The friendly next-door neighbor I’d met on my first visit, with the late and very much missed Shelbye, didn’t appear to be home. Which was a pity. His wife made great sweet tea.
Ray and I entered cautiously. Except for a buildup of mold in the corners, not much had changed. The place was still more or less identical. Given that the door was busted open, I’d expected New Orleans various “neighborhood association” members to have thoroughly looted it. But nothing had been touched.
Even the burglars in New Orleans didn’t touch hoodoo houses.
“There’s the hole,” I said, pointing to the remnants of the exit point. The concrete slab had been busted wide open in a shower of concrete about a meter and a half wide. Dirt was piled up around it.
“Looks like the place has been ransacked,” Ray said.
“I was thinking it hadn’t changed. This is what it looked like when Shelbye and I checked it out nearly a year ago.”
“And it’s still closed?”
“Nobody would live here after that. Except maybe an idiot Yankee transplant.”
“Well, let’s see if we can find that symbol,” Ray said, casting around.
“If it’s under the slab, we’ll have our work cut out for us. But if it’s under the carpet…”
It was under the carpet. The hole was in the middle of the living room. In one corner we found the symbol under the carpet. Right next to a doll.
“Couple who lived here were older,” I said, looking at the doll. “Their grandkids were visiting. Six people, four of them children, vanished without a trace.”
“Eaten by this amorphous worm,” Ray said, looking at the symbol. Sure enough, it was a slimy collection of spores. It was hard to tell if it had been drawn in something and then bloomed, or if it had just spontaneously grown that way. He glanced suspiciously at the hole. “I guess let’s try the holy water thing and see what happens.”
“Let me get the sprayer. That way we can shoot it from the door and run like hell.”
We had filled a plastic weed sprayer with holy water on the way here. Most of the local churches knew Hoodoo Squad. I stood in the doorway and pumped the sprayer until it was pressurized.
“Ready when you are.” Ray had taken up a position by one of the barred windows looking into the living room and drew his pistol. We weren’t really sure what, if anything, was going to come out of the hole, but he was ready to put a bullet in it.
I squirted the holy water into the corner. I emptied the whole container. We had to wait a few minutes while the water ran down the cracks.
The floor began to rumble.
“Oh, it’s a-comin’,” I said, bounding away from the open door and over to where Ray was standing.
Bad move.
It was massive. All eyes and gray-green leprous skin and grinding teeth. “Amorphous Worm” is the only reasonable description for that loathsome monstrosity that suddenly filled the living room with its foul bulk. Semitransparent, you could see alien and vile organs bulging and writhing beneath its pustulant membrane. Maggots crawling in eye sockets were reasonable and decent compared to that gelatinous unholy thing that erupted from the ground.
“Ugly,” Ray said, trying for an Academy Award for Master of Understatement.
The blasphemous monster, denied any prey, seemed to sense us by the window. Or perhaps one of the thousands of mad, red winking eyes spotted us there. A bulging pseudopod squirted toward us.
“Run!”
The glass shattered out in a blast as we got out of the house fast. Ray hadn’t even bothered to pull the trigger. It wouldn’t have done any good. As we reached the dead front lawn its bulk pressed between the bars. They began to give way under its mass. The bars finally succumbed and burst forth along with its bloated flesh.
But as the wretched thing touched sunlight it quailed, roiling back and steaming under the direct light of God’s sun. It could not withstand the light.
It shrunk back then with a disgusting liquescent sound and disappeared back into the tainted ground.
The street was quiet.
“Keep moving,” Ray said. “It might not like sun but I don’t want it coming up under us.”
“I’m for that,” I said, trying to stay calm. I’d seen some shit but that was fucking vile.
* * *
“Okay,” Earl said after we’d finished our verbal report. “Sure sounds like some minion of the Old Ones.”
I called Dr. Rigby and thank him for the tip. I was also able to give him some more details of the investigation and why I was a suspect. He was guarded in his reply but agreed to look into it. I said we’d contact him again when we had more information on this amorphous worm.
“But how do we kill it?” Ray asked.
