Future Lovecraft

by Anthony Boulanger

  It was a shock whose subtle charge still haunts my nights.

  I looked to Mister Nassar, and he to me, and in our blank, uncomprehending gazes, we knew we shared a secret that would shake the foundations of the Academy.

  That was six months ago and it could have been six years. He and I, joined by the strange bonds of discovery, left Cairo that day, clutching the codex, but shuddering at the weight of its presence, for we knew, deep in our hearts, that it was not just one book.

  Indeed, Mister Nassar’s connections were invaluable. Discretely, we were able to obtain samples of manuscripts from across the country—from Plato, Pythagoras, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Apollonius of Rhodes. For one and all, the answer was the same. “The skin, the skin,” he had said. “Human.” The Great Library of Alexandria was a charnel house whose secrets had been hidden in the fire that immolated all those stretched, disfigured bodies.

  In the intervening months, we have visited many archaeological sites, studied the ancient midden heaps of Heliopolis, Sharm El-Sheikh and Aswan. Beneath the layers of refuse were bones, bones, bones, so many of them that it sickened me. Whole villages had been wiped out, their inhabitants sacrificed to the altar of the great gods of our civilization. A single codex could have required as many as three hundred hides and it was becoming increasingly clear that those of the young were valued most highly for their smoothness, their freedom from blemish. Children. A seven-year-old child could provide enough for twelve folios; an adult, perhaps sixteen, though the quality would suffer for it.

  ‘The unspoken holocaust’, we called it, as we huddled in tents that clung to the skin of the desert. We were as thick as thieves, he and I, whispering our secret again and again. “Human,” he would say, until the words meant nothing and the charred midnight air snatched them away.

  Three days ago, an ancient bus knocked its way over potholes and hard rock, depositing us at last in the village of Deir el-Bahri. It was there we received a second letter, this one even more dishevelled, the number of stamps seeming to have taken to heart God’s commandment to be fruitful and multiply. Mister Nassar opened it, fingers shaking, but his face turned strange as he read the Arabic within.

  For a second time, he took my hand and I wondered at the calluses on his finger, the rough texture of them, the way the pads were paler than the coffee-coloured knuckles. They were beautiful, those hands, the skin of them.

  “It is my brother,” he said. “He must speak with us.”

  We boarded the bus for a second time, proffered bills to the surprised driver, who made a sign and ushered us aboard. The ride to Cairo was long and, try as I might to question my companion, he would reveal nothing of our new mission and what might await us.

  His brother could have been a twin. They had the same deep-set eyes, the same nervous manner about them. But whereas the one had the tongue of a linguist, the other spoke only in halting English, stumbling over words until he and his brother turned to a guttural Arabic, with only occasional breaks for breathless translation.

  He led us into the university science complex where the smell of formaldehyde drifted in clouds from behind shut office doors. A rattling elevator brought us to the bottommost level and there, following him as Theseus followed his ball of yarn through the subterranean system of tunnels, we saw a machine—a great beast of a thing, a wonder of modern mechanical genius. I don’t pretend to understand most of what the second Nassar told us, only that he had been shocked by the discovery as much as we had, and that there was a way—perhaps—for something to be done....

  What would you do, colleagues, with the weight of that knowledge hanging upon you? What would you do if you were offered a chance to set it right? The press of a button and that slaughter of innocents prevented? Would you have the strength of will to silence Aristotle, to let the words which shaped civilisation go unremembered, unpreserved, reduced to whispers and empty air? Would you preserve instead the genetic code of that dead, forgotten mass of bodies? For they are dead, those slaughtered children, flayed for the libraries, flayed so that we might—

  They are dead. A plague could have taken them and history would not have cared one jot. They would still be dead today.

  But it was not a plague. It was men. Men who desired books, who knew these things must last, that it meant more than those hundred thousand lives....

  The pyramids were built on such sacrifices. Who are we to say?

