“Your zombie slaves don't conform to your professed benevolence,” sarcastically noted Operator 13.
“Since only one of my Yekubite minions exists on Earth, projection of my telepathic power is limited. If I possessed the original cube that transfigured me, I could correct that deficiency. Regretfully, it lies beyond my reach in Canada. I can only impose my will on the feeble-minded, such as these poor unfortunates resulting from the serums that the resurrected Herbert West left behind at Auschwitz. However, several Soviet scientists here have voluntarily merged their minds with mine. I have instructed the so-called rejects to prevent any interference while these scientists constructed a machine. This machine would allow me to project my mind into every human alive.”
“You lie,” challenged the Yithian. “No human would ever willingly embrace your subjugation. You enslaved those scientists against their will.”
“I speak the truth! Why are you surprised that Communists would joyfully bond with me? I represent the Marxist ideal perverted by Stalin. I embody a future where all men are equal in a classless society. I offer the same utopia to you, my human brethren. Surrender your minds to me and witness the ascent of Man across the galaxies!”
“Where do the ghouls and I fit in your future paradise?” asked Asche. “We aren't human.”
“The same offer extends to you and the ghouls. It extends to all the races of the cosmos, even the Yithians.”
“I refuse to allow my individuality to be rendered meaningless by you!” shouted the Yithian.
“Spoken like all the haughty members of your race,” said Campbell. “You care nothing for the other sentient beings of the universe. You scheme to ensure a future where your species outlives all the others.”
“Others of our kind have become vassals to Nyogtha and Mordiggian,” declared Mr. Death, “but a true ghoul has no master! My brothers and I defy you!”
“Then you and the Yithian shall perish!” prophesized Campbell. “The rejects will tear you apart! What of you others? Will you join me or die? Choose!”
Chapter 8. Who Will Save Us Now?
by David Conyers
In the end names mattered not, and the Outer Gods and Great Old Ones and alien intelligences such as the Yithians and Yekubites were all the same. They were not humanity. They possessed no emotions that were integral to the humans’ biochemistry. They barely noticed the comings and goings of Homo Sapiens upon the third planet of a main sequence star in the outer reaches of an unspectacular galaxy in a universe no different to its infinity sisters in parallel dimensions. A war had been fought for six years across this world and fifty-five million souls had perished. The aliens cared nothing about this, saw it as insignificant, if they noticed it at all. Nothing worthwhile would ever occur here in their multitude of eyes.
It was only when humans merged with the unknowable Old Ones that agendas were formed and schemes laid out. Campbell was a man no more, but he was motivated enough by human emotions to desire the world’s destruction to come about on his watch. And yet he was one of them. He commanded their powers. He was a dangerous combination of the worst of both species.
The town of Oświęcim was Campbell’s battleground. He did indeed command the Yekubites’ time manipulation powers of past and future knowledge, and the unlimited potential creative and destructive energies of the Infinite Eye, Azathoth, Court Ruler of the Throne of Madness at the Heart of All Things. Hundreds of souls died at his tentacles, maws and claws that day.
Asche was powerless as the Campbell-centipedal monstrosity leveled his destructive powers upon the town of Oświęcim. He moved in and out of the space-time quandaries that Einstein had postulated not that long ago, and manipulated reality for his own purpose. Old buildings became fluid, like ribbons caught in streams, and were Campbell’s appendages. He was a monster that needs fight only from a distance, if distance mattered to him at all.
Asche watched helplessly as the Deadman Detective and Operator 13 were crushed under a hundred tons of fluid rock. The ghouls that had been Asche’s companions for far too long now, including Mr. Dead, were consumed by a road that opened as a maw and crushed them like ants ground between two giant stones, as if the earth itself had become an extension of the monster.
Laszlo Scheiber proved a little more difficult to destroy, until Campbell locked the unfortunate man in a time loop, forcing Scheiber to murder himself in a moment of perpetual self-electrification. And when time moved on in the human world, Scheiber did not move with it, and vanished from reality.
