Red Right Hand Read online

  He nodded, turning away in a swirl of coat.

  As he rummaged through the cabinet, I pulled my hand away from the towel. The hand moved, but the towel stuck, held to the side of my face by a clot of dried blood.

  Great.

  I pulled on one corner, tugging sharply. It peeled free with a tearing sound. I winced—I couldn’t help it—the pain flaring hot and bright like a struck match laid against my skin.

  You’ve been hurt worse. Get it over with.

  My fingers closed on the corner of the towel, and with a swift, sharp yank I pulled the whole cloth free from the clotted wound. It felt like being slapped with a belt sander. I sucked in air hard and fast between clenched teeth.

  Damnthathurtlikehell!

  The man was there, next to me.

  I didn’t see him move—my eyes hadn’t been shut longer than a second—but he somehow crossed the room to me. He was just there. As though he’d teleported. His red right hand reached for my face.

  His voice came, a dark murmur. “Do not move.”

  My nerves locked, freezing me in one spot. That hand moved closer, drifting lazily near. It hung, exposed and obscene, from the end of his sleeve, almost limp, its fingers slightly curled like those of a dead man.

  It became all I could see, all I could look at, blocking the whole world. Made of striated muscle attached to tendon and bone, stringy nerves laced over the entire surface like electrical feeds. It came closer, everything else going blurry with strain as I tried to watch, but it slipped out of my line of sight. I couldn’t move my neck, couldn’t tilt my head, frozen by his command like a field mouse hypnotized by a cobra.

  The hand touched my ear. I felt a slight pressure and then … nothing. No pain, no stab, no tear, no rip. None of the searing agony I expected. He pulled away, hand falling to his side, disappearing in a fold of that long black coat.

  My own hand flew, touching my ear. It felt … strange. Odd. Hot with fever. I felt the rough, crumbly crust of dried blood. My hair was matted with fluid into a hard knot. As I felt around, the blood crumbled and dusted down my cheek, down my neck. My fingers moved the flaps of soft, spongy tissue where teeth had ripped through the earlobe, leaving it a tangle of skin strings. The hard rim of cartilage felt like a frond of plastic under my touch.

  A gnarled, half-melted frond of plastic.

  A chunk of scab came off in my fingers, and they were suddenly slick with new blood. I felt all that in my fingertips.

  None of it in my ear or the side of my face.

  That skin was dead. Rubbery. No sensation at all.

  The Man in Black now sat across from me at the little table, a long-handled spoon clinking around the rim of the yellow coffee mug as he stirred in hazelnut creamer.

  I hadn’t seen him move. One second he stood at my side; the next I examined my ear; the third he was in the chair across from me.

  “Did you heal my ear?”

  He smirked, making the corner of his full lips twitch upward. Dark eyes glittered, smudged with deep hollows underneath. “Does it feel healed to you?”

  “No, it still feels like shredded meat, but it doesn’t hurt anymore. Why?”

  He lifted the coffee mug. George Takei smiled at me. “I shut off the nerves in that part of your face.”

  “You did what?”

  “Your eardrum is not damaged. You heard me.”

  “Is it going to come back? Will I have feeling again?”

  The Man in Black sipped his coffee, not answering.

  “Are you going to tell me what the hell is going on?”

  “Tonight is your night of destiny, Charlotte Tristan Moore. You have been chosen to receive a great blessing.”

  “A chewed-up ear is a great blessing?” My hand banged against the table. Coffee splashed over the rim of the mug in front of me, spilling across the plastic tablecloth. “Quit talking in riddles and tell me what’s going on.”

  Slowly, the man set his coffee on the table. His hands folded around the mug casually, lying loose and relaxed around the yellow cup, fingertips barely touching the smooth ceramic surface. His left hand had long, slender fingers, each one carefully sculpted and covered with smooth skin the color of the coffee in his cup. The nails were even and manicured. It made me think of the piano. His fingers looked like they would be able to seduce a tune from an instrument.

  Stroke the keys.

  Tickle the ivories.

  Then my eyes fell on his other hand.

  The right hand.

