by Unknown
Detwiler walked back over to his duffel and the remaining seal. He knelt beside the book and placed the seal face up on the ground in front of him.
Stipe set down the barrow. “Whatcha doing, man?” “Oh, this and that.”
Stipe stopped. “That’s the book, Detwiler,” he said. “Beckman’s book.”
“Yes, it is. Makes for interesting reading. For instance, I can tell you why Cthulhu’s been hoarding all these seals.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. But give it twenty minutes and he’ll be here anyway.”
Alarmed, Stipe looked around, up at the sky, at the repulsive towers. “He will?”
“Yeah, I got his attention.” He gestured toward the hydrant, the broken pieces of seal standing out in greenish contrast to the gray debris.
“John, you have any idea what even one of those is worth potentially?”
“Kind of. Pretty much all of humanity.”
Distantly, the air vibrated, a quiet, slow rhythm.
Detwiler gestured with his thumb at the book. “According to Beckman, this world of ours used to be Cthulhu’s domain. About eight or twelve millennia ago. He’s responsible for this local area, which is big, but not compared to all space and time. The realm he got booted to from here was a kind of limbo between dimensions. Thing is, honestly, he’s a cousin to the Old Ones. I mean the real Old Ones. They’re not like him.”
“No?”
“Infinitely worse,” said Detwiler. “They’d likely have scorched the whole solar system by now, melted the planets and reassembled them as something you and I can’t even comprehend, Stipe. We don’t perceive enough dimensions.”
“How you know this?”
“Well, I don’t, exactly. It’s what the book says. I mean, Beckman could just be nuts, like we both thought.”
The “whump” of huge and unseen wings grew steadily louder.
“If that’s the case, though,” Detwiler continued, “we’re in trouble here.”
“What have you done?” Stipe stood as if ready to bolt.
“This—” he tapped the remaining seal “—this is the second seal. Your Old Ones think of Cthulhu as the cousin you don’t invite to the wedding because he picks his nose and wipes it on the bride’s gown, you know what I’m saying? They gave him our backwater swamp to manage, just to keep him off on his own. The gates are in place to keep him out as much as us in. This seal is Yog-Tetharoth.”
The sound of wings seemed to be nearly overhead.
“You open this one”—he glanced at the book and yelled, “krel’bo’yni Kadath nar’whal Kaekeeba!” then went on as if nothing had happened—“and you’ll reopen that buffer space between Cthulhu and the rest of the family. Suck him right back out.”
Stipe’s eyes were huge. “What are they like, the Old Ones?”
“All it says is, you can smell them, but you can’t see them.”
Something huge, writhing, with red glowing eyes emerged out of the clouds above. Detwiler drew the crowbar from his duffel.
“Of course, it requires a sacrifice. Nothing personal.” He drove the sharp edge of the crowbar straight into the seam down the middle of the seal. With a flash, the greenish stone split in half.
Stipe put his hands out as if to push away from something. His mouth opened in a scream, but the more thunderous scream from the creature above him drowned him out. Cthulhu turned and vanished back into the clouds.
“That’s not right,” Detwiler muttered.
Stipe hadn’t moved or vanished. A pure blackness arising from the broken seal spread up and out, surrounding him but leaving him untouched, save that his face contorted into a mask of revulsion, his eyes watered and he clamped both hands over his nose. The blackness rose like smoke upon a breeze and faded.
Lying flat on the ground, Detwiler glanced over at the book. He read the relevant passages again. “Krel’bo’yni Kadath nar’whal Kaekeeba—that’s what it says. That’s what I said. I don’t get it.” Then the stench reached him. It was like the distilled essence of sulphuric eggs run through an oil refinery and then fired out of a skunk’s butt. He pressed his face into the dirt and groaned.
Stipe, on his knees, coughed and wheezed, “What did you do, John?”
“I—I was sending Cthulhu back to where he came from.” He leaned up on his elbows. “You know when I said Beckman was nuts?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, his translation’s screwy, too.”
