Brose watched me from the darkness for a length of time that seemed to stretch into endlessness. Finally he nodded. "All right," he said. "You'll do. I'll go get the form."
I let out a long sigh of relief and leaned back in my chair as Brose stepped from the room. Something on the bookshelf caught my eye, not because it glinted or was bright, but because it was more in darkness and more in shadows than it should have been. I rose from my seat and walked gingerly across the floorboards toward it.
It was a black statuette about a foot tall, carved from some sort of soapy ebony. It was a thing resembling a man, but with eyes that were utterly empty, and a beard of tentacles. The farther down it my eyes traced, the more that noble visage merged into the grotesque, until it was nothing but tentacles. They seemed to squirm and writhe and cling to the base of the statue.
I went to pick it up, to study it closer, but I gasped when I lifted it. The thing was unearthly heavy — heavier than anything that size could possibly be, heavier than I could hold in one hand. It tore itself from my fingers and lunged for the floor, where it thudded and lay still.
"Don't touch that," Brose ordered and I stiffened. He closed his office door behind him and placed a shoebox on his desk. He picked up the statue, with two hands, and returned it to its resting place.
"I'm sorry," I began. "I —"
My voice died in my throat as Brose lifted a small white mouse from the shoebox, dangling it from his fingers by the tail. It squirmed and flailed and sniffed.
"What's that?" I said.
"This," said Brose, indicating the mouse, "is the form. The application form." He paced over to that gruesomely overgrown fish tank and removed the cover.
He held the mouse out to me. "Fill out your application."
I took the mouse by its tail and held it over the foul water. The snowy little white thing tried playfully to nibble my finger.
Brose eyed me intently. It was a test. Of what? Of my willingness? Of my resolve? I let the mouse go. It fell into the water and began to thrash and scream, clawing at the sides of the tank and at all the sticky filth that enveloped it. Water soaked its fur and garbled its cries. Then it died and floated there, spinning slowly, four pink legs hanging down, and its tail trailed behind it.
"Your application's been accepted," Brose said. "Congratulations."
The members of the special program sat in a circle, with Brose at the center, and he taught us.
"There's only one thing you must learn, and that is to bind yourself to something more powerful — to attach yourself to its will. There'll be other lessons, other abilities, other distractions. The binding is all that matters. Never lose sight of that."
There were thirteen students in the class. Most were male, all had sallow flesh and haunted eyes and skinny limbs. Many were involved with cults in and around Boston. They were all from New England, at least. Everyone but me.
Brose crucified a cat. The animal howled and squirmed around on its back, pounding its tail against the desk, but the nails driven through its outstretched limbs held it firm. Blood flowed from its paws, and Brose washed it and washed it until there was no more blood.
He turned to me. "Make it bleed again."
I was filled with an aching desire to prove myself. I wanted him to think I was special — that I was his most talented, most dedicated, most favored student. I would have done anything, endured anything, to make him adore me, the way I adored him.
The cat's eyes were narrow slits, and where the eyeballs met the fur its flesh was pinkish and gummy. The iron nails and the blood were both dark and seemed to run together. The cat had soft little pads on its feet. It was innocent and helpless but I would have made it bleed. For him.
"I don't know how," I whispered desperately.
Brose paced back and forth in front of us all. "To control the body you must feel the mind. Pain is conspicuous. It'll point the way, but don't depend on it. There are greater things than cats you must connect to, greater things than you, and they have never felt pain."
Brose turned to another student, a heavier guy with dark, scornful eyes, and pointed at the cat. "Make it bleed again."
The student kept his eyes on Brose, never even glancing at the cat. The animal began to bubble and ooze and spray little spurts of thick blood from its punctured body.
"Good," Brose nodded. "Very good."
At the end of class we were ordered to pack up our things and move into a sprawling colonial house on the edges of the campus. We would have no more contact with the other students.
"Tell no one what you have learned," Brose admonished us. "The penalty will be expulsion from the program, and worse things."
