Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2011

by Mike Davis (Editor)

  And so I have come to you, on this foggy day in Providence, and lured you from your little world among the university lads, and held your hand as we walked past the little park adjacent to the shunned house. And we walked the streets where once Poe trod, and climbed down the steps that led to the winding walkway that took us into this enchanting burying ground. And isn’t it strange, as we sit upon this tabletop tomb, how the fog seems to take on a pallid tint, like unto the haze of that curious yellow day? Your large eyes are so lovely as they study the spots of mould that begin to blossom on my face. Caught in sudden perplexity, you cannot move as I tilt toward you and press my mouth to yours, as the tiny stems of mist seep from the spongy patches on my face and so intoxicate you. You will not protest as I peel one soft tissue of fungi from my visage and place it on your tongue.

  I want to kiss you, one last time.

  -

  -

  Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire is a writer of horror fiction based in Seattle, Washington. His adopted middle name derives from the story of the same title by Edgar Allan Poe. Strongly influenced by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, many of Pugmire’s stories directly reference “Lovecraftian” elements (such as Yog-Sothoth of the Cthulhu Mythos). Pugmire’s major original contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos is the Sesqua Valley, a fictional location in the Pacific Northwest of the United States that serves as the primary locale for much of his fiction. According to his official biography, his “goal as an author is to dwell forevermore within Lovecraft’s titan shadow.” Pugmire is a self-proclaimed eccentric recluse as well as “the Queen of Eldritch Horror.” His stories have appeared in major horror anthologies, and collections of his fiction and poetry have appeared under small press imprints such as Necropolitan Press, Mythos Books, Delirium Books, and Hippocampus Press.

  Visit W.H. Pugmire’s page at Amazon.com to buy his books!

  Story art by mimulux.

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  NOTE: Images contained in this Lovecraft eZine are Copyright ¬©2006-2012 art-by-mimulux. All rights reserved. All the images contained in this Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without my express written permission. These images do not belong to the public domain. All stories in Lovecraft eZine may not be reproduced, copied, edited, published, transmitted, borrowed, duplicated, printed, downloaded, or uploaded in any way without the express written permission of the editor.

  Dreams of Fire and Glass, conclusion

  by Neal Jansons

  NOTE: This is the conclusion of a two-part story. Click here to read part one of Dreams of Fire and Glass.

  Almost submerged in the bathtub, lay a shape. It had a head, two arms and legs, but at that point the resemblance to humanity ended. Its bulbous eyes and thick lips suggested batrachian ancestry, while the gills on each side of its neck suggested a few fish in the family tree. I couldn’t tell whether its green, silvery skin had scales, but it looked rubbery and shined in the low bathroom light, so I assumed its surface to be smooth. My washcloth lay across its face as it reclined in the water. If anything, it looked like a stressed-out man trying to relax after a hard day. I cleared my throat loudly, but the creature didn’t seem to react, so I decided to take my chances and speak. If I were more of a man of action, I might have pulled out a baseball bat or some sort of weapon, but brutal self-awareness told me that was a very bad idea. It was time to play to my strength.

  Sarcasm.

  “Have a rough day, dear?” I tried to force levity I didn’t feel into my hoarse voice. “Want me to rub your back?”

  The creature sat up with a splash, the washcloth falling from its face, and turned to look at me. Its thick, round eyes widened and blinked several times, its pupil a long vertical wedge, and its mouth dropped open to reveal rows of thin, spine-like teeth.

  “HOOAAARRROOOONK,” it screamed and began thrashing around in the bath ineffectually. “RAAAUGHN-FLUI HA EHKA FA!”

  “Whoa, hold on, fella,” I said, putting out my hands. “Don’t panic.”

  “HEARA HOFEN KA, PTAHLIS!” The creature ignored my pleas. It looked more scared of me than I was of it. While it flailed in understandable panic–after all, I probably looked as strange to it as it did to me, and I did barge in on its bath–I felt as if I were in a dream, detached, overwhelmed by the sheer fact of the creature before me.