Overhead, clouds floated, drifted. Then, as if a titanic soap bubble had reached them, they flew apart. Moonlight spilled down, but distorted and sickly yellow as though projected through old celophane. Detwiler could feel phantoms nearby, invisible, amorphous things that swelled against the very fabric of reality.
“You let in the Old Ones,” Stipe said.
“Uh, yeah. Let’s not mention that to the others, okay?” He got to his feet. He wiped at his eyes, sniffled, choked. “Listen, if we’re lucky, he was wrong about them melting the planets and stuff, too.”
Stipe got up, shook his head like a dog. “I can’t get that stink off me.”
The ruin of a nearby building suddenly flexed and distorted. As if liquid it drew together, the top of it curled like an ocean wave and then stretched into the clouds. The night filled with distant piteous cries of horror, not all of them human.
“We, ah, we might want to go back into the tunnel awhile,” Detwiler suggested. He bent down to pick up Beckman’s book. The stars in the night sky shuddered. “Just till things settle down.” He headed into the phosphorescence.
With a final glance at the world, Stipe stumbled into the mouth of the tunnel, too, but abruptly drew up. “Detwiler,” he yelled, “what did you mean you needed a sacrifice?”
THE HOLOCAUST OF ECSTASY
Brian Stableford
It was dark when Tremeloe first opened his eyes, and he found it impossible to make out anything in a sideways or upward direction. When he looked down, though, in the hope of seeing where he was standing—for he had no idea where he was, and was sure that he wasn’t lying down—he saw that there were holes in a floor that seemed to be a long way beneath him and that stars were shining through the holes.
There seemed to be a conversation going on around him, but there were no English words in it; the languages that the various voices were speaking all seemed to him to be Far Eastern in origin. The voices seemed quite calm, and in spite of the impenetrable darkness and not knowing where he was, Tremeloe felt oddly calm himself.
“Does anyone here speak English?” he asked. The words came out easily enough, but sounded and felt wrong, in some way that he couldn’t quite understand.
For a moment, there was a pregnant silence, as if everyone in the crowd were deciding whether to admit to speaking English. Finally, though, a voice that seemed to come from somewhere closer at hand than all the rest, said: “Yes. You’re American?” There was nothing Oriental about the accent, but that didn’t make it any easier to place.
Tremeloe thought that the other might be near enough to touch, and tried to reach out in the direction from which the voice had come, but he couldn’t. His body felt strange and wrong. He couldn’t feel his hands, and when he tried to touch himself to reassure himself that he was still there, he couldn’t touch any other part of him with his fingers. The idea struck him that the conviction that he wasn’t lying down, based on the fact that he couldn’t feel a surface on which he might be lying, would be unreliable if he were paralyzed from the neck down.
“Richard Tremeloe, Arkham, Massachusetts,” he said, by way of introduction. “Have I been in some kind of accident?” He tried to remember where he had been before falling asleep—or unconscious—and couldn’t. “I think I’ve got amnesia,” he added.
“More than you know,” said the other voice, a trifle dolefully, “but the others are a little more relevant in their concerns.”
“Can you understand what they’re saying?” Tremeloe asked, knowing that it was the
wrong question, but reluctant to ask one whose answer might provoke the panic that he had so far been spared.
“Some of it,” the other boasted. “There’s an animated discussion about reincarnation going on. The Buddhists and the Hindus have different views on the subject, but none of them really believes in it—especially the ex-Communists. On the other hand . . .”
“Who are you?” Tremeloe demanded, wondering why the anxiety that he ought to be feeling wasn’t making itself felt in his flesh or his voice. “Where the hell are we?”
“If I’m not much mistaken,” the other replied, “we’ve been reborn into the new era, beyond good and evil: the holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. I’m not at all sure about the freedom, though . . . or, come to that, the ecstasy. I shouldn’t be here. This shouldn’t be possible. The memory wipe should have made it impossible.”
