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Art for The Sea Raiders: Luke Spooner / Carrion House

Cosmic Horror Monthly

www.cosmic-horror.net

Greetings dear reader,

Welcome to this edition of Cosmic Horror Monthly, we are delighted to have you here.

This month, an office worker experiences a radical change following an incident in Hatchling. Then, a task force for Miskatonic University encounters a true eldritch abomination in The Kerouac Defense. Moving right along, we witness a frightfully original tale of first contact in Mother before a young woman tries to save the fate of the world from a creature lying dormant in her backpack in The Night Walks. Stick around until the end for a gorgeous tale by one of the originators of weird literature called The Sea Raiders and a bonus prose poem by the master himself.

Gather your snacks and blankets and light a few black candles while you’re at it. We hope you enjoy this month’s tome, a true curation of creatures.

C.R.

*~*~*

Hatchling

By Scott J. Couturier

On a cool evening in late October, Harold felt the Calling.

It stirred in his blood like the call to drink, but stronger. He moaned and clutched at his head, fretted at his clothing, rose and paced back-and-forth restlessly in his kitchen. He’d been feeling strange for a month now, ever since the accident at work. Things moved under his skin, tingled in the roots of his teeth: Harold was convinced something was breeding inside him. He was drinking too much water, eating too little. The liquor cabinet was getting dusty. Yet, he was gaining weight. His waist had ballooned out in the last two weeks, until all his belts were strained, creaking when he walked, which (since he was an interdepartmental courier) was a lot.

His co-workers noticed. Some urged him to report it to Management. It was important, after all, to document any potential fallout from the accident. Harold promised he would, even grabbed a report sheet as a pretense. But he never filled it out. Management would scapegoat him; he’d seen it happen to too many of his coworkers. They were either fired (virtually a death sentence) or, in cases of extreme mutation, dissected for preservation in the Company records. Harold respected and feared Management, and he didn’t for one instant think they had his best interests at heart.

His waist grew wider and wider. He got wraps and braces to conceal the bloating, and eventually his fellow workers stopped pestering him. Management questioned him, and he reported no ill effects. The interviewer eyed him suspiciously, but stamped his work clearance. This was all before Harold felt the Calling.

It was cold that October evening, wind howling off the lakes. Harold was back home. He, like many of the Company’s lifer employees, could afford a private residence. He’d done his time in the work/sleep tubes in his 20s and 30s, was glad to finally have a place of his own. The Calling! He felt a sudden overwhelming urge to go down to the basement, to the hidden room he’d excavated behind the furnace. There he kept his workshop, his sole secret place. He spent a lot of time down there, tinkering with the neon-colored wind-up toys he assembled as his Company-designated ‘hobby.’ They went to entertain children in the birthing orphanages—or so he was assured by the drivers of the black van that came to collect them every Thursday.

Harold flicked on the basement lights and went downstairs. He’d been having ‘visions’ lately—images of outré cosmic vistas and god-like acts of creation. For Harold (an unimaginative man in an oppressively unimaginative era), this barrage of psychic scenery was overwhelming. He felt like he was changing irrevocably into something else or Other, a state infinitely more profound than mere human. The thought obsessed him as he slid inside his workshop, shut the secret door firmly and nestled himself into a corner. Harold drowsed as he began to excrete a sticky fluid from his pores, mouth, and anus, quickly engulfing himself in a viscous cocoon.

He had dreams in his womb. Fields of star-fire crowned him as he soared among the firmament, every exhalation seeding the spore of life onto lonely, abyssal planetoids. Sentience was his to destroy or bestow. Meanwhile, he could feel his body changing. His bones melted into mush, contorted and reformed into an intricately inhuman frame. His brain split into seven distinct hemispheres, and each developed individually, thinking separate thoughts. New sensory organs sprouted, inroads of wholly alien sensation and dimension. Harold shivered in his cocoon, the skin of the thing pulsing with his delight. Eyes sprouted on the pouch’s exterior so he could peer out at the dark basement room. They came to search for him, of course, but failed to find the secret door. Really, it was a cursory examination. Management was used to workers disappearing suddenly. Usually, Management was responsible for such disappearances.

Harold gestated in the dark, damp, moldering room. Months passed, and new occupants moved into the house. A family. He could faintly hear them shuffling around boxes in the basement, the call of child to parent. Girl, boy? He couldn’t tell, he was no longer possessed of such gross dichotomous discernment. What he knew instead was a singular hunger. Inside his cocoon, the body salivated.

Often, he dreamed of the accident. When this memory came, all eyes on the cocoon slid shut as one. The shattering of laboratory glass, a fume of fluorescent green mist: it went up his nose, down his throat, clung to his skin as he scrambled back. He’d never even been in that sector, had been dropping off a requisition of data-tapes. The cloud burned as it inundated him, and the first itching sensations began soon after. He could recall bizarre etchings on the floor… It almost seemed like that black-robed scientist had pushed the flask over on purpose. What were they working on down there, anyways? The Company had fingers in every pie. He remembered the scientist smirking at him as he choked and gagged. Really, who ever needed spare data-tapes?

Wincing, Harold tried to scratch at himself in the cocoon, but his new body wouldn’t obey his commands. It’s not time yet, he reasoned with himself, returning to half-lulled senescence. The eye-studded sack quivered, resembling something like a sigh. When my metamorphosis is complete, I will bestride the world! And the cosmos beyond... Idly, he wondered if his new body would have wings.

It had to be an accident. They wouldn’t have done this to me—given me this immense power—on purpose.

Once again, it was late October. The wind was warmer than the previous year; storms on the lakes blew even fiercer and stranger. In his cocoon Harold watched as Management deployed puny weather-sifters to do something about the gale-force winds. Harold’s cocoon (he no longer thought of himself as ‘he,’ much less human) was psychic, omniscient. Each eye on his cocoon saw to infinite infinities. His body sprouted wings and seven barbed phalli, a synergy of tapeworm and penis. He throbbed with readiness and virility: it was his time to burst forth into the world. In babbling arcane languages, he thanked the universe for its blind favor—to think, he’d just been dropping off data-tapes! Right place, right time. The first thing he’d do (after despoiling and devouring the family upstairs) was lay waste to Management.

Freedom...the very concept was long-forgotten, stricken from the Company genome. Harold had re-learned it in his long astral traveling. He recalled with shame trembling as he took up spade and trowel to excavate his little illicit hideaway behind the furnace… This shame infuriated him. Harold pulsed with rage and potency, rupturing his cocoon at the appointed time.

He felt pain.

Horrific, tearing, mortal pain. His flesh—the cocoon’s flesh—tore asunder as an impossibly long black limb thrust from its wetness. Acidic embryonic fluids gushed, steaming upon contact with the concrete. Harold tried to scream but could not: he was a mere weeping sack of membrane and eyeballs, consciousness rent alongside his viscera. Gone were the visions of spiraling nebulae, the boundless eternal gaze of godhead, replaced by a subhuman torment. Harold quivered as he understood these perceptions were never his own, but belonged to the foul being he had gestated unknowingly, unwillingly. It let him think he was changing, parasitically sharing its ulterior relativity to lull him into cooperation… That body was never mine!

Suppurating, his myriad eyes weeping afterbirth, Harold beheld his offspring. A jet-black god-abomination from the void between stars: ebony-muscled, hundred-mouthed and thousand-eyed, hungers acute as the cold of space. Then, mercifully, he was devoured.

End.

*~*~*

Scott J. Couturier is a poet & prose writer of the Weird, grotesque, liminal, & darkly fantastic. His work has appeared in numerous venues, including The Audient Void, S. T. Joshi’s Spectral Realms, Eye To The Telescope, Cosmic Horror Monthly, The Dark Corner Zine, Space and Time Magazine, & Weirdbook. Currently he works as a copy & content editor for Mission Point Press, living an obscure reverie in the wilds of northern Michigan with his partner/live-in editor & two cats.

The Kerouac Defense

By Chad Eagleton

At the time of the incident, Ezra Gaskell was dreaming again about the day he found his grandfather dead in the root cellar and discovered something terrible waiting for him in the cool dark beneath the old Dunwich farmhouse.

He felt the presence behind him and, turning slowly—very, very slowly—from his grandfather’s body lying there on the packed earth, an incessant ringing throbbed through into the dream world so when he felt the prick of talons on his shoulders and he opened his mouth to scream, the scream came out as a brrrring-brrrring… brrrring-brrrring…

Gaskell opened his eyes to darkness. He was awake but confused, part of him still in the nightmare even as the other part was aware he wasn’t.

…brrrring-brrrring…brrrring-brrrring…brrrring-brrrring…

He stared, dumbfounded at the phone until he recognized the specialized ring. He reached for it and someone started pounding on the door.

Gaskell rolled out of bed, snatched the phone, and fell to his knees. Standing, he thumbed to answer but managed only a grunt as he stubbed his toe on his dresser. He stumbled from bedroom to hall, still not speaking, discovered the sharp edge of a toy his son had lost, and finally managed a hello as he opened the front door.

A blast of frigid New England air brought him solidly awake. Wade Morgan and Shirley Armitage both stood on his stoop, bundled and shivering in the bitter cold.

Shirley smiled weakly.

Never one to mince words, Morgan said, “You need to get dressed immediately,” and pushed his way through the door.

Gaskell blinked, hung up and looked stupidly at his phone. “What’s going on?”

Shirley licked her lips, looked around, and then gently shut the front door. Quietly, she said, “We have a potential Dunwich-level event.”

Gaskell was dressed in under five minutes. The three remaining members of the secretive Dunwich Committee on Student Safety were en route to a quiet house in the student slums in less than ten minutes.

*~*~*

Morgan drove quickly down an icy Arkham street.

No one did anything until it was too late…Trying to mentally prepare himself for what might lay ahead of them, Gaskell rolled through everything his grandfather had ever told him about the Dunwich Incident, hoping that experience and initial action would make all the difference.

He scratched his thinning hairline and said, “We—”

Shirley knew what he was thinking. “—Have an official sighting of an entity.”

Sighting – that took his breath away. The Committee had dealt with a lot during his tenure. Emanations, cults, sorcerers, ghouls, a riot, and student psychotic breaks. But they had never dealt with an actual entity.

When you see something like that, it’s hard to accept…

Gaskell sat all the way back in the rear seat. This is what they had always been prepared for, but now that it was actually happening—an extradimensional entity had made an incursion with potential to run amok—it seemed he wasn’t sure of the word he was looking for, insurmountable maybe.

“Any idea where it came from?” He asked. “Was it summoned?”

“It was not summoned,” Morgan said. “We think it is extraterrestrial.”

