A Secret Guide to Fighting Elder Gods Read online

  Morton High School, home of the Black Goats, was built along the same level, open design philosophy as their own Johnson’s Crossing High. It was a West Coast thing: never construct a building intended to house children any higher than absolutely necessary, since earthquakes are real and insurance rates are unforgiving. Roofed corridors connected the various buildings, which lay like a child’s discarded Lego bricks around the wide, airy campus. Trees grew between them, their branches twisted and somehow warped, like they had been shaped by an unkind gardener. The grass was green. Very green. Too green, almost. It was like the color balance had been turned up on the landscaping, hiding something darker and less kind.

  The longer they looked at the school, the more uneasy they felt. In the end, it was Laurie who put words to the sensation: “I don’t think the walls are right.”

  “The town records say the school underwent earthquake retrofitting ten years ago,” said Colleen.

  Laurie frowned. “That’s not…I mean, that’s not what I meant. The walls aren’t right.” She looked around the car, seeking support from her teammates. None was offered. Heather and Jude looked as uncomprehending as Colleen.

  Being a cheerleader sometimes meant walking into danger with chins and pom-poms high. Laurie was used to danger. What she wasn’t used to was being the only one who saw it. She considered the virtue of trying to explain and dismissed it. If no one else saw what she saw, well, maybe there wasn’t anything to see after all. Maybe it was okay.

  “I guess it’s just their terrible color sense,” she mumbled, hunching a little in her seat. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

  Jude flashed her an encouraging smile. “If it’s not, we’ll kick its teeth in. Come on. I want to see the field.”

  Somehow, Jude’s encouragement made Laurie feel even worse, like she was being childish when she ought to be brave and stalwart and true, like the rest of the Pumpkins. She bit her lip as she slid out of the car, smothering the rest of her objections, the small, still voice that said something was terribly wrong here. Something about the way the walls fit together, or didn’t, made her mind itch, shunting her thoughts down channels they didn’t want to follow.

  They’re just walls, she told herself firmly. Walls can’t break rules. Walls have to stand around holding things up all day. Walls can’t do anything.

  Jude was already starting for the front of the school, with Heather and Colleen close behind. Laurie realized that the only thing she wanted less than being here was being here alone. She hurried after them, ponytail flipping from side to side, and she didn’t look back. If the fog was rolling in to cover the parking lot again, she didn’t want to know.

  Laurie isn’t wrong. As reassuring thoughts went, this one ranked right below “it’s probably not infected,” and right above “nobody’s called my parents yet.” Jude kept her expression composed, even as her eyes searched the edges of the buildings around her, looking for the key to their subtle wrongness. It was something in the angles, she supposed; some intangible, indefinable problem with the way the corners came together. The whole thing was probably riddled with asbestos; their earthquake retrofit must have been a rush job.

  Heather and Colleen were sticking close, the one narrow-eyed and scanning her surroundings for signs of danger, the other with her nose buried in a rulebook. Colleen was the best when it came to dealing with dusty old books and terrible tomes, but she wouldn’t notice actual danger until it bit her head off. Sometimes that was useful. While the rest of them were panicking, Colleen would still be calmly reading about possible threats. It was always good for someone to stay calm.

  Laurie, though…. Laurie was another matter altogether. Laurie didn’t usually panic about anything that wasn’t actively trying to kill her. For her to be this uncomfortable meant that something was really wrong, and the fact that Jude could barely see it—that Heather and Colleen didn’t seem to see it at all—was worrisome.

  The distant tromp of feet and murmur of the crowd told her that they were heading in the right direction. A football game was a beast in its own right, made up of the combination of players and spectators and yes, cheerleaders. They were the soul of the creature, the roaring spirit that combined the body of the crowd with the leashed, furious mind of the team. This beast hadn’t fully come together yet, wasn’t awake and tearing at the sky, but it wouldn’t be long. It just needed the last few pieces of itself to wake, and rise.

  “Come on, girls,” said Jude, picking up her pace. “The others will be here soon, if they’re not already, and I want to go over our game plan for the night.”

  “Jump high, don’t fall, don’t break our necks,” said Heather.

  “Basically that, but with more synchronized chanting,” said Jude mildly. She had long since learned not to argue with Heather when the sarcasm came out. It didn’t do any good, and it could slow them down. She didn’t want to be slowed down, not here, in these subtly misshapen walkways, where the corners seemed to watch her in some indefinable way.

  “They sure do have a lot of murals,” said Laurie. Her voice was shaky. “They really like goats.”

  “We have a lot of murals, and we really like pumpkins,” said Colleen.

  “Sure, but our murals are…they’re different.”

  Jude glanced at one of the murals in question and looked quickly away as the painted goat seemed to look back at her, surrounded by a tangle of painted ivy that looked almost like a web of chains, holding the animal down, rendering it motionless.

  The hall ended at the gym, and beyond that stretched the football field, wide and so perfectly green that it hurt to look directly at it. Heather, whose sense of smell was distressingly sharp, stopped and sniffed at the air before bending and plucking a single blade of grass. She rolled it between her fingers and dropped it, holding her open hand out toward the others. There was a smear of green on her skin, as vivid as the grass itself.

