Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2011

by Mike Davis (Editor)

  Above her, the skies open, and the rain sweeps down, washing over her like a baptism.

  No. No.

  She forces herself to her feet. She’s shaking. The rain washes over her, its cold beat pushing away her fatigue. She will not accept this, will not be weak. She is in control, and she will act as she chooses.

  She looks up at the sky, the rain pelting her. Lightning blasts across the sky, and she laughs. She walks towards the house.

  She reaches the house. Water is streaming from holes she’s knocked in the roof and walls, and sections of ceiling plaster have already collapsed; it will not be safe to stay here. She steals the rain slicker from the entryway and walks into the night again. She sits on the rocks and watches the rain wash around and over her.

  At first, being alone in the night frightens you, you fear what the shadows hide, and you long for friendship and comfort. But eventually you take comfort in the dark, for you are what the shadows hide, and others fear you. And she has lived in the darkness for a long, long time.

  Sleep is clutching at the edges of her eyes again, and she allows her eyes to close. She leans over and rests her head on the rocks beside her.

  She sleeps. She does not dream.

  ***

  The chattering of her teeth wakes her. She’s curled into a fetal ball in the night, and she feels a cold in her as deep as death, but she sees her decision was a wise one; the house has fallen in, and she would surely have been killed if she had stayed there. Her limbs ache and her head feels full and soggy, but these things do not matter. She hunts through the wreckage of the house for the gas cylinder but cannot find it, and makes do with wood that has been sheltered by the wreckage from the rain, building a small fire. She takes water that has pooled in the rocks and heats it in a tin cup and gulps it down. Hypothermia set in some time ago, and she needs to raise her body temperature, and quickly. She takes a spare t-shirt from her pack and soaks it in hot water and rubs her limbs with it, trying to work heat into her body.

  She finds a few tins of beans and eats several of them, putting the others carefully in her backpack. She’ll need calories to replace what’s been burned up, she thinks, trying to recall a half-remembered first aid manual. She fishes antibiotics and tylenol out of her backpack and takes them with the beans; considers the stimulants, but turns aside for the moment.

  Even as she works, her thoughts turn north, to the lighthouse. She knows what she needs to do. Not precisely, but in broad outline. But she’ll need her strength back first.

  Her backpack has kept her sleeping bag dry. The risk of sleeping outside is unfortunate, but now inevitable. She unrolls it and sleeps again.

  ***

  She wakes, she eats. She packs her things. She stands and stretches, working the worst of the aches out. She still hurts, but no matter. She picks up a broken piece of timber from the ruins and starts to walk.

  She was foolish. The thought eats at her gut, but she pushes it aside and forces herself to think rationally, to pick and prod at her own motivations, to establish what she is really thinking and doing. She became emotional, in her attack on the house. That was the fundamental flaw: she became caught up in the release of destruction, allowed herself to take too many stimulants, and the rest flowed from there. It could have been a fatal mistake; had this island been inhabited, any of its residents could have killed her as she slept.

  It will not happen again. The mistake has been detected, analyzed, and corrected. She will not allow it to effect her judgement in future.

  She stops, digs in her backpack, finds the ephedrine and takes a single tab. Only one.

  She’s running low. She’ll need to restock at some point. The thought makes her uncomfortable.

  The lighthouse looms ahead of her. She approaches it carefully. Her weapon stays in its holster – she knows it will not protect her here.

  She stands before it, watching the light sweep the sky overhead.

  She must be very careful.

  She taps the board against the lighthouse. She circles the tower, trailing the board along the surface.

  If she built this place, she would have left no entrance. But she did not build it…

  Ah.

  Halfway around the lighthouse, on the side facing closest to the sea, the wood sinks into the lighthouse’s side about half an inch, disappearing beneath an illusionary surface. Probing carefully, she finds a space about three feet wide and six feet tall, and about half an inch deep.

  She steps back and considers. If she had built this place, it would have no entrance. But if she had built it with an entrance, the entrance would be trapped. No, not only trapped-there would be two entrances. One would be false, leading nowhere, disguised just enough to be difficult to discover. The other would be real, but impossible to find. Both would be trapped, lethally.

  But she did not build this place…

  If she had built this place, the real entrance would be locked. It would be opened only by a unique identifier of some kind-DNA is too easy to fake… A password of some kind, maybe, something long and unique but easy to remember, like a string of poetry.

  She would also design the system to kill, or to lock irrevocably, after too many failed attempts…

  She considers carefully. Her decision is perfectly rational, weighing all foreseeable factors, the risks and benefits and costs.

  It is a frightful risk. But it is worth it.

  She steps forward.

  -

  -

  Mark Lowell is a graduate student of mathematics and a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Uganda. Aside from a school newspaper, this is his first published work of fiction.

  Story art by mimulux.

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  NOTE: Images contained in this Lovecraft eZine are Copyright ¬©2006-2012 art-by-mimulux. All rights reserved. All the images contained in this Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without my express written permission. These images do not belong to the public domain. All stories in Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without the express written permission of the editor.

