Lovecraft Ezine Mega-Issue 4 Rev1

by Price, Robert M.

  Sara shook her head. The light was a hot lance through her eyelids. She wondered if she was dying.

  “She looks like some sort of mutant,” said Caleb. “Can she even understand what you’re saying?”

  Raleigh’s voice was flat. Cold. “She understands.”

  “What do you want?” Sara forced the words past her lips.

  “I wanted to get Eddie back so I could check his shoes. Now it seems like I have a bigger problem. A lot of people know Eddie was here and now you’ve seen me and your friend has too.” Caleb sighed. “Raleigh, search Eddie. He hid shit in his shoes all the time so it’ll be there if it’s anywhere.”

  There was a rustle of cloth, then the chick-chack of a pistol being cocked. Even after so long underground there was no mistaking that sound.

  Sara felt the pressure release on her arms as Raleigh started pulling at Eddie’s shoes. She remembered the little bit of plastic that she’d found in the dead man’s left shoe. Was that what they wanted?

  She groped around in her coat looking for the square and found the dark glasses that had been in Eddie the corpse’s pocket. Slowly she unfolded them and put them on.

  Sara bit her lip, hard, then opened her eyes.

  The pain was still there, but it was dimmed. Through the glasses the men in the torchlight were shadow shapes, but at least she could see enough to function.

  She checked in her other pockets and found Eddie’s plastic square, her good luck charm. She took it out and held it up to Caleb. “I found this,” she said. “Take it.”

  The big man reached down and plucked it from her grasp. He shone the torch away from her face and onto the square. “Well, huh. You find this on him?”

  “Yes.”

  Caleb huffed out a breath. “That’s something at least. Raleigh, I got it man. You can stop searching.”

  Raleigh stopped and walked over, shining his torch on Caleb’s hand. He whistled. “That’s a relief.” He looked down at Sara. “All this shit over a flash card you can buy for a buck on eBay.”

  The two men looked at each other, and she saw the shadow that was Caleb move his hand towards her. It was his gun hand.

  A whistle burst out of the darkness. Both men jumped and swung their torches around towards the sound, revealing that the little ghoul had walked up close to them. It made another low whistle, like the one Raleigh had made moments before, then it licked its lips.

  “What the f-“ Caleb began, lifting his pistol towards the tiny creature.

  In the same moment Sara’s brain caught up with the fact that the light was no longer pointed at her and she could move again. With a wordless cry, she launched herself at Caleb, bringing her fist down on his gun hand with all her strength. There was a wet crack of breaking bone, and the gun clattered away into the dark.

  Caleb screamed and tried to hit her with his torch but she was already moving, launching herself up onto the pipes.

  Raleigh ran after her, swinging the torch as he chased her. She led him away from Caleb, away from the little ghoul.

  “What did you do, you little bitch?” Raleigh screamed. He’d drawn his own gun.

  There was a loud bang and she felt something whistle past her ear. Her own heartbeat roared in her ears as she bounced and rolled and swung her way as fast as she could out of his reach, but Raleigh kept the light on her and no matter how fast she went she couldn’t get far enough ahead of him to get out of his sight.

  An idea dawned through the fear. All at once she knew where she was going.

  The crack of a second gunshot sounded behind her, and she felt the bullet gouge out a chunk of her leg. She heard herself gasp, but she didn’t stop. Just a little further.

  She threw herself across a gap between pipes, catching on by the tips of her fingers. There was nothing ahead of her except the steam room and her sleeping spot.

  Raleigh yelled something behind her but the gunshots had left her deafened.

  She heard him scream though.

  Sara turned around in time to see his torchlight vanish into the rift in the floor. He’d been focusing on her so much that he hadn’t seen it until it was too late. By the time she’d got back to the edge, the light was a pinprick in the darkness. Then it was gone.

  The sunglasses fell off her face and followed Raleigh down into the dark.

  Panting in deep ragged gasps, Sara slowly made her way back to the morgue. Her arms were tired and she could feel blood dribbling out of the wound in her leg. She stopped for a moment and was surprised to see the wound was barely a graze, it had felt like a piece of flesh been hacked out by a hot knife. Smiling to herself, she passed over the spot where Caleb and dead Eddie had been, but all that was left there was a smear of blood on the floor. Caleb’s torch was in pieces a little further on.

