Seven-year-old Suki Hashioka had always been scared of things that went bump in the night, particularly when those imaginary Things were lurking in her closet or under her bed. A nightlight helped, but jamming a chair beneath the handle of her closet door was even better, because everyone knew that Things had trouble with door handles at the best of times. One thing Suki had never considered, however, was that a Thing might come for her one sunny afternoon, in broad daylight. That just didn’t seem fair – especially as the Thing in question didn’t emerge from the closet but from somewhere else entirely…

Hearing a sound on the first floor landing outside her bedroom, Suki set aside the book she was reading and went to investigate, believing it was her mother stacking laundry or some other everyday task. But the landing was empty. Suki slowed, immediately concerned. She’d definitely heard a sound, and now there it was again, from the end of the hall – but the only thing she could see up there was the full-length mirror her mother had recently purchased from an antiques house in London. Suki hadn’t liked the mirror when she’d first seen it, which had been odd because children are so often delighted by their own reflections; now she positively despised it.

In fact she was terrified, and her childhood intuition was right on the money. Because the image staring back at her through the darkened surface of the mirror wasn’t a reflection of any kind, it was something altogether… different. It was black and green, of indistinct shape, and its eyes lit with a deep, red glow. It had claws for hands. It had teeth. And, as Suki watched on in mute horror, the creature seemed to swell and drift and float, like a fish in a tank or seaweed washing up upon the beach…

…and then the Thing from the mirror reached out, its claws making that terrible wet, sharp, skritch-skritch-skritch sound that had attracted the girl’s attention in the first place. Suki screamed.

And considering that similar scenes were playing out all across England – and beyond – at that precise moment, she sure as hell wasn’t the only one…

THE ABYSS

Part III: Yea, Slimy Things Did Crawl With Legs Upon The Slimy Sea

By Meriades Rai

“By the hearts of the Shining Ones, what is this devilry…?”

In another part of the country far from young Suki Hashioka’s plight – in an auction house of the King’s Road in London, to be exact – the sorceress Clea expressed a cry of breathless horror. She faltered at the sight that greeted her beyond the door she’d just opened – a hall of mirrors, with black, grasping claws reaching from each and every looking glass towards her – but quickly gathered her wits and thrust out her own delicate hand in turn. Her fingers weaved whilst she breathed an ancient and otherworldly incantation, and in response the air about her rippled, and shone with a greenish hue. Before her, the plethora of spidery claws quivered and recoiled… but they didn’t retreat entirely. Instead they flexed slowly, regaining their strength so that they might begin to reach out again in search of fresh flesh.

Clea grimaced. Beside her, her companions looked on in alarm.

“Well then,” said Janet van Dyne, the Wasp, in a hushed voice. “I’ll tell you this much, my walk-in-wardrobe with its full length dress mirrors back home in Manhattan? I’m seriously thinking about getting those dismantled…”

The hall of mirrors was a secret chamber located at the back of Airlume’s, the London auction house that was proving to be a front for something far more insidious. The mirrors in question varied in size and design but were all ornately framed and – as had recently become apparent – originated from the ancient, undersea realm known as Lemuria. The owner of the auction house, Ms. Lemuria herself, was in fact a scheming villain named Llyra, and the mirrors were part of some nefarious plot, the finer details of which thus far remained obscure. What was plainly evident was the fact that something – some Things – existed beyond the surface of the mirrors, and were now reaching through into the real world with black, dripping tentacle-arms of kelp and oil and dead bone. It was as if these clawed hands were thrusting from the very walls, blindly scrabbling for flesh and blood.

The six women clustered at the threshold of the room, an odd assortment of heroes, were momentarily dumbfounded.

“You’ve stopped them coming through?” Jackie Falsworth – Spitfire – asked Clea, her expression hopeful. Clea shook her head.

“I’ve conjured a magical ward to reinforce the remnants of the barrier that was already in place,” she explained. “But that barrier’s weakening. And I’m not strong enough to stop the invasion that’ll occur when it falls.”

“An invasion? Like that creature I fought back at Falsworth Manor, what did you call it…?”

“The Mindless One? No, that was an anomaly, worrisome in itself but not necessarily important right now. These creatures are… something different.”

