because luck had smiled upon me—for what little good it did me—in the hour of my second-greatest need, not so long ago. The hour of my greatest need loomed an hour hence, and I needed fortification.

But fickle Dame Luck exacts a price, and never pays out in kind. In my case, she smiled on me only because I was willing to sacrifice the shoes I wore this morning. In return, I was granted God’s grace to flee before the storm with a native who knew how to ride the current in ways that no Englishman will ever master—the only reason I was able to arrive before the coming storm at all.

You may think I’m having a laugh when I speak about a fast boat down the Amazon, but the Taupai rivermen know the river’s ways, its hidden channels and dead zones, and they manage the journey speedier than any paddleboat, and without any kind of steam engine.

Manaus’s pearl-shell whitewash and bright coal-dye colors make it the perfect storybook city for the last outpost of civilization when arriving, and the first when leaving for London. It announces that not even the mighty jungle can stand against man’s determination, and that nature bequeaths to us her bounty in such magnitude that we might never exhaust her.

And perhaps we never would have. But nature is not the only party, and, according to the Bible I was raised on, God is changeable in his favor, and might deem us unworthy if we transgress too far into the wrong domain. And this, I regret, I have done, and only in the interest of saving my family from doom at the hands of its creditors. God save us all.

It is no proud thing for a modern explorer such as Lord Phineas Roxton Summerlee to be pinning the last of his hopes on a miracle, but that was what I was down to.

My bare feet flapped on the cobbles as I headed uptown. I wanted my fortification in style, and what I lacked in attire I made up for in gold—gold enough that, even in a place like Manaus, the prigs would pretend to me that I appeared a proper lord rather than a shipwreck’s refugee.

“Give me three fingers of Jameson. Neat. Leave the bottle.” In a proper lounge like this, straight whiskey just is not done. Working-class pikers might swill straight from the barrel, but a proper gentleman—especially one drinking in the early part of the afternoon—orders with soda, or not at all.

“We don’t want no riff-raff in here. Head back on down to the docks with you.”

I stood from the mahogany stool and looked him in the eye. “What is your name?”

“Addison.”

“Addison, I am Lord Phineas Roxton Summerlee of Somerset. My brother owns this building, and I will traffic in this establishment if I bloody well please.” I pulled a pouch from my pocket and poured a measure of gold on the bar. “Take it, or go to the maitre’d and have your wages computed. Do I make myself clear?”

“Your pardon, sir.” And he obliged.

“What’s this?” That voice behind me, I’d know anywhere. My mother’s brother-in-law. Fess. Blowhard, and architect of my misery. The kind of man who moves to the end of the earth to “run the family business,” but believes that phrase should end with “into the ground.” Too old to understand what money is for, from the generation that believes industry is unbecoming to the gentry. If only my brother and I had thought that way, there would be no approaching storm.

Poor Peter. Another reason for the booze.

“Fin, my boy, when did you get in?” Fess offered me his open cigarette case.

“Just,” I waved off the smoke, knocked back the shot, and choked down the burn. If I’d wanted something to savor, I’d have ordered cognac. I was here for Irish courage, not pleasure.

“Whoa, boy!” He grabbed the bottle before I could refill.

I yanked it back from him. “Get yourself buggered, Fess.” And I poured another drink. Four fingers, this time. Knocked it back like it was water.

“Fin, my boy,” he fancied himself a diplomat, his condescension conciliatory. He lit a companionable cigarette, and made as if he had nothing more urgent on his mind than an afternoon snooker match. “What in blazes happened? And what are you doing back here? Why, you weren’t due back for weeks!”

I didn’t answer.

“Where is your brother?”

Not a word passed my lips.

“Fin? Where is Peter?”

“Still up the river.” I poured another.

“So why are you here?”

I knocked it back. I hoped I had enough time to get good and drunk. “Because we found it.”

“You found it?”

“Yes.” Drink number three hit my stomach like sulfuric acid. “Yes, we found it.”

