ALL CHARACTERS AND EVENTS IN THIS FAN FICTION — EVEN THOSE BASED ON FICTIONAL PEOPLE — ARE ENTIRELY MADE-UP. ALL DANTE REFERENCES ARE RESEARCHED… POORLY. THE FOLLOWING STORY CONTAINS LEWD SEXUAL HUMOR AND DUE TO ITS LONG INTROSPECTIVE MONOLOGUES IT SHOULD NOT BE READ BY ANYONE. _|_|_|
Stan
I had yet to encounter a lock I could not break.
Luckily, such was the case at the South Park geology lab, at which my father was employed. The locks gave easily on the front door of that rather nondescript building, but I passed over entering Dad's alarm code in order to let Ike override the system. I really didn't have the time to be answering Dad and his co-worker's questions on why I'd have been going in at, oh, nearly midnight after being at what I'd described as just a 'party.'
Some party that art opening had turned out to be. We'd gleaned a fair amount of information from it, sure, but even after our respective fights, we had suffered a couple of losses. There was nowhere to go, however, but forward.
The geology lab consisted of six research offices, two primary laboratories, and several work rooms and filing spaces. I grabbed a box of work gloves from a utility closet, and handed them out to the guys as I led the group back toward the primary lab; Kyle carried the iron sample in a dish cloth we'd 'borrowed' from the Goths, while Ike ran a periphery scan of the area, making sure we had not been followed.
"Even if we were being followed," Clyde pointed out, as he and Token kept an eye on Kenny, who walked between them, "I doubt those guys need anything we'd find here."
"Right," Kenny muttered. "Because they already have it."
We weren't in a position, currently, for me to go directly to Kenny in order to start up more of a conversation on what exactly he'd just been through, but I made a note to myself to touch base with him. He'd come back with Clyde and Bebe shaken, and utterly not himself. While he was snapping out of it, I was worried. More disconcerting were the glances he kept on giving Kyle. I knew why, I just didn't think it was very… well, Kenny of Kenny to be doing so.
It was a why not you? look. Which didn't exactly settle well with me. Kyle had escaped 'recruitment' that night, and we were lucky for that. But at the same time, I knew what kind of trauma Kenny was facing… after all, Red and Karen were the most immediate 'family' he still had. I just hoped he could shake himself cognizant enough to keep on thinking of me and Kyle that way as well. That he could talk to us, not just feel some kind of foundationless anger. Yes, Red and Kyle were both targets, but Red was more valuable to Kenny—therefore, she was more valuable to Damien, as well.
While I was convinced that they would not harm her, I knew that Kenny would be feeling otherwise. They'd hit upon a weak point, and with him vulnerable, Damien or Tenorman could strike a real blow, and it looks like they'd already tried: Kenny was listing, unstable. None of us could stand to see him like that.
Being at the lab seemed to be doing him some good, though, which was momentarily relieving. Before I could make the move to talk to him, however, Cartman made his way to the front of the group and nudged my arm.
"What's up?" I wondered. "You get those gloves?"
"Yeah, yeah," he said, yanking a pair on. "You really think we're gonna find these guys here?"
"We're gonna get close," I assured him. When Cartman went quiet and somber, I knew something was up, so I prompted, "You okay?"
"Oh, I'm great, Stan, I'm great, I'm awesome. No, I'm not fucking okay," he complained, raising his eyes at me. "Dude. My mom's been hiding shit from me my whole fuckin' life, and now the one guy who's been the big problem from the start didn't even come after me. I hate that asshole, I gotta deal with him myself."
"Cartman, you started it," Kyle reminded him harshly. "You had his parents killed."
"And ground up into chili I fed to him. I know. Semantics."
Kyle groaned. "You're just using that word because it sounds interesting."
"Possibly," Cartman admitted with a shrug. "But, dude, why didn't he just come after me tonight, huh?"
"It's not all about you," Kenny said tersely. I turned to find he was glaring daggers forward. Not at any of us in particular. Past us, probably. Right at Damien. "I'll admit that a lot of it is, but the sooner we can get closer to Damien to extract some real answers out of these guys, the sooner you'll have an answer to that."
Cartman swerved back, away from me, Kyle and Ike, and I heard him say to Kenny as he fell toward the rear of the group, "I've got nightmares too, you know."
The rest of the walk back to the lab happened in silence. Which was rather welcome, since it let me have a moment with my thoughts for the first time that evening.
Through all these twists and turns, everything had to connect, somehow. It was obvious that there were greater powers out there than anything officially known about on Earth, but I found myself questioning existence itself. Where was the break? I had been having nightmares for a while, sure, but what if those weren't just nightly images that came to mind after the stress from the Cthulhu crisis, but actual cracks in reality?
I wouldn't be surprised if I or Kenny… or, honestly, any of us would be susceptible to viewing things that anyone else could pass off as simple dreams. If Cartman had admitted to having nightmares, as well—God, I could only imagine what could be going on in his head at night. The question was, though, whether or not Damien had been keeping a watchful eye on us during and in the years since the crisis. Whether he'd been waiting to slip in between the Spaces in order to strike now, and if he had any idea of what the group of us had been dreaming about for the past four years.
Attacking us all on a personal level… I agreed with the idea that Hell had to have some kind of file system. That they were keeping tabs on us. All we could hope for was to be able to catch up, figure out where the GSM was now operating from, and shut them down before things could get out of hand. It did still worry me that the personal attacks could be distractions to ease us off the path of a larger strike, something we had yet to know about.
Kenny was blinking a lot, I noticed, when I opened up the door to the nearest lab. He was jostling himself; good. Good. Hopefully, we could all contribute to whatever we were about to find. I flicked on the lights, illuminating the enormous room with its three work desks, large topographical map situated on a table at the center, and its numerous computers and scanners. A large glass encasement was set up at the far end, containing mineral samples from various areas in our immediate region.