  In Phantom Isolation

  by W.H. Pugmire

  I gazed inward and saw naught but phantoms, apparitions that, churning, laced my soul with doom. I did not mind that this was so, for I had wearied of clumsy humanity and its uncouth realm, wherein they danced in joyful delusion beneath an expiring sun. I felt nothing but disdain for their mindless frolic as they chided my malcontent. I felt kinship with my phantoms only, they who wheeled around my heart and taught that organ deadening palpitation. Thus here I lounge, in this lonely and shallow indentation in the earth, far from the tedious others and their hallucinations of glee, their shrieks of paltry elation, their eyes so bright with shining stupidity. I sank deeper into prudent earth and its discreet embrace, and shut my eyes to pale earthly light so as to peer inward, to where my phantoms roiled; and I did not look away as they touched me with their anxious paws and helped me to melt into their danse and its unearthly rhythm, wherein my mortal heart found further deceleration, an elder palpitation that pulsed behind my eyes and taught them to envision an obscure realm where dreams are grown diseased. That sickness unto death disintegrated me, and as phantom particles I lifted upward toward the abyss of night; and then I reassembled and found my feet secured on the solid surface of the cemetery wall, on which I walked through mists of barren twilight, and through a thin veil of fog I watched a daemon star, the name of which I had once known but now that name had been forgotten – thus I could not call to it. Still, its eerie illumination served as beacon, guiding me along the ledge until I reached a place where a sluggish river wound its lethargic way. I beheld the bridge below, whereon I could cross the weary river to its other side and thus walk through the wavering field beneath a violet heaven, unto th
e cyclopean tower of bleached stone; and I marveled at the way the surface of that tower shimmered, as if it consumed nourishment from the daemon star that illuminated its rocky façade. I knew that this fiendish refraction was such as I had never experienced in dull wakefulness, with eyes that looked outward only; and because of this, I smiled, for I knew beyond doubt that I was free of vile reality, wherein fools celebrated their stupidity. I had found that spectral inner sanctum, wherein my isolated soul could dream in poetic darkness. And thus I moved toward the pale tower, and to its bleached stone I touched my shadow hand; and I spilled through its arched threshold and floated up the winding steps that took me toward the violet heaven, where called one daemon star. And in the upper reaches of that cyclopean tower I found the chiseled square that served as rough-hewn window, through which I could lean my phantom essence; and as I leaned my inner phantoms stopped their churning and spilled through my ghostly eyes, drifting to and transforming the single star, from which there fell one single beam. And to that beam my airy substance squeezed through the stony portal; and on that beam I crept to the daemon star as it began to take on the aspect of my phantoms, wherein I sacrificed one final remnant of mortality so as to join the churning conclave.

  -

  -

  Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire is a writer of horror fiction based in Seattle, Washington. His adopted middle name derives from the story of the same title by Edgar Allan Poe. Strongly influenced by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, many of Pugmire’s stories directly reference “Lovecraftian” elements (such as Yog-Sothoth of the Cthulhu Mythos). Pugmire’s major original contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos is the Sesqua Valley, a fictional location in the Pacific Northwest of the United States that serves as the primary locale for much of his fiction. According to his official biography, his “goal as an author is to dwell forevermore within Lovecraft’s titan shadow.” Pugmire is a self-proclaimed eccentric recluse as well as “the Queen of Eldritch Horror.” His stories have appeared in major horror anthologies, and collections of his fiction and poetry have appeared under small press imprints such as Necropolitan Press, Mythos Books, Delirium Books, and Hippocampus Press.

  Visit W.H. Pugmire’s page at Amazon.com to buy his books!

  Story art by mimulux.

  Return to the table of contents

  NOTE: Images contained in this Lovecraft eZine are Copyright ¬©2006-2012 art-by-mimulux. All rights reserved. All the images contained in this Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without my express written permission. These images do not belong to the public domain. All stories in Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without the express written permission of the editor.

  The Weird Studies of Harley Warren

  by Berin Kinsman

  Please remember, sirs, that it was I who came to you about this matter. Asking the same questions of me, again and yet again, will not compel me to give you an answer other than the truth to which I have already sworn. Yet I will repeat myself, at your request, until you finally gain some understand, and that I may unburden my conscience and perhaps find some solace regarding what I have done.

  Again I say, I do not know what has become of Randolph Carter. It was nine years ago that I last saw him, in Florida, near the Big Cypress Swamp, some 45 miles outside of Miami. There were few people there at the time of my residence, other than scattered villages of the native Miccosukee and Seminole tribes. Early white settlers had hunted herons and egrets there, and supplied feathers to hat-makers in New York City and Paris, France. There had been a citrus plantation there once, which had burned to the ground long before the abolition of slavery and not rebuilt. I had chosen the location for it’s remoteness, and for the small amount with which I was able to acquire a modest house in which to house my collection of books and other object, and the perfect climate in which to conduct what has been referred to as my “weird studies”.

