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

by Unknown

  A black ovoid lay in the road. It looked unnatural, so I approached it gingerly.

  Vibrationally, it reminded me of the black blot I had mentally come into contact with—the old Richmond. This was smaller. Superficially, it resembled a hole in the earth. But my light failed to illuminate the sides of the “hole.” And it lacked any sense of dimensionality.

  I dropped a stone into it. It abruptly vanished, as if relocating to another reality.

  Only then did I sense a disturbing connection between this hole and the gaping mouth of the demonic cloud face that had regarded me so singularly.

  I rushed on.

  When I came upon an orderly file of people, I joined them, as if to lose myself in their numbers. They walked along in a single file of the condemned.

  I turned to one and asked, “Where are you going?”

  He pointed to the others ahead of him. “Wherever they are,” he said dully.

  “Don’t you know?”

  He nodded. “This is the food line.”

  “There’s food up ahead?”

  “No, we are the food.” He said it without hope, fear, or caring.

  I stepped out of line.

  I saw my first centaur then. That is, with my physical eyes. My non-physical vision had detected one during the RV session.

  This one stood taller than a man. From approximately the thorax up, he looked human. He was a big burly black man, muscular in the extreme. His skull was shaven and his torso rippled with undraped muscles.

  Where his pelvis devolved into legs, no legs as we know them supported the rest. The pelvis instead flared out into a wide skirt of some unappetizing flesh, like a columnar snail. It stood on this pad, moved on it via some snail-like form of locomotion.

  But the lower appendage was not flesh, or even organic matter. I sensed this, and my perception was confirmed when the centaur glided over a great patch of unrelieved black that lay off the roadside like a pool of tar.

  The black patch supported it. It would never support a physical man.

  Confirmation of this came almost immediately.

  A maddened dog tore running out of somewhere and lunged for it. The dog charged across grass and brush and seemed oblivious to the blackness until its paws came into contact with its unreflective surface.

  Then its snarling was swallowed whole—as was the damned and doomed dog.

  Seeing this, a teenage girl detached from the line and approached the spot where the dog had vanished. I moved in to intercept her. She got there first.

  “What do you think is down there?’ she murmured as she stared into the unrelieved abyss, Gothic eyes blank.

  “Nothing,” I said firmly, reaching out with care.

  “Nothing,” she said dreamily. “Sounds like a better deal.”

  I snatched at her too late. She simply stepped in and virtually winked out of existence. Above, one of the evil low-lying clouds pulsated briefly. It had done that when the dog disappeared too. Something in me shuddered in sympathy.

  Some members of the procession saw this. They broke away from the others. Into the patch they leaped, lemmings on two legs. Into the void they vanished.

  A booming voice lifted. “Humans! Escape into the void! Escape and you will not be consumed. Escape into death! There is freedom in death. And from the new masters of Earth!” It was a centaur.

  A surge of humanity responded to that hellish promise. They stampeded for the blackness. Some were trampled. Others stumbled over them to seek dark oblivion. Soon, the greater portion of them were gone. Utterly gone. I felt a coldness in my soul . . . .

  Above, the clouds pulsated wildly, as if laughing uproariously in delight.

  Recoiling, I put distance between me and the patch of voidy non-matter. As I ran, the glowing eyes of the centaur tracked me. They burned a weird pumpkin orange, like a seared jack o’lantern.

  “Beware the voids!” he called after me, as if to taunt my flight. “Voids become vortices. Vortices become vornados. And vornados—” He began laughing raucously. His laughter boomed and cannonaded like thunder.

  The rest was lost to hearing.

  I reached a hill and found shelter among the dying trees. They drooped, blackened leaves wilting, as if in despair.

  As I watched the ragged line of humankind close up and reform itself to trudge on toward an unknowable destination, like some segmented worm, the great black void that lay upon the field began to swell. It spun. Black as it was, I could sense this inner churning. No sound came forth. But the void rose up and began to wheel and lift ponderously, growing in size as it reared to life.