  “It’s been painted,” she said.

  “There’s a drought,” said Colleen. “Maybe they’re following proper water conservation standards.”

  “I don’t think it’s following any proper environmental standard when you paint your entire football field the color of Ireland’s nightmares,” said Heather dubiously. She wiped her hand against the side of her skirt, leaving a streak of virulent green across the fabric. The Pumpkins wore orange and green daily. There was no way the stain should have clashed. It did. It stood out like a bloodstain, like something terrible and impossible and unwanted.

  Jude looked uneasily at the field, which suddenly seemed less like a welcoming expanse of curated lawn and more like a trap. But it was between them and the bleachers, where the lights were going on—and where she could see their buses, parked in a lot she hadn’t noticed when approaching the school. Well, of course she hadn’t. If they wanted people to park by the football field, they needed proper signage. Otherwise, they could deal with people wandering aimlessly around their campus.

  That seemed wrong, too. At home, they would have locked the front gates of the school, and festooned the main parking lot with signs and volunteers to make sure the away team went where they were supposed to go. It wasn’t that they didn’t trust visiting football teams to be smart enough to find a parking lot. It was that they didn’t trust those teams not to indulge in a little recreational vandalism if left unsupervised on a “rival” campus. Someone should have been at the front of the school to direct them. Even if that person had directed them to go the way they’d gone, there should have been something.

  The four of them trudged across the painted grass, toward the waiting bleachers, and it was impossible to shake the feeling that something was wrong. It tingled on Heather’s skin, burning where she had touched the ground; it flickered at the corner of Laurie’s vision, twisted and wrong and unable to reconcile itself with the world around them. For Jude, it was a lingering scent in the air, like the hot iron smell of her mother’s cooking. Even Colleen looked up from her rulebook, frowning.

&n
bsp; “Where’s the rest of the squad?” she asked.

  “There.” Heather pointed to a smear of orange and green. They were too far away for any details to be really clear, but it was apparent, even from this distance, that they were standing motionless, pom-poms hanging limp at their sides.

  “Come on,” said Jude, and broke into a run.

  The field seemed to fold beneath their feet as they ran, four bright birds racing toward the rest of their flock. In half the time it should have taken, they were running into the shadow of the bleachers. Colleen, who so rarely seemed to pay attention to anything other than the rulebook and the squad, stopped just shy of the line that separated the rest of the area from the field of play.

  “Don’t!” she yelped, spreading her arms wide.

  Laurie and Jude stopped. Heather, carried forward by her longer stride, didn’t. Her foot touched down on the other side of the line. She froze for a moment, looking perplexed. Then she shook herself, like she had walked through a cold patch in the air, and trotted onward to the rest of the squad. She didn’t look back, not once. She just kept going.

  “What the—” Jude began.

  “There hasn’t been an away game in Morton in twenty-one years,” said Colleen, holding up her book. “I was checking the schedule. Every time they’ve been assigned to host, something’s happened, and they’ve had to either relocate or forfeit. Every time. Until this year, when they requested a change of schedule because they didn’t get to host last year.”

  “Okay….” said Jude slowly. “Why is this important?”

  “Because the last team to play against them was Mill City. The Mantises.”

  “That’s not a real team,” said Laurie. “Mill City has the Muskrats and the Sparrow Hawks.”

  “The Mantises never returned from the away game,” said Colleen. “Their bus disappeared on the way home. The high school closed down later that year, and never reopened. Twenty-one years before that, the Black Goats played against the Oceanside Otters.”

  “Same thing?” asked Jude.

  Colleen nodded, expression grim. “Same thing,” she said. “Look at them. The rest of our squad is right there, and they don’t even seem to realize that we exist. Something is really wrong here.”

  “Yes, it is.” Jude took a deep breath. “Laurie, stay with Colleen. If the two of you need to step onto the field for any reason, I want you to order her not to be affected by whatever’s going on before you do.”

  “Okay,” said Laurie, in a small voice.

  When Laurie gave orders, it was almost impossible to disobey them. No one knew for sure why it was like that: she had always been able to command people to do her bidding. The fact that she was one of the sweetest, least malicious people any of them knew was most of what kept her on the squad, and off the list of things the squad had to deal with.

  “What about you?” asked Colleen.

  Jude smiled grimly, and her teeth were very white, and it would have been easy for someone looking at her from the wrong angle to get the impression that something was wrong with the shape of them; that they, like the hallways of Morton High School, didn’t quite adhere to the rules of what they were supposed to be, even as they defied exact categorization.

  “I’m going to remind them who my mother is,” she said, and stepped over the line onto the football field. She took a long step toward the rest of the squad. Then she froze, going deathly still, her hands clenched at her sides and her chin dipped slightly forward, like she was attempting to rest it on her own sternum.

  “Jude?” said Colleen worriedly.

  “I’m okay,” said Jude. Her voice was far away, watery somehow, like it was traveling through peat and bog to reach them. “Stay where you are. This is…not so good.”

  “I could tell you to come back,” said Laurie. She made no effort to hide the fear in her voice, or the way it trembled.