The colossus that was the Supreme Soviet was the last to fall, not so much obliterated but merged, as old stone buildings became fluid around him, melding the iron clad hero with bricks and wood, until Campbell pushed his foe deep enough into the centuries-old structure so that the hot water pipes found the Yithian and heated steam melded with his heart, and burnt his life-blood away.
Asche could heal rapidly from many inflictions, but not this assault. The centipedal Campbell soon immobilized Asche in its many tentacle limbs holding him fast with a hundred pincers.
“Someone will stop you,” Asche said as the air was forced from his lungs, Campbell crushing him just a little bit more each time he breathed in, murdering him slowly like an anaconda squeezes the life out of its prey. “There are plenty… more heroes… in this world… than just us.”
Campbell laughed manically. “The Great Old Ones are. The Great Old Ones were. The Great Old Ones will always be. We are not part of this universe, Asche, we are the fabric of reality itself.”
“You… are… not…” He ran out of breath. He could speak no more, and air would not reach his lungs. The Eldritch Force was spent, defunct.
“I am not what?”
Asche’s last memories were of the maws reaching towards him, and his head chewed from his neck, then his head rolling through the wet darkness of the Yekubite’s throat, and down into its equivalent of a wet, slimy gut, where it dissolved slowly.
Sabina was eleven, and she had no friends. She wanted friends and they were important to her, only they had all died or vanished during the Nazi occupation.
She had no parents either. Her mother she had seen gunned down by German soldiers who had lined her and her neighbors against a wall, and killed them with the casualness of machinegun fire. Her father had gone off to fight in the resistance and was never seen or heard of again.
Ever since, she had lived on the streets, stole food and ran messages for the American and British soldiers for a coin here and there. When boys tried to kiss her, and do worse, she would kick and scream and bite and punch until they left her alone. She made herself dirty and unpretty, and that seemed to help keep them away.
When not scrounging she played with her only companion, her doll Dorota. It was Sabina’s turn at hopscotch so Dorota watched, propped up against the rubble, the remains of the fighting that had occurred here for too long. Sabina threw her button into the one square, then skipped and hopped through the squares without touching an edge. If she messed up, it would be Dorota’s turn.
Returning to the start, she threw the button into the two square, only to have a powerful gust of wind blow the button and Dorota far down the street, far enough so that they could no longer be seen.
She looked up at the shadow passing over her.
The monstrosity that stared down was not human-forged, but a fused matter of worm and insect, with hundreds of limbs and joints in all the wrong places. It was larger than the greatest American airplanes and tanks she had seen. Its breath was hot and gusty, the source of the unnatural winds. It surged with arcs of electricity that ran as blue lines across its unnatural shape.
It stared at her for several seconds with its multitude of eyes, growled. An arc of electricity ran off it onto Sabina, and she felt a mild shock. Then it marched on. It looked sated. It seemed uninterested in her.
With the creature gone, Dorota could not be seen. Sabina’s only surviving companion was lost to her like everyone else.
&nbs
p; It wasn’t fair. Nothing was fair.
She should have been teary, afraid, depressed. She knew all these emotions even though she was only eleven—that was what losing everything created in a young girl.
Instead, she watched the arc of electricity she controlled leap from her index finger to her thumb. She felt the scars on her body begin to heal, and the voices of the dead talk to her.
She had hope now.
“When I grow up,” she whispered to ghosts, “I’m going to be a superhero.”
Robert M. Price is an American theologian and writer. He teaches philosophy and religion at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, is professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute, and the author of a number of books on theology and the historicity of Jesus, including Deconstructing Jesus (2000), The Reason Driven Life (2006), Jesus is Dead (2007), Inerrant the Wind: The Evangelical Crisis in Biblical Authority (2009), The Case Against the Case for Christ (2010), and The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul (2012).
