[anthology] Darrell Schweitzer (ed) - Cthulhu's Reign Read online

  On the seventh day, Kanako slipped into my room as I painted.

  “Help me, Tatsuya. Hold me. I can’t bear it any more!”

  She wrapped her arm around me from behind, naked, and when I turned to face her began kissing me with wild abandon. The sight of Sayoko being devoured by those white creatures flashed through my heart, and I shook my head, trying to push her away. Kanako thrust her tongue into my mouth, soft, sweet, a faint scent of perfume . . . the latch of my sanity slipped, and as I eagerly sought her tongue with my own, my arms tightened around her. We fell to the floor, and found solace in each other until the night. It was not love, nothing so beautiful, it was hungry sex, two people seeking refuge in the flesh, trying to escape inescapable terror. We spasmed in climax, brought each other back again and again with our mouths and our hands, losing ourselves in each other in timeless repetition, a mindless drive to forget the terror that seized us.

  And as the sun rose again we returned to our senses, whispering together. What did we need? How could we escape the hopelessness, the terror? We reached a conclusion, sealed it with another brief bout, and broke apart. She returned to her room, and I to the shower.

  At dinner, Kanako came wearing one of her favorite outfits, and a neutral expression.

  The dining room was of course circular, as was the table. The chairs, the plates, even the steaks and the vegetables in the salad were round, free of angles.

  She had a white scarf round her neck, matching her white suit, and she had made herself up as she hadn’t for days, chic and beautiful. Manabe, as always, was in his ratty jacket and slacks, glittering eyes peering from his pale face, looking like a successful businessman on his day off.

  I wore my old black turtleneck sweater, a cheap jacket and jeans. Not nearly the sort of dress appropriate for a dinner invitation.

  After pouring us all glasses of red wine, Kanako asked what we should toast.

  “To life without angles,” said Manabe, without even stopping to think about it.

  I lifted my glass in response, but Kanako shook her head.

  “No. I hate that!”

  “Well, then, to the beautiful suit you’re wearing, Mrs. Manabe,” I proposed. She giggled.

  “This scarf looks good on me, doesn’t it?” she asked, grasping it by the end.

  “Yes, it doesn’t have an angle on it,” said Manabe, and Kanako burst into laughter. Her wineglass toppled, red wine seeping into the tablecloth in a blotch that was also rounded.

  “What is the matter with you?” demanded Manabe, brow furrowed.

  “All you ever talk about is whether or not there are any angles. That’s all you ever think about!”

  “It’s a crucial issue. The Womb is safe because it has no angles. I can sit here drinking wine because of it.”

  “Of course. It’s safe because it has no angles, and I . . . I...”

  She pulled on the end of the scarf, unwinding it to reveal her slender, white neck, and the red mark, like a scar, that flamed there.

  “What is that?” asked Manabe, quizzically.

  “All you worry about is future generations, and you’ve forgotten what men do here.”

  “What in the world . . . ?”

  “It’s a kiss mark!”

  She laughed triumphantly, white teeth flashing. I joined her in laughter, captured by her spirit.

  “So you slept with Izumo . . . so what?”

  “Are you jealous?”

  “No,” denied Manabe, shaking his head. “If you have sex with both of us, the chances of being impregnated will increase. Your infidelity fits perfectly with my original plan to save humanity.”

  Her laughter faded as Manabe continued.

  “Was it good? Maybe we should try it together, then, tonight, all three of us. I don’t mind either way. As long as we preserve the species.”

  “Hold on one minute, Manabe!” I broke in, unable to hold back any longer.

  “What?”

  “Are you serious? You spend a fortune building this spherical coffin, you leave my wife to be eaten alive, and then when a painter steals your wife you just suggest maybe we should try a threesome! What the hell do you think is going on outside? The world is ending! And you! All you can do is . . . !”

  “It’s not ending,” he broke in. “There are no angles here, so They can’t get in. The world will not . . .”