I met my new roommate later that night. He had already unpacked when I arrived. Our room was small, with hardwood floors and peeling white paint and touches of Gothic architecture around the windows and the molding. I stared at his familiar, slightly heavy face. My bags fell from my hands and dropped heavily on the floor. "You're —"
"Adrian," he said quickly, smugly.
I finished lamely, "— the one who can make the cat bleed."
He leaned toward me, resting his arms across the back of his chair. "I can do a lot of things. I'm the best in the class, and Brose knows it."
"We'll see," I said. I was jolted by the way he seemed to have figured me out. I couldn't believe it was an accident, the way his words seemed calculated to tear at my greatest longing: to be favored, to be adored.
I added, "It was only a cat."
He stiffened. "You think I should've used something bigger?"
Before I could answer I felt a thick wetness on my upper lip, running down my face. I glanced at Adrian, then moved quickly to the mirror. Rivers of blood poured from my nose, breaking into thin tributaries that covered my mouth and chin, streaking down my neck toward my collar.
I gasped and seized a nearby towel, mopping at my face, leaning my head back and pressing the towel against my nose.
"Don't lean back," Adrian ordered. "Keep pressure on your nose. The bleeding will stop." I bent forward and pulled the towel away from my eyes, watching Adrian guardedly with one eye. He smiled.
What a horrible desire, this desire to be favored. So much worse than any other desire — whether for money or fame or pleasure. Those things could be shared with others. To be favored requires that others are disfavored, cast out. A horrible desire, but mine nonetheless.
Each day it became clearer that I had failed in my ambition. Adrian was the best in the class and he knew it, and so did Brose, and so did I. I also knew that I was the worst. I trailed behind my classmates in absorbing those increasingly macabre lessons we received.
If I could not be favored by Brose, I would have preferred to be disfavored, to be his enemy. In reality he was indifferent to me. I was not important enough even for him to despise.
As I walked along the shaded pathways of the college grounds I pondered the strange role that Brose played here. It was clear that the other students, faculty, even the administrators, suspected the dark nature of our special program. They gave us plenty of room when we passed on the sidewalk, and shot us looks full of fear and hostility. They disapproved, but made no effort to stop us. Were they simply afraid of Brose? I couldn't decide.
Brose himself became more and more agitated as the semester wore on, his lectures increasingly frenzied and mad. He raved of nothing but the binding.
"You must learn faster!" He pounded on his desk. "The hour of the binding is coming. It has all led up to this." He took a great, heaving, somber breath. "You must bind yourselves to the impossible mind of the Traveler on the Oceans of Night, the Stepper Across the Stars. If you ingratiate yourselves you will earn a place as His favored disciples and journey with Him forever to those places only He can make by His dreaming."
I glanced at Adrian, but he kept his eyes fixed straight ahead. So now we knew our fate. We would gain the ultimate power we sought by pledging ourselves to this ultimate being.
With two hands, Bro
se lifted the black statuette out of his briefcase and placed it on his desk. It was denser and darker than any earthly thing could ever be — the tentacled man-thing with its empty eyes. I noticed an aspect of the carving I had not seen before. Among its many limbs, tiny human figures clung lovingly. Such an abrupt transition of scale almost made me seasick. If those men were the size of normal men then that creature must tower to unimaginable heights. The Traveler on Oceans of Night. The Stepper Across the Stars. It was He.
That week I dreamed murky dreams of upside-down cities built from granite and slime. One night I was awakened by the fevered whimpering of Adrian. He scrabbled wildly across the floor, as if something horrid hung from the ceiling overhead.
"What is it?" I asked him, "What's wrong?"
"Oh God," he wailed. His usual swagger had disintegrated. "Oh, can't you feel it? Are you blind and deaf and numb to everything? His boundlessness reaches across the void to poison our dreams."
"What?" I pressed.
Then I saw his eyes and knew that he wasn't staring at the ceiling at all, but at the sky and the stars and the dark emptiness beyond.
