All Hail the Red King
A Lovecraftian short from World War 2
This one was inspired by something I saw while out in the fields one day. A derelict building, its roof and most of its fittings missing, with a large tree growing from the midst of the remaining walls. It was winter at the time, and the terrain was dry and dusty, with this cracked, grey-black shape reaching into the sky. The story wrote itself a while later.
For more of my Lovecraftian WW2 work, have a look here.
  Russia, in the year we arrived, was a most interesting place. Summer was starting to turn into the cooling winds of autumn, the grass and forests of our surroundings were starting to don their coats of yellows and browns and reds, and our hearts were still filled with the heady flush of victory. The Red Army was retreating before us in full flight, and the prospect of Christmas in Moscow was a very real, and much anticipated, thought in our minds.
  Then came Brezniac, and the Red Church.
  The village of Brezniac was a small, muddy affair, alike to all the many others we had passed through in the months before, and we had no reason to suspect otherwise when first we arrived. We were following swiftly on the tails of an SS reconnaissance unit, and they had sent word via wireless that the village was almost completely deserted. Upon our arrival, we came to much the same conclusion, and went about setting up our billeting for the night in the town hall - a ramshackle affair of leaning wood and crumbling slate tiles - and the houses around it. The village lay in a natural valley of sorts, ringed by forests on three sides and a stubby outcropping of granite barely worth being called a hill on the fourth. A sentry gruppe was sent to occupy the hill and stand watch for the evening, and with their numbers removed from our midst, and the rumbling of diesel engines finally falling quiet, the village began its slow and sinister transformation.
  Firstly, there was the sound of the village itself. No matter the town or heartland you visit in Europe, the soft sounds of village life - livestock settling down for the night, the soft murmur of voices, the clopping of horses and the occasional grumble of an automobile - were omnipresent.
  In Brezniac, the silence of the tombs of the pharaohs reigned.
  Secondly, there were the inhabitants of the village itself - or rather, their complete and utter lack of appearance. Of the handful of people that the SS unit had seen on their gallop through the village, there was no sight now. Houses stood deserted, doors gaped blankly in the falling gloom, and even the town water pump, where the older women of the Russian peasantry were almost certainly bound to congregate, was ominously silent and devoid of the characteristic squeaks of the handle being slowly worked back and forth.
  Last was the realization that descended upon us, after only the most cursory of examinations, that the village had in fact been abandoned for a very long time. Our exhaustion, coupled with the experience - hard earned in many villages before - that abandonment at the face of the advancing German forces was not uncommon, made us shelve these concerns for a later time, and apart from the sentries and the cooks and the supply corps personnel, we were soon fast asleep. Roofs creaked over us instead of the open sky, walls surrounded us instead of the thin covering of tent and trench wall we had become accustomed to, and even the lack of flies and lice - a rarity in this country - was appreciated by our tired forms.
  Midnight came and passed, the moon sank below the horizon, and then the screaming started.
  As veterans approaching their second year of constant warfare, the sound of gunfire - which preempted the screaming - did not raise us immediately. A soldier learns when to sleep, and sleep well, when the opportunity arose, and our beds in Brezniac were very much appreciated at that point.
  Screaming, however - gut-wrenching, hair-raising, the sort that mad men unleashed in their infectious horror as their minds broke and spread its brokenness to others around it - was a different matter. The sound of sergeants shouting had roused us from our barracks on many a night and early morn, and we were scrambling out in the streets, weapons in hand and eyes scanning the darkness, even as the screams continued, seeming to draw closer before fading back into the distance again. Closer it came, dopplering past us as if at a great speed - yet completely unseen to us - and then it would recede into the distance again, muted by the forest one moment, then echoing shrilly off the hill, before rising again from the forests in a different location.
