The Final Chapter of the Riveting Pulp Saga!

THE WORLD WILL DIE SCREAMING

Starring Darwin Flynn, the Scarlet Saint

by Phil Bledsoe

Chapter Five: Zeppelins of Gomorrah!

A human skeleton draped in chains sprang forward from the wall, clawing at the Scarlet Saint with fleshless fingers and cracked incisors. The Saint brought 'round the pommel of his Damascus steel scimitar and bashed in the thing's skull as if it were an overripe melon in a soccer match. The blow left the creature insensate, if it had ever had senses at all, and its body collapsed under the weight of its chains. The Scarlet Saint, otherwise known as Darwin Flynn and the Gatekeeper of the Underworld, used his boot heel and an expertly-driven axe kick to split the skeleton's femurs as well.

“Damn it!” Darwin spat, wiping bone dust from his face with the cuff of his fencing gauntlet. “That's the sixth one!” Ever since ascending from the lower reaches of the castle into the dungeon proper, Darwin had found nearly his every step plagued by these bone monstrosities. No doubt the master of the castle had placed them here as a security measure, but leaving them chained to the walls left them vulnerable to anyone who wasn't scared stiff at the very sight of a mobile skeleton. A walking pile of bones was hardly the most frightening, or even the most surprising thing that Darwin Flynn had ever encountered in his adventurous career. From blood-sucking genetic mutations to insanity-inducing formless fiends from beneath the sewage sluiceways of Hell itself, the Scarlet Saint had witnessed nearly every form of supernatural evil to have walked the Earth since life first crawled from the seas and rained from the reaches of space. A collection of animated marrow and calcium was hardly enough to darken his day. The skeletons merely served to slow his progress, which frustrated him as he was sure that he was quite close to concluding the case that had brought him to Romania in the first place. He also worried that the repeated smashing of these erstwhile sentries might alert someone or something of greater formidability to impede his movements or, worse yet, alert the man behind it all and give him the chance to flee.

Darwin hesitated to waste bullets on such pitiful opposition. He feared that he would soon have such need of his dwindling supply of ammunition that he could not spare it. Occasionally, he would pass the shambling form of one of the “worker zombies” that he had seen in various other stages of the master's nefarious plan. From the unspeakable depths of the caverns below the castle to the sinister machinations of the airfield, the mindless automatons were the backbone of their master's scheme. Unable to commit violence, or to even recognize a threat to themselves, they had facilitated a long-reaching attempt to create an army of enhanced, extremely dangerous hybrid zombies which would spread like a plague across first Europe and then the world. If this madman were allowed to continue, the world would almost certainly die screaming!

Darwin pushed up the black leather mask that adorned his face and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He felt a headache building, partly from the frustration of his task and partly from too many days spent underground breathing musty air and squinting through inadequate light. The fleur-de-lis on the surface of the mask shone bloody red, even through the dry layer of dust covering it. The protective alchemical properties of the mask, which likely dated from Darwin's ancient Greek ancestor Hearclitus the Obscure, kept the Saint going long after other men would have dropped from starvation, exhaustion, or the pain of their wounds. Its powers were useless against the internal forces of stress and self-doubt, though. Darwin felt a grandaddy of a migraine approaching at ramming speed, and all he could think of was his big, beautiful wine cellar back in Elysian Greens and the complete DVD collection of Gilligan's Island that should have arrived in the mail while he had been overseas.

Darwin's ancestors rallied to his assistance. Ideas for meditation techniques and herbal remedies bubbled to the surface of his mind. He took several deep breaths and massaged his temples. Holstering his pistol, he reached into the pouches of his belt and brought out a small tuning fork. He struck it against one of his own iron bracers and held the vibrating fork near his ear. A high, pure note sounded throughout the tunnels and echoed through the reaches of his consciousness. Putting the instrument away again, he composed himself and adjusted his gear. He checked his weapons and straightened his mask. A chorus of mantras were chanted in his head, as he had long since convinced the conflicting religious members of the family that each of them praying and chanting to their own tune just produced noise; a relatively innocuous Buddhist mantra had been agreed upon. It was innocuous because it defied literal translation from the original Sanskrit, roughly meaning “Hail, the jewel of the lotus.” None of the various priests, monks, friars, or evangelists of more Western persuasion could argue that it was “Satanic” to any degree, and the other holy men simply didn't care as long as it got the job done. The writers and scholars kept their knowledge to themselves about the source, as Darwin had lifted it directly from the comic book and radio stories of “The Green Lama,” whose fictional existence (along with such primary-colored crusaders as Crimson Clown, Blue Beetle, Green Hornet, Black Bat, and Red Panda) had in no small part inspired the moniker of Darwin's masked identity.

“Om mani padme hum,” Darwin repeated softly after them. “Okay, guys, I think that'll do for now.” A grumbling round of “I should think so's” emanated from the more rigidly Catholic sections of his ancestry (mostly his mother's side) while he could sense that a few other spirits were doing the disembodied equivalent of “mouthing” the words under their “breath” for their own benefit; he didn't mind, as this also created a form of psychic white noise that made it easier for him to think. Darwin's great-great- and (possibly, and if so incestuously...) great-grandfather K.L.R. Whatley, a Professor of Esoteric Studies at the pseudonymous Northern Massachusetts Young Ladies' Academy for Religious Education found this phenomenon amusing both for its novel application of several meditative and psychological principles, but also because he himself had been a contributor to (and avid reader of) Double Detective magazine at the time of the Lama's debut. Whatley had, out of concern for his professional advancement, written under a house pen name, and nothing as far-fetched as the Lama's superhuman adventures; he had also been in correspondence with the Lama's creator, Foster Crossen, as well as fellow pulp authors Hugo Gernsback, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Palmer, Richard Sharpe Shaver, Harlan Ellison, L. Ron Hubbard, Manly Banister, and E.E. “Doc” Smith.

