by Martha Wells
No, Cleo didn’t think that. Not exactly. ‘The end of us will be the end of us, my dear, but not the end of everything.’
She did often wonder, though, if the coming eclipse would herald an extinction-level event. How could she not, after all of those dreams? And one heralded in true biblical fashion by the transformation of the firmament. But Cleo was not entirely convinced by the idea, or by her predecessors’ thoughts in this area, nor with proclamations made by the new churches who were far too dependent on A Dark, Slowly Flowing Flood, among the other, older texts they favoured from Providence, New England.
‘I believe our end will be near total, Yolanda, but with a partial evolutionary transformation of whatever survives. I can’t give you any timescale, or date, but it will be relatively swift in earth-life terms. And miserably incremental like the consequences of climate change, surrounded by diebacks we’ve not seen since the bubonic plague in Europe and Asia. So, I’m giving us, at least, another two centuries amidst the rubble of our civilisation. But those will be times like nothing we’ve had to cope with so far. I mean, how many of us can breathe underwater? It may really be that simple, in most places on the earth.’
‘Oh, Cleo! You make me smile.’
‘The world has been changing rapidly and bewilderingly towards a critical mass, Yolanda. Surely you have noticed? And I believe dear old Torbay has a specific role to play in an epochal event.’
Yolanda laughed as she swung her bag over her shoulder. ‘Whatever you say, Cleo! There is so much going on in your head. But you are making great progress. You must take the relaxants if your mind races. The doctor says so.’
‘And you may ask.’ Cleo was not to be stopped, even as Yolanda was halfway through the door. ‘Why don’t I flee to higher ground? But if you consider what the women of my family have discovered, who would want to survive what is coming?’
***
[Excerpt from the diary of Cleo Harvey]
July 18th, 2055
My dearest Yolanda,
I may not remember to tell you this. I may become distracted, or sleep through your next visit. But as I am enjoying a good period this afternoon, I feel I owe you some explanation so that you can better make sense of the disparate stories that I have been telling you over the last two years; stories about my family and our work here in this bay.
My great-great-grandmother, Amelia Anning, whom I may have mentioned to you during our association, was certain that what she called the Old One, or Great Old One, as she was wont, arrived on our planet in the Ediacaran Period, 535 million years ago, and during the last gasps of the Precambrian ages.
Her methods for deducing this timeline were complex, and involved as much science as imagination, and where the two mediums seemed to enmesh within her dream life. Even with her eyes closed, while away in other places and times as she slept, she still had an eye for the landscapes that she saw, and for the forms of those things that left the imprints she had found in the cliffs.
Amelia surmised that the arrival occurred during the time of the great soft-bodied inhabitants. Those that had existed for hundreds of millions of years, ever consuming each other and recycling their drifting forms. These indigenous denizens of the young earth left almost nothing for fossil hunters to find, because they had no bones, shells or teeth. But she learned that vast creatures had burrowed through the earth during Ediacaran times, and trawled the oceans too; great tunnels and gouges were found here in Torbay and in Australia, though not what left the creases in the stones.
Amelia, however, caught sight of them, the vast iridescent jellies and the great drillers of the planet, as if she was floating among them, or scurrying through the debris of their excavations. And in her waking life what Amelia recalled both fascinated her and traumatized her. These tremors of shock loosened her rickety mental foundations. But the monstrous shapes, the diaphanous swellings of the poisonous skirts, the viscous trailings through the hot green deeps, and the blind squirmings that she tried to describe and paint, were nothing compared to that which blasted through the atmosphere and then dispersed itself in incalculably new forms. The visitor.
The Cambrian Period, as we know, is renowned for the creativity of its seas. Nothing lived on what little land existed. That far back, the maelstrom of creation was still in the deeps, and what wallowed in the watery expanses became varied and all too abundant. But it was our visitor who made these new ways of life possible. What it stimulated into being, about its landing site, crept and leapt, crawled, swam, and burrowed to escape parental predation. There were shells, encasing such young life, at least in these Cambrian times; carapaces made in the image of the old visitor’s armour. What was still soft and boneless was mostly swept away, or simply reinvented.
But the visitor, the Great Old One, was not satisfied, or so my forebears all muttered in their bloodless and traumatised states in a local hospital that is now long gone (luxury apartments, would you believe?).
Great ructions and upheavals were emitted as the slowly rusticating visitor, remade and remade again the environment that flooded past its often slumbering form beneath the waves. One such mighty cataclysm was the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction. The trilobites, brachiopods and graptolites were mostly rendered obsolete for decisions that we can only guess at, if decision is the right word. Human terms are imprecise, for although we share a minute fragment of the Old One’s vast consciousness within our own sentience, we are not like it.
This slaughter or genocide of what had either been created, or adapted from the insensate drifters of the fathoms, occurred 443 million years ago, in two stages divided by hundreds of thousands of years in which the monarch of our watery rock rested between its annihilations.
