The country doctor and I drove in his Model T toward Harbour Point where according to local legend the Nixie lived and screamed. It was also the place where the Sketcher’s girlfriend had fallen into a coma, and could well die which would likely have the Sketcher facing a bullet. At worst, I would have called it negligent homicide, but the locals in the small Maine coastal town were not, in the main, what I would call fair-minded people.



The dirt road ended alongside a barbed wire fence, and I wondered if we had to hike toward the booming crash of the waves I heard. Instead the doctor put on a pair of old leather gloves, and pulled the wire down, and told me to drive across the rough ground and the wire. Nervously, I did so, and it worked fine. He got back in.



“Must not have Model T’s where you come from, Sir.” He said with a smile that mixed reverence and good humor. The doctor still thought I was some sort of angel. That was impossible for two reasons. One, I’m a verser, a human extradimensional. Two, no magic worked in this world, I knew because I had tested it, and in order for an angel to physically manifest, a lot would have to work.



Although maybe an angel could be subtle, and sneak in? As long as it did not reveal itself that might work. I’d have to ask the Martian Terraformer or the Alchemist what they thought of this next time I saw one of them.



I saw what the doctor meant as we tore across the pasture chasing cows out of our way. Rocks, minor gullies, brush, we powered over or through them with our high wheel base. I did make a mental note as we jounced up and down almost floating out of the car a few times to explain the concept of seat belts to the doctor.



Over the top of a steep hill, we crested and halted to look down on a commonplace sandy point reaching out into the Atlantic. We watched the Sun go down.



“That’s Harbor Point, the furthest extension into the Atlantic for over a hundred miles of the coast. Its barred by law.”



I studied it, and saw the rock spine with black spots which had to be the tiny holes which made the howling noise I’d heard in the Kraken Restauraunt.



“I need to get down there, and examine the crime scene. See if I can figure anything out. You don’t have to go. No need for you to get in trouble with the law.”



I was hoping for signs of cocaine usage. Maybe, the waitress, Sketcher’s girlfriend, had suffered a coke overdose. That did not explain the green pus which welled from cuts. And it did not explain the rash of coma victims through the past couple years the doctor had told me of, but I was fresh out of theories, and grasping at straws. Life is like that pretty often; you never really find out the whole story.



“Sir, I’m the local doctor; the only doctor for fifty miles around. Also the most educated man in town. As long as I don’t kill too many influential clients, I can do pretty much what I want.”



I nodded, and we got out of the car to face the chill breeze. We trekked downhill, and I kept a wary eye out for the sherriff or the bully boys lingering outside the waitresses’ home.



Then I looked up and saw the tall and too thin form of the funeral director standing down below us on the sandy point. He turned and seemed to see us, and he turned again to flee. So I gave chase right into a tiger trap. Before I could do more than bounce back to my feet, a large weight landed on my skull.



Woozily I heard someone speak to the doctor.



“Go home, doctor. Its not safe to be alone out here tonight.”

“Listen here, Kyle Morrison. I know you under that mask. I spanked you once when I brought you into the world. I’ll make you wish I’d tossed you into the harbor if you don’t at once…”



It was magnificent and useless. I could see it in the stance of the bully boys who waited respectfully on the edge of the pit above me. They’d listen, and then they’d try to tote the doctor away. He’d fight, and they’d hit him.



“Doctor, go, remember, they have no clue what they are dealing with.” He thought I meant that I was a Power of the Light. The doctor left, and the funeral director came to lean over the edge. Right before he dropped another stone on my head, he spoke.



“Untrue, Mr. Tadeusz Worldwalker. We know exactly what we are dealing with. It is you who is ignorant.”



The lights went out.



I woke with a throbbing headache, and the crashing of waves seemed to accentuate the pain. My arms and legs spread-eagled, and tied across a damp, slick rock the size of a dining room table increased my ill temper.



Opening my eyes, I saw a ring of black robed figures circled around me. Great, just great. I was to be the sacrifice to raise magic power in a world without magic. It made me want to laugh. So, I did, and regretted it instantly as my vision doubled, and my stomach heaved.



The funeral director came up, and poured something into my mouth which instantly numbed it. I spat it back out into his face from several feet away. It not one of my favorite skills, but I’ve been tied up enough to get some good practise on spitting into people’s faces.



He accepted the insult with a preternatural calm. In the moonlight, I could see his pupils were over-expanded. Atropine or some other drug gave him bedroom eyes which looked sickening in his pallid face.



“Its to see the Nixie better as it breaches near the surface.”



I shook my head in disgust, and we waited while my headache eased. Isometric exercises kept me from cramping up, and let me subtly test the ropes’s strength. No good; these guys had done this before.



They began a low atonal chant which was genuinely creepy, but I ignored it, and began to fake a snore. I expected to get a knife in the face, and a threat but nothing.



