by Martha Wells
THE GODS OF H.P. LOVECRAFT
Edited by Aaron J. French
Copyright © 2015 Aaron J. French
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
“Call The Name” — Cthulhu — © 2015 — Adam LG Nevill
“The Dark Gates” — Yog-Sothoth — © 2015 — Martha Wells
“We Smoke the Northern Lights” — Azathoth — © 2015 — Laird Barron
“Petohtalrayn” — Nyarlathotep — © 2015 — Bentley Little
“The Doors that Never Close and The Doors that Are Always Open” – Shub-Niggurath — © 2015
– David Liss
“The Apotheosis of a Rodeo Clown” — Tsathoggua — © 2015 — Brett J. Talley
“Rattled” — Yig — © 2015 — Douglas Wynne
“In Their Presence” – The Mi-Go — © 2015 — Christopher Golden & James A. Moore
“Dream a Little Dream of Me” — Nightgaunts — © 2015 — Jonathan Maberry
“In the Mad Mountains” — Elder Things — © 2015 — Joe R. Lansdale
“A Dying of the Light” — Great Race of Yith — © 2015 — Rachel Caine
“Down, Deep Down, Below the Waves” — The Deep Ones — © 2015 — Seanan McGuire
Commentary on each deity by Donald Tyson
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:
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Printed in the United States of America
The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
ISBN: 978-1-942712-56-5 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-942712-57-2 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-942712-58-9 (hc)
JournalStone rev. date: December 11, 2015
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015951514
Cover Artwork and Design: Chuck Killorin
Interior Design: Paul Fry
Interior Artwork:
(Cthulhu) — Paul Carrick, (Yog-Sothoth) — Steve Santiago, (Azathoth) — Paul
Carrick, (Nyarlathotep) — Paul Carrick, (Shub-Niggurath) — Steve Santiago,
(Tsathoggua) — Steve Santiago, (Yig) — John Coulthart, (The Mi-Go) — John
Coulthart, (Nightgaunts) — John Coulthart, (Elder Things) — John Coulthart, (Great
Race of Yith) — John Coulthart, (The Deep Ones) — John Coulthart
Edited by: Aaron J. French
To Veronica—Who gives me the time.
To Domenic—An awesome little dude.
Call the Name
Adam LG Nevill
Upon sand the colour of rust and beneath a sulphur sky, a great shape stretched the length of a long, flat beach. Black salt water slapped the grey mass of lifeless flesh and cloaked the corpse with foam. Embedded haphazardly about the vast bulk were scores of milky eyes that stared at nothing. In the far distance, unto the reddish headlands at either end of the shore, the body remained shiny where unbroken, and pulpy where deterioration had ulcerated the smooth flanks.
In the yolky light that fell through thickening, stationary clouds obscuring the sun, a long beak was visible, lined with small killer whale teeth that always seemed to suggest a smile. What might have been a great fin, or flipper, was as ragged as a mainsail hit by grapeshot, but still pointed at the heavens. In other places, on a shoreline that might have bordered an empty lake on Mars, long pellucid protrusions of jelly streaked the sand, as if the wall of flesh had been disembowelled during a battle of leviathans in the lightless depths of the black ocean. It may merely have rolled upon another vast form and squashed it, or perhaps the mostly transparent tendrils were a part of the corpse. Cleo could not tell. No birds dropped and alighted around this fallen giant. Or was this thing only a substance improperly formed and cast from the ocean as flotsam?
Her appalled study of the thing occurred upon a shore she now recognised as the old esplanade of Paignton. A place as much transformed as the atmosphere, ocean and colour of the sand. When she realised that her inquiry into what it was, and where she was, was less significant than when this was happening, Cleo noticed that she was no longer alone on the beach.
Behind some dark, red rocks, a few hundred feet away from where she stood gaping, two black, whiskered heads appeared. They were as sleek as seals, but upon the necks of creatures with shoulders and arms.
She moved away about as fast as one can move on loose sand in a dream, which was not fast or far, all the time looking over her shoulder at the rocks. The heads disappeared only to reappear closer to her position, and beside a wall as waterworn as a pebble. The black things behind the rocks raised their snouts in the way of dogs detecting the fragrance of food.
Somewhere behind the long headland of rubble and red rock at the rear of the beach, a great shriek rent the air; air in which not a single seabird was visible. A terrible whimpering followed the roar, issued from a second party. The cry of distress broke a piece from Cleo’s heart. Beyond the rocks, the dull thump of a heavy body thrown to the ground could be felt through the vibrations of the impact as much as heard. What sounded like the breaking of the great woody limbs of a tree, amidst a series of excited shrieks, reinforced her belief that something large was being put to death by something both larger and fiercer than itself.
The thing she then ran over felt crispy beneath her feet and recoiled into itself as she trod it deeper into the sand. She looked down and a face that she was sure had once been human peered at her, but only briefly. The expression was that of a living thing reaching the end of a deep suffering, and an all-too-human mouth gasped and gulped at the air, pinkish gills fluttering in an increasingly transparent neck. The long and now bleaching body beneath the face was that of a seahorse. The spiny tail flicked hopelessly in the sand.
