“Come back!” Elden cried. “Come back, you cowards! Your king commands you!”
They paid no heed, leaping up the stone steps two and three at a time. I grabbed Radar’s collar and pulled her tight against me. The first two palanquin-bearers got past us, but the third stumbled against Radar, who’d had enough. She thrust her head forward and chomped deep into his thigh. He waved his arms in an effort to regain his balance, then fell into the shaft, his final diminishing shriek cut short when he struck bottom.
I started forward and down again. Leah hadn’t moved. She was peering at the grotesque figure in the flapping purple robe, trying to make out his features in the dim light of the stars glowing in that insane abyss over our heads. I had almost reached her when the light began to brighten. But not from the stars. The hum returned, only now it was deeper, not mmmmmmmm but AAAAAAA, the sound of some alien being, colossal and unknowable, scenting a meal it knows will be delicious.
I looked up. Leah looked up. Radar looked up. What we saw swimming out of that dark star-shot sky was terrible, but the real horror was this: it was also beautiful.
If my time-sense wasn’t entirely shot, it was still daylight somewhere above us. Bella and Arabella had to be on the far side of the world of which Empis was a part, but here those two moons were just the same, projected out of a black void that had no business existing, washing this hellhole in their pallid and eldritch light.
The larger was closing in on the smaller, and it wasn’t going to pass behind or in front. After the high gods only knew how many thousands of years, the two moons—these, and the real ones somewhere around the curve of the planet—were on a collision course.
They came together in a crash that was soundless （it really was a projection, then） and accompanied by a brilliant flash of light. Pieces flew in every direction, filling that dark sky like smashed chunks of glowing crockery. That toneless bray—AAAAAAAA—grew even louder. Deafening. The boom of the derrick began to rise, narrowing the triangle between it and the supporting mast. There was no sound of machinery, but I wouldn’t have heard it anyway.
The fierce glare of the disintegrating moons blotted out the stars and bathed the floor below in brilliance. The hatch over the Dark Well began to rise, pulled by the derrick’s hook. The grotesque creature in the purple robe was also looking up, and when Leah looked down, their eyes met. His were deep in sagging sockets of greenish flesh; hers were wide and blue.
In spite of all the years and all the changes, she recognized him. Her dismay and horror were unmistakable. I tried to hold her back, but she pulled free with a convulsive jerk that almost sent her over the edge. And I was in shock, numbed by what I had seen—the collision of two moons in a sky that had no right to exist. The pieces were spreading and starting to dim.
A crescent of darkness appeared at the edge of the Dark Well hatch and quickly widened into a black grin. That long, hoarse cry of satisfaction grew louder. The Flight Killer stumbled toward the well. His purple robe rose in several different directions. For a moment that horrible flabby head was obscured, and then the robe fell to one side and lay on the stone floor. The man beneath it was only half a man, as Elsa had only been half a woman. His legs had been replaced by a gnarl of black tentacles that hurried him along, teetering from side to side. Others protruded from the hanging sac of his belly, rising toward the rising hatch like obscene erections. His arms had been replaced by snakelike horrors that wavered around his face like seaweed in a strong current, and I realized that whatever the thing in the well might be, it wasn’t Cthulhu. Elden was this world’s Cthulhu, as surely as Dora was the old woman who lived in a shoe and Leah was the goose girl. He had traded deformed feet and a hunched back—kyphosis—for something far worse. Did he consider the trade fair? Had revenge and the slow destruction of the kingdom been enough to balance the scales?
Leah reached the bottom of the stairs. Overhead, the fragments of Bella and Arabella continued to expand.
“Leah!” I shouted. “Leah, for God’s sake stop!”
Just past the palanquin with its limply hanging drapes, she did stop—but not because I’d called to her. I don’t think she even heard me. All her attention was fixed on the flabby thing that had been her brother. Now he was bending eagerly over the rising hatch, the loose flesh of his face hanging down like dough. The crown fell off his head again. More of those black tentacles emerged from his neck, his back, and the cleft of his buttocks. He was turning into Cthulhu before my eyes, lord of the old gods, a nightmare fairy tale come to life.