Future Lovecraft

by Anthony Boulanger

  We will begin digging at an alternate site in several days’ time, after reviewing the remaining candidate sites.

  Day 490: While we initially thought the underground cavern was completely useless (except as a diversion for our resident academic), further investigation showed that there was an underground stream of clean, fresh water at this site. My team will aid with the clearing away of debris at this site, in an attempt to find the aquifer from which the stream stems.

  This news is of course pleasing to Dr. Thurston, as it means more strange linguistic puzzles for her to pore over. I often think she must be very bored out here in the boondocks of the galaxy. She must miss the libraries of the old great cities, since she’s always asking to borrow my books.

  Day 507: Dr. Thurston has full access to the cavern system. The team hasn’t found the source of the water yet, but the doctor has begun her attempts to translate some of the writing on the walls and on the artifacts we’ve turned up during the ongoing digs, as we follow the river underground.

  Zulema was particularly intrigued by some of the wall carvings, at least, the ones further down, where there starts to be art and not just text.

  The look in her eyes...I’m not sure I’d seen her smile once since we settled here, not until today.

  Day 520: We found a door, today.

  Or a seal. A big slab of rock used, Zulema and I think, to act as a final barrier between the outside world and what we think we will find beyond.

  There’s so much text on the slab that Zulema is sure she can crack the code of the language today. And it’s the funniest thing. I think I recognize a bit of it from an old book.

  Another odd thing: the further we go into this cavern, the more slime is accumulating on the walls. It has the most peculiar odour.

  Day 541: What have we done?

  We never should have translated the inscriptions out loud.

  The moons are down.

  I can’t find her anywhe—[End of log]

  ***

  Exhibit 11: Hutch, the New Roanoke mouser. During this period of colonial expansion, it was common for colonists to bring a cat to their new settlement. The cat was something of a communal pet for the community, but its main role was to kill pests in the fields or in food storage areas. The cat was alive and seemingly healthy at the time that the abandoned New Roanoke site was discovered.

  However, when the cat was removed from the surface of the planet (along with the rest of the salvaged items), it coughed up a hairball, went into a paroxysm, and died shortly thereafter. One of the crewmen on the transport ship, whose father was a taxidermist by trade, stuffed and mounted the cat for posterity.

  ***

  Exhibit 12: Heart-shaped locket, nickel plate. Clasp damaged, chain found knotted three times. No pictures within the locket. Testing revealed trace amounts of a gum adhesive on the interior of the locket, suggesting that there were once images of one of the colonist’s loved ones within.

  ***

  Exhibit 13: An antique leather-bound copy of Dire and Akashic Chronicles by John Dee, with certain passages underlined. The notations seem to be in two hands: One uses red ink and a single underline, while a reader who used a blue pen (and much more pressure when writing) underlined certain passages twice for emphasis. While some sections are underlined by both parties, most are not.

  It is worth noting that all of the sections containing dual underlining are written in Duriac, with one exception: “July 13th, Mr. Talbot came abowt 3 of the clok afternone, with whom I had some wordes of unkendness. He confessed that he neyther heyrd or saw any spirtual creature any more and left my howse.”

  The Duriac passages remain untranslatable, according to Dr. Armitage.

  ***

  Exhibit 14: Partial map of New Roanoke, hand-drawn on butcher paper. What remains of the map shows the location of the settlement’s water wells, mineral deposits, and nearby geographical features.

  A green ink square has been used to note the coordinates of some important locale, but the missing section of the map is positioned just under this green marking, prohibiting the reader from determining what this mystery location could be.

  ***

  Exhibit 15: Gamer’s dice (3). Hand-carved from bone. Six-sided, roughly cubic in form, approximately fifty millimeters tall. No further testing has been done on them to determine what kind of bone was used to create the dice.

  ***

  Exhibit 16: Signet ring in 10 carat gold. A lion is formed from three initials, though there is some dispute as to which letters are used. Armitage believed the intertwined letters were BCH, while Yang argued that the letters were, in fact, PCD. Neither set of initials matched the name of any colonist, leaving Yang and Armitage to concur that, whatever the initials were, they referred to an ancestor of one of the colonists: possibly Elyoner Dare or Dyonis Harvie.