The Wasp, miniaturized to a height of six inches and borne aloft on beautiful gossamer wings, hovered above Clea’s head, her Wasp’s sting at the ready. “So what are theyexactly?” she asked.

Clea faltered. “I don’t… I’m not—”

“They are the Dead. The Unforgiven Dead.”

Namora, the Avenging Daughter of Atlantis, stepped forward. She was a tall and powerful woman with regal gait, her narrowed eyes like slivers of ice. It was a sobering fact that even she regarded the obscene clutching of the blackened hands that filled the room with a tremor of fear.

“It’s a portent of doom,” the Atlantean breathed. “The witch Llyra has finally succumbed to her madness… and now she means to kill us all!”

The stygian blackness of the ocean depths was not absolute; rather it was lit with veins of phosphorous ore and weed that, although beautiful in one sense, was also reminiscent of some cankerous strain that blighted the ocean floor. Dwarfed by gigantic pillars of volcanic rock, clustered about the shadowed edges of an enormous trench that rent the ocean bed, the creatures known as the Unforgiven Dead milled restlessly, their red eyes bright in the gloom and their many teeth glinting in kind. Their rotting flesh dripped from their bones like polluted bile. They bore ancient swords and spears and shields in their claws. Their hearts – such as they were, for they were now merely unbeating lumps of black fossil in their cadaverous chests – swelled with some uncanny thirst for blood and suffering.

The time for invasion was nigh. And they had been waiting so very, very long…

“You would have us slay all who oppose us, Queen of Lemuria?” a voice hissed.

Llyra turned languidly in the phosphorescent drift, the glow touching her dark green skin and still darker hair, and igniting fiercely in her pale, oyster pearl eyes. Compared to the Dead she was an incandescent beauty of the softest, silkiest flesh, but when she smiled the sea witch revealed sharp teeth of her own. Monsters, it seemed, came in all forms.

“Slay everyone and everything, my lord, regardless of opposition,” Llyra snarled. “The surface world deserves no mercy… all the more so now that she has returned. Oh, Namora, you wretched fool. It would have so much easier for you just to stay dead the first time…”

Two shapes moved forward from the undersea shadows, both tall and spindle-thin, both dressed in fetid robes of net and fishskin, and with narrow heads crowned by coiled horns of bone. One was male and the other female, although there was truly little difference between them. They were both animated corpses in an advanced state of decay, more deformed skeletons than beasts of flesh.

They were the Dark King and his Priestess. They were harbingers of death.

And they, along with their legion of Unforgiven Dead, were Llyra’s weapons, primed and ready to unleash upon a world she abhorred…

A black hand grasped, but Namora was ready for it, grabbing it by the wrist and twisting it with immense strength. The arm reaching from the blackened mirror – from the world beyond the mirror – snapped in twain just above the wrist, and behind the swirling glass something quite definitely inhuman shrieked in pain.

The splintered arm withdrew quickly, leaving its severed hand behind, but was replaced almost immediately by another clutching limb. Namora cast the ruined appendage aside with a spit of disgust, then stepped backwards, away from the seething mirrors on all sides.

“The undersea nations boast their own myths, their own religions, as much as you of the surface world,” Namora told her companions. “One such legend tells of a faith in Atlantean gods known as the Old Ones. Those who embraced this faith practiced dark magicks and indulged in ritual sacrifice. The nearest equivalent in human terms would perhaps be Satanism, though the Old Ones – the Elder Gods – pre-date your modern religions by countless centuries. Legend states that the followers of the dark faith were a nomadic tribe whose horrific nature earned the wrath of Lord Neptune himself and who were eventually slain in battle with other clans, Atlantis included. But the dead – theUnforgiven – existed on in exile, their corpses animated by their own vile magic. It is said that the rulers of the tribe – the Dark King, Suma-Ket and his Priestess, Artys-Gran – would one day return to subjugate all life, both in the oceans and on land…”

The Wasp shivered, watching the severed hand that Namora has recently discarded. It was still moving, like a fish out of water that refused to perish. “You think this is them?” she asked.

“In the brief time since my resurrection, while searching for Llyra, I’ve heard many tales of events that have come to pass during my time in suspended animation,” Namora murmured. “It seems that Suma-Ket and the Unforgiven returned to plague Atlantis a few years ago. They were defeated by my cousin Namor, even apparently destroyed, but dark magic has a way of perpetuating. And the stench of these… monstrosities, added to my intuitive sense of them like a hereditary fear, and the fact that they’re connected to Lemuria – yes, I think this is them.”