“Well, dammit, man, if you found it, tell me.”

I reached in my pocket, pulled out my last precious possession. My picture of Elizabeth, and little Aaron. I propped the little silver frame, shattered glass and all, next to the bottle, then I raised the glass and thought, It’s my fault, Elizabeth. My fault. I’m sorry. I should never have left home. But if I am to die, I will gaze at the last upon your sweet face.

“Fin. Fin, speak up, lad.”

“We found it. Up the river. Maybe a thousand miles.” I sloshed down another, the bottle now half-gone. It was already loosening my tongue, but I figured, hell, he deserves to know. Even if he was a sniveling old prat, even if he was a proper scoundrel, he deserved to know. A scarce luxury as far as history was concerned, but to my way of thinking, every man ought at least to know what killed him in the end. Seems only decent.

“A thousand?”

“Yes. Or a hundred. In a granite blister near a great rift in the land where the water falls down from the upper basin.”

“Orellana’s prize?” He was practically drooling. “Like in the stories?”

“No! Not like in the stories!” I was too busy pouring to notice right away that I was shouting. The expression on his face told me. Out of self-respect, I lowered my voice. Him, I didn’t care about. This could, if I wanted it to, be his fault. He was the one who’d planted the notion. “Not like the stories at all. Not a thing.”

“But . . . the city . . .”

“The Indians, they know the truth, if we would have just listened to them . . . All the way up river. Any friendly tribe. They’ve heard the stories. They say that Orellana spoke of a man of gold, not a city—an ancient high priest who attended a sacred temple in the . . .”

“So there is a city.”

“No, there is no city—”

“But you said you found his prize!”

“Yes. I did.” I slugged back another. At this rate I would need another bottle. Maybe I’d die of alcohol poisoning before the storm hit.

“Don’t be daft, boy. There is no city—there is a prize—a man of gold—a temple? Start making sense!”

“You want sense? Very well.” I poured myself the last of the bottle, then rapped on the counter for the bartender to bring another. “When we set out, we resolved to stop at every village—every friendly village, at least—and ask. To make the journey, we needed a hunter. We found one, Alasdair Sanderson, a top man, knew a top river guide. Top people, both of them, just as Peter would have it, and so would I. Our guide, John, he calls himself in English—I could never tell what his real name was—speaks every language from here to Pucallpa.

“We moved up the river, stopping every few miles, asking about Orellana and his lost city . . .”

“But did you show them the medallion, lad?” The medallion he’d won at cards. Orellana’s keepsake, with clues, he thought. Careless blighter.

I pulled the golden trinket from round my neck and tossed it at him. “Take it. It’s Inca gold, and you’d have known that if you’d bothered to drop it in a glass of water.” Even real gold wasn’t worth anything anymore, but he’d find that out soon enough.

“Inca?”

“Christ. The color is what the Incas cared about, not the metal. The color of the sun. How long did you say you’ve been here?”

“I’m sorry, lad, but I just can’t see . . .”

“Copper and gold alloy with the copper burned off the surface. Lighter, cheaper, has the color. Not worth a whole bloody lot. You know what?” I took the last drink and rapped on the bar again, “I will have a smoke. In fact, I’ll have three.”

He shrugged and proffered his case again. I lit off the bar flame, dragged deep. A little tremor shook the place, as if an army were marching across the floor upstairs. “Yeah, three oughta just about do it.”

“Do what? Dammit, man, stop this bloody foolishness and tell me what happened!”

“What happened. Right-o.” I took a draw, held it till it burned, then let it out again. “They recognized this,” I picked up the trinket, “It frightened them. At two villages, they shot at us. At a third, their scouts melted into the jungle and refused to treat with us further. At camp that third night, John showed us the legend on the back—this.”

