It was anyone's guess as to how Lovecraft had acquired a plane. And it was utterly up for debate how he had even greased the sufficient palms to get it airborne, due to the grounding of all civilian flights.
It was relatively small, and was buffeted by the renewed stormwinds as it droned across America. At the front was the pilot's cabin, manned only by Thomas Olney. Behind this was the passenger's quarters, with long yellow sofas at every wall and clear plastic tables along the centre. Miss Alhazred sat at the far front of the quarters, flipping the pages in a sheaf of documents with one hand, still nursing her broken arm. Coraline stood a few feet away from her on one of the few clear areas of floor, practising with the rapier. Olney's disembodied soul sat at the far end next to the closed door leading to the luggage quarter, flicking through a magazine with some invisible prehensile limb.
There was no speaking, and no noise beyond the growl of the engines, the whisper of the storm, the rustling of paper, and the occasional swish from the rapier.
"Keep a tighter grip on it," said Miss Alhazred, after an inadvertently-released sword almost skewered her leg. "It's a weapon of war, not a darning needle," and here Coraline couldn't suppress a shiver.
"Any tips?" said Coraline as she prised the sword loose from the sofa and took a firmer grip on it. Miss Alhazred put the papers down and frowned, deep in thought.
"I'm not an expert, but here's a few things I picked up. Don't try anything you might have seen from Errol Flynn or Zorro films. Those fights are made to look good on camera. That's not what you're trying to do. Keep the sword moving, and keep moving quickly. Go for vulnerable regions, like the throat, the eyes, the groin, places that will hurt a lot and bleed a lot."
Coraline, a little uncertainly, stabbed at the groin of an invisible enemy in front of her.
"That's the spirit. You should also ask Olney for advice when we touch down. He's better with knives than swords, but he might have a few extra tips-"
The training was interrupted by a sudden ripple of turbulence, shaking the plane in midair and almost making Coraline fall over.
"Christ alive, that was a bad one," said Miss Alhazred. "Are you okay, Coraline?"
"I'm okay," said Coraline, as the plane's communication system crackled to life.
"That wasn't an air pocket that did that," came Olney's nervous voice. "Something else caused that little bump there."
"What?" said Miss Alhazred, suddenly alert, her good hand flying to a pistol at her side. "Are you sure?" she yelled up to the intercom.
"Certain. These systems could detect a butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the world, and there weren't any disturbances before us. Something's attacking us."
The words rung in the quarters for a few long moments. Coraline grasped the rapier with both hands and Miss Alhazred drew the pistol and flicked off the safety. From the other end, there was the faint rustle of Olney's soul standing.
There was also a faint rustle from the end of the quarters, beyond the door leading to the luggage. The sound of rummaging, of cases being overturned and bags being emptied, also crawled out, as well as a eerie high-pitched chatter.
"Where is it, where is it, it sings to us, where is it, must be found, it sings to us with music of the stars, must be found..."
Miss Alhazred leveled the pistol at the door, and motioned Coraline forwards. Breathing out, she tiptoed to the door, with a dull, sneaking suspicion as to what the creature beyond was looking for. Olney's soul padded along next to her, whispering words of encouragement and confidence.
She held the rapier in her left hand, and gripped the door handle with her right. She steadied herself. How horrible could it be, compared to what she had already seen.
She swung it open. Inside, she saw something that vaguely resembled a naked wrinkled chimpanzee, squatting amidst the discarded luggage. It paused guiltily, and look up at Coraline with burning golden eyes.
"Dimensional Shambler," murmured Olney's soul. "Step back. Leave it to..."
"Thieves, usurpers, heretics, scum," shrieked the creature, leaping upright and suddenly resembling a gorilla more than a chimp. Its mouth flashed open, revealing ivory-white teeth as long and pointed as knives. Sparks shot out of its eyes.
"Get back," whispered the soul urgently, but the creature knuckled forwards and vanished with a crack and flash of eldritch flame.
Coraline stumbled back, , but there was now another crack and flash behind her, and she suddenly backed into something. She swivelled around, the sword at the ready, and a hairless gray fist swung up into her jaw.
Fireworks exploded in her skull as she reeled back and collapsed against the wall. Through a blur, she saw the creature grappling with something unseen, swaying back and forth and shuddering as shots from Miss Alhazred's pistol lashed into its back. Its jaw opened and its teeth dashed out and into an invisible throat, shaking and worrying at it violently.
Coraline pulled herself up unsteadily, as the creature threw away Olney's ravaged soul (the plane, she couldn't help but note, was beginning to sway alarmingly in the air) and vanished with another crack and flash. It reappeared over Miss Alhazred, dangling by one hand from a luggage rack, its mouth open and teeth bared. As it reached down with one huge hand for Miss Alhazred's head, it received a full clip from the pistol to its face for its trouble, and vanished with a flash, a crack, and a shriek of pain and fury.