South Park, and the surrounding Park County, was once home to several mines during the gold rush. The mines were, and some still are, abundant in an array of minerals, and it was not uncommon to sift out a little fools' gold here and there. Prospectors did mine up iron and such, but the mines closed down when the gold rush went the way of history. Some mines in other towns remain open as attractions, but the deposits in the mountains around which our town was situated had not been traversed or excavated in years.
Perfect for a hiding place, if those involved knew how to dig. Some of the Golems earlier that evening had been wielding pickaxes, so it was no stretch of the imagination to figure out just how important those old mines were to at least some part of the impending Carnival.
Token, Clyde and Craig headed straight for the topographical map, getting a feel for how the region would be mapped out, while the rest of us remained near one of the research desks by the door. "Nightmares, huh?" Kenny finally answered Cartman, his eyes unsure of where they wanted to focus.
"Been getting really bad sleep," Cartman confirmed, "and it's not just cuz Wendy's house is too fuckin' clean."
"You sure it's not indigestion?" Ike chided, scrolling through his tablet to make sure the security system didn't accidentally re-alarm itself.
"Ike. Seriously."
Ike just shrugged.
"Let's get this stuff out of the way first," I suggested. "I've got a feeling we can talk dreams a little later. Maybe after getting some actual sleep."
"Hmm," was all Kenny offered.
"Kenny?" I asked to check in. "How're you holding up?"
He hesitated before giving an answer, and looked down at his feet, as if to confirm that he was standing on his own. Or, perhaps, to consult with his shadow. It had not moved. Kenny held out a hand to watch the shadow of it cast itself accordingly; still, did not move of its own volition. I'd watched that shadow from the envelope swallow him up, though… could Damien's version of that curse just come and go?
Kenny let out his breath, shook his head, and pushed against his forehead with both palms as he stretched his back a bit, then finally answered. "For lack of a better word, I'm awake." His voice came out a little steadier than before, which was promising.
I patted his shoulder a couple times. "Don't worry, dude," I said. "We'll figure out where these guys are and what's going on. Tonight. I promise."
Kenny nodded, then ticked his head in the direction of the research desk bearing my dad's name. I took the hint, and got to work.
Securing my gloves in place, I booted up the computer at the surprisingly clean workspace. Dad and a couple of others had research desks in the lab, in addition to their own spaces in one of the offices (right, that was the cluttered desk, I remembered), and I was lucky to have done at least a little work on this computer to know what software I was looking for. Kyle stood behind me, hands on my shoulders, and watched as I clicked through a data analysis program.
Kyle's pulse rises when he's onto something. I felt it through his hands the second I started up a new project in the software. "Am I doing the right thing?" I wondered when I'd caught on.
"Hey, you know this software more than I do," he said. "I'm just thinking."
I laughed. "I gathered. What about?"
"How they could've infiltrated without the lab already noticing." Kyle had lowered his voice as if telling a secret, but I knew it was more out of a bit of fear than anything. He was right, of course: any shift in regional geographic activity, and Dad or one of his partners or especially higher-ups in Park County usually noticed. Then again, we were dealing with Hell and Spaces Between our world, dreams and the afterlife that nobody was supposed to cross…
"Hold up, you're right," I realized. "Sample."
"Here." Kyle had set down the dishcloth full of ore when he'd joined me at the desk, and now folded back the fabric to reveal the Golem dust.
Cartman crossed over to the desk, and leaned over the work space to get closer to the action and information. "I still don't get how you're gonna track these fuckers with dirt."
"Dirt's a lot more important than you might think, man," I said.
Next to the computer was a weigh station and scanner, onto which I moved a handful of the iron dust. The analysis program on the computer fired up, and a window opened to inform me that a scan was ten percent complete.
"See, what I'm thinking," I said, as the percentage rose to twenty, "is, you've got all these raw materials, and yet no seismic activity has been noted. No change in anything, and obviously no authorization of re-opening any of the mines in or around our region. Meaning none of the ore is registering as missing, necessarily."
"What?" Cartman wondered, leaning over the desk to get a look at the program.
Kyle squeezed my shoulders and leaned in himself. The percentage rose to thirty, then fifty. "Basically," he guessed, "if I'm on the same waves you are, here, anything they're using isn't registering as missing because it's still there."
"Except it's up and moving, right?" Craig guessed, from where he leaned against another research desk a few feet away. "The rock men Golem things."
"Oh, they're probably accounting for some of it, but any huge percentage of this stuff Damien and Tenorman and them are taking is going right back into the earth," I deduced, "because they're using the same exact materials to construct the Carnival."
Ninety percent.
"I gotta get one of those systems," Ike laughed. "This place is the best."
Ike was more or less right… we'd do well, in the League, to be as fully equipped as this lab. The large room had a higher ceiling and much more tech than our constantly updating base of operations. Yes, we probably could use a better scanner system than just the several (questionably legal) programs running on Ike's iPad and Timmy's computer, so while we were hacked into the geology lab, I wanted to make the most of it. Ike, did, too, apparently: he was scanning and coding nearly everything in the room, in hopes of somehow replicating the system back at the base. That kid's brain never stopped working. I hoped for Karen's sake, though, the guy could take a breather sometime soon.
We could all use a little room to breathe.
Scan Complete appeared on the screen, prompting me to run a back-up scan to track the ore itself, cross-referencing the type with others sampled from the surrounding area that were in the lab's database. It showed up as the exact compound we'd predicted: iron sulfide. Tenorman's Ginger army consisted of Golem footsoldiers made of fools' gold.
"Yep," I confirmed when the substance analysis was complete, "iron, all right. And sulfur. Which just figures."
"You get an origin on it, too?" Token asked.
"Hold on…" I watched as the program whirred with the additional scan, giving off nothing but red light for a moment—then, a green box popped up. The ore's origin was given in topographical coordinates on the screen. Right where I should have figured the largest deposits of any sulfuric compound would be. "Yes!" I exclaimed. "Yes, got it!"
"Well? Where's it from?" Kenny wanted to know.
I borrowed a laser pointer from the top drawer and left my seat for the large topographical map on the center table, where I slapped my hand once down on an area marked on the map in yellow. "Recent activity here, but this was, what, twelve, thirteen years ago? About time to start watching it again."
