by John Shirley
What torments, yes, and what wonders, must befall mortal flesh when touched by the questing pseudopods of a god of fecundity? Even the stranger was touched by a morbid curiosity to witness whatever might follow. Each Voormi, and their “human” cousins, too, should at last pay the debt owed Abhoth, and to the unborn of the Earth.
Each fleeing form howled with pain when the viscous flood touched and tasted and digested shaggy pelt and mottled hide, until immersion in the gelatinous tide drowned their last, gargling shrieks. Reunited with their primeval progenitor, they dissolved and informed the swirling unborn abominations percolating within the myriad rejuvenated wombs of Abhoth the Unclean.
In less than no time, Abhoth again became Ubbo-Sathla, for no terrene life would escape its cloying embrace. The dark stranger from some far, unguessable kingdom, stood in pensive contemplation. Compared with the great eons of silence surrounding the brief span of life’s career on this new-made earth, the fledgling human races were not promising in either their longevity or their evolution. But he disdained the prospect of cutting short their time on earth as the successors to the once-lordly races of decadent crinoids and torpid, mind-stealing trilobites. And there was something he could do about it. Indeed, something he must do, for it had already been done, or else––
He snapped the reins of his griffin and mounted up into the cloudy heavens, where he circled, taking in the sight of the expanding mass of the renascent Ubbo-Sathla far beneath him. As the primal land mass of Gondwana had once broken up and drifted apart, destined in the long evening of the failing sun to reform into the ultimate continent of Zothique, a vast circuit was now being completed. How is it, mused Thasaidon, in his own realm a god of evil, that it fell to the future to continually repair the past?
He unsheathed his obsidian sword, gleaming with the energy of the souls it had lately devoured, and lifted it high as he caused his beaked and winged steed to plunge earthward. As by some latent instinct, the quivering mass retreated from the descending hoofs of the griffin, leaving a circle of dry tundra about the god and his beast. The rider dismounted, spread his feet apart to plant himself firmly on the ground, and then he plunged the sword into the steaming lake of protoplasm, a placid sea of potentiality no more. The stuff heaved as the blood and souls of the kings and peasants of Mhu Thulan flooded directly into the mass of Prime Matter, and the cycle began again. Serpents and salamanders detached themselves in the first moments, followed by larger and more complex creatures as the hours passed and the mass spent itself in new invention, even as it shrank down to become the remnant Abhoth once more.
The population of the earth had not yet grown great enough to surpass the coasts of the polar realm of Hyperborea, but it would still take very many years to replace it, from the pitiful tribe that lay upon the shore like a pack of breach births in the afterbirth of the Great Old One.
The result was little better than he’d feared, but they would thrive where neither the Voormis nor the gnomish, milk-blooded proto-men of Mhu Thulan could survive the cold, hard ages ahead. Bodies wrenched erect in distress at the cold winds, these new ones were taller and stouter and uglier than either of their parents, but their brows were higher and promised a bit more brain than the last batch. Thasaidon trembled with fatigue and even a trace of sorrow, that he had to destroy so many, to achieve something that would only fall, in the far end of the future. But as he took his final leave, even if there was not a word of worship to mark his departure, neither did he hear any of them complain.
Return of the Crystal
By Charles Schneider
The child played in the ruins of an ancient city of Mhu Thulan. He was reenacting an ingrained drama of the Gods, using the dry, broken bodies of iridescent snow-beetles as surrogate deities. Close by, a sun-bronzed hag scratched weird sigils into frozen tundra, watchfully keeping an enlarged and filmy eye upon the small one.
Though aged hardly a handful of years, this lad, so the crone’s witcheries revealed to her, was secretly surrounded by a shimmering cloud of silver and violet flames. These lapping, singing tongues of unknown occult power enveloped him as if within a mandala of protective salamanders. One day he would be a man of great power and greater destinies. He would become a great sorcerer, and die a strange death. He would be reborn, as he already had been, countless times over many aeons, and take many diverse and grotesque forms. Today, however, he was a mere child, and she would let him play for some time longer as the day waned.
