Return of the Old Ones: Apocalyptic Lovecraftian Horror

by Tim Curran

  “Do I kill her?” he asked aloud, and wondered whether that would even work.

  And I did this to her, transformed her into this travesty of life, her and the rest of humanity.

  Seven Days Earlier

  His wife, Sarah, sat channel-hopping, found it on BBC News. She put down the remote and watched avidly as the newsreader talked about the Internet phenomenon taking over website after website after its initial infestation of YouTube. From the other side of the room, he paused his current typing at his PC and watched the interaction, Sarah on the couch the receiver, and the television facing her the transmitter. He smiled grimly, with just a little pride.

  Lloyd and an army of fellow acolytes across the globe had programmed Webdriver Torso piece by piece over many months before unleashing it. Code through dreams and visions, sent by a dreaming god. His smile grew as he listened to the television.

  “Webdriver Torso, as most viewers will know, began as seemingly pointless eleven-second clips, all showing a series of blue and red rectangles, that were uploaded in their thousands to YouTube.”

  Pointless. He laughed and Sarah looked his way. Long, red center-parted hair, big blue eyes, round face. She smiled and returned her gaze to the television.

  “—and each of the almost-hundred thousand clips, uploaded over a six-month period, follow the same pattern—ten slides, each with a red rectangle, a blue rectangle, and a computer-generated tone. There have been a variety of theories postulated, including one that the videos are a signal from aliens, or a digital version of spies’ numbers stations, like the ones used during the Cold War to decode messages. Another outlandish theory is that it’s a rogue artificial intelligence, spreading itself virally. Now that the clips have begun migrating onto other websites, replacing the clips already there, that theory is looking more and more like a reality. We now go to the BBC’s technical expert, Stephen Becker, to discuss this phenomenon and talk about how the spread can be stopped.”

  It can’t, Lloyd thought, and standing, walked over to the couch. He leaned down and kissed Sarah on the head. “I’m going for a walk, hon.”

  She turned, took his head in her hands and kissed him heavily on the lips. “Tea at seven,” she said with a smile.

  “Oh I’ll be back before then,” he replied and walked around the couch, taking his jacket and baseball cap from the hooks on the wall beside the front door.

  “Later, baby,” Sarah said as he left the house.

  All going according to plan. Closing the door behind him, he stepped onto the pavement and examined his street. The sky was darkening just past sunset, the street quiet except for a few children playing around at the other end. He turned right, passing a few of the neighbors’ terraced houses until he reached a junction. Lloyd paused there, looked around for traffic, and crossed the road. More terraced houses followed, the sounds of televisions vibrating through the windows making him wonder if they were watching the news like Sarah.

  Soon he would have to do something with her, something drastic, for when the Program went full-exposure, he couldn’t hope to stop her watching it with words. Tie her up? Crude, but probably necessary. He’d feed her, keep her clean, and explain it all when things were over. Reaching the end of the street, Lloyd approached and entered an area of wasteland, covered in the foundations of demolished houses gone to nature.

  Walking through the grass, weeds, and stony foundations, he inhaled heavily, enjoying the scents of Mother Nature—a rare commodity in a town of bricks and concrete. He stopped, closed his eyes, and—

  Thick fog permeated the air around him, damp and smelling of the sea. He turned, examined his new surroundings, and saw nothing but white in every direction. It reminded him of school, his first days there as a teenager, standing alone on the field and staring out at the swirling mist. Walking into it, he’d imagine it led to a different world, one devoid of discipline and rules.

  “You’re there again.” The voice made him jump, but he knew he should’ve expected her.

  He turned around to face a black silhouette in the mist, a silhouette that spoke with a strange yet beautiful humming voice.

  “I was thinking about the past, and escape.”

  She nodded, a barely perceptible movement. As he had done before, he stepped forward to try and discern some features in her darkness. They were there, but shifting, moving so fast that they were in a constant state of flux. She raised her hand and he accepted it, a tingle of electricity shooting up his arm as they walked through the fog.

  “How is the plan progressing?” she asked, and the tingling grew stronger, beginning to shake his hand.

  “All good. My contact says infection is up to nine million computers in the UK alone. It’s all over the news.”

  “All good,” she repeated, and swayed her arm happily like a child.

  They continued through the white world in silence, broken when a large, humped object appeared before them.

  His companion said, “Ah.”

  Lloyd turned, looked at the shifting face and thought he detected a smile there.

  “This is Cthulhu,” she said. “Go; look,” she added, and released his hand.

  He stepped forward eagerly through the fog. As he walked it billowed and parted, giving him a clearer view of what he discovered was a bronze statue set upon a rectangular pedestal of malachite. The verdigris-spotted shape was humanoid and sat crouched upon its haunches. Its face, however, was far from human. Instead, it resembled an octopus with large, bulging eyes upon its swollen head. Its hands and feet terminated in claws, the former gripping its knees. Lloyd walked around it, and saw upon its humped back a pair of small dragon wings.

  “This is the future, a world for the chosen,” the silhouette said. “Two years from now. Why, you even helped construct this yourself.”