"Stan, what is that?" Clyde wondered, leaning over the table.
"Elevation of two hundred feet, large deposits of sedimentary rock, iron, and sulfur, high combustibility, situated near old mines and over tectonic plates?" I saw Kyle grin at me, and mouth the word, Clever. I grinned back, passed the laser pointer into my right hand, and shone the little red dot at the marked area on the map as I announced, "Guys, the Carnival is somewhere near, if not in, the South Park volcano."
Everyone in the room erupted into various verbal reactions to the discovery, with the exception of Craig, who was never very vocal; he simply ticked his head back to look at the ceiling, his face reading, of course, then set his gaze on the topographical map before joining the rest of us around it. Kenny scowled down at the map and said, "Dammit. This thing has probably been an active passageway to Hell for years, and we've just never made anything of it."
"Well, I mean, why would we?" Kyle pointed out, before Kenny could get too invested in hindsight. "It's not like this ever made itself as obvious as some other things we've seen in this town."
"The volcano…" Clyde mused. "No wonder they can just keep on manufacturing Golems. It's like they've got a direct route back down to Hell through that thing."
"Not to mention an endless supply of materials," Token added.
"With the mines nearby and the heat from the volcano for solder," I said, "shit, they could be building just about anything."
"Yeah," Kyle agreed, "and they are." He leaned back, tried to fold his arms out of habit, winced from the burns, and settled on sliding his hands into his back pockets instead. I cringed a bit as well—I felt slightly responsible for the damage done to his arms, and even though the burns would heal, we had no knowing of how, for the time being, he'd be affected by the injury. "They're building that whole Carnival. Kenny, what's it say on that note you got?"
Kenny withdrew the small note, though he hardly had to look it over. "Attraction Nine," he read off.
"Then we have a jumping off point," Kyle concluded. "There are at least nine of these 'attractions' at the Carnival, and Kenny and Ike already have tickets. I know they're after me for another one, but apparently, tonight was their last recruitment effort. I'm not saying I'm in the clear, or that anyone is, but I think tonight marks them reaching their limit of how much they can take from our mines and volcano without this lab noticing."
"So they go right ahead and open up shop," Clyde said briskly, snapping his fingers.
"We've got our opening," said Kenny. He held his hand out to me, and it took me only a second to figure out what he wanted. I passed the laser pointer into his palm. He rolled it between his fingers for a moment, as he reviewed aloud, "Our opening, the Carnival, the passage to Hell and the Dreamlands…" He stopped playing with the pointer, and shone the little red dot on the proper spot on the map. His eyes sank, and he held his breath before he finished, "…And Red."
Nobody else spoke or moved. I passed a look around the table, and we seemed to be in agreement… hoping that Kenny could stay 'awake' for a while longer. He gave himself a moment, then switched off the laser pointer, and tossed it back over to me.
"Thanks," I said. "We have an idea of a plan, guys?"
"Sure do. Ike?" Kenny prompted.
"Getting a topographical scan now," Ike said, pre-empting the rest of the request. "I'll set up a map back at the base so we can plot a route."
"Good work," said Clyde. "Token, man, you got the spare phone on you?"
"Always do." Token reached into his pocket for the unlisted, by-the-minute cell phone he had for League purposes only, and pressed a speed dial button before he could even ask, "Want me going straight to Murphy with this?"
"Murphy should know," Kenny nodded. "I don't trust Yates right now."
"Fair enough." Token spun back toward a quieter hallway, to start up his conversation with the cop in private.
"I saw him tonight," Craig mentioned, leaning over the map table to prop his head up with one hand, elbow on the edge of the table. "Murphy, not Yates. The force is kinda split in half right now."
"Fucking Sargeant's taking the bait, isn't he?" Kenny guessed. "Damien's got some kinda hold on his wife, so not till long till we lose half the force, I guess."
"I doubt he's someone they'll want to copy into Golems," Kyle said, "but still, if they get him in any way, that's still one of the higher authorities of Park County. We can't just ignore the fact that he might slip."
The consensus had already more or less been that this was a League mission only. Force backup was a last call, but there was rarely a question that the town felt safer when they saw plenty of cops around. We couldn't go stationing Murphy or anyone yet, though: no actual threat had yet been announced.
Posters were still sighted around town advertising the Carnival, and for all any of us knew, dozens more would have gone up throughout town all night, while we were fighting back the various threats that had risen up during the art opening event.
When Token returned from having made the call, we each did a sweep of the room to make sure nothing was out of place, and that no dust from the ore had spilled out onto the floor, desk, or scanner. In one of the large file cabinets in the room, I knew that there were multiple (luckily un-counted) copies of area maps, so I borrowed a few and gave them to Clyde to add to the cork board back at the base, aiding in Ike's project.
"Well, guys, we've got a few answers," I said, hoping to bring a little sense of triumph to the evening. "We can get going on breaking down that barrier and shoving these guys back to Hell."
"Right, we get where they are here," Cartman pointed out, "but what about this dream crap? We can't track those."
"Yes, we can." Kenny was still staring at the map when he spoke, but slowly straightened, and pushed back, away from the table. He walked around to where we were standing, and said, "We know a man who does it all the time. Let's go wake him up."
– – –
When we returned from the lab, the girls had long since gone home, which I'd hoped would get Kenny to relax a little, and admit that he needed sleep himself. But, no. I guess I had to hand it to him for his determination, but talking about nightmares and sleeplessness seemed to be something more easily talked about when fully alert.
Kyle and I stayed with him, though. Neither of us could argue that I was probably in need of the same talk Kenny was. In that vein, Cartman stuck around as well. The four of us needed answers.
We had to talk to Wilcox.
The others left with Token to check in on Timmy, Butters and the girls, while the four of us remained at the Goths' flat. Just about the only things stopping Kenny from storming in to wake Wilcox right off were the Goths, all three of whom scrutinized our arrival as they sat around several books and black candles in the front room.