“Reborn?” echoed Tremeloe. “I haven’t been reborn. I’m not sure of much, but I know I’m an adult. I’m fifty-six years old—maybe more, depending on the depth of the amnesia. I’m a professor of biology at Miskatonic University, married to Barbara, with two children, Stephen and Grace . . . .” He trailed off. He was talking in order to test his memory rather than to enlighten the mysteriously anonymous other, but it wasn’t an awareness of pointlessness or a failure of remembrance that had caused him to stop. It was the realization that the stars really were shining through gaps in . . . something that wasn’t the floor. “Why has up become down?” he asked. “Why aren’t I aware of being upside-down? Why can’t I feel gravity?”
The voice didn’t try to reassure him. Instead, the other said: “Miskatonic? Have you read the Necronomicon?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tremeloe snapped—or tried to, since his momentary irritation was a mere flicker, which didn’t show in his voice. “It’s been locked in a vault for decades. No one’s allowed to see or touch any of the so-called forbidden manuscripts, since the unpleasantness way back in the last century. Anyway, I’m a scientist. I don’t have any truck with occult rubbish like that.”
“Do you know Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee?”
That question gave Tremeloe pause for thought. He blinked and squinted—and was glad to know that he could still feel his eyelids, just as he could still feel the movements of his tongue—in the hope that he might be able to make out his surroundings now that his eyes were adapting to the extremely poor light. He couldn’t. Above his head—or, strictly speaking, below it, since he seemed to be hanging upside-down—the darkness was Stygian. Around him, he had a vague impression of rounded objects that might have been heads, not very densely clustered, and wispier things that were vaguely reminiscent of fern leaves, but he couldn’t actually see anything . . . except the fugitive stars, shining through gaps in what was presumably a dense cloud-bank. Occasionally, the stars were briefly eclipsed, as if something had moved across them: a giant bird, perhaps.
Around him, the chorus of foreign voice was still going on. If any of the others could speak English, they were content to listen to what Tremeloe and his companion were saying, without intervening.
What was remarkable about the other’s question, Tremeloe reminded himself, when he came back to it reluctantly, was that Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had died more than a hundred years ago . . . or, at least, more than a hundred years before Richard Tremeloe had turned fifty-six. He was long dead, but not quite forgotten . . . just as the university’s famous copy of the Necronomicon was unforgotten, even though no one had clapped eyes on it since before Tremeloe had been born. Having no idea how to answer the other’s question, Tremeloe prevaricated by saying: “Do you?”
“I did, briefly—but that was in another place and another time. I infer from your hesitation that he’s long dead, and that you . . . died . . . sometime in the twenty-first or twenty-second century.”
“I’m not dead,” Tremeloe retorted, reflexively, although he did realize that if all the other hanged men in this dark Tarot space were earnestly discussing reincarnation, he might be in the minority in holding that opinion, and might even be wrong, in spite of cogito ergo sum and all his memories of Miskatonic, Barbara, Stephen, Grace, his hands, his legs, and his heart . . . .
His heart would have sunk, if he’d had one, and if its sinking had been possible. I can’t feel gravity, Tremeloe thought. Aloud, he said: “Are you telling me that I really have been reincarnated?”
“Yes—probably not for the first time, although it’s impossible to tell how many layers of amnesia we’ve been afflicted with.”
“How?” This time Tremeloe succeeded in snapping. “When? By whom?”
“If you’d read the Necronomicon,” the other voice replied, with a leaden dullness that probably wasn’t redolent with panic because it had no more capacity to hold an edge that Tremeloe’s own, “you’d know.”
“And you have?” Tremeloe riposted.
“No,” the other came back, quick as a flash. “I wrote it—and no, I don’t mean that I’m the legendary Arab with the nonsensical name who penned the Al Azif. I mean that I too, like Peaslee, have lived in Pnakotus . . . except that to me, it was a home of sorts, though not Yith itself, and I’m not supposed to be out of it any more. The human brain I inhabited for ten years was supposed to have been cleansed of every last trace of me. I shouldn’t have been available for . . . this.”
“Has it occurred to you,” Tremeloe asked, “that you might be barking mad?”