  She got into the morgue proper and dropped down onto her good leg. She peered into the open drawer and glimpsed the top of Caleb’s head vanishing into the tunnel. A hooting whistle came out of the tunnel, and then deeper in another hoot answered it.

  “Thank,” said a voice behind her. The big ghoul had come in so quietly she hadn’t noticed. The little one sat in its arms, enthusiastically chewing on a severed human finger.

  Sara smiled.

  The ghoul had blood on its chin, and she had a sudden vivid mental image of what had happened to Caleb while she was dealing with Raleigh.

  The big ghoul took the small one over to the tunnel and put the tiny creature inside. It scampered into the darkness.

  “Where are you going to go?” asked Sara.

  The ghoul turned back to her. “Home.” The creature wriggled into the tunnel, then poked its face back out. “Thank,” it said again. It tapped its forehead. Then reached out to close the morgue drawer behind itself.

  “Wait,” said Sara. The ghoul raised its eyebrows at her. “Can I come too?” she asked.

  The ghoul shook its head. “Bad place.” It pointed at her.

  “For me? Because I’m not a ghoul?”

  The creature shrugged. “Not yet.” A hoot came from down below. The ghoul whistled a response. “Home make you ghoul. No Upworld, no words. Just dark.”

  “You still speak though.”

  “Remember..” The ghoul clicked its tongue. “You come home, you forget.”

  Sara looked back into the darkness of the hospital. “What if I was okay with that?”

  The ghoul was still for a few moments, then it shifted itself so there was room to get into the tunnel beside it. “Sure?”

  She nodded.

  “Then come.”

  Sara took its hand and pulled herself inside. The tunnel was wider than she’d thought, and after a few moments she could see it reached down deep into the earth. Hoots and whistles came out of the dark.

  Her stomach gurgled. “I’m hungry.”

  The ghoul grinned at her as it reached back to close the drawer behind them. “We have meat.”

  Sara licked her lips. “I know.”

  Andrew Jack lives with his wife in Christchurch New Zealand and has been misusing the written word for most of his life. He got his first rejection letter from Random House at the age of four, who kindly suggested he learn to read and write before resubmitting. A life long martial arts enthusiast, Andrew spends his time getting beaten up by his friends, writing like he’ll starve if he doesn’t and trying to stop his cats from destroying his house. He runs the Lovecraft inspired webcomic Cthulhu Slippers and gives out unsolicited writing advice at Andrew Jack Writing.

  Story illustration by Peter Szmer.

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  A Sense of Time

  by Pete Rawlik

  “The problem with you humans was that you had no tind’losi. Even now, here, billions of years after your species went extinct, you still don’t understand your place in things, past, present or future.”

  The thing that had asked Major Pandora Peaslee to call it Mister Ys was speaking in the past tense. Why was it speaking in the past tense? At l
east she thought it was speaking, she wasn’t looking at her captor. Looking at Mister Ys made her eyes go blurry and her head hurt. He wasn’t human, he wasn’t even a mammal. He was an insect, a coleopteran, a beetle, or something similar. That was something to be thankful for. He was at least bilaterally symmetrical, made of normal matter, and therefore bound by understandable laws of physics. Despite this Pandora still couldn’t look at the thing, it didn’t have lips, or a tongue, or any kind of facial musculature. When it spoke – Was it even speaking English? – there was nothing, no body language or facial expressions, for her subconscious to interpret. Certainly there were nonverbal cues being generated, but they were totally inhuman, her mind had no basis for interpretation. It was better to look out the window than to watch Mister Ys speak.

  Mister Ys sighed in a very human way. “The concept is so alien to your mentality that I am not even sure I can explain it to you.”

  I didn’t ask you to, said a little voice inside Pandora’s head commented. It was screaming at her, and she was doing everything in her power not to follow its suggestion: Get out. Get out. Get out. Getout. Getoutgetoutgetout!

