Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1

by Price, Robert M.

  Thursday morning I got the phone call. Pick was dead. Coward's way out. Shot himself in the front seat of his VW in the goddamn Hooters parking lot. Left a note apologizing to me. "For everything." I spent three hours at the cop station, answering questions, making statements, drinking shitty coffee. They asked me about scratches on Pick's face, about blood on his clothes that wasn't his. I told them I didn’t know anything. They let me go at noon, so I headed down to Pick's place, figured I'd beat the cops inside, check his computers, gather the evidence I needed to prove the Ghoul Girl was just a fucked-up cluster of zeroes and ones.

  I got in easy. I have a key. Pick's computers lay smashed around the warehouse. He'd gone to town on the works with a Louisville Slugger, which protruded from the face of Pick's smashed monitor. I swore, sat down in my usual chair. Shortly, I noticed Pick's tablet, a deep scratch across its face but otherwise undamaged, on the floor nearby. I picked it up, turned it on.

  The photo on the screen showed the Ghoul Girl, chained to the bed in the Rape Room, looking angrily into the camera. Unlike the first pics, there was now a greenscreen in view, and green-painted boxes lay scattered around. On the floor was the young man's half-eaten body. As I wondered why there would be greenscreen props in a virtual shoot, I heard the ratscrabble scraping sounds again. Different. Louder. I set down Pick's tablet. Got up. Followed the noise.

  In Pick's dirty kitchen, the smell hit me. Ever leave a package of ham in the back of your refrigerator for a few months? It was that, but worse. Rot and soil and chemicals and….

  The sound came again. Louder. I looked in its direction. The pantry door hung open, slightly.

  I opened it. I'm not sure why I opened it. I'm not sure why I didn't just leave.

  It wasn't a pantry cabinet. It was a door. Rough wooden stairs led down into darkness. The sound came again. Metal on concrete, a dry gasp accompanying it.

  I felt the wall, found a switch. Flipped it on.

  The twisty-bulb, like a barren, inverted ice-cream cone, stuttered into life.

  Something rasped. I heard again the sound of metal on concrete, metal on metal.

  I descended, wishing I'd grabbed the ballbat.

  Rats. In the walls.

  I reached the bottom stair. The light spilling from the stairwell failed to illuminate the room below. Except for something just barely emerging from the corner of the darkness. Something rounded… and green.

  A pickle? The pickle from Pick's favorite photo?

  Oh, fuck.

  "Hello?" I called, but silence answered. I stepped out of the too-small protective circle of light, feeling the wall for a light switch.

  Finding one, I tripped it, throwing the room into bright, high-definition relief.

  There was the greenscreen. The props. The bed. The rotting, partially-eaten body.

  The chain.

  The Ghoul Girl at the center of the room. She bared her teeth at me. She screamed.

  I stepped back, tripping over that ridiculous fucking pickle. Smashed my head against the concrete floor. I blacked out for a second, then scurried back, crab-crawling to the wall beneath the light switch. The Ghoul Girl, chain taut between her collar and the metal bed frame, reached out her hands, straining against her restraint. The bedframe screeched as she pulled it forward an inch. Another inch. She worked her ruined mouth, drooling, gasping, as she pulled.

  Rats in the walls. My ass.

  I did what any sane man would do. I called the fucking cops. Then I gave her my coat.

  Her nakedness covered, the girl dropped to the floor, shielded her face with her claw-like hands, weeping.

  "I'm sorry," I said, over and over. "I'm sorry." Until the sirens grew loud. Until the wooden stairs resounded with the sounds of heavy boots and barking German Shepherds.

  You know what happened next. The seventy-two hours of revelations. The identification, the diagnosis, the quarantines. The previously-unseen and virulent strain of porphyria. The drugs: ecstasy, scopolamine, and krokodil, in doses that could turn anybody into a ravenous sex zombie. The Croatian connection; the worldwide arrests. The nineteen-year-old Hooters girl who'd been missing for eight months, poor little lost Aimee.