"Oh, for fuck's sake," the shorter of the men huffed out.
"Sure, come right in," the taller added with arsenic sarcasm.
"We need to talk," Kenny insisted.
"Ugh, we have been," the sole woman of the group complained.
"To Wilcox," I corrected.
"Fuckin da Vinci's still asleep," said the tallest of the three.
"That doesn't really matter right now," Kenny said, trying to keep himself focused. "Look, that man knows things. About the Spaces Between, about the routes to get there, about how to deal with the bridge between nightmares and reality. If Hell's trying to connect them, then we need to beat them to it. I want to know about those paintings, and I want to know if they can help me find my fucking girlfriend."
"Perhaps."
The voice came from the hall connecting the large front area of the flat to the mysterious bedrooms in the back, and belonged to none other than the artist himself. Wilcox was leaning against the newspapered wall, staring straight at Kenny, his pale skin and prematurely white hair washing him out to appear as a ghost in the already crypt-like apartment. My triumph from discovering the trail to the volcano faded back into a notion of fear upon seeing him.
We were here to consult with him on the subject of dreams and nightmares, to uncover a bit of reality behind the paintings hanging on the walls downstairs and hopefully shed light on the metaphysical part of our mission against Hell.
It started when, after the Goths' initial mutters over Wilcox having woken up, Kenny stormed over to the man and said, "Glad you're awake. We have got a lot to talk about."
"I'm sorry, but, who are you?" Wilcox wondered.
"And, okay, we're starting with that. Henrietta, can we use your room?"
Henrietta was given a couple of awful looks from her two flatmates. She appeared hesitant, but chose us over them with no further convincing. "Fine," she said, sounding scornful. "You get an hour. Then you are all out of here for the night, got it? All of you."
The other Goths responded as positively as I'd ever seen them to Henrietta's snarky brand of pest control, and as the woman shrouded in black walked over to lead us back toward her bedroom, I noticed her red-haired friend rise to grab a bottle of red wine from the windowsill. "If Hell's coming after us," he said as the rest of us began to follow Henrietta, "I'm at least gonna get drunk for it."
"Yeah," said the other. "Maybe it'll just seem like another crappy Tim Burton movie that way."
The lights in Henrietta's room were quite purposefully dim: the overhead light remained off, and floor lamps situated at two corners cast a chilling paleness over the floor. I felt myself shiver. There seemed to be no more perfect spot to have this strange dream counseling session (as the impending discussion seemed to be, at least) than her bedroom. Henrietta sat down on the edge of her large bed nearest the cabinet I knew was stocked full of her collected remnants of artifacts from and about R'lyeh and other lost cities and cults, while she allowed Wilcox a seat at the foot. Kyle and I took a seat on a large black trunk underneath a window, while Cartman took the seat at Henrietta's desk, and Kenny had to be coerced into sitting on an ottoman that Henrietta made him pull out from under the bed.
"I hardly enjoy discussing my own dreams," Wilcox admitted, leaning over his knees. He perched his feet on the bed frame, and seemed very small upon doing so. His body and mind were both very fragile, I realized. If we were going to make any more headway tonight, we had to tread carefully, and listen to everything. "I'm at a loss as to why so many people would be interested in such a conversation."
"How many people did you have to speak to tonight?" Kenny wondered.
Wilcox reached into his pocket, and drew out a long rosary, which he began to twist around in his hands as he continued to speak. "Too many. Though very few of them were what one would consider to be 'people.' I'm sorry, do I know you?"
"We've met," I said. "Sort of."
I looked to Kenny to be the one giving the full answer, and he hardly faltered before coming right out with, "You can probably guess, Mr. Wilcox. We're part of the Shadow League. Henrietta hadn't already told you?"
"I don't gossip," said the Goth, lighting up a cigarette. She was so clipped with her words, as if she had reason to be defensive on the subject.
"I'm not sure I ever learned her name, either," Wilcox mentioned. Henrietta hardly showed an inclination of a response. When he looked at us again, I got the strangest feeling that we had no idea what it was we were inviting onto ourselves by asking the artist such a weighted question as how he perceived the world of dreams.
As we had proven many times in the past, there were answers to just about every question out there. But even then, there will always be things that mankind should never know. That, however, is what has always set us apart. We're the Shadow League. Everything we've learned is shrouded. Secret.
I got the feeling that one could say that the few of us were, effectively, our own sort of Space Between: we existed and operated between mortal perception and otherworldly phenomena.
So I really should not have been shocked to discover exactly how true that statement was. My own thoughts were, however, that, yes… someday, it would be nice to try just living life. Be proud of the events that lay behind me and move on. Do the things one was, well, more or less expected to do after college. Work, live, love… settle down.
When you stare Hell in the face, though, it's really hard to consider that a possibility. It's even worse when your own nightmares are put into the perspective of your very life.
"I should have supposed that was who you were," Wilcox said, bringing me back to the conversation from my thoughts. "I'm sorry. My mind has been… otherwise occupied. Your names, then?"
He looked at me and Kyle first, so we gave him our full names, bypassing our alter egos, since that was an easy guess. It was Cartman who brought it up when Wilcox prompted him to speak. "Eric Cartman," he said. "The Coon. Oh, and, uh, the guy that made you paint those things is kinda my brother, cuz my mom's a… well, she slept around."
Henrietta raised her eyebrows, but her mouth was occupied around her quellazaire. Wilcox, however, began rattling the rosary around and around, rubbing his palms together as if to start a fire. "Damien Thorn…?" the artist asked weakly. "Damien Thorn is your brother…?"
Cartman shrugged numbly, and started picking at a dot of black paint on Henrietta's desk. He stopped when the Goth glared at him, but answered, "Yeah, I guess. My mom, uh, sleeps around."
"You don't say," Kyle whispered, so only I could hear. Liane's promiscuity had been the source of some issues in town before, but never quite to this extent. I did kind of feel bad for Cartman on the subject… I mean, it was out of his hands. You can't choose your relatives. You don't choose to be cursed at birth, you don't choose your biological parents. That's just how things are. I knew that even Kyle felt bad… the reality was that we were nervous.