  ***

  Exhibit 17: The “Eldritch Slime”. So named by Professor Armitage for its strange volumetric properties. The slime is semi-opaque and pale-green. Collected from the ground at New Roanoke by the salvage team, it has been stored in a liter storage jar (pharmaceutical grade).

  Armitage found the slime unsettling for several reasons, the most prominent being that the slime has the ability to increase in volume by approximately ten cc every eleven months.

  No plans are currently in place to “re-plant” the slime in a larger container, as no consensus has been reached regarding the proper procedure for safely doing so. Professor Armitage estimates that, within the next four years, the slime will have grown too large to be contained within its original storage jar.

  THE KADATH ANGLE

  By Maria Mitchell

  Maria Mitchell writes. H.P. Lovecraft taught writers the importance of self-sufficiency. She is learning.

  Innsmouth, MA. 5510 A.D.

  COSMIC SHORES AREN’T so distant when they nestle themselves between the synapses of self-sacrifice. Or what Amy thought to be self-sacrifice. She followed the zodiac into the sea and stood before a crystal promise. Glancing at the darkness over the Gilman House, she walked back to her house. Her mother, having never fully come to terms with her age, sat desolate in the corner.

  “I’ve told you before not to go to the waterfront. It makes you stink of rot,” her mother said, and plucked a flea off her scabbed arm.

  “The whole town stinks of rot, Mom. It’s been that way for thousands of years.”

  “Or maybe not so little.” Her mother wheeled herself over to the window. “What do you see when you go out to the waterfront? All you see is the litter and dead fish that clog the shore.”

  “Filth can be seen everywhere. It is inescapable.”

  “That’s no reason to keep going back to see more of it, Amy.”

  Amy turned away. She didn’t want to hear any more. She knew what it was that really bothered her mother, but it was pointless to bring the issue to her mother’s attention. Silence was always the best response. Silence, however, teaches one to brood, but not to think, and therefore, is detrimental.

  She had remained by her mother’s side for many years. She liked to think it gave them both a purpose, since they were of little consequence to anyone else. Innsmouth hadn’t changed much since the most recent war with Asia, but for the fact that it had grown more impoverished. Disaffected, unemployed, burly youths, fresh home from the war, wandered the streets like sharks prowling the water, looking for any scent of blood on which to feed. For a withered, shadowy person like Amy, their incessant sauntering through the neighbourhood was a constant dread. Worse was when the church women would stroll up to the door and ask to see her mother. Their lickerish eyes loved to feast on the deformity. The hags would squeeze their rolls of fat into their pale cars and drive away, searching for another fresh victim. Amy and her mom weren’t fresh enough, after having lived in Innsmouth all their lives, but the church women still liked to smell the deformity.

  When her brother didn’t return home from Asia, Amy thought about leaving. Living
in Innsmouth had never been pleasant for her, yet it seemed that Innsmouth was everywhere and, therefore, there was little point in leaving. A dull rain began to thump over the attic window. Amy knew rain always pleased the jars, so she glanced over to her mother, just to make sure she had fallen into stupor before she crept upstairs to talk with them.

  They stood at the east wall, facing the window. A few raindrops trickled onto the wormy chest they stood upon. She knelt before them and began arranging the stones around them.

  “I don’t want to stay here, anymore. I want to leave. When will I be able to go?” she asked the jars. The magenta one snickered unpleasantly.

  “You could always kill someone and go to prison. Then you’d be gone from Innsmouth.”

  “I’m not sure anyone goes to prison for murder, these days. It is 5510, after all. Now, speaking freely, that’s a different story,” said the green jar.

  “Will I never change? Will I always be like my mother?” Amy appealed to them desperately. The blue jar snorted.

