Within Stranger Aeons

by Fisher, Michael

  “I'm drunk, and you fall down,” she said with a giggle, meandering over to where he sat, leaning over, kissing him sweetly on the forehead. “Good try, sweetie,” Cathy offered. Cathy then walked toward the bedroom. “I'll just unlock and open the other door.”

  Gerald scrambled to his feet but couldn't stop Cathy in time. She had already reached the other door to the bathroom and had opened it.

  He reached her just in time to pull her back.

  It oozed out onto the floor. All over the floor. Eyes bubbled up and fell back into the body of the thing; if it could be said that it had a “body.” The slimy, gray-black goo seemed to hiss as it reached tentative tentacles and searching pseudopods out into the new chamber. The shoggoth had indeed grown. The bathroom was engulfed.

  Lydia was nowhere to be seen.

  “Mother?” Cathy said in a breathless whisper, dropping her glass onto the floor. The shoggoth snatched it up with one tentacle, pulling it completely into its quivering mass.

  It was feeding.

  Gerald knew that immediately. He pulled at his wife as she stared incredulously at the horrid, stinking beast that had grown out of the tub. She stumbled as he pulled her out of the bedroom and across the living room to the door that led out of the apartment. She looked back into the bedroom and whimpered, “It's going to ruin the carpet, isn't it?”

  “The carpet if we're lucky!” said Gerald as he threw open the door, running, wife in tow, to the elevator. He could only hope that Cline or the others would help him now. He knew his tenure was forfeit. He rolled his eyes as he fervently poked at the button marked with an “L” for the lobby, choking out a sharp laugh. Tenure, the least of our worries, he thought as they began descending ten floors to the lobby.

  The elevator, like the building itself, was old; almost a hundred years old, to be exact. It had a comfortable, lived-in quality to it when they first moved in; however, he was cursing the age of the building now. He was cursing the elevator and how slow it seemed. Cathy was quietly giggling again. He turned to her.

  “What's so funny, Cathy? Your mom was just devoured by the shoggoth! Our home is being devoured as we speak! The entire city may be next! What's so damned funny?”

  “I was going to tell you this evening after we had sex tonight, but...I guess now is as good a time as any...” she said with that playful, mock-innocent smile she used when she had spent too much money on a new dress.

  “What?” he screamed. His mind was numb.

  “I was a little late with the rent, sweetie.”

  “So?”

  “We're being evicted.”

  Roy C. Booth hails from Bemidji, MN where he manages Roy's Comics & Games (est. 1992) with his wife and three sons. He is a published author, comedian, poet, journalist, essayist, screenwriter, and internationally awarded playwright with nearly 60 plays published (Samuel French, Heuer, et al) with 800+ productions worldwide in 29 countries in ten languages. He is also known for collaborations with R Thomas Riley, Brian Keene, Eric M. Heideman, William F. Wu, Axel Kohagen, and others (along with his presence on the regional convention circuit). See his entry on Wikipedia, his Facebook page, and his publishers' sites for more.

  William Tucker is an aspiring writer and radio personality from Grand Rapids, MN.

  VEXTERIA

  ASHLEY DIOSES

  The monoliths’ reach upward stabs the purple sky.

  Like shadow claws silently stretching toward space.

  Beneath them, in desert terrains, a loathsome race

  Of creatures dwell beneath the searing sands, and spy.

  The heavy storms of sand engulfed the planet once.

  Oceans of cerulean became seas of sand.

  The greatest cities turned to graveyards just as grand.

  Few natives just escaped, all fleeing in response.

  Aeons yet passed and evil poisoned their lush earth.

  Strange skulls and polycephalic cadavers lay

  Across hot plains and formed, as if they were soft clay,

  Into great structures of some foul daemonic birth.

  Arising in an amaranthine sky, the shrines

  And temples ever leered with sharpened grins and gazed

  With sightless sockets. Nothing could escape the maze

  Of yellow scales and bones, and painted wings of wine.