“They are the Nixie’s children. Filled with the awe and the power and the determination that I feel that lets one surmount the petty bonds and trials of humanity to reach for godhood.”



The funeral director walked up, and began chanting in some gibberish off key with the chorus from a pale book. In one of the odd pauses that jolted the listener unpleasantly and left him hanging wondering about questions that could not quite be focused on to bring them to resolution, he spoke again.



“It took me years of practise to get this far. Ever since the dead first spoke to me, and began to tell me the secrets, I have been making this book. Being funeral director was most useful. It let me get pages for the book without the effort most Seekers have to face.”



I looked at the book, and resolved to burn it at my first opportunity.



“You know, you’re insane.” I said conversationally.



“Yes. Sanity is a cover for the raging cesspool that is reality. Power is the only cure for the deep pain that is life.”



I remembered the pastor reccommending a hobby. Now this freak wanted power to cure his depression.



“What about love?” I asked instead hoping that he could be redeemed, but without any real hope.



“Love?” He said in a strange voice that set my hair on edge. “How strange to hear Tadeusz, Hammer of Tyrants, murderer of billions, assasin speak of love.”



“My deeds are accepted in the court of the heavens, and I’ve murdered none. I made lawful war, and I dispensed justice.” I defended myself from the insult with something bothering me.



The director began to chuckle oddly, and the chanting ended.



“Magic does not work here. It only works in places like the Aztecan pyramid, and the battlefields of Kharigen.” The director said in that odd voice that he twisted further to make a mimicry of mine. The “Nixie’s Children” got to their knees, and began to bang their heads on the sand, and flail their backs with whips. Green goo ran from the stripes.



Things were happening too fast for me to process especially with my concussion, and the way this world seemed to burden my thoughts.



Kharigen. How could the director know of Kharigen? The endless battlefield which housed the skirmishes, some said, that would lead up to the Final Battle was in another universe altogether than this.



Perhaps, he had read my mind. That would explain his following. He was a lunatic psi who thought the Dead spoke to him, and his powers gave him control over the others.



But that left so much unexplained. I knew it but my logic seemed to be in a permanent fog.



“Poor Tadeusz. We’re going to have fun with you.”



They began to chant again, and after about ten minutes, I saw a bubbling mass break the surface. At first I thought it bubbles, or jellyfish in a clump, but as it oozed onto the shoreline, and gathered mass to loom above the tallest man with a glimmering phosphorescence of green that highlighted each bubble that made up the mound, I felt the urge to scream.



The Nixies Children all bowed to the director and then to the Nixie. A tentacle formed out of the mass of the Nixie, and touched each one. Each bullyboy wiggled and flowed, and I saw the tentacle slim down as it pumped more mass into the bullyboys.



“The waitress, and all that fell into a coma are metamorphic duplcates.”



“True, and soon you’ll have one too. And it will be a verser. It will go out into the worlds, and in your name it will wreak havoc, betray friends, and destroy the good. In the end, the name of Tadeusz will be cursed on hundreds of worlds.”



“I’ll stop it.”



“I think not. For you will be here. Inside the Nixie providing, the RAM to run its unstable intelligence on.”



The RAM to run…The words and the concepts behind them came to easily to the funeral director. Even if he had read my mind, he would not be using my words to describe something he understood. I looked at him more closely, and he leered back.



“Took you long enough, Tadeusz. I swore, I’d pay you back for that insolent attitude you bag of pus, you, you corporeal being you.” His hate caused him to trip over his words, and the choice of insults combined to remind me. I’d stood in the battle line at Kharigen, and seen a monstrous snail ten stories high approach from the Enemy. So, seeing everyone else with me was afraid, I stepped up and spoke the words of power taught me by Lady Winterblest, elven captain of paladins. I did little to hurt it, but my attack broke the ice, and the others joined in to rain fire, and more exotic attacks upon it.



“The Snail; you’re the Snail.”



“The Great and Terrible Destruction of the Physical in Awesome Detail is my name. You see me as a giant snail because your puny brain needs to assign a form to my glories. The shell is my invulnerability, and my path is full of things I will crush in good time. Like I have almost crushed you.”



I thought about it for a moment. The director seemed to be possessed by a spirit being which should be impossible.



“Not at all. You stand in a world under the Powers of the Outer Dark, the strangest and most terrifying of all the Gods Who Stand Free. What use have they for prayers to cure, or to lift depression? In fact, what use have they for self-understanding among you disgusting corporeal creatures? Or even for the banal sort of magician who toys with magic without offering allegiance to any greater power. But they do desire those who worship power, and lust to touch the infinite. If they are willing to take years, even a decade in study in dark arts, and great consecrations, then they can gain power such as would shock the idiots that populate this world.”



I understood at last, and I smiled.



“What’s to keep me from speaking those words of power again, O Fallen and Mighty?”