A former Baptist minister, he was the editor of the Journal of Higher Criticism from 1994 until it ceased publication in 2003, and has written extensively about the Cthulhu Mythos, a "shared universe" created by the writer H. P. Lovecraft.
Pete Rawlik has been collecting Lovecraftian fiction for forty years. In 2011 he decided to take his hobby of writing more seriously. He has since published more than twenty stories. Reanimators, a labor of love about life, death and the undead in Arkham during the early twentieth century, is his first novel. He lives in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, with his wife and three children. Despite the rumors he is not and never has been wanted by maritime authorities for crimes on the high seas.
Glynn Barrass lives in the North East of England and has been writing since late 2006. He has written over a hundred short stories, most of which have been published in the UK, USA, France, and Japan. He also edits anthologies for Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu fiction line, also writing material for their flagship roleplaying game.
He has forthcoming fiction appearing in the collections ‘Atomic Age Cthulhu, ‘Cthulhurotica 2,’ ‘The Mark of the Beast,’ ‘Over the Mountains of Madness’ ‘The Starry Wisdom Library,’ ‘Steampunk Cthulhu,’ and ‘World War Cthulhu.’
David Conyers is science fiction author and editor from Adelaide, South Australia. He has a degree in engineering from the University of Melbourne, and today works in marketing communications. David’s fiction has appeared in magazines such as Albedo One, Ticon4, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Book of Dark Wisdom, Lovecraft eZine and Jupiter, as well as more than twenty anthologies. His previous books include the science fiction Cthulhu Mythos blended thriller, The Eye of Infinity published by Perilous Press and the prequel The Spiraling Worm co-authored with John Sunseri. Previous anthologies he has edited include Extreme Planets, Cthulhu Unbound 3, Cthulhu’s Dark Cults and Undead & Unbound. His e-books include the Cthulhu Mythos thrillers, The Impossible Object and The Weaponized Puzzle, while his other Mythos fiction appears in his collection, The Nightmare Dimension. Recently David became the Art Editor with Abledo One magazine. www.david-conyers.com
Brian M. Sammons has been writing reviews on all things horror for more years than he’d care to admit. Wanting to give other critics the chance to ravage his work for a change, he has penned a few short stories that have appeared in anthologies such as; Arkham Tales, Horrors Beyond, Monstrous, Dead but Dreaming 2, Horror for the Holidays, Twisted Legends, Mountains of Madness, Deepest, Darkest Eden and others. He has edited the books; Cthulhu Unbound 3, Undead & Unbound, Eldritch Chrome, Edge of Sundown, and Steampunk Cthulhu. For the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game he wrote the book Secrets and has had scenarios in the books; Terrors From Beyond, The House of R’lyeh, Strange Aeons 2, Atomic Age Cthulhu, and Doors to Darkness. He is currently far too busy for any sane man. For more about this guy that neighbors describe as “such a nice, quiet man” you can follow him on Twitter @BrianMSammons or visit his website: http://brian_sammons.webs.com/
Rick Lai is an authority on pulp fiction and the Wold Newton Universe concepts of Philip José Farmer. His speculative articles have been collected in Rick Lai’s Secret Histories: Daring Adventurers, Rick Lai’s Secret Histories: Criminal Masterminds, Chronology of Shadows: A Timeline of The Shadow’s Exploits and The Revised Complete Chronology of Bronze. Rick's fiction has been collected in Shadows of the Opera, Shadows of the Opera; Retribution in Blood and Sisters of the Shadows: The Cagliostro Curse (the last two titles are available from Black Coat Press). He has also translated Arthur Bernède's Judex and The Return of Judex into English for Black Coat Press. Rick also regularly appears on the Lovecraft Ezine internet chats.
Bruce L. Priddy's previous work can be found in such places as the Stoker-nominated anthology "Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations" and the premiere issue of the Lovecraft eZine. He won first place in the short story category in the 2012 Literary LEO contest. Keep up with him at his blog misterpriddysmarvels.wordpress.com, on Twitter at @MisterPriddy, or on Facebook. If you buy him a bourbon, he'll be your friend.