“Sure stinks like dead fish to me,” muttered Shuri, the Black Panther. “Let them come. We’ll shred them to zombie sushi.”

Clea eyed the Wakandan warrior in her ceremonial black costume of the Panther, her expression concerned. Shuri met the sorceress’ gaze, and although her own countenance was hidden behind her mask, her disdain was as obvious as her growing impatience.

“What I’m saying, Tinkerbell,” the Panther snarled, “is that standing around here hoping your pretty little-pinkie-finger faerie magic does the job isn’t going to save the day. The Atlantean Princess here, she’s got the right idea. Best to let them through, keep them contained in this room, slice and dice them into pieces…”

“An interesting strategy,” Clea said, evenly. “But the Lemurian mirrors aren’t confined just to this room. Jackie owns one. Others have seemingly been sold, and shipped all over the country, perhaps the world. That was undoubtedly Llyra’s intention, to liberally distribute the mirrors so that the invasion can occur at numerous locations at once.”

“We’ve been auctioning mirrors for the past three weeks,” a small voice confirmed. “We’ve sold dozens.”

This was the final member of the group speaking up, the mysterious girl named Skadi, now in human form whereas recently her true nature – that of a Jotunheim Frost Giantess – had been revealed. Skadi had been employed at Airlume’s, and it was she who’d directed the heroes here. Unfortunately they’d arrived too late to prevent Llyra’s escape.

The Black Panther growled in frustration behind her mask, but her irascible nature disguised a cool intelligence and the strategic cogs were already turning. “Okay,” she snapped. “It’s not enough we destroy these mirrors or wipe out the threat here. So… we go there. There being wherever these things are coming from.”

“And there being wherever Llyra escaped to,” Namora agreed. “She was here. She must have heard I was coming for her blood and absconded through one of the mirrors, and if they all lead to the same place it doesn’t matter which. I can follow her.”

“We can,” Shuri persisted. The Wasp glanced down at her, eyebrow raised.

“We? We’re a we now?”

“Back at the café, during our delightfully girly tête-à-tête, you were offering advice about how I should ingratiate myself into the superhero community,” the Panther said, every word dripping with sarcasm. “Time to put your money where your mouth is and show me the ropes, Auntie Janet. Or try and keep up. Either way.”

“You’re a rude one, aren’t you?” Spitfire noted. “Don’t play well with others and all that?”

“And you’re the archetypal rich bitch sucking on her silver spoon,” Shuri said, coolly. “We all categorize so well, don’t we?”

“Goodness, it’s like being a member of the X-Men…” The Wasp rolled her eyes, then looked at Namora and Clea in turn. “Listen, if we’re going through one of those mirrors, like a sisterhood of proverbial Alices through the looking glass, I’m presuming that we’ll be ending up under the ocean, yes? Black magic undead merpeople, watery graves, Davy Jones’ Locker, et cetera. Clea, can you conjure up whatever’s necessary for us to survive whatever physical conditions we’re likely to encounter? Breathing underwater, depth pressure…?”

The Panther huffed, but the fact that she demurred to the Wasp without another word showed she concurred. Clea looked unsure. “I can try. But, as I told Jackie, magic’s not just about waving a wand and hoping for the best. It’s more complicated than that.”

Wasp smiled kindly. “Honey, I’ve spent years fighting alongside the Scarlet Witch and I still don’t understand the first thing about magic or hexes or any of it. Don’t take this the wrong way, but to someone like me? It is what it is. I don’t know anything about car engines either, I just know you turn the key in the morning and hope it starts. You do whatever you need to do, and we’ll be grateful for what we get. Okay?”

Clea breathed deeply, then nodded. The Wasp flew close and pecked her on the forehead with a tiny, tiny kiss.

“Excellent,” she said. “Just one thing? Turn me into a mermaid or some kind of half-wasp, half-haddock person and I will never forgive you…”

The filthy black claw reaching from the mirror almost snagged Suki Hashioka’s dress, but the screaming girl pulled back at the last moment and fell on her bottom with a thump. The shock of this bump snapped her out of her immediate fear and her shriek died in her throat. She stared at the Thing in the mirror through wide, dark eyes, then clenched her fists.