As it reappeared to the left of Coraline, Coraline had a firm grip on the rapier and had the flashlight gripped in her right hand. She whipped her hand around and sent the flashlight clattering against the wall behind the creature. It automatically span its hairless head around to find the source of the noise, having an animal's instincts at heart. Realising the trick almost at once, it turned back around, and met Coraline's blade head first.
The thrust blade slashed across both its eyes, and as it yowled in pain, Coraline pulled the sword down and around and into the thing's groin.
It vanished with a crack and a flash, and reappeared outside the plane, staring in through one of the windows. It screeched something foul, lost to the howling winds, and sprang back from the plane's side.
The descending flashes of fire, down into the broiling dark storm clouds, marked its return to earth.
"Are you hurt, Coraline?" Miss Alhazred said with urgency. She had remained seated for the entire battle.
"I … no, I'm not." stammered Coraline. She felt she ought to start keeping a tally of this sort of thing. "What the hell was that thing?"
"A Dimensional Shambler. Cunning, cowardly, capable of short-distance teleportation. No end of fun." She turned back to the intercom. "Are you okay, Olney."
"Well, hitherto, I'd imagined that scars across the soul were entirely metaphorical," came the irascible reply, "But I'm okay, I'll live. How did that thing find us? They're skilled trackers, but they're not that good."
"There...there must be something aboard the plane. Something powerful, that's calling out to it. It'll attract others, whatever it is. But what could it be? Is it one of us? Something we brought with us?"
Coraline kept her silence. If whatever the Necronomicon held was powerful to call down this sort of attention, then it had to be the answer to ending this war. It had to be.
"No, no, no, that's not how you hold a gun, no – look just hand it over. Look, you – hey! Stop running with that! You could set it off. Put it down. Put it down. There. Now if we can all just line up, please. Please? Look, I'm trying to mould you all into a fearsome fighting force, and you're not helping … I told you to put it down!"
In a sun-dappled clearing in a red-gold forest in a crisp midday, Lieutenant Harsimran Pargat fought the urge to have a nervous breakdown right there and then.
Oh, he had been so bright and proud that day two months ago, when he had graduated from West Point with dozens of other newly-minted officers. He had been giddy on his own triumph, his mind flaring up images of battle, of promotion, of him doing his country proud by defending its people and interests at home and abroad.
And then, these goddamned demons had started popping out of the woodwork, and everything was utter chaos, and he had been assigned to training the Ashland branch of the reserve militia, and he had been saddled with a bunch of incompetent civilians who wouldn't recognise a rifle if you cracked one over their skull, and no part of the situation was fair in the slightest.
You couldn't make proper soldiers in a couple of days from a mob, Pargat knew all too well. You couldn't rely on a gentle-natured lieutenant trying to be firm but fair about the whole business. You needed pushups at dawn, and staff sergeants screaming into your ears, and rigorous mental training upon gruelling physical training for months on end, until you had something usable.
"Okay, look, let's take a break," he said, waving his arms to get everyone's attention. "We'll take a five-minute break, and then, and then we'll return to the firearms, okay?"
As he stumbled away from the civvies into some shade, he couldn't help but recall a certain marine officer cadet he had met during a visit to Annapolis to the US Naval Academy. The prick had been actively living up to all the stereotypes: he was loud, brash, boisterous, driven, and had cemented himself as a moron in Pargat's estimation.
And the worst thing, Pargat knew as he ground his teeth together, the bastard would be laughing his head off if he saw Pargat now.
Approaching shadows along the forest path broke Pargat out of his momentary blue screen of death. He stood up straight, showing off all the buttons on his uniform, and announced,
"This area has been reserved for training purposes by the Reserve Militia. I'm going to have to ask you to...to..." and his attention drifted as he took the group in.
At the front was a (presumed) child, wearing a heavy black coat and and a mask that looked like the love-child of the grim reaper and Sam Fisher's headgear. Behind him, an elderly black woman wrapped in a shawl and red scarf strode forward with the aid of a stick. Behind them, two other old ladies, one of them short and stout and wielding a walker, and the other tall and wielding a terrifyingly large bosom. They seemed to be engaged in a furious argument.
"...your gammy legs will give you no end of grief for this, April, you mark my words."
"Miriam, you aren't still going on about this, are you? Besides, your..."
And behind them was the tallest man Pargat had ever seen, who had dressed himself in a vest and gym-shorts. Oh, and he was blue.
Some tiny thread of sanity that Pargat had been vainly trying to maintain snapped, and freed him just like that. He swept forward to meet this group.
"Do you have a minute to spare, captain?" said the boy at the front.
"Between you and me," said Parget, "The rate at which the trainings going, I'd be as well giving you a year." He turned back to the milling militia, and then back to the boy.
"What do you want? In spite of appearances, we're exceedingly busy."
