The Bride of Dagon Collection Read online

  Somehow, the plane came to a stop. Yuri cut the engines and they began to rumble down until there was silence inside the plane other than the ticking of the cooling engines and the pattering of snowflakes against the windows.

  “Alright back there?” Shouted Sara.

  “Alive,” moaned Megan, half out of her seat. “More or less.”

  Sara unbuckled to help Megan, but Megan had already managed to get to her feet by the time Sara joined her. Yuri opened the plane’s side hatch and unfolded the stairs down to the ground. It was night, but quite bright outside, owing to the mostly clear skies and moonlight shining down on the snow. Crosswinds raised clouds of snow from the plain that gently sloped down to the melted inlet. Yuri was inspecting the Il-12’s landing skis when Sara and Megan descended from the aircraft with their gear.

  “Bit cold,” said Sara, her breath steaming in crystalline clouds through her scarf and the fur-lined hood of her military parka. She swore she could feel the wind cutting through the lenses of her snow goggles.

  “I have something for that,” said Megan, cracking something in each of her hands. She slipped to chemical warmers into the inner pockets of Sara’s parka. The heat spread through the coat’s thermal lining, creating a barrier against the bitter cold.

  “Ta, love,” said Sara, giving Megan’s padded bum a swat with her gloved hand. “You stay with the plane, help Yuri if he needs it, and make sure he doesn’t try to fly off and leave me.”

  “If he wants to get paid, he’d better not try it,” said Megan.

  “Right, well, make sure he doesn’t try it,” said Sara and she handed Megan a machine pistol with a telescoping stock. “Be gentle about it, though.”

  “Oh, you know me,” said Megan, slinging the gun over her shoulder. “I’m always a sweetheart.”

  She crunched off through the snow towards Yuri. Sara was less worried about Yuri abandoning her than whoever might be waiting for her near the inlet. They had to have seen the plane land and they would be waiting for her. She had a guess as to who it might be: a certain annoying Russian woman who liked motorcycles.

  Sara unclipped her radio from her belt and switched it on. Static washed in her earpiece for a moment before stabilizing on the encrypted channel.

  “Can you hear me, Baxter?” She spoke into her headset.

  “Five by five, Miss Chambers,” said Baxter. “The drone will be in position in a few minutes. Cold and wind is a bit of a bother, but nothing she can’t handle.”

  “Well done then,” she said. “Give us a buzz when you have a view of the target location. I’m expecting… complications.”

  “Aren’t there always?” Baxter said cheerily.

  “Right, time for a bit of downhill,” she said and clipped her skis onto her boots. She set off on the gentle slope down to the inlet, her skis hissing through the snow. She used her poles for stability as she took sometimes sharp turns around snow-covered boulders. She built speed for more than a kilometer, all the way down to a slight rise in the terrain, at which point she turned and slashed the snow, stopping her momentum. She tucked her skis and poles into a bundle and added a GPS marker to the package.

  Still a hundred or so meters from the inlet, she bellied down against the ridge. She lifted her goggles and looked at the small encampment through a pair of binoculars. There were two large military-style cargo trucks and a half-tracked snow crawler, as well as a geodesic frame structure. The flaps at the entrance of the structure were open and blowing in the wind. There were lights on in the dome, a generator running, but no signs of human movement.

  Sara adjusted her focus to look at the rusty hulk anchored just off the coast. There were motor boats moored to the hull and some dangling lights bouncing in the wind. The ship was pretty clearly the Heart of Kiev. There were no markings on its rust-eaten hull, but the ship’s structure and layout was identical to the class of steamships built just before the First World War.

  “Quiet down there,” said Sara into her radio.

  “On station, Miss Chambers,” said Baxter. “Taking a look in Infrared.”

  She could make out the high zip of the drone over the rush of the wind, the groan of the anchored ship, and the snapping of the windblown fabric of the shelter.

  “Hotspot by the geodesic,” said Baxter.

  “Just a generator,” said Sara. “Get in close on the ship. They might all be aboard the ship.”