Get a grip, Suki, she told herself. You’re seven now. Seven! What would mama do in this situation…?

It was a pertinent question. Suki’s mother, Tamara, was no ordinary parent. She was a genius, and a hero to boot. She’d had her fair share of dealing with monsters. That was one of the reasons Suki was so terrified of Things; she’d always loved her mama’s stories, but knowing that monsters were real was a lot different to thinking they were just the product of fairy tales…

Suki could hear her mother downstairs, in the kitchen. She was listening to the radio. The laundry machine was in spin cycle too. It was no wonder she hadn’t heard her daughter scream. Suki knew she could escape if she wanted to, that for some reason the Thing in the mirror wasn’t able to push through fully into her world, but on the other hand, here was a chance for liberation. If Suki could prove that she was a hero like mama, if she could drive this monster back, then maybe she wouldn’t have to be scared ofany monster ever again…

Suki’s eyes narrowed and she muttered something cool and courageous beneath in her breath in her native Japanese. Tamara Hashioka had relocated her family to England because she’d said she was done with the Japanese government’s scientific research division, and with SHIELD, and with monsters in general. At seven years old, Suki Hashioka now realized that monsters had no respect for political or geographical boundaries.

Suki shuffled backwards on her rear end, staying well clear of the clutching claw from the mirror, and skidaddled back to her bedroom. The item she wanted was to be found, ironically, in her closet, the place where she’d always thought the Things were lurking. Instead she found the tech apparatus her mama had gifted her the previous year, telling her that it no longer worked as it was supposed to but that it was a fun gadget to tinker with nonetheless. Suki’s mama had no idea that her daughter’s aptitude for technological science surpassed even her own, and that for Suki tinkering meant trying to restore any such object to its original state.

Suki Hashioka understood that the device she now held in her hands was something sonar related, not at all offensive but something she could use to bluff the Thing in the mirror perhaps, and to drive it back. She was absolutely delighted with her own skills, and also her fortitude.

It was unfortunate for all concerned that brave little Suki, seven years old, was about to unleash another, far greater threat upon her adopted country…

In the depths of the ocean, in that sickly phosphorescent glow, Suma-Ket and Artys-Gran advanced upon the trench that split the seabed before them. In the darkness of the crevasse there were dozens of glittering points of light, apertures in the fabric of reality itself: dimensional rifts. These lights demarcated the other side of each and every ancient Lemurian mirror that Llyra had distributed from her auction house in the surface world, and were thus portals through which the Unforgiven invasion could originate. That time was close…

“Gaze into the Abyss, disciples of the Old Ways!” Suma-Ket roared. “Feel the gathering power of the Elder Gods deep below, awakening from their slumber… hear the stirring of their hunger, and their murmurs of joy that we stand on the brink of such immense sacrifice!”

“Reach forth, our children!” cried the Priestess, Artys-Gran, joining her voice with that of her King. “The barriers are weakening, the membrane between worlds now thin as newborn flesh! Tear it down… and conquer!”

The legion of Unforgiven Dead screamed in response, raising their black swords and spears and surging forward to the edge of the Abyss…

…only to be thwarted at that exact moment by a sudden an unexpected eruption from the depths, and the sound of both splintering glass and a rupturing of the real world.

“Black fiends of the nether-ocean, I have a message for you,” Namora snarled, emerging from the trench with her allies at her flanks. “You shall not pass! So swears the Avenging Daughter of Atlantis!”

“And… the rest of us!” Spitfire yelled, shaking a fist. She then faltered and glanced at The Wasp, who was still miniaturized and hovering at her shoulder. “You know,” she said, “we really have to work on a team name, don’t you think?”

Wasp smirked. “We’ll put it on the agenda, right after ‘surviving an attack from undead Atlantean invasion force’. Okay?”

“Works for me, love. Works for me…”

The Unforgiven were baulked only momentarily; as soon as they realized they were faced with an adversary sortie that was unimpressively low in numbers they surged forward as one in a flurry of black blade and claw. Namora and the Black Panther met the oncoming tide instantly, each as eager as the other to plunge into battle, whilst the Wasp – though more surgical in her approach – was no less fearless, drawing away a hefty portion of the undead pack at half-speed before accelerating and beginning to dive and cut and deliver a rapid volley of precise bioelectric stings. Shuri was equally elegant in her own way, if not more so; for all her earlier displays of irritable savagery, once battle was joined she was a dervish of beautiful speed and movement, quickly acclimatizing to the changes of velocity and equilibrium required in the ocean depths. Namora, for her part, was a behemoth of fist and fury, and she cleaved through the masses of the Unforgiven like a holy weapon.

