World War Cthulhu: A Collection of Lovecraftian War Stories

by John Shirley

  That must be the truth. The sunlight cleansed the world of my evil dream, and that’s the end of it. We must not believe that I, the murderer and madman, arose and straggled off, into darkness that does not end, while Nyarlathotep walks beside me always in my dreams. I can almost see him, the hollow eyes, the air rippling about him like a black cloak. I can almost see the Mi-Go who worship him, and the beasts of the desert that lick his hands.

  But we mustn’t believe any of that. No.

  We mustn’t believe that Nyarlathotep and the rest, the unknown, dark gods, seek to return to our world, but aren’t quite material, and so must come into focus in the dreams of some great dreamer, some visionary, someone considerably more imaginative and intelligent than myself, like Marcus Vibius, for instance, who died before his dreams quite came to fruition.

  We must expressly deny that Nyarlathotep walks beside me, not angry or vengeful, for his kind are far beyond such petty human emotions; but he still finds me a bit of a disappointment.

  I do not expect to be telling this story much longer. The air around me is filled with flapping wings, with buzzing.

  I call upon King Hades to welcome me, soon, into the comforts of his kingdom. I sacrifice to him, because there are far worse places where I, where all of us, could end up.

  We are all stragglers, with nowhere to go in the end.

  That is, if you believe any of this. Which is the punch line of the joke, at last.

  THE PROCYON PROJECT

  BY TIM CURRAN

  It was an easy gig and Finn pulled it because he was a real, bonafide small-town hero. When he got back to Caneberry Creek from the Pacific, people couldn’t do enough for him. They all wanted to hear how he’d given it to the Japs on Guadalcanal as if he had taken them down single-handedly. Sometimes he almost believed it himself … at least until he woke sweating and shaking at four in the morning from nightmares of Japanese soldiers rushing by the dozens from low cave mouths, blood-smeared and fanatical.

  Regardless, he did his best to sell himself as the hard-bitten, tough Marine and defender of freedom. It got him free lunches, dates with pretty girls, and even tickets to the latest flicks at the Rialto on Main. If they wanted to believe he was some hard-charging, bullet-eating, lean mean killing machine, so be it. He wasn’t stupid enough to look a gift horse in the mouth. He played the part and they ate it up. And all it had cost him was his nerves and his left leg.

  He wasn’t back two weeks when he was offered the job at Blue Hills, which was a former pesticide plant that had been tricked out—as part of the war effort and something called the Procyon Project—as a weapons-research facility for the Defense Department. What went on there was classified, strictly hush-hush, but it paid well and all Finn had to do was check IDs when the workers and eggheads showed. It paid well and gave him plenty of time to read his magazines.

  It was strictly creampuff stuff, and after Guadalcanal, he was more than ready for a life of leisure.

  ***

  Just after Halloween in ’43, he was pulling midnights because two of the guards had been drafted. He drove out to Blue Hills, clocked in, grabbed a cup of joe at the cafeteria, then made his way out to the guard shack. He was in luck. Manpower was in such short supply that they had called in a couple retirees to fill out the ranks. One of them was Chester DeYoung, another old jarhead from the old days. He’d seen his share of action with the Marine Corps during the Philippine Insurrection forty years before.

  “Well, look what we got here,” Chester said when he saw him. “Old blood-and-guts himself. What’s a good-looking grunt like you doing in a place like this?”

  Finn giggled. Chester always gave it to him and he liked that. He was about the only one in town who treated him like an ordinary human being. Everyone else acted like he was made out of glass. And he’d told Chester that more than once.

  “Guilt,” was Chester’s answer. “They ration gas, collect metal, can’t get panty hose or good beef, but you really sacrificed and they know it. You gave a limb to keep the flag flying. But don’t worry, son. You give it a year or two, they won’t give a damn. You won’t be able to pay them to listen to the stories of an old leatherneck. Take my word for it.”

  Finn found that both liberating and disturbing.