“Like landed in a damn spaceship? A saucer?”

“No, we think the entity is an ancient astronaut,” Shirley explained. “Possibly spawned from one of the Lake samples.”

“Lake? What lake?” Gaskell rubbed his eyes. For a moment, he thought he might still be dreaming and the thing from the cellar would reach out from under the front seat any minute and try to pull him down into the darkness where his grandfather lies.

“Not a lake,” Shirley said. “Professor Lake. We think it’s one of his samples.”

Gaskell sighed. He rubbed his hands over his face again. The name sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it. At his day job as the “Special Student Advocate” for Miskatonic University, he regularly dealt with faculty. But as acting chair of the Dunwich Committee on Student Safety, he was privy to a vast number of names and incidents that had long been kept secret from the student body, the faculty, and the world outside the university.

When Shirley started to say, “Professor Lake was part of the 1930 Antarctic expedition—” it came to him immediately. He nodded and interrupted, “The one that MU financed and everything went horribly wrong?”

“That’s the one,” Morgan took over. “Professor William Dyer was the only one to make it back alive and whole. Through the university’s foundation, the Committee paid for his care for quite some time.”

“I didn’t think anything made it back but Dyer’s account.”

Shirley nodded. “Well, that’s what we thought,” she said. “However, from what I’ve managed to quickly reconstruct: Lake apparently managed to send a few things back before his camp was destroyed.”

Gaskell nodded appreciatively. When Shirley assumed her position—birthright, really—as Head Librarian and member of the Dunwich Committee, one of the first things she had suggested was using computer systems to not only better manage their own resources and information, but allow the committee almost unrestricted access to all of the university’s systems without wading through a mountain of university bureaucracy and red tape. It had proved to easily be one of the smartest decisions the committee had ever made. “Okay,” he said, “so how’d these samples end up in a house in the student slums?”

Shirley shrugged. “Best I can tell? They were misfiled.”

“I get that, but still—”

Morgan took over. “The house belongs to a grad student. He’d been given the shit job of clearing out old storage—”

Gaskell nodded. Get a grad student to do it was tenured faculty’s favorite means to dodge anything approaching real work.

“Best Shirley and I can figure, he came across the misshelved samples, was intrigued, took them home and ended up accidently reviving a prehistoric monster from beyond the stars...”

Gaskell leaned forward to see the dark, wintery Arkham skyline through the windshield. He didn’t see any flashing lights or rampaging horrors. “How’d we find out?”

Morgan slowed and looked at Gaskell in the rear-view. “Grad student didn’t show up to work. Didn’t respond to emails and phone calls. His supervisor called MUPD for a wellness check—”

Gaskell trembled. Unless there was belief that a student was in immediate danger or posed an immediate threat to others, he was supposed to be notified before the university police did anything and even then, protocol was for him to be notified en route. “Who took the call?”

“Lucia and Kneale.”

Gaskell didn’t know Kneale but was very familiar with Lucia. When he was still a cadet, the young officer had been involved with the terrible incident at the Pickman Exhibition, an exhibit the School of Fine Arts had unwisely sponsored two years ago. Lucia had handled the violent encounter better than most. When he’d applied to be a full-fledged officer, Gaskell had thrown all his support behind him.

Shirley looked out the window. “Kneale,” she said, “is not in good shape.”

“Dead?”

“We don’t know.”

“Lucia?”

“Look there,” Morgan said, pointing ahead of the vehicle as he turned carefully onto the cross street. Gaskell looked out the rear passenger seat window and saw Officer Lucia standing on the edge of the sidewalk, looking lost and shivering in the cold.

Gaskell stepped out of the car, looked around at all the dark windows and empty driveways. “’Least it looks like the neighbors aren’t home.”

“Thank Christ for winter break,” Morgan said, shivering

Lucia looked tired. “They fill you in?” He asked.

“Mostly,” Gaskell said. “But not exactly what happened with you and Kneale.”

Lucia kept his explanation simple. “We both went up to the house. Knocked, no answer. I remained on the front stoop to knock again while Kneale started around the side. He made it about halfway before stopping in his tracks, clutching his head, and screaming. He fell on the spot. I think his nose was bleeding but couldn’t be sure in the light. Hasn’t moved since.”

Morgan avoided looking in the direction of the rental house. “You think he spotted…”

“Elder thing,” Shirley said. “That’s what they were called in the account from the 30’s expedition.”

Morgan glowered at her. “—spotted the Elder Thing and either had a mental break or suffered a telepathic attack.”

“Attack,” Lucia said, sharply. “He was definitely attacked in some way—psychically or whatever—by the Elder Thing. When he screamed, I started to corner the house and almost immediately felt like a...uh...a buzzing in my head. It made it hard to think so I immediately retreated. I know it was the thing.”

Gaskell stared at the house across the street. It was very quiet and still. A single light burned in a side window. The stillness made everything far more ominous. “How far before it stopped?” He asked. “The mental noise, I mean.”

Lucia thought about it for a moment. “As soon as I was back around front, it subsided. At the sidewalk, only a low buzz. Across the street there, it was more of...an awareness of a mental presence. When I got here? Nothing.”

Gaskell buried his hands deep in his pockets and squeezed his arms in close to his sides. “Anyone been close since?”

Both Morgan and Shelly shook their heads. “I grabbed Armitage and we came straight to get you.”

“Anyone but Kneale actually see it?”

“I have,” Lucia said. “From here. Keep a pair of binoculars in the cruiser.”

“Get them,” Gaskell said, already formulating a plan.

A wide-eyed Morgan handed Gaskell the binoculars. “It’s possible,” he said, “the thing might be sickly.”

“Or young,” Shirley ventured. “Not fully matured.”

Gaskell took a deep breath and looked through the binoculars. He spotted the thing immediately. He guesstimated it to be a little over three and a half feet tall. Its body was barrel-shaped but tapered on one end and thick in the middle. Fleshy appendages ringed the truck like malformed arms. The head rose from the tapered end and looked almost like the head of a slug but with multiple eyestalks. Useless wings flexed and flapped.

“So we’re thinking that it’s not fully, what? powered?”

“Aloud that’s a terrible thought,” Morgan said. “But yes.”

Gaskell handed the binoculars over to Lucia. “Well,” he said, looking at all their faces, “we can’t let it out of there. If that’s a young one—”

“Goes without saying,” Officer Lucia said.

Shirley sighed before she spoke, perhaps already knowing what response she would be met with. “Do we know communicating with it to be out of the question?”

“Really?” Morgan scoffed. “You saw what it did to the other police officer.”

“Yes,” Shirley said, “but he had a weapon.”

Morgan rolled his eyes. Gaskell stopped the verbal onslaught he knew would follow with a calming hand on Morgan’s shoulder.

Officer Lucia seized the opportunity. “Ma’am, there’s something else you might want to see.” He handed Shirley the binoculars and pointed. “The thing is in that window there. Officer Kneale is there,” he said. “But move three paces to your left and look in the second story window. It’s dark and hard to see, but if you look closely…”

Shirley took a breath and followed the instructions.

“You see that?” Lucia asked.

“Yes,” she said quietly.

“That’s your grad student. The creature has experimented on him.”

Shirley swallowed and started to lower the binoculars. Lucia tutted and raised them back up to her eyes. “Now look here,” he said directing their gaze. “At the bottom northwest corner. That used to be the grad student’s dog.”

“He’s been vivisected,” she said softly as she returned the binoculars.

The power on the entire block fluctuated. Officer Lucia rushed forward to the edge of the safe zone, scanning the house with the binoculars. “It’s building something in there,” he warned.

“That thing can’t walk out of there,” Shirley said. “It can’t.”

“How do we do it?” Morgan asked.

Gaskell took a deep breath. “Do we know if the other houses around are actually empty?”

“I can check—” Lucia started.

Morgan grabbed his arm. “Do it quietly,” he said. “Very quietly.”

Shirley gestured for Officer Lucia to wait until Gaskell was finished. “What are you thinking?”

“It’s not pretty,” Gaskell said. “But I think the easiest thing to do would be burn it down. With the thing inside.”

“What about the fire department?” Shirley asked immediately.

Morgan looked at Gaskell. “Surely we can delay them long enough?”

“Might not need to,” Lucia said. “If the houses check out. I mean, it’s late, it’s cold as hell out here. The damn thing can burn quite a bit before anyone notices it.”

“The house is also old. Probably not up to code.”

“What’s to stop the suspicion of arson?”

Gaskell scratched his ear. “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”

Shirley rolled her eyes.

“I can help run inference.” Lucia nodded.

“We might not need to exercise even that much force. This is the student slum for a reason. At the beginning of the school year, I directed several students who live right around here and were having landlord troubles to legal services.”

“So what do you need?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never burned down a house before.”

“Gas?”

“That’s a little obvious don’t you think?”

“Not if we give them something.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a propane grill around back. Way too close to the house.”

“You can’t shoot it and make it explode. I saw that on MythBusters.”

“No, but if the tank’s full we can open the valve…”

“Okay so that’s covered,” Lucia said.

“Not just yet,” Morgan said. “What’s to keep it from just leaving?”

“You mean when the house goes up in flames?”

“Yes, exactly.” Shirley said. “Isn’t that what you would do immediately? Leave a burning house?”

“She’s right—needs to go up quick,” Lucia said.

“Maybe we should start carrying weapons,” Morgan said.

“I have my sidearm and a shotgun in the car.”

“Get the shotgun,” Gaskell said. “You said you felt the creature’s mental presence?”

“That’s right.”

“There is something else,” Shirley said. “To use the tank to start a fire, someone is going to have to get close.”

“That’s also how we’ll keep it from fleeing.”

Morgan considered quickly. “You mean, like a what, a mental battle?”

“Yes.”

“It dropped Kneale like that, what makes you—”

“I don’t know but I’m gonna try.”

Shirley was horrified. “Ezra—”

“Anyone have a better idea?”

When no one did, Gaskell, said, “No? So let’s get going.”

*~*~*

Gaskell stepped off the sidewalk and immediately felt what Officer Lucia meant by the Elder Thing’s mental presence. It started as a low buzz, a kind of a dull throb, like the onset of a headache.

Gaskell took a deep cold breath. The shock to his lungs was intense. He focused on that pain as a mental distraction and moved quickly across the street.

Unfortunately, the distraction vanished quickly and his mind became all too aware of the loud sloshing of gas in the 5-gallon can and begin rapid-fire spinning a host of scenarios of what terrible thing might happen. Then, stepping onto the sidewalk, he slipped on a dark patch of ice, and without warning, the Elder Thing became perceptible. The sensation was immediately strange—the awareness of another consciousness adjacent to the nebulous mindscape where Gaskell’s I-voice dwelled was disconcerting.