  “How … how can this be?” Lloyd asked.

  “How are you here? You would call it a wormhole, an Einstein-Rosen bridge. We used it to reach you and the other acolytes in the beginning.”

  Lloyd smiled and laid a hand on the statue. It felt incredibly cold to the touch, so much so it began to burn, but he kept holding it, his anchor to a future he was helping to build.

  “Tonight you start on a new phase,” the silhouette said. “The infection must be brought to its peak if the Program is to remain on schedule.”

  He reluctantly removed his hand from the statue. “I want to see more of this world. Please, let me see it?”

  The silhouette shook her head and said, “The future is still forming. Keep to the Program, and the mists, these mists,” she raised her arms to indicate the white surrounding them, “will clear.”

  “What happened to your hand, honey?”

  Lloyd was surprised at Sarah’s observational skills; he’d gotten so much past her already. She stood over him as he typed away at the keyboard and he paused, examined the red mark on his right palm. “Maybe an insect bite, I think. A fly or some bug over at the wasteground earlier.” He thought his lie was a good one, and it worked, for she replied, “Well there’s some cream in the bathroom cabinet, and hey, don’t work too late, will you?” She leaned over and kissed him. He felt her tongue and, getting the beginnings of an erection, pulled away and said, “I’ll be half an hour, tops.”

  She kissed him on the forehead and headed for the stairs behind him. He heard her go up and enter the bedroom, and experienced a feeling of indecision. Should I join her, or continue with the Webdriver Program? It was a fleeting thought, the biological urge, for his responsibility to the Program had to come first. Ever since the visions started, two years earlier, first in his dreams and then in the strange, misty reality, he had lived for it.

  Confident he wouldn’t be disturbed, Lloyd closed the browser window he’d been looking at and reopened one in his bookmarks called ‘Unlock Torrents.’ The name was a lie, in fact; the link led him to a blank page with a box asking for two passwords. He typed those in and the window turned black before, in a small font, a list of ot
her inductees to the Program scrolled down the screen.

  There were users in Pakistan, the former USSR (these he knew, had been taking care of the macro viruses now filling electronic documents in computers worldwide), and users in America and the United Kingdom. The latter, him included, had been installing the boot sector viruses—particular files on unwitting users’ hard drives that executed when they booted their computers.

  With his mouse, he moved down the screen to the bottom left, clicked on an invisible icon, and brought up a list of the most recently infected users. Hundreds scrolled down the page, and some he saw, highlighted in red, were connected to news networks. Lloyd smiled. Quite soon, the networks would be fully infiltrated. Starting to type, he began the activation. The networks, as far as he had seen, had been silent about the virus attacking their own systems. Pretty soon, they wouldn’t have a choice but to expose their infection.

  Five Days Earlier

  As Lloyd entered the house he found Sarah there to greet him with an excited expression on her face. She led him by the hand into the lounge before he even had the opportunity to remove his coat.

  “You won’t believe this,” she said excitedly, and pointed at the television. A news channel was on, the newsreader, a well-dressed woman with short black hair and glasses, speaking seriously with a ‘Breaking News’ logo scrolling by beneath her.

  “You just have to listen to this,” Sarah continued, and having led him to the couch, sat down herself.

  He followed suit and watched the news.

  “They have been falling in the thousands,” the newsreader said, “all across South America, with some isolated cases being reported in Mexico. The people, with no signs of previous symptoms, are being found in their beds unresponsive and, by most accounts, being described as being in a ‘comatose state.’

  “Argentina is apparently the worst hit by this mysterious illness, and we take you now to our correspondent there, Ryan Willis, who is present at an emergency conference held by the Center of Disease Control in Buenos Aires.”

  The scene changed to a harried-looking tanned man in a white shirt. His blond hair unruly, his shirt unbuttoned, he began speaking loudly but nervously into a microphone, trying to get his voice heard over the crowd surrounding him.

  “… Willis,” the man said mid-speech, “speaking to you from outside the Embassy of the United States. With the huge influx of comatose patients filling the hospitals of Argentina beyond their ability to find beds, and new victims being discovered hourly, the CDC has intervened with this impromptu conference. The representative, sorry, I don’t know his name, is stepping up now.”

  The camera view moved from the correspondent to a sea of figures that stood facing a handful of men and women standing on large wooden blocks outside the embassy gates. It zoomed in on a tall, dark-skinned man dressed in a blue suit. His black hair was plastered to his head with sweat, and his expression was agitated.

  “We will be taking questions later,” he said into his microphone in a slightly accented voice, “but for now let me get a few things clear in regards to this emergency.” He stopped, and a woman to his right translated what he had just said into Spanish.

  “We are calling this a public health emergency, and have some instructions to give to you.” The translator spoke again, then, “First of all I must address the rumors that have been circulating about this emergency being due to the spread of contaminated coca leaves, I—”

  “Coca leaves?” Lloyd asked Sarah, and she looked at him with a wry smile. “Cocaine leaves,” she replied.