Darwin found his appropriation of the Green Lama's magic words to be ironically appropo. After all, Lovecraft had apparently borrowed Whatley's surname and appearance (as well as hints of unorthodox reproductive habits) for use in one of his horror stories; Palmer had become the namesake of a comic book hero himself; Shaver and Palmer together had perpetrated a double-edged “hoax” in the writing and publication of the so-called “Shaver Mysteries.” Shaver, an obvious paranoid schizophrenic, was credited with much of the text of the stories, which were actually based on both his and Palmer's experiences when abducted by the subterranean, pre-human Deros; the stories were then presented within Amazing Stories, a pulp magazine devoted primarily to science fiction, with the claim that the basis of the stories was fundamentally true. Many (including a great many other paranoid schizophrenics who found the stories eerily similar to their own delusional experiences) took the stories at face value as fact; most dismissed them as typical of the outlandish content for which Amazing Stories was well-known, and saw the “true story” label as merely a publicity stunt; others considered the fact or fantasy of the tales a matter of great controversy, and debate raged about it for decades. Darwin himself bore the scars of poisonous, acid-tipped claw marks across his left kidney and the nearest floating ribs, from a thing that could not be called (regardless of what it had called itself) anything but a Dero, which had somehow wandered into Carlsbad Caverns. He saw a certain wicked, deranged wit in presenting a true story as true in a publication known for fantastic fiction, and crediting it to a man whose mental health invited doubt. What better way to place such outlandish information in the public arena without fear of reprisal or suspicion? Darwin found it humorous that so many fans considered the occult works of Lovecraft to be a sort of “hiding in plain sight” revelation of terrible secrets that the man had supposedly known in real life; in fact, Lovecraft had simply been a really good guesser. Professor Whatley had attempted no such dissemination in his own pulp writings, but had rather told simple stories of sordid people whose sordid lives often involved them in unseemly activities and who died very badly as a result. While Whatley's tastes would have no doubt taken to Shaver's unexpurgated manuscripts of sexual experimentation and torture at the hands of the Deros, he was far more at home with the tramps, brutes, and shysters of detective noir. Fan letters to Whatley from fringe figure and Shaver correspondent Fred Crisman, filed away in the family vault until Darwin located them, only cast more sinister light on the world behind the pulps and the men who crafted them.

Wallowing in the filth and mystery of the past was an unfortunate vice of a man whose brain was largely possessed by the shades of every ancestor, direct or peripheral, from the past several hundred years. Fortunately, those from the remote reaches of history seemed almost inaudible to Darwin's waking mind; he sometimes suspected their influence in his dreams, but he was thankful that they had no tidbits of scandal or regret to share in the daylight. His family experiences from the time of the Holy Inquisition to the present were dispiriting enough without adding in the decadence of ancient Greece or the hardships of Neolithic survival.

As the dusty cobwebs of history fluttered across Darwin's thoughts, a sound caught his attention further down the passage. For a moment, frigid panic filled his throat and caressed his epiglottis as terrifying memories of facing the Dero in Carlsbad raced through his mind. Deadly, dark-clad warrior of righteousness that he was, the Scarlet Saint still knew well the tang of mortal fear. His ancestral memories made him all too familiar with both the fear of a approaching death and the sting of its arrival; being the only living person who knew what several different forms of death really felt like made him both more bold and more cautious in his own way. Pushing the beastly black nails of the subterranean degenerate from his mind, Darwin stood from where he had let himself lean against the wall for support.

The gray-white luminescence of the fungus-covered walls showed the hint of a shadow approaching from around the next corner. The alternating sound of one heavy footstep and one foot dragging limply behind it was familiar enough to Darwin, as well as his various occultist forbears (and one film student who interned for George Romero in the early 1970s before dying of a heroin overdose): a zombie was approaching. Not one of the benign zombie laborers that Darwin had encountered by the bushel-full so far, either; a genuine, brain-eating undead monster straight out of the nightmares of millions of drive-in movie fans.

When it hove into view, it was not quite what Darwin had expected, like so many other elements of this particular adventure. The top of the thing's head was split open and peeled back in several directions, exposing part of the top of the brain. From the brain's surface there sprouted an immense blue-black mushroom cap, twice the diameter of the creature's mutilated head. It was flecked with tiny, round white spots. The zombie's pale face was dusted with a black powder of spores from the underside of the mushroom. Its eyes bulged outward and partial mushroom stalks jutted from its nostrils and ears. As it limped closer, its hands stretched out menacingly with fingers that wriggled in anticipation.

“We know you,” it said. The voice was a mix of the workings of decrepit vocal chords of an animated corpse and the unnatural sound of air pushed through the hollow cavities of a pulsating, sentient fungus. It resembled the voices of those bizarre creatures which lined the walls of the cavern that had led him upwards to this dungeon. As Darwin had climbed past them on his way to confront the diseased mind which had created them, the fungi had told him of their nefarious origins: they had been engineered to take over human brains and turn them into an army of killer zombies. However, they had proven so unreasoningly destructive that they were a danger to both themselves and each other, making the concept of an army unworkable. Apparently the master was not one to waste a good weapon, however, and the mushroom zombies could act as adequate guardsmen when used sparingly.

