A Lonely and Curious Country

by Matthew Carpenter

  Then we saw them. Two meters long with scaly backs and white bellies. They lacked the beautiful Aryan heads and blond locks I was expecting, having fish heads – an irony upon mermaid legends! They had large sharp gills on their necks, and vast cold eyes bulging on each side of their face. They did not like the searchlight, so I do not know their true color, although I suspect it be gray green. Their long paws were webbed and they carried small rods – either some wonder of Aryan science or some artifact of eldritch wizardry. Seven of them approached our craft. Our captain began shouting orders to leave. One of my guards silenced him. I sat in the radio-telegraphy device and with all my might I sent my thoughts toward them, the mantra of Aryan power that Dr. Webb had recorded almost a century before in Greenland: “Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtag!"

  The Fischvolk convulsed with surprise (or perhaps laughter?). One swam up to our submarine and placed her hands on the craft. I could hear her voice in my mind. She sounded like a schoolgirl I had known in Berlin decades ago. The cruel girl that made fun of my defective eye and my short stature. Her German was almost without accent.

  “Dreams from the sunken City enflesh themselves in Hydra’s spawn. The will of the Old Ones High Priest is undying!”

  Evidently this was a counter-call or litany. I did not know what to project, so I improvised, “Sister of the Folk, I greet thee! I am come to reunite the Aryan people. The ice-moon is long gone and we are preparing to scourge the land of inferior races.”

  Again the Fischvolk convulsed. I felt waves of humor. This must have been much-longed for news.

  The ambassador asked me, “Who are you that thinks of Great Cthulhu? “

  “I am Herman Mueller of the Thousand Year Reich!”

  More laughter.

  “A thousand year Reich! That must be a long time to your people.”

  “We have heard that you are undying.”

  “The dreams of the Old One’s High Priest are undying. They were old on Yoth of the Green Star, they were old when they seeped down to this world and you were not yet monkeys. But we are not undying. I am scare three thousand years in age. What do you want Herman Mueller of the Thousand Year Reich?”

  “I am come to reunite our Folk.”

  The Fischvolk spasmed again. I grew afraid. Could it be that this was like the false tryst where Helga had humiliated me? Did I hear her voice from this bacitracin abomination? I formed in my mind the emblem of the swastika, surely that would kindle their Aryan blood, even it was as cold as the sea.

  She sent a Symbol back to my mind. A nine lined star that cut the surfaces of my brain to visualize it. Their language or dreams was alive! It crawled in my mind. These were not Aryans. These were not humans. These were not on the same level of being as we were. Our thoughts are not alive our words do not crawl and thrash in the same darkness of our skulls. I heard the sailors around me scream. My guards had drawn their guns.

  To kill themselves!

  To free themselves of the single Symbol, or Word or living Nightmare that she had placed in the machine. Into our heads. Then she smiled at me and sent a second picture. A silvery and rainbow colored wall of the Cthulhu chapel in the city below. I could see that it was covered in hieroglyphics, a long verse that she had simply thought the first word of at me. I could feel that first killer thought dissolving like sugar in tea. It was flowing down my brain and through my spine into my blood. It was water that burned. It was stone that blew with gale force. It was space that sucked time into it. It was the aethyr, the merest breeze through which great Cthulhu sent his dreams. It was changing my flesh. Taking something from it, and adding a great deal more.

  “Would you like to be part of the Million Year Reich, Herman Mueller? You could not be as useful as a dolphin, but we love you Herman. Your deep hatred of others, your loathing of inferior races! These are precious things. We would be very amused by your tales of the land world. We think humans make great pets.”

  The Fischvolk were all laughing. I tried to throw back images of German power. The torch lit parades, the camps of starving men, the V-2 rockets, the Olympics.

  And they laughed and laughed.

  “I will think another Word for you little Herman. It will change your eyes so you can see us. Would you like to be my husband little Herman, we are building up the city on the land. We have to say certain things in the air at certain times. Your children would be” – she paused looking for the idea – “your children would be rich. We gave Marsh gold, the Japanese want platinum, the humans of Cornwall simply want fish. We are very giving. We would make your children very long-lived. You would say immortal.”