  He suddenly broke off, slapping his hand to his mouth, eyes blinking wildly, searching left and right. From behind his hand, the sound of a clogged drain oozed from his mouth, a pause, then the sounds of his stomach violently surging back up his throat. His hand slipped from his mouth, letting thin, translucent tentacles snaked out, like wet slugs or tired noodles. They writhed, squirmed, heads twisting and seeking.

  “It’s Them! Oh God, it’s THEM!”

  Kanako leaped from her chair, shrieking.

  A jellyfish gently began testing the air from inside his nostril . . .

  “But how . . . ?” he asked, voice muffled, and his right eyeball popped out, little ripping noises, as tentacles lifted it up from the inside.

  “No angles . . . there are no angles!”

  I drew back from the table and the shaking mass that was Manabe, and answered him: “There are angles, you fool! The oldest angle of all, the human triangle!”

  “Ridiculous!” he tried to cry. His right eyeball fell, trailing the debris of nerves and blood vessels, and dozens of jelly-like tentacles writhed in the gaping wound.

  “You’re an occultist! You of all people should know that metaphors and analogies can be truth! We painters have known that for centuries!”

  “Just playing with words . . .”

  A smile bloomed on Manabe’s face. A smile of understanding? A sneer of self- mockery? Before I had a chance to find out which, his face was hidden behind a twirl of ropey tentacles, wrapping him up.

  Tentacles were already bursting from his ears, from the bottom of his pants legs, squirming, writhing.

  “Kanako! Where’s the remote?” I cried.

  “Here! But . . . what?”

  I answered as I took the remote control from her outstretched hand. “We’re leaving. Getting out of this spherical hell!”

  We ran toward the exit, urged on by a bestial roar from the dining room behind us. Kanako flinched.

  “It’s all right.That’s Manabe’s death rattle.”

  A horrible tearing sound came from the dining room, and the smack of raw meat slapping into the floor. A pause, and then innumerable milky tentacles, jellyfish or squid or whatever, came creeping from the dining room. I tore my eyes away, and pressed the button.

  The doorway irised open, a camera shutter revealing a pitch-black world awaiting us.

  “Beasts, global catastrophe . . . Bring it on! Even with angles, it’s better than staying here!”

  Wrapping my arm around her shoulders, we plunged through the circular doorway.

  WHAT BRINGS THE VOID

  Will Murray

  I

  “Things Are in the Saddle . . .”

  It was the dark season of the portmanteau word. Ragnageddon. Yog-Narok. Demondammerung. None of them caught on.

  It was not the twilight of the gods long prophesied. It was sunset for the human race. Or sun blot. For the sun’s fate was the first cosmic sign of the uber-apocalypse.

  In the Western hemisphere, it was past midnight when the moon simply winked out. Few noticed. It was still there, of course. In the Eastern hemisphere, the sun just shut down. No sun, no moonlight. In the darkness of the void, the stars brightened. Yes, there were fewer of them than before. That hardly seemed to matter.

  A bluish filament of light traced across the utter night like a crazed comet. The Sothis Radiant had touched the sun with a groping tendril, extinguishing it with appalling finality. But few cared. Things shifted so fast that the past and its causes were lost in the torrent of violent ever-present change.

  I was walking the streets of Washington, D.C. that first nig
ht of First Dark. I sensed the moon’s death. Darkly luminous, a weird cobalt-blue cloud rolled in, smothering the night sky. It seemed to hang lower than any terrestrial cloud had any right to hang.

  Down from it had fallen two cloudy appendages, like fat tails of some boneless monster. I turned a street corner and there they were. Where they fell, they right-angled like torpid boas. At the blunt tips of each, the misty heads seemed to have taken on the form of squat dogs—a sheepdog and a bulldog. Or was one a chow? They were dull impressionistic apparitions. Both stared at me with their hollow cloudy unreadable eyes.

  I reached out to touch one, thinking it some trick of the night fog. It shrank from my touch.

