Beyond The Chaos Gate: Lovecraftian Horror

by Quentin Ravensbane

  About half of the guardians on the closest side of the cluster rushed toward the four, while the others rearranged their positions to bridge the gap in security around the Three. Twenty of the things loped and clawed their way toward the companions, who still stood just inside the building.

  The three men leveled the shotguns at the creatures, and the boom of the discharge of the scatterguns was deafening. Freya's handgun was quiet by comparison, but she was responsible for the fall of two of the things, and the crippling of another one, before they closed the gap to the four.

  Garret switched to the flamethrower, and the whoosh of his flames made the approaching creatures a parody of myths about burning bushes if they could have walked. Despite their best efforts, they could not stop all of them before they arrived.

  Oscar continued to use his shotgun, while Freya danced into battle with her machete in her right hand and her handgun in her left hand. Ian abandoned his guns entirely, preferring to hack and slash with his recently sharpened sword. Garret's flamethrower was emitting a constant stream of flame.

  The two sides clashed together, the four humans against the six things that still sought to murder the humans. Garret, Ian, and Freya all managed to avoid letting any of the things close with them, dealing death by bullet, blade, and flame with more narrow escapes than they could count. Oscar was not so lucky.

  One of the things got close to Oscar, and a tentacle with a scorpion stinger at the end of it stabbed out and impaled him in the arm. Even before he could disengage the limb with one last roar of his shotgun, he was already changing.

  Oscar looked over at Garret when the last of the attackers were dispatched, a pleading expression on his rapidly shifting face. A matter of seconds it continued, and then he began to show the signs of exhilarated insanity that the others now recognized as the changing to that alien mind that sought their destruction.

  Garret thumbed the flamethrower back to life, and a stream of fire flowed out over Oscar and the thing that had infected him. There were screams in the fire, but none of them wanted to know which of the two burning bodies they came from.

  The death of their friend at the hands, or tentacles, of the things, brought an instant rage to the three remaining humans. They all brought their weapons to the ready and instinct drove them forward, toward the remaining creatures, and the end of the battle.

  Unconsciously, all three of them began a roar of defiance as they rushed the remaining enemies. The rest of the guardian things started to rush toward the three at the same instant. Garret met them all with the flames of his flamethrower, and the guns and blades of the other two brought death to many of the things.

  They almost made it through the creatures that were attacking. By unspoken agreement, they intended to destroy all of the guardian things, and then kill the three big creatures that commanded them. They hoped that, with the last of them gone, the world would return to normal, and they could get on with their lives.

  The Guardians were burning in front of them, so hot and brightly that none of the three could tell if any of them were left. They knew that they must destroy the masters to finish this business, but how hard could that be without the guardians to protect them?

  They stood uncertainly in front of the great conflagration of flames that burned the flesh from the guardians. Too hot was the fires to advance, and too obscured was the view to declare victory, they waited in front of the blaze for some change that would give them a chance to confirm the victory. It was not long in coming.

  Something that looked like a cross between a giant snake and a tentacle snaked its way out of the flames. As Garret quickly prepared the flamethrower for action once again, the tentacle reared up off the floor and wrapped his neck with a coil of the loathsome flesh.

  The tentacle was clothed in scales, sharp-edged and jagged, and these grasped Garret's neck in a grip that ripped the skin and brought blood from the wound that left a trickle of red on the floor beneath him. As Ian and Freya tried desperately to find an avenue of attack on the limb that would not kill Garret, the tentacle began to retract, like a great, scaled earthworm, reeling Garret in toward the portal and the three commander creatures.

  He was just in the flames for a second, as the tentacle pulled him toward his doom. As he passed through the burning things, they were knocked to either side, and a path was cleared for Ian and Freya to see his fate.

  The pain, and the fire, and the rage of impotence that Garret must have felt combined to make him release a roaring scream of anguish, rage, and fear. One of the Three had generated the tentacle, and it now skittered in the direction of the portal, with him being pulled along behind. A reddish and smoky glaring light was now being emitted from the open gateway behind them.

  A trail of blood followed the struggling man, but the two watching friends could not quite make it through the trail of flames help him claim his release. They could only watch while the creature pulled him close, and entered the portal with a struggling Garret held fast. Both the creature and the man vanished into the doorway. The ruddy red glow flashed an intense bright violet, and then it turned into the darkest black.

  Ian picked up Garret's abandoned flamethrower and thumbed it to life. He grabbed Freya, and they rushed quickly through the path of flames to the other side. It appeared that only the two giant creatures remained, with all of their guardians burning at Ian's back. This was the closest to success that the human resistance had yet come, and these creatures were deserving of pain for what they had done to the couple's friends, and to the humanity in this town.

  A stream of continual yellow flame came from Ian's inherited weapon. Ian carefully sprayed both of the giant creatures with a full measure of the fire and watched with satisfaction as the creatures began to burn. The smell of roasting flesh had never smelled so sweet to the couple as it did at that second.