“You think you know me,” the Scarlet Saint replied coldly down the length of his Mauser's sights. “But you have no idea, monster.” His leather-gloved finger squeezed the trigger with the Schnellfeuer's selector set to full-auto. He was taking no chances with this one, and aimed for the stomach while letting the recoil lift the muzzle by degrees as he emptied the magazine. Six rounds blew the abdomen open in a cloud of spore dust which stank of decay and the corruption of flesh. Fourteen more brass-jacketed nine-millimeter bullets mapped a new continent in pointillism across the chest with an ugly peninsula jutting up across the neck and a cluster of deadly islands erupting volcanically from the face. Twenty rounds in all burst through the walking corpse of what had once been an innocent man, possibly a man with a family or friends who loved him. Now all that was left of him was the rude machinery of a living thing, a framework preserved only to provide mobility for an inhuman killing machine. It was that framework that Darwin attacked, splitting its bones and joints as best he could to slow its advance against him. The damage to the throat and the main mass of fungus in the head stopped its horrible voice, which Darwin began to find both an annoyance and an unsubtle reminder of just how deeply he now waded into the unknown and unknowable. The rest of the wounds that he inflicted would be superficial, even in a “conventional” zombie. He knew not what weaknesses and limitations went with this botanically-enslaved undead creature, but he was convinced that the usual process of destroying the brain would not be enough.

As the now-mute thing lumbered towards him, more slowly, he saw its face slacken and its body slump under the immobile weight of whatever had broken loose under bombardment from the Mauser. It continued to move, and new shoots of mushroom wormed their way out through the new orifices that the bullets had given the zombie. More slowly, new growths of mushroom cap began to show themselves where the bullets had opened the remnants of the skull.

“Just as I feared,” said the disembodied voice of K.L.R. Whatley. “The fungus was intended to be the basis of an army of animated dead more dangerous and virulent than any previously seen in the world. While their uncontrollable violence was a strategic drawback in the long run, they could only be expected to have more tactical advantages in the short term. The brain is not their Achilles heel, my boy.”

“That won't be a problem, Professor,” Darwin replied, subvocalizing. “I was emptying the magazine for a reason.” Darwin had once faced a rare breed of vampire in the hills and valleys of Pakistan; instead of a wooden stake, they had to be impaled in their coffin with the bone of a dead man through their hearts. The remains of their own victims had supplied plenty of weapons, but Darwin had taken the time to return to civilization and have the phosphorous extracted from several of the bones to be used in the formulation of tracer bullets. A chemist of his acquaintance in Islamabad had helped him also obtain iron oxide and magnesium for additional heat and flammability, because burning a vampire's corpse was almost never a bad idea. While Darwin had returned to the field, the chemist had proceeded to continue manufacturing tracer bullets in his absence. Due to the highly unusual circumstances of the case, Darwin had been gone for nearly two months and returned to find a stockpile of specialized tracer bullets formulated from dead men's bones, more than he could use in a lifetime.

Darwin never advocated setting fire to a zombie, since that just left you with a flaming zombie still intent on eating you. Zombies don't burn as fast as people would like to think. When a strike to the brain fails, however, you must resort to other options. Darwin palmed a fresh magazine of tracers from his belt pouch with the dexterity of a stage conjuror and the speed of a Western quick-draw expert. As the magazine clicked into place, his shooting hand released the bolt back to battery which swept fresh round into the chamber in a motion so swift and fluid that it all sounded like a single “snap” of metal on metal. Darwin backpedaled before the oncoming horror, groping with his free hand for the staff slung behind his back.

“Your entrails should taste divine,” the monster said, or some semblance of that as it was speaking around and through the destruction wrought by the first salvo of bullets.

“Oh, they are quite delicious,” the Scarlet Saint said with a grin. “Come and try to get them, if you can.” His ironwood shepherd's crook came out from behind him grasped in his left hand; as it did, he dropped to one knee and planted the staff in front of him with the head angled towards the zombie. In the narrow passage, it forced the zombie to either grapple with the staff in order to get past it or proceed no further. As the creature slowed its pace and registered surprise and confusion at the tactic, Darwin brought his right hand up with the pistol and rested the butt of the gun on the iron bracer of his left wrist for support. Then he began firing. He eschewed fully automatic fire this time and placed individual shots carefully, but still rapidly.

The fungal zombie reeled from the attack. Its body began to fall apart as flaming projectiles pierced it. The heat burned mushroom stalks away from bones and muscles, rendering them as lifeless as the flesh from which they were torn. The beast collapsed on the floor as it died its final death, the last hint of unholy life within it a baleful look from its remaining eye like angry recrimination from a mad cockerel suckled on black milk.

Darwin Flynn fought on through the castle. His every stride was beset by danger and violence. After the zombie, he climbed the stairs to a laboratory where dismembered body parts inside glass vats flailed helplessly to reach him as he picked his way through ancient debris. Passing through the kitchen, he found colonies of the sentient mushrooms clustered together to form symbiote creatures with leftover hunks of rotten cabbage and moldy tomatoes; they brandished tarnished cutlery with bloodthirsty relish. Tracer bullets blazed brightly, filling the kitchen with witch-light and the sound of shattering crockery. The main court was festooned with decorative suits of armor which began to clank and stomp towards him with flailing long swords and halberds. The Scarlet Saint's sword parried and counterstruck and his staff smashed the hollow shells of metal into their component pieces. As he escaped the room, he turned with one pistol upraised and battered several attackers with magnetized cast-iron bullets; the walking armor found itself sticking together, clinging to its own weapons, and adhering to the fixtures of the court-room until it could no longer follow him.