Low in numbers, yes. But the Dead were quick to discover why the Earth’s heroes boasted such a formidable reputation…

The other three women in the group help back at first. Spitfire glanced back at Clea and saw that the sorceress was preoccupied with the trench behind them, ripples of magic flowing from her outstretched hands as her luxuriant violet cloak drifted about her.

“I need to close the rift!” Clea cried. “That way, even if we fall here, we’ll have curbed the immediate invasion.”

“We won’t fall.”

“You don’t know that, Jackie. You’ve retained the strength and vitality of youth far longer than any human should, and your speed of thought and instinct has warped your perspective. You can’t help thinking yourself immortal. But don’t allow that to make you complacent.”

Clea’s words weren’t intended as rebuke, anxious or otherwise; it was simply her nature, a mixture of naivety and biting honesty. Nevertheless, Spitfire was stung and scowled in response. “For someone who’s only known me for five minutes I’d say you’re too quick to make judgments,” she declared, although even as she spoke she was admonishing herself as much as her new ally. She thought of the late Steve Rogers, her one-time companion Captain America. He’d been long-lived too… but not any more.

“I’m sorry,” Clea murmured, hesitating in the task at hand. “I didn’t—”

“Forget it. More important things to worry about” Spitfire turned sharply to the last of the group, Skadi. The young girl looked stricken, and Jackie’s demeanor softened to see it.

“Underwater,” Skadi whispered. “Breathing underwater…”

“Actually, no,” Clea corrected. “I’ve manifested personalized energy fields around each of us, allowing us to breathe and function as close to normal as possible. But it won’t last forever. I can send you back through one of the dimensional gateways if you’d like, but you have to decide quickly.”

Skadi shivered. “If… if I grow… like before…?”

“The energy field expands with you.”

“Go back, sweetie,” Spitfire murmured. “You’re not one of us. A hero-type, I mean. You don’t have to do this.”

Skadi blinked, then her expression darkened.

“Frost giants have our honor,” she declared, her voice now deepening even as, bizarrely, her physical mass begin to shift. “You’re doing what’s right, little mortals, regardless of being outnumbered. I won’t abandon you to your fates…”

Skadi grew, and in doing so created a surge of displaced water that scattered all about her, friend and foe alike. She didn’t appear to notice. Instead she merely reached out and snatched up a fistful of wriggling Unforgiven and, ignoring the way they stabbed at her knuckles with their swords and spears, drew them close to her face. Her expression was furious.

“Stay still, rotting fish people,” she commanded. And then she breathed upon her captives, and the dark water all about them suddenly bloomed with a beguilingly beautiful explosion of pearly-blue ice crystals, freezing the undead warriors in mid-struggle.

Spitfire stared up in awe, then glanced back at Clea and grinned. “See?” she said, with a wink. “No worries. But this ‘little mortal’ also needs to start pulling her weight, so if you’ll excuse me…”

And with that she shot away at high velocity, slamming into the nearest group of Unforgiven and bowling them in all directions. Clea watched her go, her expression uneasy. Her anxiety increased as she looked back towards the trench, and the glitters of light that still flickered there. No worries? Well, that all depended on whether she could close these rifts – and how they’d been opened in the first place…

“Adversaries, Llyra? Some human, some not, but all determined to thwart you… a flaw in your grand plan?”

Llyra of Lemuria whirled upon Suma-Ket, her alluring face now twisted with contempt. “Don’t presume to mock me,” she hissed. “If not for me, you and your beloved Priestess would still be nothing more than piles of black, forgotten bones on the ocean floor, unmoved since Namor of Atlantis defeated you.”

Suma-Ket snarled, drawing himself to his full height. The horns upon his head uncoiled like something alive. In his shadow, Artys-Gran stirred in similar fashion. Llyra paid neither of them any heed. She’d feigned deference to the Dark King and his consort when she’d first resurrected them, wary of whatever power they might possess, but seeing them now – and watching the way a ragtag bunch of human women were rallying against their Unforgiven – it was fast becoming apparent that she’d overestimated their usefulness. Fortunate, then, that she had other far more potent weapons to—

“Llyra!”

