World War Cthulhu: A Collection of Lovecraftian War Stories

by John Shirley

  Then it ended.

  He got to his feet and hobbled the rest of the way to the dispatch Quonset. When he got there, he leaned against it trying to catch his breath. He could not seem to find his center. He held onto the outer metal shell because he was literally afraid that it would happen again and this time he really would fly apart.

  After about five minutes, he was calm.

  As calm as he was going to get anyway. He went through the door and found Jack Coye waiting for him. He was sitting by the radio, monitoring the air traffic out there. A cigarette dangled from his mouth. His usually robust face looked pale and pouchy. There were brown circles under his eyes.

  “Crazy night,” he said. “One hell of a crazy night.”

  Finn dropped himself into a swivel chair, pressing his hands flat against his legs so they would not shake. Jack poured him a cup of hot black coffee and he sipped it slowly, dragging off a Chesterfield.

  “You look like you seen a ghost,” Jack said.

  “Seen more than one,” Finn told him.

  “It’s that … whatever they’re doing over there. Some kind of generator, word has it. Some kind of energy source or something. Lots of weird stories making the rounds. I almost pissed my pants the last time they fired it up.” He turned from the radio and looked at Finn. “Been getting to you, too?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Finn said.

  “Feel it in your guts?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your head?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Makes you want to vomit out your stomach?”

  “Yes. What’s it about?”

  Jack shook his head and lit another cigarette. He sat there smoking it. A long gray ash fell from the end onto his uniform coat. He didn’t seem to notice. “Every time that machine up there kicks in, radio goes crazy. Everything cuts out. Nothing but static. But you should hear the traffic out there when it comes back on. Planes stalling out in the sky. Police losing their frequencies. Trouble over at the power plant. Maybe it’s not related; I don’t know.”

  Oh, it was related. Finn was certain of that. Whatever kind of machine they were developing or testing up there, it was like no machine the world had ever seen. He had no idea what it could be, but he was starting to be very afraid of its potential. Every time they kicked on, things went insane. The world changed, the sky changed. And each time it seemed to be a little worse.

  And what about that creature eating the raccoon? He asked himself with a slight involuntary shiver. What in the hell was that about?

  Again, he didn’t know. All he knew for sure was that it looked like some kind of horrible insect, but like no insect of this world. He wanted to tell himself it was unrelated to what they were fooling around with up there, but he wasn’t buying it. And particularly after he saw that swarm of them when the machine kicked on just a few minutes before.

  They were related, but in what way he did not know. It was simply beyond his comprehension.

  “I don’t know what they’re doing, Jack, but they’re putting out a lot of power. Power or energy like we never seen before.”

  Jack nodded, pulling off his cigarette. “The only scuttlebutt slipping out is something about a generator, a power source. That’s the core of Procyon, I guess. Gotta be something big, though. I pulled day shift last week. We had brass from the Defense Department coming through, and a general from Army Intelligence. I hear they had admirals from ONI and ONR here on Monday. This is big, Finn, real big. You know what else?”

  Finn looked at him. “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “Way I hear it, it won’t be just us handling security come next week. They’re bringing in soldiers to man the fence.”

  Finn was liking all of this less and less. They already had MPs guarding the main buildings, but now the fence, too? “Well, I hope they don’t blow us off the fucking planet.”

  Jack looked around conspiratorially as if he was trying to see if anyone was listening. “Now, I don’t claim to know what they got up there, but get this,” he said in a whisper. “I got a cousin over in Puxley. He works at a meatpacking house. Apparently, they’ve been doing business here at Blue Hills.”

  “A meatpacking house?”

  Jack nodded. “For the past month they’ve been bringing over truckloads of meat and blood.”

  “Blood?”

  “Yeah. According to my cousin, they’ve been delivering something like over a hundred pounds of raw meat and twenty gallons of animal blood two or three times a week,” Jack admitted. “It would take a small army to go through that much beef on a weekly basis. And the blood … what the hell do they want with twenty gallons of animal blood?”