A powerful kick, delivered with all the skill of a hundred trained fighters and strength born of anger and frustration, split the timbers of the castle's front door. The door cartwheeled across the courtyard and struck up against a massive stone pedestal. Darwin Flynn, avowed closer of the gateways between the living and the dead, between man and beast, between science and sorcery, grinned at the door he had opened with such zeal and alacrity. He could have fought his way up through the rest of the levels of the castle, but he sensed that it was empty. The abandoned lab just past the dungeons had convinced him of that, even if he hadn't been able to sense the evil thoughts of the master of the castle so far above him that the castle could not possibly contain them. Now he faced the courtyard, plenty of open room to fight and not a threat to be seen anywhere. His preternatural senses had also told him that there were ridiculously large quantities of metal to be found without the castle, and now he saw why.

The demolished door rested against a cylindrical stone taller than a man and more than twice as wide as its own height. Set into the top of this stone was a gigantic iron plate, anchored through the stone and into the ground below. From the top of the iron plate rose an iron ring, which was in turn attached to another iron ring. Following these rings upwards with his eyes, Darwin saw what appeared to be links in a gargantuan chain. Each link was easily eight feet in diameter, the gauge of the metal almost two feet thick. Darwin gaped at the sight as he saw the chain stretching away into the sky above, its ultimate terminus obscured by low-hanging clouds. The demonic thoughts and unclean power of the man behind all of these abominations were clearly emanating from somewhere high overhead, at the other end of that chain.

“It's a long climb, boyo,” said Darwin's heathen grandfather Buckley. “If'n I wasn't already dead, I'd say you'd never get me up there without a few drinks in me first.”

“You never did anything without a few drinks in you, Gramps,” Darwin retorted without even thinking. He walked to the pedestal and hoisted himself up. He tested the chain with his hands and he could feel the tension of all those hundreds of links extending into the heavens above. A subliminal vibration of metal scraping against metal thrummed through him as the cyclopean chain twisted slightly. He moved his hand just in time to keep the links from crushing his fingers as they moved together with whatever they were anchoring.

“All right, everyone,” Darwin addressed the spirits. “Once more into the breach.” Checking what was left of his climbing gear and fitting a makeshift piton/harpoon into the barrel of one pistol, Darwin unlimbered his whip from the strap that held it to his belt. He made a few practice swings with the length of leather, loosening it up from its coiled shape. He snapped it and felt the comforting response of a well-made weapon moving in the hands of an expert. Circus performers and cattle-drovers manipulated the whip for him as he looked up and lashed out at a link in the chain almost twenty feet overhead. The whip coiled around it and snagged, and he used it to pull himself up.

Darwin was forced to shinny up most of the links in the chain as he proceeded, relying on the whip to swing his body clear of danger when the chain moved. Once, the scraping of the metal set up such a deafening screech that he was forced to call upon the skills of a performing omnitriloquist to set up counter-harmonics within his larynx to keep his eardrums from bursting. The cold became an issue as well. He had already been high atop a mountain when he began this climb, and even his heavy garb was doing little to cut the chill as he approached the upper atmosphere. Frost formed on the chain, and he felt his own breath leaving ice crystals in his mustache. Eventually, he reached a point where the whip could no longer find purchase on the iron because of the ice and he had to put it away. His own efforts at climbing by hand were greatly impeded as well.

Soon, he had to rest. He wedged himself into a position inside of one link where he could relax his arms and legs somewhat. The wind battered him and cold cut through his insides. For all the added fortitude afforded him by the ghostly presence of his ancestors, and the miraculous stamina and recuperative powers of his enchanted mask, he was beginning to wonder if he would fail after all. One misstep at this height and he would plummet to a death from which none of his vaunted skills could save him. As he pondered this, he noticed the mist around him clearing just a little. For the first time, he was able to see farther than the links of the chain itself immediately above and below him. At some far remove from his position, he saw what looked like the horizon in the distance. He was disoriented when he realized that he was seeing it both below and above. Some solid plain was blocking out the sky, and its rounded edge was clearly visible in the distance. Looking straight up, he could just make out a round iron plate matching the one on the ground. He had found the end of the chain.

Pulling himself up the last few links was harder than anything that he could remember doing in years. The plate where the chain ended provided no relief, though, as it merely represented a solid surface with no means of traversing it. He searched for handholds and none presented themselves. He reached out with his mind and felt a strange tickle. He probed at it and it eluded him. There was certainly a lot of metal around, including most of the substance of the surface above his head, but this was something a little different. He called upon the expertise of scientists and scholars, searching for a name for the elusive sensation that he felt must be his salvation in this desolate place.

“Hydrogen,” the answer came at last. “Hydrogen is causing your sense of metals to react, which means it must be present in huge quantities and under very high pressure.”

“That's ridiculous,” Darwin said, “hydrogen's a gas, not a metal.”

“But,” retorted an infamous Belgian quantum physicist, “hydrogen has a bonding charge of plus one, meaning that it will only bond with substances with a negative charge. Positive bonding properties are usually ascribed only to metallic elements. That is apparently enough for it to trigger your senses.”

“Okay, okay, you win,” Darwin grumbled. He reached out again, seeking the source of the sensation and realizing that it was so hard to pinpoint because it was all around him.

“Of course!” cried Helmut “Fokker” Van Heilig, German ace of World War One. “Gas bags! This chain is anchoring something supported by gas bags!” The explanation was sound enough, especially to Darwin's exhausted and oxygen-deprived brain. Darwin had to spend precious moments reminding Van Heilig that everyone had already heard the story of how he had once single-handedly confronted a flotilla of Zeppelins (appropriated by a mad German aeronaut bent on world domination) which pelted enemy planes with trained attack leopards, each of whom could fly short distances by means of colonies of mutant rhino beetles embedded in their fur and skin.