  I could see the men around me becoming nervous, their eyes darting to and fro as they tried to pinpoint the sound, but all to no avail. A sergeant from the sentry lines came running up to us then, bareheaded and slick with blood from chin to waist, and yelled at us to head north, into the forest. He disappeared behind us again in an instant, lost in the twisting streets and the darkness as we rushed north, boots churning up mud and slipping over grass as we moved. Darkness, thick and choking like a dust-smothered curtain, lay about us as we entered the woods, and within moments we came upon the first of the bodies.
  They had been men, once. Men, who fought with us, shared foxholes with us, shook before Russian artillery with us and celebrated their distractions with us, but - what we found there, covered in night and blood and the rank stench of terror - those were not men.
  Some of us lost dinners there, amongst the trees, while others lost more than just the contents of their stomachs, and stood shuddering and weeping soundlessly as we took a quick tally of the bodies. We roused them from their stupor quickly enough with curses and words of encouragement alike, and set off north again, flitting from tree to tree, more alert now, fingers more nervous, eyes jumping ever more at the shadows that lurked all around us. Ahead of us and off to the side, a light was starting to become visible, faint between the tree trunks, and casting an unholy sheen of red over the darkness. Black shadows became lurid shades of dark crimson as we approached, and a doleful chant became audible, muted by the trees and still faint enough that we could not decipher its meaning, nor even the language of those somber chants.
  A clearing lay before us as we drew closer, trees hewn apart to form a vast circle of grass and dirt an equal shade of black in the light, and in the center of this clearing, lurking like a squat, stony toad, was the Red Church. Not one spire, but two, raised twin horns of stone and stained-glass windows into the night sky, appearing both menacing and sullen at the same time. The church itself had lost its roof in some time long past, and a massive tree now rose from between the walls, of a height with the two spires - yet dead, and as barren of life and leaf as the grounds around it. The red light we saw was spilling through the open door of the church, a broken maw where once two great doors must have stood, and black fingers of petrified lightning, cracks in the night sky, were painted by the light as it washed over the tree that seemed to be rooted at its heart.
  I call it a heart, now, because that light was not a constant pressure, as of an electric light, nor the cavorting tongues of fire-light - but instead, the thick, pulsing, regular beat of some giant heart.
  We spread out as we drew closer, men going to ground and wriggling forward over dead leaves and windfall - and over more dead bodies, these ones even more mutilated - as impossible as that had seemed at the time - than the first discovery which had greeted us just outside the village. Men were torn limb from limb, torsos torn apart and bodily cavities opened as if from mine explosions - yet next to them would lie the body, untouched, of a man whose face had been inverted, sucked in as if through some great vacuum in their skull. Others lay with their every joint bent the wrong way, eyes rolled back and black foam still dribbling from their mouths, while those closest to the clearing were not only on the ground, but also found pinned to the trees, and in some nightmare-inducing case - even partially inside the trees. The reek of Death, of blood and loosed bowels and vomit and the ever-sour tang of bile, lay upon us like a tangible blanket, thick and cloying and poisoned as we slowly inched our way forward - and for some men, it proved too much. Voices raised in terror, some of my brothers fell back, forsaking reason and duty and even their firearms as they turned and fled, and their anguished footfalls soon receded behind us. I never saw any of them again.
  Here, at the edge of light and darkness, with death around us and a primal, unspeakable terror ahead of us, we found ourselves. Less than a handful remained, arms and uniforms slick with the blood and gristle they had crawled through, eyes staring white from their faces in the soul-crushing depths of some animal terror - yet... Yet we were resolute to go on. We were the men of steel, hard as Krupp steel and tough as leather, and even though our hands shook and our bowels betrayed us, we were determined to go on.
  Whether it was determination, or compulsion, I cannot now say any longer.
