Today we have an excerpt from The Great Outer Dark by David Neil Lee, the conclusion to the Midnight Games trilogy, in which “the cosmic Cthulhu Mythos comes to life in a struggling post-industrial city.” The novel is out now, published by Poplar Press/Wolsak & Wynn, here’s the synopsis:
After his voyage across the galaxy, Nate Silva arrives home to find Hamilton in the grip of a monstrous triumvirate. The Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods has returned, with the human form of the shape-changing nightmare from the Medusa Deep as its leader. And closely guarded in a downtown tower a mind-devouring entity called Oracle lurks. The city is infested with invasive species that have slithered into our world during the Church’s occult ceremonies – many-legged dritches, bat-like thrals and the eerie, flying night-gaunts.
Caught in the middle of this are Nate’s friends Megan and Mehri, who are leading the resistance with the Furies, along with a mysterious double agent, the enigmatic Dr. Eldritch and his Cosmic Wonder Circus.
For the safety of everyone he loves, Nate and his friend H.P. Lovecraft hijack the antique airship Sorcerer for one last voyage, to free Earth from the Great Old Ones once and for all.
*
“Down the stairs!”
Leslie and I charged down together, joining Gretchen at the bottom.
“You okay?” Leslie looked at her closely.
“Why did you come down here?” I asked.
“I didn’t come down; I didn’t fall down.” Gretchen groaned, checked the flamethrower.
“I was running along the pavement and suddenly I was here.”
I looked back to see if Magnus had followed us down the stairs. “What the hell?”
The stairs were gone. And with them the plaza, the fog, the things in the fog, Magnus. Max and the hihyaghi. Sorcerer. We were looking up at a blank wall built not from ancient stone but from riveted metal, curving off into the blackness, and looking newer than anything around it. Why did I come down here? I couldn’t even tell where “here” was.
“I know what this is,” Gretchen said.
“Max called it sonic backstairs?”
“Chthonic,” she said. “It means something like ‘hellish.’”
“Terrific. How do we get out?”
Our eyes were getting used to the dimness. Leslie pointed into the darkness. We were in a corridor of some kind. “I see a light there,” she said. “If we can get to an opening, get our bearings . . .”
I gestured at the blank wall. “Max said we should follow his voice.”
Sure enough, we could hear him. “Gretchen,” he called. “You and your friends. This is Max . . .”
“Max!” Gretchen called.
“. . . believe me, you can get out of there. Follow the sound of my voice, Gretchen.”
Gretchen called back. I was getting more and more confused. If the stairs we came down were now a blank wall, and if that was in fact the way we’d come – then where was Max’s voice coming from? I slapped the metal wall with my open hand. It felt solid as a battleship. In the background, Max still droned on.
“Leslie?” Where had she gone? To my right there was darkness, but poised there in the middle of the dark was a distant circle of grey. Against that circle I could dimly see Leslie’s silhouette, getting smaller.
“How did this happen?” I asked Gretchen. “Is this a door? Did it close?” I hadn’t seen or heard a thing. The stairs were just gone.
“Let’s follow Leslie,” she said. “But make sure we can get back here.”
I took out my pocket knife and scratched my initial, a big N, on the metal wall. Then I scratched an S on the opposite wall, and we headed in the same direction as Leslie.
The corridor, I noted, was perfectly level. And we were underground, almost for sure. So why, at the end of the corridor, did we emerge into daylight? Above us, the dim grey dome of the R’lyhnygoth sky. And below us, a deep ravine, stretching from left to right, its far bank, at least a kilometre away, the same glowering and impassive stretch of ancient skyscrapers that we occupied. I looked around but saw not a trace of movement, nothing that looked poised to attack. Leslie, meanwhile, perched on the edge of the drop, looking over into an abyss.
“How deep does it go?”
She frowned. “It’s not a pit or a valley. It’s . . . well if it is a valley, we’re at the top of it.” She pointed over the edge. “Look what’s at the bottom.”
As I looked cautiously over the edge, I felt a burning in the pit of my stomach and blinked, amazed at what I saw. I drew back, dizzy. “How’s this possible?”
A minute ago, we’d been running on the pavement of the ancient plaza, no more than a hundred metres from LOAD/EVAC. But I’d just looked down through the darkness and seen a spray of distant light emanating from something small and dark grey, like a jelly bean of an unknown flavour. Sorcerer. It was the light spilling out of the LOAD/EVAC door. But it was all unreachably far away. We’d almost made it, and suddenly we were up here in the sky, while Sorcerer was still on the ground.
“How’d we get way up here?”
“Your buddy Lovecraft used to write about this,” Leslie said. “Cities of impossible angles . . . architecture that doesn’t make sense, not to us.”
“I’ve heard of chthonic backstairs,” Gretchen said, “but never wanted to try them.”
“To understand them, you have to perceive the world completely differently,” Leslie said. “I suggest we shut up and we listen.”
We crept back down the corridor, and sure enough, in a matter of seconds we could hear Max’s voice again, dimly against a rising wall of sound. Roaring, chittering, gibbering and those whistling, hissing notes like bird calls – if instead of evolving, birds had stayed dinosaurs. “Tekeli-li!”
I followed Gretchen upstairs (what stairs? – they weren’t there a second ago!), and almost collided with her, looking back to see Leslie close behind me, when Gretchen stopped and triggered her flamethrower. By now, it was all I could do to focus on where we were going. The chthonic backstairs, the horde around us repelled by the flames as well as by the head-splitting roar of the flamethrower and its awful stink. Gretchen shouted again, and we reached the head of the stairs. Fog swirled around us thick with writhing, lunging shapes, and there in the distance was the end of the plaza . . . and Max and the hihyaghi . . . and the illuminated doorway of LOAD/EVAC. Somehow, we were back at Sorcerer.
Panting and stumbling, we dropped our smoking torches onto the stony plaza but something was wrong – the ramp ahead of us was bobbing up and down as if an earthquake was shaking this ancient city.
“What’s going on?” Leslie and I looked at the closed loading door, then at each other.
“They’re idling,” Max gasped. “Hovering. We’ve got to get on board.”
With great difficulty and a delicate touch from Agnes at the controls, the airship was bobbing inches off the plaza’s rocky surface. Although the nearest engine was many metres away from us along the airship’s considerable length, the fog around us was blasted away by the force of the huge propellers, revealing us as tiny rodents in a swamp of angry predators.
The door began opening. I was ready to squeeze in as soon as there was enough space. But first I looked back.
*
David Neill Lee’s The Great Outer Dark is out now, published by Poplar Press/Wolsak & Wynn.
Civilian Reader 