by Tim Curran
Anatoly’s mind looked for someone, anyone that would share his burden: any living being on that ball of impure iron, broadcasting what shred was left of his consciousness down below to see …
The Prophet screamed at the heavens from his desert perch, a glistening red bounty in his hands. The wounds on his chest and back ululated madly, calling out to the gods of his fathers and their fathers before them. His legs shivered, his genitals were engorged and fully erect for the first time in years since he had long since abandoned all hope of sowing a scion.
Around him, the dead earth crackled and hissed and sputtered. Noxious fumes shot out into the air. Abandoned machinery hummed to life, wrought clockwork struggling to set cyclopean gear trains in motion. In the world below, the necropolises of the serpent-men, scions of the nothing-gods began to actuate protocols that would awaken their masters, themselves long since brought to dust.
“To me! To me!” the Prophet pleaded “I am the Chosen One! I am the Emperor of Earth! Kootooloo, K’tuugha, Cxaxuktuth! I bring red gifts!” he spat, lips frothing.
Was he not prepared? Was he not learned? He had lived three lives, sustaining himself with forbidden sorcery; his organs rested inside carefully hidden clay pots, beating away in the dust. He’d fasted for years, living off the hearts of crows and the juices of cacti. He had fathered hyenas, let carrion fester in his wounds. It could not be for nothing.
“Bring me your Fire! Bring me your Secrets! I kept the faith, Venerable Masters! Give me the word!” the Prophet whimpered, beating his chest, stomping his feet in the dust. With shaking hands, the Prophet raised his flute to his parched lips, hewn from the bones of owls and played the shrill song that would call his sky-steed. But the susurrus of membranous wings never came. When he beat his fists on the earth, the red worms would not come. The Prophet rattled his talismans, drew blight-signs in the dust under the unforgiving glare of the midday sun to call the Messenger. But the Messenger would not heed his call.
“To me! To me!” he howled one last time before a vessel in his brain finally popped and his life finally ended, unceremoniously, snuffed as he was about to step through the threshold of glory, denied of what he considered his birthright. Stepping out of their hiding places, the hyenas yipped joyously and descended on the meager feast.
“Too eager. Too greedy.” Anatoly said. The Prophet had thought the charnel-gods could be reasoned with. Foolishly, he had not thought that on the day of their Coming, they would have no need for him whatsoever. He wondered how many others had suffered because of the Prophet and his fathers. Hundreds? Thousands? How many courts had bowed to their will, how many had died to serve their futile purpose? Anatoly had known, since he was a teenager that the world he inhabited was a small place, a tiny rock bobbing in the gravitational eddies of an uncaring giant. He had seen the stars from up close, when the man who married his mother took him to the observatory, taught him about the secret shapes of the constellations. Anatoly had known, then and there, that the night sky was a vast ocean teeming with life. That his life, the life of every human being, was inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
Through the porthole of the Soyuz, Anatoly caught a glimpse of Hughes leaned over Wei’s body, sinking his teeth into her flesh to rip at the soft skin, abandoning himself to the forbidden lusts that the end of the world had promised. In the shattered haze inside his skull, Hughes nursed a glimmer of hope. Perhaps he, in turn, thought that this was a show of faith to the venerable gods. That with this display, he would be spared their attentions.
But the void-gods had long since become jaded to atrocities. Hughes’ gift was in vain. Anatoly looked once more below, looking for an anchor.
Off the coast of Latangal, Aluses the fisherman was thrown off his boat as the basalt city erupted from the waters of the Pacific, raising a mile-high tsunami that swept across Namatanai, wiping it off the face of the Earth. His skiff skirted along the edge of the tidal wave, cresting over the top of it, slid over the rim. Over the deafening roar of the waves, he could hear the screams from Lihir and Konos and Tatau. For one terrible instant he could even make out the shrill cry of his wife before the wall of seawater broke every bone in her body and carried her all the way to the Bismarck Sea.
