Cthulhu remorseless the.., p.1
Cthulhu Remorseless (The Collected Harrison Peel Stories Book 3), page 1
CTHULHU REMORSELESS
The Collected Harrison Peel Stories
Volume 3
David Conyers
“Conyers is like some impossibly perfect distillation of Lovecraft, Fleming, Barker and Ludlum. There’s an awful logic to his terror and action.” — PETER CLINES
“David Conyers, I have to say, is my favorite mythos author. He does what would have made Lovecraft weep with joy.” — CJ HENDERSON
“Every bit as disquieting as anything found in the oeuvre of Lovecraft.” — BLACK STATIC
“I started reading a few pages… and it grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. A fast-paced read with a great plot and some DAMN scary Shoggoths!” — LOVECRAFT EZINE
“When it comes to eldritch espionage action, nobody does it better.” — CODY GOODFELLOW
“The versatile David Conyers greatly impresses. He is gifted with much imagination, the knack for intriguing plot, suspenseful pacing, and compelling characters. I suspect the man can do it all, and will.” — JEFFREY THOMAS
“David Conyers is like the physicist who is all too happy to remind us that the solid world is only an illusion. Time and again, Conyers rips open the universe for us, to show us how empty it is, and how dark.” — D.L. SNELL
“There are a very few authors still living today that I can point to and honestly say that they have inspired me. David Conyers has.” — BRIAN M. SAMMONS, editor of WORLD WAR CTHULHU
“David Conyers is the reigning king of the Cthulhu Mythos Down Under. With Conyers at the helm, you won’t be disappointed by your journey.” — HORRORSCOPE
“David Conyers is a rising star... So good are the scenarios he dreams up that I'm beginning to wonder if he is really a time traveler from the future.” — SF CROWSNEST
“David Conyers spawns with frightening ability scenes that could fuel the most terrifying of nightmares.” — DARK WOLF FANTASY REVIEWS
Cthulhu Remorseless © 2021 David Conyers
First published worldwide 2021.
All Rights Reserved
All characters, events, companies and organizations portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, or companies or organizations, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, by photocopying, recording or otherwise, without express permission of the author.
“The Masked Messenger” (2011) with John Goodrich, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine #52 , Australia, © 2011 David Conyers and John Goodrich.
“War Gods of Men” (2014) with David Kernot, Lovecraft eZine #31 , © 2014 David Conyers and David Kernot.
“Invisible Demons” (2021) with Brian M. Sammons, Cthulhu Remorseless , USA, © 2021 David Conyers and Brian M. Sammons.
“The Bullet and the Flesh” (2014) with David Kernot, World War Cthulhu , Dark Regions Press, © 2014 David Conyers and David Kernot.
“Stomach Acid” (2006) with Brian M. Sammons, Lovecraft's Disciples #5 , Rainfall Books, UK, © 2006 David Conyers and Brian M Sammons.
“The R’lyeh Singularity” (2012) with Brian M. Sammons, Cthulhu Unbound 3 , Permuted Press, USA, © 20012 David Conyers and Brian M. Sammons.
“Mouth of Jupiter” (2021), Cthulhu Remorseless , USA, © 2021 David Conyers.
“Supersymmetry Blues” (2021), Cthulhu Deep Down Under Volume 3 , IFWG Publishing, Australia, © 2021, David Conyers.
The character Harrison Peel, © 2005, 2021 David Conyers. The character John Dixon, © 2007 John Sunseri. The character Emerson Ash, © 2014, David Kernot. The character Jordan, © 2006 Brian M Sammons. The character Joan de Molina © 2015 CJ Henderson. The character Rudolph Pearson © 2005 William Jones.
