The Rage of Cthulhu

by Gary Fry

  She responded coyly, much like the young woman she’d been when they’d first met. In this golden light, she looked only a little older than that, and the sight almost made him cry. “I know you do, George. And I love you, too.”

  He placed his free arm around her, drawing her closer. Tears had begun rolling down his cheeks, but unlike on previous treasured occasions – their wonderful marriage; the births of their children; his fiftieth birthday, when Christine had arranged a surprise party, inviting all their friends – he refused to wipe them away. Let the universe observe my grief, he thought, seeing a few stars emerging in the dense fabric of the sky. Let me transform its indifference to pity.

  But what did the cosmos care about him? In fact, what did it care about anybody? Didn’t he possess evidence of one of its vicious emissaries, an otherworldly monster primed to unleash terror upon the planet? Wouldn’t the emergence of great Cthulhu, along with other unspeakable entities, herald the end of civilisation, leading people to riot en masse as so many cities burned?

  He mustn’t think about any of this. He’d vowed earlier to concentrate on only his wife tonight. He glanced down at Christine and noticed that she’d removed her iPhone, presumably intending to record these precious moments, as their heads pressed together and they maintained the silence that all wise people knew was the only way to communicate profound human bonds. George imagined that she’d want a memento of this event, one to review once he’d gone, helping her to recall how happy they’d been, soul-mates permanently united by some unknowable force.

  Later, lying in bed together and listening to an unexpected storm brew outside, they reviewed the footage and, at one stage, noticed a band of orange suffusing them, like a spectral commentary on their nuptial bliss. Christine explained that the focus function on her phone was occasionally unable to adjust to bright light, and that when the sun had dipped, the lens had probably become confused.

  Maybe everything is similarly prosaic, George reflected as he settled down for the night. Perhaps every piece of information I’ve acquired lately about the Great Old Ones has a rational explanation and I’ve wanted to believe in their existence so I don’t feel alone as I reach the end of my life.

  But how could he think this way when he had his wife to cling to, his children back in Europe, and all his friends from his former career? Maybe he should drop enquiry into his recent discoveries; perhaps he shouldn’t even read the translation of that ageing manuscript he was expecting any day now.

  As Christine breathed deeply in his arms, suggesting that she’d fallen asleep, George heard thunder rumble beyond the ranch’s bedroom window, like the unforgiving footfalls of cruel deities. He switched off the lamp on his bedside table, resisting the urge to check his laptop for email. The world could get along without him for one night, even as it raced towards inexorable destruction.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was the following day, while waiting for their flight in the airport, that George eventually succumbed to temptation and checked his phone for messages. Tremendous storms had lashed the area overnight, delaying their flight, leaving him and Christine with little alternative but to occupy the departure lounge with countless other disgruntled passengers.

  George’s mind had turned, perhaps inevitably, to events that had happened during their trip so far. He recalled the unconscious chant he’d delivered in Stockholm, the tribe he’d visited in Ghana, the trancelike state into which he’d lapsed in Saudi Arabia and the hideous sculpture he’d discovered by obeying an unnatural form of guidance.

  At least nothing of similar unsettling import had occurred during their stay in New Zealand, even though George was wary enough not to tempt fate. He and his wife were still yet to leave the country, after all. Indeed, might the rapidly transformed weather conditions have something to do with that? Could the impish planet be having its final say, before unleashing something frightening upon all its unsuspecting occupants?

  But George was being egocentric. The world was a complicated place, and despite his recently acquired knowledge about an important strand in its history – that it had once been inhabited by a race of alien beings, who’d since been buried by spells and still waited for the stars to be right to prompt a re-emergence – it endured more prosaic horrors. Many were announced by newspaper headlines in the airport shops he passed while summoning enough confidence to check for email. The Eurozone remained in political chaos, the North Koreans continued to be provocative, and the seemingly unsolvable Israeli-Palestine conflict had reignited again.

  It’s just the same old, same old, thought George, retaking his seat beside his wife and finally removing his phone. Despite his illness, he remained fearful about the state of the planet. After all, he had his children to safeguard and wife to protect. Any information he could gather might help him to achieve these goals. The thought prompted him to access the message he’d received from his former colleague, one with a document attached, a word processor file called: “TRANSLATION_NORWEGIAN MANUSCRIPT_COX”.

  As George, heart beating fast, was about to open the attachment, the flight was announced. He and Christine, along with all the other passengers, were required to collect their hand luggage and then walk to their gate, where they queued for another half hour before finally boarding the plane.

  Uncertainty about the weather in the South Pacific had led to travel problems, with many journeys by boat cancelled and flights rerouted. This would compromise the journey to Chile, the plane’s path adjusted to avoid the worst of the storms. The doglegged trip would take an extra few hours but would deliver them to their destination on the same day as they’d planned.

  Other passengers complained, particularly those with appointments or connecting flights to make, but George and his wife were resigned to the situation. Even the highest human authorities could do nothing to legislate for acts of God, or rather, as Christine pointed out after they’d taken their seats, the complex vicissitudes of a mysterious planet.