  Finn felt sick inside. The scientists up there working on some kind of machine were one thing, but this was something else again. That much meat and blood suggested they were feeding animals. But there were no animals at Blue Hills. It wasn’t a biology station or a medical research outfit; they were involved strictly in weapons research. Physics and electronics and the like. That’s what the Procyon Project was about. At least, that’s what people said.

  Jack let that lay for awhile. “You think that’s strange? Well, get this. They’ve been getting deliveries of books and documents from some university out east. They come by special courier.”

  “What of it?”

  Jack offered him a sardonic grin. “These aren’t just any books or documents, friend. They’re not technical manuals or blueprints or any of that baloney. These are special.” He looked around ever more carefully now, ignoring the posters on the wall that said LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS and CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES. “These are magic books.”

  Finn couldn’t believe what he heard then. Not just magic as in pull-the-old-rabbit-out-of-the-hat, but magic as in black magic. These were ancient, rare compendiums of arcane lore about vanished religions and forgotten gods, spell books that described how to summon things from beyond space and time.

  “You mean, like demons?” he said, his voice dry as chalk dust.

  Jack shrugged. “Witch books, Finn. That’s what they are. My source told me they got weird names like Necronomicon and De Vermis Mysteriis … that’s Latin, by the way. These books are old, old, old. Very rare. They were banned by the church centuries ago. Only a few copies remain. Devil books.”

  “This is goddamn crazy. You sure your source isn’t having a good laugh at your expense?”

  Jack shook his head. His eyes were wide and unblinking, his face mottled with a grayish pallor. No, he looked worried; scared, even. His was not the face of someone who had gotten off a good one.

  “Those books are for calling up things … I can’t even pronounce the names. Don’t ask me to.”

  “But what’s it all mean, Jack? What the hell is going on here?”

  Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. They got some kind of machine that sends out waves or something that make people sick. It creates some kind of energy that makes the stars go funny. They’re bringing in blood and meat like they got a cage of tigers up there. And they’re studying books on devil worship and witchcraft.” He swallowed. “I’m afraid to connect the dots on this one.”

  “Me and you both, brother,” Finn said.

  ***

  They chatted for another hour, then separated to go make their rounds. It was easy and peaceful. Finn relaxed because there didn’t seem to be any more activity coming from up on the hill, and that was a godsend. He keyed in at the watch clocks, taking his time, enjoying the night. He saw nothing weird. Everything that had already happened was slowly fading in his mind and he was putting it in perspective—save for the big bug. He still couldn’t make sense of any of it, particularly the things Jack told him about, but he knew well enough that some things were better off being left alone.

  None of my business what they’re doing up there.

  Joe Heidigger had offered him a job driving a forklift over at the lumber yard last week and Finn was thinking very seriously about taking him up on it. Maybe it was time for a c
hange. Time to distance himself completely from the war and weapons. God knew he’d served, he’d done his part. Nobody could ask more from him.

  The night was nice. Real nice. That was what he liked about the graveyard shift. The quiet, the tranquility. The crickets. The night birds. The lonesome cry of an owl. The solitude put you in touch with yourself. You could think and make sense of things.

  He got back to the shack, poured a cup of coffee from his thermos, and settled in. He had high hopes the rest of the night would be quiet. But when he heard the sound of running footsteps he knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  Sighing, he stepped out of the shack and saw Dr. Westly right away. He was one of the Procyon Project scientists. His game was physics, Finn knew. In the flashlight beam, his eyes were wide, his mouth trembling. “Up there,” he breathed. “It’s happening up there … we can’t stop it now. We can’t!”

  “Can’t stop what?” Finn asked.

  “The machine … it’s self-augmenting! It no longer needs us!”

  “You’re not making any sense,” Finn told him.

  “We … we saw the potential for a new weapon. Dear God, but we did! It was a cutting-edge fusion of theoretical physics, particle theory, and witchcraft theorem … yes, yes, yes! How could we know what we were playing at? The elemental forces of chaos we were tampering with?”