His mind started to race with fear and doubt. He held the gas can tight, listening for the sloshing to subside while hyperaware of the alien mental presence. He tried to observe the presence in his mind. It seemed as though it hadn’t detected him yet.

Gaskell moved as quickly as he could across the yard. The problem was that now he couldn’t shake the fear of slipping and the fear of spilling the gas everywhere, including on himself.

Again, he tried to focus elsewhere. This time he tried to suss out the Elder Thing’s powers. He supposed its default mental state might exist in a larger kind of group consciousness, free of the constraints of its physical form, it was aware of all the minds nearby and lay in wait like a predator eager for something to catch its attention. If there were a way to know what it was that mentally triggered a psychic assault response, then perhaps…

*~*~*

Officer Lucia sat in his cruiser and checked his weapons. When he was satisfied, he rolled down the window and handed his sidearm to Morgan. Morgan thanked him with a nod, slipped the pistol in his coat pocket, and took up position on the sidewalk.

Lucia sat the shotgun across his lap. He took a breath and stared at the house across the street. He was struck by how normal it looked. So often in horror movies, the house where the bad stuff goes down looked weird and creepy and you’re watching it thinking, why the hell would you going in there? But this house looked like any other house.

Lucia remembered then how normal things had seemed in the Fine Arts building that night before those hungry things had come up from below the campus.

Looks truly are deceiving, he thought before he closed his eyes to pray.

*~*~*

Gaskell knelt beside Officer Tom Kneale. Gaskell had seen dead bodies outside of funerals, but there was something particularly startling about the MU police officer. It wasn’t just the dried blood in his ears and around his nostrils. It was how vacant his eyes looked, as if something essential had been ripped from inside before the rest of the body could even process that it was dead.

Gaskell closed the officer’s eyes and continued on around the house. He immediately felt the Elder Thing invade his mind. He had thought he would be able to put up more of a fight, but the creature’s psychic tendrils easily tore through everything he thought of as mental toughness and raced through pillaging his internal landscape.

A crushing wave of panic washed over him. His heart beat hard. His lungs ached, he felt like he couldn’t catch his breath. His stomach knotted and trembled. His asshole clenched.

He knew there was no way to keep it from plumbing the depths of his consciousness. Whatever training he had ever done mentally could not match up against this alien entity from beyond the stars.

Breathe, Ez. Breathe.

Gaskell didn’t have to outmatch it though, he just needed to keep one part of his thoughts hidden—his intentions and what he was doing outside the house.

Quickly, he did two things. He partially relented—let the thing sort through the trash heap of my mind—and tried to throw back a conscious attack of his own, a vivid assault of ephemera, a gambit he had referred to in the past as The Kerouac Defense.

Anything and everything that came to him. Dog breeds—pugs, Pekinese, Pomeranians, pitbulls. All the strange character names from the anime his children watched—Naruto, Goku, Vegeta, Sebastian Michaelis. The different colors and patterns of his ties—red, burgundy, navy, purple, paisley, argyle. Each and every one of the CDs gathering dust in his closet, from Fiona Apple to Frank Zappa. Useless bits of movie trivia—Tom Selleck almost played Indiana Jones, The Golden Child was originally a thriller set to star Mel Gibson, John Wayne passed on Dirty Harry and regretted it.

Meanwhile, around front, the timer on Shirley’s smart phone chimed. She slipped the phone into her coat pocket, stepped off the sidewalk, and immediately did the only thing she had been able to think of as she slowly approached the house.

She began singing Taylor’s Swift’s Shake It Off in her head.

Not just singing it but also picturing the words in her mind, almost like a read along. With the words, she added images. Sometimes snippets she remembered from the video. Sometimes Taylor Swift’s face—a huge portrait with moving lips, like the projected image of Big Brother only this was sweet Taylor.

And when she stumbled on the lines or felt herself following into a mumbled humming that only invited intrusive thoughts into her head, she switched lyrics. Jumping to an associated Taylor Swift song or simply the next song she could think of before returning, ever and always, to Shake It Off.

*~*~*

Gaskell felt the mental pressure lessen. He assumed that meant that Shirley had entered the fray. He gripped the gas can with both hands and quickly rounded the house.

*~*~*

Morgan’s alarm chimed. He took a deep breath and found his feet couldn’t move. He took another breath and started forward, only to stop immediately with the first sense of the Elder Thing’s mind. He had been a declared atheist since he was little more than a child, but very loudly, he said, “Please God no…” and considering praying.

He glanced over at Shirley. He could see her lips moving as she sang to herself.

“Come on, man,” Morgan said, under his breath. He took the cold air deep into his lungs, held it till it burned, and stepped off the sidewalk.

It was like diving into a frozen river…only with your mind as the distant alien consciousness bore down upon him. Morgan fought to regain the surface. But it wasn’t just the strangeness of it or even the intensity with which the thing probed at his thoughts, it was the deep and lasting blow to his ego.

Morgan had always considered himself well-educated and smart—brilliant even. He thought of himself as an asset to the university and to his community of fellow scientists, as an unparalleled and disciplined instructor who shaped the malleable young minds of the world’s future leaders and now—

None of that was true. This alien consciousness tore through his mind like it was wet tissue paper.

Remember the plan… Remember the plan…

The alien presence stopped at the word plan. The mental pressure lessened and Morgan felt a sense of understanding from the thing—something about the word “plan” made sense to it. This was all buried under a rapid search of the contents of Morgan’s mind, information being pulled to his surface thoughts, quickly examined, then tossed as this thing strived to quickly understand the word plan and then to understand what went into the particulars of this the plan.

Ah hell—Morgan pushed back. First, simply willing the thing out of his head. The thing blew over his will like a tidal wave shattering a crumbling sea wall.

Morgan began to cry. The psychic backlash was so intense he felt his knees bend as his hands shot to his skull, convinced his brain was going to leak from his ears. He grunted back to his feet and choked down his pride. He tried the first thing that came to him, reciting the periodic table. The Elder Thing was familiar with it, more familiar even—Morgan had a brief flash of unknown elements—that it registered only as a bump in the rapid cycle through his consciousness.

Morgan’s mind raced for something else, something to pour over. His desperation was so intense at that point and the possibilities so wide open, he felt himself shutting down. Then it came to him—

Women—

Let’s see, first was…Lizzie Kirkman. He remembered her braces. The way her mouth looked when she laid back on the old couch in his parents basements. The peppering of pimples along her hairline she hid with too much makeup…

Later that summer was Jenny Cruiser…God, he though, her mouth always tasted like grape bubblegum…

*~*~*

Gaskell reached the backyard and nearly screamed with relief. Which unfortunately lessen the mental barrage of word associations he had thrown at the creature. He felt its tendrils once more grip his mind and he knew immediately and instantly, deep down in his bones, he had never known anything else, that the only thing that kept the creature from ripping the contents of his consciousness away and taking it for its own was the continued distraction-assault by his fellow committee members.

Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, rocky road—Rocky and Bullwinkle…moose and squirrel, tutti fruiti—Little Richard…Good Golly Miss Molly…

Gaskell sensed confusion in the Elder Thing. Confusion and frustration. Even freed from the trappings of spoken language as the creature was, it struggled to make any sort of sense of the images, feelings, tastes, colors, associations and memories each of the word-concepts carried with it.

…Miss Molly…Molly Dodd…The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd…staring Blair Brown…a young Blair Brown…long before she appeared on Fringe…young and sexy short haired Blair Brown…God I crushed on her…the Cleveland Browns were named for their first coach Paul Brown…Brown is a color…the German word for brown is braun which sounds like brawn…brawn—brawny paper towels the quicker picker upper…uppers dowers ludes…Christ, sometimes, I miss illicit drugs…

Gaskell unhooked the tube to the grill and turned the valve on the propane tank full blast. He stood quickly, tried the door, found it unlocked. He opened it and was hit with a wall of heat and realized the Elder Thing had been adjusting the climate inside the house to something more suitable.

Gaskell splashed gasoline on the floor, along the walls, and even tried to fling some to the ceiling. He stepped quickly back out of the doorway and tossed the can against the grill.

Drugs rugs hugs…hugs…his grandmother had given the best hugs…shrugs…students shrugged a lot…so many times in his office, he’d asked them questions, and their only response would be a shrug.

Gaskell glanced briefly at the open door and he saw the Elder Thing standing there in the hallway. Quickly, he grabbed the knob and slammed the door closed and when door hit the jam—the cellar door slammed above him and—

Ezra’s breath caught in his chest. He looked down at his hand and saw it was his hand. His adult human hand. Hairy, wrinkled, scarred, and still with that worn spot around his finger where his wedding ring had been too tight all the years he was married. But he had a sense of himself, as he had that day long ago in Dunwich, as a scrawny, scared child.

“This is not real,” he said aloud.

The root cellar was cool and dark. Dirty shafts of light knifed through the worn ceiling slats. Ezra could hear his grandmother above him. The creak of her every movement across the kitchen floor. The rhythmic sway of the boards as she stood at the kitchen sink, dressed a chicken and shifted from one leg to the other, one leg to the other.

Ezra turned and rushed up the stairs. As soon as he laid hands against the cellar doors, he felt a weight press back from the other side. The doors wouldn’t budge.

His ex-wife called to him from the other side. “You stay down there, asshole. That’s where you belong. In the dark and in the ground. I hate you and I’ve always hated you.”

Ezra sat on the steps, stooped beneath the cellar doors while she laughed at him from above. “This is not real,” he said. “She’s not here. She’s in Kingsport, teaching at the Hall School.”

Something moved under the stairs.

Reflexively, Ezra raised his legs and looked below. He saw old boxes and crates rising out of the darkness below like skyscrapers rising out of the fog. There was nothing—directly below, the darkness moved, it swished, and roiled not like true darkness but like pitch-colored water churned by the tail of something large and predatory.

Ezra gasped, stood to flee, forgot where he was, and cracked his skull—the Elder Thing stood at the backdoor, its fleshy appendages slapping against the glass—and tumbled down the stairs, landing with a hard thud on the packed earth.

“Not—”

Something scratched at his canvas tennis shoe.

Ezra looked and saw his right foot was against the bottom step. A long finger tipped with a brown-nail talon retreated into the darkness.

He kicked at the stairs. Flipped over and pedaled away from the darkness, screaming.

His grandmother called down from above. When he looked up, he could see her bent over, looking at him through the slats. “Is that you down there, Ezra? Are you trying to look up my skirts? You little pervert, you want to see an old woman’s panties, don’t you?”