The youth wore a bracelet of dried infant toads and deadly snake rattles, strung together by the gut of vermin. He had received it at an eldritch ceremony, as a mighty priest sprinkled him in hyssop. He would wear this until the chain of animal parts would break of its own accord, the contents dispersing, perhaps unnoticed.
The moon, dead but still mighty, hung pendulously above the entire landscape, afflicting all below with strange influences and unpredictable insanities. The very landscape was changing, for it was the end of a gilded world of fable. A new age of malignant decay had begun. One day, the vast and exotic blossoms, which filled the enormous vases that lined the great temples, were found to have wilted overnight in a sudden and unexpected freeze. Exquisite lichen and delicious moulds glazed over the grotesque carvings, and water rotted the very clay of the monstrous statues of the land. Everything was breaking down, as iron in water, as flesh in sarcophagi. Once the very art of a world begins to decay, the death of the weary soul of the people shall soon follow.
The red and fiery orange, velvety leaves turned brown and wet overnight, infused with deathly frost. That was the beginning of the Great Change – the end of a world beyond dreams.
~*~
The child lifted his tiny leg up high and brought his foot down hard upon the pile of fragmented husks. They exploded into a small cloud of glittering, metallic greens and deep, golden blues. In the same manner have gone the very Gods themselves. When men stop believing in the Gods, the Gods no longer believe in men. Their great godly hearts, as big as the center of any sun, plummet into icy depths. The world turns into monster-engorged oceans of shadows.
Fissures upon the humid mountains surrounded the snow-capped plains. Frozen and pale-blue geysers of crushed ice erupted from these frost-volcanoes, locked and time-lost.
In the distance an entire village of grey figures traveled, part of the diaspora precipitated by the change in the land. It was growing so cold that the people had no choice but to attempt to outrace the encroaching Glaciers of the Gods.
The travails of doomed and desperate mortals mattered not to the small boy as he played godling in the deadly polar wastes. His young mind tried to forget the sound of the snowy avalanche into which his parents had vanished. He was fortunate that the village beldame took an interest in him. He was consumed by the tasks at hand, the games and secret machinations of a child grown far too wise. Any observer would have noticed in the lad’s wisdom a sparkle of glinting energy and the sort of enigmatic smile that only an old man, learned in the strangest arts and steeped in the most decadent of tastes, might possibly have possessed.
The boy poked the frozen earth with a hard, grey stick, looking for things to make into strange toys. Into God-toys. The vegetation was sparse. Freakish grasses stabbed through the snow, denuded of color. The ragged children always had to use their imaginations to create new games here, unlike the spoiled youth beyond the white wastes, who might find all of the latest puppet creations of city-craftsmen in the glittering marketplaces. New pastimes or near-forgotten ceremonies, both had to be reenacted here in the far reaches, with naught but snow, animal bones, stones, scraps of leather, cast off and rusted metal bits and the occasional ice-worm to play with.
Is there any more ideal locale in which to set a demoniacal magician’s den than within the ghoul-crypts and lich-caverns of ice? As the boy played above, not far below his feet began the systems of ancient, endless tunnels, built by the long-vanished serpent men. Many an unfortunate traveler had inadvertently begun the desce
nt, had found the forbidden entrance and, thus, faced untold, invisible and nameless horrors in fathomless depths of crystalline ice and ruins inhuman. Those villagers who dwelt close by spoke fearfully of these ancient shafts of reptilian origin, and shunned them.
The boy was well aware of many hidden entrances to such subterranean grottoes. If he could have, he would have spent all of his time exploring the secret, inner worlds and lost, forgotten ruins of the land. He had grown bored with this sport of making new gods out of old sticks and older pebbles, then destroying them. Seeing that the hag was distracted, he wandered toward a deep blue rent in the earth. He swiftly descended a few hundred feet into the ice tunnel. He slowed his pace as it began to grow dimmer. He studied the frost-kissed earth at his feet, studded with odd stones and shards. He kicked at a few rocks. It was at this very moment that he dislodged a milky crystal from the cold earth. He had never beheld its like ere this. As he picked it up, the boy found that it filled his small fist like a stunted piece of fruit, being round in the center and flatly tapered at the edges.