I flipped the medallion and pointed to the scrollwork ringing the outside, which resembled a brood of vipers, and the central device of the seven-pointed wheel, which looked for all the world like a compass rosette made of narwhal horns. “He said they thought even looking on it would bring bad luck. He said word traveled faster up the river than boats, and if we wanted to keep our skins, we would stop now before we met a tribe that was ready to kill us to prevent us from befouling the sacred river.” I took a long drag, replaying the moment in my head, considering what might-have-been, had we but listened.

But what was the point now, in dwelling on might-have-been? I might as well mourn the tobacco smoldering between my fingers. Much better to complain about the bloody empty whiskey bottle, but I figured I’d better get through the story before I finished the bender. “Between Peter, Alasdair, and I, we prevailed upon John to make one further attempt at a landing of his choosing. We would corner and trap a native, and promise release contingent upon him telling us what we wanted to know: Where the city was, and why the medallion frightened them so.

“We spied our quarry the following morning. A man—no more than a boy of fourteen years, really, but a man by the standards of his tribe—spear-fishing on the river as we happened up. Alasdair identified him as being from one of the Tapui tribes by his tattoos, and John spotted the initiation scars. I don’t recall exactly which tribe, and it doesn’t matter now in any case . . .”

“What if we need them again?”

I started laughing. A rough, dry thing that kept me from breathing. I couldn’t speak but to choke on my own bitterness. “I suspect very much that we shall not need them again. And we were none too gentle with this poor boy. We caught him, Alasdair circling around to the rear with his machete and rope, the three of us approaching open-handed on the boat. As the boy attempted to get the measure of us, the great hunter lassoed him from the shore. When I showed him the medallion and told John to ask him about Orellana’s lost city . . . He took persuading, and you know well that Peter’s appetite for cruelty hasn’t abated since our schooldays. Where’s my goddamned whiskey?”

I needed something to soothe my hacking throat. And my nerves.

The bartender deigned to return. He looked askance at my uncle, who gave a little shrug and glanced at the empty bottle. A new one took its place, and I poured a fresh tumbler and lit a new cigarette off the butt of the old while dear old Uncle Fess tried to look as if he wasn’t fretting. By now, even that old fool could tell I was not in the highest of spirits.

“So,” I continued after I’d coated my throat with an acceptable amount of swill, “The boy refused to speak, at some length, until at last Peter’s persuasions proved effective. He cried out, begging forgiveness from his gods, and protection from the Unspeakable Evil.

“Then, when he had run out of prayers, he looked at the medallion, terror in his eyes, and pointed upriver. He said there was a spur running north. Small mouth, hidden flow. Its waters emerged from beneath a low spread of trees marked on either side by sponge-stone banks. We would know it by the device of the seven-horned wheel carved into the banks. He begged us not to go. He pleaded with us, upon the lives of our people, upon our very souls. Up the river Ku Tuk Lu, he said, lay the doom of men. The end of the world. Only the appointed may go, and no other. Only a fool would even think to brave the caiman and the anacondas and the other dangers of the remotest stretches of jungle, and only the heir to the throne of the chief of all fools would contemplate transgressing into the sanctum where not even Orellana dared go. Orellana, he said, stopped at the golden man and turned back—he never saw what lay beyond.”

My cigarette had gone out. I lit it again from the bar, and chased the acrid hit with another slug of whiskey. My uncle’s face was a mask of consideration. He did not approve of the torture—well, no, that is not quite correct. He did not approve of being told about the torture. Using it to accomplish the ends he himself sought, that he paid no mind to. It was complicity through knowledge that troubled him. But I wanted him troubled. I wanted him to know that this thing happened because of him. I wanted him to feel like it was all his fault, because there was too much blame for one man to bear, even in the trivial amount of time we had left.

“We let the boy run free in the jungle, to return to wherever he came from. Poor blighter probably died from his wounds. And we? We headed up the river, and, after a time, almost got lost in a fetid, sulfurous fog that burned our eyes.” I held up the fringe of my shirt, half-decayed in the last twenty-four hours. “Our clothes, too, though we did not notice it right away.”