  Once they were airborne and travelling, George finally accessed the document he’d been sent by email. After such a delay, the translation George spent the next hour reading seemed almost anticlimactic. He felt he’d already known what material would be alluded to, and this troubled him more than what became apparent from Gustaf Johansen’s account. It was a chronicle of events in which the man and fellow sailors had been involved back in March, 1925.

  Their ship, a schooner called Emma, had left Auckland in New Zealand, headed for a port in Chile. After being blown off course during a heavy storm, it had chanced upon another vessel – the Alert – carrying a savage crew which, after issuing warnings to the Emma about occupation of this part of the ocean, had begun firing a cannon. The Emma had sunk, but its crew (including Johansen) had captured the Alert by climbing aboard and killing everybody, losing only three men in the process. The following day, the eight survivors had reached an uncharted island, which sounded like the one George had dreamt about lately, ever since entering that foghorn building in Whitby.

  Other familiar aspects of this story hadn’t escaped him. For one thing, there was the location in which it had occurred – in the South Pacific, somewhere between Chile and New Zealand. That was where he and his wife were right now. A great storm had also been involved, and George had only to take a glance out of the plane’s small window to realise that this was identical, too. Although it was already growing dark, diagonal slashes of rain affected the cloud formations, revealing glimpses of the ocean below. Then there was the date on which all these events had occurred: March, 1925 – exactly fifty years earlier than the episode in England, when another Norwegian, a guy called Jens Amundsen, had found this same text in a bottle, before summoning Lord knew what to his home at the time.

  George wondered what had happened to the document’s original version, and how much more Professor Lovecraft might have understood if this had survived the Norwegian. But the fact was that its author had claimed that few people with his kind of knowledge las
ted long afterwards. This had surely encouraged him to make a copy, the one to which George now had access and at least one other person had read in its entirety. He hoped his former colleague had dismissed its troubling content and had no desire to further pursue issues it raised. It might be sensible for George not to do so himself, but it wasn’t as if he had much longer to live.

  He hesitated, glancing at Christine reading a magazine beside him, but then curiosity got the better of him; he returned his gaze to his phone to finish reading the sailor’s statement.

  What followed was a harrowing description of the eight men’s experiences on that unexpected island. It involved many aspects with which George was familiar: the strange terrain with impossible geometrics and mutated laws of nature, the weird sculptures scattered right across it, and that terrible beast – the bulky-limbed, savage-winged, tentacle-faced creature – which had emerged from a mountain at the heart of the place, tearing all asunder in its path.

  Six of the sailors had lost their lives there, some going mad at the mere sight of this dreadful entity and others mutilated, ripped apart by the Thing advancing thunderously their way. It – great Cthulhu – had given chase to the remaining two, who’d somehow outdistanced it. One of these men had died in the boat soon afterwards, possibly when delayed shock had induced some cardiac episode.

  After returning to Auckland on another ship (the Vigilant), the only survivor Gustaf Johansen had spoken with authorities and then travelled home to his wife in Norway, where he’d chronicled his adventures in written form. Little else was mentioned about the case, and that was how the account ended.

  George, hearing thunder rumble outside the plane and many other passengers expressing concern, closed the document on his phone. Then he turned to face Christine.

  “What’s the matter, George?” his wife asked, beginning to show alarm herself. The aircraft had started wobbling, presumably in reaction to the severe storm. Its engines groaned, but George didn’t move at all.

  “What’s the date today, Christine?” he asked, his brain seeming to convulse with shock. He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t made this obvious connection before now.

  “The date?” she replied as the plane lurched sideways, causing others to scream and several stewards to hurry into the aisles, issuing unconvincing requests for calm.

  “Yes, the date.”

  “Are you…are you having one of your episodes, George?” She pushed one hand in her jacket pocket. George might have suspected that she was seeking her iPhone, planning to record this latest example of his behaviour, if she hadn’t then spoken again. “Do you need your medication? I know that all these flights have messed up the timings.”

  “Just answer my question,” he barked back, and a few people nearby, despite their unease as the aircraft was lashed left and right by strong winds, glanced across, clearly wondering what was afoot here.

  That was when Christine provided the information he required. “It’s March the 20th, George,” she told him, holding on to her seat, now by necessity.

  “And the year, Christine? Tell me the year.”

  “Okay, calm down.” She hesitated, but only for a moment. “You know as well as I do that it’s 2025.”

  George stared at her, his mind zeroing in on facts. He’d needed his wife to confirm his terrible suspicion, if only to make it real for him.

  In 1925, there’d been a great storm and Cthulhu had been sighted. In 1975, fifty years later, another tremendous storm had occurred, resulting in Cthulhu being summoned again. And now, fifty more years on, a third terrible storm was underway.

  It’s happening in a cycle, thought George, but that was all he could do to absorb this latest truth about the Great Old Ones.