“Well, I can't climb any further and I don't have a lot of choices here,” Darwin said. He drew the pistol loaded with the piton and pointed it straight ahead. He fired and watched the climbing line trail along behind the receding spike. It struck something and the line went slack. He waited for it to fall, but it didn't. He tugged and the line held. He tugged harder and it pulled taut. Holstering the gun and grasping the line with both hands, he jumped into empty space. The line swung him sickeningly downward, and then back up until he struck a slick, fibrous surface. Before he swung back, he had one hand off the rope and on his sword hilt. He slashed a hole before swinging back to the chain and making another attempt. This time he caught hold of the rip which his sword had opened and pulled himself inside. He could just hold himself in place well enough to pull in the slack of the climbing line, load another piton, and then hang himself out the opening to shoot for the next gas bag. In this manner he traversed the underside of whatever this thing was, until he had reached the edge. From there, it was simply a matter of adapting his technique to ascend the vertical edge of the dirigible's surface (if you could call something the shape of a gigantic pancake a dirigible).

As he neared the apex of the edge he was climbing, the last of the climbing line ran out. Fortunately, there appeared to be some sort of pylons extending from the uppermost edge and his cold-cramped fingers reached for his whip one last time. He braced himself as best he could, planting his feet in the rend his sword had made in a surface that he guessed was a metallic foil-coated canvas of some kind. His stiff arm cocked back and snapped forward, snaking the frost-rimed leather around the protruding metal structure. He felt it catch and tugged it to fix its grip. Then he climbed, hand over hand, painfully the last twenty feet. He left the whip wrapped around the metal pylon, or whatever it was, as he pulled himself up onto the top of the platform. He was surprised to feel wood under his hands and feet as he did. Edging forward cautiously, lest he slip on the icy boards and pitch back over the side to his death, he examined his surroundings.

He found himself on a wide, flat surface of staggering proportions. In the wind and clouds, he could scarcely hope to estimate its width; it could easily span a mile, but was more likely at least two. He noticed markings burned into the wooden surface, specifically a double line that ran parallel to the outermost edge. As his eyes followed the lines, he spotted a symbol marked between them and walked to it. It looked like a letter of the Enochian alphabet, alongside a symbol from the “Martian” script of 19^th century medium Helene Smith.

“Well, that doesn't spell anything,” Darwin quipped while linguists and academics in his head railed and debated at both the historical and mystical significance of the two symbols appearing side-by-side. Looking across the surface of the platform again, he saw another much larger symbol farther away from the edge. He walked to it, and found himself standing atop a ten-foot-square pictograph of Sumerian cuneiform.

“Er, it says 'demon,'” Prof. Whatley supplied. “Loosely translated, of course.” Looking back at the double lines that seemed to describe the perimeter of the apparently circular platform, and seeing widely spaced symbols within those lines, Darwin started to recognize a pattern:

“This is a ritual space, isn't it?” he said. “This is a ridiculously huge flying platform inscribed with a massive summoning circle on it, isn't it?” A chorus of disturbed silence told him he was right. The plot into which he had stumbled now began to seem exponentially more sinister than any which he had previously investigated. Reaching out with his mind, Darwin felt the inert silver bullet against his frontal lobe quiver. His consciousness lanced out across the platform like an ectoplasmic searchlight; it plunged through the wooden surface, the intricate titanium and aluminum superstructure, and the foil-coated canvas of the gas bags below. He found the anchor point at the top of the chain which held the platform stationary over the castle. That had to be the center. He homed in on it, locked it in his awareness as the magnetic North of this present evil.

“Where there's a summoning circle, there must be a summoner,” he reasoned. “And any summoner worth his salt will be at the center of his circle trying to summon something.” He walked on into the blowing, swirling mist. His cloak was by turns plastered to him with ambient moisture and dried by near-jet stream-force gales. He soldiered on in the face of these impossible odds, his heart warmed by the nearness of the conclusion of this latest series of calamities.

Surely now, through the gaps in the clouds that surrounded him, he could now see a small structure ahead of him. It bore a comical resemblance to a ramshackle wooden outhouse, as one would expect to see employed by cartoonish stereotypes of backwoods hillbillies. As he neared it, he saw that its boards were warped out of shape and proportion by the wind and damp, leaving the structure listing awkwardly. The miniature shingles that made up its neatly peaked roof were curled at their edges, resembling nothing so much as decrepit scales of some doddering, ancient saurian. The existence of this small, painfully unsuitable building ceased to represent any level of comfort or reassurance for Darwin. For in its very patheticalness, it now stood as a visible icon of the mind and nature of the man that he sought. It could scarcely stand against the elements for another minute, it appeared, and yet there it stood despite all reason: a thing that should not be in this world. It was twisted and perverted from its original form, like all of the creations that he had used to execute his plans and to attempt to foil Darwin's efforts against him. Darwin stepped cautiously around the side of the small building and found a door, just as misshapen as the rest of it, set into the front, facing true North.

“Enter,” came a dry crackle from within, somehow audible despite the wind. Darwin slung his staff behind his back and drew one of his pistols. With his free hand, he grasped the arched brass handle and pulled the door open.

The inside was just large enough for two men to stand facing one another, with a tiny brass lantern hung from the underside of the roof for light. A man, frighteningly thin, knelt on the floor in a purple robe that could have covered four of him. Open on his knees was a large and yellowed book. From under his hood, his gray lips grinned, which made them crack. Darwin's broad shoulders and cloak blocked the wind from entering, but he could feel an equal pressure from the pounding waves of evil rolling off of this small, unassuming, and somewhat cadaverous man.