  The press started calling Pick the "Ghoulmaster." Pondering my complicity in the case. The death threats came next. I'm shuttering Smilin' Necrophile. I'm not sure I'll ever smile again.

  For nearly a decade, I've published extreme horror. Monsters, murders, and mayhem. I've always rationalized it, saying that horror was cathartic, a necessary release. A societal safety valve. That there are no real monsters.

  But there are. Oh God, are there.

  And sometimes we look them in the eye, and they lie to us, telling us exactly what we want to hear.

  ROSS E. LOCKHART is an author, anthologist, editor, and publisher. A lifelong fan of supernatural, fantastic, speculative, and weird fiction, Lockhart is a veteran of small-press publishing, having edited scores of well-regarded novels of horror, fantasy, and science fiction.

  Lockhart edited the anthologies The Book of Cthulhu I and II, Tales of Jack the Ripper, and The Children of Old Leech (with Justin Steele). He is the author of Chick Bassist. Lockhart lives in an old church in Petaluma, California, with his wife Jennifer, hundreds of books, and Elinor Phantom, a Shih Tzu moonlighting as his editorial assistant.

  Story illustration by Peter Szmer

  Return to the table of contents

  Changes

  by Lars Kramhøft

  On the morning of May 13th, 1959 – a Thursday – an explosion shook the Wormhole and threw me and the kraut, Albert Lissner, through the air like a couple of toy soldiers in a child’s game of war.

  “I’m gonna die now,” I thought.

  Then my body slammed against the wall of the laboratory and I hit the floor like a slab of meat.

  I didn’t die, but my glasses were knocked off and without them I was as blind as a bat. I wouldn’t have been able to see much anyway, for the laboratory was quickly filling with billowing smoke. There was a sharp smell of ionized air in my nostrils and my ears were ringing. I heard Lissner moaning low somewhere ahead of me. I wasn’t fond of working for the kraut, but right now Lissner was simply another human being, probably hurt, and I was damned if I was going to let anyone die on my watch, kraut or no kraut.

  We were roughly two miles beneath the Nevada Test and Training Range, below the salt flat known as Groom Lake, in the top-secret military research facility ‘the Wormhole’, where we had been working on the William James Project for the better part of a year.

  The Wormhole was a vast network of sterile, interminable white corridors and heavy metal doors barring the passage of anyone but myself, Lissner and the few other scientists allowed access. To the soldiers many miles above our heads, the Wormhole was merely a peculiar name to make lewd jokes about over their cigarettes, but to the few people who knew the purpose of the William James Project – and among them were none other than Eisenhower himself – the name carried a very special, hopeful significance.

  My fumbling hands found my glasses – they were close-by, a dead plastic insect with its legs neatly curled up under it.

  The lenses were cracked and I seemed to see the world through a spiderweb of fractals. I dared not think of the damage to the laboratory. The five-thousand pound magnet we had been using to generate a magnetic field three-times as intense as that of Earth’s, and Bertha, the supercomputer from MIT which had been working day and night analyzing the cosmic rays bouncing off the field… all of it reduced to shrapnel in the violent release of unfathomable energy.

  But didn’t that mean the project was successful, the indomitable scientist in me wondered as I staggered through the smoke.

  Somewhere, the sound of a fire-alarm mixed with the ringing in my ears. Undoubtedly, help was on its way and would be here in a matter of minutes. But those minutes might prove detrimental to Lissner.

  The smoke cleared in front of me, like heavy curtains parting before a grand sh
ow, and I saw Lissner, unconscious, sprawled on the floor among shards of glass and plastic scorched and crumbled by the heat.

  Something was standing over Lissner, poised on elongated goat-like legs, as if studying the kraut with wary curiosity.

  My first thought was how, and when, a third person had gained access to the laboratory, but then the thing turned to look at me.

  My brain simply didn’t know how to interpret the stimuli my eyes were feeding it. I was looking at something completely alien, a stranger to this world.