The Lemurian turned as she heard someone shriek her name, and her pearly eyes widened as she saw Namora emerge from a throng of Unforgiven Dead, scattering severed limbs in her wake. One of the undead thrust a black spear towards the Atlantean’s spine but she swatted it aside with barely a murmur, before grabbing the Unforgiven about the throat and removing its rotting head from its shoulders with a simple flex of muscle.

“You all but murdered me!” Namora growled, her eyes blazing. “You left my beloved daughter an orphan, sentenced me to decades of restless sleep in a funeral casket, corrupted my adopted kingdom—”

“Lemuria didn’t belong to you, any more than Merro, that idiot husband of yours!” Llyra seethed. “You were an interloper!”

“And you were a jealous, treacherous whore. One whose death is long, long overdue.”

“You think yourself a match for me? The sea is my domain as much as yours, or your worthless cousin – but I am more ruthless and cunning than you’ll ever be. The beasts of the ocean will heed my call! The Unforgiven Dead are just the beginning. I shall raise the kraken and the hydra! I shall conjure giant serpents and cephalopods, and leviathans beyond your imagining! I shall destroy the surface world, and then Atlantis! Llyra and Lemuria shall be supreme!”

“Not if I end you, here and now…”

Namora lunged forward. Llyra, braver than perhaps she first appeared – and certainly stronger – rose to meet her enemy’s attack. In the shadow of this personal battle, the Wasp, the Black Panther, Spitfire and Skadi advanced through the ranks of the Unforgiven Dead with ferocity and determination, whilst Suma-Ket and Artys-Gran looked on, planning their own offensive strike…

…but, in truth, none of this was the real threat. It was an important conflict, yes, but it was all only a prelude.

As Namora and her allies were about to discover…

In the depths of the ocean, there was a stirring.

Something was awakening…

Suki Hashioka sat hard on her bottom once more, breathing heavily. The mirror at the end of the hall was still dark, but the black claw had retreated, almost as soon as Suki had trained her sonar upon it – but was it because it had felt threatened, or for another reason entirely? Now Suki could see strange images in the smoky glass, images of battle, and of an ethereally beautiful woman with silver-white hair and violet robes, drifting as if in deep water beneath the mirror’s underside.

Had Suki just saved more than herself? Had she saved the world…?

“Suki?”

Tamara Hashioka ascended the stairs to see her daughter sitting on the carpet, a strange but familiar device in her hands. Tamara frowned. “Suki, what are you doing with that? And why is it… is it…”

Suki looked up as her mama faltered. The device was glowing, every light lit. It was operational, the sonar screen alive once more and eliciting a merry chirp. Tamara gasped, sinking to her knees.

“Oh my God,” she breathed. “You got this working? How…? Suki, baby, what did you do?”

“I fixed it, mama,” Suki said, gleefully. “I’m going to be a scientist, just like you. And hunt monsters, like you did with SHIELD. Like in your stories, from before I was born? Look, I just zapped my first one!”

Tamara looked at the mirror where Suki was pointing, and she paled. She could see the battle raging beyond the glass now, and the strangely shimmering face of a woman with silver hair. And there was a rumbling, a trembling, emanating from whatever world existed inside the mirror’s heart…

The sonar device bleeped.

Tamara dropped it as if it were something alive.

“You fixed it,” she breathed, incredulous. “And then… you woke him up. You summoned him. After all this time…”

“Him, mama?”

Tamara Hashioka – once of SHIELD and the Japanese Red Ronin project, in what seemed like a whole other lifetime ago – looked on in fear.

“Gojira,” she whispered. “The beast. The king of monsters…

“Oh, Suki. You’ve woken Godzilla…!”

NEXT: Godzilla, King Of Monsters, advances upon England! Suma-Ket and the Unforgiven Dead rally for one final, desperate attempt at invasion! Llyra invokes unspeakable leviathans from the depths! Clea makes a worrying discovery! A race against time for Tamara and Suki Hashioka! And the Heralds are caught in the middle of it all! Don’t miss HERALDS # 4 and the stunning conclusion of… The Abyss!