“Come in. Shut the door.” He stood, with a creak from his joints that was painful to hear. Hesitantly, Darwin complied. He was at least secure in the thought that this man, this thing, could pose no physical threat to him regardless of the distance between them.

“You seem to have been expecting me,” Darwin said, still holding his gun at the ready.

“I would hardly be the threat that you think I am if I wasn't,” the man answered. “I believe that even in meetings such as this, it is customary for the host to offer some trifle to his guest, tea perhaps, but as you can see I have no amenities with which to entice you. Sit or stand as it pleases you, and keep me at gunpoint if it satisfies your needs, but neither one truly matters.” He stood looking at Darwin for the longest time then. Darwin looked down at his pistol, shrugged, and holstered it.

“Obviously, you know why I'm here,” Darwin said softly. “You don't look like much, certainly not compared to what I fought my way through to get here, so I'm reasonably sure I could kill you right now if I sneeze too hard. I don't understand everything that you've been up to, but I know enough to know that you need stopping. It's as simple as that. So if you have any last words, I'm the one to whom you'll be saying them.” The grin widened, and the split skin of the lips spread across the cheeks. Very little blood seeped from the cracks, and what did was pale and thin and hardly could be called blood at all.

“You've not faced many sorcerers with that attitude, have you now, boy? Not real sorcerers doing grand work like this? Oh, I daresay you've disrupted some human sacrifices, maybe kicked over a few black candles rendered from baby's fat and so forth, but you've never really dealt with a master of the art. A sneeze indeed! Ha! There was a time I would've made you the smallest carbuncle on a toad's ass for such impertinence!”

“And yet you don't,” Darwin pointed out, edging his hand back towards his pistol.

“Have you ever heard of the Voynich Manuscript, boy?”

“Of course I have. It's indecipherable, incoherent. Some medieval text probably fabricated as an elaborate cryptographic joke, filled with meaningless, untranslatable cipher.”

“BAH!” retorted the sorcerer. “Meaningless?! Idiots! A joke? Bah, I say! The Codex of the Chaos Druids! An ancient and terrible work of unthinkable secrets! I wrote that manuscript that has so baffled the academic world, encoding the power of the Codex into it. Since I passed it off to that fool Baresch in the 17^th century, men have been reading it, transcribing it, reciting it in their minds... Do you have any idea of the power I have built by that one simple ruse? It is that which allows me to stand before you today, still alive after these many years! Oh, many and layered have been my plots and conspiracies! Oh, but the tales I could tell you!”

“So tell me, old man. You say you authored the Voynich, translating this Codex into a secret code to make people mentally recite the incantations even though they couldn't know what it was they were even looking at? I've never heard of magick performed by such means, and my sources go back even farther than you do.” There was a long, pregnant pause as the sorcerer tilted his head back and let the flinty pinpricks of his black eyes show upon Darwin's face for the first time.

“Ah! So that's it! When I look upon you with truth in my vision, I see that you are not one but many! Ha, ha! Delightful!” he nearly giggled. “My watchdog fancied itself a Biblical 'Legion' of sorts, despite my having no intention of it being so. How deliciously ironic that its flame was snuffed out by a true legion of souls in mortal form! Strange, to see such shades abounding in one man. Never before have I encountered... I do believe I know some of them! Egads, boy! What new diabolitry have you brought to my doorstep?”

“Tell me your tale, old man, and I'll tell you mine. First, what do I call you?”

“Ah, the power of knowing the true name of a thing! The influence of the Hewbrew Kaballah in your thinking, there! Very well, I am very old and you are certainly a novel guest despite your intention to thwart me. I'll tell you a bit, until you being to bore me. Emmet Sudsbury is my name, and I was born in Suffolk in the year 1562 by your reckoning.”

“Emmet Sudsbury? Darwin Flynn,” Darwin said, extending a hand. Sudsbury looked at it in distaste and Darwin lowered it, leaving it instead to rest on the scrimshawed ivory butt of one the loaded Mausers at his hip.

“The manuscript was my mentor's idea, for he held the copy of the Codex. But it was my own device to look into the future through his scrying glass and see what eventual result could be gained by the translation. His death was just the sacrifice needed to empower the book to complete its task. After all, the cost of one human life is more than sufficient to ensure the continuation of another. The book itself built power slowly; it was only after the dupe Baresch began sending samples of it to others for interpretation that it began to grow. With my immortality thus ensured, I was free to pursue experiments of my own, building on the incomplete projects which my master left behind. You have witnessed my expertise in the surgical grafting of disparate living creatures into a unified whole, which was no easy feat. The English countryside is veritably littered with the remains of my failures, but everlasting life has the advantage that trial and error will eventually work out in one's favor, so here we are. After grafting began to seem pedestrian to me, I set my sights on the next most obvious goal: the conquest of death itself. This too proved difficult territory to navigate, but I persevered nonetheless. After mastering the more common occult methods of raising the dead for short periods, I began to explore other methods with varied results. My explorations eventually led to the first successfully animated corpse that could last indefinitely. The difficulty I then faced was that the formula which produced this effect was so painstaking to manufacture that it hardly seemed worth the trouble. Bits of bezoar, fat of lambs, sprigs of mistletoe harvested at just the right cycle of the moon... the logistics were nightmarish. So, I hit upon a brilliant solution if I do say so myself: I manufactured a creature that could produce the formula as a natural secretion of its bodily functions!”

