Return of the Old Ones: Apocalyptic Lovecraftian Horror

by Tim Curran

  “It was too late in Babylon,” he said. “Much too late in Athens.”

  “What was too late?” Nemon heard herself ask, as if from very far away and through numb lips that did not feel like her own.

  “No, Nemon! Do not listen—”

  “It was too late already in Jericho and Ur!” With a final cackling cry, both hideous and triumphant, Zath clawed at the sides of his head. His fingers sank in knuckles-deep, popping through the skin.

  The children screamed, stumbling and tumbling backward. Nemon felt mired in cold, sludgy mud. She could not move, could not even look away, as Zath worked his fingers deeper into his own flesh. The noise of it was a wet squishing; fluid too dilute and pale to be blood spurted from the wounds and trickled down his neck.

  He peeled off the wholeness of his face like the rot-softened rind from a decaying fruit. Underneath was not a raw, flayed skull … nor a gaping hollow … but a slick mass of slimy bubbles and myriad glowing orbs. They oozed, bulging and receding, moving over and around each other in a strange, oily effluence.

  More screams erupted all around her, but Nemon still could not move. She stared at the spreading horror birthing itself from the boy’s collapsing form. Its smell was both bitter and sour, insinuating itself into her nose, coating her tongue and throat with a lingering foulness.

  Above them, the gloom-darkened clouds grew even darker as immense shadow-shapes converged, and shifting lambent beams wavered through the mists. The air seemed to have thickened, become clammier with a tangible, gelatinous chill.

  The beasts went mad in their harnesses. Some broke free and fled, crashing through mud-and-stick dwellings, trampling anyone in their path. Others fell, half-entangled, tipping sledge-rafts, kicking and biting.

  Villagers and travelers alike succumbed to shrieking panic. Nemon saw from the corner of her eye Chayg and Shurg running in opposite directions, Anith on her knees sobbing, Oalthi abandoning her howling baby sister, Paulph diving into a much-too-shallow pond, Yunnig on the ground with his arms over his head.

  The thing that had been Zath loomed up before her, bulbous and writhing. In its faint, vile sheen, Nemon saw herself reflected untold times, reflected in mockeries and distortions. Mouthless now, voiceless, a loathsome gurgling hiss was its only speech … yet, somehow, she understood.

  “You know what will happen if you do what she wants. They will die, you will die, in the end you all die. Why make it worse? Why such torment, such poison suffering? Let it fade. Let it be forgotten. It is the only kindness you have left, the only true gift you can give. Remembrance is pain. Hope is cruelty. Spare them.”

  All at once, Mema was there, Mema terribly illuminated in the questing rays of the under-seers, looking more ancient and haggard than ever. Tesya and Lut were by her side, each clutching precious relics of the gone-world tight in both hands. They, alone among the tumult, looked serene … hypnotized, almost spell-struck.

  “Did I think no one would notice me?” Mema asked. “That I was unknown, unseen?” She laughed, fearless in the face of the monstrous entity before her. “You noticed, but you did not comprehend. You thought you knew, but you were wrong. You saw … but you did not see!”

  The Zath-thing recoiled in uncertainty. Under its slimy iridescence, orbs rolled and bubbles roiled. In the mist-thick clouds above, the coursing shadows hesitated. More of their beams converged, bathing the gloom in a seething, murky light.

  “Take the children,” Mema said, pushing them toward Nemon. “You are Keeper now. You know where to go.”

  “Where we took the others,” she said, hefting Lut onto her hip and grasping Tesya’s arm. Neither child resisted. “But, Mema—”

  “Our comprehension is beyond yours, greater than you guess!” came another noxious, gurgling hiss. “If you had left them in dull nothingness, we might have let them live out their lives!”

  “Nemon, go!” The old woman suddenly stood taller, straighter than it seemed the bowed hunch of her spine should allow, and cast aside her scrap-hide robe.

  “Instead, let them be consumed and dissolve a thousand years in the mindless madnesses Beyond!”

  Nemon turned to run, pulling Tesya with her. Their feet slipped on rain-slick grass and splashed in sloppy mud. They hadn’t gotten more than a few paces before the sounds of ripping meat and cracking gristle reached their ears.