“No,” he said, with his deep man’s voice.

“No,” he said, looking away, and suddenly speaking as a child.

Gaskell closed his eyes. This is not real. You are standing in the backyard of a house in Arkham. The Thing has you trapped psychologically. This is not real. Not real.

“It is real,” Shirley Armitage said.

Ezra opened his eyes. He was standing in the center of the room. Ugly yellow light poured through the floorboards. He could hear the load swish of her grandmother’s skirts as she twirled around singing about panties. The rest of the root cellar was total darkness.

Shirley’s square face pressed out of the thick shadows and into the light. Her watery eyes looked as vacant as Kneale’s had. “It’s real,” she said again. “We’ve failed. The Elder Thing has eaten our minds. This is how we shall spend the rest of eternity. Torn shreds of consciousness tossed together like a brain salad.”

This is a trick, he thought. Bring your awareness back to the body. The body is always in the now.

“It’s not a trick,” Shirley said. “It’s real. This is it. This basement forever. Why don’t you just give in?” She stepped into the light and she was wearing an old timey dress, like the ones his grandmother had kept in her closet and never worn. The fabric was patterned but thin and tight against her frame. He had never noticed how shapely Ms. Armitage was.

“See,” she said, unfastening the buttons down the front of her dress as Ezra felt his nose begin to bleed. “You do like me.” She pulled the dress open and slipped her breasts out. “We can have fun forever.”

Ezra felt a pain behind his left eye. He touched his nose. His blood was warm. “No,” he said, and Shirley hissed at him as her entire body folded in on itself and retreated back into the darkness with strange scuttling movement punctuated with the constant crack of bones while his grandmother sang louder about perverts and panties.

“He likes me,” Emmalee Pearson said suddenly standing behind him, touching him lightly on the back of the neck.

Ezra elbowed her arms away, spun and retreated from her and her newly claimed spot in the light. When his back brushed against the wall of darkness, he felt it undulate against him and when the darkness touched him every bad thing that had ever happened to him, every intense moment of fear, every breath-stealing incident of terror, every single bit of pain, flashed across his mental landscape.

He felt something wet in his ears.

“He likes me,” Emmalee Pearson said, tossing her long dark hair out of her face and moving toward him slowly. She wore a long Mistakonic University sweatshirt and a pair of black leggings printed with red vines and flowers. As she moved, she pulled the sweatshirt slowly over her head.

Ezra couldn’t help but notice her hips and her thighs and how tight the leggings were against her mons pubis and there was her stomach…

“No,” Gaskell said. “No. It’s not her. You checked in on her last week. She’s doing fine since the incident. She’s cut her hair. This isn’t her, her hair—”

Emmalee tossed the sweatshirt. It hit the wall of darkness and was sucked inside the black. Her hair was suddenly short. Bobbed just below her chin.

“I know you want me,” she said, pressing against him. “It’s okay. I want you too. You saved me. I’ve never been with a real man.”

She kissed him hard on the mouth. He tried to push her away but she held him tight. They spun. He struggled in her grasp as she kept telling him to take her, and suddenly his children were standing on the stairs, jumping up and down in time with their chant, “Daddy’s a pervert. Daddy’s a pervert.”

Ezra screamed and pushed Emmalee’s face away until her neck cracked and suddenly she let go as her head flopped against her spine.

He backed up as she put her hands on her hips and turned slowly around. “Now, look what you’ve done, Ezra,” her dangling head said. “Look what you’ve done!”

“You’re a bad boy,” his grandfather said, grabbing him from behind. “A bad, bad boy.”

“You’re dead,” Ezra said. “You’re dead.”

His grandfather squeezed him hard enough, Ezra felt his little ribs compress and he squeezed his eyes closed to keep from screaming out in pain. “You’re dead too,” his grandfather said and pressed his mouth close to his ear. Ezra felt that mouth open wide and phlegm-covered tentacles slide out of it like a crab sliding from its shell.

Somehow, his grandfather continued speaking, “All your friends are dead.”

Gaskell opened his eyes and said. “…all my friends—”

The Jim Carrol punk song filled his mind. The opening riff blew his grandfather backward and when he hit the darkness, the darkness retreated, taking with it the old farmhouse cellar.

“—who died,” Gaskell screamed and tossed the match.

The Elder Thing knocked the backdoor open.

The fumes ignited and the explosion knocked him down. The Elder Thing emitted an eerie panicked and pained noise, its stalks trembling like a plant rustling at the passage of some larger creature.

Gaskell watched the rear of the house go in flames and realize suddenly he was on fire. He curse, scrambling backwards, slapping at his legs, rolling in the ice and the snow.

The Elder Thing stood there dumbfounded as fire rolled up the creature’s barrel-like trunk.

Gaskell stumbled to his feet, still retreating from the fire and the creature. He fell backwards, landed hard on his hip against a thick piece of ice. He immediately felt the thing’s consciousness reach out toward his mind. Instinctively, he knew it would try to take over his mind as its body died.

Desperate, Gaskell’s mind raced for something, maybe the song again, no, not that song, another punk song, and then he noticed his arm was on fire and he slapped it against the wet snow and his felt his mind—

The shotgun boomed. He looked up as Lucia pumped the empty casing clear, moving steady around the creature. Morgan stood near the side of the house, conscious of the rapidly spreading flames. He took aim and fired. Missed completely, his shot pinging into the grill.

Shirley called his name and ran across the yard to him, shielding her face against the bright glare of the flames.

Lucia fired again. This time striking dead center in the trunk. The Elder Thing squealed and collapsed down and in on itself.

Shirley dropped to her knees, sliding a little in the snow even as she flung it against his burning coat.

Morgan moved away from the house, around toward Lucia but slightly behind the more experienced police officer as he pumped the next round clear. He didn’t fire but held his gun at the ready, in case the thing got up again and made it through the officer’s onslaught.

Lucia moved closer and fired on last time, blowing a large hole in the trunk of the creature. It waivered, seemed like it might topple over into the now roaring flames. When it didn’t, Lucia cleared the chamber, and kicked it backwards into the house before falling back.

Shirley batted the fire on his sleeve out and slid up closer to Gaskell. “Are you okay?”

Gaskell looked at her, then up at the night sky.

“Are you okay,” she asked again.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “Punk rock will never die.

Shirley brushed her hair away from her face. “What?”

Gaskell laughed as smoke overtook the expanse of the stars in the wintery night sky.

End.

*~*~*

Chad Eagleton is a former reader forNeedle: A Magazine of Noir, served as co-editor for theBeat to a Pulpwebzine, and was one of the last to write for the legendary counter-culture site Disinformation. He is also that editor ofHoods, Hot Rods, and Hellcats, a 1950s-themed crime anthology featuring an introduction from the legendary Mick Farren.

Chad lives in the Midwest where he is completing a biography of forgotten crime author Shane Stevens, tentatively titledThe Darker Half.

Artist: Donyae Coles

Mother

By R. Gene Turchin

She watched with other engineers hunched over the feeds from remote cameras as the pumps pulled the smoke from the tunnel after the fire was extinguished. A twelve-foot section of the tube had been shredded, as if blasted by a runaway food processor blade. Thick metal was torn like ripped paper. An inky blackness seemed to writhe in the depths of the collider tube. Sarah’s team was tasked with inspecting the torus ring to evaluate the accident.

It took an hour after the blast to exhaust the smoke, shut down the equipment and test for toxic material. Even though indicators were negative for toxic debris, they still followed protocol by suiting up. Wearing anti-c coveralls and a helmet like the others, Sarah brought up the rear of the group of nine scientists as they inched forward through the narrow maze of pipes and cables.

The group moved shoulder to shoulder in pairs, the bulky suits obscuring the view through the passage for all except the two men in front. She could only see the backs and oversized head gear of the men in front. Movement was difficult and shuffling in the tight space.

The lead pair, a mechanical engineer and photographer, stopped abruptly as if blocked by a wall. Those in the middle and rear assumed the front men were slowed by the rubble until the screams started.

Sarah heard the screams through her headset. The voice of the photographer rose in an animal howl as the sound of cold fear tore from his throat. Her heart froze and she held her breath. What could make him scream like that? Was he hurt?

The entire group turned as one unit and pushed back propelling her away from the tube. It became a wave of panicked bodies carrying her back down the corridor. She stumbled against pipes banging her head and arms. The entrance hatch loomed ahead and she rushed forward as the men behind pushed and shoved. The sound of wretched vomiting and mumbled words that made no sense blanketed her headset.

She twisted the wheel of the door and jerked it open but was pushed aside by the others trying to exit the maintenance tunnel. She stole a fearful glance back at the passage before finally stepping through and sealing the door. A blurred image of an otherness formed behind her eyes even though she had not seen the thing in the accelerator tube. Squeezing them shut only made the vision sharper. She drew ragged breaths as she slumped back against the hatch. What happened?

Only Jeff, the engineer and two others had remained waiting for her. Everyone else had continued running. Alarm klaxons boomed and emergency strobes flashed down the hall. Jeff had removed his helmet and was bent over, hands on his knees, dry heaving. Between the spasms he gasped, “Robots.” He gagged and coughed again. “We’ll need robots and a containment chamber. No cameras. Tell them we can’t look at it.” He slumped to the floor.

It took 38 hours to get the robots and the box, the size of a small upright closet. It was triple walled, vacuum between the first wall and inert gas in the second. They guided the robots with proximity sensors. The thing was alive—they sensed its life. Jeff could only describe what he saw in vague terms.

The agency investigators, bland men in dark suits, asked simple questions: “Did it have arms? Were there distinct body parts? Did it have a head? Eyes?” Sarah shook her head.

“I don’t know, I didn’t really see it,” she said. “I was at the very end of the group in the passage.”

*~*~*

She was still processing the incident after two days when she visited Paul the photographer and Jeff, the engineer in the hospital off-site.

“You can’t stay long. Paul is in a catatonic state,” the ICU nurse told her. “If you try talking to him, please don’t mention the incident.”

“Did he breathe something? Was it radiation?” Sarah still did not know exactly what had materialized when the accelerator tube had shattered, only that something alive came out and it was something not of this world.

The nurse shook her head. “I can’t say.” she glanced down the hall. “The doctors are guessing he saw something his mind couldn’t process. Mental trauma like PTSD.

She’d known Jeff casually through work. Jeff at least could talk when she sat next to his bed though he easily lost track of the conversation and stared with a blank look. Paul died on the fourth day after the explosion. They said the cause was whole body trauma, whatever that meant. Jeff was transferred to another facility, a military hospital, rumors said. She didn’t get to say goodbye.

