Son of Erogrendel
We open in a well-lit facility beneath the earth. Faceless men and women in drab clothing move around the featureless hallways, all with purpose, all with a destination in mind, all with a mission that, however minor, is an integral piece of the fabric that makes up the impenetrable field between humanity and the great beyond.
In one distant corner of the upper level, a group of individuals sit and monitor a bank of security camera screens, watching with utter stillness as the captive creatures below make their umpteenth futile attempt at escape. The watchers are not bothered. There is no escape from this facility, not for something as small and powerless as a human being.
We move through the reinforced floor of this level and descend further into the facility. Every room beyond these seemingly infinite corridors houses a person or a group of people singlemindedly dedicated to their task, every one of them understanding all that is required of them, every one of them knowing that one step out of line is an instant death sentence, or worse. Satellites are monitored, cell phones are snooped upon, individuals across the country are viewed through any number of remotely-accessible security cameras whose owners will never notice the parasitic program leeching off their hardware. Further down the hall, a group of workers puzzle over a paperback dossier on one particular political figure, scratching their heads as they piece together the perfect cocktail of bribery and blackmail. Still further, a lone man sits at a computer whose only purpose is to remotely access a computer hundreds of miles away, leaving this facility invisible to any and all Internet service providers or even the most knowledgeable of hackers.
Another floor down, and we have reached a series of rooms that would in another place be called bedrooms, or chambers, or maybe even cells. The only ones sleeping are those who spent days straight at the grindstone, in a militaristic cycle of on/off. Yet even as they sleep, their brains are not inactive, and they explore the depths of their subconscious minds for the answers to puzzles they have yet to conquer while awake.
Below these difficult-to-escape chambers are more chambers, these completely impossible to escape. A combination of space age material and good old-fashioned concrete has made these cells so fully cut off from the rest of the facility that they may as well be on the moon. The men and women and creatures that spend their lives inside these cells will never see the sun, but no sympathy is lost on them: every one has the ability to cause untold destruction to the human world, should they be let loose. You may notice a young adult man cowering alone in the corner of his cell – he killed dozens of innocent people, frying their brains until they melted out of their ears, without even trying. You may notice a man dressed as a clown, performing a juggling act for a nonexistent audience, living out his fantasies within his own mind. His kill count is unknown, but may be in the hundreds. You may catch a glimpse of a young woman sitting crosslegged on the floor, every soft padded object in her cell orbiting around her in a different sort of juggling act, one that doesn’t require the use of her hands. You may even see an ordinary-looking woman in a white robe and wonder what prompted her incarceration. What you wouldn’t know is that the woman was borrowed from a prison, bought by blackmail, brought here as a sentient container for her voice box and lungs, through which the inhuman thing inside her is able to communicate with its captors.
These holding cells cover the entire subterranean story, and several below it. Even further down, as we inch further through the crust of the earth, we find laboratories and experimental facilities whose arcane contents are so incomprehensible to most that they may as well be magick. And maybe they are. For every futuristic machine built from technology the public and even the military haven’t discovered, there is an ancient tome bound in human skin, containing the rituals of the old world, written in a language long forgotten. For every attempt at building a vehicle to travel backwards across the fourth dimension, there is a failed attempt to recreate the ancient experiment that bound lost technology with the essence of time itself, for the cost of a life.
Within the lowest floor of the facility – at least, the lowest floor we are able to access, even in this form – we find a bizarre scene that looks as familiar as a surgical procedure, and as fantastical as the Second Coming. Scattered throughout the clean, white, sterile medical room are machines ranging from semiautomatic firearms to CAT scans to miniature chambers built to instantaneously drain an organism of all the energy that allows it to be considered life. Interspersed with these machines are objects that would appear to the layman to be utterly anachronistic: artefacts both natural and manmade whose function could only be something in the realm of magick. Painted across these objects are symbols that everyone in the facility knows not to even think about, let alone draw, in any other location.
Dominating this airplane hangar of a subterranean hospital is the patient itself. To the untrained eye, the patient may appear to be beyond help, but to the untrained eye, the patient wouldn’t be comprehensible to begin with. Its skin, stretched tight and dried out, is miscolored and knobbled, once as thick as elephant hide and bulletproof as Kevlar, now sensitive to the merest touch. Its limbs are stretched out and restrained, great masses of muscle that once could climb skyscrapers, now lying dormant beneath the earth.
The creature lost one of its arms years – centuries – ago, which allows the geneticists and biologists in this underground hospital easier access to the internal cavities of its gargantuan thorax, an almost humanoid torso branching off into two sets of powerful shoulders and a neck that once held an elongated head with a jaw wide enough and teeth sharp enough to bite a giant in half.
All seven of the creature’s limbs have been amputated and replaced at different stages of this decade-long process. Its arms and legs have been sewn on with rudimentary tools, grafted on with surgeries that the public would consider advanced science, even magicked on with rituals that weren’t fully understood, resulting in twisted masses of flesh borrowed from elsewhere in the body.
Ten years have passed, and still the monster lays unmoving in the lowest (or very low) level of this underground facility. Still, after ten years, the geneticists and biologists and surgeons and scholars of the arcane poke and prod at the beast, assured beyond a doubt that it will never move again. They haven’t kept it alive, but they have kept it present: if not for the symbol painted thirty feet wide below the tables where it lays, the creature would have faded to dust ten years ago. If not for the volunteer who had sacrificed all the blood in his body to paint that symbol on the sterile floor, the monster’s body would have gone the same way as its soul.