  “They will remember!” Mema cried from behind them. “They will rebuild, and they will renew!”

  A keening screech of otherworldly agony split the air. Almost despite herself, Nemon risked a quick glance over her shoulder, and wished she hadn’t.

  The knobby hump on Mema’s back had split apart, bones forced up in jagged quills strung with glistening strands of slime. From her temples, her brow, and the base of her throat, wormlike segmented lengths extruded, black eyes opening wetly at the ends of whip-thin stalks.

  “And as for you—” The thing that had been Mema laughed again, as the thing that had been Zath writhed dripping in her grasp. “Now that you’ve revealed yourself, O Over-Seer, you are mine!”

  SHOUT / KILL / REVEL / REPEAT

  Scott R Jones

  The Hassan-i Sabbah touches down / crashes / sexually assualts / makes landfall on the shores of the Mad Continent in the last hungry minutes of the Hour of the Spastic Mandala. The shiftship quakes like a palsied geriatric and yowls in obvious pain / pleasure / indifference / surprise. The sound / colour and vibration / texture are enough to wake me, or at least bring me up to what passes for human consciousness in this, the Time of the End, the Eternal Finishing of the World, the Age of Dead Stars.

  “Greetings from sunny R’lyeh,” I whisper / mindlessly chant in a guttural tongue I barely recognize as mine / gasp with my last breath as I gaze from a porthole onto a sea like phosphorescent corpse-clogged black gelatin, a sea that washes and foams onto a spit of so-called land that looks like a migraine made of granite / oozing egg sacks / other, brighter migraines.

  I would order the shiftship to immediately begin repairs on itself, but a quick glance at the telltales in my sleep chamber tell me that would be unnecessary; the Hassan-i Sabbah had etheric conduits draining strange matter from the ancient alien stone of R’lyeh since it cleared the event horizon in the early hours of a grumbling dawn. Her protests have nothing to do with her state-of-being and everything to do with where she is.

  “Good girl,” I whisper, and place a palm on a bulkhead that quivers and warms to my touch. The Hassan-I Sabbah used to be several whales, sperms and greys and humpbacks, but that was very long ago, before the hexentechs went to work on her, before I took command. She’s old. I don’t know what she is now, but she’s a she. A capable she, a she that’s delivered us safely.

  We are here. We have arrived. Other telltales indicate that our payload is safe, our hearts resolute. My crew is well-trained, healthy, at least thirty percent sane, and most importantly, prepared. We have had centuries to prepare.

  I open a channel to greet them.

  “You all know what to do. Boots on the ground in twenty.”

  I close the channel / murder a small bird with my bare hands / masturbate my secondary organs until they bleed / finish penning this narrative / weep for a mother I can’t remember, then prepare to go ashore.

  Before setting my feet for the first time on the schizophrenic ground of the Dreaming Lands, I pay a visit to the upper deck to check on our payload.

  Nestled in the concave bay of its hangar, the ruddy light of the clinker sun glistens from its surface like mother-of-pearl, like Hope. A team of hexentechs call out to each other as they work. Hoist that line, Bob! Get that coupling secure, Emily! The order believes adopting the ancient names of their ancestors will somehow strengthen the human life wave. The names are clunky, empty things that bruise my ears, and yet somehow I recall each and every one of them, so perhaps they’re right. The hexentechs swarm around the massive globule like the ants they are, attaching Hoffman-Price field generators to its carriage of steel an
d bone.

  I marvel / shudder in fear / shrink away in disgust at the sight of it. I know that within its esoteric depths lies a hermaphroditic human form, a painfully beautiful androgyne body that houses a Perfected Human Soul, the shining result of generation after generation of artificially-induced reincarnation. We were never able to figure out how the Yith had migrated their entire population across space and time into new bodies, but we understood enough of their abandoned mind-transfer technology to reverse-engineer our own crude devices and move a single mind from one dying body into a freshly conceived one.

  Over and over again, and then again. Again. Again. A thousand years to shield one individual consciousness from the madness of the world in the deepest chamber of the Voorish Domes. A thousand years for the hexentech priesthood to refine whatever it is we are into its purest, most energetic form. Now that form rests, a saviour, waiting to fulfill its dread purpose, to do what saviours do. To save us.