His skiff splintered into a thousand tiny pieces on the jagged rocks of the shore. His legs shattered with the impact. Aluses grasped a jagged edge, holding fast to an outcrop that should not be there, hanging from empty space. Above him, the city shivered and growled like a living thing, a behemoth composed of barnacle-studded obsidian. Centennial coral reefs cracked and rained down on the rocks, their edges slashing at Aluses’ back.
The fisherman pulled himself up over the edge, looking blindly for purchase. His rough, calloused hands had borne him to the peak of Puncak Jaya when he was a young man. Back then, he was invincible. The entire world, it seemed, was his for the taking. These same hands strained as they pulled his broken body up on a perch, carrying him to safety just as a large section of the rocks began to shudder and split, hidden seams running across the face of the rock releasing a torrent of searing red light. The behemoth burst forth, blossoming outward like a newborn continent, branching like a lotus. Mighty windowless towers rose from its depths, coiled like snakes prepared to pounce. The terrible blighted light of the behemoth exploded outward into the heavens, spreading to envelop the moon and choke the starlight. Aluses started praying despite himself. It was a prayer his grandfather, a Greek whaler by way of Tangalooma, taught him. It was all that he had left the boy besides the skiff and his skinning knife. The words were gibberish but they kept him from succumbing to shock. A splinter of bone was poking out of his knee, pumping out blood in synch with the beating of his heart.
“Oh God, you are in Heaven …” he began, the verse reduced to a string of babble. Behind him, the drowned city began to sing its war chant, a million voices welcoming the alien sight of dry land. Spiral spears, their hafts hewn from trunks of giant underwater kelp with jagged volcanic-rock tips, gleamed in the sun. It was a deep, terrible sound that shook the ocean bottom, sending tremors across the muddy bed of the Pacific. Aluses knew the words, a half-remembered rote that had been passed on unspoken through countless generations, surviving from the wriggling traditions of trilobites all the way to the dawn of man. It was the song of the return of the Masters of the Earth.
Aluses dragged himself along the branches of the surfaced city (whose name he knew, by virtue of having beheld it, was R’lyeh the Sunken, R’lyeh the Perpetual, R’lyeh the Patient and Holy). The pain in his shattered leg, which had long since overwhelmed his senses, reduced into a dull throb. Aluses’ agony had subsided, transmuted into a ball of pure hate inside him. The ape in the back of his mind had wrested control. Pulling himself up the perch, knife in hand, Aluses grasped the ankle of one of R’Lyeh’s soldiers: a towering thing with scales that glistened in the cancerous false-dawn. Aluses brought his skinning knife down into the thing’s gills, watched in fascination as the blade slipped with ease into the flesh. He twisted the knife and brought it down on its neck, neatly cutting its head off in the process. Thin blood spurted out of the wound, coating his hands and chest. Aluses let out a hoarse, futile battle-cry. Bringing his knife-blade down once again blindly, he severed a fishman’s fingers, cut through another’s thigh. The edge caught into the brittle bone, the slick hilt slipping from the fisherman’s fingers. Disarmed, Aluses was stuck by the spears of the warriors, pinned against the slick floor.
“Quiet!” the fishmen hissed through gritted teeth, twisting the points into his flesh. Blood welled up in Aluses’ throat, choked him into silence. His thrashing ceased, the fishmen continued their blasphemous ululation. From the center of the city, the bald countenance of the arch-priest emerged, shedding murky sea-water as it went. Wriggling its tentacles, it called to the idiot face of the moon, beckoning its gods to come closer.
Aluses died on the rocks of R’lyeh and his body was divided among the fishmen. His flesh was bitter, h
owever, tainted by the rictus of the slain fisherman. For in his final moments, Aluses had recognized the terror in the arch-priest’s voice.
Anatoly ceased his contact with R’lyeh. He had seen enough. Across the length and breadth of the Earth, fear gripped the hearts of the living. In their resting places, the dead ceased their envy of the living and were finally still, content to slumber in the quiet dark.