  When the things were totally engulfed in the fire, he dialed the flamethrower back, and Freya and Ian stood watching them burn. They still moved in aimless lurching movements, as things that do not know that they are already dead always do.

  Ian looked into Freya's blue and beautiful eyes and found that she had already sought his out. Was it done? Was it finally over? Each of them read the newborn hope that it was finally over, and the cold fear that it wasn't, in the eyes of the other. The only certainty was that they were not alone, and they would face the future together.

  The smoke was getting a bit worse so that they began to cough and hack. A lot of the building was also now on fire, so Ian decided that it was probably time for them to retreat to the relative safety of the parking lot asphalt outside the front entrance.

  Ian and Freya labored their way out of the building and kneeled coughing just outside the door, to catch their breath, and clear their lungs of smoke. The double entrance doors had been flung open by recent events, and through the open door, the couple could keep their eye on the scene of the crime for a few more minutes, before finally having to retreat from the heat.

  Through the haze of heat and smoke, they found the eerie way that the portal or gateway was backlit disturbing. It almost seemed as though the angry ruddy hue that it had briefly displayed was back. Ian thought that it was probably just a trick of the lighting, but it still bothered him.

  "I will be happy when this whole building is burnt to the ground," he confessed to Freya. "I will finally believe that it is all over then."

  "I hope so, baby," Freya agreed. "Maybe everything will return to normal, and the sun will come out, and we can leave this town. I never want to return to this town again."

  "I agree," Ian responded. "We should move to Dallas, and get married. But before that, let's move out a little more. I am starting to feel like a marshmallow."

  Freya agreed, and they retreated another thirty feet from the building, but they stayed in a line that allowed them to continue to see into the building. Neither of them trusted the events of that location to be finished and only seeing could reassure them that they w
ere indeed done.

  Finally, the flames began to break through from the top rafters of the building, and the interior view of City Hall was a useless view of smoke. The couple decided that it was probably time to return to the car. Ian was fairly sure that they would be forced to walk back to the house since he doubted that Garret had left the keys in the car.

  Just as they began to turn for the walk back, a darkness appeared in the core of the smoke-filled room, and dark tendrils of the darkest blackness that Ian could possibly imagine streamed out of the building and came rapidly in their direction. He grabbed Freya's hand, and physically turned them both away from the shards of absolute darkness, that he thought with a cold fear to be a living, destructive entity.

  They began to run as fast as they could go, but in the next second, Ian felt the absolute coldness that he always knew must come with such a darkness. Somehow, through her hand, he could tell that Freya was feeling the same cold power.

  He looked down where the cold darkness touched his chest, and he felt the energy being drained away from his body. He looked with the last of his energy at Freya, and he saw that she was also penetrated with a twin shard of darkness to the one in his own heart.

  They were still holding hands, and as their energy left their bodies, they slunk down to their knees. Ian felt an infinite despair with the fatigue and a painful regret that he could not protect Freya.

  "I'm sorry, honey," he apologized. "I love you."

  He was starting to see blackness in his field of vision, and a great wave of dizziness washed over him. They leaned against each other, and in the final moment, they went gratefully into darkness.

  27 walking

  Sunday 21, 2019

  Ian felt himself walking. He knew that he was not directing this movement. Something else was in charge of his body. Something other was using his body to do something unknown.

  He tried to send a message to his leg muscles to resist the compulsion to walk. His body ignored his commands and kept trudging along in the same mechanical way that it did before. He felt panic rising from somewhere deep inside himself, as he realized that he had no say in what he was doing. He was a prisoner trapped in his own body!

  He became aware that he heard thousands of voices, and even more sounds from the throats of things that could not ever have been considered human. Almost buried by the multitude of voices was the timid and cherished voice of Freya, sounding frightened and in pain.

  He realized that the voices he heard originated inside his head. They felt very real, but the place where they sounded out their pains and anguish was deep inside his head. Two ears can triangulate on the sound recreated within the ear, to determine a location outside the body from which the noise originated.

  This was not so with this sound. He knew that it came from outside, but there was no way to triangulate a location for the sound. It carried all of those little clues indicating that the voices were of a telepathic nature, bringing the nuances of thought, along with what the mind heard as sound that sound waves did not carry.

  It was not that there were not real sounds around him. Strange growling surrounded him and screams, and all manner of sounds of pain and anguish filled the world around him. With so much to focus on, the only thing he was desperate to protect and hold safe was Freya, who he now was sure was walking along by his side.

  Ian noticed something that he had not realized before. His movements were not in his control, but some things did not seem to be forbidden. When he thought of Freya at his side, he had turned his head in that direction. Apparently, that was not prohibited. What else was in his control?

  He still had no control over his legs, but maybe, just maybe, he had more control over his head. Maybe he was allowed to do anything that did not work against the task that had been set for him to do. Maybe if it did not stop the walking, it was not forbidden.

