The drop was sudden, a depthless chasm yawning beneath, reality falling away. Panic seized him; he willed that the sensation stop. Nothing happened. Swathes of shadow and color moved before his eyes, inconstant shapes coalescing and dispersing. He expanded his consciousness, producing filaments of light, working them into a shining conduit. The light-tunnel stretched, enveloped him within its glimmering walls. The rushing chaos receded. His disembodied mind rode the conduit into the neural interchange matrix. At the other end was a presence; he could sense its thought-breath, rhythmic and steady, electric with expectation.
Strange disassociated images flashed across Jorev’s thoughts: three bodies motionless beneath glass lids, bathed in purple-hued light; half-naked celebrants chanting around an altar of stone, immense manlike constructs of wicker and branches burning in the background, the screams of bound human sacrifices rising from the smoke and flames.
Then the entry—dark waters closing over his head, an endless sinking, awareness melting away. He felt the other mind rebel against the intrusion, the surface swelling like a stormy sea, black waves rising like mountains. Of the three minds Aril’s was the strongest, but he could never have anticipated the extent of the force that now hurled itself against him, huge and uncontrollable. Darkness threatened to overwhelm him.
From the depths came swirling plumes of color, the neural relaxant inching through her bloodstream. He dipped into the colors, projected a thought-vision: scarlet sunset on the shore of a boundless ocean. A memory from days long past—the shore long vanished beneath sprawling arcologies and saltwater-processing towers, the sunset reduced to a harsh, chemical glare in a yellow, poisoned sky. But it worked: the maelstrom subsided. He was descending through gossamer sheets of thought and feeling and memory, his self dissolving, melting like a shard of ice in sunlight.
In the blackness another conduit gleamed. Coupled, smooth, fluid, they poured through it and into a mindspace of crystalline order and Cartesian angles, of flexsteel lattices across which ideas sparked like blue flames; a complex mechanism of interlocking cogs and wheels, a relentless mill grinding incalculable quantities of data. A reflexive shudder vibrated the apparatus, but the resistance did not last, and Feyn Osair was swept along. Time and space ceased to exist. For an eyeblink, or an eternity, or not at all, the composite Mind floated on the currents of an ocean, drifted across the fathomless velvet distances between the stars.
From the nothingness rose the fringes of the Sapientia, trillions of information nexuses and memory repositories gleaming like a galaxy in the frozen emptiness of space; at its center, the black hole of the Corridor. The tri-mind floated into that lightless well in which lay the inner core of humanity, stripped of reasoning and logic: raw emotions, primal urges and half-formed fears, forgotten memories of tooth and claw and darkness, of fire falling from the sky.
Sensations and inchoate thoughts swam out of the murk, slipping through the heightened awareness of the tri-mind. A broad plain of long grass, glimpsed through the brain of an ape-thing, tinted by the scarlet haze of hunger and terror. Sharpened stones rising and descending and rising again, covered in blood: the sharp tang of wrath and lust, of mindless triumph. A barren wilderness covered in snow, the sense of something approaching behind a line of blue mountains, cold and enormous and deadly. Sweat and agony and merciless heat, thousands of wasted bodies straining as one in the shadow of a colossal stone altar. Blind fear at the sight of land vanishing from sight. Guilt and blood frenzy. Regret and passion.
Jorev—or the part of the Mind that still retained a recollection of Jorev—felt and subsumed through Aril’s synapses, analyzed and correlated using Feyn’s machinelike reasoning. He could see the Feyn behind the cold, calculated exterior, a man tormented by insecurity and superstition, by lack of faith in science; he could sense Aril’s regret over a life wasted in idleness and sensual glut, her brilliant mind tearing itself to pieces; he faced his own irrational awareness of the futility of existence, deep-seated and inescapable, the black spectre of melancholy forever tainting his days.
It no longer mattered. The world on the other side of their eyelids was a distant dream, unpleasant and all but forgotten. Deeper and deeper into the dark node the Mind drifted, shedding layers of thought and emotion, casting aside myth and metaphor, seeking the naked kernel of truth. Each of the three ceased to exist, and in doing so became more than they could ever have dreamed of becoming. The Mind was now all that remained, an amalgam of neurons and cortical memory-implants connected by thin tendrils of fiber-optics; a pulsing beacon of composite consciousness in a shadowy vortex, processing, assimilating and rendering the thought-images that flashed past like a datafilm compiled from random frames. Intellect, emotion, physical reality itself: all a mirage, a carefully constructed hallucination, a screen behind which lay the no-space of the subliminal.
Show me, said the Mind, and forced a shape on the blur. Show me your true face.
Something shifted in the whirling mists and a voiceless shriek of horror traveled through the Mind. It was a form that defied form, ancient and infinitely malignant; a thing of insane dimensions, of decaying universes. It was the Father, the life-giving Mother, the creator and devourer of worlds; the only god mankind had ever worshipped, to whom it had given thousands of names, before whom it had prostrated itself and laid out sacrifices since the beginning of time.