Special thanks to Dori Barrett, Brian M. Sammons, David Kernot, William Jones, C.J. Henderson, John Goodrich, Shane Jiraiya Cummings, Angela Challis, Mike Davis, Glynn Owen Barrass, Jeffrey Thomas, Paul Mudie, Cody Goodfellow, David Anderson, George Anderson, Frank Ludlow, Bob Neilson, John Kenny, Konstantine Paradis, Peter Rawlik and Peter Clines.
All reprinted stories revised and expanded in this edition.
Cover Image © 2016 Can Stock Photo / grandfailure
CONTENTS
The Masked Messenger | with John Goodrich
Stomach Acid | with Brian M Sammons
War Gods of Men | with David Kernot
Invisible Demons | with Brian M Sammons
The Bullet and the Flesh | with David Kernot
The R’lyeh Singularity | with Brian M Sammons
Mouth of Jupiter
Supersymmetry Blues
Copyright
About the Author
The Masked Messenger
With John Goodrich
Harrison Peel counted the dead as more covered corpses rolled into the Marrakech morgue. They weren’t really humans, rather the dissected remains of their flesh, stuffed into leaking body bags. The sharp, coppery smell of blood filled the room, reminding Peel of an abattoir.
Lounging next to Peel was Fabien Chemal, a spook with Morocco’s DST intelligence agency. Chemal mumbled something in Arabic about being inconvenienced by the gory spectacle. While he watched junior spooks and morgue attendants catalogue the grim remains, he offered Peel a cigarette. Peel refused, wishing instead for a good strong coffee.
“How many dead?” Peel wiped his sweaty hands on his cotton pants. It should have been cold in this place. That’s how they would have done it back in the NSA. Cold to keep the body parts preserved for proper forensic analysis.
Chemal shrugged, lit his cigarette. “We don’t know yet. At least eighteen dead: five Americans, two Germans, one Spaniard. The rest were my people, but I guess your people won’t care about that.”
“I care.” Peel said as he stood. The smell of death and smoke felt constricting from his seat in a corner. “The NSA care, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
Chemal raised an eyebrow. “I get the impression, Mr. Peel, that you were a little eager to come in person, rather than send a subordinate?”
Peel didn’t know precisely what Chemal’s rank was in the murky hierarchy of the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire. He knew that any time he didn’t spend with Chemal, he would spend being tailed. They were controlling him, and this would make his job here more difficult than it needed to be.
The morgue was in the basement of Marrakech DST offices. At least one more level existed beneath their feet, reserved for DST’s prisoners and interrogation cells. In this building, the dead warranted more respect than detainees.
“Some personal reason perhaps, Mr. Peel?”
Peel ignored Chemal’s question. The Moroccan’s tone sounded too inquisitive, as if Peel were under interrogation himself. “You said you don’t know how many died in the blast? How’s that? And second, I’m not sure it really was a blast. To me, the bodies look sliced to pieces. Thousands of pieces.”
“They were… They still will be.”
Peel’s stomach felt empty. His mind confused. But then everything about yesterday’s terrorist bombing in Jemaa el-Fna square lacked any resemblance to sense. The blast had been invisible, soundless. People shredded where they stood in the Marrakech market. Yet their clothes, wallets, purses, souvenirs and the pavement beneath them remained untouched. It was as if invisible demons had mutilated their victims with razor-sharp teeth and claws.
“Do you know that some victims died before the blast occurred, hours, even days before?”
“I don’t understand?”
Chemal shrugged. “Neither do we… really.” His burned-down cigarette hung precariously from his lip as he reached for another. Perhaps his need to smoke was only a need not to smell death. “Of the eighteen dead, two were market vendors who would have been in the square at the time of the blast, had the authorities not found them shredded three days earlier. The German pair were in their homes two mornings ago in the same mutilated state.”
Feeling anxious, Peel rubbed the back of his head where it itched. He saw a pattern now and wished he didn’t. Yet he’d been right to come so far, these people needed to know what he knew, if only they would let him help. “There’s more, isn’t there Mr. Chemal?”