“My boy . . .”

“Uncle, if you wish me to finish, you will kindly allow me to speak without further interruption. I will answer questions after . . .” I glanced at the bottle, “assuming I am still upright.”

My uncle shrugged the merest of shrugs, which I took as his leave.

* * * * * *

We found it there, in that fog. The riverbanks he described—foamy volcanic rock, which struck me as odd. I have never read anything about volcanism in the basin, but there you are. More things in heaven and earth and all that. It had to be the Ku Tuk Lu. After hours of searching them, we did indeed find the horn rosette, and a narrow channel, deep and fast, concealed behind a sprawl of camocamo. Too fast to take a boat up, at least at the neck. We had to carry it overland, upriver, through the acid mist.

The waters were warm. Doubtless volcanic. And, quicker than I might have thought, we reached a widening in the waters where we could lower our boat if we chose—but we refrained. Our way was almost clear, as if we trod a path not-long overgrown, and purpose-cut. Here and there I spotted ancient cobbles peeking up through the terra preta, as if we were on what was once a proper road that the jungle had since reclaimed.

Our nostrils burned as we breathed the mist. My skin chafed beneath my clothes as we climbed a steepening grade. John led the prow by maybe ten yards. The Indians have no written language, just as the Inca did not, but they do leave signs and symbols, and, according to Alasdair, John knew how to read them all.

The river on our left widened into a pool, and the path bent around to the right, accommodating its edge, but retreating from it bit by bit, until the shore was lost to the undergrowth.

After some discussion, and reasoning that we could easily come back to it if we needed to, we agreed to leave the boat at the edge of the path near the water. John waited while we backtracked, set it in the brush, then continued on.

We found John a little ways on, in the midst of the path, transfixed. Following his eyes, we spotted, at the top of the next rise, what we took to be a golden statue of a man astride the path, naked save for a loincloth and a short scepter.

Orellana’s man of gold. Indeed, not a city. And even under the canopy’s dim, the figure burned and shimmered yellow like the afternoon sun. As we approached, cautiously in deference to John’s urging, the figure spread his arms—no mere statue, he, but a man, in fact—and shouted.

Out of reflex, I looked back at John for translation.

“Stop!” our man said. “He says ‘come no closer.’”

The golden man spoke again. We heard his words through John’s mouth. The path was forbidden. Only the purified might enter, for only they had any hope of drawing near without waking the Ku Tuk Lu. When we asked what that was, he said “The beast of the world’s ending.”

Alasdair wanted to press on, and see for ourselves. Peter wanted to know if there was gold, as the legends told. I wanted to know what this place was, and how long it had been here.

He would not tell us. He would only say that we were not permitted to pass.

John urged us to turn back. He said that he, too, had grown up on tales of the beast, and the people who guarded its rest. We should seek our fortune elsewhere—surely, in a jungle so full of relics, there must be something else we could find to make our fortune.

Alasdair declared that it was all balls, and, his rifle raised like a shepherd’s crop to push the golden man aside, he stepped forward.

The golden man slashed him across the chest with the tip of his scepter, quick-as-you-like. The great hunter fell to the ground, twitching madly, and within seconds was still.

Before Alasdair’s death throes finished his ignominy, Peter’s revolver was in his hand, and the guardian’s head lay spread in pieces across the landscape behind his body.

Shouting did no good. Peter simply holstered his Webley and said that it had to be done. I supposed, at the time, he was right. The man had murdered Alasdair without so much as a warning, and he was killed in his turn. Having incurred such a cost, we might as well press on.

John did not agree. When we called him forward and received no reply, I turned to see him stripping his clothes off, tearing them as he went. Every article, down to his hairless skin. He would not respond to questions, did not even reply to his name. When he was naked, he cursed us in what I assume must be his native tongue, then turned and strode back along the path whence we came.

“Coward,” Peter spat.