  We moved closer, then, weapons at the ready, preparing to encircle the lurking mass of stone and dead leaves, and our first man died in that open stretch of lurid, devil-painted ground. I forget his name now, but his death will remain with me for the rest of my days. One moment he was still at my side, rifle in hand and boots scuffing softly through the dead ground, and then some force cast him up, so fast and so sudden, that his one boot remained on the ground behind. There was a shriek, a great rushing of air, and when I turned to my side, I saw only the forlorn boot, and the shape of his rifle tumbling from the sky, digging, bayonet-first into the ground and coming to a rest like some grotesque mockery of the crosses we put over our roadside graves. The shriek seemed to grow louder even as my senses told me that it was drawing further away, a shriek that came from whatever vault of the soul that was being plumbed in terror - and then there was a pop, as of some truck tire bursting under pressure, and the shriek was silent. Nothing further rained down, and I would have bolted at that time, forsaking all for a chance to get out of that accursed place, if a sergeant to my left had not prodded me with his rifled - and dark looks - into the direction of the church again.
  When we reached the walls of the church, there was a crash of stone from the one side, and two of the men disappeared into a previously covered pit that gaped below one of the windows. The sound of falling rock and screaming echoed up at us for a long time, before there was a distant splash. Silence reigned - and then, over the renewed screams, came the baying of goats, impossible to explain, yet unmistakable. The silence that had followed the first man's demise was a very long time coming with those two men. A very long time, and through it all, the incessant baying of goats echoed up from the dark earth.
  The men at the front doors of the church were the next to go. The chanting had maintained its somber dirge even as we advanced, and when grenades were readied and primed to be thrown through the door - towards that pulsing, living, red light - the chanting seemed to pick up, growing frantic and angry. Pins and fuse beads rattled as the grenades were primed, lobbed forward through the doorway and over cracked stairs - and then some incredible force reached out and touched the men. Touched them, and felt them, and crushed them into slivers as flat as the leaves that fluttered around them on the ground. The grenades, I never heard going off, but in that instant, when the force reached out and touched those men, extending itself from the depths of the church, I saw it. A glimpse, no more, but a glimpse that had me shrieking in my own terror-grasped mind.
  Two hands - human hands, if human hands had seven fingers and furry nails and an eye at each joint - that reached out, on arms impossibly long and with skin the same red as the light, to press down, almost gently, on the top of each helmeted head, until that head was flat and paper thin. Like a cardboard box, each man collapsed beneath the relentless pressure of these red hands - a process which happened in an instant, but which my fear-saturated mind stretched out into a long, clear moment of the utmost clarity - and became that thin sliver, that shadow of everything they had been before.
  Others must have seen as I saw, must have seen the eyes rolling and glaring in all directions as they reduced men to playing cards, and my voice was not the only one to be raised in terror. Rifles cracked and machine-pistols barked around me, spitting fire into, and through, the doorway where these arms were, yet whichever creature had sent them forth, had used them so effortlessly to destroy these puny invaders, was not to be caught so easily. The arms disappeared, the remaining men rushed in with cries and screams of their own, and by the time my senses returned and my training too carried me forward and through the door - and into the church - I was to be the last survivor.
  The last survivor, and the only witness.
  Men have called Him the Red King for as long as Man has walked the lands of the world, have called Him - It? - King before even the concept of kingdoms was known, before even the concept of fire was a firm and established element of life. Before Man, when life crawled and slithered in different places, He was there, a terrible king, pulling starlight down as His cloak, blending the very light of Nature and our infant Sun into a raiment that gave Him His name. When brother fought against brother in the wars of the Elder Things, when planets tumbled in chaos and rode the icy grip of the Neverlight - where neither sun nor stars nor moon light the sky - He was there as king. He was there to watch and laugh and bestow his blessing on the shapes and designs and things that did his work even without their own knowing.
  All of this I knew, with a clarity that made me even doubt my name, as I set foot in that Red Church the first time.
  The inside of the church, as a starter, was something that bore no geometric or spatial, or even remotely dimensional, relation to what we had seen of the church from the outside. Starry expanses swept off to all sides around me, and the doorway through which I had entered was revealed as an archway of primitive stone, standing behind me like a forlorn monument in the wilderness. I stood on a stone causeway that was only visible when I did not look at it directly, and which snaked off into a multitude of ever-changing pathways even as I did glimpse it. Overhead, red stars dominated, but the red light did not come from them.