  “Don’t,” said Jude. Her voice was still far away, but it seemed to be getting closer, even though she never moved a muscle. “There’s something here. This whole place belongs to something. Something that isn’t supposed to be here. It makes the streets bend when people get too close. It makes the fog. Not just outside. Inside, too. But it doesn’t…it’s not here. It’s here, but it’s not here. This place, it’s not big enough for what owns it, and so it only pays a little attention, every twenty-one years, when time comes to pay.”

  “Pay for what?”

  “Not being eaten.” Jude raised her head, glancing back over her shoulder at the others. She could taste blood, bitter on her tongue. How she loved them. “Stay where you are.”

  “But—”

  “Stay,” ordered Jude, and returned her attention to the field. The rest of her squad was so close. They were so far away. She began to run.

  The bleachers were crammed with bodies, all of them wearing Morton black and red. Where were the Pumpkins supporters? But that was a silly question, really: they were somewhere else. The roads had bent, turning them away from the school, away from the site of a slaughter they weren’t meant to witness. The thing that owned this place was terrible and vast, but wasn’t here, although its presence permeated everything, distorting the flowers, the grass, even the air they breathed.

  Breathing. Now there was a thought. Jude stopped breathing.

  The world wobbled for a moment, her cells screaming a sharp reminder that she was technically a living thing, and living things needed oxygen. Then the part of her that was only and ever her mother’s daughter rose sluggishly from sleep, yawning, and shunted those screaming cells aside. If Jude wanted to run without air, there were ways for that to be arranged. The taste of blood grew sweeter in her mouth, reminding her of the cost of moments like this one, the consequence of calling on her heritage more than absolutely necessary.

  But the ground wasn’t bending under her feet anymore, and in only a few long steps, she was standing behind Heather. Jude took a breath, dulling the taste of blood, and pushed her way into the huddle.

  Coach Harrison was speaking, eyes sharp and animated. “—if you jump high enough and cheer loud enough, you’ll drive our boys to greatness. Now, I want you all to look over these new cheers—”

  “Coach,” Jude interrupted. Coach Harrison turned to look at her with open surprise, like Jude was the last person she’d been expecting to see on this field. Jude took another breath. “I didn’t approve any new cheers. We can’t do them.”

  “I’m your staff advisor. I think you’ll find that you don’t have a choice.”

  “Cheerleading is a student-operated elective, thanks to budget cuts,” said Jude. And thanks to Colleen, for making sure we all knew that, she added silently. “You supervise us and escort us to competition, but we choose our own material. My squad can’t do any cheers that I haven’t approved.”

  “Then I suppose you’ll have to approve them, won’t you?” Coach Harrison took a step forward. There was malice in her eye.

  She had a red scarf tied around her neck. Bright red, arterial red…school color red. Just, well, for the wrong school.

  “This was your high school, wasn’t it?” asked Jude. She cocked her head. “You’re too young to have been a student here last time they hosted a game, unless time bends here, too. But this was your high school. They sent you out into the world to bring them back a sacrifice.”

  Coach Harrison paused. Only for a second. That was long enough.

  “What?” Heather shook her head like she was trying to throw off a fog—one that clung to thoughts, rather than to landscapes. She took a step toward their coach, and her gait was that of a predator, a lion stalking its prey, and not a teenage girl. “You brought us here to sacrifice us?”

  “Not just us,” said Jude, putting a hand on Heather’s arm before she could get any closer. “The football team, too. They disappear along with the cheerleaders. Coach, why would you bother with Johnson’s Crossing? You know what we are. You know what we do.”

  “Because our Lord doesn’t like
the competition,” hissed Coach Harrison, and leapt.

  Cheerleaders are athletes. Anyone who would contest that has never seen a cheer squad at the height of their skill, moving as one entity, a smaller beast inside the greater beast-body of the football game. Their captain and her presumptive second were standing against their coach, and that alone was enough to let the others throw off their confused tractability and move into position, surrounding and supporting Jude and Heather.

  Coach Harrison found herself grabbed by a dozen pairs of hands, flung backward, away from the group of girls in orange and green, brightly colored birds showing their talons at last. She hissed, snarling something in an unspeakable tongue.

  Jude sighed. “The Black Goats,” she said, sounding disgusted. “We should have guessed. I should have guessed. Shub-Niggurath owns this school, doesn’t he?”

  This time, Coach Harrison recoiled. “How dare you speak his name?” she demanded.

  “Easy,” said Jude. “He doesn’t own me. He doesn’t own any of my family. He’s the servant of a different darkness.” Her teeth ached. Her skin buzzed. It would be easy to kill this woman, so easy to surrender to what her body wanted and her heart denied. “When you see him, ask what he knows of Yibb-Tstll. Ask him what he knows of blood.”

  Five Pumpkins held Coach Harrison back as Jude turned to the rest. “Get the football team on the buses. They should be pretty easy to convince. Tell them we won. They’ll believe you.”

  “What if the other team fights us?” asked Marti.

  “They won’t.” Jude glanced at Coach Harrison. “They know they can’t win without messing with our minds. They didn’t want a real game. They wanted a slaughter.”

  “We’ll have it,” hissed Coach Harrison.