Return of the Old Ones: Apocalyptic Lovecraftian Horror

by Tim Curran

  “Rocky?” she said in a weak, barely existent voice. “Rocky?”

  Her voice reverberated around her oddly. The sound waves it created seemed to make the air around her vibrate. Her words bounced off the walls and came back at her like ripples she could feel on her skin.

  She could still hear the breathing.

  Terrified, she swung her legs out of bed and stood, instantly recoiling because the floor was not the floor but something almost gelatinous, a cool burning mud that was crawling with squirming things that began to slink up her legs. Dreaming, dreaming, you’re still dreaming. But she couldn’t convince herself of that. She reached out for the bed but it was no longer there. Panting, she stumbled towards the door and felt an immense momentary relief when it was still there. Something had happened. A pipe had burst or something and she was wading through shit, yet there was no odor save a dank, cellar-like sort of smell. She was in the short hallway that led into the living room. She pushed on through the slopping ooze. She reached out and could find no walls. The hallway seemed to have no end and no beginning.

  “ROCKY!” she screamed in desperation.

  Again, her words bounced around becoming waves crashing ashore on an alien beach and striking her with force in their reverberations. The air … warm, thick, almost congested …trembled like jelly. She kept moving, reaching out in every direction, but there was nothing, absolutely nothing to touch. That awful, degenerate breathing kept pace with her but its owner made no sounds as it glided along with her. Her head was throbbing, her temples pumping. A headache was gathering steam, its pain funneling out from the back of her brain to some excruciating white-hot spot on her forehead. There was an explosion of brilliance in her mind that left her reeling, it blazed like white phosphorus, igniting her thoughts into a firestorm of luminosity.

  What?

  What?

  What is this?

  Being blind since birth, she did not know sight. She could not conceptualize it. It was perfectly abstract in all ways to her. Even her dreams were of sounds, smells, tactile sensations … but not this. She saw for the first time in her life … a multitude of colors and images and forms like thousands of burning bright fireflies filling the night sky. And then, then she saw—if only for the briefest of moments—what stood breathing behind her. A man, a very tall man in a tattered cloak that crept with leggy vermin. He was staring down at her. His face was black, not African, but something like smooth, shiny onyx. A living carved mask. Two brilliant yellow eyes, huge and glossy like egg yolks, watched her. And then it was gone. Whatever had opened in her head had closed, and she nearly passed out.

  The dark man gripped her with fingers like crawling roots and she let out a scream, one that seemed to echo from a distant room. Her hands, unbidden, reached out to him as they had done so many times in her life, finding a face that was greasy and soft like a gently pulsating mushroom. She cringed, but her fingers continued exploring despite the abhorrence that made her viscera hang in warm, pale loops. Beneath her fingertips, nodules rose and from each something worming slinked free. They crawled over the backs of her hands. One of them licked at a cut on her pinkie. Another suckled her thumb. Whatever they were, they came out of him in hot geysers, vermiform fleshy nightmares that gushed over her hands and brought a stench of death—old death and new death—that made her want to weep in her revulsion. Her fingers, seemingly magnetized to the face, continued exploring until they found something like a muscular, phallic optic stem growing from his forehead. It held a great, swollen, juicy eye that her index finger slid into, like an over-ripened plum soft with rot.

  And a voice, a gurgling slopping voice that sounded as if it was spoken through mush, said, “So thou might see and thou might make communion with the darkness that waits for all …”

  When Simone was next aware, she was sitting on the couch. She had no memory of getting there. She was in bed, she had nightmares, now she was on the couch. Her sense of smell, heightened beyond normal ken, gave her a sampling of the oily, sweaty, fetid odors that seeped from her pores in toxic rivulets.

  The TV was on.

  It was on the public- access channel. She never listened to public-access, but here it was. A man’s voice was droning endlessly in great dry detail about the cult of the Magna Mater, Cybele-worshipping Romans, and the depravity of Phrygian priests. Little of it made much sense, from the dark secrets of alchemy to the thaumaturgical arts and necromantic rites, from Etruscan fertility cults worshipping the Great Father of Insects to nameless miscegenations that did not walk but crawled within the slime of the honeycombed subterranean passages of Salem.