“Yes.” The Moroccan lit a new cigarette from the embers of the last one. “Three more have died in the twenty-four hours since. Same cause of death: spontaneous shredding.”
“And none were in the square at the time?”
“They were when the blast went off.” He caught Peel’s stare with a sardonic grin. “You came all this way Mr. Peel, all the way from Maryland, U.S.A. Can you tell me what’s happened here?”
Peel wouldn’t catch his eye. “You said the bomber is still alive? I need to speak to her before I can give you definite answers… If I can do even that.”
The DST agent glared. “Be my guest,” he snorted, and waved to show that they should now leave.
He escorted Peel downstairs, past two Royal Moroccan Army privates, their Steyr AUG assault rifles and unblinking stares guarding the only entrance. Deeper in the smell was of shit and perspiration.
“What do we know about her?” Peel asked as the corridor grew dark and confining. He didn’t look in any of the cell’s peep holes, afraid of what he’d see. Even the air felt more constrained down here.
“Her
“You have evidence of this?”
“Nothing substantial. We suspect she’s related to the wealthy Benhammou family, although they are denying it.”
“And who are they, exactly?”
Chemal laughed throatily. “The Benhammous? They’re ‘Arabized’ Berbers who made their fortunes long ago in phosphate mining. A rare breed — wealthy Berbers, I mean.”
“Interesting?”
“Perhaps.” He stopped outside a cell, took a large metal key from his pocket. “You really want to talk to her? She hasn’t responded to any of our interrogation methods, any of them, and it’s been over twenty-four hours.”
Despite his misgivings, Peel nodded.
“Well, good luck then.” Chemal’s tone was flat, like he wanted to be somewhere else. He opened the door slowly, betraying its weight when Chemal had to push his body into it to move it.
Hesitantly, Peel stepped inside.
In the tiny cell, a thin woman sat against a wall stained with trickles of dark water. Dressed in a black jellaba, only her face and cuffed hands showed. Dark eyes stared through Peel and the wall behind him. She looked like she’d been staring at nothing for a very long time. When Peel stepped closer, he saw that her hands betrayed the usual third-world interrogation techniques: bruises and several circular cigarette burns. It was Chemal’s crushed filters that littered the concrete floor. Peel cringed, wondered who the enemy was here.
“I’ll leave you to it.” Chemal locked Peel in.
Peel sat opposite the young woman on the only other chair, where she had to stare through him unless she wanted to break her gaze. She didn’t.
He spoke slowly in his disjointed Arabic. “My name is Harrison Peel. Once upon a time I used to be a Major with the Australian Army, fighting terrorists like you. Now, however, I work for America’s National Security Agency as a consultant. I still work in counter-terrorism, but these days we’re against a different breed of insurgent. Men and women who’ve made deals with dark gods, alien gods … You know what I’m talking about: the real gods.”
There was the briefest flicker of her eyes. Slight enough that if Peel hadn’t been paying attention, he would have missed it.
“I’m here because you have a weapon, an explosive device that works outside our perceptions of space and time. A weapon beyond the limitations that you and I and everyone on this world remains trapped inside, called cause and effect.”
Her concentration broken, she looked at him through tired eyes. When she answered, it was in English. “What would you know of these things?”
“A lot more than you could imagine,” Peel too switched to his native tongue because it was easier for him. “Perhaps, or perhaps not?”
“The weapon was a gift, a gift from the Masked Messenger.”
Peel raised a questioning eyebrow. “Nyarlathotep?”
Her blood-shot eyes grew large, and she trembled. With that single word, Peel had finally rattled her.
She whispered now, but there was no mistaking the venom in her tone. “It seems you understand the shadowed world.”
Peel gave a tiny smile, remembering his own haunted past, and where he’d read the name Nyarlathotep before, words that had left him cold. “Yes, unfortunately.” He leaned forward, whispering. “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? I know you’re not from the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group, as you’d like everyone here to believe. From some reading I did in an ancient book, I can see that you’re really a member of a secret sect which calls themselves the Sisterhood of the Masked Messenger.”