  It became a vortex. And as the vortex found coherence, it elongated, became towering, mighty, hungry.

  Vornado! I thought wildly.

  The vornado twisted and spun on its ever-changing ropy funnel, got itself organized, and moved for the line of humans with deliberate intent.

  “Alive! It’s alive in some way!” I cried.

  The vorando sought the last stragglers and ingested them, lunging after the rest. The screaming that followed was wild, but brief. The line broke, scattered, but the vornado moved about, with unerring instinct and consumed them all.

  None were flung about or ejected by its centrifugal force, nor wasted.

  When the last of the fleeing ones was gone, the vornado spun and searched in forlorn disappointment. Finally it sensed the laughing centaur.

  It bore down on him too. His laugher chopped off. He turned to flee, urging himself along on his semi- fleshy pedestal. But it was designed for non-matter. The pad dragged on earthly grass, retarding him.

  The centaur screamed until the last possible moment of life. After he was gulped up and digested, his scream seemed to linger, and the vornado gobbled up the echoes in a final voracious effort.

  Then, howling with hunger, it moved along the road in search of new prey.

  Above, the clouds danced with an unholy bluish-gray light.

  II

  “. . . And Ride Mankind.”

  Somewhere in the deep of the night, I came upon a man in black. He was fiftyish, with a deeply- lined face and gray stubble hair, charred eyes set in bony craters like spent meteorites.

  I did not recognize him for what he really was.

  “Can you show me the way to the plant?” I asked.

  “Have people lost their faith so much that they seek hell itself?” he countered.

  Then I noticed his soiled collar and crucifix.

  “Sorry, Father. I’m with the government.”

  The priest spat. “And you’re here to help, I suppose?”

  “That’s classified.”

  I noticed his crucifix. The broken hands and feet of Christ were present, still nailed to the cross, but the body had been forcibly wrenched off.

  “Where’s Jesus?” I asked.

  He lifted a gnarled hickory cane in my face. “Where’s Jesus, you say? That’s the question of the hour. Of the century! Isn’t it?” His voice rose in righteous indignation.

  “All my life I preached the lesson of the cross. Now the world is tumbling into the abyss, and where is our Lord? The greatest battle between good and evil in human history and Jesus Christ is nowhere to be found!”

  I could see he had a point. But I said nothing. He charged on.

  “If this is the Day of Judgment, where is our Savior. Late? Overdue? Perhaps he’s busy on some other planet saving the sinful souls of lizard men. Do you think it likely? How else to explain his absence? For if the Second Coming is tomorrow, he’s a bit bloody late, isn’t he? Can he put back the entire world? Can he restore sanity? Has the Rapture been postponed? Or rescheduled like a damned pink tea?”

  “I don’t have answers for you, Father,” I said gently.

  “The world of our fathers is no more. It was all for nothing. Nothing, I tell you. Nothing! A sham. Not just the Holy Church. But the Jews and the Muslims and the Hindus. They too followed a lie. A damned lie!”

  “Father,” I said carefully, �
��we still have our souls.”

  “Yes! Our immortal souls. Death is our only hope now. One solitary means of escape from this earthly torment. Jesus has turned slacker. We must take salvation into our own hands. Look!” He took two long needles from his tunic. “Do you see these?”

  “I do.”

  “All my life I have railed against the mortal sin of abortion. But now I perform them. And do you know why?”

  “It’s better not to bring children into the world as it now is,” I replied.

  “Far, far better!” he thundered. And he broke like a rainstorm, weeping uncontrollably, his dark threadbare shoulders wracking with unleashed sobs.

  “Direct me to the plant, Father.”

  He croaked the words out. I had no words of comfort for him. He was a broken priest, but yet also a driven man. Something was about to snap in him and only death would cure it.

  “Go with God, Father,” I said.