  “Was it not foretold?” the voice asked. “Did not Cotton Mather warn of it? Did not his sermons of those cursed of God, born of the tainted blood of those from outside, serve as an omen of worse things to come? Yes, but we did not listen! Was it not known to the mad Arab and his disciples? The time of the shearing and the opening is at hand, is it not? In Al-Azif—thus named for the sounds of night insects, some say, but in truth a cipher that prophesied the coming of Ghor-Gothra, the Great Father Insect—did he not tell us that Yog-Sothoth was the key just as the mad faceless god was The Messenger? Yes! Just as he hinted at the blasphemies of the Father Insect, who was the needle that would open the seams of this world to let the Old Ones through!” He ranted on about something known as the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Angles of Tagh-Clatur and the Eltdown Shards. Becoming positively hysterical as he discussed De Vermis Mysteriis and the dread Liber Ibonis. “It was all there! All there!”

  Simone wanted to turn the channel because these public- access stations were always infested with half-baked religious fanatics, but she did not. There was something here, something important. The voice told her that in 1913 there appeared a novel by Reginald Pyenick called The Ravening of Outer Slith, which quickly disappeared from bookshelves because of its horrendous nature, detailing a fertility cult worshipping a pagan insect deity. It was basically a retelling of the ancient German saga, Das Summen, which was hinted at in the grand, grim witch-book, Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and written about in detail by the deranged Austrian nobleman Jozef Graf Regula in his banned tome, Morbidus Pestis de Resurrectus … the very volume which detailed the history of the Ghor-Gothra cult and the coming age of the Old Ones. Regula was convicted of witchcraft and sorcery for writing it and was drawn and quartered in 1723. No matter;, despite the suppressed knowledge of the cult, fragments of knowledge persisted in Verdin’s Unspeakable Survivals and in the poem “Gathering of the Witch Swarm” which was to be found in Azathoth and Other Horrors by Edward Derby. “It was there—prophecy of the ages! Now He comes from the Black Mist to usurp our world and let the others in and we, yes, we, shall tremble in the shadow of the true progenitors of the dark cosmos that shivers in their wake. The 13th Equation is on the lips of the many and soon comes the Communion of Locusts, the buzzing, the buzzing, the buzzing …”

  Simone shut the TV off before she lost what was left of her mind.

  She was hallucinating, she was paranoid, she was delirious. And listening to the ravings of madmen was not going to help her.

  Do something! You must do something! The time draws closer! It is now!

  Frustrated, scared, quivering in her own skin, she called good friends—Reese and Carolyn—but they didn’t answer. She called friends she hadn’t seen in months—Frank and Darien and Seth and Marion—nothing. No one was answering their phones. Why was no one answering? Because they’re gathering now in secret places, on hilltops and misty glens and lonesome fields to wait the coming of—

  That was insane.

  Wiping sweat from her face, Simone called her mother. Mom was at the Brighton Coombs Medical Care Facility, a nursing home. Half the time, she did not even recognize her daughter’s voice and when she did, she laid out a heavy guilt trip. You shouldn’t be living in the city alone. Terrible things can happen in those places. Your father would roll over in his grave if he knew. The line was answered and thirty seco
nds later, her mom was on the phone.

  “Mother … how are you?” Simone said, trying to keep from choking up.

  “Oh, Simone, my darling. I’m fine. How are you? You sound stressed. Are you eating enough? Do you have a boyfriend yet?”

  Jesus.

  “I’m okay. Just lonely.”

  “Ah, loneliness is a way of life as the years pile up.”

  But Simone didn’t want to get into that. “I’d like to come see you.”

  “Oh! That would be just fine. I wish you were here now. We’re all sitting in the sun room, waiting for the big event.”

  Simone felt a cold chill envelope her. “What … what event?”

  Her mother laughed. “Why, the stars will soon align and they will come through. The seas will boil and the sky will crack open. Cthulhu shall rise from the corpse city of R’lyeh and Tsathoggua shall descend on the moon-ladder from the caverns of N’Kai when the planets roll in the heavens and the stars wink out one by one. Those of true faith will be numbered and heretics shall be named … you are not an unbeliever, are you, dear?”

  Sobbing, Simone slammed the phone down. When something furry brushed against her hand, she nearly screamed. But it was only Rocky. It had to be Rocky … then it moved beneath her hand with the undulating motion of an immense worm and now she did scream. She launched herself off the couch as that thing moved around her, making a slobbering, hungry sound.

  She was hallucinating.

  She had to be hallucinating.

