The response was a bullet that hit off to my side. Pro-tip: You don’t shoot in front of someone. The ricochet is liable to hit them. Frandsen apparently knew this pro-tip.
“Would it help if I told you I believe you’re right and I need to know what you know so I can do something about it?”
“Or you’re here to shut me up!”
“Can we discuss it without shooting?”
“You got any guns, drop ’em!”
I squatted down and started disarming myself.
“Who’s with you?”
I was getting tired of all the shouting. “Just the guy who drove me from the airport! I swear, I’m on your side! I’m one of the good guys!”
It took a while. I could vaguely see the outline of presumably Frandsen moving around checking the surroundings. There’s paranoid and there’s “Lunatic Fringe.” I was going to have to handle this carefully.
“Go tell Aviqming to drive back,” Frandsen yelled from the front porch. “I’ll radio when he needs to pick you up. Might not be long.”
* * *
Former Professor Neil Frandsen was short and burly with iron-gray beard and hair and bright, intelligent, but suspicious blue eyes. He had a rifle trained on my chest as I sat down in the offered chair.
The interior of the cabin was cluttered with books and charts. Homey, clearly a single man’s domain, but well organized. The charts seemed to mostly be geological data of the surrounding region.
“I go by Robert Heinlein’s adage that you should always give a man ten words before you kill him,” Frandsen said. “You’ve got ten words.”
I thought about that. “It is a dangerous creature that has to be killed.”
“Repeating what I said isn’t going to save your life.” Frandsen pointed the rifle at my head.
“Do you know what it is? I do.”
“I know what I think it is,” Frandsen said. “But whenever I’ve told people what I think it is they call me crazy. And I’ve had plenty of people who write books for and about crazy people try to get me to open up. Figure you’re one of them.”
“I don’t write books about crazy stuff…Okay, I do write, but it’s academic. My job is to kill monsters. Simple as that. You were in New Orleans. Ever hear of Hoodoo Squad.”
“No.” Frandsen frowned. “But maybe it wasn’t called that then. You’re a Monster Hunter?”
“Yes. And the anomaly is what’s called an Old One. Very bad juju. Which is why I need to know everything you learned about it. If it hatches, the whole world’s in for a very bad time.”
“Why the hell do you think I’m up here?” Frandsen finally laid the rifle across his lap. “Prove you’re a Monster Hunter and not one of those UFO book writers.”
“I’ll have to take off my coat.” I pulled off the layers I was wearing and showed him my scars. I started pointing them out. “Loup-garou. Vampire. Ghoul. That weird one is from some sort of shadow demon…Do I look like a writer?”
“This thing…You can’t kill it.” Frandsen set his rifle aside, and got up to get a bottle of Wild Turkey. “It’s something from beyond time.”
“They’ve been killed before. It’s generally called a mava paṇauvaā, Gujarati for ‘worm mother.’ I believe it is the larval form for an extremely deadly alien species.”
“No kidding. Which is why I’m up here,” Frandsen said. “Once I figured out that thing was alive, and I couldn’t get anyone to listen, I headed for the most out-of-the-way area I could move to. This plat is about as stable geologically as you’re going to find in the world. I figured that if that thing started moving there’d be all sorts of crises. And one of them was bound to be geological. And sociological. Up here there’s too few people to be a problem.”
He might have thought that sounded bad, but it was actually a remarkably optimistic take on what would happen. Old Ones meant blood, fire, madness, and then lights out.
“Did you call the government when you figured it out?”
“Of course I did!” Frandsen said angrily. “The minute I put two and two together. They blew me off!”
“You got the wrong department.” This could have been handled well before my time. Thanks, God. “Let me start at the beginning…” I gave him the standard MHI “the supernatural is real but there are people who can do something about it” talk. After that, and a lot of Wild Turkey, he was ready to talk freely.
“When we found the anomaly on seismic surveys, it really wasn’t looked at as a big thing. How a big cell of rock got dropped under New Orleans was a puzzler, though. Do you understand New Orleans geology?”
