Return of the Old Ones: Apocalyptic Lovecraftian Horror

by Tim Curran

  “Thanks, brah.”

  He took the knife and rammed it through the side of my neck.

  I stumbled backward, the pain hot and intense, blood spurting from the severed artery, but then my knees gave out and I just kept falling, falling through vertiginous blackness—

  —I thrashed awake in my bed at the assisted living facility, coughing, gasping for breath. The pain of being inside my old body was almost worse than getting stabbed through the throat. Linda lay across the foot of the bed, and for a bad moment I thought she was dead. But then she let out a little moan and stirred as though she were having a bad dream.

  “You’ve done your bit, and so I’ve done my bit,” said Brandon. “And now I must bid you adieu. I regret that I’ll no longer be calling you to chat about movies; I’ll miss our talks.”

  “Wait.” I was dizzy on top of the pain; my body felt starved for oxygen, and it was hard to think. “That guy … he killed me.”

  “Yes; that’s the most effective way of returning to your body in the absence of … other release.”

  What kind of a man had I unleashed on the ship? What had I just done? I felt sick.

  “What’s he going to do now?” My voice shook.

  “Well, at this moment, I suspect he’s preparing to launch a cruise missile from the defense contractor vessel. A little wake-up call for our Master to rouse him from his nap in the Pacific.”

  I blinked. “What happens when your Master wakes up?”

  Brandon smiled enigmatically. “Oh, that’s weeks off, I’m sure. A being of his magnitude won’t be up and about quickly. In the meantime, enjoy the necklace. If you have any concerns that your actions might inadvertently ruin anyone’s life … don’t. Trust me, nothing you do from this moment forward can cause any lasting harm.”

  SCRATCHING FROM

  THE OUTER DARKNESS

  Tim Curran

  After two weeks of relative silence in which the pot of the world began to boil over, Simone Petrioux heard the scratching again. This time it came from within the walls. Sometimes it came from the shadows—particularly the shadows in the corners—and sometimes from behind her or the sky overhead. And sometimes from inside people.

  “You have a marked hyper-aural sensitivity,” Dr. Wells explained to her. “A form of hyperacusis. It’s not unusual with those without sight. When one sense fails, others are heightened.”

  “But it’s beyond that,” Simone told him with a singular note of desperation. “I hear …strange things. Things I should not hear.”

  “What sort of things?”

  She swallowed. “Sounds … things echoing from another place. Busy sounds.”

  He told her that auditory hallucinations were known as paracusia. Sometimes they were signs of a very serious medical condition. He did not use the word schizophrenia, but she was certain he was thinking it.

  “Just because you hear things others do not does not necessarily mean there’s anything there,” he explained.

  “And it doesn’t mean anything isn’t either,” she told him. “Rocky hears it too. How do you explain that?”

  But he couldn’t, of course. Dr. Wells was a good man, she thought, but this was beyond him. Ever since she was a child, she heard things others could not. It ran in the family. It was something of a Petrioux family curse—like the blindness—the ability to detect sounds in a frequency beyond that of ordinary human hearing. Simone had been blind since birth. Vision was an abstract concept to her. She could no more describe her acute hearing to Dr. Wells than he could describe sight to her. Stalemate.

  Of course, it really didn’t matter.

  Things had gone far beyond that point now.

  Feeling very alone and very vulnerable, she listened for it to start again because she knew it would. There had been the two- week reprieve, of course, but now the scratching was coming again, and it was more frenzied and determined than ever. Like someone’s trying to get through, she thought. Trying to dig their way through a stone wall. Scritch, scritch, scrape, scrape. That was the sound she kept hearing. It was worse at night. It was always worse at night.

  Listen.

  Yes, there it was again.

  Scritch, scritch.

  Rocky started to howl. Oh yes, he could hear it, and he knew it was bad. Whatever was behind it, it was bad. “Come here, boy,” she said, but he would not. She found him over by the wall, fixated on the sounds coming from the corner. She petted him, tried to hug him, but he would have none of it. Beneath his fur, he was a rigid mass of bunched cables. “It’s okay, my big boy, it’ll be okay,” she said, but he knew better and so did she.