  I felt her Love. And it was great and deep and alien. It was like the ocean and it consumed everything. It was like hunger, or fire. It was like the feeling I had listening to Hitler’s speeches but raised to the millionth power. And I knew my intentions, my will, my self – didn’t matter in this equation. Then she drew back. The telepathy-radio was smoking. The air of the sub was filled with smoke and the smell of blood and the moans of the dying. I thought of killing myself, but I imagined my Word-changed flesh might not die. At least not die in the way I meant that word.

  In the movies it is always at this point when the mad scientist throws a switch to destroy his laboratory. I knew nothing of what switch to throw. I couldn’t blow up the Cthulhureich. The other submarine was not in sight. I swept the searchlight this way and that. The Fischvolk have begun tapping on the sides of the boat. It is a game. A game for the young ones of a few thousand years age. All of our dreams are nothing to the dreams of Cthulhu. The outcome of the war, the Thousand Year Reich, nothing. Of course they hadn’t moved their city when the U.S. government shelled them. We don’t move a tent because a few mosquitos come along.

  My dream to be part of something bigger will be fulfilled. Just not the savior. A jester, a butler, a servant to a trusted dolphin perhaps.

  (For Arnold Federbush)

  The Litany of Yith

  Brett Davidson

  “There was one thing I did not tell you,” the Time Traveller said to me in a sharp whisper, though the room now was empty but for us. He had dismissed the rest of the party, but he had kept me aside just as I reached for my coat. His tale was, as you have seen, remarkable enough, with its marvels piled precipitously high. A further complication, another chapter, would bring the whole edifice crashing down in the eyes of the skeptical reader. This he knew, and this he had not told to the others. For some reason of his own though, he felt that he could tell it to me – perhaps because, as a visitor to England, I might be somewhat lest prejudiced than the others. I hardly think that it was my easy credulity that made me a prospect; he was no panderer and would have been insulted by the gaping acceptance of a naïve listener. Nor would he have wasted his time with a man of great scientific expertise but so rigorous as to be ossified in thought. Instead, I think he chose me because I was a student, a man young and curious but no child and with my curiosity brought into focus by the disciplines of scholarship – or so I flatter myself.

  “I only found it after I had returned, wedged in the frame of my machine,” he explained. “Some opportunist perhaps jammed it there while I was… distracted by the hostile fauna. It appears that not all of that community were, are, will be predatory brutes.”

  The object looked like a bundle of seaweed and indeed as I took it, I smelt the brine and felt its rubbery texture and the grit of a sandy encrustation, grains of which scattered across the small table between us. The weed though was simply a binding and I could see that it was not merely tangled, but deliberately knotted. My host had already undone some of the knots, enough to be able remove the contents and presumably examine them, but he had thrust them back within. “Take a look at it,” he said, and leant back, watching me intently to observe my reaction. “Remember that I know that you are an expert in strange documents and-”

  I interrupted him: “Hardly an expert, I would say. I-”

  He raised a hand
impatiently. “A specialist in philology then. In any case your professor vouches for your talent and tells me that you promise to take up his own position in time. Now then, think of the great range of human history, the diversity of tongues and scripts that you have read and think most especially of the tale I have just told and of the still greater reaches of time that I have crossed. Imagine the years, that desolate beach under the cooling sun and the inconceivable gulf of time that stretches between now and that age.”

  I did indeed, and I shivered a little as I gingerly untied the remaining knots to reveal what they held. It was a manuscript, as he had implied, though it was not paper. Whatever it was, it reeked awfully and I peeled apart its layers while trying to have as little contact as possible. When I saw what was written on it, I jerked back as if burned. It was unbelievable.

  “Aha!” my host said with a grim smile. “You see?”

  I did see. The words on the slimy sheets were quite clear: they were in a recognizable Latin script and their language was English.