Excited, he hurried back to the entrance of the tunnel. Once outside, he held the weird crystal up to the white sun and was puzzled by what seemed to be a shifting within the orb. There appeared to be an angry miniature world within the crystal, a place of dark clouds with sudden, bright pulses of crackling lightning within. The young one had witnessed such things as one ten times his age would go mad to recall, and this might give reason for the disturbing premonitions he felt as he held the faintly glowing, translucent orb. Or was it just the late afternoon sun hitting one out of an endless expanse of pebbles and weird stones?
“Gaze into me!”
Had he imagined the ancient, croaking voice, thick with power and suggestion… and insistence? Was this strange crystal speaking to him through some unknown sorcery? Or was it a madman’s lost soul piping into his ear, as it drifted upon the ghostly, boreal winds?
He raised the crystal to his eye, and hesitated. He seemed to hear the murmuring of distant voices. One exhorted him to gaze into the crystal’s depths… but another interior voice loudly urged him away from any such inspection. Such resistance he found as difficult as passing by those sweet, candied syrups that ooze out of the sacred Notash tree like the liquid, ruby-blood of a dying god, without partaking of the rare delicacy.
~*~
The shadow of a dreadful but inchoate threat flitted before the lad, and he now found himself powerless to resist the siren call of the crystal.
He held it up to his face and took a peek within. He beheld a tiny figure, then another, and then still another changing form, each replacing its predecessor in turn. Like ripples of flesh in an ancient ocean of fetid creation, the visions of these shifting figures slid like oil into his brain. He had seen more interesting things that had beached themselves upon the shoreline, flopping, multi-limbed things of pink and blue transparency.
Despite his newfound ennui, it occurred to the boy that the befogged, glass-like stone might smash apart wonderfully. It had been such a good day of making and destroying things. This lump of glass would be a grand ending to this game. He grabbed the strange stone in his fist and raised it aloft in the chilled air.
At the very instant he was about to bring the crystal crashing down upon another rock that jutted out of the earth, he heard the hag call his name.
“Zon Mezzamalech! Enough playing. It is time to return home. ”
~*~
So began the long walk back to the tiny ice-cave wherein they sheltered themselves during these days of the dying land.
He thoughtlessly dropped the milky white stone and ran to the hag’s side. After all, when your grandmother says it is time to stop playing, ‘tis best to heed her.
As it lay upon the ground, the crystal dropped in temperature. Within three heartbeats, its temperature fell below freezing. A translucent lizard scurried from a fissure, searching for sustenance. Its side glanced against the crystal, instantly turning black. The malignant ice-rot slowly and terribly consumed the flesh of the reptile. The foul, bubbling remains were devoured by a vulpine scavenger who was, in turn, destroyed by the sloughing horror.
Boy and hag sojourned to their squalid dwelling where a meager fare would await them. As he walked through the snow, listening to it crunch beneath his roughly shod feet, the boy could not help but think upon what he had seen within the stone.
Flashes of reflected visions flamed in his mind’s eye, fragments and glimpses of the Yet-To-Be. So many twisting, bobbing heads, screaming dolls of blood and bone who came and went, mere shapes, splintered forms. It seemed to him that he should know them, yet despite their troubling familiarity, they remained strangers.
Why was one figure coming into strange and wild focus? The form was in a room, surrounded by… were they books and all manner of old and strange objects? At first distant, then coming closer with alarming speed, the figure was looking right at him! Or rather, the figure appeared to be staring with unbreakable focus at him through a stone of identical form and substance! The ever widening eye was staring, it seemed, back at him and beyond with magnetic fascination and awe. A burst of blasting white, as the death of a star, and the vision was gone.
With a half-shudder, the boy hurried on, walking beside the crone. There was a stomach to fill and a night of studies. How was he to become a mighty sorcerer if he did not apply himself to the hag’s lessons, the crumbling grimoires, the powders and liquids? A good thing he had tossed the idiotic crystal. It would never trouble his thoughts again.