  “Look, obviously something weird is happening,” I said. “Just calm down, and we can figure out how to get you home.” I looked back into the apartment and saw the paper-covered walls pulsing as a sickly greenish light filled the room. “Or get me home, as the case may be.” I forgot all about the apparently terrified creature in my bathtub and walked into my room. My computer was glitching; mathematical symbols and letters in an unknown language floated on the screen, arranging and rearranging themselves at a dizzying speed. The layers of paper on my wall were pulsing slowly and wheezing, as if the room were breathing. In the corners, a strange luminescent lichen was growing in thick disks, and deep inside of myself, a part of me screamed in recognition.

  I have seen this before, I thought. But where?

  As I stood, reeling at the warped reality my room had become, some part of me whispered, too much, and made me fall to the bed. I pulled my knees up to my chest and began to shiver. Before me, I saw the twitching collection of eyes, which had stopped their mad rolling to stare at me, and I could see the confusion and terror I felt mirrored in each of them. In the bathroom, I heard more splashing, then the horrific squelching sound of rubbery, webbed feet hitting the tile. As I gazed at the eyes in my collage, first one closed, then another, then they all fell shut, their eyelashes overlapping to suggest more symbols in a language I couldn’t recognize.

  “Good idea,” I said and closed my eyes. In the blackness behind my lids I saw a swirling depth and felt myself fall.

  #

  Bizarrely, I slept.

  The room I found myself in was dark, but in the manner of dreams, I knew somehow that darkness was better. A single window hung in the far wall, and I could see the moon, nearly full, and as its light filled my eyes, I could see it was moving far too quickly.

  The Earth is small tonight, I thought.

  The square of light moved down my legs and across the floor. It fell upon a foot, deformed and twisted, its toes turned in and ankle stretched, so that it resembled a soft hoof. As the light spread and worked its way up from the foot to the leg, a voice came out of the darkness that I had never heard outside of online voice-chat.

  “As we look into the old, we become the old, and the old becomes the new.”

  “Sabrina?” I asked. “Is that you?”

  “The dreams you weave, oh engineer, the spires of twisted minarets and beasts stalking the fields. The hunters in the shadows wait, wait, wait listening; all we need do is give the word. Great, shapeless things, and things with shapes we cannot know. Lurking beyond our horizons and dreaming, always dreaming.”

  “Sab?” I suddenly felt a great urge to go to her, to kiss her, to push myself upon her again and again. “Are you okay?”

  The light crept up her legs, which seemed bent oddly, and splashed across her thighs.

  “The spaces between speak of endless, enormous paroxysms of madness and joy. Endlessly writhing, twisting through spasms of ‘is’ and ‘is not’.”

  I found my body walking toward her, and I fought it, forcing my legs to stop by will alone. Lust rose in my body, and fear sharpened it, forcing me to stumble toward her even as I was repulsed.

  “I see!” she said. “Great dancers at the end of time, nay, outside of time, finding their way home. Great shapes moving beyond the spiral arms of our galaxy, throwing shadows over the world, making their places ready. The great bear hangs by its tail in the sky and the demon eye is ascendant.”

  The light made its way up her naked belly and chest. Her arms, elongated and hideously stretched down the length of her body
, sat balanced, elbows on knees, holding something.

  “The beauty, the beauty!” Sabrina sang out. “Entrances to hidden gulfs, the lights, the eyes…THE EYES!”

  The light reached her hands and revealed a doll made of pale canvas cloth. Its button eyes and sewed-on mouth seemed to be widened in a scream.

  “The end, the end, the end is in the in-between, Jason. The crossroads.” It was the first time she had said my name, and the sound of it in her sing-song chant made my body cold and damp. “The below, the above, the beside…these places hid the truth. But now the truth is revealed in fire and glass.”

  Sabrina’s hands twisted in the moonlight, pulling the arms of the doll. Her fingers were thick, folded together, and encrusted with layers of flaking skin.

  “We always knew they were there, just beyond the horizon,” she continued to croon. “We made tales of gods and angels, devils and demons, to give a face to that knowledge.”

  One arm of the doll stretched, then suddenly came away from the body. A thick, viscous fluid flowed from its torn arm, and the room filled with the smell of copper.

