No Pain, No Gain (Pt 3) (Cthulhu Mythos)

No Pain, No Gain

A Cthulhu Mythos Short Story by Spike Valance

Part Three


Axel was just excited, almost electrified by his body’s augmented efficiency. In heats he had broken the scholastic record and he was neither at first lap. The teenager was really feeling his legs charging the turbo like a Lamborghini and this persuaded him to undergo a further session of Doc West’s alchemies, though it wasn’t going to be costless; a golden thin chain Hayley gave him for the 17th birthday of his could be sacrificed but Doc had different plans.

An experimental electro-stimulating device – as West dubbed it – has been employed in next treatment; it was endowed with strange nonagonal-shaped electrodes made of a glossy jet-black metal never seen before; Doc called it Tuloo or Tulu, it was quarried somewhere in Oklahoma and one could feel it as ductile to the touch as pure silver or some quicksilver’s alloy.

“In its natural state” West explained “it’s not so plastic; this one is of a very rare and special alloy, a blend of native Tulu Metal and a peculiar liquid siderolite of η-Pegasidean kind.” (Whatever all those scientific mumbo jumbo was supposed to mean).

In a nutshell those weird black plates had to stimulate certain ganglia and neural connections the human body doesn’t employ ordinarily; with the addition of the alkaloid injection and the suprarenal turbo those would have increased Axel’s performance also augmenting white fibres count in muscles.

The teenager came back West's the following week: exalted.

But the more satisfied he was, the more the injections and treatments’ price rose, leading the youth to pawn everything most precious he had got; he even managed to secretly draw family savings, to the point that some teachers suspected of an involvement of his in a racket of drugs, usury or both; but none had got or could retrieve the proofs of it as long as Axel didn’t confide in with anyone. He just didn’t with his parents and let alone with his girlfriend Hayley.

Mr. Teague was the most distrustful, not either persuaded of Axel’s sudden and too much suspicious physical improvements. He drew the youth aside one day facing him up and inquiring if he was taking drugs or anabolic steroids of some sort. Axel resolutely denied but the coach didn’t trust and ordered him an anti-doping test, the sole idea of which threw the teenager in utmost dismay but he couldn’t escape from it.

Nor Teague or Axel liked what the urine sample revealed.

Absolutely nothing.

The coach was incredulous, Axel himself just bewildered by the results; West’s mysterious serum had left no traces in the teen’s fluids, or at least not detectable ones. Way much detailed examinations were required to confirm Teague’s suspects but costs were high, times very long and school’s budget not wealthy enough to cover the expenditure. The old coach’s suspects had to hopelessly remain such, Axel secretly breathed a sigh of relief but this prevented not the teacher to distrust his obscure methods.

The months went by, the Kingsport’s Athletic Contest was ever closer and the records achieved by the teenager were increasingly astonishing and worth of mention in local and even national news as well as in blogs and social media. Careless about the costs and the alibis he had to invent day by day to collect money, Axel chose to undergo to complete treatment, a total of twelve sessions, as many as the chapters of a strange old pharmaceutical formulary Doc West used to browse – it was named the Revelations of Draghi? Gaga Agie? Glocky? Whatever… – and each session was followed by a new record, an awesome, enviable figure and a turmoil of heady emotions, including something the teen boy tried to pay not too much heed at first.

By night and often in daytime too when taking a nap at lesson or training time, Axel had a strange dream, maybe due to anxiety or some eerie psychotropic side effect induced by West’s biosynthetic elixir. The point was that each time the dream grew rich of one or two unsettling details previously missing and the thing wasn’t everything but reassuring.

In that recurring dream, always identical to itself, Axel was running in some racetrack caressed by a tepid breeze and exalted by hysterical shouts of a mindless raving crowd; at some point the youth left the track heading towards the locker room but once there he sprang not in the place he was expecting, but kept on running in a lightless and narrow corridor paved of polished slabs as dark and glossy as basalt or serpentinite. Beyond the murky alley Axel saw a surreal, almost unnatural vista opening wide before himself which reminded him the haunted marshlands he had seen in the Tale of Fantasia when he was just a child but in a way gloomier and more disturbing version.

There was an endless brownish mudflat under a leaden and sultry sky, scantily gleamed by a pale flickering Sun periodically eclipsed by the Moon and other additional undefinable celestial bodies. Despite the viscid and incoherent soil, Axel managed to keep the quick pace with no hindrance like a bold imitator of Atreyu, having almost the sensation of prodigiously walking on those foetid waters. In the oneiric march the teenager was looking around but without detecting any familiar place or figure. At some point he spotted in the background a Babelic black keep standing out the marshy sea and suddenly heard a weird buzzing sound propagating in the damp air followed by a dull roar – no, a beckon - of deep, almost subliminal timbre, resounding more in the meninges than eardrums; it was something Axel seemed unable to escape but delirium wasn’t yet over.

Raising the eyes to the pewter sky he had the impression of glimpsing odd winged insectile shapes in frenzied flight above the mudflat. There were of two kinds at least: the former were small, pigeon-sized, with strange, little scaly wings, ciliate thorax and trigonal head endowed with three gaping maws; the latter were larger and would have been human-like in size and appearance if it wasn’t for the membranous wings, the multi-jointed limbs and the hallucinating head, a medley of arthropod appendages and aspergillus or ascomycete-like protrusions.

Nevertheless Axel went on with his frantic run towards the unknown trying to ignore the insectoid things above and around him, until he began feeling something strange beneath his feet, like a track of bumps and humps which seemed not stones or sinkholes. As the teenager lowered his eyes to see his path the dream suddenly stopped, followed by a rude awakening bathed in perspiration; images turned blurry and confused but not devoid of a strange sensation of uneasiness and the feeling he was missing something important or crucial, but he could not get what.

The day of thirteenth session, the conclusive one which would have made Axel Ross invincible, the youth felt really weird at finding the gym half dark and totally desert despite the weekday timetable. He incredulously sneaked in heading for the corridor with the eldritch icons as he abruptly felt grabbing by invisible grasping hands and dragging towards Mr. O’s office. The door slammed loud and the youth was rudely cast on a creaking chair; darkness ruled over the mould-smelling room, with rare light blades of external neon signs filtering through the curtains. A dusty and oppressive mantle of crypt or sarcophagus fluttered inside and despite the dim light the teen spotted Doc West’s silhouette leaning on the desk, nervously smoking a cigarette, whereas Snider was hiding in a shadowy corner with neck muscles stretched.

The two rascals weren’t either angry, they were scared and fear was as palpable as electricity and Axel too was feeling an overwhelming sensation of anguish and apprehension; soon after he understood the reason of such tension, a nervous and tense subjection toward the third man occupying the dark room. The Big Shot, The Boss, Mr. O in person.

To be continued