  Above, the natives watched the building up of bones,

  And wondered if they were so built to worship them.

  And yet no idols of the dwellers there did stem

  From Vexteria’s lore. Their gods did not need thrones.

  They worshiped gods from welkins past the horrid stars,

  Beyond their poison rays, and once more will they come.

  Vexteria is silent, save a vibrant hum

  Caused by an unknown source, yet something not too far….

  Ashley Dioses is a poet of dark fantasy and horror from southern California. She is currently working on her first book of dark traditional poetry to be out from Hippocampus Press in 2017. Her poetry has appeared in Weird Fiction Review, Spectral Realms, Weirdbook Magazine, Omnium Gatherum Media, Eye to the Telescope, Xnoybis, Necronomicum, Gothic Blue Book, and elsewhere. Her poem, “Carathis”, published in Spectral Realms No. 1, is mentioned in Ellen Datlow's full recommended Best Horror of the Year Volume Seven list. She blogs at fiendlover.blogspot.com.

  NAMELESS ONE

  ANDREW J LUCAS

  Through nightmares vaulted, dreamscapes ply,

  And with intent through ether fly.

  The King in Yellow

  ONE

  Galad stared hard into the dark surrounding his ship. The boat didn’t have a name like most vessels of her size, the name she used to have had long since been sanded away from the bows and aft panels. Black paint obscured the place her name had been and Galad felt the ship was lesser for it. Captain Akoni was more pragmatic and had told the crew in no uncertain terms that the ship was his and anyone not interested in working on a ship without a name could find a berth on another ship. Removing the identifying marks from a boat made sense if you were a pirate, and Akoni was every inch a pirate.

  He’d been with Akoni for four months now. Captain Akoni had recognized Galad’s abilities early on and had quickly promoted him to first officer, a position which had little respect and little insulation from the abuse Akoni heaped upon his crew. Galad was an experienced fisherman and one of the few men on the boat who could read a navigational map, compass heading or an ocean current, for that matter, but he was as desperate as the rest of the crew.

  Galad had once made a good living fishing the waters near his home village, at least he had until the big company trawlers stripped the sea of the once teeming schools of tuna and sea bream, leaving only small foul tasting squid in their wake. Galad was forced to venture further and further out into the ocean just to find enough food for his family to eat with little else to share or sell at the town market. He became nostalgic as he dwelled upon the town and the good years he’d had taking his day’s haul to share with the village.

  The town market used to be a bustling gathering place where anyone in the town could bring their goods, produce and crafts for sale. Galad’s family had maintained a small fishmonger’s stall for years, but that was now gone, along with so much else. The marketplace had been filled with potters, artisans and baskets of bread and vegetables from locals. Once a month, grocers and merchants from the city had brought their trucks to the market and would buy the best of the food and pieces of local art. It had been years since a reputable merchant had visited the monthly market nowadays locals had only a few small yams, small chickens and runty pigs to offer. Now the trucks parked around the market square were driven by rough men looking for recruits. They hung about offering cigarettes, liquor and tales of riches found at sea. Galad had steered clear of them as each year, the fish he caught became more and more scarce. Finally in the face of losing his boat, his livelihood and his family, Galad had succumbed to the siren call of the
pirates.

  Galad soon discovered that Akoni’s crew were of a very different breed than the Somali bravados he’d been accosted by while fishing. These men under their Nigerian captain had little regard for life. A Somali like Galad took to piracy only when all other options had failed. There was no government to call upon for help, no drops of food from a benevolent United States; there was only your family and the one next door. When all else failed you took to the sea in fast boats looking for merchants to ransom. It was dangerous, desperate work and when a ship was taken, the pirate captains took most of the money leaving little for the crew and their families. Still, when you had nothing, the chance of a big score and a bit of adventure was attractive.

  Galad was not that naive—he was however desperate enough to take a berth on Akoni’s ship.