  After I had moved on, he seized control of himself and cried out, “Heed me! Trust not the Lord! Look to Satan himself for succor! Lucifer was at least once an angel! But these hellish things, they—”

  I walked away from his retching anguish. I was a lapsed Catholic. I had long ago put all belief systems behind me. I had been out in the matrix of all creation. I knew what the real score was. God was more of a hologram than a unitary being. But human consciousness was inextinguishable. There was no death, only transition to other realities. This hard-won knowledge kept me sane through all the horrific earth changes. Detachment became my baseline emotion. What was the worst that could happen to me? Death was inevitable, Old Ones or no Old Ones. If in the end the universe were devoured by the eternally-beating nuclear chaos called Azathoth, there were other universes, adjacent dimensions in which my immortal soul might dwell.

  It was a strange unanchored courage, but I had learned it in the matrix. Thus fortified, I prepared to brave the locus of local activity that should explain the One Ones’ fell objectives.

  The factory sat in a dell or hollow not far from the corpse-choked James River.

  It looked like a coal plant, but smelled like a crematorium. The flaring smokestacks reminded me of that time I RVed Dachau. The spiritual emptiness was oppressive and overwhelming. I never wanted to go back, physically or otherwise.

  And now, here I was—facing a far worse environment. I could sense it.

  Lines of yoked and chained people were being driven into the main gate by a dozen centaurs, some of which had birdlike heads and tentacles for lower limbs, like the ancient representations of the suppressed Egyptian godlet, Abraxas.

  I made a nest of branches, brush and other debris and hunkered down to observe closely.

  When I had absorbed all my physical eyes could perceive, I closed them and eased into an alpha brainwave state, then cycled down to theta. I do my best work in theta. When I don’t click out . . .

  I focused on the line of victims filing into the factory. What did they represent to the Old Ones? What was their value?

  My first impressions were representational and confusing. I saw soda cans, milk cartons, liquor bottles. Clearly I was operating on my right hemisphere. I tried to switch to the left to invoke the clairaudient function.

  I heard a single clairaudient word. A mere whisper bubbling up from my unconscious mind: containers.

  My eyes snapped open. “For what?” I said under my breath. Can’t be blood. Or H2O. The Old Ones are non-physical. They were busying terra-deforming the Earth—clearing it as the Necronomicon once prophesied—so that it will be vibrationally supportive of their kind. Could they be energy vampires?

  I shut my eyes and tried again. This time I set a different intention: containers for what?

  A vivid image sprang up. Clouds. The cobalt clouds that had been forming above the Earth, growing by the immeasurable hour. What did that mean? I focused on those eerie apparitions.

  In my mind’s eye, they brightened and pulsated. I saw turbulent faces, boiling like thunderclouds shown in time-lapse photography. Demonic faces roiled and shifted and regathered madly. The clouds spread. I recalled reading about the phenomenon of noctiluminescent clouds—mysterious atmospheric vapor formations that had been reported for over a century now—were they somehow more than mere clouds?

  Orifices opened in those clouds. Many of them. Thousands. They irised wide, then snapped shut. I was reminded of gulping piranha. What were they doing? Making faces at hapless mankind?

  I gave it up. Rolling over in my makeshift shelter, I stared up at the night sky. Metallic-blue cumulus clouds began gathering over the factory like scavengers to a corpse. That meant something. But what?

  I upshifted my breathing and climbed back to a beta state. I needed a clear head. The deeper I went into non-ordinary states of consciousness, the fuzzier my thinking would be until normal baseline beta consciousness reasserted itself. The dreaded downside of being operationally psychic.

  An hour passed. Two. A dismal line of people continued filing into the factory. Chopped-off screams broke the stillness. But I could glean nothing further on any level of perception at my command.

  It had been years since I had astral-projected. I was never very good at it. Just looking and down at my body lying there was enough to give me a jolt and send me snapping back into my physical self.

  Yet I had to try. It was the only way in—the only safe way. Or so I assumed.

  I lay on my back and drifted into a deep meditation. Fighting a rising fear, I pushed my jagged beta brain-waves flatter and flatter, till they were sine waves, then shallow waves. As they moved toward flatline, I unexpectedly went delta.