  “You knew from the time you were small that your mother was defective. That she would never change enough to take to the sea. There’s no hereditary reason why you won’t end up the same way. The same thing happened to your aunt. That’s why she starved herself. She couldn’t go on living, caught between this world and the sea.” The blue jar expelled a deep, philosophical sigh. “I remember Irene very well. She was such a vibrant scrap of a thing. I used to love thinking about the day she’d change and begin her new life among the anemone. She was so found of beachcombing when she was your age. I just knew she’d have the most impressive anemone garden in all of Innsmouth Harbor. Fancy my horror when she turned 17 and we saw the mark of defection rise on her. You think you’ve got problems, Amy? You can’t even imagine how disappointed I was. She had everything going for her. She was well-educated in the texts; she was in regular contact with Cthulhu every time she shut her eyes. She had cursed the entire state of Massachusetts with a plague of raining human excrement for three days on her 16th birthday. We were so proud of her. But then, one year hence, it turns out that she’s basically human, after all. She doesn’t have enough of the Innsmouth blood to take to the sea. Somewhere along the way, the bland, indifferent God of Baptists must have wrenched her boundless potential for the Necronomicon into a skulking subservience for the mortal plain. As a consequence, Cthulhu can do nothing with her and she will never be a part of the sea.”

  “She won’t be a part of anything, now, because she’s dead.”

  “Well now, don’t go too far, Amy. I mean, who are addressing right now?” the blue jar said.

  “No one. I am mad,” Amy replied. She got up and went back downstairs. This staircase was so old that it seemed it must fall, soon. The paneling needed to be mended, but there was no labourer Amy was willing to let in the house after one brawny workman had broken the pale-pearl jar when trying to fix the hole in the attic. Amy looked about the house and wondered how it had fallen into such disrepair. There wasn’t any reason for it to be like this. It had been beautiful, once. It was the only thing that was. The last few years had aged it to an ugly, leering edifice that echoed with the sound of creaks magnified to a feverish dissonance. She steeled herself to try and fix a few of the panels, herself.

  While she pulled at the planks, and pathetically tried to wrench the bolts off to reset the configuration to a more acceptable level of stability, she imagined how the house could look again if she succeeded. She was too busy thinking about this to notice that she’d plunged her pick too deeply into one of the posts. It gave way with an angry thrash and she stumbled back, terrified. The staircase somehow remained standing, but now, before her, stood a yawning blackness. There was a pocket behind the stairs. She tentatively looked inside, but found nothing. Returning to the scene with a flashlight, she shined it into the depths. She could see nothing except the gauze of spider webs and the miserable muck of water-damaged drywall. The mildew of dust pervaded her nose and she stumbled back from it, angrily. She could not define the purpose of this space, so she quickly tried to cover it back up with the paneling, but her mother wheeled into the room before she could conceal the damage.

  “What have you done, you stupid fiend?” her mother yelled.

  “I was trying to fix the stairs. I’m tired of living in filth, among fleas, rot and dust. I never could depend on you to clean anything, even when you could still walk. All you ever do is sleep and yell, scream, and cry.”

  Her mother rolled to her and slapped her across the face.

  “Don’t you ever speak that way to me again, you little snot. You know I am weak and limited in what I can do.”

  “You’re not so disabled you can’t thrash me whenever you like.”

  “That’s right, because I know how weak and stupid flesh of my flesh is.”

  They stood before each other in a tableau of mutual hatred that seethed with barbed, suppressed rage.

  “I don’t ever want to look at you again. If you continue to live in this house, you will stay clear of me,” her mother finally said, and turned away from her and wheeled back into her room. Amy surprised herself by not crying. She had shed so many tears in her life. Tears for her lost brother, tears for her lost aunt, and all the snide, unrepentant treatment she’d received. Yet, through it all, she did not cry. It was the first time that tears would not come since she could always cry so easily. She was always so easy to break. They didn’t come. For the first time in a great many years, she felt a sense of relief. Maybe she would never cry again.