The god-swarm pushed through the confines of Anatoly’s mind, crashing against the face of the planet, a great unseen wave that swallowed the talented minds and set the brains of artists on fire. Driven by unholy fervor, these impromptu doomsayers ran to the streets to proclaim pointless gospel. Across the old whore that is Europe, the lakes boiled with newfound activity; simple-minded monstrosities crawled along the shorebanks, cilia flailing blindly. In the jungles of South America, half-forgotten tribes donned the masks of their ancestors to shield their eyes from the killing glare of resurrected machinery.
In Canada, the carnivorous gods of the Senijextee left their snowy perches to snatch at the newborn. Across Antarctica, shining cities winked into existence for brief moments and finally collapsed. North America set great atomic bonfires to hail the new masters. The Russian tundra disgorged its hidden fauna, prehistoric jungles infested with intelligent spiders monster-forming Siberia in the blink of an eye. Spreading outward from the Mediterranean, the waters of the world became poison, killing everything that they touched. The Earth was being shaped to the form that pleased its hidden masters. Anatoly looked down once again. Perhaps there was a pocket of sanity left in the middle of all this madness. Perhaps he could find the chosen few that would muster the waning forces of humanity.
Hila had gathered the men after the infighting had died down. Allai had burned fiercely and briefly, the men turning on each other, the women prostrating themselves blindly, offering their children to the invading gods. She was not a learned woman, but she was wise in the ways of the world and she had known that this was not the end, not even after the deadly cloud had erupted over Kabul.
“It was the Americans!” the men screamed. “No, it was the Jews!” said others, as they climbed up the mountain ranges, treading the narrow paths. Others blamed the Hindi; some said that the Russians had enacted a poorly planned revenge for the thrashing they had given them. Hila let them have their spats; she let them spit their poison and concoct their theories. Any explanation that the men offered would keep them occupied, stop them from turning against her and the children.
The children were what had saved Hila: the sight of her newborn gurgling out a string of nonsense, its eyes glazed as it was swept up by the rapturous presence of the invaders. No enemy of the Afghani had the power to destroy their minds in such a manner, to fill their pristine brains with poison this fast. Hila had smothered the child to keep it from spreading. If this damned her, so be it. She would cherish her next child, raise it to be a warrior worthy of standing up against the hell that it would inherit.
“Where are we going? How can we run from this?” Pamir, her brother-in-law, was the first to crack. He raked his nails across his face, forming deep red gashes along his cheeks. “There is no place to go! Nowhere they can’t find us!”
Hila pushed past the children, ripped the ancient automatic rifle from Pamir’s hands. Pamir was too caught up in his rapturous trance to notice as she unloaded half a clip into his chest, sent him hurtling down into the rocky outcropping below. “We have no time for fools or prophets!” she barked and they followed her lead. The children did not weep even as the men blubbered incessantly behind her. When they regained their presence of mind, perhaps they would kill her. No matter; Hila was more than willing to take this risk.
She led them across the mountain range into the secret cave systems that the Taliban had built. Hila’s husband had been one of them, a zealot, overwhelmed by the rapturous promise of heartless fanatics. He had died with the rest, choked by American nerve gas pumped into the mountain. He still lay there among the desiccated bodies of his comrades. She found a family of sheep-herders huddled in the darkness. “Don’t come closer!” the father threatened her, wagging his ancient revolver around like a witch’s finger. Hila slapped it away from his hand, shook the man by his shoulders. The shepherd began to weep uncontrollably. She let him have this luxury.
“There is water here. We can drink it. We’ll find food and shelter. We’ll keep vigil until it all ends,” she said to the cowering few that had joined her.
“And then? What will we do afterwards?” one of the children asked. A boy, barely three summers old. Hila had rocked him in his cradle while his father eked out a living as a taxi driver in Kabul.
“Then we go back. And we pick up the pieces. And we make something beautiful blossom from the rubble,” she told the boy. It would have to do, for now.
Looking through the twisting corridors of time, Anatoly saw Hila’s future: starved after a cave-in, trapped under tons of rubble when the continents would once again slam into each other. But she would bear another child to replace the one lost. And her pale get would sire a hardy generation in turn that would brave the blasted surface of the world and raise their fists against the cancerous sun. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.