“The cave slugs!” Darwin exclaimed.

“My little children. Yes, you did distress me when you killed them, but I can make more quite handily if I've a mind to do so. I need merely revisit my laboratory, which I have not done in years now.”

“I could tell. Why leave your incomplete experiments lying around?”

“It discourages curiosity-seekers, if you must know. And I have learned never to throw away anything that could prove useful later. You'll be wondering about the airfield next, I've no doubt.”

“Yes, the airfield. I recognized the various means of converting people into zombies, but what was the point of the anti-coagulants? The stimulants and hallucinogens? How would these have improved your undead army?” Sudsbury chuckled and spread his hands wide.

“Look around you, boy. This is the culmination of centuries. This platform was originally commissioned in 1919, and construction actually started in 1924. This was to be my ritual space; if you looked closely at the wings of the planes, their markings were part of it too. Once they reached a certain point in their flight pattern, the symbols they bore would have fallen into place as part of my magickal incantation. As for the drugs, I was merely attempting to make use of all the raw materials available to me. After all, anyone can raise an army of the undead from existing corpses; they'll hardly be fresh, and they're often not very sturdy, but they make up for it in numbers. Fresh bodies make stronger, fitter zombies. I merely calculated that if I meant to kill thousands of people anyway, just to raise them as zombies under my command, the most effective way to do so was by committing the largest blood sacrifice in the history of the planet.”

Darwin stared, dumbfounded. It all fell into place once he heard that: the anti-coagulants, combined with the stimulants, once sprayed across the Romanian countryside would cause people to quickly and painfully bleed to death from every orifice in their bodies. Add in the panicked state of their heartbeat and the mind-altering influence of hallucinogens, and they would die in abject terror as well. Sudsbury was planning to sacrifice hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people simultaneously in one immense, miles-wide ritual with fear and bloodshed to spare. Psychokinetic energy levels across the world would spike higher than they had been since the sinking of Atlantis, and all of it would be at the fingertips of the man who orchestrated the whole thing. The bombardment of mystical forces, combined with the various drugs and viruses turning people into zombies would produce an unstoppable onslaught of the walking dead the would quickly spread to every corner of the globe. Even with massive military response, the likelihood of stemming the tide was slim.

“But what did you intend to do with all this power? You wouldn't need it to control your zombies; you already that taken care of. You wouldn't be using it to raise them; they'd practically be jumping back to their feet after all the things you had planned for them. You're already immortal, according to you, so what else is there? You were going to take over the world and live forever. What else were you trying to accomplish?”

“See,” Sudsbury sighed, “this is where your inexperience really shows. You're still thinking in terms of some halfwit babbling in backwards Latin in his grandmother's basement while listening to terrible music and thrusting a cheap hunting knife into a goat. I am a sorcerer. I have loftier goals than mere mortal affectations like power and immortality. I would have rent the fabric of the Universe itself! I would have opened the way for the Great Old Ones to return!” Darwin smirked.

“And now your inexperience is showing, Emmet. Pick up a paperback horror novel and find out what happens to every damn person who's ever tampered with the so-called 'Great' Old Ones. It ends in tears, my friend, in tears. You die, they take over, everybody else dies, no encore, no curtain call. There's no thanks for your having freed them from millennia of imprisonment outside our Universe, there's no bartering with them for a place at the table. You're kind of lucky I stopped you, because...”

“FOOL! FOOL ABOVE ALL FOOLS!! Do you truly believe that a man who has lived for nearly five-hundred years would not know these things? Do you take me for some carnival prestidigitator slipping marked cards from up my sleeves? Certainly not!” Sudsbury chuckled, and it began to lose its senile, demented tone and take on an edge far more sinister. “I would be responsible for raising the greatest army from beyond the grave in all history! I would have turned the entire human race into my undead slaves, and sucked the marrow from their souls to empower myself! I would greet the living chaos of Azathoth with pride, for I would be its equal! I would not be summoning them as a servant calling its masters, but as a god myself calling my brothers home to share in my power!”

“Okay, I think I've heard enough. Crazy time is over, Emmett. You're not doing any of this, because I grounded your planes days ago; I've destroyed hundreds of your zombies slaves already, and sabotaged your ability to make more. Even your chief guardian, the pinnacle of your perverted science, is lying in shreds on a mountainside by my hand. This plan is officially over: no army of zombies spreading across the world, no influx of spiritual power flowing into you to make you a god, none of it!” He punctuated this last word with the slap of his hand against the butt of his gun, and held it in Sudsbury's face long enough for the man to see his fate before pulling the trigger.

The muzzle blast blew the gray dust of the sorcerer's dried flesh right off of his skull before the bullets struck. However, the bullets stopped harmlessly, flattened against the bone before falling to the floor. The swirling cloud of powdered human meat coalesced back into the semblance of a face and settled onto the bone once more. Sudsbury's smile widened. He pulled back his own sleeve and grasped his forearm. Sliding his hand up and down the length of his arm, his skin and muscle came away in flakes which disintegrated into more dust in the air, but the whole mess formed itself back onto his bones before so much as a speck had touched the floor.

“Immortal, boy. Remember? You notice that I did not say 'eternal youth,' nor would you have believed me if I did. I age as any other man, but I do not die of that age or anything else. Try as you might, you cannot destroy me, and I will outlive you to start my plans again.”