  “We made up stories to explain what we felt of their presence,” she said, her tone shifting, becoming casual, almost conspiratorial. “But nothing we could imagine told the truth.”

  Her hands continued to tear apart the doll, shredding its remaining arm, legs, and head apart till finally only the torso remained, and she squeezed and squeezed and squeezed as it oozed thick, red fluid. Finally, she dropped the remains of the doll, and they fell wetly to the floor. I felt the lust within me rise to spasm, and the coppery smell became delicious as it tickled long-dormant neurons. I stumbled forward another step toward her and saw the light passing toward her face.

  “The long-hidden will be revealed, the ancient spires of that great city will rise above the waves, and lust and love and fury shall rule the land.” Her body began to writhe and twist. “Ah, it hurts,” she gasped with what seemed like pleasure.

  As the light reached her face, a final spasm wracked her twisted form. I felt a sharp, hollow pain within my chest and back, like heat and pain and tingling pleasure all at once, and fell to the ground. A sudden vision of Sabrina filled my mind, and I saw her galloping down the alley beside my building, her lengthened arms and twisted legs working in fierce harmony, her face warped into a parody of her old features. Her rapturous eyes, pulled into slits, shone with a hideous glee, and thin, almost non-existent lips revealed long, gritted teeth that strained the jaws that housed them. She rocked back and forth as she galloped until, in a single, fluid motion, she turned on me and reared, those twisted jaws opening wide, drool glistening on the jagged teeth. The pain in my torso became unbearable, and I squeezed my eyes closed, denying it and everything else, but even then I could still hear Sabrina’s joyful galloping.

  #

  I woke to my phone vibrating its way across my desk and quickly reached over to grab it. The caller ID said “Josh”. I tapped the key to send it to voicemail and looked around my room cautiously. The walls had ceased to breath, the eyes were still, and the glowing, green lichen was gone. I stood up and checked my computer and the bathroom, finding the alien computations and bathtub visitor gone as well. Had it been a dream? Maybe I fell asleep earlier than I thought and had simply dreamed that I had fallen asleep. The contents of the dream could be chalked up to playing too much Fire and Glass and chatting with Sabrina.

  Chuckling at the notion of a recursive dream, I sat down at the computer and opened my internet browser. While the window opened and my email disgorged its daily spam, I reached over and tapped my phone to listen to Josh’s message. The speaker buzzed as I opened Google Reader to check out the headlines.

  “Hey man, it’s Josh. Henry and some of the others helped me grind my character a few levels, and we’re talking about going after the King in Yellow tonight. You in?”

  I scanned down the articles pulled from my favorite gaming blogs. It looked like the game was doing well, the population was rising fast. It was estimated that soon the total people playing would hit over two billion. The other games had become ghost-towns, with even the most hardcore players switching to Fire and Glass.

  “I’m at work, so I can’t check in-game, but can you see if you can find Sabrina? She’s not answering her phone, and we need to know if she is coming to the raid tonight. We need her heals.”

  Switching from industry blogs to normal news, I saw the overall swell in violence was continuing. Analysts were stumped as to what was causing it, and various groups, from environmentalists to evangelical Christians, had put forth theories ranging from global warming to the apocalypse. I chuckled to myself while scanning the transcript of a televangelist blaming the increase in violent crimes on gay marriage. A senator blamed it on the increased violence in political rhetoric, while, of course, a parent’s advocacy group blamed it on video games.

  “Anyway, I gotta go, man. People here are being crazy today. It’s like half of them are walking around in a daze, the other half want to kill each other. I’ll see you in-game. Lates.”

  I opened Fire and Glass in another window and checked to see if Sabrina was in-game. She wasn’t. I opened my instant messenger, and it said ‘Idle 6 hours 28 minutes’ next to her screen-name. I closed Fire and Glass and went back to reading the day’s blogs. I switched from news to my ‘local’ list, blogs that were about things happening in San Francisco.

  LOCAL ARTIST MISSING, SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING IN MURDER

  I clicked the link and was taken to SFGate.Com.