  Why did Carter state that our home was somewhere off the Gainesville Pike? You may guess that as well as I, but given that you are disinclined to believe the majority of the statement he gave you, I do not understand why you choose this fact as the one to quibble over. There was neither toll road nor railroad line near there, only the Everglades, rank grass, moss, and weeds covering everything else. He was an unreliable narrator at best – you know that he was writer of fiction, do you not, particularly of weird fiction, spinning yarns of that which is not, and that which should not be. It was how we met.

  He had a fascination with the occult, as did I. He was looking for truth in it, wishing to touch some greater cosmology in which humans were as insignificant as grains of sand in the ocean of the universe. It was also fodder for his wicked little tales, which he only sometimes submitted to a handful of magazines willing to publish such stuff, mostly circulating them directly via mail to fellow scribblers of such bunk. My interests were scientific. My studies were in the field of Egyptology, namely the ritualization of certain scientific processes among ancient peoples. These included, yes, funereal rites, and the preservation techniques of corpses. Dessication and mummification, the preservation of bodies, and how this was accomplished in warm, ofttimes humid climes. I had a number of texts in Arabic, which Carter envisioned to be volumes of forbidden mysticism but were merely medical texts, histories, and the occasional memoir or journal of a figure who’d worked first-hand in the Middle East.

  Oh, how the man infuriated me! Constantly complaining about his lot in life, always wishing he could read other languages, that he had my skills for translation and interpretation. For seven years – seven years! — I listened to him go on so, but in seven years he did nothing to improve his station. It came to a point where he was interrupting my work. He was under foot while I was doing research, never actually offering to help but lamenting his inability to do what I did. He would prattle on while I was reading, or worse still, while I was trying to carefully translate some ancient tome from a difficult and obscure language. At times it almost seemed as if he wished me to feel guilty that I had certain talents that he lacked. That I had spent years studying and developing these talents, while he frittered away his time constructing bad fiction, did not seem to register with him.

  Yes, I did make attempts to speak with him on the matter. I tried to establish some boundaries, so that he would not disturb me in my work. He would pout like a child, and try to explain that I was his only friend and that he was only trying to help. He had nothing else to do, while I was in my researches, as if I were responsible for his constant entertainment. To encourage him to get out and make other friends, or to take up some hobby, was but another lesson in frustration. He would become deeply self-deprecating, and dismiss such things as impossible, beyond his ability.

  Do not ask my why I tolerated his presence for seven years. He was pleasant enough company, in the beginning. We had enough in common to sustain some rousing conversations. Having a partner to share expenses would have been reason enough, for neither my pursuit of weird studies nor his writing of weird tales provided more than modest incomes, and those being irregular and unpredictable paydays at best. My intolerance of him was a gradual thing. He’d annoy me one day, but not the next, so I let it go. I made allowances that this was simple how he was, who he was, and that I should be more forgiving and accepting of a close friend. Over time, the small irritations did built, and soured into resentments, until one day I could no longer bear to look at him. I needed to be rid of him.

  No, I do not know what happened to him, or anything of his recent disappearance. All of these events happened years ago, and while I admit that my actions likely contributed to his mental condition, Randolph Carter had such issues before I met and and for a long time after we parted. I will not be held responsible for that man’s madness! There was no foul play on my part, only a boyish, you may even say chi
ldish, prank.

  The remains of a plantation, as I have mentioned, was a short walk up the road from our house. The only thing still visible was a cemetery, and that mostly tumbled stones scattered in orderly patterns across a strangely level plot of land. I had gone there, once, to see if I could do some rubbings of headstones, to gather names that I might learn more of its history, but time had worn away any legible engravings. Quite by accident I did discover the stone foundation of a small house, most likely servants’ quarters, and as it was still early in the day I poked about and explored. There was a great gaping hole, quite dangerous had I not been paying attention, with stone steps leading down. I surmised that it was a passageway that led to the main house, a feature found in many plantations. This would allow servants – slaves, then – to bring food fresh and hot to the main house, and to travel to their master’s home without getting rained upon or wind-blown and thus presenting a disheveled appearance. It was well-built, sturdy and intact after two centuries or more, dry in spite of its proximity to the swamp, and I vowed to come back at some point with a lantern and visit the inside.

  Upon my return home, Carter questioned where I had been, what I had done, and why couldn’t he have accompanied me. A letter had come, from a colleague in Egypt, inviting me to visit and perhaps do some research on-site. It was then that the first outline of a plan came to me.

  There was no way in which I could simply tell Carter that I was leaving, going abroad without him. He would beg to go along. He would hinge until, unable to take any more, I would concede. If I were firm, he would still follow, finding a way to make passage, somehow tracking me down. There was but one way to be rid of him. Fine, then, too, and I know what you are thinking. I could have wrapped my hands around his throat, crushed his windpipe, and left him in that hole I’d found to rot and never be found. I could have stove in his skull and dumped him in the swamp. I did none of those things, and have no motive now, for it’s been many years since I last saw him, and a far shorter time since he’s been seen.