“There’s oil under it?”
“Some,” Frandsen said. “New Orleans and the surrounding area, most of the delta region for that matter, is composed of Pleistocene-era loess. There’s thirty thousand feet of loess silt under New Orleans before you get to Cretaceous limestone bedrock.”
“Loess is…sorry, ‘dirt’ formed from the glaciers grinding rocks and releasing it as dust, right?”
“Get you a C in my class,” Frandsen said grumpily. “Close enough. That ‘dirt’ as you say—soil would be a better term—got washed down by the river that’s more or less where the Mississippi is over thousands of years during the Pleistocene.”
“Pleistocene. Mammoths. Ice Age.”
“Which is when you got continental glaciers,” Frandsen said. “And most loess formation. That was when most of the Mississippi delta built up. There’s more recent, within the last few thousand years, surface geology. But under that is pretty much undifferentiated silt going down twenty to thirty thousand feet. So when we found a gigantic cell of what looked like rock three thousand feet down, it was a sort of ‘Hmmm, that’s interesting’ moment.”
“Generally the best time in science.”
“Not this time. I wished I’d never gotten involved.” Frandsen took another drink. “Best hypothesis was an asteroid that somehow came down more or less intact. Bottom line, we got some grants and drilled down to it.”
He took another drink.
“You gotta understand, core tapping at those depths was sort of in its infancy. We were mostly getting ground-up bits of whatever the hell it was made from. The drill guys kept wearing out heads. What we were getting wasn’t making any sense, either. When we hit the hard stuff, it seemed to be organic. So we sent it to the biology lab…” Frandsen paused and seemed really reluctant to continue.
“And?”
“Dr. Catherine Ramos was in charge of analyzing the organic materials. I really liked Catherine. I’d never really dealt with her until we found organics in the anomaly. But working with her was a real charm. We sort of had a thing. Then she started to…change.”
“Get a bit crazy?” I asked.
“Bit?” Frandsen snorted. “By then we’d penetrated the shell. And it was definitely a shell. Carapace. Something. We got up this weird liquid. Gray-green. Just came gushing out of the mud from the pumps. Smelled…horrible.”
“Like dead cattle bloating in the road mixed with some sort of horrible chemical spill.”
“So you’ve smelled it. Ever seen a world-class biologist try to analyze it?”
“No.”
“Catherine was grounded, sane, totally rational,” the former professor said. “Two days after she got the sample, she was in a nut house. Been there ever since. One of her grad students committed suicide. The rest quit. Drillers got sick. Quit. One of them killed another guy with a wrench over nothing. I was feeling the effects. Anybody who touched those samples went nuts. That’s when I realized we’d struck not gold but pure evil. I shut down the drill and pulled out. I stopped researching geology and started researching theology. That’s when I realized we’d struck something that had been biding its time from before time.”
“And in ‘strange aeons even death may die,’” I quoted.
“Exactly,” Frandsen said. “But when I tried to tell people…”
“They thought you were nuts. Doomsayer prophets tend to get dismissed. On
e of the issues I’m going to face. I’m sort of surprised, though, that it didn’t come to the attention of the right authorities.”
“Well, if there are right authorities, they certainly screwed this one up. I’ve managed to keep up with it. Some of my real friends still send me reports. I know they do it just to humor their crazy friend, but they do humor me. The thing hasn’t really moved. Slight upward movement but no real acceleration. Though at the current rate, it will surface in five hundred years or so.”
“Unless it hatches,” I said. “But like you said, dawn-of-time stuff. It could hatch in five hundred years. Or five minutes. Or five million. Really don’t know. But it is, yes, just as bad as you think it is. Worse.” I thought about it for a few moments. Dr. Frandsen gave me the time.”I need you to come back.”
“No way in hell,” Frandsen replied. “I’m quite comfortable where I’m at, thank you.”
“You’re the expert. The only expert. You want the world to end or you want to do something about it?”
“I’m prepared.” Frandsen shrugged. “If people wanted to do something about it they should have listened when I was telling them back in the seventies.”