“Yes,” the other replied. “How about you?”
Good question, Tremeloe thought. This is a nightmare—a crazy nightmare. There’s no other explanation. Please can I wake up now? Somehow, he knew that wasn’t going to happen. He might well be dreaming, but he was very clearly conscious that he was living his dream, and that he was not going to be waking up to any other reality any time soon.
Even so . . .
“The cloud’s getting lighter,” he observed. “It is cloud, isn’t it? That is the sky, isn’t it? It only seems to be beneath us because we’re hanging upside-down.”
“Yes,” the other answered. “It’s dawn. Whether we’re barking mad or not, this might be a good time to strive with all our might to lose our minds completely: to dissolve our minds into private chaos and gibbering idiocy, if we can. On balance . . .”
The other shut up, somewhat to Tremeloe’s relief.
The dawn was slow. The shades of grey through which the bulk of the sky progressed as its patches turned blue and the stars were drowned seemed infinite in their subtlety, but Tremeloe soon stopped watching them, in order to concentrate on the tree.
The reason that he couldn’t feel his body was that he didn’t have one. He was just a head and a neck—except that the neck was really a stalk, and it connected him to the bough of a tree from which he hung down like a fruit, amid a hundred other heads that he could see and probably a thousand that he couldn’t. The things he’s intuited as leaves really were leaves, and really were divided up in a quasi-fractal pattern, a little like fern leaves but lacier. They were pale green streaked with purple.
The tree, so far as Tremeloe could estimate, was at least a hundred feet high, and its crown had to be at least a hundred and fifty in diameter, but he was positioned on the outside of the crown, about five-sixths of the way up—or, as it seemed to him, down—and he couldn’t see the trunk at all. He could barely see the ground “above” his head, but the thin streaks he could see between his head-fruit-tree and the next were vivid green and suspiciously flat, as if they might be algae-clogged swamp-water rather than anything solid.
The jungle stretched as far as his eyes could see. The birds in the sky really did look like giants, but that might have been an error of perspective.
There was no disintegration into private chaos, no hectic slide into gibbering idiocy. While not exactly calm any longer, and perhaps still capable of a kind of panic, Tremeloe felt that his consciousness was clear, that his memory was sound—so far as it went—and that his intelligence was relentless. He realized tha
t he was no longer possessed of the hormonal orchestra of old. Presumably, he still had a pituitary master gland, which was probably still sending out its chemical signals to the endocrine glands that had once been distributed through his frail human flesh, but whatever was responding to them now was a very different organism. From now on, his feelings, like his voice, would be regulated by a very different existential system. Even so, he did still have a voice. He had no lungs, but he did have vocal cords, and some kind of apparatus for pumping air into his neck-stalk. He wasn’t dumb, any more than he was deaf or blind.
All in all, he thought, only slightly amazed at his capacity to think it, things could be worse. Then he remembered what the other English-speaker had implied about losing his mind completely, and dissolving into gibbering mindlessness, probably being the better alternative . . . .
The head of the other English-speaker—the only Caucasian face amid a crowd of Orientals who occasionally glanced at him sideways, with apparent curiosity but no hostility, but showed no sign of understanding what he said—seemed to be that of a man in his mid- fifties, who might have been handsome before middle-aged spread had given him jowls and thinning hair had turned his hairline into a ebbing tide. The jowls seemed oddly protuberant, but that was because they were hanging the wrong way. Gravity still existed; it was just that Tremeloe no longer had any sensation of his own weight. He felt slightly insulted by that, having always thought of his intellect-laden head as a ponderous entity.
Tremeloe didn’t see the bats until they actually arrived at the tree, wheeling around it in a flock that must have been thirty or thirty-five strong. This time, there was no possibility of any error of perspective; they were huge. Because Tremeloe was a biologist he knew that real vampire bats were tiny, and that the common habit of referring to fruit-bats as “vampire bats” was a myth-based error, but now that he was a human fruit, the difference seemed rather trivial—especially when he saw the bats begin to settle on his fellow human fruit.