When the men questioned her again, she asked about the thing in the tube. “Is it something we made in the accelerator?” she asked. They scribbled notes on their pads and ignored her question. No answers were forthcoming. The questions themselves made one of the scientists re-experience the trauma of the encounter and he regurgitated his lunch across the desk and onto the papers of the agent. Thereafter, they deleted the questions that began with, “Try to visualize . . .”

*~*~*

“You were the least traumatized by the encounter,” the nameless man said. “We want you attempt communications. It’s alive and so it needs to eat or consume energy in some way, don’t you agree?” She nodded, not liking the direction of his thought. “If we withhold food now that we have it locked up securely. It might cooperate to eat.”

“We have no idea what it needs. We don’t know what capacities it has. All we’ve got after a week of tests, is that it radiates a sense of power and . . .” She searched for the right word. “Evil. I don’t want to have anything to do with it. It needs to be destroyed. It tried to eat our souls.”

The man shrugged then nodded. “It’s intelligent so we cannot let this go. This is first contact.” He paused. “We’ve sealed it in behind several layers of our strongest steel and carbon fiber alloys. You should be safe.”

“Should be?” she asked.

“Nothing is one hundred percent. You know that. And we’ve taken every precaution.”

“Some of those people lost their minds and Paul died. It’s like that thing ate his spirit.” The man’s face remained stoic but acknowledged her concerns with a tip of his head.

“Will you do it?” She looked down at her hands and absently picked a nail.

“It’s evil. I don’t want to be around it.” She lifted her eyes to meet the agent’s. “It’s evil,” she said again.

He nodded and now the silent man who had been standing behind him leaning against the wall, stepped forward.

“Sarah,” he said, touched the other man on the shoulder and shifted his eyes toward the door. The agent questioning her gave another half nod and left the room. The second man did not sit.

“We think it is from another dimension, another universe, possibly. Are you familiar with the brane theory?” Sarah shrugged. “Some of our people, really bright ones,” he waved his hands in a circle. “Like you people, here, think it has something to do with leaking between universes, between branes and that’s how it got here. This could be a huge breakthrough. And you could be right at the forefront.”

Paul’s face kept floating up in front of her like a white scrap of paper in a dirty river. It was a crumpled blankness, as if everything that was Paul had been leached out leaving a dried, desiccated husk. He’d died when he looked upon it then his body lived on for a week and now they were asking her to attempt to communicate with the thing.

She gave in, collapsed, weary from the continuous appeals. Like accepting death, she thought. National security. Fate of the world. No one else can do it. She acquiesced and was immediately drowned with a sense of dread and fear. Where would she find the strength?

*~*~*

“This is how it works,” he explained. “The escape mechanism is triggered by a button squeezed tight in your hand, when released it jerks you away like a pilot’s ejection seat. In the control room we slam doors and pull you out. Theses goggles filter the spectrum of colors surrounding it. The colors not of this earth,” he said. “The colors that seem to make humans sick.”

She held the tray of raw meat. The gift. Quid pro quo.

*~*~*

In this world a mother is one who feeds a child. I call her mother because she brings nourishment. Mother unlocks the door and enters to feed me. The thin blade of light slices through the darkness momentarily as I reach for it, but she shuts it quickly.

“Too much light is bad for your eyes,” she says.

She does not touch me. Mechanical hands with steel bones and electrical motors move inside a glass box. This is how she reaches me through a double sealed lock. She inserts food through another slot, again double sealed, micro machined joints so that not even a whisper can penetrate the barrier. The breath of life is long gone from the dead food. Bare nutrients to sustain my physical flesh but lacking fresh soul blood.

Mother has insulated herself from me with barriers. Passive panels shed photons on my cell while a faint cold glow from some hidden source provides enough light to my receptors to illuminate her features. Her face contorts and twists with fear and revulsion at my appearance.

We lived before accretion formed rocks giving birth to this planet and its puny flesh. Our tongues tasted the slime colonies of multi-celled creatures before man, before primitive chemicals joined together to reproduce and then feed on each other to become complex eukaryotic cells. For a time, we ruled this meat-soup planet from our dark places but men learned of us and through their own magic drove us back across the barrier. We were too long walled out of our rightful space. Man’s words and images harbored the power to open the doors between spaces. Words written in a special book. Old words with power. What was magic is now called science.

We waited because this world had once given us lustful pleasures then, sensing the time had come once more; we expended our energies against the door but were met with ten thousand whirring blades, in a shearing spasm of rejection. The old ones were torn asunder as screaming shards of meat flesh. The energy exceeded any force we had experienced across the endless worlds of our realm. The others gave themselves to shield me with their bulk and let fly strong curses that I might keep the door ajar. Man, it appeared, had harnessed fearsome power.

Their machine was constructed to fling elemental particles like bullets, crashing them together and releasing potent energies. Something went wrong as it exploded and keyed the door open. Those same particle beams were slashing scimitars of death that slew my brothers as they traversed the gate. I was spared by their sacrifice. Once across, the lower energies from the machine were delicious food and I sucked like a hungry infant until its teats ran dry and smoke billowed from the torus. They found me overfed in a sated drunken torpor, and the humans were able to encase me in this lightless cube.

The knowledge of their minds flowed into me at the instant of my crossing. I learned their synchrotron was constructed in an isolated valley where grasses were raw sharp things and trees bore only a few pallid, sparse leaves. Ancient man had shunned the tract as an unholy place. They said water accumulated in pools like the scat of a festering giant and gave off the stench of odor and decay. Those early first men felt the power of place, the result of an intersection of dimensions, which accorded power to a geographic coordinate. It permeated the ground, infected things that grow, and chilled the air. Modern men held no respect for the spirit of a place. The old men of the native people were both wielders and harvesters of these intersections. The craggy faced old crones with milky eyes who spoke in hoarse cryptic whispers were warning beacons but now they have passed and the scientific man believes he knows more.

I am alone and weak on their earth though I grow stronger.

The first could not stand in the presence of my power and now they send her with offerings? Will she offer up her soul? The aura of fear bathes her in a milky green light even through the metal and glass barriers and yet, she lies just beyond my touch. When we came before, man could not limit us, only the place where both worlds met held constraints allowing so few of us across. And those few only being allowed with the speaking of the forbidden words. It had been enough to sustain us until a solitary man slammed shut our passageway, giving of his blood to bolt the door. How we have craved the taste of man since that time. The breaking through the wall weakened my corporal and psychic essence. Sucking the souls of those who came upon the rupture sustained me but it was never enough. These creatures have grown too quickly and now the scientific man is able to enclose me with their machines. I have become hungry again.

The greater need is not physical but for the thing they call the soul. It is mine to suckle until it shrivels into a dried and wasted husk.

*~*~*

Sarah felt the air puff up inside the suit. Like a deep-water diver, she thought, encased against the elemental pressure. The air was cold and irritated her nose. Her eyes watered, forming tears that ran down.

“Sarah,” a soft voice cackled in her ear. “We’ve got your six. We’ve taken every precaution. You can do this. If anything—anything at all, doesn’t feel right, release the button.” She tried to recall his name, the confident man from the government team. He was responsible for keeping her safe. He touched her arm before she climbed into the suit, a reassuring gesture. What was his name?

“Roger,” she said. “I’m ready.” No. I am not, but I will do this. For Paul and for the others.

She heaved the meat bag as the thick door swung on noiseless hinges. It was dark inside. Three air locks. A Manhattan project cobbled together out of fear. And above it all, the small-scale nuke. A last resort.

Inside the last door, her eyes adjusted to the darkness; only a faint shielded light caressed the last lock and drawer.

“This will be the most critical part. Our shields are minimal here. We know it is hungry. All you have to do is insert the meat bag in the drawer. The automation will do the rest. It will sense we are offering food and will attempt to communicate.”

Her left hand held the button at her side. Movement was awkward in the suit. She slipped into the chair and a harness fastened her in.

She knew she was isolated from its sounds but still she felt she could hear the horrible wet slurping as it gorged on the meat.

“What are you?” she thought. Her head rang like the inside of a bell with its reply.

“I am those, who came before man.”

The single eye was a red globe with vertical yellow night predator pupil. It reminded Sarah of alligator eyes. Images of a toad like body structure formed out of the sickly green haze surrounding it.

“Can you understand me?” she vocalized. She wanted the others to hear, not to be isolated with the thing inside her head. Was the voice real?

“Yes,” the voice had the tenor of a jackhammer. It gave off a stink of a malevolent intelligence.

“Shit!” The expletive sounded in her head piece. “How can it do that? We have auto-damping on the electronics,” the man in the control room said.

“Was the meat sufficient for nourishment?” Calling the bag food was not something she could bring herself to do. “We were not sure you could tolerate our nutrients. Do you understand?”

Something like a hollow laugh echoed in the vocal spectrum and in her head.

“I eat. I consume.” It paused. “I will survive even if you withhold sustenance. You cannot bargain. These chambers may fade to rust, and dust and I will still be.”

She risked a push. “But you are confined.”

“For now,” it replied.

She felt a hot volcanic nausea rising up in her. “Pull me back,” she said. “I’m done for now.” She felt the latch engage under the chair and it moved her slowly out of the nested chambers.

Her hands were shaking as she unfastened the latches and connectors of the suit. Technicians swarmed around her. He was there when they disconnected her helmet.

“Sarah, you did very well. We got a lot of data. The team wants to do a debriefing. Think you’re up to it?”

She nodded. His face showed concern.

“We can wait,” he said.

“No. Let’s be done with it.”

The lights in the conference room were dim.

“Can we turn up the lights?” she said to whoever followed her. “I need it to be bright.” She felt like she was slogging through thick weeds, like seaweed, the way it tangles around your feet near the shore. Slimy. Her head was stuffed like a bad sinus cold, thick and muffled. Am I even awake?

He stood at the head of the table, while he waited for the others to be seated. She still couldn’t pull his name from memory. His eyes moved to each of the members as if counting. Sarah felt she was struggling to stay awake after been anesthetized, as if she was caught in a vague continuously rolling film of sporadic disconnected images where nothing made sense. The feeling started the moment the thing broke through the synchrotron.

“Thank you all for your efforts this morning,” he inclined his head slightly toward her, silently singling her out among them. “Now we’ve made contact with the creature, intelligent and alien. You were very brave.” The speaker exuded a Zen-like calm but it had no effect on her.

“It says it was here before man,” she heard her own voice saying the words. The man paused.

“Sarah?”

“It was here before us, before man,” she found herself suddenly aware of things beyond what the creature had spoken to her. “They call themselves the old ones who ruled earth. We are their cattle.” The words crawled out before she could stop them. Her hands clenched into tight fists.