  But that’s what he liked about Chester. He had a way of putting things into perspective. Every time Finn told him about something that bothered him, Chester would sort it out for him and give him a new way of looking at things. Unlike his own father, who got up every day and stared at his son’s medals on the mantelpiece like he was gazing upon the Ark of the Covenant itself. Finn was pretty certain old Dad liked the medals better than the guy who’d won them.

  “How’s it tonight?”

  Chester shrugged, stretched. “Same, same, same. Check ’em in and check ’em out. I’m so good at it I ought to bag groceries at the A & P. How you holding up, son?”

  “Good, pretty good.”

  “Still getting the nightmares?”

  Finn thought about lying, then he just nodded his head. “They’ve been bad lately. Real bad.”

  “They get that way. I know I had my fill and now and again, I still get them. You can’t go through combat and walk away from it pure as snow. Something in you forever changes. You just have to accept that and plod on.”

  Chester told him that the heavy fighting for the Sohoton cliffs in 1901 still came back to him in his dreams. The ground was wet with blood. He’d never forget the men he mowed down during the assault.

  “Sometimes it seems like a lifetime ago, and sometimes it seems like last week.”

  But, Christ, that was forty years ago, Finn got to thinking. Am I still going to be dreaming about this shit in the 1980s?

  A sudden rumbling sound broke up the talk. It was coming from one of the main research complexes. The entire ground seemed to shake, then vibrate. Finn felt suddenly lightheaded, his guts clenching like a fist. He teetered uneasily on his artificial leg.

  “Been hearing that off and on all night,” Chester admitted. “Hell if I know what they’re doing up there. Hopefully they won’t blow us up.”

  Finn stepped out of the shack and leaned against it, sucking in lungfuls of cool, clean air. Crazy. That’s what it was. The rumbling made him tense up like when the shells were incoming on Guadalcanal. It felt as if his guts pulled up into his chest. That was bad enough. But the weird vibration made his head spin, his eyesight blur, and his skin feel like it wanted to crawl off his bones. There was something wrong about that.

  “My neck gets sore when it does that,” Chester said. “Goddamn old ticker skips a beat.”

  Finn worked his jaw. The fillings in his teeth made his molars ache like the metal was expanding.

  “What the hell kinds of things are they doing up there?”

  But Chester just shook his head. “Don’t know and maybe I don’t want to know. Can’t say that I care for it much.”

  Finn lit a cigarette to calm his nerves and steel himself. There was something very strange about this whole business. Suddenly, his scalp prickled and it came again—that low rumbling that made the ground shake. It was followed by something like a high electronic squealing, then the vibrations. His head spun again. When he opened his eyes … it seemed as if the world was moving, the trees writhing in the woods though there was no wind. And the stars overhead had changed. Instead of looking like tiny white pinpricks, they looked much closer, like glowing, pulsating marbles.

  Then all returned to normal.

  “It gets you inside, don’t it?” Chester told him. “I thought I was going to throw up the first time. I called up to Building A to see if something happened, but Doc Westly said they were just having some generator problems.”

  Generator problems, Finn thought. That wasn’t no goddamn generator. Felt like the fucking world was about to split its pants.

  He didn’t really know what the Procyon Project was, but he was pretty certain it had nothing to do with generators.

/>   Chester snapped his lunchbox closed. “Well, I best get going. The old woman waits up for me. Keeps the soup hot.” He dropped a wink to Finn. “Worries about me heading into town and catting around with the girls.”

  “Sure,” Finn told him, forcing a laugh.

  Chester waved and then he was outside the gate, moving pretty fast across the lot to his old Ford. He looked like he couldn’t get away from Blue Hills fast enough.

  Shivering, Finn didn’t blame him one bit.

  ***

  The first hour was easy. Finn sat around in the shack and listened to Kay Kyser live from the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago and paged through one of his mystery magazines. It was quiet, low-key, and boring. Just the way he liked it.