  The terrible, red right hand.

  The memory of it touching my face slithered through my brain. A chill ran up one side of my spine and tumbled down the other to splash against something low and deep inside me.

  I tore my eyes away, forcing them up to his face.

  He looked at me, gazing intensely from under a dark brow. His nose was sharp, hawkish at the bridge and widening at the bottom over full lips. He had an exotic face, feral and Semitic, the face of an ancient Babylonian or a time-flung Assyrian.

  That sensation happened again, the sick thrill that churned deep inside me.

  Fear wrapped itself around me. I felt like an injured swimmer in shark-infested water.

  This time my voice did tremble, just slightly, just below the surface. “Who are you?”

  “I am Nyarlathotep.”

  “Why does that sound familiar?” I’d heard that name before.

  “Your uncle Howard Phillip Lovecraft wrote of me.”

  “My uncle Howard?” Who the hell was he talking about? Knowledge slammed into my brain. “You mean my mom’s great-uncle? The dead writer?”

  “You are of the Lovecraft bloodline.”

  This makes no sense.

  “My last name is Moore.”

  A sip of coffee, a twinkle in dark eyes. “Your father’s last name is Moore. You are a Lovecraft through your mother’s blood.”

  “Wait, wait, wait a damn minute.” My hands were flat on the tablecloth, holding onto something solid because the world had tilted on its axis. My brain fumbled around, trying to figure things out. “I read that stuff as a kid ’cause my mom made me. It was weird and boring and totally made up.”

  My mom took great pride in being related to a famous writer and wanted me to be proud too. She used to assign his stories to me like homework. I would sit on a Saturday and try to plow my way through words that filled pages like marching insects. Words that had been out of date when he wrote them, containing enough syllables to make my jaw hurt, and he used them as though it were his job. Four adjectives to describe one noun, and three or four nouns in a sentence. Everything became eldritch, elephantine, horrifying, terrifying, or some other ten-dollar descriptor.

  Too wordy and dry for a twelve-year-old.

  Too wordy for me now.

  “Howard Phillip Lovecraft walked your planet as a prophet, able to see through the veil between worlds. He didn’t understand his gift, passed to him from his own mother, a daughter of the original wardens. It very nearly drove him mad. He wrote stories to clear his mind and warn your kind of dangers they knew nothing about.” He leaned toward me. “You have the same gift, Charlotte Tristan Moore.”

  “Stop using my full name. It’s annoying. Just call me Charlie.”

  He shrugged and sipped his coffee.

  “Let me get this straight. You’re telling me that all this craziness is real, and I’m a prophet, and you’re a demon named Nar … how do you pronounce your name?”

  “Nyarlathotep.”

  “I don’t know if I can say that.”

  “You may call me savior.” His lips twitched. Not a smile, just a flicker of amusement. “Or master, if the name is too hard to pronounce.”

  “Are you serious?” I stared at him. “Did you seriously just tell me to call you master?” Anger spilled into my voice, making it crack. “What the…”

  “Stop talking.”

  Something in the tone drew me up short, some power catching my breath in my throat like an animal
in a trap. His eyes flashed, crackling with the heat lightning of anger. Dusky skin flushed even darker, a shadow of a thunderstorm rolling over the horizon. His voice dropped into a hiss.

  “I am Nyarlathotep. I am the Crawling Chaos. It matters not if you call me the Thing in the Dark or the Nightmare Man. I am that which you fear. I have been named Shaitan, Loki, and the Spider God. Know this.” He leaned forward. “I have chosen you, Charlotte Tristan Moore, to be my Acolyte. That gives you leeway.” A raw, red finger stabbed the table. The plastic tablecloth sizzled underneath it. “But I will not be mocked.”

  He sat back in the chair, his dark eyes boring into me. The words vibrated the air between us. They hung like a suicide, dangling loose and swinging slightly. The silence swelled, filling the air like a humidity, making it hard to draw a breath.

  I clenched my teeth, keeping words trapped in my mouth. Sweat ran under my hair with a gut-locking sweep of fear. My mind raced, thoughts pinging off the insides of my skull, tearing along the twisted pathways of my brain and stumbling over each other.