I was inclined to agree. The superstitions of natives was not much our concern, and a lonely outpost of a dead civilization, with only a man painted gold to guard it, certainly must qualify as fair game by any rules of etiquette.

Such was my reasoning at the time. And that is why I joined my dear brother, and braved the forbidden fortress—for, after cresting the hillock, we learned that it was, in fact, a fortress carved out of an upthrust granite dome. Steam vented occasionally around its edges, but the path—clean stone on this side of the ridge—wound down into the depression, as if we were descending into an ancient caldera, and straight to a doorway cut into the granite blister.

The place reeked of sulfur, though the mist was less, and it did not burn so much as befoul us. With every breath, we choked on the stench of decay. But the wonders there we fancied worth the discomfort. The place had all the marks of an Incan temple—the iconography carved in relief, the visage of the sun god staring back at us from golden plates affixed deep into the rocks. Everywhere we looked, we saw gold glinting in the sun.

Inca gold, it must have been, but knowing that, and knowing how little it would profit us to bring it back home, did not diminish the wonder of seeing such an ancient place unspoilt. No wonder the Spanish and the Portuguese went half-mad when they met the people that built places like this. Their eyes, dazzled with wealth, must have been equally offended by the virtuosity in engineering. Or, perhaps, they were so pig-headed they could not recognize it as engineering, because they themselves were ignorant of what it takes to quarry and sculpt stone and fit it together like so. It is not the tools that make the architect, but the mind and the will, and that, the Incas had in abundance.

Besides, even though it was not true gold, there was artifact value in the art we saw on display. And that, still, might save the expedition and pay off the family debts before the creditors ruined us in court.

We determined to get a measure of the place before deciding what to take. We moved through the litter of preamble and into the temple proper, for temple it was. A sun god’s temple, cut into the rock itself—most unusual. “Why have the sun god down here where the sun cannot see?” I wondered aloud.

Peter merely shrugged, and bundled his shirt about a stick, and soaked it in gin from his pack, then set light to it so we could see into the dark corners where the sun did not reach.

Beyond the idol opposite the door, we found a narrow stair, leading down. A red glow, like the sun god’s face at twilight, came up from below. And with it a hot breath, fetid not just with sulfur, but with moisture and the metallic tang of blood.

Near the staircase there was a series of basins—the first filled with hot running water and accompanied by a black powder, the second with an oil, the third with a white powder, and the fourth with finely ground gold dust.

We saw on the walls a series of reliefs, showing what must have been the purification ritual. A male figure, stripped naked, scrubbed down with the black powder, then rinsed himself in the water. Then, he submersed himself in oil, covering every inch. Then, the white powder, smeared all over the body until it formed a paste. Then, atop it all, the gold powder.

It was real gold, and fine for the taking, so we filled the pouches in my pack with enough to pay the debt, and enough more to allow us to make another go at the rubber business.

From below, we heard a deep growl, like the purr of a lion just waking. Between that, and the scent, and the light, I found myself compelled to investigate what was down the snarl of stairs.

We descended, and found ourselves in a long annex curving out of sight to the right. The whole room was awash in a suffocating red light that passed through a long slit on the right hand side, as if the entire corridor bordered the pit of hell itself. I mentioned this thought, as it shivered me to my toes even with the sweltering heat, and Peter muttered that it might explain a few things.

We followed it around the bend, and found the end of the passage, lit by a large window in the stone. Against the far wall, I saw the altar, with amphorae arrayed upon racks behind it, as if each one might hold a unique vintage.

And the blood. So much blood.

Upon closer inspection, the altar seemed not so much an altar as a basin. I chanced a reach down inside, and felt a drip drain at the bottom. It seemed to lead through a ceramic pipe and out the window-hole.

“What in the hell is that?”

I followed Peter’s gaze until I was standing by him, looking out the window.

Below, resting on a bed of cherry-red magma, was a strange shape stretching out of sight beneath the far side of the vast chamber, which I reckoned must be twenty or thirty yards away. Like a beetle’s carapace, with squid-fins flapping idly along either side.