  After her mother had gone to sleep, she went back to the staircase and opened the pocket she’d exposed earlier. It didn’t have anything in it, but it seemed like it might be part of a larger network. She crept inside. She longed for the peace of dust, but that peace was unrequited. It did not want to give solace to her. It only wanted to be dust. She sat under the panel and in the darkness. She felt like she could sit there for a million years, without compunction about not getting to see what was happening outside. She did not want to know. Certainly, the entire town of Innsmouth already knew enough about all of them, from her drunken father marauding through the streets like a fool, blasting his idiocy to anyone who would listen. If Innsmouth had a dark reputation, then the Gilmans had a particularly slurred stance in a town in desperate need to make something worse than its own blackness.

  Would gossip never tire and would burly brutes never be silenced? Would they continue to skulk through the streets outside her door? She lay down on the mildewed floor inside the stairs. She huddled into the corner amidst fungi and rot. She clutched herself. In a few moments, she felt something change. It wasn’t anything which she could readily identify. She breathed long, gasping breaths and felt something in her suspire that was alien in its comfort. She breathed deeply and, in her mind, she felt an azure rapture. Pale blue. Electric. The fleas stopped biting her. The tears would not come. She breathed again and felt it bubble in her blood, again. It was unlike anything she’d ever felt before. Suddenly, she could envision the horrid church hags forgetting who she was. Not only forgetting who she was, but having their gossiping tongues ripped off by some invisible spectre, if they ever dared to speak of her or her family again. She could envision the plutonian trash she’d worked for many years ago, now having to take back everything they’d forced her to cover for them. She could envision the tormentors of yesteryears gone, by melting away into a new light from which their evil was bound. If mortal she must remain, then mortality would not be her enslaver. It would be her liberator. She breathed in the rot and, instead of being repelled, she was delighted. Gossip may be a measure of power in some circles, but it was nothing compared to this: great, fabulous, azure light beaming inside her thoughts.

  The seeds had been implanted inside her mind. Now began the countdown.

  ***

  Diary of Amy Gilman:

  Day One

  I have had the most incredible experience. I have no words for it except: azure raptur
e. I can’t define it as anything else. It is the most wonderful feeling I’ve ever known. It comes over me like a wave of light and sea. It washes away all my fears, all my anger, all my hatred. This morning, a punk kid plunged a rock through my window. I didn’t even get angry. I didn’t even feel abused. I felt as I do now. I felt incredible.

  ***

  Day Two

  Many in my life have indicated to me that a woman’s only real power is that of procreation. That, if she cannot conceive, she is nothing but a slab. I can’t conceive because I have no interest in doing so. Not a mortal child, anyway. But something has happened. There were strange growths on the inside of that staircase. I breathed them in. I felt something change in me. I am pregnant now with something I cannot define. Not in my belly but in my mind.

  ***

  Day Three

  The change is growing more voluminous. It scares my haggard mom half to death. When she saw me this morning, she screamed herself into unconsciousness. You see, journal, the wires are growing.

  ***

  Day Four

  Space is no longer of the sky. It is of me. 5510 A.D.? Ha! Try 15,510 A.D. and you may have the more accurate year. But the year is of no consequence. Not without my blood to guide it, anyway. Give me all the centuries untold and I’ll give you the gluons of a million universes, ten million years in the future. Innsmouth is quaking under the overcast rain of a sneaking, summer deluge. It’s uncommon for Innsmouth to have this much rain this time of year, but then again, there is no time, anymore.

  ***

  Day Five

  I went to the waterfront. They were waiting for me. They know what’s happened and are proud to say they knew it would. They assured me that they would not forsake me. Cthulhu knows how valuable I can be to his dreams. They would not let me remain a skulking mortal, to rot to dust. The change is still happening. My flesh is starting to slake off in scaled fragments. The town of Innsmouth is truly now one belonging to the Deep Ones. The human fraction that has caused me discontent for so long is beginning to quake with fear, because now they are seeing, as if for the first time in their whole, benighted history, that there really are beings that stalk their shadows that are far more powerful than they. And I am now one of them. The fungi growing in my head are sprouting exponentially. Soon, like Athena bursting forth from Zeus’s head, my dreams will give birth to the Kadath Angle: the angle of dream that will engulf the future with my azure rapture.