Like a bloated spider, it sat at the heart of the space that was not space, spinning a web of shimmering illusion; a mad god in a deranged universe of patterns without reason. The Mind beat itself bloody against the confines of its flesh-prison, attempting to terminate the program, to blot out the madness rushing across the thought-continuum like a putrid wind.
The God showed Its true face and smiled.
There is no death in the simulation nodes of the Creator’s mind.
There is a universe in which they awaken on the frozen shore of a black lake, surrounded by piles of rotting corpses, and are pursued and devoured by the great snake-god who inhabits this desolate wasteland, over and over again.
In another reality there is a landscape of black, jagged rock and a sun like a red, infected smear, and the air burns their lungs as they try to scream, and all the aeons that have ever existed are but a tick of eternity’s clock.
In another, a crooked, twisted thing of limbs and heads and shrieking mouths sounds its interminable agonies in a vast cavern.
In another, three bodies lie motionless in the purple light of the navpods, surrounded by the low hum and whir of the machinery that feeds them and removes waste and stokes their metabolic processes; perfect and virtually deathless, an infinity of horrors behind their closed eyelids.
Within the walls of the castle above the valley, silence reigns, thick and absolute, broken only by the metallic scuttling of automatons.
About the Authors
MATTHEW M. BARTLETT is the author of Gateways to Abomination, a fragmented novel in the guise of a collection of short weird fiction. He is a member of the New England Horror Writers. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts with his wife Katie and five cats, and is currently working on several projects, including an illustrated chapbook entitled The Witches of Western Massachusetts. You can follow him on Facebook and visit his oft-neglected blog at matthewmbartlett.com
DARRIN BRIGHTMAN lives in eternal thrall to the four-legged eldritch abomination, B’zlli (his Doberman Billie Dog: an ex nicknamed her Bizillie). He has spent years deciphering B’zlli’s wails, shrieks, and moans, and has amassed an archive of terrifying translations. IPO is the first of many horrors B’zlli will inflict upon an unsuspecting world. He lives in Salem, is an AICP-certified urban planner, and is slowly rehabbing a 120-year-old house. Darrin took about 20 years off from creative writing before getting back to it a couple of years ago, and is currently on the fifth draft of a Lovecraft-influenced middle-grade novel.
RICHARD LEE BYERS is the author of forty fantasy and horror novels including Called to Darkness, Blind God’s Bluf
f, and The Reaver. He has published dozens of short stories, some of which are collected in the ebooks The Plague Knight and Other Stories and The Q Word and Other Stories. He invites everyone to Follow him on Twitter (@rleebyers), Friend him on Facebook, and add him to your Circles on Google+.
CODY GOODFELLOW has written five novels––his latest is Repo Shark (Broken River Books)––co-written three more with John Skipp, and three collections––Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars, All-Monster Action and Strategies Against Nature. He wrote, co-produced and scored the short Lovecraftian hygiene film Stay At Home Dad, which can be viewed on YouTube. He is also a director of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival–Los Angeles and cofounder of Perilous Press, a micropublisher of modern cosmic horror. He “lives” in Burbank, California, and is currently working very hard on building a perfect bowling team.
ORRIN GREY is a skeleton who likes monsters. He’s also the author of Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings and Painted Monsters & Other Strange Beasts, the latter of which is due out in October from Word Horde. His macabre tales have recently appeared in such venues as Giallo Fantastique, Jazz Age Cthulhu, The Children of Old Leech, and Letters to Lovecraft. You can visit him in his crypt at orringrey.com, where he mostly watches old monster movies.
Marooned on a tiny west coast island, LYNDSEY HOLDER spends her free time gardening, writing about inescapable doom, and eating too much chocolate. She’s currently trying to learn to play a selection of 80s new wave songs on the piano at the hospital where she works, and continuing to toil on her eldritch pulp noir novel.
LEEMAN KESSLER is a Nigerian-born, American actor living in Canada where he spends his time impersonating the notoriously dead writer H.P. Lovecraft as part of his Ask Lovecraft series. He is a member of Toronto’s Monkeyman Productions and takes to the online airwaves with his wife for their podcast, Geekually Yoked. All of this tomfoolery is made possible by the exorbitant patience of his daughter. You can follow him on Twitter @lemurbouy
H. P. LOVECRAFT was an American author of horror, fantasy, poetry and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction. He was the creator of the Cthulhu Mythos, the Necronomicon, and has inspired countless works of literature, art, film, and music. Stephen King called Lovecraft “the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” Lovecraft died on March 15, 1937.
ANYA MARTIN first encountered the Velvet Underground in high school via Venus in Furs on a mix tape from a friend who also had the good taste to turn her onto Captain Beefheart. She kept the VU in constant rotation on her college radio show, Dangerous Visions, and recently attended a recreation of the EPI by the Atlanta-based avant garde cinema society Film Love. When not listening to obscure music, she pens stories in prose, comics and journalism. Her fictional works include Sensoria (Giallo Fantastique, Word Horde, 2015), A Stuffed Bunny in Doll-Land (Womanthlogy: Heroic, IDW), The Toe (Feet, Dynatox Ministries), and The Courage of the Lion Tamer (Daybreak). She is also bloggeress-in-chief at ATLRetro.com.