"The Traveler on Oceans of Night," Adrian whispered. "He's coming." .
I had failed to win the adoration of Brose, but who was Brose, compared to all this? Compared to this great Traveler? Brose was nothing. He was a small man who lived a small life, pointing others along an exalted path that he himself dared not follow. I had found an object far more worthy of my attention. To be a disciple to such imaginable power, to be favored by the Traveler! I trembled at the thought.
I wouldn't fail this time.
The night of the binding arrived. The Traveler on Oceans of Night was near. His power and his presence was palpable, casting long shadows of blackened ether over the landscape. He loomed imposingly, like a tsunami just offshore. I looked out into the sea of forests, and the trees themselves seemed to quake and tremble, the air charged with magic. I shivered.
We donned black robes and Brose led us deep into the Arboretum, down well-worn trails, among piles of sharp, mossy stones, beneath the thin thorn branches of withered old trees. Brose held that dark stone idol before him and we didn't need light to see, because the statue seemed to suck the shadows out of the ground and pull them into itself.
In the deepest corner of the woods, within a grotto of carved gray stone, sprawled a huge and ancient shrine interwoven with the roots of great, rotting trees. Brose set his statue on the ground and- we settled among the gnarled roots to wait.
I don't know how many hours we waited out there on the cold, unforgiving stones. A breeze began to twist and turn, picking up damp leaves and flinging them about, raising them into great columns in the sky, faster and louder every second until the wind seemed to shriek in pain from the forces tearing at it.
There was a sudden, maddening sense of dislocation, like a dream and a nightmare spun together into a crazy cacophony of unbearable sensation. The shadows leapt from beneath the trees to block out the starlight and wrap themselves around my throat and sink behind my eyes.
The Traveler on Oceans of Night was there, his form stretching upwards to infinity. There was no limit to his dimensions and all of him was far away and yet pressing close around us all at once. He was so enormous, so horrible, so magnificent, that our bodies collapsed into a formless mass and we wept helplessly and without shame to behold Him.
Through that confused jumble of sensation and reality came the voice of Brose screaming. "Bind yourself! Do it now!"
Adrian was first. He rose off the ground, arms outstretched, robe whipping wildly about him. He had closed his eyes and his face was turned to the sky. His expression was one of wild religious ecstasy. One by one my classmates lifted from the ground until they circled in rings around that great being, weaving complex patterns — like flies, I realized suddenly — like flies rising out of the rot to circle around Professor Carlton Brose.
I saw Brose, and on his face was something I had grown to know too well. Indifference. It was all horribly wrong. I imagined I saw that same expression mirrored in the face of the creature before me, on that incomprehensible otherworldly countenance.
I would not bind to Him. I crawled and crawled until somehow I found a rock to hide behind and then I screamed incoherently to my whirling classmates. "We're the flies!" I screamed until my throat was torn and useless. "Oh God, we're like the flies."
Then the Traveler made one ponderous motion with a million of His slimy tentacles and He stepped away towards another star, another dimension, another world He had dreamed.
The night was silent and empty, except for me, and Carlton Brose, huddled against the ground. When he saw me, he said, "You failed the binding."
I seized him by the throat and forced his head down against the stone. "You lied," I growled. "You said you'd make us His disciples."
Brose watched me uneasily for a long time. Finally, he whispered, "The Traveler on Oceans of Night is a great vessel. I would put you aboard."
"As what?" I challenged. "A rat in the hold?"
He closed his eyes and was silent for a long time.
I said, "Or rather, a flea on a rat."
I relaxed my grip for a moment, and in that moment I imagined I saw the dozen bodies of my classmates, sucked away into the bitter black void between worlds, grouped close, their frozen forms twirling slowly, stiffly, in an endless dance among the stars. I shuddered.
Suddenly, Brose seized my temples with his muddy fingers and forced me to look down into his cold, tombstone eyes. Then my own eyes began to burst and ooze, and red blood filled my sight. I screamed out in the night and knew he meant to kill me.