  This cloud is alive, I marveled. The doggy form collapsed in on itself as the tentacle silently withdrew.

  I found a rope and threw it toward the other—the bulldog. I thought to dispel it with its manila weight. Instead, the rope caught in its shadowy mouth—or was caught.

  I felt a distinct tug. Dropping the rope, I fled.

  Mankind was in a new reality.

  The sun never rose again and what the moon did no one knew. An extinguished lamp, it was never seen again. Nor were most of the Milky Way stars. Without them, time simply stopped. It became 2012 forever.

  No one knew what killed the global power grid. It simply stopped functioning. A greater night clamped down. Machines stopped cold. But just as importantly, world currencies—reduced to electrons moving unseen through fiber optic cables—collapsed. With no gold or silver to back paper bills or coin, the global economy popped like a soap bubble.

  Civilization as we knew it was over within a month. Two unknown satellites rose in the sky eventually, twin orbs of emptiness, one a sickly bone white, the other the hue of coal. Those who knew their Necronomicon gave them names—Nug and Yeb. Need I say more?

  The Old Ones were back, and Great Cthulhu drinking up the vast Pacific in his vaster gullet was the least of the legion. The Poles ignited, burning with a dark electronic fire. New place-names sprang up. Lake Ohio. Chesuncook Pit. Transyl- Pennsylvania. Kalifornia. Nyarlathotep again strode the whelmed Earth, reverse-engineering centuries of human civilization. It was terrible.

  Mankind stood prepared to battle this hellish host—only to learn that the invaders regarded man as parasites on their newly reclaimed world.

  Some said they merely wished to exterminate us. But there was more to it. Far more.

  I was in a unique position to observe it all. Never mind my name. Call me ORV 004—Operational Remote Viewer #4. I was attached to the External Threats Directorate of the Cryptic Events Evaluation Section of the National Reconnaissance Office.

  “External threats” was our euphemism for extra-solar or other-dimensional concerns.

  The Old Ones kept us hopping. But that was Back in the Day. Now there was no day—only endless night.

  We had our first post-change briefing session by guttering candlelight, like a coven of damned witches.

  The Director kept it simple. “I don’t want to hear any crap about end times. This isn’t the Rapture or Ascension. It’s a goddamned invasion, and we’re running a counterinsurgency out of this office.” Pounding his desktop, he growled, “I want intelligence—local and non-local.” He looked at me, the only surviving ORV.

  “On it,” I said.

  “Get cracking.”

  “I’ll need a tasker and a monitor,” I pointed out.

  Remote Viewing is an intelligence methodology devised in the 1970s for special military applications. One definition calls it “The ability to perceive, by purely mental means, persons, places and things usually inaccessible to normal senses, regardless of time, distance or shielding.” I was trained under Department of Defense RV protocols, at a sleepy place nestled in the Virginia foothills called the Monroe Institute.

  The secret of Remote Viewing is to blind the viewer to the target. If you have no idea what you’re supposed to look at, your imagination can’t run away with you.

  No deduction, induction, or adduction possible. Just pure psychic signal.

  I lay in the dark and listened to the monitor’s voice. He had no clue as to the target any more than I did. The tasker simply handed him the coordinates, and the monitor read them to me. That way I couldn’t inadvertently access his mind and glean clues by common telepathy.

  “Your coordinates are 8646 7944. Target is to be viewed in present time. Good luck.”

  I went in. It was like walking through a dreamscape. Fleeting multisensory impressions swept across my mind’s eye. I scanned for resolution.

  “I see a black blot,” I reported. “Huge. The size of a city.”

  “Can confirm blot.”

  I probed the image. “Blot was once a major city. City is no longer there. Not even ruins. I don’t even perceive a soil base . . .”

  “Keep going,” the monitor encouraged.

  “Nothing exists there. It’s like a drop out in reality. There’s no matter there—as we understand matter. It’s vibrating on another level—slower, colder, darker.”

  I shuddered in contact with the anomaly. That told me I had successfully bilocated to the target area. My senses felt like they were swimming through static.