  “One second… no… nothing on the decks… let me…” Baxter’s voice faded out and into a long wash of static. “One tick…”

  “What is it?” Sara demanded.

  “I am getting heat through the hull, lower decks, back of the ship,” said Baxter. “A glob of heat. Like they’re all crowded down there. Like… the colonists in Aliens.”

  “What? What are you on about, Baxter?”

  “Nothing,” said Baxter. “Look, there is heat in there. What I can read through the windows and hull are about 5 degrees, so it could be a lot of people crowded into the lower decks.”

  “Right,” said Sara, tucking her binoculars back in their case. “I am going to find out what is happening. If I don’t come out, don’t send anyone else in here. Do you understand me, Baxter?”

  “You don’t have to do this, Miss Chambers,” said Baxter.

  She had already climbed over the ridge and was running towards the geodesic dome. She rolled into the structure’s entrance, bringing her pistols up as she cleared the blowing flap. The lights were on inside the tent, snow swirled through the open flap, and there was a cup of coffee frozen solid on a folding table. Charts and scribbled notes written in Russian seemed to confirm Sara’s suspicion that Svetlana was leading this group.

  Sara also came across a secured laptop. She activated it and the word “XERXES” and a rotating green logo that resembled the head of a falcon appeared on the screen. She didn’t recognize the logo and couldn’t bypass the security features, but she made a mental note of the laptop.

  “I’ve got something for you, Baxter,” said Sara. “I’ll pick it up on the way out.”

  Sara left the tent and approached the trucks next. They were gassed and with the keys sitting in the vehicles. She skirted the rocky shoreline, the dark water of the harbor becoming slush in the shallows and lapping languidly at the stones to leave a glistening coating of ice. The float plane bobbed gently up and down, its interior cockpit lights glowing softly. There was a single rigid-bodied motorboat floating in the slush and tied to a stake pinned beneath a rock.

  “Going to take the boat over,” she said.

  “Be careful,” warned Baxter.

  “Thanks for the advice,” said Sara, climbing aboard the boat.

  The motor was frozen dead and without some way of heating up the engine she resorted to using an emergency paddle to row the boat awkwardly out to the drifting hulk. It towered high above her, but a rope ladder had been rigged to the top deck. She caught it and scrambled nimbly up the side and onto the ship.

  The frost-caked wheelhouse on the upper deck was holed in a hundred places and slumped sideways as if in danger of complete collapse. One of the hatches was open and Sara approached cautiously, shining her torch into the darkness. She gasped and the cold seemed to penetrate her layers of clothing at what she saw within.

  Half a dozen bodies sprawled on the rusty floor of the deck. They appeared mummified and covered in a thick layer of glistening slime that glittered with frost. They might have been the salt-preserved corpses of the original crew, if it weren’t for the fact that they were wearing modern cold weather gear and holding modern assault weapons. There were several shell casings frozen to the floor, but no signs of wounds on the corpses. It was as if whatever had killed these men had sucked out all their life force.

  “Baxter?” Sara whispered into her headset. She heard a choppy reply and then static. “Baxter? If you can hear me, I’ve come across some dead bodies. At least some of our rival expedition has been killed by whatever is on this ship.”

  Another squawk of static answered, followed by a brief burst of clarity.

  “…do not go further. I will let…”

  Baxter’s urgent message to get off the ship dissolved into a squeal of feedback that stabbed at Sara’s eardrum. She cursed and tore the earpiece out.

  “The hell with that,” said Sara, cutting off the radio. “This is not finished.”

  She backed out onto the deck and gestured to her earpiece to the spot in the sky where she thought she saw the drone wobbling against the crosswind. She moved around the rust-eaten wheelhouse and continued aft. What must have once been a grand staircase descended into the depths of the Heart of Kiev. Many of the wooden stairs had rotted away, leaving behind the rusted iron framework of the staircase. The ship swayed and creaked ominously as Sara clipped a karabiner to the top of the stair frame and one to her climbing harness and descended abseiled into the darkness.