  By this time, he had grabbed hold of Finn and simply would not let go. His eyes were those of a lunatic, his face wet with rolling beads of sweat, his mouth contorted, his face twisted into a frightened mask of pure animal terror. “We let them through … yes, we did! But only the insects! I swear, it was only the insects! We had peered through the doorway of multi-dimensional reality into the very heart of a cosmic anti-world! We fed the insects with blood and meat and they got larger and larger! They were not of this dimensional plane … don’t you see? We couldn’t contain them. They could utilize four-dimensional space! They flew right through the walls! Right through them!”

  Finn was getting frightened himself. “Doctor, you have to calm down.”

  “I can’t calm down! I don’t dare calm down! The machine is still active! It no longer needs us! It draws its energy right from the stars and the atoms themselves! Those things got into the machine! They took it over! They activated it! It runs because they will it!”

  “The insects?”

  “No, you fool! Those migrating minds from beyond! Those formless, shapeless entities that want to bring the horror through! The monstrosity from the throne of primal chaos! That living primordial mass of nuclear cataclysm—”

  Westly was out of his mind, completely out of his mind, and Finn wasn’t too far behind him.

  The rumbling starting again.

  Shit.

  The earth shook and he heard a roaring sound from up on the hill as Westly continued to rant on and on. Then a shock wave of sorts knocked him off his teetering feet and nearly punched the wind out of him. It came with a great booming noise. It felt like Blue Hills had been picked up and dropped. He had the same sensation as you get from riding an elevator down many floors. The vibrations followed immediately.

  From the vicinity of Building A and Building B, he heard screaming.

  Finn got to his feet and hobbled up the road even though his belly was flopping and his head felt like it was filled with a storm of pillow down. He had a hell of a time staying on his feet, but somebody needed help, and he was going to help them.

  The vibrations were coming from up on the hill, moving in oscillating waves that made him feel like his bones were hollow and he might drift off into the sky like a helium balloon at any moment.

  “Don’t!” Westly cried. “Don’t go up there!”

  “I have to!” Finn told him.

  The world around him had become a threatening, evil thing. Nothing was right. The stars were drawing down again and the tree branches undulating like tentacles, reaching up toward the sky. Buildings A and B leaned this way and that like narrow tombstones. They were wiggling like loose teeth. He tried to blink it away, but it remained, growing more distorted by the moment. The landscape became an abomination. He saw shadowy dark structures like obelisks and spheres and cylinders rising in the distance. And then—

  A whirring sound as swarms of those nameless insects filled the night sky and then a great flapping as of immense leathery wings and he saw other things flying above him, just over his head … save that they were glossy and black, anthropomorphic but lacking anything that might be called faces.

  Westly screamed at the sight of them and Finn himself could only stand there, a numb and mute witness to the grim intersection of worlds.

  The vibrations grew stronger and stronger.

  The sky became a whirling, spinning vortex of thunder and flashing lightning. The rumbling became the roaring of freight trains, as if the mother of all tornados was bearing down on them. There was a deafening shearing, ripping sound like static electricity crackling and popping. The air went hot as a funeral pyre, then cold as Arctic wastes.

  It was like trying to breathe warm, wet oatmeal. Then a searing hot wind hit him, driving him to his knees next to the shrieking form of Westly. The wind was peppered with flakes of ash like a blizzard.

  It came with incredible force.

  The hill that Buildings A and B occupied had risen like the cap of a monstrous mushroom now, and as he watched, the roofs of both exploded into fragments with a blinding blue flash of light that carried the fragments straight up into the night.

  Then the sky above them split open in a luminous aperture like blazing sunlight seeping through a crack in a drawn shade. The hole widened, fanned out, consumed the sky and became a great and glowing gash of sucking, vacuuming wind that dragged both Westly and Finn along the ground, trying to draw them up into the cataclysmic heavens, which had become a huge and discordant vortex of spinning, twisting cyclonic matter.