  “This is impossible or it is a joke,” I gasped.

  “I assure you that it is neither.”

  “But how could this be?” I asked.

  “It simply is. Read it,” he insisted.

  Carefully I spread the first sheet out. It was in fact more of a membrane than any kind of paper, almost translucent, and the smell of the sea and something else unidentifiable made it something quite repellent – and yet its text made it utterly compelling. I began to read…

  “No,” I said throwing it down. “I can accept your story up to a point. I saw your model machine vanish and I accept that it was no trick; I saw the flowers that you brought back and I know that they are like none that bloom today, and so I am forced to believe you – to a degree – but this, this is too much.”

  “Imagine my shock,” he said calmly, “when I discovered that I was neither the first nor the last man to reach the end of time.”

  I took a deep breath and bent my head once more to scan the lines.

  ***

  … at one moment I was in my accustomed theatre at Miskatonic University prepared to expound on some point on… well, I forget what now. My life in that time was like a nauseous recurring dream; the same events occurred over and over and seemed sometimes disturbingly but vaguely familiar and then disturbingly unfamiliar and yet forever cyclic. Such is the life of routine.

  Then I found myself awake and my senses were sharp, far sharper than they had been. They were also far stranger and I was dizzy and overwhelmed at once with a suite of such novel and odd impressions so that I was unable to make sense of my surroundings or even myself. I thrashed about in a panic, hitting things while sharp jabs of sensation that might have been light or sound stabbed back at parts of me painfully until I began to realize that I had senses and this pain was in fact information of a sort. I forced myself to be calm and eventually an impression of looming masses of clustered points that I think had colors – though what colors! – became comprehensible as something akin to sight. Things did not move quite as I thought they should, but displaced themselves and they had no edges but rather flickering, coruscating borders as the points became brightly near or dimly far so that they had the immateriality of clouds and yet the glittering rich saturation of a jeweled tapestry, though one that hung not in a flat plane, but in three or more dimensions.

  My other senses were just as problematic. Touch was uncertain, felt more as a mixture of the haptic and the vibratory. My skin seemed to have no suppleness and little sensitivity to texture directly, but nonetheless I could feel the slightest currents in the air tugging at bristles of hair and when I stroked my fingernails over even the smoothest surface it rattled as if I dragged a nail across a washboard.

  This sense of “touch” seemed to overlap my hearing, which in turn seemed like an inversion of my breathing as if a church organ used to producing notes drew in air and felt them instead – but really I find both touch and hearing, like sight, purely arbitrary terms in attempting to describe my sensorium and there were other senses such what I think is an awareness of magnetic fields that are entirely beyond description in terms you would understand. There is then no way that I can fully explain to you what and how I felt and “saw”; suffice it to say that I saw, I felt and I heard. Smell at least functioned normally, though under the current ambience, I wished that it did not.

  What then did I make of what I perceived about me? That, I must tell you, was horrible. The tapestry that I beheld about me was quite as full of chimerical grotesques as the imagination of any medieval weaver, and then some. Indeed, the person who had woven this must have eaten some ergot on their bread. Let me describe to you the beings I saw about me and challenge your credulity: To begin, think of a praying mantis, but altogether stouter, almost beetle-like and with many more legs which are as elongated as a cricket’s. Imagine a plethora of ruffles under its abdomen beating ceaselessly at the air with the sound of a gentle rhythmic whisper. Imagine at the end of its thorax not the rather elegant valentine of a mantis’s head as we know it, but two swollen orbs restlessly swiveling, their surfaces elaborately and densely studded with jewels like those famous Easter eggs made by Fabergé. These, I supposed, might be their eyes, compounded of myriad lenses like the eyes of insects, or they might be something else entirely. Its arms, folded in a sanctimonious posture like the insect I have recalled did not end in hands, but what seemed like the aggregation of the contents of a kitchen drawer. The frivolous thought occurred to me – as if trying to distract me from an insidiously dawning realization – that if one were to patent a practical replica of such an appendage, one would have a universal tool that one could carry in one’s pocket and which would make all others redundant. I imagine a lot of money could be made from such a mimetic invention, but I am no practical businessman.