  Around 1:30, he started making his rounds of the facility, keying in at the various watch clocks. Buildings A and B was where the research was going on, but there were a dozen other sheds and storage Quonsets that had to be checked. There were two guards on as always: Finn and Jack Coye. Finn had the gate sector and Jack had the western sector, which included Buildings A and B. They had it all timed out. They’d start their rounds at 1:30 and by 2:15 they’d meet up over at the dispatch office, which was unmanned at night.

  Ever since that weird stuff earlier—the rumblings and vibrations—Finn was feeling more than a little on edge. He was looking forward to running into Jack and having a smoke with him. Not only for the company, but because Jack always seemed to know about things he wasn’t supposed to know.

  Jack usually made it to dispatch before Finn did. You could only go so fast with a wooden leg.

  Although the various drives and parking lots of Blue Hills were strategically lit, it was still a damn dark night. The black forest seemed to be pressing up closer to the fence than usual. A crescent moon hung above the dark thickets and fields of tangled yellow grasses.

  Finn felt like he was the last person on earth.

  The damp seemed to be reaching up under his coat and crawling along his spine. He couldn’t shake the chill that encompassed him. He was even getting the phantom stiffness in his missing leg again. Of all things.

  He moved along the outer road, gimping along, as he liked to refer to it, checking the fence because they were real particular about their fence at Blue Hills. There was nothing to see as usual, just lots of weeds and shadows and that awful encroaching darkness that Finn simply could not tolerate tonight. Maybe it reminded him too much of those black nights on Alligator Creek during the Battle of Tenaru when the Japs assaulted their positions all night long … or maybe it reminded him of the pooling shadows that seemed to ooze out of his closet door at night when he was a kid.

  Whatever it was, it was really doing a job on him.

  He patrolled along the outer road, scanning the fence with his flashlight, almost afraid of what the light might reveal in the long grasses. He felt tense inside, his heartbeat fluttery.

  It should have lessened after he got back on the main road and made his way up to the boiler house, but it increased. Nothing felt right tonight. Everything was out of whack somehow and he couldn’t put a finger on what it was. When he got up near the dark hulk of the boiler house, he thought he heard a noise. A sort of fssst! fssst! sort of sound. The first time he paused briefly, but the second time it came he stopped dead.

  Hell is that?

  He waited there, looking from the cars of the night crew parked in the grass to the boiler house itself.

  Fssst! Fssst! Fssst!

  It seemed more insistent now and it was coming from over near the cars themselves. Finn approached them cautiously, ever aware of the .38 at his hip. His hand eased down toward the gun, fingers wrapping around the butt. As he withdrew it, a dew of sweat speckling his forehead, he panned the cars with his light. They were all dark and empty.

  He saw something scamper behind a coupe.

  It was large, too large to be a woodchuck or even a bobcat. In the back of his mind, he thought it had been a man scampering away on all fours. Swallowing, he looked around. What he would have given for some backup just about then. There were always the boys in the boiler house … but what was he supposed to tell them? That some night animal had him scared white?

  Shit, Finn, we didn’t think Marines were scared of anything.

  Yeah, he could hear it now. Whatever this was, he would have to handle it on his own. He heard the fssst! fssst! sound again and by then, he was shaking. His nerves weren’t good since the Pacific. He had a habit of starting at the slightest sound. Even his sleep was thin, so thin it could barely be called sleep. A twig scraping against the roof or a dog barking three streets away brought him fully awake, eyes staring, muscles bunched and ready for action.

  The .38 was shaking in his hand.

  “Hey!” he called out, his voice scratchy and weak. “Hey! Who’s over there?”

  There was no response but that same fssst! fssst! which sounded a little too much like the call of a night grasshopper … except it would have taken about 10,000 of them to reach the kind of volume he was hearing.