The man seated at the head of the table wore a look of sympathy. His eyes focused on her.

“Are you all right, Sarah?”

“Yes, I . . .” she sank into her chair. “Stress,” she heard herself mumble. His gaze lingered on her for long seconds before he turned back to the others. His words indistinct. They didn’t concern her.

The meeting ended and the others exited the room. Already, she couldn’t remember what had been discussed. Some nodded or touched her as they walked by. Finally, he took a seat in the chair opposite her.

She looked into his face, feeling tears forming. She remembered now, his name was Victor.

“I’m afraid,” she said, her own voice a stranger in her head. “I want to leave here. Get away. It’s trying to control me.”

“We won’t let that happen.”

They moved her to a hotel outside the facility. A small suite where she stayed alone though she knew people were watching over her. Outside life moved with normal random winds. After a week she felt almost ordinary again.

He sat opposite her at dinner but again, his name had escaped. Did she ever know it?

“We need you to come back to meet the creature once more. We’ve added even more safeguards and we think we may be able to send it back across the brane.

“How?”

“The NSA AI found old references to the power of ‘ancient ones’ in its search. Obscure writings in ancient books written in near forgotten languages and the AI analyzed the tracts.” He waved his hands. “Ancient magic, but our people think it was a method of opening the intersection where universes touch. The passing through could only occur at sacred places. The locations appear to be purposefully obfuscated, however the AI made credible guesses.” He paused. “It appears the shamans could sense the energies in those places. They called it witchcraft or black magic, but it was neither. It was just something they didn’t understand.”

“So, the incantations or sacrifices or whatever were used to open a connection to the thing’s universe?”

“It’s more complex but essentially both sides had to be ready. Historical references show they may have crossed several times. Sarah, we plan to send it back because we don’t think it can be killed in any manner we can conceive. It derives energy at quantum scales. It is too dangerous to stay in our world. We need you to initiate the opening to make it return.”

She agreed if only because she could bare the thought of that thing existing in her world no longer.

*~*~*

“You only have to be strong enough for just a while longer, the techs have made all the preparations. You need only talk to it to keep the energy flow uninterrupted.”

It would be the last time and it would be over, they told herself. Send it back to the hell from whence it came.

*~*~*

She sees her own breath as she exhales. It is a red haze drifting from her mouth, not unlike the white air of a cold day. She understands it is feeding on this part of her as it dissipates through the faceplate. Her exhale hangs indecisively for a moment and then swims with a purpose through the barriers. Sarah wants to cry out but voice is lost in fear, because she now knows it will consume her no matter what the precautions. It draws her as a plate of food presented by a faithful servant. What is left of her will become table scraps tossed to the panting dogs below. She knows the confidence of man is fallacy—it will not go back and the door is only opening wider.

They are very hungry.

End.

*~*~*

R. Gene Turchin had aspirations to be a lead guitarist in some kind of band, when that didn’t work out, he spent a few years in the US Navy, took up with engineering and technology and then stumbled into academia. His writing leans toward dark and odd, a sharp contrast to his cheerful optimism.

Find R Gene on the web at www.rgeneturchin.com

The Mercurial Clouds of Misery

By Kurt Newton

The city was a vast landscape
of makeshift hovels and squatters pits
constructed of rock and dirt and bone.
Everywhere there were candles lit,
candles made of earwax and the oily pus
that oozed from wounded souls.

The candles sent an acrid smoke
into the air that hung like a cloud above,
a cloud that behaved with a life of its own,
a malevolent ever-present judge,
writhing and roiling with the tormented faces
of those to which we should atone.

These mercurial clouds were omniscient,
the faces different for each set of eyes
that chose to cast their gaze.
It was a haunting conjured by lies,
a ghostly remnant of guilt intended
to expose our wicked ways.

The madness it produced
was too great a pain for some,
and for others an annoyance at best.
I fell into the former, stricken dumb,
my heart a crazed animal
thumping wildly in my chest.

I ran through the narrow alleyways
that separated the hovels from the pits,
the clouds swimming in my brain
like a drug I could not resist,
a drug that offered only
the untold misery of the insane.

And then the clouds were gone,
the faces once again hidden deep,
replaced by strangers fueled by fire.
A mournful music stirred my sleep
and awake I lurched inside
the Church of the Unholy Choir.

*~*~*

Kurt Newton's poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Weird Tales, Spectral Realms and Penumbric. You can visit Kurt on Twitter at @kurtdnewton or find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kurt.newton.56. He also has an Amazon author page at www.amazon.com/Kurt-Newton/e/B006VYUMUM

The Night Walks

By Joshua Thomas

It is midnight. I walk downtown, carrying the evil burden on my back. It sleeps for now and I pray it continues sleeping until I reach the river. Though my backpack is in chains, its claws can very well tear through the fabric if it were to wake. If it does wake up, there’s no telling how fast it will grow. It’s small enough, for now, to drown at the bottom of the river. That’s all that matters.

I walk at a calm, active pace to keep it relaxed and asleep. Any sudden movement aside from my careful footsteps could lead to disaster.

If only there was another way to the river. If only I didn’t have to walk through downtown at night. There are countless legends about this place after sundown. Stories of ghosts and murder have infested this place since the epidemic. Only those who live in the darkness of the abandoned and collapsing buildings lurk here now. Anyone with a right mind would stay far away from this cursed place. I fear my mind slipping as I walk. I’ll take care of my sanity when this is all over.

The night was already chilly, but the temperature steadily drops. I notice my breath in the air. Its body twitches from inside the backpack. My breathing and my footsteps stop.

Please, God. Don’t let it wake up.

My body jerks backward. I fall in reverse and lose my backpack. I squirm and try to turn around, to figure out what’s happening, but I’m blinded before I see anything important. My attacker forces a thick bag over my head. A rope tightens around my neck, securing the bag in place. Hard, calloused hands force my arms behind my back. I am put in metal handcuffs.

The only words I manage to let out beyond my grunts are, “Throw it in the river! Throw it in the river! Throw it in the—”

Something hard bangs against the top of my skull. I blackout.

*~*~*

My eyes open, but my vision stays in darkness. The bag is still over my head. Hands still cuffed. I’m down on my side against a hard surface. There are vibrations beneath my body. I’m in a moving vehicle. It feels like I’m in the back of a van without any seats.

I roll myself over and sit upright, my legs cross.

“Stay down back there.” I hear the smoky, deep voice of a man. I have no clue if he’s alone or not.

“Did you throw it in the water?” I ask.

“Shut up.” The same voice demands me.

“We’re all in danger. You have no clue what—”

“I said, shut up, girl!” He’s getting angrier.

How long have I been out in this van? My thoughts panic me. Has it been long enough for us all to escape it? If not, when will it find me?

I ask, “How long has it—” The van screeches to a halt. My body falls forward. My chin slams against the cold floorboard. My teeth clank together. The taste of iron seeps over my tongue.

“If you talk any more, I’ll crack you in the skull again.” The man warns me. “You’ll be out for the long one then.”

I stay silent. The van starts moving again.

I have to get out of this or else we’ll all die. How many doors does this van have around me? Are there side doors? Doors in the back? If I leap out, could I manage to at least get the bag off of my head to see where I’m running? The rope around my head isn’t that tight. If there is only one attacker, I could move my cuffed hands under my butt and legs, and remove the bag over my head. Would the man notice? I’m double-jointed, I can do it. Even if he’s watching me, it’s a risk I’ll have to take. If I die at the hands of this lunatic, we will all die at the hands of that thing unless I take it to the river first. The Scriptures must be followed to stop the horror.

I take the risk of believing that the man is alone. I disconnect my shoulders, slow, so there isn’t a loud clicking noise. I used to do this all the time when I was a child to freak out the other kids, but it hurts now. I’m willing to hurt if it means survival.

I lift my body up so my hands can slip beneath my legs from my back, then drop down onto my butt. My hands are under my legs now. I wait for a handful of seconds to sense the man’s awareness.

There are no audible signs of alert. I stretch my arms out and pull my legs close to my body. I pop my shoulders back into place with two clicking noises. There is no more time to stop and assess my safety again. My hands are in front of me now. I grab the rope around my neck and remove it with the bag.

My vision is blurry for a few seconds, but everything comes in.

The first thing I see—the man’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Right as I realize he’s alone, we lock eyes.

“Shit.” The man’s eyes open wide.

I lunge forward with my cuffed hands reaching out. I throw my arms over the driver seat and wrap the chain of my handcuffs around my attacker’s neck. The van swerves.

I’m not letting go.

The man fights to control the steering wheel with one hand while grabbing at my arms with the other. I’m pulling my cuffs around the man’s neck so tight that my wrists bleed.

The man slams on the breaks to another screeching halt. I hug the driver seat to keep my balance and position. Still, I do not let go.

Both of his rugged, dry hands squeeze my forearms. His dirty fingernails dig into my skin and draw blood. I shout to fight off the pain. I want to decapitate him.

His grip weakens and he lets go of my arms. They turn purple and yellow upon the release. I shut my eyes. My bloody teeth grind against each other.

The man’s gasping and gurgling noises turn to frightful, shaky growls—like a hurt dog. He stops fighting against me, but I know he’s not dead yet. I open my eyes and look forward, out of the windshield.

It’s here.

I see it in its full horror, lit by the van’s headlights. For the first time, I look into its red eyes. I see glimpses of the future, full of torture and disease.

I gasp—I stopped strangling the man. I try to return to my attack, but the man shifts gears into reverse and stomps his foot on the pedal with all his might. My body crashes into the back of the driver seat. I have completely lost hold of the man’s neck, but my arms stay around him.

I look through the windshield again. It’s running on all nine legs towards us. I’ve never seen so many sharp claws and spikes on a creature. I try not to vomit, but the adrenaline of fear forces my mouth to open.

I see the speedometer. We’re passing fifty miles an hour in reverse. The thing closes in on us.

The man freezes in motion. His eyes are wide open—swelling with blood and tears.

“Stop the van!” I shout.

We completely stop with a bang. So many things happen within the instance, but I could see it all in slow motion: The van’s windows shatter inward. The shards of glass consume the man’s body like a thousand bullets. His torso and head reduce to unidentifiable flesh. His blood splatters all across the front of the van’s interior. Some of the shards cut through my arms as my body lifts and flies backward. The chain of my handcuffs slices through the man’s neck like a sharp machete. His head rolls off into the passenger seat. Blood erupts from his open neck. The driver seat’s metal frame catches the chain. My wrists and forearms shred open—bones become visible. Inch by inch, from my wrists to my elbows, my bones shatter like the window glass. I collide against the crushed-in backdoors of the van. My back and chest crack in countless places.