  It came from the tree, and the being that sat before it.
  How my sanity did not shatter at that point, how I managed to observe this sight, yet remain today to tell the story... Perhaps I did not survive, perhaps I did break, and even now lay gibbering on the steps of that god-forsaken temple to the horror that had drawn us in, helpless as flies, and had then laughed as we burned our wings at the edges of the searing flame of its being. Perhaps Time had taken a different meaning for me, as for Him, and I was still trapped, still that fly without wings, still faced with that which my human mind, my mortal reckonings, could not comprehend.
  He was as red as His name, but in the form of a king - an earthly king, as still walked the earth in some lands - he was not. Black fur covered an inverted cone that rose from a tapered point to a great distance - and circumference - into the starness above Him, a size impossible for me to guess, for even the tree which stood beside Him was dwarfed by His shape. Arms, red of skin and seven-fingered as the hands I had seen outside the church for but a moment, dangled down from this cone like overripe fruit, clustered thinly around the narrow base, and growing progressively thicker and more frequent as the cone - His body? - rose into the sky. Counting them was a task for no man, for each arm was constantly in motion - and few were empty, for the Red King liked to keep trophies.
  Human trophies, of every race and age and sex, held by their heads by these countless arms, and tortured incessantly by the arms around them.
  For each arm that grasped a trophy, there were seven arms around it that pulled and pinched and slapped and poked at the victim, tugging them this way and that, torturing them for all eternity in the Red King's grasp. This realization of eternity in the Red King's grasp was one that followed swiftly on the realization that the figures visible were not all German - in fact, the men we had lost moments before were nowhere to be seen, while clothing from our very day, back to those of the days of the pharaohs - and earlier - were visible.
  Humans were not the only victims of His grasp.
  I saw creatures like ribbed barrels, with bat wings and starfish feet, twisting and contorting helplessly in His grasp. I saw beings like stones, in blues and golds, that rang hollowly as arms slapped and slapped against their whorled surfaces. I saw men with wings and tails and no faces, and I saw great winged crabs, covered in fur, that clacked helplessly at the arms that surrounded them, yet from whose grasp they could not escape. There were fish, with spider legs and shimmering, circular wings, and there was even a being - black of skin and vast of size - that bore a striking resemblance to the Sphinx of Egypt.
  The more exotic the tribute, the closer they were to the tapered tip of His form and as this helpless fly felt his gaze drawn ever downwards, I finally saw the significance of the tree.
  For the tree, with its thick, black trunk and the myriad of star-clawing branches, was no tree, but in fact the upright tongue of the Red King, freed from His maw at the base of His form, and reaching, reaching, ever upwards to the stars that had birthed Him.
  Why I was spared the grasp of those red, seven-fingered and multi-eyed arms, I do not know. How I found my way back to Brezniac, I do not know. How I came to be here, in this place with its cool walls and friendly nurses, I do not know. I have asked them for writing material for many years now, and this is the first time they have untied me enough to use this typewriter. They said it was for good behavior, for not breaking the red light over my door again. Apparently I have been doing it for many years, even when they put that special grille around the light.
  As I type now, the memories come back to me, fresh again, clearing from the muddle of whatever they had been giving me. My room even has a view now, out into the gardens, where the walls of this place are visible in the distance, if I squint.
  I do not wish to look that far, though. There are some beautiful gardens outside my window, and they are far more pleasing to the eye - and to the soul.
  There is a black tree in the garden.
  It was winter when they brought me here, and summer is now waning again, but that tree is still black. I asked them about it, but they would not answer me.
  The black tree is close to my window. Some nights, I can hear it moving outside, whispering in the wind. Laughing at me. Calling me a little fly, and asking me where my wings are.
  I must write quickly now. The branches have started tapping against my window, and I know that there is nothing I can do about it. They do not listen to me, and if I complain again, they will take me away and put me in the red room again.
  I can hear the black branches.
  I can hear them tap-tap-tapping at my window.
  I can hear them, little fly that I am.
  I can hear
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