  Akoni was a massive Nigerian, his dark skinned body thick with muscle and crisscrossed with the scars which no doubt chronicled his rise to captaincy. Galad had heard that the captain had once taken a French merchant ship and her crew. He’d outrun a British frigate and while he was forced to abandon the ship, he’d concealed two of the crew with a gang of Islamic rebels far inland. A few weeks of negotiation with maritime insurers and French diplomats had netted him a cool million Euros. Most of that had disappeared into the endless maw which was the Nigerian criminal network, but enough of it had filtered back to Akoni and the rest of crew to make them want more.

  Galad could see this hunger in his captain’s eyes, and knew it had spurred Akoni to invest his earnings to purchase the nameless boat they were on and set to sea looking for his next big win. It was an ambitious plan, to take an ill-equipped ship out into the Gulf of Guinea, with a poorly trained crew he’d collected from the desperate fishermen and foolish youth of starving Somali villages. Half of the crew was drawn from local Somalis and the remainder consisted of a vicious gang of thugs Akoni had brought with him from Nigeria. The Nigerians were rough men that enforced their captain’s orders with their fists, or the butts of their guns. The Somalis were less vicious, but their desperation had lead them to this place and they took the brutality as it it was their lot in life. Galad was too old to be searching for adventure on the high seas and had no delusions as to how solidly he fit in with the other Somali crewmen.

  Akoni had tasked his new crew with getting his nameless boat seashape. Galad provided his suggestions and firsthand knowledge of the seas and oversaw the refitting of the boat for its new function. The boat was a nondescript ocean trawler, complete with booms for the sieve net it would have previously dragged along the ocean floor. Akoni had removed the massive nets and the spooling engine which held them, and replaced them with a pair of semi rigid inflatable boats. The massive booms that had manipulated and spread the nets when under tow were jury-rigged to allow the inflatables to be lowered into the sea while the boat was at full throttle. It was dangerous for the unlucky crewmen assigned to the inflatables which would be dragged in the wake of the boat while Akoni pursued whatever hapless ship he’d set his sights on.

  Akoni fancied himself a great hunter but so far, he’d only managed to catch a handful of small fishing boats, none of which were worth the effort and Akoni had let them go, after rifling through the scant valuables they had on hand. The Somali crew contingent was disgusted when their captain had returned with a handful of US dollars, a couple of bottles of some South African whiskey and a small golden medallion, but none of them would risk a beating by complaining. Akoni had bit the medallion, testing the purity of the metal, then tossed it to the deck spitting on it in disgust. Galad had recognized the medallion as an icon to Saint Peter, the patron saint of fishermen, twin to a similar medallion he wore about his own neck, concealed from his captain.

  Galad had spent the rest of that day watching the medallion slowly inch its way across the deck toward the boat’s edge, urged into motion by the rolling motion of the sea. Every glance at the shifting bit of embossed tin ate at him, intensifying the guilt he felt at being on this boat at all. Eventually the medallion worked its way to the edge and slid into the sea, the links of its chain sliding across the edge like silvered tentacles of some ocean going octopus. It was an evil portent especially for a Christian man in a country dominated by Muslins. He felt he was betraying his convictions even more than he had already, nothing good could come of it he was sure.

  Now in the black of the night his mind went back to the image of that medallion slipping into the waves and the slight clink, clink, clink of its chain rattling as it slid down the hull to the water, mirrored the tap, tap, tapping, of the radio watch’s pencil against his station. Jeyte was assigned to the night watch with Galad and in addition to their duties of keeping the boat on its course, Jeyte was tasked with hunting the radio waves for the telltale conversations of any ships which might be within range. It was crude, inexact work that more often than not led the boat on wild goose chases following errant radio signals. Once Jeyte had pursued some sort of Indian radio play which, through some atmospheric anomaly, had bounced all the way from Calcutta to their location far at sea. They’d chased that radio play for seventy-five kilometers before Jeyte had realized his mistake.