We'd had a few scares in the past, when we'd wondered whether or not the Coon would stay on in the League. With the entire future of the League up in the air now, it would be the worst of times for anything to happen to divert him now. I doubted he would, though, if he'd been so quick to bring up the subject of nightmares himself.
"I would be extremely careful if I were you, then," the artist advised Cartman, who looked too distracted to respond.
"No shit. See, Scott Tenorman's my brother, too."
Once again, Wilcox rattled his rosary. I glanced over at Kenny, who was staring right at Wilcox's pale hands. As if that were enough, the rattling stopped, but the man's hands still shook.
"Scott Tenorman who's, like, working with Damien," Cartman clarified. "The fuck do I do? The fuck haven't they come right after me?"
"If I were one to assume," said Wilcox, "it may be that luring you slowly, if they need you, which it sounds like they do, is more effective than direct attack."
"Whatever they're doin', it's pissing me off," Cartman muttered.
"Actually, me, too," Kenny said, nearly slipping into his lower Mysterion tone to speak. "Listen. We've learned about the spheres. Circles, whatever. This Heaven-Earth-Hell thing, or even Earth-R'lyeh-Hell. You've got to know something about what's left over. The spaces between the circles, the pockets without rules."
Wilcox nodded. "The Dreamlands," he said somberly. "Yes. I've seen and painted worlds like those for years."
"Then do you have any idea how to access them?" Kenny wondered. He looked like he could fall asleep any second. He was exhausted, and it showed with every question he asked, every sentence he formed.
"Why would you want to?"
"Because Hell does, and they have!" Kenny snapped. "I've seen them, or heard them. I'm just getting over hearing someone speak to me who isn't here."
"Living?"
"Yes, and trapped. They've got her. My girlfriend, her name is Red. They took her tonight, and gave me a ticket telling me to come search for her. We have proof that Damien, Tenorman and their army are building a physical Carnival somewhere around the volcano—"
"Classy," Henrietta put in.
"They have a physical Carnival, but it's more than that, I know it," Kenny continued. "There's some kind of Dreamlands link. How can something be real and imagined at the same time? Are these places just in your mind?"
"Goodness, no. They exist," Wilcox said. "It takes a certain sort to see them, that's all."
I felt like my heart leapt right out of my body. I really, really should not have been shocked… it must have been the Hell aspect of the whole thing. While very few had known of the existence of a place called R'lyeh, Hell was something very much embedded into all of us, as humans, from an early age. Hell was every place you never wanted to go, every awful thing you never wanted to think about. And it was real. Something that could only be imagined while alive.
It sounded like such a lonely, terrible place to me. I had this strange lingering perception of the Hell of the Middle Ages, full of flames and torture—I was sure it wasn't all like that now, but if Damien was trying to bring Hell back to the structure it had once had…
What could they possibly be setting up at that Carnival…?
"Please," Kenny said, using the word for quite possibly the first time that evening, if I had to make an educated guess, "tell us everything you can about them. About how to see them, or get there, or… well, how to get someone out."
Wilcox let out a hum. He was suddenly like a psychologist, seeing us all at once for group therapy. An unwilling one, at that. He was trembling and timid, but it was very apparent in his expression that he had seen Hell and did not want anyone, regardless of how well he knew them, to suffer the same experience.
"The Dreamlands manifest to those susceptible to find themselves there," said Wilcox. "Now, I know, that may sound rather roundabout or ridiculous, but it's true. If I'm going to tell you anything about my own experience with that sort of thing, I must know yours.
"Now, boys, tell me," Wilcox prompted us, sweat beading on his brow. "What was the most recent dream you had?"
"What, like, that we can remember?" asked Cartman.
"That would make sense, wouldn't it?" Kyle mocked him.
"It would be best if you could recall your most recent," Wilcox agreed. "Better still if you chronicle them. Or… possibly not."
"What makes you say that?" I wondered.
Wilcox shook his head. "I don't want to encourage any of you to cross the same line I did. That my father and uncles did, my relatives until many, many years back. We're all prone to fever dreams, fits, madness, awful things that will stay in our heads and eat us alive unless we let them out.
"So we have to paint. Sculpt. Something, anything, just to get these things outside of our minds. But when they leave, they become the sources of nightmares for others."
"But Damien commissioned you to paint those nine things downstairs," Kenny pointed out.
"Ten," the artist corrected.
"One of them is blank."
"So was that dream."
"What about the red?" Henrietta asked, reaching over to a table beside her bed for a slip of paper. "The dice and mirrors and crap."
"That was a result of the way my hand interpreted things," said Wilcox. "It's true that this is a commissioned set. I saw Hell in those dreams. He approached me, would not let me refuse, gave me a drink, supplied me with paint, and told me to work until this deadline. I'm so sorry, boys."
"Damien was drinking something weird tonight, himself," Kenny recalled. "Mr. Wilcox, what kind of paint were you given? What was in it?"
"Oil, as far as I could tell at first. It had a strange smell to it, like sulfur, which drove me to finish many of these in charcoal. I never could see anything for the tenth…"
"Sulfur and charcoal," I repeated. Kyle caught his breath beside me. "Full circle."
"Indeed," said Henrietta, breathing out smoke.
Even the paintings were pieces of the volcano.
"…So…" Kyle began, unsteadily, "wait, if they're mixing that sulfur with oil paint, and using it to make Golems and, as far as we know, the Carnival itself…"
"Dude, what if they control anything that shit's in?" Cartman realized. "You were right, Stan, dirt's serious."
"And, I mean, there's iron in the bloodstream," Kyle added. "I bet they're mixing that with the iron on site to make those things anyway."
"Meaning the Carnival might be more or less 'alive,' as well," Kenny mused. "Fuck. Fuck, these guys are good…"
"I apologize if I aided them in any way," Wilcox said. "After being given that paint, all I could see were Hell's nine circles in my dreams. I had to get them out."