  (SAN FRANCISCO) LAUREN TATE, 23, WAS FOUND MURDERED AND MUTILATED IN HER MARKET STREET APARTMENT EARLIER TODAY. POLICE ARE SEEKING HER ROOMMATE, SABRINA HSUEH, 25, A FREELANCE DIGITAL ARTIST AND THE COMPUTER GRAPHICS DEVELOPER RESPONSIBLE FOR THE FAMOUSLY SUCCESSFUL ‘FIRE AND GLASS’, THE ONLINE GAME THAT HAS TAKEN THE WORLD BY STORM. HSUEH, WHOSE WORK HAS NOW BECOME HIGHLY SOUGHT AFTER, HAS BEEN DESCRIBED AS ‘RECLUSIVE’ AND A ‘HOMEBODY’ BY NEIGHBORS AND FRIENDS, LEADING THE POLICE TO BELIEVE HER EXTENDED DISAPPEARANCE IS CONNECTED TO THE MURDER OF HER ROOMMATE. “WE DON’T KNOW IF SHE WAS KIDNAPPED OR WAS SOMEHOW INVOLVED IN THIS BRUTAL KILLING,” SAID SFPD DETECTIVE MIKE SPENCER. “BUT WE DO BELIEVE THAT FINDING MISS HSUEH WILL BE NECESSARY TO BRINGING MISS TATE’S KILLER TO JUSTICE.” POLICE ARE ASKING ANYONE WHO KNOWS ANYTHING ABOUT THE CASE OR KNOWS THE LOCATION OF SABRINA HSUEH TO PLEASE CALL THE SAN FRANCISCO POLICE DEPARTMENT OR CONTACT THEM VIA THEIR WEBSITE, WWW.SF-POLICE.ORG.

  Looks like we’re gonna need a new healer tonight, I thought. I sighed long and hard and went to our cult’s website. I quickly posted to the forum that Sabrina was missing, and that we needed a new high-level healer before tonight. Then I closed the browser and went to lie back down and take a nap before the raid. No one had ever fought the King in Yellow before. No one, including Sabrina, even knew what he looked like; the graphics had been supplied by the client, Nathan. We were going to be the first, and for all anyone knew, the zone leading up to him and the fight itself could take all night, or even days. I needed my rest.

  #

  I awoke feeling refreshed and to a pinging on my computer. Voicemail; a message from Sabrina. I clicked ‘Play’. At first she was silent, and all I could hear was her breathing a bit of static. In the background, I could hear dripping water.

  “–and I found myself looking down from a great height. I could see everything, and it was all so small, and the rushing in my ears was deafening. My flight was through air and space and the place in between, and my breath was taken away by speed and suddenness. My eyes could feel the friction of the air against them, but then the friction was gone, and I opened my mouth so that I could taste the vacuum. Stars and lights–such lights as I had never imagined–flew past and with me. Further and further I flew, until I was taken past all stars, and into an utter blackness at the center of all things. There was no light, so far were we from the stars, but I felt it there, crouching, spinning, dancing, and I could hear the wailing of pipes all around, cap
ering presences that I could feel leering at me as they played tunelessly. I had found it; after years of searching, I had found god, the ontological ground, the answer to the threat of non-being. And god was an idiot, amused by fools.”

  I was puzzled. The narrative made little sense, and it sounded like Sabrina had started it in the middle. I clicked on my IM to see if she was on. ‘Idle 10 hours 56 minutes’.

  “Then I flew past even that idiot god who dances at the center of time and space. I went out of the darkness and, though I saw no planet, was soon above a city, a city so glorious that it made my heart ache and tears flow down my face. Golden and beautiful, caught eternally in the moment of sunset. Walls of veined marble and temples to unknown gods tipped with spires of gold and lapis lazuli. Wide streets lined with delicate trees, and perfumed gardens housed flowers of a thousand varieties, each more beautiful than a mother’s face to her child, each blossom more delicate than a snowflake. It was here that I finally felt dread, for the city was never-ending. It went on endlessly in all directions, its amazing complexity and eternal beauty tempting the eye to look first here, then there, trying to take in each marvel. But I could see. I looked and looked and looked, and no one was there.”