Cleo let forth a sob and wished, madly, to crush this delicate head with a rock to end its misery, but her own pursuers had drawn closer and now seemed to be leaning over their rocky perches and hissing as her panic and weariness increased.
The way ahead was barred by the mottled trunk or appendage, white-spotted by disease, that had been flung up the beach from the great, dead bulk at the shoreline.
Cleo’s belief that her attempt to escape in any direction would be futile was horribly complemented by an instinctive assurance that her end in the sand would not come easy. And among the corpses on the beach, and amidst the audible splinterings of bone behind the seawall of rubble, she understood that in this place this was the way of things. Her realisation of such was the worst thing of all.
***
Cleo shivered awake. Her face was wet. She’d been talking in her sleep too, or crying out; a sore throat attested to that.
She nearly wept with relief as her familiarity with the living room interior slowly returned. Some parts of the room remained strange and were not a part of her home, at least not part of the home that she could recall. Maybe tomorrow these features and objects would be recognisable and bring comfort rather than anxiety.
Another 20°C night.
Cleo drank water from the teat of a closed cup sat upon the tray attached to her easy chair. Once she’d calmed herself with two anti-anxiety tablets, she turned on th
e media service and watched the world fall apart on a screen.
Fifth refugee ship intercepted by Italian Navy in three days. Thousands confirmed dead. No survivors.
Night vision footage in a late, live broadcast was beamed from the Mediterranean. The Italian Navy had found another ship.
The metal walls inside the drifting vessel were predictably, and somehow functionally, the terrible grey that Cleo associated with war at sea or maritime disaster. Pipes traversed a low ceiling studded with rivets. Paint bubbled with rust. Dust glittered and drifted through darkness as if it were plankton in a sunken wreck. As the moving camera panned through the greenish air, a moth’s frantic capering was lit up.
Immobile forms haphazardly covered the lower deck. They created a lumpen procession that reached out of sight: blankets, exposed limbs, discarded sandals, disparate piles of baggage, and the pale soles of feet that had walked so many miles to reach that ship, but would never walk again. The far end of the wide space was a void.
A figure moved into view. Bulky, too upright, it emerged slowly like an astronaut in zero gravity; a CDC or military scientist encased in a protective biosuit, carrying an equipment bag. Another two men appeared, identically dressed in unventilated suits attached to hoses, waddling cautiously through the jade umbra, their faces grey and undefined behind transparent masks. They too carried plastic crates. All were being filmed by a fourth figure with a camera attached to a helmet.
There were quick close-ups of swollen black and brown faces, eyes open and bloodshot, the mouths crimson slices through which ochre-filmed teeth grimaced. Long-necked, his expression a rictus chiselled from agony, one man opened his jaws wide in a close-up, as if his last act was to scream at death itself. Beside him, a mother clutched a motionless child in a papoose. The small head of the child was turned away as if afraid of the camera. Most of the dead faced the floor, suggesting the life they had departed was unbearable to look back upon, even once.
The footage cut to exterior shots of a large, antique, merchant freighter, blooded with tributaries of corrosion, the white bridge lightless; a vessel adrift. Flares lit the water red. PT boats and a frigate circled at a distance while white searchlights fixed the vessel as if it were a specimen on the black surface of the sea. Rubber dinghies rose and fell with the swell alongside the hull. Marine commandoes were huddled down within the smaller craft, but peered up with their weapons trained on the railings above. The fore and aft decks of the merchant vessel were similarly littered with the unmoving lumps of discarded humanity. The oily sea lapped with the usual indifference about another ancient vessel that never made it across.
The children.
So far away, in the relative comfort and safety of her apartment in Devon, England, Cleo closed her eyes and swam in a ruddy, private darkness for a while. She wanted these sights to remain poignant, but to see too much horror was to normalise such and stop caring. And even this new disease and the never-ending refugee crisis were trifles in the scheme of things.
When she opened her eyes, politicians and civic authorities, military personnel and scientists were announced by subtitles that she lacked the energy to read. They each spoke in separate portions of the broadcast. The ship had sailed from Libya; its cargo entirely human; more of the desperate from East, West, Central and North Africa.
A new recording occupied the report within seconds. Amidst a panorama of dark green foliage, enshrouded by mist, a scattering of black shapes could be glimpsed amidst long grass. A subtitle and map indicated a forest in Gabon. Recent footage too, because she had never seen these pictures on any of the twelve news channels that she flicked between whilst remaining motionless in this infernal heat.