Rodney LaSalle Has a Job Waiting in Commoriom
By John Shirley
Watching Watching Oddney Rodney walking off in that oddball way of his, Hezza whispered, “You know what he said? ‘Riches and freedom await me there’.” Hezza ran the back of his hand across his damp nose. It was cold in West Oakland that evening. “That’s what he said, Skroggy.”
Skroggy shrugged. “So? He says all kinda weird shit.”
“So these riches ‘await’ him...where? His uncle’s got the only riches Rodney’ll ever get near. And his uncle’s house is right directly flat-out that way. No other place he could be going. His mom’s house is the other way. I know this nerd. Lived on the block with him all my fucking life. He doesn’t go anywhere but the library and his mom’s house and school—and to his uncle’s. Why now, tonight, when the old loon is finally dead? Maybe ’cause there’s a pile of money there, dude.”
“His uncle’s dead, yeah, last week,” Skroggy allowed. “Don’t see it means nothin’.” Skroggy shrugged again.
Skroggy was getting on Hezza’s nerves. He always was a dumb ofay, just greasy red-haired, trailer-park white trash. Slow on the uptake. Hezza’s sister asked like once a week, Why you hang with that dumb white boy? “Skrog—listen. Rodney Lasalle fucking knows where the cash is. He’s gonna get that cash and get outta town. You see? Riches and freedom!” He started off after Oddney Rodney, who was almost a block ahead.
They’d catch up, but not too fast—they’d have to hold back some. Oddney moved slowly, due to that fucked up left leg; it seemed to lean toward the other leg at the knee, tilting him over to one side, making him walk in a kind of step swing, step swing.
Hezza—known to his moms as Hezekiah—had been keeping an eye on Rodney Lasalle since their first term at Laney community college in this cracked and much-tagged corner of Oakland, California, because he had this weird second-sight feeling that he and Rodney were entangled in the sneaker shoelaces of destiny. Hezza’s mom said the second sight ran in the family, and Hezza had always thought he might have it. He wanted to use it in the Emeryville casino but they wouldn’t let him in there, because of that incident in the parking lot...
Anyway, he figured if there was a tangled destiny involved, that meant money. To Hezza, destiny and mo’ money came together like a Fitty Cent half-rhyme.
Skroggy, on the other hand, never figured anything, he just bounced from one event to the next like a pinball.
So
now he slouched passively along with Hezza. The red-haired lunk was bigger and stronger than Hezza, and that came in useful.
“I’m telling you, Skrog,” Hezza muttered, as they paced along slowly behind Oddney Rodney, “I can feel it coming. Laney going to take away my school loans and shit. I’m one of the best students at that damn school, too.” A slight exaggeration, but he did have a 3.1. “So what I’m going to do? Got to go somewhere. Got to connect with destiny, dude.”
“What you mean, destiny? I heard people say that, never know what they mean.”
“It’s like a story where you know how it’s gonna end, man. Destiny, for you and me.”
“End with mo’ money?”
“Fuck yeah. What else? I swear I can feel it. Oddney there, he knows where that old crackpot’s money is...”
They walked through the early evening mist; this muggy October night the fog was like some kind of sour belch from San Francisco Bay. Up ahead lurched the ungainly figure of Oddney Rodney, with his heavy lower half, his narrow shoulders, his crooked leg, his unkempt, curly brown hair; the diamond-patterned sweater he never seemed to change.
“Boring, walking this slow,” Skroggy grumbled.
“We can’t go faster yet,” Hezza muttered. “Don’t want to catch up to him, clue him we’re here.”
~*~
Rodney knew full well that The Dolts were following him. That was how he thought of them. The Dolts. Philistine dolts like so many others in Oakland. Once, Oakland and Berkeley had hosted great writers, like Jack London and Ambrose Bierce. Now the East Bay was a tatterdemalion, was the creeping grounds of beggars, of the worst sort of drug fiends and licentious professors who seduced nubile students; it was the abode of “hip hop stars” and part-time rappers and full-time Occupation protesters; of punk rockers and Phish heads. When Rodney heard of Phish heads he’d hoped they might have something to do with Lovecraft’s Dagon. Sadly, no.