  Something was coming through that gash.

  Something that had come to devour the world, to suck its blood and gnaw on its cold yellow bones.

  Westly went absolutely hysterical at the sight of it, screaming and screaming, making strange signs with his hands. His speech was frenetic and garbled, but Finn heard this much: “It’s coming for us! It’s coming for all of us! The primal nuclear chaos! Dear God, help us …Yog Sothoth spare us! Nyarlathotep! Iä … ngai … ygg … IÄ! IÄ! THE EYE OF AZATHOTH! I SEE IT! I SEE IT OPENING!”

  Finn just waited there, speechless, mindless, helpless.

  This was the end result of the Procyon Project, the ultimate triumph of weird machines and banned books and blood and meat—to call down this godless, hideous nightmare from the subcellar of reality, this writhing haunter of the dark, this seed of atavistic dread, this living atomic furnace. Yes, this is what they’d been trying to do all along. This was the power they were trying to harness and the force they wanted to weaponize.

  They had been trying to bring this atomic placental nightmare to term.

  Finn thought for one insane moment that the full moon was being birthed from that gash. But it was no moon unless the moon had gone misty, indistinct and nebulous, a fluttering pale orb like a bleached and decomposing eyeball. And like a cyclopean eye, the thing began to iris open lengthwise, swimming closer and closer, filling the sky … and he saw something in there, something begin to unfold like the petals of some degenerate flower. Squirming, slithering things like fleshy ropes of afterbirth, unwinding and reaching out, growing and lengthening and dividing a thousand times until above the hill there was a forest of pulsing, whipping, transparent roots that seemed to reach for miles.

  And beneath them … a phosphorescent chasm. A fungoid, hissing miasma that began to erupt and open like a mouth, slowly, ever slowly. A birth canal. There was something alive in there, a roiling river of cremating pink hunger. Something alive with a glaring and ancient intelligence, a cold and alien hunger reaching out from some haunted, charnel dimension. It had come to devour the world.

  Fi
nn heard a reverberating, wet mewling, like the agonized cries of some deformed, grotesque infant being born.…

  In mere minutes, the thing had divided and expanded like pestilential cells in a Petri dish, a great and squirming tumescent web that was spreading over the heavens, the ravaged husks of Buildings A and B silhouetted against the flashing, blinding, awesome energy of its face.

  It had not only filled the sky, but become the sky, and Finn was certain he was only seeing the barest fragment of its immensity.

  Then there was a rending, rocketing explosion, and the sky sealed back up, and the thing which was engulfing the heavens let go with a huge and deafening eruption of force and matter and disappeared.

  When Finn came to some time later, the world around him was filled with smoke and fire. The destruction was everywhere. The buildings were gone. More so, the hills that held them were missing, too. A smoldering, blackened crater had opened up in their place. The land was flattened and gutted as far as he could see, thousands of trees blasted and felled. It looked like the dark side of the moon out there, gray and scarred and lifeless.

  Westly was dead.

  He lay there, covered in a dusting of gray ash, his hands held before him like gnarled claws, his mouth hooked in a twisted grimace, his eyes bulging from their sockets.

  Dazed, numb, half out of his mind, Finn stumbled through flaming debris and a mist of greasy black smoke until he reached the place where the guard shack had been but was no more. It was here he fell to the ground, shaking and feverish. In the distance he heard police sirens and fire whistles.

  Jack Coye was the first one to get to him. Like Finn himself, Jack was streaked with windblown ash, face smudged with soot. He gathered Finn in his arms. “Come on, boy, don’t check out on me now. Talk to me, kid.”

  Finn smiled up at him. “Is it gone?” he said.

  “Yeah … yeah, it’s gone.”

  Finn breathed in and out for a moment, then managed to sit up. “Whole place went up.”

  Jack nodded. “Sure, sure. Nothing left. But … did you see it? Did you really see it?”