The noise came again, and the shape shifted position. A snuffling sound came, and then a word—or what must have been a word—in a language deep and alien.

It said the word again, and then, suddenly, the window was covered by a large, fiery eye. Glassy, with no pupil, like the eye of a seal, but bright and red and dancing in the hellish light.

It saw us.

The moment did not last. A second later it was gone, and a terrific noise shook the cavern. A roar, then a thud. We could see the massive bulk swinging back and forth, winding up, hitting the wall.

Then the window was covered again, this time by a writhing mass of cilia. It rushed the window, smashing into it, and the stone around it cracked.

I shouted to Peter to run, and turned to go, when another shockwave sprawled me face-first onto the smooth stone floor.

In my terror I did not even look behind me, I just tried to scramble to my feet—when I found I couldn’t move my legs.

Peter was blaring behind me in mortal terror, and I looked back to see him dangling out through the shattered wall, kicking madly at the mouth of the creature as he held on to my feet. I tried to pull—he screamed for me to pull—I writhed and wriggled and he pulled and scrambled, but we could gain no purchase.

The beast lunged. It got Peter. It dragged both of us closer to the edge.

Truth be told, I didn’t think. I seized the knife from my belt and stabbed at my own feet, slicing the laces on my boots open. Peter’s eyes went wide with betrayal, and he slipped off my legs along with my shoes, both of them tumbling out that window to their ends.

I had no choice.

I ran. Along the gallery and up the stairs and out of the temple and across the caldera and over the hill past the bodies, then down into the overgrown path in the forest.

Free of my boots, I had nothing to protect me against the jungle’s harsh ground, the snakes, or any of the thousands of other things that might kill me faster than that infernal beast could, trapped as it was in its stone prison. I trusted to fate, believing my escape secure, and set my shoulder to the boat. Heaving and heaving for an hour, I managed to scrape it down the rough path to the water boiling up from beneath that thing’s foul cell.

And with every heave, I felt the ground beneath me tremble, as if, down in the bowels of hell, the beast were lashing at his prison, throwing his massive bulk against the walls, waiting for the very Earth itself to crumble around him so he could fly free on those monstrous, squid-fin wings.

The river bore me swiftly down to the Amazon—it was all I could do to keep control of the thing. It shot me out into the vast, crawling waters of the jungle’s arteries, where I spotted, running naked along the near shore, the nut-red figure of John.

I begged him to join me. He ignored my pleas until, at last, the very air trembled with fear. A great cry, the cry of the beast, roared against the landscape. It battered the mountains, it blasted me to my back and disturbed the waters with ripples rolling high like storm-waves from shore to shore.

John fixed me with his wide eyes from the shore, his beautiful skin gone gray like a ghost. “You have awakened it!”

“Come on, you fool, get in! It’s coming!”

The roar came again. The boat nearly capsized.

John dove into the water and came up on the boat. He tore the steerboard from my hand and ordered me to paddle, hard. He guided us into the current, and we picked up speed, putting ground between us and the monstrous noise that flushed the creatures out of the forest and into the river behind us, like bats fleeing a cave at sunset.

We fled, for two days and two nights, without sleep or rest, John’s native facility with the currents making shorter work of the water than we had any cause to hope, even with the shaking and the howling of the beast echoing through the forest, across the water, and petrifying everything under the unsympathetic sky like Lot’s wife overlooking Sodom.

Behind us, the storm grew. Rain did not once touch the jungle floor, but up toward the mountains, we watched the billowing black grow as that thing attempted to win its way free from its volcanic cell.

And then, this morning, as dawn broke over the jungle, we saw it: The plume, white, as if from a gigantic steam factory, rising into the heavens. And with it, a new earthquake, larger than a million artillery shells, shaking the ground. And we saw the fire, and the white it spread. The jungle dying off before it. We saw the white spreading down the river towards, as if that thing, whatever it was, were sucking all the green and lifeblood out of the jungle. Rushing towards us like paint. Anytime the river bent and twisted, it got closer. When the shores straightened out and made straight east, we gained ground.

