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

  Visions of viscous black rain came to my mind. I could not tell if this was precognition or in the nature of an imminent threat.

  But no rain came, black or otherwise. I relaxed, remembering that it had not rained since the night of sun blot.

  I got up and reached into my backpack where I carried my E-reader. It was standard issue, loaded with only one text—the Necronomicon.

  I started a word search. First I tried “shrub.”

  Not Found, it read.

  I next tried “cloud.” I got several hits. But the first was “cloudy.” I almost skipped on to the next one when my eyes fell upon a phrase: “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young.”

  Not “shrub.” Shub-Niggurath!

  I looked up. There was nothing goatlike about what was floating above my unprotected head. Nor was it truly black. Dark yes, but in the way a thundercloud is blue-gray.

  Could the ancients have got it wrong . . . ?

  I raced through the other hits and they made my blood run cold. Finally, I was back at the first hit. This time I read more carefully.

  The Necronomicon described in spare terms the malign intelligence called Shub-Niggurath as “a vast cloudy entity of unknown source or purpose,” almost always spoken in the same breath as the Black Goat of the Woods, which has long been identified as Shub-Niggurath.

  What if Abdul Alhazred was in error? What if they were two separate beings, linked ritualistically, but not otherwise?

  What if staring down from the unreflective sky where the alien satellites Nug and Yeb raced drunkenly was the hellish incomprehensibility, Shub-Niggurath?

  They say if you possess the name of a thing, you gain control over it. So I made my next move.

  Are you Shub-Niggurath?

  Back came a splintery confirmation. I did not understand the splintered aspect of the nonverbal reply, but since more clouds had gathered under the perpetually night sky, perhaps Shub-Niggurath was in the nature of a colony of beings, or something that could separate and reform like amoebae.

  What is your purpose?

  Back came a stark clarification. It was virtually in English.

  To help clear.

  Clear what? I beamed back.

  The Earth.

  Of what?

  Of all.

  What is your specific function? I was thinking in English now, and was answered in kind.

  Back came a sense of a box being opened. It turned into a tableau—a sea of humans seen from the waist up, eyes dead, the tops of their heads opening like a soft-boiled eggs being shelled, and a golden light streaming upward toward waiting clouds.

  Hungry clouds, with rapidly irising orifices.

  “Knowledge? You drink knowledge!”

  Shub-Niggurath only communicated a thirsty impression.

  I ran then. Foolish flight or fight conditioning, I knew. But I had to get this intelligence back to headquarters. Damn, for a cell phone that worked!

  The cobalt cloud followed me, hurling a chilling thought at me: No escape. No escape for any human.

  Three towering centaurs abruptly converged on me, responding to commands from my pursuer, I sensed. Loops of some rubbery matter dropped over my head, constricting my neck. Helpless, I was dragged back to that hellish factory.

  We came to a fenced-in yard where debris and detritus lay in forlorn heaps, lit by fitful flames. A charnel odor hung over all.

  There was an altar. And before it a great black statue in the shape of a man.

  But the man had no face. It was gargantuan, uncaring, pharaonic. It struck me as hauntingly familiar. But my oxygen-starved brain couldn’t process anything.

  I sent out an interrogative. Back came an accursed name: Nyarlathotep.

  But it was not the literal Crawling Chaos, only an idol created in his image, formed of fused bonemeal—human bonemeal. For the carbonized cremains of those who were processed through the human rendering factory were not wasted. All this I sensed in a pounding heartbeat.

  They laid me on the altar, which had the coolness and shape of a gigantic anvil—an anvil on which mankind was now being hammered into extinction.

  My wrists and ankles were held down. I struggled, but the centaurs were irresistible in their obdurate strength. I was finished and I knew it. A curious calm came over me then. I relaxed. Suspecting a trick, the centaurs tightened their grips.

  I took several slow breaths and prepared to die.

  When death is this close, the mind shifts into a pre-death mode. Inevitability helps the process. I would be killed, after which my soul could escape from my body. This time for eternity.