"I've got information about the creatures rampaging across the world. Information which could save us all, if I can give it to people with power. You have weapons. Therefore, you have power, and can help save the world."
Lieutenant Pargat opened his mouth. He then closed it. He opened it again.
"Go on," he said.
The President sat at his chair behind the desk in the Oval Office, the echoes of Lovecraft's tale dying as he thought. His brow was furrowed and his eyes stared at a knot in the wood of the desk.
"This is a lot you're asking me to believe, Mr Lovecraft," he managed, after some time.
"I understand that. But it is vital that you do."
"This organisation you claim to represent...how many of you are there?"
"About five dozen."
"That's pretty small."
"Our membership is restricted to those who have had contact with the Outer Realms." Lovecraft smiled, a grim smile. "I believe our membership could now be reasonably expanded to the entire population of Earth."
As he thought about it, the President suddenly realised where he had heard the name "Lovecraft" before. When he had been at a university in New York, one of his friends had tossed a small book into his lap, insisting that he would like one of the stories in it, "The Call of Cthulhu." He had read it and had been unimpressed by the overwrought prose and mild racism. But something had stuck with him after he had read it. A sense of overwhelming cosmic horror, a sense of insignificance amidst "black seas of infinity." And the creature described within bore some resemblance to the one that was...
He shook away the memory, and turned back to Lovecraft.
"I appreciate you coming to me, Mr Lovecraft, and I appreciate that you earnestly believe that you can help."
"Your tone and words suggest otherwise."
"Let me be clear," said the President, his voice cold and firm. "For every earth-shattering event, there have always been doomsayers and cults cropping up across the globe. They have never been right before, the world didn't end on the turn of the millennium, the Illuminati have thus far failed to rise, nothing they have predicted has become true. How do I know your group isn't one of these cults? That all this really is "foreordained" or anticipated by one of your past leaders? I won't deny, I can't deny, that what is happening to our world in unprecedented. But we will overcome it with sufficient power and planning. The last thing the world's leaders need to do is listen to a group coming from nowhere and claiming that they alone can stop this incursion if they're given absolute authority."
"Can I then infer," said Lovecraft, his voice flat, "That you will not accept my help?"
"You're correct. I have no reason to accept that the evidence you present refers to the creatures attacking us. I don't even have any reason to believe you really are Lovecraft. There is too much at stake here to place our faith into the hands of an unknown few. And I'm going to have to ask you to leave. I have to leave for the conference in Manhattan in a few minutes." The President motioned at the secret service agents at the door. "Wallace, Lamort, please escort these people out, as gently as possible."
"Is that your final answer?" asked Lovecraft, his hand stealthily sliding down to his right pocket.
"Yes."
"Ah. A pity," said Lovecraft, silently cursing. He had hoped it wouldn't come to this, but he had prepared regardless. He gave the slightest of nods, and out of the corner of his vision, he saw Titus and Lavinia tense.
As one of the agents put a large hand on Lovecraft's shoulder, he span around, drawing the small, sharpened sliver of wood of his pocket, and slashed it up along the agent's cheek. The man gasped with pain, and let all the air out of his lungs in one astonished heave when one of Lovecraft's fists slammed out and into him, sending the agent flying across the room and smashing into a cabinet. The paralytic on the tip of the splinter coursed through the agent's bloodstream, and he stayed down.
The other agent's hand blurred into her suit jacket for her pistol, but Titus's fist loomed into her field of vision. His other hand seized the back of her head and slammed it forward onto the fist. The two connected with a dull thud, and the agent fell from his grasp to the floor.
The President started forward, but Lavinia's hand seized his throat, and held him helpless in a grip as unyielding as an iron bar.
"Danforth. Keep guard," barked Lovecraft, and the shortest of the group rushed to the door and stood at attention before it. Behind the closed door were the sounds of shouting and rushing feet. The President's view of it was suddenly blocked by Lovecraft looming before him. The man's right hand's fingers began to dance, increasing in speed, blurring and snapping before the President's eyes.
"What do you think you're doing?" managed the President through a severely compressed throat. "Kill me and to hell with you, but you'll never get heard by the United Nations..."
"I know," interrupted Lovecraft sadly, and it could have been just the President's imagination, but was there green fire leaping between his flickering fingers? "I will regret what I am about to do, for what consolation that is. But we must all sacrifice something in times of need. Pray that it shall ultimately be only this precept of my morality."
"I hope you know what yer dewin'," hissed Lavinia to Lovecraft, his hand now definitely blazing with otherworldly fire.
"I do," he said simply. "The world needs us, now more than ever."
And as the President opened his mouth to shout some last defiance, and as Lavinia's grip tightened, and as the door burst open and security flooded in to be met by Danforth wielding a chair, Lovecraft's flaming hand struck down and gripped the face of the President.
Whatever escaped of the tortured scream that erupted from the President's throat through the closed windows was drowned out by a crack of lightning.