“You’re bitter. I get that. You just got ignored and ridiculed. I recently got beat most of the way to death by federal agents. I’m going to have to go back to those same people, the ones who put me in the fucking hospital, and tell them that they’re wrong. Again. That what’s down there isn’t just some scavenger creature but a full-on Old One. The thing they fear the most, and that I found it when they couldn’t. That they missed it. And I’m going to do that, one way or another. I’m going to convince them. Because if I don’t, world ends.
“And there is no ‘prepared,’” I added. “Get over that naïve notion. This thing breaks out, there’s nowhere on earth to hide. You can’t just hide up here. Not for long.”
“I’m old,” Frandsen said. “You said yourself it could break out in five minutes or five thousand years. I’ll take my chances. Here. Not in New Orleans. Screw you.”
“Fine. Can I at least get your data? We’re going to have to replicate your drill. You can at least give me what I need to do that.”
Frandsen thought about that for a bit then shrugged. “That you can have. For what good it will do you. You’re going to expose the drillers to this stuff, you know. Again. It’s evil.”
“Ultimate evil,” I said. “Which is exactly why we have to kill it.”
CHAPTER 19
On the way home I had a layover in my old stomping grounds of Seattle.
It was tempting to just go to Saury and get some good sushi, but there was one other avenue of investigation into the mava that I had not pursued yet.
The night club was in a bad part of town. It was an ugly brick building with no signage. There was a big metal door, and when you knocked on it, the bouncer looked at you through a slit. The vision slit was about a foot and a half higher than I was tall, which would be your first clue this wasn’t a normal club.
I knocked and got eyes.
“What’s password?” The bouncer had a very deep voice.
“Party, party all night long,” I said, trying not to sigh. “Party little Princess ’til the break of dawn. Shake your little groove thing, yeah, yeah, yeah. Shake your little groove thing, Princess Shallala.”
“You gots do dance too. Princess says you gots do the dance when you says the password!”
“I’ll slip you twenty bucks if I can skip the dance part.” There weren’t any witnesses, but I had my pride. “Just tell Shallala I did it.”
“Deal.”
I stuck the money through the hole and the door opened. The bouncer was a troll. Trolls make good bouncers. As tough as my friend Decay is, he had nothing on this guy. Shifty bastards though. He’d probably spend that twenty on porn.
At night there would be human customers and human employees and the Fey servants would hide, and Shallala would put on a glamour and mingle. But during the day, there were no humans inside. There was movement in the shadows, but any Fey creatures who were here must have smelled that I was a Hunter and were hiding.
“Princess in her dressing room.” The troll pointed.
I knocked on that door and she yelled for me to come in. She was at a table, in front of a mirror, putting makeup on.
Shallala wasn’t using glamour.
“Aaagh!” I yelled, turning my face away. “For God’s sake, Shallala! Glamour or something!”
Royal Fey weren’t beautiful, to humans, in their natural form. Quite the opposite. Their actual form was utterly alien. Truly “different” in a horrible and terrifying way. I had no question they were from another dimension or planet. Whatever they were, the Fey weren’t saying.
“Like, you humans look just as bad to us!” Shallala said, but when I turned back she was glamoured. “I’m all, like, ‘grody’ all day surrounded by monkeys, you know. Gross!”
And this was why I had not bothered to see if the Fey knew anything. If there was a Fey out there who wasn’t insane or an asshole, I had not met them yet.
“Like, what now, Chadwick? I’m getting ready to go out!”
I was apparently looking into her vanity mirror. She was now illusioned as a naked and beautiful blonde human female. Yeah. Right. Once you see Fey-ugly it’s one of those things you wish there was a brain scrub. She might look like a supermodel but I could still only see the Fey.
“We’ve got a situation.”
“Again?” Shallala said. “You had a situation here before. I, like, totally had to save the day for you.”
“This is a bit different,” I said. “Are you aware that Old Ones leave larva behind on planets?”