  The scratching sounded like an animal digging, claws scraping against a door, the sound of tunneling, determined tunneling. She cried out involuntarily. She couldn’t bear it any more. Her greatest fear was that whatever was doing it, might get through.

  Get through from where?

  But she didn’t know. She just didn’t know.

  Night—another abstract concept to the sightless—was a time she had always enjoyed the most. The noise of the city diminished and she could really hear the world. The gurgling of pipes in the ceiling. The gentle breeze playing at the eaves. Bats squeaking as they chased bugs around streetlights. Mr. Astano rocking in his chair on the third floor. The young couple—Jenna and Josh Ryan—at the end of the corridor making love, trying to be quiet because their bed was so terribly creaky (through the furnace duct she always heard them giggling in their intimacy).

  But that had changed now, hadn’t it?

  Yes, everything had changed. These past few weeks, the night breeze was contaminated by a sweet evil stench like nothing she had ever smelled before. Mr. Astano no longer rocked in his chair; now he sobbed through the dark watches of night. For three nights running she had heard whippoorwills shrilling in the park, growing louder and louder in a diabolic chorus. Rocky howled and whined, sniffing around the baseboards almost constantly. And the Ryans … they no longer made love or giggled, now they whispered in low, secretive voices, reading gibberish to one another out of books. Last night, Simone had clearly heard Josh Ryan’s voice echoing through the furnace duct, “There are names one must not pronounce and those that should never be called.”

  The scratching was persistently loud tonight, and no one could ever convince her it was hallucinatory. It came from outside, not within. Her nerves frayed, a frost laying over her skin that made her shiver uncontrollably, Simone turned on the TV. She turned it on loud. The voices on CNN were initially comforting but soon enough disturbing. There had been a mass suicide in Central Park. By starlight, two thousand gatherers had (according to witnesses) simultaneously slit their left wrists, using the gushing blood to paint an odd symbol on their foreheads, something like a stem with five branches. The police were saying they were members of a fringe religious sect known as the Church of Starry Wisdom. In Scotland, there had been arrests of a group—the Chorazos Cult—in Caithness who had gathered on the bleak moorland at a prehistoric megalithic site known as the Hill of Broken Stones. Apparently, they had ritually sacrificed several children, offering them to a pagan god known as “The Lord of Many Skins.” In Africa, there were numerous atrocities committed, the most appalling of which seemed to be that hundreds of people had congregated at a place known as the Mountain of the Black Wind in Kenya and cut their own tongues out so that they would not, in their religious ecstasy, speak the forbidden name of their holy avatar. There were rumors that the offered tongues were then boiled and eaten in some execrable rite known as the Festival of the Flies, which dated from antiquity.

  Madness, she thought. Madness on every front.

  Christians called it Armageddon and began feverishly quoting from the Book of Revelation as, all across North America and Europe, they flung themselves off the tallest buildings they could find, smashing to pulp far below, so that the Lord could wash his feet in the blood of the faithful as he walked the streets of men during the Second Coming.

  It was comin
g apart.

  It was all coming apart now.

  There was mass insanity, religious frenzy, mob violence, murder and genocide coming from every corner of the world.

  Simone finally shut the TV off. The world was unraveling, but there seemed to be no root cause. At least none a sane mind would even consider.

  The whippoorwills resumed their eerie rhythmic piping in the park, growing louder and louder, their cries coming faster and more stridently, as if they were possessed of some rising mania. Rocky began to whine in a pathetic, puppy-like tone. At the windows, Simone heard what sounded like hundreds of insects buzzing. It all seemed to be building towards something, and she was more afraid than she had ever been in her life. Now there were screams out in the street, hysterical and rising, becoming something like dozens of cackling voices reaching an almost hypersonic crescendo of sheer dementia. They resonated through her, riding her bones and making her nerve endings ring out. There was a power to them, some nameless, menacing cabalism that filled her head with alien thoughts and impulses. Now the walls … oh dear God, the walls were vibrating, keeping time with the voices and the whippoorwills.