"I bet that's what the guy who wrote The Inferno thought, too," Kenny said. "Damien said that was a commission from his father however long ago."
"I would not doubt that." After fiddling just a bit more with the rosary, Wilcox transitioned, "Please, boys, tell me about what you've been seeing. Dreams, nightmares, however you can categorize them. If you want to bridge through to the Dreamlands, I need to know if I can help."
After a moment of discerning who would be the first to expound upon his dreams, it was decided that I should come forward. I'd been having nightmares the longest, though I could hardly say what all of them were about. I explained to the painter that I'd once been shot down and was effectively dead for a full week, and that the nightmares had begun some time after the Cthulhu crisis had ended.
"Last time I had a really vivid dream," I went on, racking my brain, "it was about—shit, this is gonna sound stupid… it was about some town I've never been to. Near the ocean. Or maybe a marsh. At least, I think it was. Not all of them are about that. Hell, not all of them even have images. It's more like a feeling than actually watching something when I sleep. When the dreams first started, I'd wake up cold."
"That's how you felt—" Kyle recalled, taking hold of my wrist and staring straight at me. I couldn't meet his eyes.
"That's how I felt right before we crossed into R'lyeh." I nodded solemnly, and Wilcox took in the information with concern and understanding. "Sometimes I wake up and my palms are sweating. It isn't so much what I dream about, it's how I wake up that's weird," I admitted.
"You wake up feeling as though you're still asleep." Wilcox did not state that as a question. I shivered. He lived that, every day. "Waking is a hard part of the process, Mr. Marsh."
"Stan," I requested, "please."
"Stan," the artist tried. "You have heritage in the Spaces Between. I can see it." Kyle and I winced together, and I felt another chill coming on, just before Kyle shifted to lace his fingers through mine, place his free hand on my arm, and squeeze as tightly as we could both currently stand. I drew in my breath.
"How do you know?" Kyle demanded. "Or… see?"
"Mere ancestry," Wilcox continued, skirting slightly around Kyle's question, "probably no more than a distant relation. But, a relation, all the same. Tell me, Stan, is there any history of—of groups, or gatherings in your family?"
"Cults?" Henrietta prompted more bluntly.
"No," I answered with a sharp tongue. "Dude, unless you count the Hare Club for Men, my dad and grandfather have no history in that kind of thing."
Wilcox was silent for hardly an instant, going over what I'd just said. "Hare Club for—ah, yes, yes, I've come across that, yes," he said, nodding as he spoke. "Interesting, if terrestrial. Now, your grandfather, Stan, is he living?"
It was tough to give the answer, so I simply shook my head.
"Does your father have any of his records?"
"What are you trying to find out about me?" I demanded. "I thought you wanted to know about my dreams."
"I do know about your dreams," said Wilcox. "You're a Marsh. Do you swim?"
"I'm a lifeguard."
Wilcox hummed, and tapped his fingertips together somberly. "No wonder you lived," he mused.
"I'm sorry," Kyle cut in angrily, "but what the fuck is this about and where do you get off? Is it so hard, is it so hard to get a real answer out of you?"
"You're the Human Kite," Wilcox accurately observed.
"Kyle," he allowed quickly. "But—"
"You don't dream as vividly," said the artist. "When you wake up, your dreams are over. You live in this world, and that's enviable."
"I like things to be logical," said Kyle, "that's all. Which is why all this roundabout crap isn't getting us anywhere, because you aren't making any sense."
Wilcox regarded the statement, but let it fall to the side. He passed his hands through his shocked-pale hair, and licked a cut on his upper lip before he continued. "I've heard about you. You perceive more of what is logical than the average mind dares to."
"I'm psychic," Kyle said through grated teeth.
"And yet you don't dream beyond barriers…"
"Stop it!" Kyle barked. "Quit the riddle-talking, please. What's so significant about that, and what's wrong with the dreams my fucking boyfriend is having? And what about Kenny?"
"Kenny?"
Kenny raised his hand to remind Wilcox who he was, and the painter blanched. "Mysterion," he reminded him.
"Yes. That makes sense. We spoke downstairs." Wilcox's expression went grey, and he added, "You, too, have nightmares. You've crossed a barrier of consciousness. You feel like you've been sleepwalking, don't you?"
"I saw my girlfriend," Kenny stated again, sounding weaker each time he mentioned the phenomenon. "Where is she? Is it Hell? Is it just my mind?"
"Hell is your mind," said Wilcox.
"Then how do we fight it?" I asked in a whisper.
Wilcox sighed. "By taking Hell's trials," he advised us, "and hoping that Fate allows you to win.
"Hell has enlisted the Spaces Between, to access the dreams of the ones most vulnerable. You all dream vividly, but for you," Wilcox nodded to Kyle, "the tether, like the Circles themselves. You follow rules."
"Logic," Kyle corrected. "So… okay, can you break this down for me? The more of a formula this can be, the better I think I can understand. Where's the line? I mean, look at that chart Henrietta's got. In the circle, there's all those lines. I know the Spaces Between are the issue, here, but what about the lines actually connecting? Is there anything metaphysical on those lines? Or, like, these 'tethers…' you know, how is it that Hell can cross planes?"
"Hell is a physical place, and humans are solid beings. Hell is fueled by what manifests in people's minds…"
"So there's a break somewhere," Kenny deduced. "Are they making what's in our minds real, and vice versa?"
"Perhaps. If that is their goal, they are starting with you."
"Guessing cuz you guys protect the town and junk," said Henrietta, puffing out a smoke ring.
"I'm willing to bet there's more than that," said Kenny. "Look, we've all seen that chart. We've seen how things connect. We need to see what's Between. What about that lamp? Is that the only way I can see any of the—"
"Lamp?" Wilcox wondered, haunted eyes widening in their hollow sockets. "The… the lamp? The lamp of Alhazred? It wasn't destroyed?"
"It better not have been," said Henrietta, pointedly. "We're going to need it."
"Yeah," Kenny growled out, "and I'm pretty sure that son of a bitch devil kid has it."