  I made to scream at the sight of these weird things and to my utter shock I could merely hiss while I felt as if my whole face came apart. Sharp plates spread and scraped like the opening blades of scissors, but far more complicated in their action. Suddenly the thought that I had repressed came upon me with its full, dreadful force: I had metamorphosed into a nightmarish efflorescence of hinges and articulated blades, and I was one of them!

  I trembled and thrashed violently – or rather I attempted too, because my hosts had shown some foresight in restraining me with some silky elastic cords. I could move – somewhat – but I could not raise myself and I could not reach out beyond the slab on which I lay. This was for the best, considering the harm I might have done myself, but it did not bode well. Was I to be straitjacketed permanently? That may well be the case, because how else could I explain my circumstances except with a diagnosis of insanity? I was at once vividly aware that I was a beetle and yet I remembered too my life as a man. There is an old parable told by Chuang Tzu of a man who awoke under a tree and remembered that he had dreamed of being a butterfly, but then wondered if that he was in fact a butterfly now dreaming that it was a man. It is an interesting conundrum, but one I would rather have saved for discussion in the common-room than had as first-hand experience.

  Am I then a man or am I a beetle? Be that as it may, I see things before me and they affect me and I must deal with them and thereby control the affect that they have on me. Let me then describe what I see and what I make of it and you may judge for yourself. This is the rule I imposed upon myself in order to maintain my grip upon reason, and as I demonstrated personal restraint, I needed no external restraint and the cords were released and eventually I was even permitted to wander with guidance throughout the domain of these creatures, learning as I went.

  My discoveries since my first awakening have not been particularly cheering. I surmise that the time is very late in the history of the world. The sun is nothing like the warm and dazzling orb you know. It is instead as swollen as a tumor and colored the red of embers. It squats on the horizon beyond an oily sea, lethargic and unmoving while a cold wind blows eternally. Limp b
lack vegetation of a kind like seaweed and like tough leather in texture drapes itself in layered heaps of gray dunes that undulate down to the shore where feeble waves roll in with tubercular gurgles and mutterings. Now and again I see things like gigantic white crabs roaming the littoral zone. Perhaps they are distant, degenerate cousins of my hosts.

  I would say that this earth that was ours is at the brink of its ending, but it seems to me that there will be nothing so dignified as an end. Instead, its dreary senescence will be forever, pointlessly attenuated.

  My hosts have made their redoubt here by this beach. As befits their insectile appearance, they are as busy as bees. Unlike bees however, they do not store honey, but knowledge. Their civilization transcends is dubious and meager environment and is, I must say, a grand and noble thing – all the more so because of the hopeless conditions outside. They are industrious and ingenious, filling their vaulted basalt halls with extravagant machines as visually delightful as the innards of a pocket watch, all composed of glittering crystals and concentrically oscillating movements that quivered and sang like crickets on a spring evening. Contra the sound of the lassitudinous surf, it is quite reassuring.

  These beings – we – have a name of course.1 We who call ourselves the Great Race of Yith – the name is the sound of a scraped claw and an indrawn breath – have an interest in those who are themselves interested. According then to their interest they have devised a technique by which they are able to open “windows” into time. As the recent demonstrations of Hertzian waves in our own time have shown that information can be propagated across space without physical contact, the Great Race have earned their sobriquet by collecting information propagated across time. In particular the information that they are able to collect is thought. To further my analogy with this wireless telegraphy, as a transmitter-receiver of Hertzian waves may be turned in various directions and it may be tuned to send or receive at different frequencies, so too do their transmitter-receivers of thought may be directed to different eras, and by exquisitely fine tuning, establish a link with an individual mind to passively listen to it, or to actively influence it. It is by this means that my thoughts have been drawn from my brain at the end of the Nineteenth Century have been drawn out and projected into the brain of this beetle-like creature at the end of the earth’s time.