  The monitor commanded, “Move to a point northwest of the center of the black area, please.”

  I found myself perceptually at a far different place. Something familiar about it. I reported my aesthetic perceptions.

  “Concept of factory. Sense of purpose. Darkness and secrecy around the latter. I see beings. Bipeds. A mixture of human and not. Decoding as centaurs, but not centaurs. No horse attributes. Some type of bioengineered half-human hybrids. They function as slaves and slave-drivers.”

  “Enter factory.”

  I tried. I really did. But I was blocked. I felt an impenetrable membrane.

  It reminded me of the time I viewed the current location of the Ark of the Covenant. I got in, but something forcibly ejected me. Something powerful.

  “Denied area,” I reported.

  “Recon vicinity for impressions, Number 4.”

  The ground gave up nothing but a cold staticky energy. But when I shifted my focus skyward, I detected something.

  “Sense of clouds above. But these are not meteorological clouds. They pulsate, then brighten. No recognizable atmospheric phenomena correlate to these changes. But I sense a connection between the activity in the factory and the clouds above.”

  “Describe this connection.”

  After a period of struggling with inchoate impressions, I reported, “Cannot.”

  “Are you blocked, Number 4?”

  “Negative. Feels more like I lack a frame of reference to comprehend the exact nature of the activity within as relates to the overhanging clouds.”

  “Okay. Come back.”

  When I attempted to sit up, I felt like a truck had hit me. My brain expanded against the cavern of my brain pan like a fat balloon. I closed my chakras down as best I could.

  By candlelight, I wrote my report. Secondary impressions of a rendering plant danced in my head, but I left them out as imaginal artifacts.

  The director had me in his office within the hour. My report was on his desk.

  “Number 4, I want you to recon this so-called factory.”

  “In person, sir?”

  “Only someone with your clairvoyant abilities can get close without detection. Determine what’s going on in there.”

  “But—”

  “This is not a request. You are not a volunteer. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.” It was a death sentence, but how could one care? The entire race was under a death watch.

  The locality was outside the former Richmond, Virgina. A short ride. I took a train. Some were still running.

  As the engine pulled me through the unrelieved night, I looked up at the star-starved sky. A narrow face stared down from the clouds. It was a confusion of luminous contra blue and purple, suggesting a sharp-featured demon with a round
open mouth. Too round. Like a black orifice.

  Once you train up to Master Remote Viewer, you are always in viewing mode. The only question is whether or not your inner perceptions reach the conscious mind’s level.

  This time they were. I had the distinct feeling that the demon of the clouds was looking exclusively at me, and would swallow me if he could. Was it a presentiment—or a warning?

  The demon passed from view. But I still felt its hollow eyes upon me. They reminded me of those nightmarish canine apparitions.

  The train let me off short of the dormant crater that had been Richmond. I walked from there. It was like a trek through a minefield of the unknown. Even the leafless locust trees had a stark look, as if shocked by their new habitation.

  Three miles along, I encountered trouble breathing. I backed up and worked around it. No-oxygen zones. They were growing. The Old Ones didn’t need oxygen, people said. I wondered if the factory was dedicated to atmosphere conversion.

  Even as the thought glimmered my mind, I intuited that the truth was more dire. Far more dire. But I could not conceive how much . . . .

  People filed along the road, coming from somewhere, but going nowhere.

  Everyone understood that, so talk was shunned. I was reminded of Springsteen’s mournful end-of-the-world song, “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Welcome to the new world order. . . .

  You don’t fully understand time and timelessness until the sun and moon and the familiar planets are no longer there to help mark the celestial procession. Against a fading blue web spun by the star-quenching Sothis Radiant, Nug and Yeb careened crazily through the vacant sky, confusing matters.

  I walked for hours, but it felt more like an elastic eternity. Nothing to look forward to. No hope of natural light. My flashlight helped to guide me. Then I encountered a darkness it could neither penetrate nor dispel.