  The aircraft, steered wildly off course, had started plunging towards the South Pacific.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  By the time the plane hit the ocean, chaos had erupted inside. George couldn’t figure out what had happened – there was so much screaming and crying to distract him – and the only reassurance from the flight crew had been a message from the pilot during the descent concerning damaged speed sensors and a stalled engine. Everybody had been instructed to put on life vests and to assume the crash position, but then the aircraft had hit something which felt simultaneously firm and yielding. Moments later, a whole section packed with seats had split in two directly in front of George and Christine, ripping away the walls on both sides and creating a sudden foamy abyss all around.

  The sound had been terrible, like whales being assaulted with savage weapons. All the same, keeping firm hold of his wife, George had unfastened their seatbelts, setting them both free to surge forwards amid displaced rising water. This took them through a ragged gap which had opened in the top of the fuselage as the rest of the plane had started sinking, dragging countless other passengers – men, women, children – to a mass liquid grave.

  Everything was hissing, frothing, churning insanity. As if ordained by higher forces than human will, George kept hold of Christine as they were thrust through freezing water, holding their breaths until, with a mighty release like blood vessels bursting under severe stress, they reached the writhing surface. The aircraft behind them lurched and swayed, as if a mockery was being made of humankind’s delusional command of nature, and then the whole thing started sinking with an immense gulp of foam and detached fragments.

  Minutes passed, during which George and his wife plunged in and out of the ocean, buffeted back and forth by crisscrossing strands of rampant meteorology. The plane struggled hard against gravity, bobbing up and down as water violated every vacant part of it. People protested inside, voices muffled by twisting metal and the unrelenting storm, which never ceased lashing the area with its savage rains and wild winds. Nobody else could have acted as quickly as George, all failing to detach themselves from seats as the passenger compartment had crumpled and collapsed. Perhaps they hadn’t had the same foreknowledge he had; maybe it was that simple.

  George and Christine had drifted a hundred feet from the melee, two improbable survivors of this headline-grabbing tragedy. Once his mental acumen had returned, George imagined recovery of the aircraft’s black box and the way its data might be reported in the news: technological malfunction; loss of autopilot; inability to steer the plane from a specific path, as if it had been drawn that way by some bizarre magnetism. The plane’s engine failure had been no accident, he was sure of that, and neither was his survival. This whole event had been conjured into being. As George glanced up at the darkening sky, where tiny points of ice had begun pushing through, he realised something else significant: the stars would be “right” tonight. At last the circumstances were perfect for great Cthulhu to rise again.

  Once the aircraft had vanished, sliding into the depths with its bellyful of victims, George turned and saw, lurking on the horizon like a worryingly dark shape in an X-ray, the island he’d expected, the one he’d dreamed about lately and towards which he and Christine were borne by predictable tides.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was half an hour later, as the storm continued pounding the earth with unrelenting brutality, when they reached the beach. George, bewildered by his efforts at saving himself and his wife, was hugely grateful to feel solid ground underfoot; his arms and upper body ached from withstanding so many volatile waves while drifting to this ostensible haven.

  The location was just as he’d imagined during uneasy sleep on many nights recently. Huge towers reached up near the island’s heart, surrounding a mountain constructed wholly from artificially shaped blocks. The place’s vegetation was also symmetrically regimented, with only abstract sketches of plants and flowers rather than the things themselves. Several palm trees, fan-like leaves sprawling, occupied much of the territory ahead, but as George started walking, he felt something synthetic beneath his sodden shoes, as if he was crossing fragments of plastic or perhaps a material which had no place upon this planet. It was squeaky and firm, defying its sieved
, orangey appearance.

  “George, where are you going?”

  He stopped and turned, looking at his wife still lying on the rain-spattered ground. She was soaking wet, but trivial ailments like the common cold or more serious conditions such as influenza or pneumonia were of little interest to him. He was here, after all – the place to which all his investigations lately had brought him. He was finally on R’lyeh, the fabled home of at least one Great Old One, if not all of them. Suddenly he had much work to do.

  “I have to confront It,” he said, not knowing exactly what he meant but going on anyway. “I have to face the Thing. It’s turned me into something I’m not and plans to do the same to the world next – to our beautiful world, Christine. A place that has you in it. And our children. And all our friends. And so many other worthy people.”

  He hesitated, brain reeling from the onslaught of rain driving against him and the winds whipping it into such a sordid dance. “If It’s going to take all that, I need to look into Its eyes and perceive Its indifference.” He paused again, thinking for a moment, and eventually added, “But more than that, I need It to look into my eyes and try to destroy me that way.”

  Christine didn’t immediately reply, merely sat up straighter and pushed one hand into a trouser pocket. Then George spoke again.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying? Does this make any sense?”

  He realised that he’d yet to offer her all the facts of the case but hoped she’d trust him, refusing to reduce his behaviour to a mere symptom of his condition. Indeed, the moment she removed her iPhone, he persuaded himself that she planned to support his latest investigative stage.

  “Thanks, Christine,” he said, once she’d climbed to her feet and shuffled through the ceaseless rain to catch up with him. During the manoeuvre, she’d activated a feature of her phone, which started whirring. “That’s the way, love – record every moment.”