"It's a safe guess," Wilcox nodded somberly.
"If you know about it, too," Kenny pointed out, "any idea where I can find it?"
"The last I heard, it was in Innsmouth," said Wilcox, "in the hands of a friend of the late… my word…" He paused. His hands were trembling again. I wondered how it was at all possible that he could ever find the steadiness to paint. Then again, his works were all products of fits of madness. Perhaps he could work no other way. The painter looked down at his hands, and then directly at me, staring, as if trying to see into my soul. "Captain Marsh…"
Stupidly, the first thing that popped into my mind caused me to blurt out, "I quit football." The others groaned, aside from Henrietta, who just kind of scowled at me, not that that was anything new. Kyle patted my hand as a way of saying a sort of, A for effort, Stan, but… "Wait," I said, stumbling around my words. "Oh. Wait. Sorry. Who's Captain Marsh, now?"
"Head of the Esoteric Order of Dagon," said Wilcox and Henrietta together. Henrietta rose, and went to her cabinet, scouring through her artifacts.
"I had no idea it had stayed in the family," the painter continued.
"Dude," I argued, "there are no captains in my family."
"Oh, Captain Marsh died well over a hundred years ago," Wilcox said, as if in an attempt to reassure me. "1878, I believe."
"Like that matters," I pressed. "Look, we're geologists. Dad does everything his dad did, and we've been in Colorado for, I don't know, fucking generations."
"It could be a distant relationship."
"Oh, my GOD!" Cartman blurt out, throwing his hands up and standing. He folded his arms and paced for a couple passes, going on, "The fuck does this have to do with Hell and soulless motherfucking Gingers?!"
"Everything's connected," said Henrietta, "when they pass through the Between."
"Can we move on?" Kenny said, at the end of his rope. "Can we just get through what this Dagon thing is? What's it have to do with the lamp? I fucking need that thing."
"Obsessions, Mr. McCormick, are deadlier than nightmares," Wilcox warned. "Please, be patient, and I'll try to explain."
"Here," Henrietta offered. She had returned from her cabinet of horrors with both the Necronomicon, and a large Hebrew text.
"Why do you have a Torah in there?" Kyle wondered, eyeing the yellowed text.
"Well," Cartman began.
"Don't you even start," Kyle lashed out as a warning to him. Cartman just shrugged, and paced a little more. "Why?" Kyle asked again of Henrietta.
The Goth inhaled deeply off of her quellazaire, and let the smoke billow out from a narrow space between her lips. "I'm only interested in the Old Testament," she explained, "and the guys would kill me if they knew I had a Bible. So I keep it locked up."
"Valid, I guess. But, still, why that; why now?"
"I'm just thinking," said Henrietta, passing her fingers along the pages of both texts. Wilcox's brow collected more sweat as he watched the pages turn. "Those Carnies aren't gonna be relying on Golems much longer, if you guys're picking 'em off so fast. And if the Old Testament was here before the Book of the Inferno, we might be dealing with more than just giant cats.
"See, Dagon is a being of the water," she continued, passing the Necronomicon forward to me. I hesitated, then pulled on my gloves before taking it from her. The page she'd turned to detailed an enormous sea creature, which I'd seen before… yes—in Wilcox's portfolio. "He appears in texts of the Philistines, too, but Captain Marsh summoned up these things under Dagon…"
"Deep Ones," Wilcox shivered.
"Whole domestic cult worshipped him, them, Cthulhu a little." Henrietta paused to take a drag, and I saw Kenny tense. Kenny and Cartman shared a slight glare, and I understood why. Cartman's father, Jack Tenorman, had been a member of the Cult of Cthulhu, and had, at one point, attempted to turn his unborn son into the Shadow of Cthulhu, which had ended up being Kenny's fate instead. (Props to Jack, I guess: his first son had formed an alliance with the spawn of the Devil. What is wrong with some people? I mean, really.) "The residents of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, even mated with some of the Deep Ones, and they're said to have been Immortal, but I doubt it. Plus, anyone from that gene pool alive now's probably had it mostly bred out…"
"Shit," Kenny whispered under his breath.
"What the fuck are you even talking about right now?" I burst. "You're talking shit about family I don't even know if I have!"
"Anyway. Dagon's a water entity, but so's something in here." Henrietta opened up the Torah to the Book of Job, and passed on another illustration of an enormous beast with armored scales. "The Leviathan.
"That thing's a beast of water, and the Behemoth is a creature of land. I wouldn't rule out a couple Biblical beasts as inhabitants of the New Between."
This Carnival was turning into more of a Labyrinth by the second, in the execution of this so-called "game" Damien had secured into place. Every turn was another challenge. My own family history was now being called into question. Cartman's already had been, and was proven by his own mother.
We weren't just talking curses and nightmares anymore. Not even simple madness. This entire ordeal was a matter of family, blood, and history.
Predisposition.
Whatever was happening, it was meant to.
"Guys," I began tepidly, "if this Dagon shit is true, and I am related in some way to this list of monsters we keep attracting, I just… I can't help—look, are you noticing it, too? How the attacks are being plotted out?"
The others fell silent, but Kyle, who knows my mind, spoke up. "Tenorman basically mentioned it himself, like I said. This is about family. Tenorman wants us all up against everything our individual genetic lines've been exposed to."
"And where there isn't immediate family, he's taking what we have," Kenny commented dourly, looking at the floor. "Attacking us based on how we define ourselves. That's why," he added, looking at Cartman, "one of the first people Damien went to was your mom, I'll bet you anything."
"And why General Disarray seems to be back," I mentioned.
"More like because," Kyle corrected me. "That little shit probably revived the Ginger movement, since that's not just Tenorman's army, but it was another way to get at me and—"
"Red… is in… the Spaces… Between," Kenny repeated through clenched teeth. "All of this is still coming down to the same thing. They are using her, she's in a rift between realities, and the only way I can find her is getting that lamp."
