Mirror of the Nameless Read online

  Table of Contents

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  About the Author

  Join the Kindle Club

  First Edition

  Mirror of the Nameless © 2013 by Luke Walker

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  Twitter: @darkfuse

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/darkfuse

  Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/jOH5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  To my mum. Toda lakh, ima.

  Acknowledgements

  As always, thanks and love go to Rebecca. A big thank you to Dave and the rest of the DarkFuse team for their support and hard work with my story. My humble thanks go to three writers—Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard and HP Lovecraft. And thanks definitely go to he who lurks at the threshold.

  1

  The Children of Naz Yaah—the Little Nazs—ran at me across the dirty street and my first thought was a simple one.

  I knew I should have gone a different way home.

  There were six of them. All large men. All armed with either handguns or clubs. All wore the uniform of the Little Nazs—black trousers, black boots, black coats over black shirts. And in the poor light cast by the few working streetlights, the familiar white line curved its way down each man’s shirt. The white line of Naz Yaah the Worm.

  “Hello, sacrifice,” one said to me. Another hit me in the back with a pole. I dropped, winded. As much as I attempted to pull myself through the dirt and rubbish lining the pavement, it did no good. The men were too close. One kicked me in the stomach. I rolled over and blinked away the tears of pain.

  A few of the men giggled. All stank of beer, the cheap stuff with which I was all too familiar.

  One of the men, the leader I presumed, crouched and pulled me upright into a sitting position. Thin scars lined his cheeks. Gray stubble grew around them.

  “Your name, sacrifice?” he said.

  Although there was no point in delaying, I stayed quiet. The man yanked my wallet out, thumbed through it and slid my ID card free.

  “Dave.” I held my stomach and fought for breath. “Anderson.”

  “So I see.” He placed my wallet back in my pocket and slapped my arms as if we were old friends. “Congratulations, Dave Anderson. You have been chosen as an offering to our First Lord Naz Yaah. May she welcome our humble offering. May she swallow your soul and cast you into her belly for all time.”

  The giggling again. Not from all of them, though. That might have given me some hope. No. Enough of the Little Nazs were believers. Even if a couple of them were along for a laugh or to just get a kick from killing, it didn’t help me.

  “Against the wall,” the leader told the others.

  They shoved me hard against the side of a house. Although we were on one of the many densely populated streets less than half a mile from the center of town, no lights were on in windows. Nobody walked outside here after dark. No curtains moved. And all because nobody wanted to be a sacrifice as I was about to be. The leader raised his gun. Leveled it with my forehead. Behind him, the other Little Nazs laughed and shuffled. I wished for the real squads of sacrificers to appear out of nowhere. The people who worked for the Department of Public Order, who took prisoners and volunteers and the sick to offer them to our gods. They didn’t look kindly on the freelancers surrounding me. Not at all. It was all about order to the people in charge, about keeping things as calm as they could be. Even the police would have been better than the lot with me. This group of ex-coppers and drunks, they were all about the denial of our terrible situation. But then, so was everybody else.

  “Oh, Lord Naz Yaah, our dear one, our sweet ruler. We, your playthings, wish to give you this man as a symbol of our devotion, of our gratitude for your continued and eternal rule and for our brief existence in the universe you call home.”

  Behind the leader, the other five men intoned a solitary word. “Amen.”

  They’d stopped giggling.

  “You are permitted your final words,” the leader said to me.

  It’s funny. I’d often wondered what they’d be. As has everyone, I imagine. After all, we never know when Naz Yaah and her siblings will tire of their involvement in our world. It could be today, tomorrow or the day after. And it’s been like that for decades. Which explains the state of the world. Which explains the man with the gun aimed at my head. Which explains damn near everything.

  I drew breath and stared at the little visible of the man’s face beyond his gun. Sweat coated me all over even though I’d not been walking fast when they jumped me. The night was as warm as ever. Eleven o’clock and dark for just the last hour. Another hot day. Another short, hot night and nobody gets any sleep. And the same tomorrow and the same the day after. What a world. What a miserable world.

  “I love my daughter,” I said to the man with the gun.

  “Love is meaningless. Naz Yaah rules all.”

  I kept quiet. I’d said my final words and would say nothing more.

  “Naz Yaah will eat your soul.”

  His finger tightened on the trigger.

  At the far end of the street, explosions roared into the stifling air.

  2

  I’d like to say I seized the chance that came with the distraction. I’ve never been that quick on my feet, though. Instead of grabbing the guy’s gun, I ducked as if something was about to land on my head. The explosions roared again. A window shattered and a woman screamed inside one of the houses, probably as surprised by the sound of guns as I was. Hardly anyone owned a firearm. Bats, clubs and knives were the weapons of choice for most people around those streets.