“Them,” I said. “We’ve had fourteen incidents of eruptions. So, how do we kill them.”
“Assuming there’s a different one at each hole, and not one big gummy worm blob thingy tunneling around town,” Ray mused. He was handling this better than I was.
“Either way, my answer is Kill It With Fire!”
“Might work,” Earl said, nodding. “But it would take a hell of a lot of fire. MCB will shit bricks if we burn down a neighborhood.”
“Timer.” Ray suggested. “We put something in there with a fuse on it, leave the offering, then get the hell out of the way.”
“Pig,” I said. “Put a gutted pig in the house. You can put a lot of thermite into the cavity of a pig, and I intend to pack the shit out of that sucker. Hook up a ten- or twenty-second delay on it. Hook the fuse igniter to a wire. Thing comes up, all angry again, sees the offering, swallows it. Goes back down. Fuse pulls.”
“One problem,” Ray said. “Assuming we kill it, we’re going to need to file on it. The only previous reference to this thing is a single story from Ghana in the 1700s that might not even be the same thing. If this is a totally new entity, Treasury will have to make a ruling.”
“Shit,” Earl said. “We’re gonna have to call the PUFF adjuster.”
* * *
The PUFF adjuster’s name was Harold P. Coslow, Junior. He had appeared out of nowhere when we were setting our worm trap.
We’d chosen a different house in case the first worm had gotten wise. It was another ranch house, 1506 Andry Street, in the Lower Ninth Ward. The street was definitely ghetto but had the usual New Orleans crowd hanging around. Franklin had notified MCB, and they had insisted on a perimeter that held back the crowds this time.
The adjuster was shorter than me, so maybe five foot three. Hunched back. Bald head covered by an old-fashioned fedora. Shabby black wool overcoat, carefully cared for but ancient and used, which had to be stifling since it was about a hundred freaking degrees. If it bothered him it wasn’t evident. Black eyes with a hound dog’s expression. Worn, equally well-cared-for brown leather shoes I suspected had been rebuilt over and over again. You just knew he had a change purse in his shabby but well-cared-for pocket. He was carrying a brown briefcase that was as worn as the rest of his ensemble.
“Mr. Coslow,” Earl said, nodding his head deferentially.
Earl wasn’t deferential to anybody. I mean anybody! Who the hell was this guy?
Mr. Coslow looked at him for a moment and pulled a leather-bound journal from his overcoat pocket. He read it for a moment.
“Is it still Harbinger?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“It is difficult to keep up, you know,” Mr. Coslow said, putting the book away. “Shackleford, Wolf, Harbinger—I do wish you would pick a name and stick to it. It complicates my paperwork.”
“I apologize. I have to live out here. People ask questions.”
“You suspect a kifo minyoo,” Mr. Coslow said.
“Excuse me, sir?” I said carefully. If Earl was treating this guy with kid gloves, I was going to practically grovel. “You know what this is?”
“No. If it is a kifo minyoo, I will have to observe it with my own eyes. The secretions are similar enough to other
entities they are hard to sort out. I rather doubt kifo minyoo, however. There has never been a recorded mava paṇauvaā in North America. They have only been found in West Africa, interior Indonesia and northwest Mongolia. Then there is the problem of finding the mava paṇauvaā. While individual pseudopods are PUFF-applicable, without removal of the mava paṇauvaā, destroying them is quite pointless.”
“It attacked us with a worm,” I said.
“The worm as you call it is the pseudopod, young man,” Coslow snapped. “A kifo minyoo is a feasting entity of a mava paṇauvaā. It is estimated they can have up to sixty such protuberances, and the body could be one hundred and twenty meters in length. Previously recorded supernatural generation fields for an Old One servant entity of that size were approximately seventeen kilometers in radius as a red zone with a yellow zone out to fifty-six kilometers. Which would, admittedly, explain the high level of undead activity in this region. I still strongly doubt a kifo minyoo. Rare does not begin to describe them. Similar fungoid symbols can also be found with mara ugaulaka, dauoa gildru, lefu leraba and kurth vedekje, all of which have been found in North America. But we shall see.”