  Oh shit this is crazy why haven’t Bobbi Annette or Shasta come down this is crazy what is he a man is he a man did he kill them in their sleep what the hell were those things when I got home why did Nyar … nuh-yar-la-THO-tep save me what the hell is going on?

  Nyarlathotep waved his normal hand in front of me. “The other people who live here are asleep. They will not wake until I allow it.”

  My tumbling thoughts screeched to a halt.

  “Did you just read my mind?”

  “I did. Your housemates are locked in their dreams until I allow them to wake. I chose to not kill them. I am not a man. Those things were skinhounds, bidding-doers of the Ones Locked Away, sent to kill you before I could find you. I saved your life because you can be my Acolyte.” He smiled. “Did that answer your questions?”

  I pushed the chair away from the table. The legs grunted across the floor, loud and sharp. I needed to get up, to move around. This was weird, too weird, too strange, too much. I felt trapped on a train headed off a cliff somewhere down the line. I couldn’t see it from my car, but I could feel the tracks were loose under the wheels. My skin twitched all over from the adrenaline pumping through my bloodstream. I paced beside the counter on the other side of the kitchen, as far away as I could get from the Man in Black while staying in the kitchen. He sat between me and the door. Somehow I didn’t think he would let me leave the room.

  I took a deep breath, making my mind calm down.

  Think, Charlie, think. Work the problem.

  “Why would those skinhounds want to kill me?”

  “To stop you from becoming my Acolyte.”

  I put my hand up. “Stop that. Stop talking like I know what the hell you’re saying. I don’t know what”—my fingers jerked quotation marks into the air—“become your Acolyte means. Tell me what you want in plain, dumb, human English.”

  Nyarlathotep took a sip of coffee. He studied me over the rim of the mug with half-lidded eyes. Slender brown fingers held the cup to his lips. That awful red right hand lay somewhere out of sight, under the table or put away in the folds of his coat.

  I didn’t care, as long as I couldn’t see it. That thing creeped me out. It filled me with a cold dread in the bottom of my stomach. Nyarlathotep drained his cup and placed it gently on the table.

  He stared at the empty cup, his hand tented on the table just in front of it. After a long moment his hand twitched, fingers flicking out. The cup upturned and flipped to its side. It rolled until the handle thunked on the table, bringing it to a stop. Dregs of heavily creamed coffee slowly ran to the edge of the mug and spilled over to drip out onto the tablecloth.

  His voice was clear. “There are things, gods if you will, beings of immeasurable cosmic power who covet the Earth. They desire to overrun it. Some want to destroy your species. Some want to enslave you as playthings. Some want to devour you as succulent prey. They are the Elder Gods, the Outer Gods, the Great Old Ones of time long forgotten. They ruled when this world was without form, and void. They were the darkness upon the face of the deep, slaughtering the ancestors of Adam, laying waste to Creation until they were bound, imprisoned on the edge of the universe. For eons they have tried to crash their cell gates, return to this world, and seek vengeance on the sons and daughters of the ones who slammed shut the door against them.”

  I blinked, my eyelids shuttering down for only a split second. When they opened, the Man in Black stood in front of me.

  Everything inside my body locked down, every muscle tightening in alarm.

  Nyarlathotep loomed over me. Sharply arched eyebrows creased together, obsidian eyes boring into the meat of me. The weight of his gaze lay heavily, a physical thing, pressing against my skin.

  His voice came low, nearly breathy, pushed between too sharp and too many teeth. “After millennia of howling and gibbering against the gates, they have a new design. Now they slip quietly into this realm, squeezing through the cracks and the fractures and the fissures little by little, seeding themselves here in this reality. They come like a thief in the night, growing in might and power until enough of their substance has crossed over to make a full and complete transition.”

  He leaned in, his sharp-angled face inches from mine. I didn’t flinch, didn’t draw back.

  I didn’t.

  “I have grown fond of your world, of your little humanity. I do not wish to share my playthings with Old Ones who would destroy you all. If the human race is to die in glorious slaughter, it will be by my hand or none at all.”