My poor forebears all cited the alien deity’s sensitivity to temperature and climate, and claimed that it drew great ice sheets over itself and its resting places following the Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction. It also used a new armour of ice to drastically alter the chemistry of the oceans and the atmosphere above the waters. But the ruler continued to vandalise its own newly created habitat too, and repeatedly, across the next 380 million years, whenever its meditations became fitful, or disturbed. The planet was plunged into apocalypse and collapse in the Devonian, Permian, Triassic-Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods. There were smaller mass extinctions too, and in each of these eruptions of the roused tyrant’s rage, half of the species that it had formed or evolved were destroyed again.
Varied evolving parts of itself, and therefore life, were discovered upon our shores by my fossil-hunting family. All of the clues of what came before mankind, mainly occurred in the Devonian and Permian Periods, and because the slaughtered littered their corpses in the bare cliffs of our beautiful, sheltered Torbay, my forebears dug them up. Do you see?
The Devonian was the Age of Fishes. The sea levels were so very high and the temperature of the water too hot for some, like our ruler, at thirty degrees in the tropics. So a great wrath from below was invoked by this heat. Now this is important if you consider the temperature of our own world now. But three quarters of all the species on this planet were made extinct across a slow, deliberate and sadistic cull lasting for several million years. At one point, you could say chemical weapons were employed by the Great Old One. The oxygen was removed from the waters, as the creator noted such a chronic dependence upon that gas amongst its myriad subjects. The wiping of the slate was also embellished by the Old One’s wilful alterations in sea level, by changes in the climate, and by disruptions in soil fecundity. Even great rocks, passing through the heavens, were pulled down by its rage upon the seabed; a rage that our own baboonish antics today inadequately mimic. The fury that destroyed what had been created must have been incendiary, incandescent, and so cruel. My relatives only found fragments of the war-torn carcasses. They had been buried in rubble for 359 million years, but they were still smoking with a psychic trauma at a bacterial and subatomic level.
The visitor covered the world with ice again. It
banished the earth from its sight and slept in the ruins. The survivors struggled on. The land welded together its wreckage into the Pangea supercontinent, in which every bleeding and shell-shocked continent came together to shiver in the ice. This diaspora began 290 million years ago. But what life and activity there was heated the planet all over again and melted the ice.
Such was the savagery and merciless genocide of the visitor upon awakening this time that all previous mass extinctions were rendered irrelevant. You could say that the Great Old One came out swinging with both eyes open, and The Great Dying began. The fish, and even the insects, were smashed and cast aside. He called down a rain of stones from that canopy of debris that flowed through the solar system. He opened his bellows and poisoned the earth with methane, rid the air of oxygen and suffocated his own multitude of abandoned children. Up rose the tyrant’s seas too and down they crashed upon what we call life. The annihilation was near total. All but four percent of the species of the earth were put to death. My mother told me that his indifference alone had allowed the four percent to survive. All of what is left alive today began life in the four percent that survived The Great Dying.
200 hundred million years ago, and then 65 million years ago, he laid waste again and again to what swam, flew and crawled anew around his throne. And again, he used the climate as his weapon.
65 million years after that final massacre, our species has heated this earth again, and we have become so noisome, noisy and populous. Only the flora, water and the animal kingdom can sense the destruction and extinctions of the past ages, and they have begun to scream that name in alarm and terror again. They know that one of our creator’s eyes has opened. Bleary with slumber maybe, but red with a demented rage that is as hot as a star.
As I watch the news on the screen in my home, and as I reel through the data from every kind of scientific observation and analysis that cognitively overloads our poor and troubled minds, in all of this chaos, I believe that we have fatally roused the Great Old One with our careless tenancy. We have begun to wake him with the heat that we have caused. The visitor is the sole creator, and always has been, but we have dared to ape a deity’s excesses. So this time his wrath will explode with a creativity that not even the cruellest God or devil, in any of our mythologies, could even imagine to inflict upon its subjects.
This is why I think it best that you spend the day of the eclipse with your loved ones.
I sincerely wish that I, and my mother, and her mother, and her mother, and her mother too, really were all nothing but insane, deranged and delusional old women.
Your fond friend,
Cleo
***
At the end of the dream, Cleo dreamed of the bay. The same dream she had been having for months. Or had it been months? It felt familiar, but how would she ever really know? But from Hope’s Nose to Berry Head, she dreamed of the great body of water as it turned as black as oil and roiled like a weir as wide as an ocean.
The thin outline of the sun’s silhouette diminished, then vanished.
Stars she recognised and many that she didn’t recognise, and many other moving, shining objects, crisscrossed the vast canopy of sky, leaving silvery trails like those of snails upon patio stones.
And when the sun began to reappear the people who had gathered on the shore all called out a name, and their myriad, faraway voices sounded like a small wave washing upon sand before dying into silence.
The horizon was changing its shape.
Soon, it was as if all the water in the world was rushing forward from out there, and in the form of a long black wall. Behind the great wave, she thought she saw something vast and lumpen in shape, that could have been a new black mountain emerging from the earth’s crust, rising to conceal the sun again.
***
Cleo awoke to the sound of screams. Tens of thousands of them. Screams on the shore one mile away and screams on the television screen that flickered beside the balcony doors of the living room. The whole world seemed to be shrieking at the same time.