I wanted to ask questions. Follow up. Was he saying there was some sort of massive entity under New Orleans and the giant shoggoth worms were just sprouts off of it? But I could tell that asking more questions was a way to really piss this guy off. I could only think of one thing useful to say.
“Fuuuuck,” Earl said, taking the words right out of my mouth. “This is like a yemek daire. Shit.”
“Yes. Related, or at least originating in the same reality. Assuming mava paṇauvaā, this could be significantly larger and more powerful,” Coslow said, nodding at Earl as if he were a student who had managed to just miss putting on a dunce cap. “My time is valuable, Mr.…Harbinger.”
“We’re about ready,” Earl said.
Ray and Decay were setting the trap. We’d gotten a pig from a slaughter house, complete except for being gutted, then packed it with thermite and an igniter.
“Done,” Ray said, coming out of the house. “You do realize this is enough thermite to melt the turret of the USS Iowa?”
“This had better not cause a big incident,” Special Agent Campbell said, striding over. “We’ve got enough questions about what’s—” When he saw the PUFF adjuster, he stopped. “Oh…Sorry, sir. I didn’t realize you were here.”
Everybody was scared of Mr. Coslow. I was starting to like him.
“My time is, as I previously noted, valuable,” Coslow said as he gave the agent a stern nod. “I don’t have the patience for another First Reason argument now. May we begin? I should note that there may be a good bit of quite unwholesome smoke. Mortals should don breathing filters.”
Mortals?
Earl just crossed his arms and sighed.
“Put on y’all’s gas masks,” he said.
We donned respirators as Ray started the pump.
We were well back from the house this time. There was the awful shaking of the ground then the eruption. As the house rattled, Coslow casually strolled up to the window and looked through. I could tell from the set of his shoulders it was professional curiosity. And he hadn’t donned a gas mask. Neither had Earl.
The thing didn’t try to get out of the house. Apparently, the pig was sufficient offering. There, with another blasphemous liquid sound, it was gone. I started to reach for my gas mask and Earl put his hand on my arm and shook his head.
Then there was another rumble, harder this time. It was like being in about a magnitude five earthquake based on my time in Seattle. Then gray-green smoke started pouring out the front door of the house.
Even with the gas mask it felt unclean. I wished I’d put on MOPP gear or a silver suit. I backed up as it poured out of the house in a wave of fumes and horror.
Eventually the smoke stopped gushing forth and Mr. Coslow walked over to the group. If the smoke had bothered the PUFF adjuster, it was not apparent. He brushed some dust from the arm of his old overcoat.
“I stand corrected. Kifo minyoo. Large. FUCCN 11189-3. A well developed mava paṇauvaā is now positively identified in North America. Mava paṇauvaā is FUCCN 11189-1. That is my official ruling. I will send the paperwork to the MCB. You gentlemen have quite a problem on your hands.” He walked away without another word.
Then the arguments started.
* * *
“Sheeeit,” Earl said, rubbing his fingers through his hair. I’d never seen him so upset. “Do we know anything about a…”
“Mava paṇauvaā,” Ray and I both chimed in.
Campbell, with no PUFF adjuster to fear, had taken out his anger on us. We were bad boys for causing an incident, even though we’d done as instructed and given them plenty of advance warning. I suppose he’d prefer we just let the damned thing live and eat more people.
He wasn’t interested in the fact that there appeared to be a massive entity hiding under New Orleans. Seemed to think that was none of our concern. We were ordered to leave the area while he “handled the incident we’d caused.”
I was starting to get really tired of his crap. And even though we’d figured out how to kill the kifo minyoo, which was apparently just one of what was probably sixty-something giant blob snakes growing out of the giant mava paṇauvaā, which had probably been under this spot since before the dinosaurs.
“I’m saying it sounds Hindi,” I said.
“Swahili,” Ray suggested.
“Could be Minangkabau. He mentioned they’re found in interior Indonesia.”