  I took a slow, careful step back. Like you back away from a dog that may or may not bite you, but definitely will if you move too fast. “What do you need me for?”

  “Only the Lovecraft bloodline carries the gift of Sight. I need you to be my hound, to help me hunt the avatars of the Old Ones that have already crossed the threshold before their power grows too great to stop.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like what you’re talking about. Not until tonight. Not until you.”

  “The magick lies dormant inside you. After I place my Mark upon you as my Acolyte, your gift will spark. You shall be of me, and I of you. Then your magick will be accessible to you.”

  Dread sat like lead in my stomach. I didn’t want anything to do with this. I just wanted to get away from this … this Man in Black and his craziness. I felt stuck.

  Trapped.

  Trapped like …

  I shoved that behind its door, locking it away.

  No! Not like that. Never like that again. Keep it together, Charlie. Play along until you get your chance.

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Simply give me your hand.” His right arm moved out of the folds of his coat. His hand hung, red, raw, and sticky-slick. I pulled back. I didn’t want to touch that hand. I clenched my fist and shoved it in my hoodie.

  The Man in Black looked amused.

  “Do not fight me on this, Charlotte Tristan Moore. I will have your hand one way or another. It would be best to give it willingly.”

  Slowly, I unfurled my arm, stretching out my palm like a sacrificial offering. His dreadful crimson hand fell quick and terrible, clamping around the bones under my skin, rubbing them against one another. My mind loosened. The shiny cinnamon skin touched mine, firm and slick like scar tissue. I thought it would be sticky and tacky, like semicongealed blood. For a second it almost felt pleasant. Comforting.

  Then the pain struck. Small and quick, like a biting cuttlefish under the water. Just a sharp nip that faded before I realized it had happened.

  That wasn’t so …

  And then the cutting began.

  A jolt of agony slashed across my palm. My mind filled with the image of my dad using a woodcarving tool: the spiral blade spinning furiously, carving grooves into a piece of wood clamped to the worktable. The pain burrowed deep in my palm, and it moved, zigging and zagging across my grip, building and building and building, crashing and clangi
ng inside my brain like a crescendo, a cacophony of agony. I tried to jerk away, but the red right hand clamped harder, grinding my phalanges together until they felt shrill and spiral-fractured.

  My muscles yanked and stretched, threatening to tear tendon from bone as I fought to break the grip. My mind babbled at me, overloaded from my nerves being set afire, the edges gone brittle and crackling like spun glass, threatening to shatter.

  He let go.

  I fell backward, ass banging on the kitchen floor, jarring my spine in a click-clack of vertebrae. My jaw slammed shut, teeth tearing through the sides of my tongue. Blood dripped and splattered on the linoleum around me, sizzling as it landed. My hand was smeared with it, looking like a kindergarten finger-painted version of his. I looked at my palm.

  The flesh had been excised in lines and whorls and squiggly trails. The raw wound was in the shape of a symbol I’d never seen before. It looked like a pentagram, but there were too many lines, too many swirls. The edges of the skin were crisp, the cuts deep, grooved all the way to the pink flesh underneath. Blood, my blood, pulsed out in time with my heartbeat. Each pulse matched a sick, queasy throb deep in my belly.

  His voice rolled like thunder. Pronouncing, “Charlotte Tritsan Moore, you have been Marked as my Acolyte. Now you will be able to See.”

  I looked up.

  The Man in Black was gone.

  In his place stood a monstrosity.

  5

  I AM GOING insane.

  I couldn’t see it all, couldn’t take it all in, my vision breaking on the edges like cheap windowpanes, crackle-fracturing from the outside in. The thing in front of me filled the room, a mass of limbs and tentacles writhing in knots. The tentacles roiled against each other, worm-white membranes tearing as they rubbed. Clear ectoplasm gushed, lubricating the smearing caress of alien flesh against alien flesh. From this mass jutted spindly limbs ending in grasping, many-fingered hands with too many joints, each finger capped by a talon black and curved to pull meat from bone.

  I don’t, I don’t, I don’t …