  Not out in the streets, not out in the streets, but from within the walls.

  Yes, echoing voices from some terribly distant place and, as she listened, she could not be certain they were of human origin … guttural croakings, discordant shrieking, bleatings and hissings, and vile trumpeting, a reverberating lunatic chanting, hollow noises as of storm winds rushing through subterranean channels.

  Dear God, what did it mean?

  What did any of it mean?

  There was a sour taste on her tongue and a foul stench of graveyards.

  Feeling dizzy and weak, her stomach bubbling with a cold nauseous jelly, Simone fell to the floor, cupping her hands over her ears as the blood rushed and roared in her head, making it feel as if her brain was boiling in her skull. The sounds were getting louder and louder, the floorboards shuddering, the room seeming to quiver and quake like pudding. There were smacking and slurping sounds, the cries of humans and animals, of things that were neither … all of it lorded over now by a cacophonous droning that made her bones rattle and her teeth chatter. It sounded like some monstrous insect descending from the sky on droning membranous wings.

  Then it stopped.

  All of it ended simultaneously and there was only a great, unearthly silence broken by her own gasping and Rocky’s whimpering. Other than that, nothing. Nothing at all. A voice in Simone’s head said, it was close that time. Very, very close, they almost got through. The barrier between here and there is wearing very thin. But she had no idea what any of it meant. Between here and where?

  “Stop it, stop it,” she told herself. “You’re losing your mind.”

  She pulled herself up from the floor, barely able to maintain her balance. The silence was immense. It was a great soundless black vacuum of the sort she always imagined existed beyond the rim of the universe.

  She made it to the sofa and collapsed on it, wiping a dew of sweat from her face. With a trembling hand, she turned the TV on because she needed to hear voices, music, anything to break that wall of morbid silence.

  On CNN, there were voices, yes, but they spoke of the most awful things, things that only amplified her psychosis … because it must have been a psychosis, she couldn’t be hearing these things, these awful sounds like the veneer of reality was ripping open.

  It was reported that several million people had made a pilgrimage to Calcutta to await the appearance of a dark-skinned prophet at the Temple of the Long Shadow whom they referred to simply as “The Messenger.” Border skirmishes had broken out in Asia and the Middle East. There was pestilence in Indochina, bloodshed on the Gaza Strip, immense swarms of locusts blackening the skies over Ethiopia, and the Iranians had fully admitted that they were in possession of several dozen hydrogen bombs, each of which were equivalent to fifty million tons of TNT. With them, they would soon “ascend to heaven in the black arms of destiny” via a synchronized nuclear detonation which would bring about what they referred to as the symbolic “Eye of Azathoth.” In Eastern Europe, a terror organization calling itself either the Black Brotherhood or the Al-Shaggog Brigade had been burning Christian churches, Jewish synagogues, and Muslim mosques, calling them “places of utter blasphemy which must be eradicated so that the way be purified before the king descend from the Dark Star and the Great Father rise from his sunken tomb.…”

  “Kooks, Rocky,” Simone said. “This world is full of kooks.”

  The idea made her smile thinly. Was it at all possible that the human race was losing its collective mind at the same time? That instead of sporadic outbreaks of insanity there was a global lunacy at work here? She told herself it was highly unlikely—but she didn’t believe herself.

  That afternoon, the UPS man came to her door, knocking gently, announcing that he carried a parcel that had to be signed for. It was perfectly innocuous. He was delivering her new laptop with screenreader software … yet as she made to open the door, a sense of fright and loathing swept through her as if what was out there was something hideous beyond imagining. But she did open the door and right away she was gripped by a manic paranoia and a mounting claustrophobia.