  Galad knew when the mistake was discovered that Akoni would punish Toby severely for wasting fuel and time, so he had stepped in and taken responsibility-as first officer, the beating he would receive would be less severe than what Toby could expect. It didn’t get Toby off the hook completely, they both drew their share of lashes and were relegated to the night shift. They weren’t friends exactly but the pair did spend most of their time together, usually alone on what passed for the boat’s bridge. Alone in the dark, Galad staring into the dark watching for a freighter’s deck lights and Jeyte listening intently for stray radio talk. It was tedious work, with the promise of another beating if they got it wrong but an incredible payday if they were able to sneak up on a freighter unawares.

  Jeyte had been catching a stray broadcast all week, and was struggling to locate the source of the transmissions and identify the language. The few small bits Galad had heard reminded him of Russian, or perhaps Polish ,but without being either. Jeyte swore he could make out words and sentences, but all Galad could hear were random syllables which sounded like the speaker was forcing sound past a larynx not designed for such things. It was a disturbing thought and surely was a warping effect of the atmospheric conditions which allowed the transmission to be heard in the first place and nothing more. The few minutes Galad had concentrated on the signal had made his head hurt. He had no idea how Jeyte managed to listen to the signal let alone decipher directions from it. Jeyte would pop his head up from his listening and point in one direction or another: while Galad adjusted the boat’s heading to the proper course.

  Galad wasn’t sure where the radio broadcast originated from only that it was stronger at night. Jeyte insisted that he could track it and it seemed that each evening the signal was stronger, clearer, and more persistent even. Galad couldn’t listen to the signal for very long before his mind became weary trying to make sense of the words barely discernable within the sound. While he couldn’t listen to it for more than a few minutes without developing a splitting headache, Jeyte on the other hand, seemed to relish the challenge of picking out words from the broadcast and trying to wrap his tongue around the foreign syllables.

  “Ph'nglui mglw'nafh,” Jeyte whispered, hunched over the radio set into the back of the boat’s bridge. “Cthulhu R'lyeh.”

  It was an annoying habit of Jeyte’s, his parroting whatever transmission he was listening to, or at least trying to.

  “Wgah'nagl fhtagn.”

  Jeyte was making disturbing, unearthly noises and it didn’t seem possible that any human voice should be able to produce those words -if that was even what they were.

  “Jeyte!” Galad had had enough.

  “Eh?”

  “Shut up! You’re driving me crazy. I can’t concentrate on the heading you’re giving me.”

  “Sorry boss.”
/>   “Don’t call me boss.”

  Jeyte was a scrawny Somali who seemed composed of wiry limbs and annoying habits. From his acne pocked face, the threadbare woven vest he insisted on wearing all the time, to the vile brand of Russian tobacco he rolled and smoked constantly—Jeyte was a collection of neurotic tendencies which drove Galad crazy. Despite Jeyte’s irritating habits, there were moments of quiet reflection on the night watch that Galad enjoyed. The night was so very different without the driving shouts of Akoni cutting into their thoughts or the lash of the bamboo crop he sometimes carried falling across their skin. Akoni was a vicious man, but Galad could always anticipate what path he would take—the path toward the big payoff he was chasing.

  “The broadcast is getting stronger.”

  “We’ve been following this trail for days.” Galad sighed, “We’re not getting any closer.’

  Jeyte looked out the forward windows into the dark and pointed with one hand slightly to the left, northward. He was using his other hand to hold the radio set’s earpiece against his head, concentrating on the sound. Galad could detect the fair chanting cadence of the transmission from the other earpiece, it made him slightly sick to his stomach.

  “This is closest we’ve gotten so far. It’s like I can reach out and touch it.”

  Galad looked in the direction Jeyte was pointing, just in time to see a massive shape loom out of the dark. An immense wall of metal towering over the boat like a cliff. There was no time to do anything but pull hard against the wheel and try to slew the boat out of the path of the monstrosity. Galad had only a few seconds warning and even as the boat’s rudder cut into the water angling the boat away from impact, he knew it would be too little too late.