  Carefully, he edged around the cars, keeping the light in front of him. He had heard some very weird sounds in the Pacific at night, animals and insects that were truly disturbing, but this was beyond that. Now he was hearing something else. It almost sounded like a soft, meaty chewing.

  “Hey!” he said with more volume now.

  The chewing stopped. It was replaced by an almost throaty purring sound, then that fssst! fssst! noise, but louder now. Almost like a warning. It was coming from behind the Chevy in the back. Finn tried to swallow as he made his way over there, but there was no spit left in his mouth. The gun was shaking in one hand and the flashlight in the other, its beam bobbing frantically.

  He moved around the Chevy, smelling a sweet, almost decayed sort of odor that stirred his guts. Then he moved around the back of the car and saw … he didn’t know what he saw … only that it was enough to make him take two or three awkward steps back that put him firmly on his ass.

  The light glanced off something.

  Something that went fssst! fssst! and then rose up into the air on membranous wings that made a whirring sound like the prop of an airplane. It flew right over him and off into the darkness. He sat there, his breath barely coming, his heart pounding in his chest. Whatever it had been, it was nearly the size of a man but looked almost like an insect, a wasp maybe, except that it was set with sharp spiky hairs like needles and had three globular yellow eyes. And it had a mouth filled with backward-curving fangs like those of a rattlesnake.

  When he pulled himself to his feet, his light picked out the remains of what must have been a raccoon that was split right open, its entrails cast about like bloody clocksprings.

  That thing … that bug … it had been eating it.

  He stumbled back toward the boiler shack, bound and determined to tell the night crew what he had just seen, but then he stopped, knowing he couldn’t. They would think he was nuts. Another crazy shell-shocked gyrene. They might not laugh to his face, but after he left they would be doing just that.

  No, he wasn’t going to say a thing.

  Maybe he had hallucinated it. Maybe his nerves were more shot than he realized. Maybe the war had unscrewed something in his head.

  But he didn’t believe that for a minute.

  ***

  He was late getting over to dispatch and he knew it, but things weren’t exactly easy after the big bug. Maybe outside he was no longer shaking, but inside he was still trembling, his guts coiled white. He had to key in at four different watch clocks before he got to dispatch and his hand was shaking so badly at the first two that he could barely hang onto the key.

  Finally, he just stopped, breathing in and out, forcing himself to calm down.

  You survived a war, meathead, and now an overgrown hornet is giving you the heebie-jeebies?

  He thought that sounded real, real good, but it didn’t hold water. He had seen the teeth on that thing and since when did insects have teeth?
And the wings … now that he thought about it, there hadn’t been a single pair, but maybe two or three pairs. No, it was wrong in every conceivable way. Bugs did not get that big and they did not have fucking teeth.

  He keyed in at his last station and breathed a sigh of relief.

  He couldn’t wait to see Jack.

  Jack would have some good gossip about all this weirdness, and he knew it.

  Finn walked down the lonely moonlit road, getting closer and closer to Building A, and dispatch, which was housed in a Quonset just down the way from it. A cup of coffee and a cigarette, and he would start feeling human again. Things would make sense then.

  The rumbling came again.

  Oh shit, not again.

  The rumbling noise grew louder and louder, sounding suddenly like huge waves crashing into a pier. The ground was moving and again Finn found himself on his ass. The vibrations began right away. He could feel them in his bones, in his blood, in his tissues. It felt like the very stuff he was made of was going to fly apart at any moment. The nausea moved in waves through his belly; his head spun like a top. When he blinked it away, he saw the world as he had never seen it before. It was grotesque and twisted, the trees like wriggling black fingers reaching up to luminous clouds in the sky, the buildings like leaning monoliths, the stars above incredibly bright and incredibly close, each of them pulsating and fleshy, like beating hearts, and each of them opening like eyes in livid blood-swollen sockets.

  Finn screamed.

  Then screamed again as he saw a flock of those horrible insects pass over the face of the moon, which was unpleasantly close and unpleasantly bloated, like a slice of moist rotting fruit.