  “Package for you,” the man said, his voice cheerful enough. But it was a façade, an awful façade … for there was something sinister and lurking just beneath his skin and she knew if she reached out to touch his face it would be pebbly like the flesh of a toad. Right away, she heard that dire scratching coming from inside him like rats pawing and chewing. In her mind, she sensed a spiraling limitless abyss waiting to open like a black funnel. A voice—his own, but ragged and wizened—whispered in her skull, has she … has she … has she linked? Have the angles shown her the gray void? Has she seen the black man with the horn? The voice kept echoing in her head until she felt a cool, sour sweat run down her face.

  “Are you okay, ma’am?” asked the UPS man.

  “Yes,” she breathed, taking the parcel from him with strained, shaking fingers. “Yes, fine.”

  “Okay, if you’re sure.”

  But deep within her, perhaps at some subconscious level of atavistic fright, she could sense a godless vortexual darkness opening up inside him, and a noxious stench like seared porcine flesh blew into her face and that dry, windy voice whispered once again, show her, show her, it has been promised in the Ghorl Nigral as such … let her gaze into the moon-lens and gape upon the Black Goat of the forest with a thousand squirming young … let her … let her … find communion with the writhing dark on the other side.…

  “Listen, are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yes … please, I’m fine.”

  But she was not fine. She was blind and alone and a ravening outer darkness was spilling from this man, in diseased rivers of slime. She felt scalding winds and dust blowing in her face, a fetid odor enveloping her that was no single stench but dozens breathing hot in her face, with a fungous, gangrenous, nearly palpable odor.

  He reached out to steady her, clutching her wrist with a flabby, leprous claw.

  She screamed.

  She could not help herself.

  She slammed the door in his face, ignoring the whining and growling of Rocky. Physical waves of disgust and utter repulsion nearly paralyzed her, but she managed to reach the toilet as the vomit came out of her in a frothing expulsion. And crouching there on the bathroom floor, shuddering, drooling, her mouth wide in a silent scream, she could still hear that voice whispering from unknown gulfs: eh, even now at the threshold, the veneer of the Great White Space weakens as the time of the pushing and the birthing draws near—

  Enough, by God, it was enough.

  She went into the kitchen and made sure Rocky had enough food and water. He had touched neither all day. He was hiding under the kitchen table, trembling. When she reached out to comfort him, he snapped at her. Even my dog, even my dog. Feeling depressed and defenseless and without a friend in the wor
ld, Simone climbed into bed and tried to sleep. After a desperate round of tossing and turning, she did just that. Her dreams began right away. Twisted, unreal phantasms of limitless spaces closing in on her, of immense and shaggy forms that brushed against her, of monstrous pulpous undimensioned things moving past her, of crawling up winding staircases that led into nothingness, and being pursued through shattered thoroughfares of wriggling weeds set with monolithic towers that felt like smooth, hot glass under her fingertips, and a world, an anti-world of shifting surface angles where everything was soft and slimy to the touch like the spongy, mucid tissue of a corpse. And through it all, she heard a voice, a booming and commanding voice asking her to make communion with the darkness that awaits us all in the end.

  A sinister, malign sort of melody was playing in the background, at first soft and silky then building to a harsh feverish pitch, an immense ear-splitting dissonant noise of bat-like squeaking and shrill creaking, bone grinding against bone, thunderous booming, and saw blades biting into steel plate, chainsaws whirring and jagged-toothed files scraping over the strings of violins and cellos … all of it combining, creating a deranged, jarring cacophony of disharmonic noise, filling her head, melting her nerves like hot wires, cracking open her skull like an eggshell until she came awake screaming in the deathly silence of her bedroom—

  Soaked with sweat, shaking like a wet dog, she forced herself to calm down. But it was no easy bit. She was awake and she knew she was awake, but the terror and anxiety bunched in her chest did not lessen; it constricted more tightly. Her brain was sending a steady current of electricity to her nerves and the result was that her entire body was jittery and trembling. She had the most awful sense that she was not alone in the room, that another stood by her … breathing. She could hear a low, rasping respiration, a coarse, vulgar sort of sound like that a beast might make.