Flailing on the ground, my fingers fell on the dark statuette. I lifted the thing above my shoulders and brought it down with two angry arms. The unearthly weight of it fell into Brose's forehead and it sank and sank deeper, without resistance, until it reached the ground. I pulled it away. There "was a black, gaping hole where the face of Professor Carlton Brose had been.
The empty eyes of the Traveler could see things that humans never dreamt of, but He was blind to the pain of this sad world.
You were the best, Adrian. You were better than me, better at a lie. Are you proud?
A student came to see me today, to beg admission to my special program. He pushed a mouse down into the fish tank and held it in his fist until it drowned.
"Congratulations," I said. 'You have been accepted."
He smiled.
So much cruelty. I could teach the class without it, but I keep the tradition, as I'm sure Brose did, to ease my conscience. It reassures me that my students are evil, that they deserve their fate.
The college hates the special program, but they know it's necessary, and after Brose died I was the only one who could replace him. Dangerous people are lurking around New England — ones who've latched onto darkness, or might — and they need to be taken care of. The harmless ones I turn away.
I've learned the truth Brose knew: it's best to be a big fish in a small pond. Fish can't live outside the pond, and it's not so bad being a fish. Every Spring, until I send them off to die, a new class studies with me. They are enthralled by my meager powers, they long for my briefest attention.
They adore me.
A Colder War
by Charles Stross
Analyst
Roger Jourgensen tilts back in his chair, reading.
He’s a fair-haired man, in his mid-thirties: hair razor-cropped, skin pallid from too much time spent under artificial lights. Spectacles, short-sleeved white shirt and tie, photographic ID badge on a chain round his neck. He works in an air-conditioned office with no windows.
The file he is reading frightens him.
Once, when Roger was a young boy, his father took him to an open day at Nellis AFB, out in the California desert. Sunlight glared brilliantly from the polished silverplate flanks of the big bombers, sitting in their concrete-lined dispersal bays behind barriers and blinking radiation mon
itors. The brightly colored streamers flying from their pitot tubes lent them a strange, almost festive appearance. But they were sleeping nightmares: once awakened, nobody—except the flight crew—could come within a mile of the nuclear-powered bombers and live.
Looking at the gleaming, bulging pods slung under their wingtip pylons, Roger had a premature inkling of the fires that waited within, a frigid terror that echoed the siren wail of the air raid warnings. He’d sucked nervously on his ice cream and gripped his father’s hand tightly while the band ripped through a cheerful Sousa march, and only forgot his fear when a flock of Thunderchiefs sliced by overhead and rattled the car windows for miles around.
He has the same feeling now, as an adult reading this intelligence assessment, that he had as a child, watching the nuclear powered bombers sleeping in their concrete beds.
There’s a blurry photograph of a concrete box inside the file, snapped from above by a high-flying U-2 during the autumn of ‘61. Three coffin-shaped lakes, bulking dark and gloomy beneath the arctic sun; a canal heading west, deep in the Soviet heartland, surrounded by warning trefoils and armed guards. Deep waters saturated with calcium salts, concrete coffer-dams lined with gold and lead. A sleeping giant pointed at NATO, more terrifying than any nuclear weapon.
Project Koschei.
Red Square Redux
Warning
The following briefing film is classified SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM. If you do not have SECRET GOLD JULY BOOJUM clearance, leave the auditorium now and report to your unit security officer for debriefing. Failing to observe this notice is an imprisonable offense.
You have sixty seconds to comply.
Video clip
Red Square in springtime. The sky overhead is clear and blue; there’s a little whispy cirrus at high altitude. It forms a brilliant backdrop for flight after flight of five four-engined bombers that thunder across the horizon and drop behind the Kremlin’s high walls.
Voice-over
Red Square, the May Day parade, 1962. This is the first time that the Soviet Union has publicly displayed weapons classified GOLD JULY BOOJUM. Here they are:
Pyrate Cthulhu: Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Volume 1 (4.0) Page 3