  Somewhere behind the slender figure, partly obscured by the smoke, I sensed the presence of something my mind could not quite categorize, not as a sort of vessel, nor as a living, pulsating something that flickered, seemed to be there, yet not completely there, almost as if it would disappear if I were to look hard enough at it.

  Without seeming to have moved, the thing I had seen standing over Lissner, appeared in front of me. It stood a good foot taller than me, and as I gawped at it, it seemed for a moment to be crawling with bees, and the next, entirely covered by buttercups. I feared my brain might start leaking out of my nostrils, yet I could not look away.

  The thing’s head became a glowing spider standing on its hind legs with outstretched arms, spinning maddeningly around itself like a nightmare amusement park ride. It raised a finger-like appendage and gently tapped my forehead.

  “#šh‘÷ÔÈḧ͖c̺̗͚h̠a͡t͑͒ͫ̉͊ͤͣ̓” it said to something dormant inside me.

  Then I passed out, just as the rescue team started banging on the door.

  Colonel Leary was sitting next to me when I awoke in a hospital bed.

  Judging by the light it was late afternoon, but I had no idea for how long I’d been out. My head hurt so much I just wanted to bury it under a pillow, but no fabric in the world would be soft enough to ease the crushing pain.

  “Marion and Junior are waiting outside. They came as soon as they heard. The nurse could hardly keep Marion out. You’re a lucky guy,” Leary said and pursed his lips.

  I moaned, rubbed my aching forehead and struggled to form a sentence.

  “Anyway,” Leary continued, “I thought it might be best if you and I had a little talk first. You know, get the facts straight.”

  Leary always knew what was best. It had been he who had recruited me for the William James Project. He had shown up one day at the university in Cambridge where I had been teaching Physics, and invited me out for a drink, just as if we were old friends. He had a way about him, a comradely tone glazed over an air of authority that made you feel proud of having earned his attention and made it impossible to say ‘no’ to him.

  In a shadowy bar on Massachusetts Avenue, Leary told me the military had taken an interest in me based on a series of articles I’d written for a scientific paper about the philosopher and physiologist William James. Though James was believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States ever produced, I had never thought anyone – save for a few professionals – would notice the articles, yet here was this old cowboy Leary talking about them as if he had doted on every word I’d written.

  “We look to science now for the edge in military defense,” he said.

  He told me how the people he worked for, people high-up I understood, had become interested in James’ theories of the multiverse – of the existence of parallel realities stacked ad infinitum against ours like books in the library of Babel – and of mining those realities for anything that could yield an advantage in the arms race.

  I would be working for a prominent physicist, Leary told me, trying to create a temporal wormhole in the fabric of space and time. To pierce the veil between the worlds. The prospect was enough to make any scientist’s head spin, and I felt dizzy with the possibilities as I sat there in that dive bar in Cambridge.

  The job meant moving with my wife Marion and my son Junior halfway across the country, giving up friends and colleagues, Junior’s Cub Scouts, the brisk air and the red maple leaves in autumn, for rocks, cacti, and prairie dogs in the Silver State. Not a tempting prospect, but I saw it as my duty, both as a man and a patriot, to do what was best for the country, and as a scientist, to strive for new discoveries.

  “Of course,” Leary said, his glass paused halfway to his mouth, “now that I have told you all this, I will have to kill you if you decline our offer.”

  Then his lips split into a convivial grin.

  I joined in, a bit too late, and a lot more hesitant.

  “You did it, didn’t you?” the hospital chair squeaked below Leary as he adjusted himself, “You broke through, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I think so.” I was going to nod, but realized it still hurt too much.

  “Damn, you boys are too smart for your own good!” Leary said, and laughed that laugh of his that always sounded like something he pulled out of an old drawer on certain occasions.

  “What happened to Lissner?” I managed to ask.

  “Ah, he’s all right. Matter-of-fact he checked out of here a few hours ago. Guess those Germans are like cockroaches: hard to kill.”

  Leary got up from his chair.