“What the hell is…?” Earl said, then stopped and snarled. “I hate this kind of shit! Shit you don’t know about and don’t understand is the worst kind of shit in this business! PUFF adjusters never tell you shit either. They just pronounce and go. They’re so top-secret tight-lipped you never know if they’ve got actual intel, or they’re just pulling guesses out of their ass.”
“Earl,” Ray chimed. “Let me and Chad research it. We’ll find something. We’ve got the names, now, at least. That’s a start. I don’t give a shit what this new MCB fella says, there’s a PUFF on this thing which means we kill as many as we can find. Starting with all the incidents.”
“We still don’t know how much the PUFF is,” Milo said.
“Susan’s looking into it now that we have the FUCCN,” Ray said. “Doesn’t really matter. These things need to be dealt with.”
“If we start killing them, will more erupt?” Milo asked, frowning. “These are part of one big thing, right? They’re like its tongue. Tongues? Tentacle tongues? Whatever. We burn one, will it start making others? That weird Coslow guy said there could be a bunch more. That could be bad.”
“How often do they erupt?” Earl asked.
“Random,” I said. “But seems to be increasing.”
“If they’re increasing, we need to just kill them and hope for the best,” Ray said. “And find out what we can about the mava paṇauvaā and how to kill it.”
“Fire,” Milo said. “Lots of fire.”
“Action beats reaction, but if reaction is all we got, we take it,” Earl said. “Until we know how to kill the body, we’ll bait every previous attack spot, and when there’s a new eruption, we’ll hit that one too. Once we know how to kill the body, we’ll take it out.”
“We’ve got to find it first,” I said. “A hundred meters sounds big. But we don’t know how deep it is or where it is located, exactly. So we can’t just drill down to it. Until we can find the central body, we’re going to be killing these things forever.”
“Then we keep killing them forever,” Earl said. “Shake the trees. Ray…”
“I’ll head back to Cazador and see what’s in the archives,” Ray said.
“Iron Hand, they like you at Oxford. Assuming the MCB hasn’t blocked your passport…”
“I’ll book a trip.”
“Probably best to keep you out of MCB’s eyesight for a while anyway. And we still need to get to the bot
tom of you being under investigation. I don’t like it when they slander my people. I’ll spread the word to be on the lookout for your idiot brother.”
“Thank you.” It was nice to have people at your back.
“Milo…”
“I’ll handle the teams killing these things.” He rubbed his hands together with glee. “Kill it with fire!” he added with a mad cackle.
“Coordinate with Franklin. Hoodoo Squad’s busy enough as it is, so we’ll work the bait traps in when it’s best for them.” Earl cleared his throat. “Now, I know everybody is excited, but you need to realize what we’re up against here. I’ve fought creations of the Old Ones before. They’re rare, and that’s a blessing. I can’t accentuate enough how serious this is. What the adjustor said about the radius? The more powerful servants of the Old Ones twist reality just by existing. The veil gets thin when they’re around.”
I had briefed everyone else on my encounter with the powerful—maybe even master—vampire during Mardi Gras. “This must be the outsider Jack warned me about.”
“Yeah. This thing beneath us, it’s why New Orleans is so fucked up, why every little wannabe chickenshit witch doctor can suddenly raise the dead and create giant monsters,” Earl growled. “You’ve got your assignments. We’re going to take our time, do this right, get our shit together, and kill this motherfucker dead. Get to work.”
* * *
I had to stick around for at least one kifo kill. It was my idea, after all. And it turned out the PUFF was pretty damned decent. Milo and the teams were about to make a pretty penny off of giant slug monster barbeque.
We carried the pig over in the team van. It was two hundred pounds dressed weight. Serious porker. This time we were going back to Eagle Street. MCB had reluctantly accepted our argument that if it had a PUFF, we were allowed to kill it. But they’d insisted on evacuating the neighborhood and coming up with some bullshit cover story. I think it had to do with methane gas or something.
The reason it was bullshit was New Orleans. Most here knew hoodoo was real and serious. All you had to do was walk along the street banging on doors and saying “Gonna be some serious hoodoo. Bars won’t help. Best get out.”