  The three of us—myself and the twin Nassars—took wine that night, though I had never seen my companion drink a drop in all our time, despite everything. We swallowed morbid thoughts with every draught, drank down our fears, our apprehensions. But as the sun sent pale fingers of light creeping through the window, across the table and its scattered papers, its empty bottle, I hailed a taxi to the airport and left Mister Nassar and his brother to their grim duty.

  We had come to something there, a decision.

  Members of the Academy, colleagues, I know much of what I say is doubtful and I can already hear the murmurs of my detractors. You do not believe me and I do not blame you. It is a horrid business.

  But you need not believe me; you need not ever publish these findings; you need do nothing but wait.

  We decided, you see, the three of us there with our forbidden bottle. We decided.

  The second Mister Nassar and his machine—that damned machine. I cannot say how it will work, only that he has promised—sworn—that it will. That the past could be unwritten if we so choose.

  And we did.

  I stand before you, not to accept laurels for my findings. I stand here in shame, for a terrible thing will happen soon.

  This is a vigil, you see.

  Soon, even as I speak, the button will be pushed and we shall face a brave new world, a tabula rasa, with the guilt of sins wiped clean. What the world will look like, I cannot say. I cannot imagine a universe without those learned men, those sages—the words of Aristotle and Plato like a light for us in the darkness. Their words, written for us, on the skins of children. It is a terrible thing we have done, and I do not know if Mankind will be the better for it.

  But I saw their bones and I have flayed myself of every pretension, every mark of civilisation, of academic certainty and distance. We live in a world in which a life must be measured against more than the length of a page—mustn’t it? Mustn’t it?

  That is why what follows must happen.

  They are dead.

  The children are dead.

  And so, colleagues, I ask that we wait, together. The button has been pushed. The world is changing. It will only be a moment now.

  THE OLD 44TH

  By Randy Stafford

  By day, Randy Stafford practices the dark arts of tax collection for his master and counsels his minions in the same. At night, after the anguished cries have faded from his ears, he cowers in his Minnesota domicile, comforted by his wife and an extensive collection of books and DVDs. He writes many a book review for Amazon. Every few years, he writes some poetry and, besides being an American Academy of Poets award winner in his long-ago-vanished college days, he has published poetry in National Review Online and 2001: A Science Fiction Poetry Anthology, and book reviews in Leading Edge.

  There is a geometry of Death.

  I have seen its streets and paths

  In the records of my father,

  From the old 44th.

  Krasten’s streets were open

  And straight like their minds,

  Calling for our wares

  And for our human ideas.

  So, they baited their minds for the Hounds,

  Pack predators from forests outside spacetime.

  They came and killed, as did my father,

  With comrades, to add another legend to the old 44th.

  And as he, the last of the 44th,

  Lay dying, his kit listened,

  Watched as the last of the Hounds

  Loped past the terminus of the city.

  Right there, where the
mesa ends,

  And their blue, frothy Hound blood

  Shone under the moons,

  Is where they’re kenneled.

  The Angles, kinks of rectitude,

  Hide them in the Beyond,

  And in our world of circles,

  There’s always more like the old 44.

  IRON FOOTFALLS

  By Julio Toro San Martin

  Julio Toro San Martin resides and writes in Toronto, Canada.

  I fled Him, down the nights and down the days...

  I said to Dawn: Be sudden–to Eve: Be soon;

  With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over

  From this tremendous Lover!...

  Halts by me that footfall;

  Is my gloom, after all,

  Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?

  — “The Hound of Heaven” by Francis Thompson

  Year 562 NNPE

  SHE CROUCHES ALONE in a corner, waiting quietly for you, her prosthetic reader barely registering her enclosed environment. She waits and remembers when her father first told her the dream of you. You were the embryo, the idea, the fixation in his brain, throbbing constantly like a metronome. How many versions of you there were, at first, she can’t now remember, but when something finally like yourself—your terrible self—emerged from the compass of his craft, his workshop cocoon, she naively marvelled at the sight.