  “They’ve got guns,” one of the Little Nazs shouted.

  They scattered, running in all directions to hide behind cars or the low wall bordering the houses behind me. Only the leader remained. He stood in a crouch, gun aimed roughly towards the other end of the street. That was when I took my chance.

  I threw myself at him, knocking him off balance and sending his gun to clatter on the road. He threw a punch at me which missed more by accident than my movement. I shoved him as hard as I could and ran.

  Barely five seconds later, he fired at me and another window exploded. I hit the side of a car, ducked and slid alongside it. The leader fired a second time and more explosions answered it. My ears rang. In the confusion and echoes of the bangs and the leader’s shouts, a voice screamed from off in the dark.

  “Dave. Dave Anderson. Come on.”

  The leader of the Little Nazs stumbled over the pavement and into the road, searching for me.

  Ahead, a vehicle roared into life and sped towards us, reversing all the way, hitting parked cars. Metal screamed. I screamed.

 
; Without any thought, I ran from the car to the rubbish-strewn pavement, trying to veer left and right through all the crap. The leader fired a third time. The van driver hit a car close to me and a figure leaned from the driver’s side. “Dave Anderson, come on.”

  Behind—not far enough behind—the leader of the Little Nazs screamed. There may have been a word in the sound. All I heard was rage.

  I dashed to the van. The driver shoved the door open. I jumped in, fighting for breath, wishing I were younger than forty, wishing I’d gone a different way home.

  We shot forward. Gunfire followed us. The driver spun us to the right at the junction. We hit no traffic, of course, sped on and turned into a side street. Driving on, we took what appeared to be lefts and rights at random and I tried to keep my breathing and heart rate under control.

  Dark houses and dead streetlights passed us. There was nobody out walking and no other traffic. The sticky heat of the day remained and slid in through the open windows. And somewhere behind us, the Children of Naz Yaah were coming.

  For the first time, I looked at the driver. Much younger than me. Probably less than twenty-five. Thin. Unkempt hair. Staring eyes.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “Tom McMahon,” he replied and gave me nothing more.

  “Is that it?”

  He glanced at me. Definitely less than twenty-five. Barely twenty, I thought. I’d been rescued by a kid. And that thought was only a little more surprising than the fact I’d been rescued at all. Nobody rescued anyone. Not these days. Better to keep your head down and mind your own.

  “Sorry. I’m a bit distracted. Not slept in a while.”

  I thought I saw lights behind us but it turned out to be moonlight reflecting off something. At least, I hoped it was moonlight. The last thing I wanted was Naz Yaah herself to make an appearance.

  “You got a gun?” I asked him.

  “Yeah. I’m not firing it, though. I’ve only got five bullets.”

  “Then what the hell was all that banging?”

  “Look behind you.”

  I craned my neck and peered in the backseat. Objects covered it. It took me a second to realize what they were.

  “Fireworks?” Years had passed since I’d last seen any.

  “A few. Bangers, mostly. Not much of a weapon but a good distraction.”

  “I’ll say.”

  We drove on, heading away from the main part of town towards the fields and countryside surrounding it. I hadn’t been out there in easily five years. Nobody had as far as I knew. No reason to. Unless you were hiding or wanted to get away from the overcrowding, or the crime and the dirty streets.

  “I don’t have any money.” I kept my focus on the road ahead. “So don’t expect a reward.”

  He laughed. “Wasn’t planning on asking for one. I’ll be honest. I saved you for purely selfish reasons.”

  “Which are?”

  “Hold on.”

  He brought us to a stop in a layby, silent fields on one side. On the other, overhanging trees formed the edge of woodland. I didn’t like the look of the trees. Much too green. The sort of green that wasn’t right even in the gloom. Made your eyes hurt. Made your brain think of bad things, of regrets and pain. And I had plenty of both.

  Tom saw me looking and nodded. “I know. It’s not nice out here. Too…green. She’s been here but not in a long time.” He left the name unsaid and that was fine. Saying Gatur out here would be asking for trouble. “It’s quiet, though, and we need to talk.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I’m Tom.” He laughed and brushed his hair out of his eyes. “Sorry. I’m tired.” He gathered himself. “Right. I’m at university in Norwich.”

  “Norwich.” With that one word, I knew where this was going and why he’d rescued me.

  “With Ashleigh. And I need your help because of her.”

  I stared at the kid who’d saved me because of my daughter, while all around us the cloying humidity of another long, long day baked into our skin.

  3

  “So,” I said. “Are you her boyfriend? Am I looking at my potential son-in-law?”

  “Not quite. I am her boyfriend. Well, today I am.”

  “Meaning?”