Small pockets of sanity still remained. Anatoly did not look for them. He could not bear to see them, could not risk the chance of the gods finding them. They were an uncaring lot, but they gravitated toward fear.
Shattered hope was a rare delicacy to them. To keep them occupied, he turned inward, scanned the contents of his own mind, saw the entirety of his life unfold around him.
Anatoly was born again in Uzbekistan, his mother’s home overlooking the dead patch of dirt that had once been the Aral Sea. Ravaged by the Soviets, it had destroyed the lives of the workers and the fishermen, driven the sane away. Only the hardy madmen and the paupers lingered. Anatoly played in the mud, digging for dead fish to keep his mind away from the rumbling of his belly and the moaning of his mother who gave herself to visiting officers to put food on the table. Anatoly hated the strange men; he wished he could bury them in the muddy ground, watch them go under the earth, where his father was.
Skipping through the years, Anatoly made it to Kirov, piggy-backing on the shoulders of an officer who had fallen in love with the hardy beauty of his mother. An air force man as cool and patient as the Urals. He taught the boy the secret of assisted flight, took him to see the jets come and go from the tarmac. Anatoly loved and hated him in the same breath.
The officer had a prize bitch. He called her Kuja, adored her almost as much as he loved Anatoly’s mother, took her hunting in the forests and always brought back a bounty of fowl. Anatoly was a teenager aching to hurt the officer, but the officer was an impregnable fortress further shielded by his mother’s devotion. The dog seemed like a quicker way to his heart. It was easy to make up an excuse. He would take the dog hunting. He was old enough to know his way with a gun and Kuja adored him. She never got wary of the boy even when he pressed both barrels of the shotgun against the base of her skull and pulled the trigger.
Anatoly could feel that he was not alone in his memories anymore: the gods dwelt at the fringes, reveling in the guilt, the fear, the horror of the moment. The dog died. The boy cleaned the blood from his eyes and threw up. Below, hunchbacked ghouls licked their lips and clicked their teeth as they shared the spectacle. They clapped their crooked hands as they felt his joy upon seeing the officer’s expression. The dog’s death had crushed him. But Anatoly remained unpunished. He was still loved—albeit from a distance—still trained and educated to prepare for Baikonur. The boy made it to the stars, borne on cruelty, on the day the officer’s aching heart finally caved in his chest.
Now Anatoly knew why they had chosen him: for his lack of compassion, for his inhuman distance, and for his capacity for calculated cruelty. Out of all the Olympians and the sorcerers and the pious, he was the only one who could muster their presence in his mind. “Did I end the world?”
Anatoly mused to himself. The Old Ones cackled, wriggled their tentacles in open mockery of the man. No, of course not. How could he end the world? He had only lingered at the threshold, held open the gate to let the nightmare take hold.
Below, the mayhem has ceased. Isolated pockets of chaos still remain, themselves swiftly extinguished. The planet spins on its axis, ancient and uncaring. Even it, in turn, is impervious to the Old One’s sophisticated cruelty. In time, the wounds will heal. In time, even the immortal idiot gods will wink out of existence as mankind did. This is a cold and uncaring universe, after all.
Anatoly climbs back into the Soyuz, clears away the blood and the teeth, ejects Wei and Hughe’s bodies from the airlock. The gods have abandoned him, having turned against each other to resolve ancient enmities. He turns the shuttle down, aims the thrusters at the flesh-forests that have choked China where formless maws gnaw at what’s left of the populace. Looking through the vast oceans of possibility, he adjusts the course and launches into the atmosphere. With any luck, he should burn on entry, reduced into a clear ball of impure metal and reduce the horrors into ash in a display of apocalyptic force.
Above him, around him, below him, the gods scoff at the futility of his sacrifice. It is good. It means they’ve noticed him. The sight warms his heart. For a brief flash, he sees them frozen and lifeless, drifting in the desolate emptiness of heat-death. The sight sends them into a frenzy. Perhaps there is something that even they fear.