  “Now, don’t get me wrong, we’re all very happy that you two are alive,” he said, “but all the equipment is trashed. No one’s going to get any useful readings out of them. No one’s saying that’s your fault, but it sure would be nice if we had something to show for it. Prove to Willis and the higher-ups that this hasn’t all just been a waste of tax-payers’ money, you know. Lissner claims he was unconscious the whole time, so it rests on you, Randy. Whatever you saw, if you saw anything at all, is going to have a whole lot of pull with the money men. Might determine whether the William James Project gets a second chance, or if we wrap it up now.”

  “I don’t know …” I said. Part of me wanted to confide in Leary, to share what I had seen with someone, but it would sound as if I was mad. Maybe I was. I figured no one else had seen the thing that had come through, and that it had gone back to whatever sunless world had spawned it. Or maybe it was still out there somewhere, trapped in an unfamiliar world. I didn’t know which was worse. It hurt to think about it, like a smoldering chunk of coal behind my forehead, and I just wanted to bury the hurt and the memory somewhere far, far away where I would never have to go again.

  “I’m sorry,” I managed, “It’s all a blur.”

  Leary stared out the window at the desert landscape.

  Then he smacked his lips. It was hard to tell if he was annoyed with me, it was always hard to tell what really went on behind his jovial good-old-boy humor and those cold, calculating eyes of his.

  “Yeah, well,” he said and turned to me again, “You should thank me. I’ve convinced Willis to let you take a few days off. The white coats are stepping over each other’s toes to get to talk to you first, but I told them to leave you alone. Go spend some time with your family. And if you remember anything — anything at all — you call me, okay?”

  The door flew open and Marion and Junior entered in a flurry of worried smiles and loving concern.

  I felt myself disappear in Marion’s golden locks as she planted big, wet kisses on my cheeks and on my mouth, and when she straightened up again Leary was gone.

  “Daddy, what happened to you?” Junior was asking. He was wearing his beloved suspender longies, and the cap Marion’s mother had given him before we moved to protect against the desert sun.

  “Oh hush, baby,” Marion said, “You know daddy can’t talk about his work.”

  She looked as fine as she ever had, tall and slim, her liveliness animated by the concern she felt for me. It felt good to be with my family again.

  Marion made my favorite that night – meatloaf with mashed potatoes and peas – while Junior played with his new Lego set and I pretended to watch “American Bandstand”.

  Jerry Lee Lewis was on, and normally I would have enjoyed his performance, but tonight my eyes kept drifting to the view outside the window, the deafening solitude
of the desert and the boundless sky. There was something immensely sad about the way the sand drifted in the wind.

  When we first came to Remand, the small desert town established by the military to house their employees and their families, we had all been impressed by the violent thunderstorms that sometimes rolled over the desert, the opulent, boiling clouds and the lightning that cracked the sky like a giant eggshell.

  I remembered standing close together with Marion and Junior, looking out at the spectacle and counting the seconds between lightning and rumble, while the rain tapped on the roof above our heads.

  There was no thunder tonight, the sky was a languid gray tinted-with-gold after swallowing up the sun. It was an altogether pleasant evening in Remand, yet I could hardly hear Dick Clarke speaking from the television set, for tonight the noise of rolling thunder was inside my head.

  The more I turned the memory of what had happened that morning in the laboratory in my head – and I could not put it aside – the less I was able to make it fit in anywhere. It was a puzzle piece that didn’t belong in the big picture.

  I considered calling Lissner. Somehow it worried me that I hadn’t heard anything from him. Perhaps I even hoped he would be able to convince me it had all been a hallucination, a result of hitting my head against the wall. In some weird way it felt like the two of us had done something wicked and had scurried away from it, ashamed to look at each other again.

  “Dinner’s ready,” Marion called cheerfully and tore me from my inertia.

  As I sat down at the dinner table and looked at the steaming pile of mashed potatoes, the roasted bacon crowning the meatloaf, and the familiar pitcher of lemonade next to it, I felt scared out of my wits.