And as the white rushed to overtake us, I saw a fire rising into the storm clouds. And in the fire, even at such a great distance, the eyes of the beast, burning through the mist.

It was not until that moment that I truly understood, I think. The beast was growing. Feeding on the life all around it to grow into itself, to break free of its prison, and I knew I’d prepared for this moment my entire life. Death was coming for us, upon a pale horse, and Hell followed with him.

But it was not just death, it was the Beast of the Earth, with its seven-pointed crown. Perhaps not seven necks on seven heads, but would anyone, even St. John, be able to describe that thing properly, especially if just glimpsed in a fever dream, even if the dream was brought to him by Our Lord personally?

I could not say. But I do know what I saw. And I could tell how long we had, by how fast we were outrunning the white on that final jog toward Manaus.

An hour, maybe. A little more, if we were very, very lucky.

* * * * * *

I lit my last cigarette and chased the light with another full measure of whisky. I was feeling rather grand now, and I turned to my uncle and said “And that is why I came here. Because I wanted you to see what your idiocy has wrought. I wanted to see your face when you learned it all, dear uncle.”

He stared at me, slack-jawed. He plainly did not believe me. Even thought I was mad.

But then, I suppose, I did not need him to. I knew what was coming.

My knowledge was soon rewarded by another earthquake, and this one accompanied with that terrible hell-mouth sound of the hungry beast bellowing its wrath.

“Well,” I said around the cigarette, “Sounds like that’s our cue.” I pulled my revolver from its holster and broke it open. I ejected the spent brass and reloaded all six shots from the loops on my belt, then snapped it back together. “Come, uncle! Don’t you want to see how mad I truly am?”

I did not wait for him. I simply strode out into the street, and down the street to the square, and stepped up onto the platform that was sometimes used as a bandstand. The hot rain started. I turned west, and saw it: The white, sweeping toward us across the jungle, leaving the trees in its wake like ashen memories. And above the white, riding straight toward Manaus, barely a mile off, the great monster of Ku Tuk Lu.

It seemed bigger, much bigger, than it had in its paltry little prison. It rose for three hundred feet above the forest canopy, a musclebound thing with a slick blue carapace running along the ridge of its spine. Its head, which I could see in total now that it was free of its prison, was like an enormous squid, its mouth a beak ringed by cilia, whip-thin and long, always moving like a vast vat of maggots.

“And the third angel poured out his bowl upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood.” I quoted, as near as I could remember. And I drew my weapon. I would not face my fate with docility. I would not give in, even in the face of the impossible. I would not stand before God a coward, if heaven would even have me.

I sighted down the barrel, and there, upon the beast’s great head, I saw the artifacts it had claimed. The seven bones protruding from its brow, like horns, displaying upon them the announcement of my sin. The body of Alasdair. The golden man’s head. The coat, bloodied and shredded, torn from my brother’s back when he fell into that horrible mouth.

And last, as the beast lunged for me, and I emptied my Webley into the cilia-ringed maw that sucked into itself all the life it set itself upon, I spotted something on the spire nearest to its mouth. Something that had caught on it as my brother was dragged down into that hellish hole to be constricted and digested by that inimitable hunger that, now unleashed, was unmaking the world.

I could see them there, the last justice in my life, to watch as I died, the beast’s dangling trophy:

The shoes I wore this morning.

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Lost Days, Last Nights contains this and seven other tales of apocalypse, horror, mystery, and romance from across human history and drawing on the Western world’s great mythic traditions. I hope you find within it the delight and light in the darkness that you’re seeking in these dark days.

If you’d like to experience more of my fiction, you can find a number of podcast dramas, novels and shorts, and get a preview of my new science fiction adventure at the links in this paragraph.

Enjoy!

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