Story illustration by David Felton
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Cthulhu Does Stuff is a monthly comic strip by Ronnie Tucker and Maxwell Patterson. Visit their website, Max and Ronnie do comics.
Maxwell Patterson is a freelance writer, available for parties, corporate events and Bat Mitzvahs. You can contact him at [email protected].
Ronnie Tucker is an artist who plies his wares (eww, gross!) at http://ronnietucker.co.uk/. You can contact him at: [email protected].
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Echoes from Cthulhu’s Crypt #7
The Ring in Yellow
by Robert M. Price
One of the most powerfully eerie horror movies I have seen is The Ring. I was fortunate to see it one afternoon when not another soul was present in the theatre. When it was done, I rose to my feet and said one word: “Damn.” The depiction of someone literally scared to death was the most effective and the most horrifying I had ever seen. And that was just the beginning.
When I returned home, my daughter Victoria asked me what I thought of it. I told her how impressive the movie was, but I said I didn’t know if I’d want to expose myself to it again. But she was curious, and I soon agreed to take her to see it. I was glad I did. Later Victoria told me that The Ring was so frightening to her that it actually purged her of minor but persistent frights that used to plague her when she would hear little noises in the house at night. After she saw The Ring, no more of that. Wow!
I saw the sequel which had its strong points but was inevitably disappointing. I also read the whole trilogy by Koji Suzuki and was amazed! At the end of the first book I thought I knew what was going on, only to have the rug yanked out from under me when I read the second book. Same thing when I read the third. What an imagination!
What does any of this rambling have to do with the theme of this issue, Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow? Much in every way, for it suddenly dawned on me just a few minutes ago how strikingly similar is The King to The Ring. Specifically “The Yellow Sign.” Both involve an artist of Bohemian habits and his female companion. But the main thing is the premise: The play The King in Yellow has a peculiar potency to drive every reader to despair and suicide. The untitled, unlabeled videocassette in The Ring has much the same effect, only worse. The film is almost an update, a modernization of Chambers’s classic tale. Samarra (Saduko in the book) is equivalent to the squishy maggot-man who delivers the Yellow Sign to the hapless readers of the soul-damning play.
Did Koji Suzuki have Chambers in mind? I doubt it. Did Chambers have in mind Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”? Less improbable, though there are striking similarities there, too. (They inspired my own tale, “The Mask of the Yellow Death.”) Did Lovecraft get the idea for the Necronomicon from the King in Yellow? Some have suggested so, but I think that hypothesis has failed. But t
hese dread tomes are fungible (that does mean the same thing as “interchangeable,” right? Naturally I want to use “fungible” because of the similarity to “fungi.”), as witness the substitution of The King in Yellow (the fictive play, not the Chambers book) for Huysmans’ Against the Grain in my collaboration with the mighty talented Roger Johnson, “In Memoriam” in the anthology Rehearsal for Oblivion. (Sorry for the obnoxious self-promotion.)
I’m sure you can come up with other parallels to the premise of “The King in Yellow.” Probably M.R. James’s “Casting the Runes” as well as the rather different adaptation Night f the Demon would qualify, for instance. I think it is significant that the great power of the common premise of these various works is measured by the fact that its shared use is not immediately evident. It functions as a common underlying genotype, yet fleshes itself out in very different phenotypes.
Robert M. Price is an American theologian and writer. He teaches philosophy and religion at the Johnnie Colemon Theological Seminary, is professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute, and the author of a number of books on theology and the historicity of Jesus, including Deconstructing Jesus (2000), The Reason Driven Life (2006), Jesus is Dead (2007), Inerrant the Wind: The Evangelical Crisis in Biblical Authority (2009), The Case Against the Case for Christ (2010), and The Amazing Colossal Apostle: The Search for the Historical Paul (2012).
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