“No, I truly don't think so,” Darwin replied coldly. “You see, when your workmen abandoned the castle, they left a lot of things behind. In fact, they had apparently intended to destroy you themselves and had come equipped for that express purpose. No doubt they would have failed, being ordinary men fighting an individual such as yourself on his way to godhood. However, their supplies and equipment were just the thing for an experienced individual like myself to concoct the perfect means of removing you from the equation. Now, I do have the means and knowhow to manufacture an atomic explosive device, and I fully intend to do so and return with it to wipe out any trace of your operations once I'm done here, but for the time being I've a more immediate solution.” His hand came out from under his cloak holding a radio detonator, and one leather-sheathed finger pressed the button. A series of explosions rocked the platform. “You'd think a man of your age and experience would have learned something from the Hindenburg. Hydrogen can be a real handful, especially when you mix it with gunpowder, thermite, and napalm.”

“What have you done?” Sudsbury said, low and threatening.

“And don't think we're just going to crash down onto the mountain and you can just walk away and start over. I've learned a thing or two in my day as well, and counting the knowledge of my ancestors I've actually had longer to learn from my mistakes than you have. I added plenty of thermite to the anchor chain, too. As the gas bags explode and drop us, it should be breaking loose and letting us drift aimlessly to God-knows-where.”

“But how,” Sudsbury asked menacingly, “shall you deal with me personally. Your bullets have no effect, as I assure you neither will your sword or your staff or any other foolish weapon you've thought to bring with you. Even now, I am mere seconds away from condemning your soul to the foulest reaches of hells undreamt-of by the men of Earth!”

“Funny you should ask,” said the Scarlet Saint. He jumped straight up into the air and did the splits, kicking out in either direction simultaneously. The small building flew apart to reveal the platform in flames all around them. The punishing gales of the jet stream buffeted them mercilessly, and Sudsbury's robe was carried away to reveal his skeleton standing in a cloud of gray dust that was trying desperately to reassemble itself. The Scarlet Saint calmly fired several shots, temporarily splitting the skeleton apart at the joints of its arms and legs, before holstering his gun. Equally calmly, he then produced from his belt a stick of dynamite and a World War Two vintage hand grenade. He stepped on the skull with his boot, holding it in place on the floor while its jaw worked wildly and the still-human eyes in its sockets rolled in panic. He pulled the pin on the grenade and stuffed it inside the skull before lifting it and kicking it a safe distance away where it disappeared into the flames. The deafening winds almost muffled the sound of the explosion before it reached him. He then seized upon the ribcage and performed a similar operation by wedging a stick of dynamite between the ribs before casting it away as well. By the time he reached for the spinal column, he could feel the platform beginning to noticeably tilt. He began to run uphill, against the slant of the surface, and let the spine drop behind him.

Through the smoke, in boots already worn nearly smooth by the last several days hiking and climbing, he was hard put to run up a swiftly tilting plain while lugging the weight of a chain mail shirt and an opera cloak along with all of his weapons. Although he knew that he would pay the price later in pain, he pushed his muscles to the limit of their capacity and summoned the strength and endurance of many men at once to aid him. He did regretfully discard his cloak, letting it flap away into the distance like some black-winged phantasm. After all, as he reached the uppermost edge of the platform, which was now nearly vertical, he needed his parachute clear of any entanglements.

Why Sudsbury's disgruntled workmen had chosen to store a parachute with their equipment, he'd never know. Perhaps someone among them entertained thoughts of ascending the chain as Darwin had, and confronting Sudsbury's evil face-to-face, and the parachute was their escape plan. Regardless, some fine (and not-so-fine) military men in the Flynn family tree had assured him that it was properly packed, and he had known that Sudsbury was unlikely to notice it underneath his cloak. As Darwin leapt clear of the flames and pulled the ripcord, he could only hope that the makeshift flaghoist signal that he had hung from an extra length of climbing rope partway up the chain had been seen by his Romanian friend and guide, Razvan. He knew that, like himself, Razvan was well-versed in the International Code of Signals, and would have no trouble reading it and knowing what to do next. If only Razvan had, in fact, been looking for his signal.

The chute opened beautifully and Darwin felt an enormous sense of relief. The heat generated by the flames was creating thermal updrafts that would keep him airborne considerably longer than normal. It would certainly give him enough time to steer himself clear of the toppling zeppelin platform and look for a safe landing zone. As he used his steering lines to drift well away from the falling wreckage, he heard the subtle buzz of an approaching aircraft engine. There, over the horizon, was Darwin's own single-engine plane, piloted by trusty Razvan. Even at this distance, Darwin knew that Razvan was grinning like an idiot at having spotted him. As if in confirmation, Razvan tilted the plane back and forth to “wag” the wings at him.

Darwin settled into a slow descent an watched as Razvan first circled him, then flew up over his head and dove alongside him. He eased back the throttle of the plane, almost stalling it in the slowest dive he could manage. Darwin, meanwhile, angled his body and watched carefully as the plane flew just below him. At the last possible second, he released his chute and dropped. His boots hit the back of the wings on top of the cockpit, and his right hand found the custom wing-walker's safety handled he'd had installed there. Holding tight to the steel with his battered gauntlet, Darwin looked to the horizon, away to the West, towards home. He let a smile play across his lips as he felt Razvan bank the plane and head for the makeshift airstrip where Darwin had first arrived and set out on horseback. From there, it would only be a short ride to Razvan's hunting lodge and a dinner of warm stew and cold vodka. After that, a couple of days spent in recuperation and maintenance for the plane before refueling and pointing the nose towards America.

Darwin could almost feel the hearth-fires of Elysian Greens calling him home, with all their promise of both comfort... and dangers not yet faced.

THE END...

But don't fret: Darwin will return soon in an all-new adventure!

Thanks for reading!