  “… no evidence of this, so I want to quell that rumor right now,” the CDC spokesman continued. “Until we discover the cause of what we are tentatively calling an outbreak, I want to ask the people of Argentina to limit their contact with the afflicted and also, where possible, to limit their contact with large groups of people in enclosed spaces.”

  Cameras flashed as a roar of dissent rippled through the crowd. The translator tried to speak but was overwhelmed by angry voices.

  The camera panned to the angry crowd then returned to the correspondent. More harried than before, his shirt’s armpits and chest now bore dark patches. The man started speaking rapidly, but rather than listen, Lloyd leant back into the couch and put his arm around Sarah.

  “Hey, someone’s happy,” she said, and he realized his mouth had formed a broad grin.

  “Ah, I was just thinking about something I heard earlier,” he lied.

  It’s spreading faster than I thought, Lloyd mused. His mood soured as he realized that now was the time to restrain Sarah.

  “Hey,” he said. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  Sarah grinned and snuggled into him.

  “Sounds like a plan,” she replied.

  Now

  Lloyd sat with Sarah for as long as he could bear, mere minutes, before he found himself unable to look at, or hear, what was happening to her. He walked downstairs, found the remote control on the couch, and aiming it at the television, pressed the ON button.

  It came on after a couple of seconds, a blue screen with a white box at its center displaying the words ‘NO SIGNAL.’ Checking through the channels revealed more of the same, and after going through twenty or so, he gave it up, tossing the remote back on to the couch.

  A quick stride towards the PC, and Lloyd sat down, opening a browser window to Google.

  The Internet works, but for how long? he thought and typed the words ‘news headlines.’ As expected, a list of the world’s most recent horrors appeared onscreen.

  ‘Coma virus’ victims appear worldwide—States of Emergency called in over 70 countries.

  Mass rioting in the USA as ‘coma virus’ victims walk.

  ‘Coma walker’ actions defy science—signals detected from human pylons—directed en masse to the South Pacific.

  What is happening beneath the South Pacific Ocean?

  All in the space of a week, no less than that, for the comatose across the world, those that had experienced heavy exposure to Webdriver Torso, had begun performing their part of the Program just a few days earlier.

  Lloyd reread the fourth headline down. What did happen beneath the South Pacific Ocean? he wondered. She’ll know, he told himself, and she’ll fix Sarah.

  Two Days Earlier

  The instant Lloyd arrived home he went to watch television. He knew he should go see Sarah, try and placate her accusing expression as she lay constrained on their bed, but the guilt he felt …

  Later, he thought, and flicked through channels till he reached the news ones, pausing on CNN to watch a distressed-looking female anchor, her blonde bouffant in disarray and her face pale beneath heavy makeup.

  “—patients across the globe have begun getting up,” she said, “although still unresponsive, and by some unknown urge have been gathering together to—”

  He changed the channel, going through two more before pausing at Al Jazeera.

  The video showed a woman seated in a tan Humvee. Dark gray top, mustard trousers, a dark red scarf covered her hair, the black ends of which waved in an unseen wind. Her skin was olive-colored, her face round, and her expression serious.

  “—Subina Shresta speaking to you from Katmandu,” she said, and climbed from the Humvee. The camera operator stepped back revealing the Humvee stood parked before dry, hilly terrain, spotted with small trees and bushes. The reporter paused, tucked the loose strands of hair into her scarf, and continued.

  “The city has been heavily afflicted by the virus, and as such, the aftereffects, or should I say, continuation of its effects, have been greatly apparent.” She turned and began walking past the car’s bonnet. The camera followed, the handheld device steady, and the view changed to an uneven space of ground with green hills beyond.

  Between the reporter and the hills stood a dark, wavering cone-shaped object.

  She stopped some meters from the object and turned to address the camera.

  “This is one of scores of these …
fleshy pylons constructed by the coma victims.” She turned and looked at the object behind her before turning back and continuing, “We’ll go in now for a closer look.”

  The camera zoomed in.

  “Oh my god,” a male voice said, and the camera fell out of focus for a moment before showing the base of the pylon up close.

  The thing appeared formed completely of human flesh, mostly of an olive hue but with other shades evident. Panning slowly up, the camera revealed buttocks, genitals, chests, and breasts, all melded together within the seamless structure. The solidified, mangled flesh also held faces, warped and melted into other body parts, some of the mouths twitching as if about to speak.

  The camera zoomed out a little, showing the top half of the pylon tapering off to the tip.

  The cameraman coughed and gagged.

  “This is disgusting, and I don’t just mean the smell,” the reporter said. “There’s something just so …” from the nervous tone of her voice, it appeared she had lost her composure. “They should destroy these horrors, burn them or blow them up or something.”

  The camera zoomed in to the base again. It followed movement, something that moved like a centipede but was, in fact, a row of eyes swimming through the flesh. They stared blindly as they traveled, then disappeared into a nearby, gaping mouth.

  “I’ve seen enough,” the reporter said, and a few seconds later, the view shifted to her anxious face.

  A wail, high-pitched and echoing, made Lloyd jump in fright. He juggled and dropped the TV remote then stood, looking towards the stairs.