  But I possessed spiritual tools most ordinary people don’t have. I made a prayer to the Infinite Spirit God whom I acknowledge, and prepared to commend myself to the Vastness.

  Various theories and belief systems kaleidoscoped through my unnaturally calm mind. Would I be absorbed into the Allness like a drop of spiritual water into the ocean of God, surrendering all individuality? Would I transition to a place of astral regeneration, there to await a future existence? Would I plunge into eternal life, according my earned rewards?

  I let all these concerns wash over me, then let them go. I would die soon.

  And I would know the ultimate truth almost as soon. I had no fear.

  For I was about to go beyond the reach of the Old Ones and their terrible universal hegemony. The Earth was now theirs. I only hoped that the realm which awaited me was greater than the spent one I was about to vacate.

  I harbored no Earthly regrets. But I did have a spiritual ace up my sleeve. I waited for the beginning of the death stroke. It soon came.

  One of the centaurs lifted a crude tool I could barely make out in the smokestack glow. Was it a cudgel? A blade? I could not tell. And I felt myself disassociating from all concern.

  When the downstroke began, I departed from my body. Pop! Clean separation.

  This way I would feel no pain of slaughter.

  I floated face down. Fascinated yet detached, I watched my very brains being spattered about. The silver cord severed. I could feel it, see it—and I accepted it.

  Slowly, with my mortal form jittering in death, I began ascending heavenward. A peace washed over me. I was going home. I knew that now. Home. I didn’t know its name or its form, but I could feel it tugging me toward its uncharted territory.

  Smooth as a swimmer, I rolled my orientation skyward to focus on my immediate if unknown future. I half expected to see archangels in flight.

  Instead, I beheld the awful nodular countenance of Shub-Niggurath. It gazed down with sharpening visage.

  Out of my way, I directed. You can’t hurt me now.

  Not knowledge, it said clearly.

  What?

  Humans have no knowledge we seek.

  Then what—?

  I sensed a lascivious energy. Your container is broken.

  My soul froze.

  Then its maw opened—empty and black as interstellar space . . . and I understood what Shub- Niggurath meant and more dire, what it sought on earth.

  Humans were containers—for souls!

  As I was sucked into that blackest of black holes, cheated of all hope of an afterlife, realization crystallized. All over the Earth the globe-girdling clouds hung poised to capture freshly liberated souls every time men died. And we are all predestined to die . . .

  Around me, others like me continued collecting. Soon we began pulsating in resonance to our swelling host. All one. Yet also individual. Parasites, yet prisoners. Powerful, but helpless. Nothing but something. Something yet nothing. Neither matter nor energy. Not particles and not waveforms. Only blind self-aware voids in an unknowable plenum.

  I send these thought-forms out to my surviving colleagues. Take drugs. Seek madness. Pray for the gift of amnesia. For there is no other escape.

  Absorption finally came, and I became another cold, yet still conscious corpuscle of the insatiable, eternal void that is and always will be Shub-Niggurath.
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  THE NEW PAULINE CORPUS

  Matt Cardin

  Seated at a small wooden desk, a humble piece of cypress wood furniture elevated to veritably mythic status by a heaping of fabulously ornate decorative flourishes, he spreads out the papers on the smooth surface before him. A rushing murmur, like the sound of ten thousand voices melding into an oceanic hush, flows through the doorway that stands open and waiting on the far side of the equally ornate room.

  The papers are crammed to capacity with a chaotic jumble of handwritten markings. Rows of text run from left to right and then, often, meet the edge of the page and instead of breaking to the next line simply continue on, rebounding from the barrier in curling coils and tracing the paper’s edge in circles that effectively form a written frame around the rest. Some lines appear in ink, others in pencil. Some words are minuscule to the point of near-indecipherability. Others shout hugely in hysterical looping letters.

  None make sense. Not on their own, at least. Fragments. That is what he has in his possession. Pieces of a puzzle. Scraps of a portrait. Shards of a mirror, each reflecting and refracting the image of all the others to create a dazzling maze of meanings whose infinity encompasses enormous blank spaces.