  She had to get out. The dead were all around her, shambling through the streets. They had overrun the city, devoured the inhabitants, spread their infection. She was trapped in the Tillinghast Tower, fighting her way to the rooftop. There was a helicopter there, she knew how to fly. She only had six more floors, twelve flights of stairs until she could get out. As long as the army didn’t blow her out of the sky. Her heart was pounding, her breath was ragged, her legs felt like lead. Her arm stung, why did it sting? There was blood on her sleeve. She had been cut, scratched, bitten. When had she been bitten? It must have been hours ago. Hours ago. The wound had already turned septic. It had been hours since she had eaten. She was hungry. She had to eat. So hungry, hungry, hungry, hungry.

  “You craved space, hungered for it. Space is something you understood. Your eyes, your ears, they all helped you with space, helped as you moved through it, but your tind’losi, your sense of time was very poorly developed. You knew time existed, and that you were moving through it at a given rate, but you had little sense of your past and even less of your future. Your sense of time was almost entirely subconscious. This is why your species had difficulty planning for the future. Your ability to contemplate things months, years, decades, centuries or millennia in the future was extremely limited.”

  Her options had been limited. She remembered that. She had taken the job in Antarctica, Outpost 31, babysitting a team of scientists drilling in the ice. Easy really, mostly kept them from going outside without the right gear, and making sure no one went stir crazy or snow blind. When they found the city, the one that went down in to the ice she took point. It was an alien metropolis composed of tiers and gently sloping ramps and weird pentagonal doors. The place was a tomb, something about it made Pandora think of death, there was a stale stink, and the air was weirdly moist. She was woefully under equipped, they didn’t have much in the way of firearms, in some ways guns were a liability in a facility that locked men in with each other for six straight months. She had her Glock, and the thermal ice corer which would bore through six feet of glacier in thirty-seconds. When the barrell-shaped things came crawling up out of the darkness, their tentacles waving in the air, their five eyes burning in the darkness, she didn’t have thirty-seconds. She emptied the clip into one of them, but they dragged her down. The last thing she heard was a horrible keening sound that burst her eardrums and made her eyes bleed. It wasn’t until they took her head off that she finally understood what was happening.

  “Some humans understood this, and were able to shuffle free of their bonds. Your feeling of déjà vu was an example of your conscious minds accessing your unconscious sense of time, but most of you tended to just ignore those rare occurrences. Those of your species who were able to do this on a regular basis, who tapped into their sense of time, well you called them mad, and locked them away. You never realized that those madmen were essential to understanding the very nature of the universe you lived in.”

  Why is it still talking? SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!

  She hadn’t been in Antarctica, she had been on a ship in the South Pacific. A storm blew them off course. There was an island, and on the island something else, something plastic that seethed with hate and devoured men’s souls leaving nothing but shriveled sacks of skin and bone. It moved through walls and bulkheads, seeping through the spaces in between matter itself. She had locked herself in the engine room, as if that would have helped. When it finally came for her, rising up through the deck like some kind of phantom, the inevitability of her death washed over her. She was calm, serene even. She died quietly, in spite of the horror, comfortable in that last final truth.

  “Your physicists and fantasists hit on the truth, well part of it. They theorized the Butterfly Effect and the Jonbar Hinge, and how points of divergence might lead to parallel time lines. They were fascinated by the concepts of paratime. They imagined that divergence was easy, that the simple act of a butterfly flapping its wings, or not, was sufficient to cause a divergence, and therefore the creation of an entirely new universe, a new paratime, nearly identical to the original but with slight differences. This was a very anthropocentric concept, so very arrogant of your species. Your researchers never considered objectivity, or even the energy constraints that such a system might entail. Your species never considered that there might be a limit to divergence, a limit to the energy needed to create and sustain paratimes. They never considered that points of divergence might also have an opposite, that there might be points of convergence, of collapse.”