  The delta state is trance sleep. I don’t know my way around it. But somehow I achieved separation.

  Below, I saw my body entangled in brush and hoped I’d get to return to it.

  Carefully, I moved away. I was now in the thought-responsive aspect of reality. I had but to think of a place, and I would translate there. I approached the factory with the care of a visible man—which I was not.

  At a far corner, away from all centaur activity, I eased in through a broken window. Inside, furnaces massed. The place was full of great smelters and electrical furnaces and the like. Whatever this had been, it was the fiery pit of hell now.

  Centaurs with their scourges stormed about. Some wielded clubs. They drove people into the fire. Some humans quailed before the flames. Centaurs quickly dashed out their brains and flung them bodily into the glowing furnace maws.

  This was a crematorium!

  I was almost disappointed. That’s all?

  No. Not all.

  It was not a voice. I would not have heard a voice. For I had left my ears behind.

  It seemed to be coming from above. I moved to the shadowy vault of a ceiling, through it, and floated above the roof.

  Above hung the low-lying clouds. Dull blue, they stared down at me with hollow interest.

  Suddenly I felt an irresistible force, pulling me up, higher and fast.

  I willed myself back into my resting body. But the force tugging on the eternal me was strong.

  Frantically, I looked around and saw the silver cord that anchored me to my mortal form. Still intact!

  With a dawning horror, I spied the smoky tendril drifting down from a nodular cloud. It quested coilingly for the silvery filament that guaranteed my survival.

  Just as its leading edge bloomed into a scorpion with snapping claws, adrenalin kicked in—and I was yanked back!

  I sat up, gasping, clothed in flesh once more. A coldness settled into the pit of my lower chakras and I knew a hyperventilating terror beyond anything I had ever experienced.

  “What are those damned clouds?” I called out to the Almighty.

  As if in answer, the clouds above pulsated menacingly. God, if he still ruled the created universe, said nothing.

  Cold fear turned to hot anger and I resolved to complete my mission.

  When my brain cleared, the obvious became obvious.

/>   Back in my days as a lowly NRO Signalman, I was taught that every thing in creation had a unique energy signature, and from it flowed non-local signal information about its identity and fundamental nature. You just had to learn to tap into it.

  For a Signalman—and here I mean a Remote Viewer in training—it was as hard and as simple as sending a telepathic interrogative to the target. They explained it that it was like bouncing a signal off an orbiting satellite. Or transmitting an IFF—identify friend or foe—transponder signal to an approaching aircraft.

  You simply directed a thought at the target. But the thought couldn’t be couched in words. Sometimes the target was not human or did not speak your native language.

  Other times the target was inanimate. They had us practice on vehicles to train us how to interact with non-conscious targets.

  The trick was to formulate the question conceptually, or visually, without brain-based language. It was tough, but we learned to do it.

  Lying there under the mocking cloud, I mustered up that old training.

  I had little to lose and less to fear. After all, it had already attempted to seize my incorporeal form, and failed miserably.

  What are you? I beamed up.

  Back came an inchoate chaos of thought impressions—largely consisting of roiling cumulonimbus clouds en-mixed with gaseous nebulae, and a sense of ultra-deep spacial regions.

  Are you cosmic?

  The cloud pulsated. I sensed an affirmative and a secondary sense of greatness. Extra-cosmic, I intuited that to mean.

  I sent up another interrogative, and waited for the bounceback signal.

  I didn’t quite catch it. Was it calling me the N word? That made no sense. I’m white. I tried again. This time instead of asking what it was, I inquired of its name.

  It was sentient. Therefore it must possess a name—if only for self-reference.

  The bounceback decoded on the wrong side of my brain. I saw an image. It was a lowly shrub. I had no idea what it meant, and sent that puzzlement upward.

  I sensed laughter. It was cruel. It mocked and threatened the way a storm cloud threatens rain. I felt as if any minute now I would be rained on by the most hellish precipitation imaginable.