  The more I dwell on it, Francis, the more I am convinced that the single most fruitful result of the frightful transition which has overtaken us is the resurrection of our collective passion for story, for the specifically narrative understanding of our lives on this planet. I now view the trajectory of my former theological writings toward an almost exclusive emphasis on ontological matters as an egregious error. More than any other religious tradition in human history, our own Christian faith, along with its Jewish forebear, has always been centrally rooted in a cosmic- narrative understanding of human life and the cosmos itself. A reverence for story—as we have now been forcibly reminded—is not symptomatic of a regressive intellectual and theological naiveté but of an unblinking realism. It may simply be the case that the story in which we find ourselves existentially involved as living characters lacks any obvious correspondences with the charming drama we were told from childhood about the Eden- to-Fall-to-New Eden arc of our race. Or perhaps these elements are indeed discernable in our new tale, but in a jumbled order or—more likely—as inversions of themselves. I hope to say more about this in a future letter.

  In any event, happily for me, since it means that I do not have to jettison the entirety of my former theological corpus, is the fact that theology-as-story does not preclude ontology but incorporates it. In fact, what has now been revealed to us in our dreadful recent disruptions is the express unity of these two categories of thought. That is, we are living the story of a war between levels of reality. Our metanarrative is the tale of how space-time, the cosmos, the created order, was usurped by a reality that is more fundamental, primary, and ancient.

  This story, our story, is a tale of the deeply inner and primordial turning with hostility upon the objectively outer and evolved, and reshaping it according to a set of principles that are incomprehensible and, as we can see all around us in the fact of our wrecked cities with their new and growing populations of squamous, octopodan, and quasi-batrachian inhabitants, thoroughly revolting to the latter.

  Under red-glowing smoke-filled skies I thread my way through a boulder field of shattered buildings. Fires blaze and smolder in places where no fuel ought to burn. Twisted chunks of steel and concrete burn like dry-rotten wood. Sparkling shards of shattered windows and doors and street lamps catch the flickering orange glow and ignite from the pressure of the images on their glassy surfaces. A sea of flaming rubble, fifty miles wide. This is what remains of my city and of all the others like it dot-ting the surface of the round earth like piles of autumn leaves raked together for burning.

  Here is the heart of the matter, Francis, in a rush of analogies intended to distill the essence of the insights I lost when I shredded my manuscript on that terrible day.

  ITS OMNIPRESENCE: my theological namesake quoted approvingly to his Greek audience a common bit of philosophical wisdom from their own cultural milieu when he spoke of God the Father as “the one in whom we live and move and have our being.” Does not such a formulation recall Yog-Sothoth, who walks with the other Old Ones between the dimensions, and in whom past, present, and future are one? Does it not recall Azathoth, the primal chaos that resides not only at the center of infinity but at the center of each atom, each particle, perhaps serving as the unaccountable subatomic bond that has categorically escaped scientific explanation? But here I overstep the limits of my formal authority, so effectively does this demonic pantheon inspire a plethora of transgressive and exhilarating speculations.

  ITS ANNIHILATING HOLINESS: in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the desert, under the merciless sun, the Israelites witness repeated outbreaks of Yahweh, Who “is a consuming fire,” an untamable force, a burning pestilence, a plague of serpents. And so is He revealed not just as the Holy Other but as Wholly Other, possessed of a cosmically singular sui generis nature that cannot and will not abide contradiction. In the words of Luther himself, if you sin “then He will devour thee up, for God is a fire that consumeth, devoureth, rageth; verily He is your undoing, as fire consumeth a house and maketh it dust and ashes.” As Otto wrote with such frightening clarity of apprehension, there is something baffling in the way His wrath is kindled and manifested, for it is “like a hidden force of nature, like stored-up electricity, discharging itself upon anyone who comes too near. It is incalculable and arbitrary.” To see His luminance shining from the face of Moses is a horror. To see His face is to die.