  He couldn't see anything because his eyes were shut, or so he believed. Maybe he was allowed to open his eyes. There was only one way to find out.

  He started working on the process of opening them. It is usually an unconscious process, and to think the process through on a conscious level is a strange and intricate procedure.

  Now that he was concentrating on his eyes, it felt like there was some sort of light crusting on his eyelids that resisted, but did not forbid, the act of opening them. He began the task of forcing his eyes to open.

  He expended far more effort than he would have imagined necessary, but after a time, he began to see a sliver of the outside world. There was shadow, and there was light, and both felt like a glaring and somehow diseased quality of the world he was now inhabiting.

  After a moment more, his eyes finally began to focus, and he saw that he walked down an unknown path, in a landscape that defied instant understanding. He did not know where he was and was not even sure that he was still on earth. Never far from his thoughts, his primary concern was the girl at his side, and he turned his head slowly in the hope of seeing her once again.

  Freya was there, walking mechanically at his side. She has to walk beside him because where their arms touched, they had merged together. A tracery of the fungal hyphae covered the skin of the arm, and the arm still ended in a hand of sorts. The hand resembled a grotesque mockery of a combination of the features of each of their hands.

  She walked beside him with her eyes closed, but he felt her respond to his mental suggestion that she could open her eyes. After a momentary struggle, he saw that she had repeated his efforts to open his eyes, and she had achieved the same results. She looked at him with an unreadable but plaintive expression on her face.

  ***?*** Freya mentally asked him, and perhaps asked reality itself.

  ***I don't know*** Ian responded. After that brief conversation, they saved their energies to do what they must, and to try to discover what kind of world they had awakened in, and consider what they could understand about where they fit in this world.

  Freya knew what Ian knew because their minds were as connected as their arms were, so after a time, both of them were making full use of their limited freedom to move their heads to observe the world around them. The first thing they discovered is that the world that surrounded them smelled like death.

  It was not the fecund scent of organic things becoming fertile soil for growing new life. It was the rotting stench of spoiled meats, and rotting things, which only promised the coming of disease and of the end of life.

  It was the scent of corpses and of oceans of life rotting into a thick and slimy scum. It was the scum that floats upon the surface of the waters. It was the bringer of death, and it would choke any life hardy enough to still be alive. It would deprive it of the oxygen to live, and of the light that promises food and energy to that which lives.

  All around them, the heavens, if such a term still applied, were lighted with the constant flashes of lightning, and the rolling and menacing thunder that accompanied the lightning. Ian could feel the crackling static of nearby lightning strikes. It seemed that endless energy charged the air, from the bolts of lightning, and from other, far darker sources. They were the energies of destruction, not those of creation.

  Ian turned his head as far as the compulsion that controlled his body would allow him. Everywhere he looked, the horizon was backlit by a violent and ruddy red flaring light. It had the feel of an alien power, perhaps a parody of volcanic eruptions. Was it whatever version of volcanic activity existed now? He was not sure.

  All about them, there was mindless screams, heard with both their ears and their minds. Mental screams and the thoughts of insane minds crowded their own thoughts. There was something fundamentally alien behind everything around them that they could see, or hear, or in any other way sense.

  Ian had occasionally sensed something behind everything that made the universe that stared back at him with a cold regard. It felt indifferent, but it also felt like something that obsessed itself with creation. Perhaps it was the true face of whatever god truly exis
ted. He was never sure, but it was vast, and it felt as though it was an integral part of existence.

  It was gone now. Nowhere could he sense a great mind that sought to build a universal tapestry as the greatest possible art. There was still a mind behind it all of course, but this mind was alien in ways that nothing in our universe could be alien. It was cold, it sought only the flow of power into itself, and the result of its actions would always end in the death of all, and the final tearing and ripping away of reality itself.

  When actions lose all direction toward purpose, and when they do not serve the fundamental goals of survival and reproduction, the only definition that fits the nature of those actions is insanity. In this new and alien world, there were no actions that served the purposes of survival, or of continuing. In this new and strange world, none of the allowed motivations were sane ones, and so, the fabric of the universe now was predicated on insanity.

  There was no barrier between the universe and the psyche of whatever remained of the human species now. Ian felt the lopsided alien insanity that had slipped deep down into the core of his mind, he heard its echo in Freya's mind, and in the minds of every voice, he could hear.

  The world was now a place of pure pain and dark depression. There was no hope left anywhere in this world, not even the false hope that came from wishful thinking. Even the hope of death was now denied to everything that is, or once was human. It would be to deny that which now acted as the god of existence a small part of its will.

  The world around the couple was changing rapidly, and as far as Ian could see, randomly. The landscape tended to degrade into more chaotic forms, but even that direction of change was not always the direction of change. Sometimes, the ground would split open, and things that were inherently indescribable would come out of the chasms, or flow into the cracks to unseen destinations.