She returned to saying nothing again. Chemal was right, she would be difficult to break. He wasn’t sure he had the will to break her, or if he really should.
“What I don’t understand, Souad Benhammou, is how you triggered the bomb without being killed.”
She permitted him one more flicker of her eyes, one more acknowledgment that he existed. “Who said I survived?”
It took Peel several seconds to notice his entire body had gone cold. He toppled out of his chair, stumbled backwards against the cell door, to smash his fists against its coarse metal.
“Chemal!” he cried. “Chemal!” he screamed.
He looked back to her.
She smiled for him, briefly. Then her face lined with a dozen crimson lacerations. Her shape seemed to fold, crumpled into her falling jellaba. Her heart, before it collapsed into a dozen slices with the rest of her meat, pumped one final time, spraying Peel with the last of her living blood.
——
A fist slammed into Udad Benhammou’s mouth with a meaty thunk, nearly knocking him out of his chair. Only the handcuffs that fastened him to the steel table saved him from a fall. Fabian Chemal looked around the small, dingy cell, as if seeking answers from anywhere but his silent prisoner.
“Your sister is a terrorist, Udad, and so are you. When is the next planned attack? Who is the target?”
Udad looked down at the American football Chemal had placed in his lap. Earlier, the interrogator had put on gloves and rubbed the unclean pigskin over Udad’s bloody face. The man was a disgrace to everything holy, nothing but a Western puppet. Udad did not let his hatred show. He did not speak, allowing the interrogator to read what he wanted from Udad’s silence.
There would be a reckoning, and this dog would receive his reward.
Chemal lit another foul cigarette and waved the cherry-red tip threateningly close to Udad’s eye.
“In the old days, we would have sewn filth like you into a pigskin and dropped you in the river. You are nothing but an Al-Qaeda puppet, a fool who wants to murder women and children for some ignorant interpretation of Al-Qur’an.”
Udad did not react. He merely stared into a corner of the room. The red glow of the cigarette moved away from his eye.
“Unfortunately, we have a squeamish Westerner who seems to think he can walk into another country’s affairs. Typical cowboy.” He punctuated his annoyance by putting out his cigarette on Udad’s forearm. Udad heard the sizzle of his burning flesh, but the pain was less to him than the itch of a mosquito bite.
Vaguely, Udad heard a scream, and then another. Chemal took no notice of it until a thickset man came through the cell door to whisper something in Chemal’s ear. With a look of annoyance, they both left, and Udad was alone in the dirty concrete cell.
He’d barely had time to think before Chemal was back. He placed a boot on Udad’s chest and shoved. The chair would have tipped over but for the cuffs that locked Udad’s wrists to the steel table. Chemal leaned his weight onto his prisoner, and the joints in the Udad’s arms protested.
“Seems our American got a little excited. I hope you weren’t too attached to your sister.”
“Souad?” Udad had thought himself immune to pain. Chemal’s face became a mask of triumph, and Udad realized he had spoken aloud.
“She’s a bit of a mess. You probably wouldn’t recognize her anymore.” He searched Udad’s face before continuing. “I don’t know what he did, but the blood he got on the lightbulb makes the whole place stink.”
Udad closed his eyes and tried not to imagine what the cursed mongrel had done to Souad, but the reek of burned flesh suggested too many things. She was in Paradise with the martyrs, but the assurance only brought him a scrap of comfort.
Chemal gave Udad a spiteful shove that nearly dislocated his shoulders.
“Unfortunately, our enthusiastic but careless American has managed to break what could have been a valuable source of information.” He shrugged, then moved his weight. “You are, therefore, free to go.” Chemal kicked the chair out from under Udad, slamming his face against the sharp edge of the table. Udad could feel blood slowly oozing down his forehead and wondered how badly the impact had cut him.