  “She’s…” Whatever Tom was about to say, he checked himself. Obviously he’d remembered who I was. While he had saved my life, I was also his girlfriend’s father. “She’s not afraid to say what she wants or to do what she wants. Some days, I’m her boyfriend. Other days, she goes her own way.”

  “Sounds about right.”

  He relaxed a little. I could have lied to the kid, told him that wasn’t my daughter and he should take the hint and leave her. All of that would have been a big lie, though. He’d got Ashleigh’s character down in a few words.

  “So what’s all this about? How come you saved my life? For that matter, how did you know where I was?” I said.

  “Ashleigh mentioned where you live a while ago. Just in passing.” Tom faced away from me to stare at the trees. The quiet trees, the leaves thickly green. Wrongly green. And was there a movement in the trees that hadn’t been there before? A presence?

  No. There couldn’t be. If Gatur had come to us, we’d have killed each other in seconds. As it was, her influence in making the evening horribly hot was the same beside the fields as it was in the town. All the better to make people angry.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “She talked about her hometown a bit. Said she loved it and hated it at the same time. Loved it because it’s where she’s from and she’s got you here. Hated it because it’s the same as everywhere else.” He looked at me. “Scared. In denial. Resigned to it all. Her words, Dave.” He wiped sweat from his face and turned up the air conditioning. It barely did anything to shift the heat.

  “That’s just how things are,” I said.

  “I know. And how long’s it been like this? Thirty years? Forty?”

  “Thirty-five years. Give or take. I’m not sure.” And that was the truth. I’d turned forty the month before and life had been as it was for nearly my entire life. I had very vague memories of being a little kid and people being…I don’t know. Different to now. Calmer, perhaps. More hopeful. Nicer. And definitely more aware of others. And that had to be down to our gods not being in our world. But then they came and things changed. We didn’t ask why or what or when. We kept quiet and our gods ruled over us. Same as always.

  “You heard of BF Makepeace?” Tom said. “Bertram Fitzgerald Makepeace?”

  “No. Tom, listen. About Ashleigh—”

  “He was a writer. So are you, right?”

  I laughed. “Not these days and not in a long time.” I went into no further detail. No need to. More than a decade before, I’d written some reasonably successful books on ancient cultures and their beliefs. Then people began telling me, on the quiet, I’d best call it a day on those sorts of books. People didn’t like to think about other beliefs. They only worried about real beliefs. That’s all we were allowed to think about.

  So I stopped with those books and began ghost-writing celebrity autobiographies part-time. People couldn’t get enough of them. The money was terrible because, as with just about everything, people stole what they wanted rather than paying for it, but I kept at it while also working in a pub. I had to do something to stop me from being too scared to move. Plenty of others did nothing. They just waited for the sacrifices to stop working or for our gods to grow bored with us and end everything. And since that could happen any day, I understood that fear well.

  “Okay. Well, Makepeace was a writer. Wrote about seventy years ago. Stories about other worlds. Places different to ours. People in his stories, they were all about working together, about the potential of humanity. They built things. They explored. They were all about improving their lives. They thought religion and all that stuff just got in the way of the important things.”

  “So?”

  “So, they weren’t scared. That was Makepeace’s
thing. Writing about people who embraced their lives instead of running away from them.”

  By that point, my patience was all but gone. I kept my voice level. “What’s this got to do with my daughter, Tom?”

  “She’s obsessed with Makepeace. He’s the reason she wants to be a writer.”

  “And there was me hoping she got it from me.”

  He ignored my little joke. “When I say she’s obsessed by Makepeace, I mean it. His stuff is everything to her because…” He gazed at the empty country road. “Because she doesn’t think he was just telling stories. She thinks he was leaving messages for us. That the worlds and people he wrote about are real.”

  4

  We were driving again, the roads and streets as empty as they always were this late. For a few minutes, we drove through a couple of suburban streets where, once upon a time, the houses would have cost more than a lot of people could afford. Now they cost more than just about everyone could afford. Not a single light was on, and out of the ten streetlights we passed, two worked. Without moonlight, we would have been close to blind. Not that the house owners cared. They were left in peace by the police. No sacrifices here. Just the wealthy. Just the people who kept their heads down and their noses out of any unpleasant business.

  Tom spoke all the way from the edge of town back into the center and out to my road. He told me about university life with Ashleigh, about their friends, about their idealism and how they kept it quiet for fear of being branded troublemakers. I learned more names than I’d heard in years and I learned what it was to be young and hopeful again. For a few minutes, I even learned what it was to not fear our gods. That didn’t last, though.

  We came off Segoth Road (known as Derby Road back when my parents had been children), drove through the silent street towards the turning into my road.