CHRISTINE MORGAN works the overnight shift in a psychiatric facility and divides her writing time among many genres, though her true calling seems to be tending toward historical horror and dark fantasy (especially Viking-themed stories). A lifelong reader, she also writes, reviews, and beta-reads. She has several novels in print, with more due out soon. Her stories have appeared in more than three dozen anthologies, ‘zines and e-chapbooks. She’s been nominated for the Origins Award and made Honorable Mention in two volumes of Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She’s also a wife, mom, and possible future crazy-cat-lady whose other interests include gaming, history, superheroes, crafts, and cheesy disaster movies. christinemariemorgan.wordpress.com
EDWARD MORRIS is a 2011 nominee for the Pushcart Prize in Literature, and has also nominated for the 2009 Rhysling Award and the 2005 British Science Fiction Association Award. He received two Honorable Mentions in Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year in 2014 (for A Love Song To Frank Booth and Tekeli-Li!)His work has appeared in Interzone, the Lovecraft Ezine, the Magazine of Bizarro Fiction and numerous other markets in four languages. edwardrmorrisjr.wordpress.com
SCOTT NICOLAY is the author of Ana Kai Tangata: Tales of the Outer the Other the Damned and the Doomed (Fedogan & Bremer, 2014). He lives in the desert, where he is currently at work on a second collection of tales. Watch the skies.
ROBERT J. SANTA has been writing speculative fiction for more than thirty years. His works have appeared in numerous print and online magazines and anthologies. Robert lives in Rhode Island, USA, with his beautiful wife and two, equally beautiful daughters.
DAMIR SALKOVIC is an aficionado of weird and macabre tales, presently residing in Arlington, Virginia. His short stories have been published on the Tales to Terrify podcast, in the Schlock! bimonthly magazine and in anthologies by Schlock! Webzine, Source Point Press, Parasomnia Press, Apokrupha, Villipede Publications, Miskatonic Press, Mad Scientist Journal, Thirteen O’Clock Press and the Black Library Bolthole. He earns his living as an accountant, a profession that lends itself well to nightmares and harrowing visions.
CHRISTOPHER SLATSKY is an author of weird fiction whose works have appeared in the anthologies Arcane and Conqueror Womb, and publications like Innsmouth Magazine, the Lovecraft eZine, and Dunhams Manor Press. He lives in Los Angeles.
RODNEY TURNER is from Baltimore. When his duties as a father of three allow, he posts serialized fiction and general geekery at daringdefenders.wordpress.com
About the Editor
SCOTT R JONES is a writer, poet, spoken word performer, mostly unintentional comedian, and naturalized sorcerer. He lives in Victoria BC Canada with his lovely wife Sasha and all-round awesome kids Sean and Meridian. He keeps at this writing thing. Like a dog he keeps at it. His fiction and poetry has been published in Broken City Mag, Innsmouth Magazine, Cthulhu Haiku 2, and upcoming in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. He is the author of the short horror story collection Soft From All The Blood and The Ecdysiasts, a book of literary flash fiction. His book detailing an auto-ethnographical approach to religious themes and practice derived from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, When The Stars Are Right: Towards An Authentic R’lyehian Spirituality, has received praise from the likes of Laird Barron, Ross E. Lockhart, and Richard Gavin, and apparently caused S. T. Joshi to make a squicky face when it was mentioned during a convention panel. Like Lovecraft, Scott produces more correspondence than fiction, so he’d be happy to hear from you. You can reach him by email at [email protected] or you can follow him on the Twitter @PimpMyShoggoth
About Martian Migraine Press
We are an independent Canadian micro-press with a focus on the weird, unusual and occasionally transgressive. Fiction that plays with boundaries before ignoring them altogether; erotica with dark humour and a taste for the outré; and poetry for people from other planets. Martian Migraine books are available almost exclusively in e-reader formats through the usual fine online retailers, although we sometimes make forays into producing physical books and chapbooks in limited press runs. Mostly when we’re feeling nostalgic.
Martian Migraine Press:
the Best Kind of Headache
Be sure to check out these other Martian Migraine Press titles…
SOFT FROM ALL THE BLOOD
by Scott R Jones
PRIESTESS
Volume One of the
BLACKSTONE Erotic Series
by Justine Geoffrey
R’LYEH SUTRA
by skawt chonzz
martianmigrainepress.com
Follow us on Twitter @MartianMigraine
Table of Contents
MAGIC CIRCLES, NOXIOUS MACHINES
FROM BEYOND
IPO
INFERNAL ATTRACTORS
SATORI
PROFESSOR HILLIARD’S ELECTRIC LANTERN
FILM MAUDIT
NINESIGHT
BUG ZAPPER
PROGRAMMED TO RECEIVE
MACHINE WILL S
TART WHEN YOU ARE START
PARASITOSIS
THE HAPPINESS MACHINE
TURBULENCE
DERESONATOR
RESONATOR SUPERSTAR!
THE WIZARD OF OK
THE DIVIDE
About the Authors
About the Editor
About Martian Migraine Press
Other MMP Titles
Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond Page 20