  Grantha waddles to my side, and I try not to let my eyes rest for too long on his twisted features.

  “Is it ready?”

  “Yaz, yaz, Captain. Zhe’s ready, ready, ready for that jelly, straight up.” The hexentech High Priest’s voice is a glutinous, wet thing that slops unpleasantly into my ears / licks the fingers of my left hand / lays eggs in my dermis. “That’s the last of the field generators now. You get the anchor where it needs to be, and we’ll deliver our shining Little BoyGirl here. Right into his throne room. We’ll drop hir right into his abominable lap. Who’s a shiny baby? he’ll coo. Who’s a morsel? Who’s tasty?”

  “We’ll get there. We’ve trained for this.”

  Grantha smirks and gurgles. “Oh, sho nuf, son. You’re the best. Best of the best of the hand-picked beasties and no mistake, none.” His head does a repulsive little jig on his shoulders, and he points a scabrous chin to the pearl. “Still. Makes ya think, don’t it? Puts your own monstrous existence into some kinda horrible perspective.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Look at it there. A Perfected Human Soul. A being of pure enlightenment. Conduit for untold kilotons of Universal Energy. Or whatevah, whatevah. I’m sayin’ it’s cold, homes. All our work and striving, all the love and death and blood-soaked evolution, from the second we climbed down outta the trees, a million years and change of the Struggle, and this is all we’re good for?

  “The best and highest thing we can ever be is a bomb, Captain Strunk.”

  “A bomb to take out a god, hexentech. That’s something.”

  “Maybe, maybe. Or take out its balls, at least. If it has any.” The grisly little gnome sniffs, kicks at a loose bolt at his feet, sending it clattering over the side of the ship. “Good luck, in any case. Waiting on your signal.”

  “You’ll get it.”

  He puts his back to me and waves a hand in a vaguely disrespectful manner, starts barking at his acolytes.

  The best and highest thing...

  Atomics couldn’t do it; the Thing That Should Not Be and its impossible spawn weren’t made of our matter. Harvesting asteroids from the Kuiper Belt and dropping them on their insane cities couldn’t do it; the shrieking fractal architecture received them like kisses, incorporated them into its mass. The re-purposed tech of the extinct crinoid things in Antarctica, poorly understood and poorly implemented, did little more than annoy them.

  And all the while, with every attempt to cut them, to disintegrate them, to collapse the weird space-time bubble that housed their foul continent and send it back where it came from, we went mad. Our dreams, our every thought and feeling turned against us, as surely as we turned on each other in rage and confusion. Our minds losing all cohesion as surely as our genes. Our very existence on this plane becoming multiple, a constant flux of forms and actions in a temporal stream that thrashes and buckles and splits every second, only to merge again every other second.

  How long has it been since I did one thing only?

  We became monsters. Monsters in a world ruled by greater monsters, rulers who didn’t even acknowledge our presence, except to scoop up a handful of us when they got peckish. And there are very few of us left to scoop.

  So. Let this mission I lead be my last. Let it be my one true and singular thing, my pure deed in an impure world.

  I cast a last glance / scream until my throat’s raw / faint / do a manic jig to entertain the unseen being at the core of Grantha’s bomb before going below to check on the engines.

  “Are they fed?” I ask before she can say anything. “I want them happy and fueled and ready to pulse the second we get back.”

  My chief engineer has a terrible speech impediment. Even with the inhibitor collar anchored by flexible spurs to the cartilage of her throat, her voice is still weapon enough to make eyes bleed. Without the collar, Silattha Parv could ask your pineal gland to come out through the front of your skull for some air, and the thing would do it, too. Another child of the hexentechs: a Speaker to the Hounds.

  “They’re never happy, Captain.” Her eyes roll alarmingly in her head, and she grinds her teeth with such force her breath carries with it little chalky puffs of enamel. She pats the side of the perfect sphere that is one of the two Tindlosi Drives.