“Shushukanala,” Shallala said, shrugging and continuing to put on makeup. I don’t know why she felt the need. The glamour covered it. “Gag me with a spoon, human. Like, everybody knows that. How dumb face can you be? They’re more like big stupid eggs. The eggs are asleep, like forever since they’re totally immortal, until, like, wakey wakey, and then boom! I just ate your stupid planet, losers.”
“What causes them to ‘wakey wakey’?”
“Usually by, like, food being around and, like, people being dumb butts and using Old One magic. Like necromancy and stuff. Depends on how much, like, food and worshippers are around,” Shallala said, shrugging and continuing to trowel on makeup. “Blood sacrifices. Whatever.”
“What if they had, like, a totally very-into-magic entire city over them?” I asked. Shit, fucking insidious Fey magic! “With, like, lots of food and plenty of worshippers?”
“Not long, then. We were, like, totally killing them before you humans stole fire. Fey courts always kill them as soon as we find them. ’Cause they’re like totally grody and if they get to adult they’re like impossible to kill. Like, you got to totally kill them when they’re young, or sucks to be you! Wait…” She stopped putting on makeup and actually looked at me, suspiciously. “Like, how come you’re asking?”
“There’s, like, one under New Orleans.”
“What?” she screamed, her glamour suddenly dropping. Fey-ugly again and clearly upset. The makeup goop was clear on the gigantic Fey bug-eyes and it was…wrong. “No way! How big is it?”
“It’s, like, about two hundred meters long. Is that bad?”
“How big is that? What’s that in real words? The metric system is lame! Tell me it’s little. Like the size of a car.”
“I don’t know in your terms.” Did Fey use the inch pattern? Never checked that at Oxford. “But more like the size of a high school football stadium. Including the bleachers.”
“There’s never been one on earth even close to that big! How did you stupid humies let one grow that big? That’s like practically adult!” She screamed again, starting to put her makeup away. She still hadn’t reglamoured. I think she was panicking. “Do you know what one of those does when it grows up? I’ve got to go. Nice planet you had here. Now we’re going to have to find a new one! That’s li
ke what we get for letting you stupid primates try to run things!”
This thing scared the crap out of a Fey princess who could probably level an SRT without breaking a sweat.
“Don’t worry. We’re going to handle it…What are you doing?”
“Looking for my suitcase! I’ve like gotta pack!”
“We could use your help. There’s a clause in the contract—”
“Stick the contract up your big dumb butt! Try an’ enforce it after your planet blows up!”
She had the troll escort me out.
* * *
Frandsen had a lot of stuff. Shitloads of stuff. Charts. Plats. Pages that were just columns of numbers. Early computer printouts. I hoped somebody would understand it, I sure as hell didn’t.
The next question was what to do with it. This wasn’t MHI level; this was MCB, but I wasn’t even sure SRT could handle it. The last time a mava was attacked it wiped out a sepoy regiment. Before that, it was five thousand crack Chinese soldiers. What did the MCB do in situations like that, call the DOD? We were going to need some serious firepower. Air strikes. Napalm. If it hatched, Katy Bar the Door.
We had to at least inform MCB. Seriously inform them as in formally and full up. Write a report, submit it to DC. I’d just cost them millions of dollars, so why would they believe evidence I’d gathered from a discredited crackpot? That was going to go over like a lead balloon.
It was a long flight back. I pored over what I could understand of all the geology gobbledygook and considered how to kill the thing, preferably without digging up the Superdome. Pump holy water in through the drill? Could you do that?
I have a real hard time admitting when I’m in over my head, but as soon as I landed, I had to swallow my pride and call Earl Harbinger for help.
* * *
Ray Shackleford was the one who made MHI’s case concerning the danger posed by the mava directly to MCB Director Wagner. Even though I was the one who had done most of the research, I stayed in New Orleans. As far as Ray’s presentation went, that Hunter who had just sued them for millions of dollars didn’t exist. Chad who? Sorry, Director, don’t know the guy. He sounds like an asshole.