  She landed on the sloping floor of the lower decks and shined her flashlight down the hall. Mold-speckled doors stood open on both sides of the halls. She noticed at once that several trails of the glistening slime had been left on the refuse-strewn floor. She advanced with her guns out and encountered two more of the dead bodies. Both men were clutching assault rifles and had the same withered appearance as the men in the wheelhouse.

  A faint, bluish light from her left caught Sara’s attention. She dimmed her torch and swung around the doorframe, aiming one of her pistols into the room that seemed to be the light source.

  Tsarina Xenia Kochenkov was as beautiful as the paintings Sara had seen of the woman in various history books. She was slender, with a delicate face and supple limbs. Her curly hair flowed around her shoulders. Every part of her, including the bodice and skirt she wore, was a light, powdery blue in col
or. She faintly emanated light of the same pale blue color. It took Sara a moment longer to realize the tsarina was hovering a few centimeters above the rotten floor.

  She was singing a Russian lullaby to herself and playing with a glowing baby booties. It was so clichéd that Sara almost refused to believe it.

  She was looking at a ghost.

  “Tsarina Kochenkov?” Sara spoke softly, lowering her aim, but not her guard.

  The ghost turned her head slowly, her glowing hair floating around her head as if she were underwater. Her eyes glowed a bit brighter than the rest of her as she stared at Sara.

  “Bloody hell,” whispered Sara.

  “It will know you are her,” said the ghost in Russian in a soft, distant voice. “It knew the others… the women… it took them. Soon… soon…”

  The ghost of the tsarina turned away and resumed fondling the baby booties. She began to sing another Russian lullaby. Sara took a step closer.

  “What will know I am her, tsarina?” Sara asked, her hair standing on end on her neck.

  “The beast with one thousand arms,” said the tsarina. She turned again took look at Sara. “You are very pretty. I am sorry for that. It’s going to like you a lot.”

  “Like me?” Just then, Sara heard a noise echo in the hall that seemed to issue up from the lower decks.

  “Mmmmmhhmmm,” said the tsarina, nodding her head solemnly. “It will take you down in its arms and it will stuff you full. Like all the others… like…”

  The ghost of the tsarina runs her hand over her flat belly. Sadness contorted her delicate features. Tears swelled in her glowing eyes and fell in smoky droplets that dissipated in the air.

  “They will be mothers,” she whispered. “But… not… the…”

  Something groaned from below, closer than before and rasping slowly up the hall.

  The tsarina’s image flickered and disappeared and Sara had the impression it was almost like the radio messages she had received from Baxter that had kept cutting out. Sara stepped into the room, over to the debris-heaped table near which the ghostly figure of the tsarina had appeared. Something blue glinted amid all the debris. It was a tarnished silver necklace with an unusual, large blue diamond that seemed to be clasped by tiny silver hands.

  “The Tsarina Stone,” whispered Sara. It was one of the treasures assumed lost with the ship and not one Sara had even hoped of finding after so many years. She reached out for it, but before her fingers could make contact, something shot into the room and grabbed Sara around the waist.

  “Ahhhhh!” She cried out, still reaching for the necklace as she was dragged from the room and out into the hall. It took a moment, and the wet, slurping grunt of whatever had her, to snap Sara out of her desire to take the necklace.

  One of her arms, the one holding a gun, was pinned to her side by whatever had wrapped around her waist. She looked down as she was dragged off-balance into the deeper darkness of the ship. Thick, fleshy, gray and pink tentacles seethed in the hallway. Some, like the one wrapped around Sara’s waist, were as big around as her thigh. Others were as slender as her index finger. They twisted and knotted in on each other and made a gruesome, wet sound like a pail full of earthworms.

  “Not appetizing,” grunted Sara, trying and failing to free her right arm.

  She reached her left down to her holster and drew her other pistol. She pressed the barrel to the slime-sheathed flesh of the tentacle wrapped around her waist, braced herself to pull the trigger dangerously close to her hip, and stopped. The tentacles had dragged her into the bottom hold of the ship. In that dark, cavernous space, a perverse scene was playing out that nearly drove Sara mad.