Yolanda was on the balcony. She was naked. In her waking delirium, for some reason that Cleo could not understand, her nurse had come into her home that morning and removed all of her clothes.
‘Yolanda!’ Cleo called out with a throat so dry the word sounded like a croak.
Even in the din below the balcony, that now resembled a crowd in a football stadium, or a hundred school playgrounds filled with terror, Yolanda seemed to hear Cleo. The nurse turned around, smiling.
As she stepped into the room the first thing Cleo noticed was the eye tattooed upon Yolanda’s flat, brown stomach. An eye that she recognised. She’d seen it around and it was a good likeness.
The wind that hit the building turned the curtains vertical and Yolanda staggered, but never stopped smiling. Her face was wet with the tears of an intense, private joy.
The ground shook and everything in the apartment rattled. Amelia, Mary, Olive and Judith’s pictures fell down upon the sideboard, as did the preserved and pressed weeds that hung upon the walls.
The din from outside could have been a plane crashing in a thunderstorm, or the very earth being twisted and broken within a pair of great hands. The sea didn’t even sound like the sea anymore. The sea was an animal’s roar. Cleo believed most of the air in the room was soon sucked back out through the balcony doors.
No more than a few feet in front of Cleo’s seat, Yolanda opened her mouth, but Cleo had no chance of hearing what came out of it. By the movement of the nurse’s lips she was certain, though, that a name had been called. And as Yolanda helped her out of her chair and began moving her towards the balcony, either to see what was happening, or to become a part of it, Cleo winced and then whimpered when she saw the long, livid gills where Yolanda’s ribs should have been.
Cthulhu
The foremost characteristic of the great old one known as Cthulhu is his enormous size. He dwarfs all living things, and indeed, all spiritual creatures that from time to time descend from the higher spheres. The elephant and behemoth cannot challenge his vast bulk. Even the mighty leviathan of the deeps is a toy for him to play with. He has been called the mountain that walks, and with good reason, for his head brushes the clouds, and each stride he takes is measured in furlongs. When his vitality waxes his body becomes larger, and when his strength wanes, he diminishes in size, yet always he is immense.
It is a curious fact that material representations of Cthulhu tend to be of no great size. This may be due to the utter futility in trying to express the sheer magnitude of this being with any sculpture or engraving. The artists who represent him have fled to the opposite extreme, and encapsulate him in small carven figures of stone, or on little plaques of hardened clay that may be held on the hand.
These figures depict a godlike being who squats on a block of stone with his upper limbs dangling over his knees. At first glance he appears to be humanlike in his shape, but a closer examination reveals that this is an illusion. It is true that he has two limbs that might be said to be legs, and two other limbs that can be called arms, but both end in hooked talons like those of a hawk, and his body is little more than a swollen mass. His head is massive, but as for his face, he has none, only a wriggling tangle of rootlike appendages that writhe about his head as they test the air. Within this mass is hidden his mouth. His eyes are small black beads, akin to those of an insect, and three in number on each side of his pulpy head arranged in the pattern of a descending triangle. The squamous flesh that covers his body is a kind of gray color tending to green, and covered with bumps like the skin of a toad.
It is said that the substance of his body is not like earthly flesh, but that it has the consistency and appearance of translucent slime, similar in this respect to the bodies of the sea creatures known as jellyfish. When broken apart it immediately reforms itself, for Cthulhu’s body is sustained by the force of his mind, and as long as his physical form is held complete and perfect within his mind, his body can never b
e destroyed by violence.
From his shoulders spread leathern wings that most nearly resemble those of a bat. They appear ludicrously tiny—far too small to bear him into the air—but they are depicted in their inactive state by the artists of the little carvings that represent his form. When he flies through the air, or through the airless spaces between the stars, his wings spread wide and inflate to such an enormous size that they blot out the sun and turn day to night. Each beat of these heaven-spanning vanes is enough to knock down whole forests of trees, or to raise great waves that inundate cities.
Upon these mighty wings he flew to our world from alien stars. His method of locomotion is unique, for when he wishes to travel through the heavenly spheres, he causes certain stars to glow more brightly and explode with great violence, and the force of these explosions, reverberating through the higher planes, propels him forward, as a ship is driven across the sea by the wind that fills its sail.
Inside his vast head, which appears to have no skull to lend it a distinct solid form, throbs and undulates the greatest brain in the universe. With it Cthulhu controls those slaves who worship him as a god and serve his purposes. In the past, by using thought alone he could send his mind forth across the world and call to him the scattered cults of his worshippers. He came to them in their dreams and gave them visions of strange worlds far removed from our own. Some men he drove mad, but the others who remain sane were changed, and thereafter they adored him.
Only the unplumbed depths of the ocean could contain him, and that is where he lies, in the southern ocean on the backside of this world, far from any island or human habitation. At one time in the history of our terrestrial globe this remote region was a continent, and here Cthulhu ruled from his citadel atop its highest mountain, where he built a great city called R’lyeh. From his stone house he could look far across his lands and direct the alien creatures that inhabited them with his thoughts. This was before the rise of man above the level of mere beasts.