Time returns to normal speed, but I wish it all would end. The blood drains from my body through my severed arms, mouth, nose, ears and eyes. Half of my vision is normal. The other half is black and crimson. The pain I’m feeling is beyond possibility. I cannot move.

How am I still conscious? I close my eyes and pray for death to come…

Something hairy and sharp touches my face. It’s wet and freezing cold. Please, no.

The claw lifts my head. I open my eyes. It glares, gazing deep into my soul. I cannot look away. I am helpless to the deity. It unveils its mouth from beneath countless vibrating spikes and scales.

It hisses, “Mother.”

End.

*~*~*

Joshua Thomas is an independent filmmaker and freelance writer in Orlando, Florida.

The Sea Raiders

By H.G. Wells

Originally Published in 1896

I.

Until the extraordinary affair at Sidmouth, the peculiar speciesHaploteuthis feroxwas known to science only generically, on the strength of a half-digested tentacle obtained near the Azores, and a decaying body pecked by birds and nibbled by fish, found early in 1896 by Mr. Jennings, near Land’s End.

In no department of zoological science, indeed, are we quite so much in the dark as with regard to the deep-sea cephalopods. A mere accident, for instance, it was that led to the Prince of Monaco’s discovery of nearly a dozen new forms in the summer of 1895, a discovery in which the before-mentioned tentacle was included. It chanced that a cachalot was killed off Terceira by some sperm-whalers, and in its last struggles charged almost to the Prince’s yacht, missed it, rolled under, and died within twenty yards of his rudder. And in its agony it threw up a number of large objects, which the Prince, dimly perceiving they were strange and important, was, by a happy expedient, able to secure before they sank. He set his screws in motion, and kept them circling in the vortices thus created until a boat could be lowered. And these specimens were whole cephalopods and fragments of cephalopods, some of gigantic proportions, and almost all of them unknown to science!

It would seem, indeed, that these large and agile creatures, living in the middle depths of the sea, must, to a large extent, for ever remain unknown to us, since under water they are too nimble for nets, and it is only by such rare unlooked-for accidents that specimens can be obtained. In the case ofHaploteuthis ferox, for instance, we are still altogether ignorant of its habitat, as ignorant as we are of the breeding-ground of the herring or the sea-ways of the salmon. And zoologists are altogether at a loss to account for its sudden appearance on our coast. Possibly it was the stress of a hunger migration that drove it hither out of the deep. But it will be, perhaps, better to avoid necessarily inconclusive discussion, and to proceed at once with our narrative.

The first human being to set eyes upon a livingHaploteuthis—the first human being to survive, that is, for there can be little doubt now that the wave of bathing fatalities and boating accidents that travelled along the coast of Cornwall and Devon in early May was due to this cause—was a retired tea-dealer of the name of Fison, who was stopping at a Sidmouth boarding-house. It was in the afternoon, and he was walking along the cliff path between Sidmouth and Ladram Bay. The cliffs in this direction are very high, but down the red face of them in one place a kind of ladder staircase has been made. He was near this when his attention was attracted by what at first he thought to be a cluster of birds struggling over a fragment of food that caught the sunlight, and glistened pinkish-white. The tide was right out, and this object was not only far below him, but remote across a broad waste of rock reefs covered with dark seaweed and interspersed with silvery, shining, tidal pools. And he was, moreover, dazzled by the brightness of the further water.

In a minute, regarding this again, he perceived that his judgment was in fault, for over this struggle circled a number of birds, jackdaws and gulls for the most part, the latter gleaming blindingly when the sunlight smote their wings, and they seemed minute in comparison with it. And his curiosity was, perhaps, aroused all the more strongly because of his first insufficient explanations.

As he had nothing better to do than amuse himself, he decided to make this object, whatever it was the goal of his afternoon walk, instead of Ladram Bay, conceiving it might perhaps be a great fish of some sort, stranded by some chance, and flapping about in its distress. And so he hurried down the long steep ladder, stopping at intervals of thirty feet or so to take breath and scan the mysterious movement.

At the foot of the cliff he was, of course, nearer his object than he had been; but, on the other hand, it now came up against the incandescent sky, beneath the sun, so as to seem dark and indistinct. Whatever was pinkish of it was now hidden by a skerry of weedy boulders. But he perceived that it was made up of seven rounded bodies, distinct or connected, and that the birds kept up a constant croaking and screaming, but seemed afraid to approach it too closely.

Mr. Fison, torn by curiosity, began picking his way across the wave-worn rocks, and, finding the wet seaweed that covered them thickly rendered them extremely slippery, he stopped, removed his shoes and socks, and coiled his trousers above his knees. His object was, of course, merely to avoid stumbling into the rocky pools about him, and perhaps he was rather glad, as all men are, of an excuse to resume, even for a moment, the sensations of his boyhood. At any rate, it is to this, no doubt, that he owes his life.

He approached his mark with all the assurance which the absolute security of this country against all forms of animal life gives its inhabitants. The round bodies moved to and fro, but it was only when he surmounted the skerry of boulders I have mentioned that he realised the horrible nature of the discovery. It came upon him with some suddenness.

The rounded bodies fell apart as he came into sight over the ridge, and displayed the pinkish object to be the partially devoured body of a human being, but whether of a man or woman he was unable to say. And the rounded bodies were new and ghastly-looking creatures, in shape somewhat resembling an octopus, and with huge and very long and flexible tentacles, coiled copiously on the ground. The skin had a glistening texture, unpleasant to see, like shiny leather. The downward bend of the tentacle-surrounded mouth, the curious excrescence at the bend, the tentacles, and the large, intelligent eyes, gave the creatures a grotesque suggestion of a face. They were the size of a fair-sized swine about the body, and the tentacles seemed to him to be many feet in length. There were, he thinks, seven or eight at least of the creatures. Twenty yards beyond them, amid the surf of the now returning tide, two others were emerging from the sea.

Their bodies lay flatly on the rocks, and their eyes regarded him with evil interest; but it does not appear that Mr. Fison was afraid, or that he realised that he was in any danger. Possibly his confidence is to be ascribed to the limpness of their attitudes. But he was horrified, of course, and intensely excited and indignant at such revolting creatures preying upon human flesh. He thought they had chanced upon a drowned body. He shouted to them, with the idea of driving them off, and, finding they did not budge, cast about him, picked up a big rounded lump of rock, and flung it at one.

And then, slowly uncoiling their tentacles, they all began moving towards him—creeping at first deliberately, and making a soft, purring sound to each other.

In a moment Mr. Fison realised that he was in danger. He shouted again, threw both his boots, and started off, with a leap, forthwith. Twenty yards off he stopped and faced about, judging them slow, and, behold! the tentacles of their leader were already pouring over the rocky ridge on which he had just been standing!

At that he shouted again, but this time not threatening, but a cry of dismay, and began jumping, striding, slipping, wading across the uneven expanse between him and the beach. The tall red cliffs seemed suddenly at a vast distance, and he saw, as though they were creatures in another world, two minute workmen engaged in the repair of the ladder-way, and little suspecting the race for life that was beginning below them. At one time he could hear the creatures splashing in the pools not a dozen feet behind him, and once he slipped and almost fell.

They chased him to the very foot of the cliffs, and desisted only when he had been joined by the workmen at the foot of the ladder-way up the cliff. All three of the men pelted them with stones for a time, and then hurried to the cliff top and along the path towards Sidmouth, to secure assistance and a boat, and to rescue the desecrated body from the clutches of these abominable creatures.

II.

And, as if he had not already been in sufficient peril that day, Mr. Fison went with the boat to point out the exact spot of his adventure.

As the tide was down, it required a considerable detour to reach the spot, and when at last they came off the ladder-way, the mangled body had disappeared. The water was now running in, submerging first one slab of slimy rock and then another, and the four men in the boat—the workmen, that is, the boatman, and Mr. Fison—now turned their attention from the bearings off shore to the water beneath the keel.

At first they could see little below them, save a dark jungle of laminaria, with an occasional darting fish. Their minds were set on adventure, and they expressed their disappointment freely. But presently they saw one of the monsters swimming through the water seaward, with a curious rolling motion that suggested to Mr. Fison the spinning roll of a captive balloon. Almost immediately after, the waving streamers of laminaria were extraordinarily perturbed, parted for a moment, and three of these beasts became darkly visible, struggling for what was probably some fragment of the drowned man. In a moment the copious olive-green ribbons had poured again over this writhing group.

At that all four men, greatly excited, began beating the water with oars and shouting, and immediately they saw a tumultuous movement among the weeds. They desisted, to see more clearly, and as soon as the water was smooth, they saw, as it seemed to them, the whole sea bottom among the weeds set with eyes.

"Ugly swine!" cried one of the men. "Why, there ‘s dozens!"

And forthwith the things began to rise through the water about them. Mr. Fison has since described to the writer this startling eruption out of the waving laminaria meadows. To him it seemed to occupy a considerable time, but it is probable that really it was an affair of a few seconds only. For a time nothing but eyes, and then he speaks of tentacles streaming out and parting the weed fronds this way and that. Then these things, growing larger, until at last the bottom was hidden by their intercoiling forms, and the tips of tentacles rose darkly here and there into the air above the swell of the waters.

One came up boldly to the side of the boat, and, clinging to this with three of its sucker-set tentacles, threw four others over the gunwale, as if with an intention either of oversetting the boat or of clambering into it. Mr. Fison at once caught up the boathook, and, jabbing furiously at the soft tentacles, forced it to desist. He was struck in the back and almost pitched overboard by the boatman, who was using his oar to resist a similar attack on the other side of the boat. But the tentacles on either side at once relaxed their hold at this, slid out of sight, and splashed into the water.

"We’d better get out of this," said Mr. Fison, who was trembling violently. He went to the tiller, while the boatman and one of the workmen seated themselves and began rowing. The other workman stood up in the fore part of the boat, with the boathook, ready to strike any more tentacles that might appear. Nothing else seems to have been said. Mr. Fison had expressed the common feeling beyond amendment. In a hushed, scared mood, with faces white and drawn, they set about escaping from the position into which they had so recklessly blundered.

But the oars had scarcely dropped into the water before dark, tapering, serpentine ropes had bound them, and were about the rudder; and creeping up the sides of the boat with a looping motion came the suckers again. The men gripped their oars and pulled, but it was like trying to move a boat in a floating raft of weeds. "Help here!" cried the boatman, and Mr. Fison and the second workman rushed to help lug at the oar.