  Without the neutered Hounds suspended in grav-harnesses within the plasteel casing, the Hassan-i Sabbah would have broken up into shrapnel, cetacean meat, and good intentions before the sun had set on the first day out from shore. Slaved to the ship and the navigation system, the Hounds provide power, and let the ship slip along angles outside of Time, avoiding the worst of the distortion waves that tsunami their way across the planet from R’lyeh.

  “They are Foulness and a Contagion from before there was a Universe and they are lean and athirst, as ever, Captain, but they. Are. Never. Happy.” Silattha hisses to the floor. Paint peels around her feet. “But fed. Oh yes. My babies are fulla babies.”

  “I don’t know how long we’ll be gone...”

  “Yup. Time gets funny here, I get it. Got my dogs on an automatic three squares a day of ripe abortions. The hopper’s full, so quit your worrying.”

  The early research that led to our payload on deck revealed a terrible truth: there was such a thing as a soul, though as a descriptive term “soul” was woefully loaded and inaccurate. A discrete packet of energy, then, unique and unchanging, that accessed this dimension through the medium of flesh. Sometimes the flesh failed or was ended before it had a chance to really dirty that energetic cocktail: miscarriages and abortions. The hexentechs knew enough about their cannibalized Yithian machines to begin the harvest of these small but potent packets from the depths of the past, but with no purpose other than the pure science of it, the so-called souls were put in storage and stayed there. Until we caught our first Hound in a grav-sink, that is.

  “Poor things,” I say. Silattha whips her head around at me at the words, and I can see her merciless ghoul ancestry leering at me from the lines of her face.

  “Poor things? Poor things?” she snarls. “Man, you don’t know what they experience! They were never going to live, Deimos. They were dead already. Shit, they’ve been dead for millennia. And now they serve us. The dead should serve the living.” Her eyes flare wide enough to show white all around, her irises flexing wildly.

  The best and highest thing...

  “Is that from your cannibal bible? Dagon’s Teeth. Are you high right now?”

  Her face cracks wide in a sloppy canid grin. “You know it, Captain.” She lifts the mass of her yellow-grey mane to reveal an intravenous slug strapped to the back of her neck. She taps it. “New Jack Lao on a steady drip, cut with a little hexstacy to take the edge off.”

  I know it won’t affect the mission, but it irritates me anyway. I don’t say anything, but then I don’t have to.

  “Don’t get pissy, D. I’m five by five. Still feeling mad aggro though. You said boots on the ground in...?”

  “Twenty. That was eight minutes ago.”

  “So it’s a quick fuck then
.” Silattha turns her back to me, places long palms against the milky translucency of the Drive. “C’mon. You know how a ghoul likes it.”

  Her orgasm sounds like a dirge. From the impossibly compressed space inside of the sphere, a livid blue tongue lashes out to trace a spastic trail of sizzling ichor where her curves press into the plasteel. She hisses, and her own tongue mirrors the action. I shudder / compose a haiku / half-recall a play I once saw or acted in, I’m not sure which / climax, and then pull away from her.

  “All ashore who’s going ashore, Sil.” She whimpers something affirmative in response.

  She’s still licking the sphere when I leave.

  On the slick, nauseous pseudo-granite of the shore, littered with the aromatic remains of dead sea life, the massive vantablack tetrahedron that is the Hoffman-Price anchor sits in a chassis, studded with grav-harnesses waiting for activation. Around it, a dozen makeshift altars have been set up, for those inclined to make religious observances before heading inland.

  The hexentechs use ceremonial graphite crystal blades to remove thin strips of flesh from their forearms or abdomens, according to their rank. Worshipful tongues click in dry hexentech mouths while braziers cough a greasy pungent smoke into the air as the strips are consumed in offering to their obscure Render, Daoloth.

  Silattha lifts a juvenile dhole’s skull to her mouth and drinks from its contents: a heady liquor brewed from the worm’s fermented seminal and lymphatic fluids. She toasts her charnel gods with a wordless curse thrown to the boiling sky.

  Other prayers are made. Piotr Tillich, my science officer, lifts the lid of a black lacquered wooden box and with unmoving lips hums to the glowing thing inside, his buzzing quickly moving below the range of hearing into the subsonic. I don’t pretend to know what passes through his Yuggoth-cultured mind; Mi-Go meatpuppets are eternal observers, detached, inscrutable.