  This incomprehensible, inconceivable, incalculable, arbitrary horror serves as the font, finish, and focal point of our entire tradition. I trust my attempts at commentary would only weaken the blow of the brute fact itself.

  “My son.” The voice speaks behind him, and he looks sideways in acknowledgment of its presence without actually turning to face it. “Have you read them again?” The voice is thin as a reed, like a sick child, and also thick and murky, like a chorus chanting together in imperfect unison. But even now, with the world having passed beyond its own farthest extremity, the voice exudes a supernal calmness and control that still, astonishingly, serve to comfort and soothe.

  “Some of them, yes,” he replies. “But something is eluding me. They seem to contain two different strands or stories. One of them is like a dream narrative that follows an alternative plot and—perhaps—posits a world in which the efforts of the other narrative have failed or were never made. But I’m not at all certain of any of this. I need to read the pages once more.”

  “Then read,” the voice says. “But remember that we are waited upon.” As if in confirmation, the ocean roar of voices swells momentarily to a peak, washing up from below the balcony outside and telling of a tensely waiting throng before settling back into an undulating trough.

  He nods and returns to the pages.

  ITS TRANSCENDENCE. In the Book of Isaiah we encounter a Yahweh who protects the cosmic order from destructive incursions by the ancient chaos serpents but also launches His own cosmos-shaking assaults against that order, all leading up to a concluding note of horror in the book’s worm-infested final verse that has resounded down through the ages and brought no end of trouble for biblical exegetes, since its literary and theological effect is to stamp the book with the impossible message that Yahweh is the ultimate chaos monster who only saves His creation from the others so that He can destroy it Himself. (Surely you remember this subversive reading of the Isaian text from my last book, which sold relatively well but drew such scathing condemnation from my fellow theologians.)

  Is it possible, can we conclude, that these and a thousand other aspects of our tradition were always both more and less than they seemed—that they were, in a word, other than they seemed; that instead of pointing directly toward spiritual and metaphysical truths, the great concepts, words, and icons of our tradition were in fact mere signals, hints, clues, that
gestured awkwardly toward a reality whose true character was and is far different from and perhaps even opposite to the surface meanings?

  Consider: humanity’s dual nature—conscious and unconscious, deliberate and autonomic, free and determined, physical and spiritual, cerebral and reptilian—has always singled us out as the earth’s only true amphibians. We have always acted from two centers and stood with feet planted in two separate worlds. Now we have seen this duality ripped apart or brought to fruition—how to regard it is unclear—as those elements of reality represented by our reptilian brainbase, and by the darkest archetypes of our collective unconscious, and by the corresponding monstrous elements in our mythological traditions, have fulfilled a nexus of ancient race-level fears.

  Does this perhaps indicate something of our role in what is transpiring? Do we perhaps serve a necessary function as bridges between the realms, simply by the fact of our fundamental duality?

  I turn my eyes skyward and see the gargoylish figures still commanding the open air between the coiling columns of smoke. Rubbery black demonoid shapes with smooth blank faces and leathery wings swoop and careen like flakes of ash on a hot wind.

  A moment later I stumble on a fragment of granite, and the involuntary ducking of my head proves perfectly timed for avoiding a surely fatal encounter with a squid-like shape twenty feet long that bloats and shimmers through the air in a rhythmic pulsating pattern like a sea creature propelling itself through deep water. I stare at its underside, sick with terror, as it slides past and over me, but then note with relief that the fat torpedo-shaped body is turned so that its great blank eye looks laterally instead of downward. Had the thing been looking down, it would have done what these sentinels always do when they detect their prey: it would have paused directly over me and regarded me through that alien eye with an equally alien intelligence. Then it would have bunched itself into a knotted mass of claw-tipped tentacles ringed around a dilating sphincter-mouth set with concentric rows of needled teeth, and dropped upon me with inconceivable speed and ferocity. I have already seen those serpentine tentacles enmesh many a man in their deadly loops. I have heard the human flesh sizzle and scorch on contact with that corrosive extra-dimensional matter. I have watched shrieking people disappear into that churning meat grinder of a mouth.