  From somewhere, she hears the powerful disemboguements of the Ion-Plasma weapons. The tearing of metal. What a strange sound metal makes when it rips like paper. Tremors shake the walls. Loud blasts set air particles quivering. Then comes the silence. How many station drones have you destroyed now, Brother? Perhaps hundreds? She places her one biochemical hand against the cold, metallic sheen of a wall and thinks she can feel the steady, diminishing pulse of the CompuMind, retreating into itself, like a lanky, frightened tentacle into a deep hole. And then she hears your footfalls again.

  Steady. Steady. Moving in her direction.

  She wonders if you wonder how Father felt when you were almost complete. She wonders how he felt, too.

  As a young soldier, her father could remember being taken to the peripheries of the Oort Cloud. There, in the Rim System, where human habitation barely penetrated, from the windows of an interplanetary carrier, he could see the silent spaces beyond, stretching to eternity, where, in unfathomable distances, lay the cluttered stars, eons old. Stars, that had never known human passions, sickness, evil, war. Staring into those abysses of beautiful darkness and uncountable time, he had felt peace, awe, silence, and all the ages of strife had seemed as nothing to him, then. This is what she imagines he felt then, looking at you, as they both stood on this lone asteroid hurtling quietly through open space, around a star that’s been its companion since before life ever appeared on Earth: when the first planets were formed in early times out of the primordial, galactic ooze; when the stardust first touched the nascent valleys and mountains of his homeworld, and the first sunrises were there to be recorded by no one, until mankind had come.

  Do you grasp the sublimity of the image, the awe of time and eternity, the feeling of vastness, of grandeur—do you feel anything at all, she wonders, Brother?

  She’s lost. The only difference she can imagine between you is that her darkness is the blackness of this station, where the lights have all gone out, while your darkness is the blackness of the soul, where no light shines and perhaps never shone.

  She says, This darkness, this nutshell, this being locked up, inside and out, this claustrophobia is becoming maddening.

  She reaches out with her mechanised hand and cybersynapses instantaneously make her realise she’s touching blood. Dry blood—her own.

  Your footfalls are getting closer.

  From the corridors and the nearby airlock, she hears snippets of her absent father’s recorded mad talk, disjointed and emanating from the comm centres scattered throughout the station. They say:

  ***

  His name was Talus, made of iron mold,

  Immovable, resistless, without end;

  Who in his hand an iron flail did hold,

  With which he threshed out Falsehood, and did Truth unfold.*

  ***

  War. Drudgery. Pain. Death. Hopelessness. Destruction. War. Mankind. I will soon put right a mistake that never should have happened.

  ***

  Oh, how I long for you to live, Talus!

  ***

  His footfalls are coming faster, now, girl. Unstoppable. The booming echoes—gigantic. Like a mad-brained, moonstruck hound, he’s homing in on you.

  ***

  He will walk, breathe, and learn by uncontrollable compulsions like great, heaving seas of lava.

  ***

  Time is running out. She, however, has not given up hope. She believes some message will reach her father, the planets, or at least a stray ship.

  Sadly, no help will ever reach her. She is alone, too far from anyone.

  We see this all and laugh.

  Close now are your iron footfalls. With majestic instancy they beat.

  Crouching, she uncoils the segments of her cyborged arm, which then part and configure into two snake-like appendages that input into a wall panel nearby, joining metal to metal. Direct communication with the central brain of the CompuMind is now possible. She feels the totality of the station and, in cyberspace throughout it all, lurking, a foreign mind, hunting and sniffing for her. She bypasses this presence whenever she senses it and secretly whispers with the CompuMind in a shut psyche-lock. Her waiting is almost over, she tells it. The CompuMind warns her it hasn’t stored enough energy, yet.

  Her hastily-attached synthetic reader, resembling a goggle, retracts and re-lenses. Visual images, albeit poorly, allow her to focus more closely on the end of the lightless corridor.

  Your footfalls have stopped, Brother.