Then the man with the boathook—his name was Ewan, or Ewen—sprang up with a curse, and began striking downward over the side, as far as he could reach, at the bank of tentacles that now clustered along the boat’s bottom. And, at the same time, the two rowers stood up to get a better purchase for the recovery of their oars. The boatman handed his to Mr. Fison, who lugged desperately, and, meanwhile, the boatman opened a big clasp-knife, and, leaning over the side of the boat, began hacking at the spiring arms upon the oar shaft.

Mr. Fison, staggering with the quivering rocking of the boat, his teeth set, his breath coming short, and the veins starting on his hands as he pulled at his oar, suddenly cast his eyes seaward. And there, not fifty yards off, across the long rollers of the incoming tide, was a large boat standing in towards them, with three women and a little child in it. A boatman was rowing, and a little man in a pink-ribboned straw hat and whites stood in the stern, hailing them. For a moment, of course, Mr. Fison thought of help, and then he thought of the child. He abandoned his oar forthwith, threw up his arms in a frantic gesture, and screamed to the party in the boat to keep away "for God’s sake!" It says much for the modesty and courage of Mr. Fison that he does not seem to be aware that there was any quality of heroism in his action at this juncture. The oar he had abandoned was at once drawn under, and presently reappeared floating about twenty yards away.

At the same moment Mr. Fison felt the boat under him lurch violently, and a hoarse scream, a prolonged cry of terror from Hill, the boatman, caused him to forget the party of excursionists altogether. He turned, and saw Hill crouching by the forward rowlock, his face convulsed with terror, and his right arm over the side and drawn tightly down. He gave now a succession of short, sharp cries, "Oh! oh! oh!—oh!" Mr. Fison believes that he must have been hacking at the tentacles below the water-line, and have been grasped by them, but, of course, it is quite impossible to say now certainly what had happened. The boat was heeling over, so that the gunwale was within ten inches of the water, and both Ewan and the other labourer were striking down into the water, with oar and boathook, on either side of Hill’s arm. Mr. Fison instinctively placed himself to counterpoise them.

Then Hill, who was a burly, powerful man, made a strenuous effort, and rose almost to a standing position. He lifted his arm, indeed, clean out of the water. Hanging to it was a complicated tangle of brown ropes; and the eyes of one of the brutes that had hold of him, glaring straight and resolute, showed momentarily above the surface. The boat heeled more and more, and the green-brown water came pouring in a cascade over the side.

Then Hill slipped and fell with his ribs across the side, and his arm and the mass of tentacles about it splashed back into the water. He rolled over; his boot kicked Mr. Fison’s knee as that gentleman rushed forward to seize him, and in another moment fresh tentacles had whipped about his waist and neck, and after a brief, convulsive struggle, in which the boat was nearly capsized, Hill was lugged overboard. The boat righted with a violent jerk that all but sent Mr. Fison over the other side, and hid the struggle in the water from his eyes.

He stood staggering to recover his balance for a moment, and as he did so, he became aware that the struggle and the inflowing tide had carried them close upon the weedy rocks again. Not four yards off a table of rock still rose in rhythmic movements above the in-wash of the tide. In a moment Mr. Fison seized the oar from Ewan, gave one vigorous stroke, then, dropping it, ran to the bows and leapt. He felt his feet slide over the rock, and, by a frantic effort, leapt again towards a further mass. He stumbled over this, came to his knees, and rose again.

"Look out!" cried some one, and a large drab body struck him. He was knocked flat into a tidal pool by one of the workmen, and as he went down he heard smothered, choking cries, that he believed at the time came from Hill. Then he found himself marvelling at the shrillness and variety of Hill’s voice. Some one jumped over him, and a curving rush of foamy water poured over him, and passed. He scrambled to his feet, dripping, and, without looking seaward, ran as fast as his terror would let him shoreward. Before him, over the flat space of scattered rocks, stumbled the two workmen—one a dozen yards in front of the other.

He looked over his shoulder at last, and, seeing that he was not pursued, faced about. He was astonished. From the moment of the rising of the cephalopods out of the water, he had been acting too swiftly to fully comprehend his actions. Now it seemed to him as if he had suddenly jumped out of an evil dream.

For there were the sky, cloudless and blazing with the afternoon sun, the sea, weltering under its pitiless brightness, the soft creamy foam of the breaking water, and the low, long, dark ridges of rock. The righted boat floated, rising and falling gently on the swell about a dozen yards from shore. Hill and the monsters, all the stress and tumult of that fierce fight for life, had vanished as though they had never been.

Mr. Fison’s heart was beating violently; he was throbbing to the finger-tips, and his breath came deep.

There was something missing. For some seconds he could not think clearly enough what this might be. Sun, sky, sea, rocks—what was it? Then he remembered the boatload of excursionists. It had vanished. He wondered whether he had imagined it. He turned, and saw the two workmen standing side by side under the projecting masses of the tall pink cliffs. He hesitated whether he should make one last attempt to save the man Hill. His physical excitement seemed to desert him suddenly, and leave him aimless and helpless. He turned shoreward, stumbling and wading towards his two companions.

He looked back again, and there were now two boats floating, and the one farthest out at sea pitched clumsily, bottom upward.

III.

So it wasHaploteuthis feroxmade its appearance upon the Devonshire coast. So far, this has been its most serious aggression. Mr. Fison’s account, taken together with the wave of boating and bathing casualties to which I have already alluded, and the absence of fish from the Cornish coasts that year, points clearly to a shoal of these voracious deep-sea monsters prowling slowly along the sub-tidal coast-line. Hunger migration has, I know, been suggested as the force that drove them hither; but, for my own part, I prefer to believe the alternative theory of Hemsley. Hemsley holds that a pack or shoal of these creatures may have become enamoured of human flesh by the accident of a foundered ship sinking among them, and have wandered in search of it out of their accustomed zone; first waylaying and following ships, and so coming to our shores in the wake of the Atlantic traffic. But to discuss Hemsley’s cogent and admirably-stated arguments would be out of place here.

It would seem that the appetites of the shoal were satisfied by the catch of eleven people—for so far as can be ascertained, there were ten people in the second boat, and certainly these creatures gave no further signs of their presence off Sidmouth that day. The coast between Seaton and Budleigh Salterton was patrolled all that evening and night by four Preventive Service boats, the men in which were armed with harpoons and cutlasses, and as the evening advanced, a number of more or less similarly equipped expeditions, organised by private individuals, joined them. Mr. Fison took no part in any of these expeditions.

About midnight excited hails were heard from a boat about a couple of miles out at sea to the south-east of Sidmouth, and a lantern was seen waving in a strange manner to and fro and up and down. The nearer boats at once hurried towards the alarm. The venturesome occupants of the boat, a seaman, a curate, and two schoolboys, had actually seen the monsters passing under their boat. The creatures, it seems, like most deep-sea organisms, were phosphorescent, and they had been floating, five fathoms deep or so, like creatures of moonshine through the blackness of the water, their tentacles retracted and as if asleep, rolling over and over, and moving slowly in a wedge-like formation towards the south-east.

These people told their story in gesticulated fragments, as first one boat drew alongside and then another. At last there was a little fleet of eight or nine boats collected together, and from them a tumult, like the chatter of a marketplace, rose into the stillness of the night. There was little or no disposition to pursue the shoal, the people had neither weapons nor experience for such a dubious chase, and presently—even with a certain relief, it may be—the boats turned shoreward.

And now to tell what is perhaps the most astonishing fact in this whole astonishing raid. We have not the slightest knowledge of the subsequent movements of the shoal, although the whole southwest coast was now alert for it. But it may, perhaps, be significant that a cachalot was stranded off Sark on June 3. Two weeks and three days after this Sidmouth affair, a livingHaploteuthiscame ashore on Calais sands. It was alive, because several witnesses saw its tentacles moving in a convulsive way. But it is probable that it was dying. A gentleman named Pouchet obtained a rifle and shot it.

That was the last appearance of a livingHaploteuthis. No others were seen on the French coast. On the 15th of June a dead body, almost complete, was washed ashore near Torquay, and a few days later a boat from the Marine Biological station, engaged in dredging off Plymouth, picked up a rotting specimen, slashed deeply with a cutlass wound. How the former specimen had come by its death it is impossible to say. And on the last day of June, Mr. Egbert Caine, an artist, bathing near Newlyn, threw up his arms, shrieked, and was drawn under. A friend bathing with him made no attempt to save him, but swam at once for the shore. This is the last fact to tell of this extraordinary raid from the deeper sea. Whether it is really the last of these horrible creatures it is, as yet, premature to say. But it is believed, and certainly it is to be hoped, that they have returned now, and returned for good, to the sunless depths of the middle seas, out of which they have so strangely and so mysteriously arisen.

End.

Nyarlathotep

By H.P. Lovecraft

Originally Published In 1920

Nyarlathotep... the crawling chaos... I am the last... I will tell the audient void...

I DO not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a demoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.

And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellaheen knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilization came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences of electricity and psychology and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a sickly sky.

I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city the great, the old, the terrible city of unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him, and of the impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations, and I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries. My friend said they were horrible and impressive beyond my most fevered imaginings; and what was thrown on a screen in the darkened room prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and in the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had never been taken before yet which showed only in the eyes. And I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew Nyarlathotep looked on sights which others saw not.

It was in the hot autumn that I went through the night with the restless crowds to see Nyarlathotep; through the stifling night and up the endless stairs into the choking room. And shadowed on a screen, I saw hooded forms amidst ruins, and evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments. And I saw the world battling against blackness; against the waves of destruction from ultimate space; whirling, churning, struggling around the dimming, cooling sun. Then the sparks played amazingly around the heads of the spectators, and hair stood up on end whilst shadows more grotesque than I can tell came out and squatted on the heads. And when I, who was colder and more scientific than the rest, mumbled a trembling protest about imposture and static electricity, Nyarlathotep drove us all out, down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others screamed with me for solace. We swore to one another that the city was exactly the same, and still alive; and when the electric lights began to fade we cursed the company over and over again, and laughed at the queer faces we made.

I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we began to depend on its light we drifted into curious involuntary marching formations and seemed to know our destinations though we dared not think of them. Once we looked at the pavement and found the blocks loose and displaced by grass, with scarce a line of rusted metal to show where the tramways had run. And again we saw a tram-car, lone, windowless, dilapidated, and almost on its side. When we gazed around the horizon, we could not find the third tower by the river, and noticed that the silhouette of the second tower was ragged at the top. Then we split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a different direction. One disappeared in a narrow alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column was sucked toward the open country, and presently I felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon- glitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for the black rift in the green-litten snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half-floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable.

Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.

End.

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