  Tentacles covered the floors and walls, as if they were appendages within the fleshy insides of some massive creature. Seven naked human women shared the chamber with the tentacles. Some had the hard bodies and sharp haircuts of mercies, some had the soft look of researchers, and then there was scarlet-haired Svetlana.

  All of the women were eagerly pleasuring and being pleasured by the tentacles. The soft moans of their ecstasy filled the chamber. Sara passed one woman, broad-shouldered and handsome, who had three tentacles stuffed into her cunt and one in her arse and was riding them both furiously. Another woman was sucking slime from a thrusting tentacle as another thrust between her breasts and showered her with glistening spurts of goo. Sara was dragged closer to Svetlana and she saw the beautiful Russian treasure hunter was sucking and fucking the tentacles, her thighs smeared with goo and her belly distended with all that she had swallowed and had pumped into her pussy.

  It was a scene straight out of one of those awful Japanese cartoons Sara had caught Baxter watching on more than one occasion. At the center of it all was a jewel-encrusted egg, the halves split open and leaking a glowing purple miasma. The tentacles, as thin as blades of grass at their roots, emerged in great bundles from the split artifact.

  “The Egg of Balykov,” gasped Sara. Not only had she found it, but it was real and more terrible than even the darkest legend had suggested. This blasphemous artifact must have been what caused the ship to disappear. Clearly, whatever perverse entity or portal lurked within the egg had been reactivated by Svetlana and her team.

  Sara realized she was so overwhelmed by the scale of the madness and perversion taking place that she had allowed herself to be drawn nearly to the egg itself. She quickly pressed her pistol back against the rubbery tentacle wrapped around her waist. She was in the glowing miasma. She took a deep breath and tried to pull the trigger… tried to… pull…

  The dark ship’s hold seemed to break apart in chunks like a house of cards caught by a gust of wind. The dark, rusty plates and bundles of tentacles tumbled into an azure sky and revealed a grassy hill and a courtyard of white marble.

  All of the women Sara had seen being fucked by the tentacles were there with her in the courtyard. Some were naked and some wore diaphanous gowns of white. A similar gown clung to Sara’s otherwise nude body.

  The women were caressing, kissing, laughing, and moaning as they gently competed for the attention of a handsome man with slightly Asian features, dark eyes, long, dark hair and a matching thicket of beard. He wore a white toga opened to reveal his enormous, erect cock glistening with the kisses and nectar of the beautiful women that surrounded him. At a gesture this cooing crowd of women parted and he stepped forward, approaching Sara with a serene smile on her face.

  “Ragusthka,” whispered Sara. She had just enough sense left in her mind to raise her pistol and shoot the bastard in his smug face.

  Unfortunately, her pistol was a flower, a rose that matched the color of the miasma that she had been drawn into by the tentacle. Instead of shooting the tsarina’s mystic, she offered him the flower. He took it from her, plucked off the thorns, and tucked the steam of it behind Sara’s ear.

  “There you are,” he said in a calm, sweet voice. “Welcome, Sara Chambers, flower of London. A beauty without compare. I am honored you have come to my garden.”

  “I know what you are doing here,” she said to him, although she meant it as an accusation, her words came out in a sweet, cooing tone that made her thighs quake. Her gaze was drawn to his hard manhood and she was forced to imagine what it would feel like plunging into her delicate quim and stretching her tight arse.

  “Of course you do, Sara,” said Ragusthka. He took her hand gently and she felt a buzz of pleasure at even this friendly touch. His dark eyes gazed at her. “You know the history of my people as well.”

  “Hunted by Cossacks and the tsars,” said Sara, aching to caress his handsome face and muscular chest. “Tortured by… by…”

  “Yes, tortured, slaughtered, driven from our lands, marginalized,” said Ragusthka. “When my family was driven from our tribal lands, I sold my magic to sailors and criminals, those looking for something illicit, women who wanted to please their husbands or husbands who could not stiffen their flesh for their brides. Imagine my surprise when the tsarina came to me and offered me piles of money and limitless access to forbidden objects.”