  A small scoutdrone is suddenly thrust into her line of vision. The drone makes a horrible screech and red lights begin to flash violently around it. She quickly tries to re-lens, to get a better optical reading, but before she can, we feel the drone’s insides ballooning with your meaty metal, Brother, until it explodes, leaving your gleaming feelers quivering with excitement.

  Shards of the scoutdrone hit her, cutting and jabbing into her organic parts. She loses her balance and falls over, hitting her plated head, yet still, she manages to remain hooked to the wall panel.

  Though dazed, the primitive lizard brain in her humanity causes her to involuntarily send a shocked, lightning-like panic signal to the CompuMind. It answers in kind.

  Reams of corded electricity shoot out from capacitors hidden throughout the corridor and impact on you fantastically. Energy illumes you, flashing and exploding in blinding, brilliant lights. Erratically, you still advance, like a dark planet rising within a molten sun. Her lens refocuses and she sees your shape, full of wrong angles and impossible edges and strangely moving contraptions that should not fit together. You heat up like the core of a red-hot star.

  She begins to feel pain. Terrible, burning pain. Her flesh bubbles. Her metal heats.

  We hear the CompuMind say, in a tone too emotional for a machine, “Impossible! Impossible! Nineteen dimensional spaces! Curved space collapsing, inconceivable angles surfacing!” And then it goes silent. The charges cease, darkness comes and, at long last, ends the chase.

  Now your being is upon her like a looming horror. She feels your electrified presence. She sees your terrible hand reach out to her. She awaits her death bravely.

  But nothing happens.

  She feels, above, your hand swing past her, like a bird of prey swooping for the kill and then leaving. You pass by her like a planet swing. Uninterested. Walking around her.

  She turns to see your footfalls recede and then vanish into a wall. You are now on the outside of the asteroid. Your massive shape is moving away. Your alien intent and intelligence are incomprehensible to her. An intelligence more like ours.

  How you yearn
to set us free. The blessed impurity of angular Space-Time will soon enter her dimension.

  Once, there was a God of love and spirit; now they have fashioned a god of metal and of the outer hells. Her father wanted to destroy those responsible for their ceaseless war and then start anew, yet through our influence he created instead a sentient machine, designed to perpetrate genocide on its own creators.

  You are like a scapegoat, Brother. In times long gone, when her species was as yet young, they would lay their sins upon a goat and send it into the wastes to die. This creature bore the sins of the people and they would be cleansed of their sins. You, the Talus Machine, are the last scapegoat come back out of the wastes, bearing their sins back to them.

  As she prepares to hunt for you on the asteroid, she hears your voice inside her head, metallic and scratchy, say the ultimate incomprehensibility to her mind: Witness as I fall into the sun and pull the worlds down. Then your heavy feet push away from the asteroid. Senseless, she thinks. Utter, complete senselessness.

  Seconds pass and then she begins to feel the pull—the great, gravitational pull of the collapsing sun that will soon form into a fast-burgeoning black hole, from which nothing will escape.

  These are the last hours of her species. Unbeknownst to her, on Earth, a few days past, the Great Old Ones rose in madness from their sleep and plunged with worshippers and slaves towards the blasphemous, ultra-dimensional, black planet of Yuggoth. And now, the last portal to Tindalos will soon be opened.

  Sasana Xavi VI rushes to a window, horrified. The stars in the night-black sky begin to burn out. The celestial bodies move. The asteroid shifts forcefully towards the sun. She looks one last time and then the lights of the universe go out.

  We will soon howl free from the other side of our prison-home. It will soon be time for a new arrangement.

  *From Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book V, Canto I.

  THIS SONG IS NOT FOR YOU

  By A. D. Cahill

  Avery Cahill has worn many hats in his life, from working at a cheese factory to Lecturer of Classics. He’s lived in Japan, Italy and Norway, but currently awaits the End Of Time while waging a losing war against fire ants in Florida. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and his fiction has appeared in Dog Oil Press and Innsmouth Free Press. Tweeting as Falcifer9000 or blogging at scythe-bearing chariot in the 2D world, he shouts into the meaningless void.