Though her discipline and background were in marine life in British coastal waters, as a retired conservationist she remained unable to resist any news story about the desecration of the natural world. Like a masochist, she watched the Sixth Great Extinction unfold in detail, and at its own inexorable, determined pace in this short Holocene Period. And, guiltily, she had no more compassion for her kind than for the fates of the other species with whom humanity shared the world, and had subsequently annihilated. Sixty percent of the world’s wildlife was now extinct by virtue of the planet having to accommodate so many people: nine billion and rising. Cleo wished she had never lived to see this.
She altered the setting and the room filled with sound. The recordings originated from one of the last stretches of trees in Equatorial Africa. This was believed to be the very end of the wild gorillas. She had no idea that any were still alive. It appeared that a final two hundred and thirty-seven gorillas had clawed out an existence deep inside one of the last private forests, but now lay silver belly up, or were hunched, heavily furred, but stiff with death and wreathed by flies.
The news service confirmed that the seventh outbreak of Gabon River Fever was responsible; the same pandemic that swept away the remaining wild primates from the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, Republic of the Congo, and Uganda. The gorilla was officially extinct, along with the entire complement of refugees on board another freighter carrying the same virus.
The only question she asked herself quietly was the same question she had asked forty years before, in 2015: what did we think would happen once food aid and food exports eventually ceased? How could the countries of Equatorial and then North Africa not collapse? And like the viruses that had scattered across the planet in their multitudes, over the last three decades, Cleo knew that Gabon River Fever was zoonotic, spreading from animals to humans. Those people still hanging on in Equatorial Africa had little to eat but game. And in desperation they had eaten the dead flesh of the last apes, fed upon the bushmeat carcasses, and so contracted and then spread a deadly virus that had originated in bats; another species driven from its habitat and thus panicked into spreading a pandemic that was benign in the reservoir host.
Invaded ecologies always seemed to call us out eventually and fight back. But Cleo was also convinced that it was not only the bats that had revenge in mind. In mind: but was that even the right phrase for what was stirring? Could something so vast be considered a mind? Or was it an independent living cosmos that we could only compare to our own feeble shreds of consciousness, in the same way that an atom with its orbiting electrons can be likened to a great planet with its moons?
On screen, an academic commentator from Rome commented upon the irony of another species of our closest ancestors becoming extinct, and reaching its end in the very place where our own precursors emerged. He likened the burden of man upon the earth to that of a flu infecting an eighty-year-old woman. The comparison was, at least, sixty years old. Not much use recycling it now. Metaphors only reshape horror; they don’t prevent it.
The heat wave, the forest fires in Europe, the Chinese famine, and the escalation between India and Pakistan, had been greedy and monopolised any news she’d seen for months. At least the fate of the last apes was given a short, late-night spotlight. Though even that was soon swept away by additional reports of another lethal virus, reported in Hong Kong, and one not yet named.
Breaking news, reporting its endless cycles of catastrophe, continued to flicker and flash through the humid innards of Cleo’s living room as she stared at the window, a black rectangle of hot darkness. She could smell the warm, foamy brine of the high tide. The curtains could have been carven from marble. There was no wind in the bay, not so much as a breeze. All was still, inside and out.
Those as elderly as Cleo were told to stay indoors and be still, even at night. They could not cool down after the sweltering days. Right across Europe, for three months, heatstroke had cut another swathe through the aged. A perennial event for the continent and its islands. But what she had discovered within a few miles of her own home was of far greater significance than anything she watched on the news.
The women of her family, distinguished scientists and environmentalists, whose pictures were lined up across her sideboard a
nd whose framed specimens decorated her home, had all believed that the desecration of the planet by mankind’s thoughtless extension had disturbed something greater than we could ever amount to. The very rapacity of her own species had functioned as the worst wake-up call since the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction, sixty-five million years before. Life could never be inactive or silent; the cries of infants for succour would always be heard by predators.
Cleo knew the world could no longer continue as it was anyway. Not while the great fields of permafrost in Alaska, Siberia and Canada so hurriedly released their terrible, long-withheld breath into the air. Enough methane and carbon dioxide to nullify and exceed all revised greenhouse gas emission targets. The forests and oceans were absorbing far less carbon dioxide now. The feedback loops had become a tourniquet around mankind’s throat.
The average global temperature was now three degrees higher than it had been in 1990. The higher latitudes were five degrees warmer. Nine billion pairs of fingers were beginning to clutch at the thin wire strung about their throats, some more frantically than others. Sometimes, in her daydreams, Cleo believed she could sense nine billion pairs of feet, kicking up the dust as the chokehold tightened.
The subtropics and mid-latitudes had all but lost their rain. The great collision of the polar cold and the heat from the equator, up there in the sky above the vast, heaving, warm bodies of water, now retreated like another refugee upon the exhausted earth. Tired, spreading out, and meandering to higher latitudes and distant poles, the great writhing cables of wind that once reeled so fast and so high, those great definers of air masses, were taking their precious cool air and delicious rain away with them, as if they were removing all that they could carry out of this heat. The fresh water and the nourishing blankets of gentle, golden warmth were vanishing, along with those near-forgotten climates that had allowed so many to exist.