  The mine was collapsing. She was in a desert in Nevada, not far from the testing grounds. Some of the mine workers had gone missing, including Pandora Peaslee’s cousin. Great pits had opened up in the waste piles, and smaller ones within the mines themselves. Pandora had gone down to investigate. At least that is how she remembered it. She had been properly armed this time, the Glock and an Uzi. She had needed them to fight off the horde of subhuman things that had climbed up out of the earth. They had been men once, but that had been long ago. Now they lived in the ground, burrowing with clawed hands and searching for food with huge yellow eyes. They only came up to the surface when they were hungry for prey, or when they were being preyed on themselves. The Uzi had been useful against the ghouls, but not the things that chased them up. Vast cthonic masses of flesh had boiled up, like entrails through the slit in a deer’s gut. They swallowed her up, embraced her, crushed her within their filth.

  Pandora Peaslee fell to her knees and put her hands on her head. She had all these memories, things that didn’t make sense. Why couldn’t she remember clearly? Why did she remember so much?

  “Paratime lines aren’t stable. The differences in history are subjective, totally based on the point of view of an observer. If they don’t result in significant and drastic differences, the divergent lines reconverge. It’s simple really. Say you give a primate three blocks of different shapes to fit into their appropriate receptacles. In one universe she follows a particular order: square, circle, then triangle. In another universe she places them in a different order, and in yet another universe she does it a third way. These particular results create paratimes, driven mostly by the perceptions of those who viewed the actual events. But as time passes, the importance of the difference decreases, and is instead replaced, overwhelmed by the fact that the result is the same, and the differences between the two universes are relatively small. Eventually the differences that were sufficient to create a point of divergence aren’t enough to sustain the two paratimes, and they collapse into each other. The differences between the paratimes is remembered only by individuals that were directly affected by the initial divergence. Their memories become fuzzy and confused. Individuals recall things differently. It’s not that one is right, it’s that they remember different paratimes.”

  Major Pandora Peaslee felt her stomach
turn. She was panting, and sweating profusely. She was sick, something had been done to her. This thing, Mister Ys had done something to her. It was still talking. She could barely hear it.

  “Only some paratimes are stable, in general the structure of a local cluster is limited to a dozen or so primary branches, with several hundred minor branches weaving in and out. On occasion a small branch from one of the primaries will diverge so greatly from its mother that it will weave itself into another. We call these bridges, for they link two very different paratimes, and the things they transplant are called Rogues.”

  Her head was pounding, it felt like a knife was being shoved into her left eye, but she managed to open her mouth without throwing up. ‘What have you done to me?”

  “I have been telling you, or at least trying to.” The creature knelt before her. It couldn’t bend because it was an invertebrate encased in an exoskeleton, so it knelt. “This paratime you are currently in, you don’t belong here. The whole human race doesn’t exist in this line, never did. Here, a species of coleopterans became the dominant life form. They achieved sentience millions of years earlier than humans, and have remained so millions of years after humans went extinct. They’ve attained a level of science and technology humans could only dream of. You aren’t supposed to be here, you’re a rogue. Your paratime bridge collapsed into this one millions of years ago during a period when the coleopterans, the Kub’sek, had abandoned the Earth. It was nothing more than a wasteland, the exact same condition you humans left your world in after you went extinct, or were destroyed. That similarity was enough to crash the two paratimes together and build a rogue bridge between the two branches.”

  Pandora turned her face so she wouldn’t have to look at the thing that was crouching over her. “You said humans were extinct, how is it I’m still alive?”

  “A fascinating question, one that I’m surprised you even thought of, let alone had the nerve to ask.” She could hear the clacking sound of the mouth pieces rubbing against each other, and smell the breath of the thing as it exhaled. “You were dead. How doesn’t matter, oh I know you think it does but trust me, it doesn’t. You died, probably in many different ways, paratime collapsing in on you. Somebody, in at least one of your existences cremated you, reduced you to ashes, your essential saltes, put you in a ceramic container and shot you into a long parabolic orbit around the sun. You were one of about a hundred.” This seemed to create a sense of pleasure in Mister Ys. “The Kub’sek found you and the others, and were fascinated by your very existence. They, like you, don’t have a well-developed tind’losi, this may be a terran thing, something deficient in your local star or the original proto-matter. Anyway they reconstituted you.” Pandora looked at Mister Ys with confusion. “They invoked Yog-Sothoth and turned back time, put you back together. Then they put you in a zoo.”