“Please do. Your brain can barely keep a straight thought together. Cast a spell that will rend space. If it goes awry as it is likely to do since you are not skilled in its use, unlike my host who is eminently skilled, why I will be here to ensure that it goes awry in the way I wish it to. You will rend a gate open to the Outer Dark, and allow in some Great Ones.”



My choice seemed clear. Risk magic or have the Nixie enslave me, and a pawn made of me. Then I looked more closely at the Nixie as the tentacle unwillingly, driven by magic enhanced commands from the director’s mouth, advanced on me. I saw it, and suddenly I wondered.



Maybe it was not a creature of magic? It seemed natural enough, if dreadfully alien. My hairs on the back of my neck did not warn me of magic so maybe?



I reached inside myself, and pushed aside the pain and the confusion to feel my hands, and to feel the blood flow to them, and to curve them into cups with my fingers held in the Vulcan’s salute. With an intolerable, almost, itching my hands shifted to three-fingered claws that cut the ropes with ease.



I lunged forward, and plunged a claw into the director’s chest as he scrambled madly back. Then I fell face first on the sand breaking an ankle, and spraining the other since they were both still tied. My fingertip claws lacked the cutting edges all along the edges of my hands, and would have been useless.



The Nixie touched me on the back of my neck, and flipped me over with ease taking my legs loose as well. Oh, well, I’d bleed out in under minute I thought and waited for the mind-rending pain of having my legs removed which never came.



The Nixie touched me gently on the lips, and my mind was inside it watching the mass flow down into my lungs.



I wanted to scream, but instead I shouted at it to stop.



It ignored me.



So I demanded. It paused, and continued on. I set my will like steel, and pushed. The same determination which had let me do things which any normal individual would have avoided came into play. I rarely let it out because it tended to result in damage to myself, but it was hard to see how I could hurt myself worse than the Nixie intended.



Our wills clashed in that mass, and I saw that I had a disadvantage. Everyone that it had stolen was a spare brain, a spare will for it to use against me. Still individually, none of them were equal to me, and I fought slowing the absorbtion as it covered my body on the beach.



I felt the waitress as a tiny flicker when I wondered where she was. I appealed to her, and suddenly strength ran out of the mass for a moment as her natural personality asserted itself.



The moment of confusion as I greeted her, told her to fight, and attacked myself with every bit of force I could muster despite the confusion was a turning point I thought. The Nixie was even more confused than I, and for a long minute, I had it on the run. Then it started to push back in the type of see-saw that war often is. One side pushes and overextends itself, and then the other side pushes back.



Eventually, one or the other breaks. We went back and forth as I struggled to free the greater mass of people inside the Nixie. It fought me with a killing hatred that knew no bounds. The thing was wholly evil with a purity rarely found outside of vampires and demons.



Still we managed to free some more when an unexpected presence came to my aid. I felt the Sketcher in astral form assault the Nixie.



Some of the director’s coven fell free of the Nixie, and I felt a lessening of the intensity of hate. In its place was…nothing. I gave the fight over to Sketcher for a moment as I pondered.



The Nixie was not evil. It was a blank template. Without human brains it was not even intelligent.



Words I had spoken about love came back to me with an odd clarity that I thought meant they were from Above. So, I needed to show love to the Nixie. All it knew was the hate and despair that the director had taught it.



I began to replay fond memories, and stories, and songs. I told it of Milos and Kyra, and finally I heard it speak.



“This love is not for me.”



And it paused its attack. I needed to show love for this globular mass of bubbles, an alien entity from the outskirts of the solar system I assumed remembering what I had seen earlier.



The only things that came to me terrified me.



“If you sample my blood, you may find a weird subatance in it. Let this ’scriff’ be in you, and you may walk other worlds, and find some place for yourself.”



The idea of letting the Nixie free to wander the verse scared me, but I had to show it trust.



It paused, and I heard echoes of my own worries come back to me.



“That might not be such a good idea. I am not really in control of myself. But thanks.”



“Then take me.”



“Alright.”





A long time blurry with odd dreams passed, but they seemed to get brighter and brighter as time went on.



Finally I woke back to myself.



I hung inside the Nixie on the surface of a cold moon of Jupiter. I could tell this by the Red Spot I saw above me.



“Tadeusz. I die now, but I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course.” A sense of profound peace followed his words, and I looked out to see a field of Nixies all making a glowing green cross glow inside their mass. My nixie had become the first missionary to his people.



I wondered how long it had been that I slept, and my only answer was to see human cities glowing brightly on the dark side of the Moon.



Then the Nixie dehydrated, and cracked apart, and I stood unprotected in sub two hundred degree weather. I versed out very quickly, but I got to see a landscape few humans ever see. The stark elegance and grace were inhuman, but beautiful.



Tadeusz