"That's where Captain Marsh comes back in," Henrietta said calmly. "If some relative of his had it, and they came out to Colorado and Stan's family's been in the rock business for generations…"
Kenny looked excited for the first time that evening, but even that was a weak candle compared to his usual spark. "It's in the mines. We can track it. Right?"
"We can try," I said. "I mean, we're taking this fight to the mountains, yeah? Our next plan is to get to those mines and hopefully the Carnival itself before these 'attractions' go live. I'm sure I could do some more digging at the lab to see if there are any places we could start. We've got equipment at the lab that could probably help pinpoint… wait…"
It dawned on me, in thinking about the geology lab again in conjunction with this artifact, that someone else had been tracking it once, as well.
His name was Nelson. He worked with my father.
He had killed me four years ago to open the Gate to R'lyeh.
Nelson, it was safe to assume, had been working alongside my father because of his name. Because of the glimmer of a possibility that Randy Marsh was somehow a descendant of Captain Obed Marsh from the other side of the country, and that he and I had something in our genetic code that would give us predisposition to, well… attracting weird things. Just like Kenny's curse did. Just like Cartman's blood did. Hell, for all I knew, maybe even Craig.
But even more than that, if Dad and I were related to that long-dead captain, then it had been our family that had buried the lamp in the mines. Technically, it still belonged to us. Damien had just found his way to it first, if Kenny was right…
Either that, or both parties were on a scavenger hunt. And they were planning to use us. Disarray certainly would have been able to tell Damien some of our weaknesses; Disarray and Chaos had probably dug up a whole bunch of things on us in the past. Of course, Butters would probably have made note of that, but it wouldn't hurt to pick his mind again.
I didn't want to say it, but maybe this was a situation that might even call for Chaos…
Like that would happen. We couldn't be sure.
All that I was able to assume, though, was that the Cult of Cthulhu, while focusing most of their efforts on Kenny, on turning him into their new Messenger, into Cthulhu's Shadow, had kept tabs on the rest of us as well. Every last one of us who had grown up here.
When I brought all of this up to the others, nobody objected to my hypothesis.
"I think we should all assume," said Kenny, breathing unevenly, "that we bypassed the possibility of other strange cults playing into the Cult of Cthulhu."
"The Esoteric Order of Dagon is gone," Henrietta told us. "But that doesn't mean the deities are. Dagon wasn't a thing from R'lyeh. It's been stalking Earth long enough."
"So we've got ourselves a bunch of Hell beasts comin' at us, and we're fighting over a fucking lamp," Cartman said.
"Yes."
"That's kinda lame."
"Not if you saw the lamp itself," said Wilcox. "It can show you the worlds in between everything you can perceive."
"It can lead me to Red," Kenny predicted. "Maybe even help us shut down the Carnival."
"But if the Cult and Damien and them were all tracking us since we were kids," Kyle pointed out, "how do we know they don't have counter-attacks already set up? How do we know we're not all walking into a shit ton of new curses?"
"Well," I realized, my thoughts coming full circle, "we've got something, someone, Hell doesn't. Someone who didn't completely grow up here."
"Wait, who?" Cartman wanted to know.
I glanced over at Kenny, who turned pale. He knew what I was going to say before I spoke:
"We have a Guardian Angel. We have Karen."
Kenny let out all of his breath, and turned to lean against the wall. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment, then, attempting to keep himself fully focused, said in a whisper, "And she never opened her letter. Good girl, sis." Back to us, he added, "We can do this. They're attacking our families so we'll either join them or give up. But fuck that. Know why?"
"Your fight's back," Kyle noted with a grin.
"Damn right it is. Because this is our town. Literally. Weird shit has happened here, but we've always come through."
"Good to hear that from you," Kyle said. "So what's next?"
"Honestly? Let's get some sleep, guys," I suggested. "I know that's not the soundest advice right now, but until we've got that lamp to show us where we're supposed to go, I think we should pay attention to whatever our dreams try to tell us."
"And what happens when the Carnival opens?" Kyle asked, posing the question to anyone.
"Then we shut it down," said Kenny. "They want us on a scavenger hunt? Fine, we'll play, but, guys, we are not letting one minor detail go. I don't want any more nightmares to manifest, and I am sure as hell not losing Red to Damien."
"Let's try to make it so nobody has to lose anything," Kyle added.
"Agreed," I said.
The only one who hadn't spoken up was Cartman. He seemed to be off in his own world. He always did, in a way, but not like this.
Then again, he really was a central figure in all of this.
If planes operate on circles, and some of us—like Kenny and myself—were flung in certain directions while others of us—like Kyle and, I started to believe, Red—were the tethers of logic keeping us in once sphere, then there had to be some kind of center of gravity, around which everything orbited.
God fucking dammit… the two half-brothers were after Cartman to be their center of gravity. But they needed the rest of us, as well. We'd essentially been training for this our entire lives.
Everything that had ever happened in South Park…
It wasn't the town.
It was us.
We existed outside of certain rules. Our hometown was a rift in the Spaces Between. Now, Red had been dragged between the cracks, a Carnival was being erected as a celebration for the building of a new Circle of Hell, and we, the Shadow League, led by the only man alive who had been born Immortal and managed to defeat that curse, were the only ones who could do anything about it. Oh, and we would…
Because it was in our blood. Every last one of us.
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Authors' Notes:
South Park is - c - Matt Stone and Trey Parker!
This chapter brought to you by science. This stuff is fun to speculate. XD (And yes, the title is a reference to another Lovecraft story… ^^) Many comments on Cthulhu Fhtagn did point out the Captain Marsh possibility (the character appears in The Shadow over Innsmouth), especially given the Donovan reference (from The Call of Cthulhu)… and you were right! ^^ Bringing Dagon in during the first part would, I think, have crowded the first story a bit much; the reference worked its way into this one, though~ :3
More Inferno stuff coming very soon, as we move into more action-heavy chapters. Due to both of our crazy schedules, we are skipping another week (sorry, ahh), but the next chapter will be posted on Wednesday, October 24th! :3
Thank you so much for reading!
~Jizena, and Rosie Denn.
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