Ten years have passed, and they are no closer to understanding what power animated this creature. There have been more, since, others of its kind, but none that they were quick enough to capture before they faded away. This creature has wasted more time and energy than any other project over the past decade, even the various forays into the White House and the neverending search for the rogue Homo praefortis who rested at the end of the Viam Veritatis. But this creature holds the secrets to not only rebirth after death (a concept understood quite clinically by this collection of scientists), but to the correlation between emotion and the supernatural, the potential for Homo sapiens to overpower the dark world beyond. This creature is the most important asset in this facility, and maybe in the entire world. This creature will be the weapon of humanity when the war between the worlds begins.
A decade on, this monster has become a mainstay of the facility, and though the scientists and geneticists and magick speakers work tirelessly on puzzling through the secrets of its body, they have all silently assumed that nothing particularly interesting will happen. But as we watch, something interesting does happen; interesting for us, but deadly for them.
The first shift of the creature’s body goes largely undetected. The second does not. A surgeon slicing an impossibly thin shard of natural armor from the creature’s torso looks up across its torso, meeting the eyes of a man in the traditional robes of his order, who is busy making another futile attempt to communicate with some form of intelligence within the husk. The man in the robe immediately assumes he was successful, to a dangerous degree, and that he singlehandedly brought the creature back from the netherworld. The man is incorrect, but he will go on believing this for the remaining thirty seconds of his life.
All work pauses as the handful of mismatched men take a collective step back and hold a collective breath. The creature looks exactly as it has for a decade now, lying spread across several stainless steel tables, three legs and two arms reattached through different means, one of each lying nearby, its neck lying limp and weightless like an empty burlap sack. The creature’s head, which has been all but forgotten after years of being the center of study, is held in a Plexiglas case within the confines of the rune, and now, with a sound like creaking old leather, its jaw begins to move.
The men begin to swear under their breaths. They can see what’s coming. They shuffle backwards in awe as the tree-like limbs of the creature begin to flex and twist, massive ligaments and arteries growing pronounced, though there is not a drop of fluid inside. The first restraint snaps off: an inch of galvanized steel rope cut through like a mouse chewing string. The creature’s arm, so close to being human but ending in four claws like butcher’s knives, reaches for the ceiling above, the tips of its claws scraping across the white material.
One man runs for the door and is suddenly struck dumb: he can’t remember the process to leave the room. Another man joins him, preparing the brief ritual required, while others yell at them, demanding they stay. None of them get the chance to leave. Another restraint snaps in half, the steel rope flying across the room and slamming into the men at the door. One manages to survive, briefly, but the other isn’t so lucky, and the steel shoots through his throat like a javelin, spraying the door with blood. The monster’s free leg lashes out, a massive clawed foot slamming into the door, hard, denting the impenetrable metal and sealing off any chance of escape.
The biologists and geneticists begin to scream. A horrible sound fades into existence from the heart of the room, growing louder and louder until it drowns out the screams of the soon to be dead. It is a rusty, mechanical sound, like a chainsaw cutting through metal.
Only the man in the robe is able to think on his feet, so only he can see that the headless beast is not moving with any sort of plan: it is simply lashing out, pulling against its restraints, struggling to understand that it has returned to something like life.
The man in the robe holds up his hands. The words come instantly to his mind, but he never gets the chance to speak them. Another strap breaks, and the massive hand of the beast reaches out blindly, grasping the man around the torso and crushing him, squeezing his bones and muscle into a concentrated mass. The powerful limb reaches up and lets go, throwing the remains of the robed man across the room.
The head is moving. The head is shifting around on its own, its jaw moving up and down, the teeth that have been pulled out and stuck back in clacking against each other, the sound ugly and vicious under the chainsaw roar. The brow of the beast pulses, eight empty eye sockets glowering out at the world.
No one is left by the time the final restraints are broken; no one but us. Only we can see as the creature falls from the tables, its three legs hitting the floor, its fourth moving on its own, slithering across the ground until it reaches its rightful place on the monster’s hip. Inhuman flesh and muscle knit themselves together, an uneven seam holding the components together. Next comes its third arm, returning to the headless mass, clawing its way up the legs and the torso until it reattaches to where it was severed.
Only we, and those above, watching the security cameras in terror, are able to see as the beast crouches low under the ceiling, thoughtlessly crushing the already-dead men below its feet as it approaches the Plexiglass case. The men who cut the creature to pieces do not see as it tears the top off the case and retrieves its lost head, the elongated skull and bear trap mouth settling in between two pairs of shoulders as the monster becomes somewhat whole for the first time in a decade.
At the last possible second, the man in charge of the facility, a man who is unable to see the horror playing out on the security camera feeds, calls for an evacuation: something that has never happened in the man decades of this facility’s existence. But he has no choice. No sedative can pause this beast in its tracks, and no firearms can kill it – not a second time. And not down here. The creatures in the cells above are left behind, and the man in charge can only hope that the beast below will be unable or unwilling to break into their cages, the way it is even now breaking out of its floor and tearing apart the stairwell. To lose the living experiments in this facility would be an incalculable loss, but to let them free could mean destruction on an untold level.
The facility is evacuated in a matter of seconds, and when the creature bursts through the stairwell and enters the uppermost floor, there are no more humans for it to kill. But we know the creature isn’t interested in killing humans. At least – none except for a very specific target. This creature is vengeance incarnate – reincarnate – and as it claws its way up through the tunnel exit, crushing the near-unbreakable walls with the pure force in its shoulders, the monster known as Erogrendel makes ready to exact its revenge.