  Through the furnace ducts she could hear Josh Ryan saying, “She crawls because she cannot walk, she hears but she cannot see. The sign … she does not bear the sign.”

  Simone pulled herself up the wall, standing on shaking legs. She heard the scratching again … but this time, it was in her own head like claws and blades and nails scraped along the inside of her skull.

  Scritch, scratch, SCRIIIIIIITCH, SCRAAAAAATCH.

  The apartment was filled with a hot slaughterhouse stench of viscera, cold meat, and buckets of drainage. She could hear the buzzing of flies, what seemed hundreds if not thousands of them. And the scratching. It was very, very loud now, like giant buzzsaws in the walls and echoing through her brain.

  The barrier was coming apart.

  Shifting, tearing, fragmenting, realigning itself. She pressed a hand against the wall and felt a huge jagged crack open up beneath her fingertips. She touched something that pulsed within it—something busy and squirming like grave worms wriggling in some peristaltic nest. The buzzing was so loud now she could no longer think. Insects filled the room. They crawled over her arms and up the back of her neck. They tangled in her hair and lighted off her face, sucking the salt from her lips.

  She stumbled from the living room and into the hallway as that great furry worm searched for her. Things touched her. They might have been hands, but they were puffy and soft with decay. Worming feelers came from the walls and embraced her, squirming over her face to touch her and know her as she had done so many times with so many others. A mammoth rugose trunk brushed her arm and her fingers slid through a heaving mass of spiky fur. She pulled away, trying to find the wall and succeeding only in finding a wet pelt hanging there that she knew instinctively belonged to Rocky. Her screams could barely be heard over the constant sawing, scratching noise and something like a great tolling bell.

  Sobbing and shuddering, she fell to the floor and her knees sank into the floorboards as if they were nothing but warm, malleable putty. This was not her apartment; this was the known universe gutted and turned inside out, merging with another anti-world. She heard the roaring of monstrous locomotive mouths blowing burning clouds of irradiated steam. They shrilled like air raid sirens as the barrier weakened and the bleeding wound of this world split its seams and the nuclear blizzard of the void rushed in to fill its spaces. Her fingers touched snaking loops of crystalline flesh and things like hundreds of desiccated moths and mummified corpse flies rained down over her head. There was a stink like hot neon, shadows falling over her whose touch burned like acid. The elder sign, child, you must make the elder sign, reveal the Sign of Kish. Yes, yes, she knew it but did not know it as the air reverberated around her with a scraping, dusty cackling.

  Though she could not see, she was granted a vision of the world to come. It filled her brain in waves of charnel imagery that made her scream, made blood run from her nose and her eyes roll back white in her head. Yes, the world was a tomb blown by the hissing radioactive secretions of the Old Ones who walked where man once walked, the skeletons of heretics crunching beneath their stride. The blood of innocents filled the gutters and putrefied bodies swollen to green carrion decayed to pools of slime. The world was a slag heap, a smoldering pyre of bones, and no stars shone above, only an immense multi-dimensional blackness that would have burned the eyes of men from their sockets if they were to look upon it.

  Then the vision was gone.

  But she could still see.

  The crack in the wall was an immense fissure in the world, splitting open reality as she knew it … and through the gaping chasm, through some freakish curvature of time and space, she saw strobing, polychromatic images of a misty, distorted realm and some chitinous, and truly monstrous form striding in her direction with countless marching legs. Something that was first the size of a truck, then a house, then what seemed a two-story building. She heard the nightmarish whirring and buzzing of its colossal membranous wings. It looked almost like some grotesque mantis with a jagged, incandescent exoskeleton. It was filling the fissure. Not only filling it, but widening it, its droning mouthparts and needlelike mandibles unstitching the seams of creation.

  AL-AZIF, AL-AZIF, AL-AZIF, she could hear voices crying.

  Hysterical and completely demented, she tried to escape it but one of the insect’s vibrating skeletal limbs reached out for her and she was stuck to it like flypaper. Then it had her, flying off through trans-galactic gulfs, through shrieking vortexual holes in the time/space continuum.

  She was dropped.

  She fell headlong through a dimensional whirlpooling funnel of matter where slinking geometric shapes hopped and squirmed and then—

  Her sight was stripped of meat, her soul a sinewy thing desperate for survival in some godless chaos. She crawled, slinked, crept through the bubbling brown mud and pitted marrow of some new, phantasmal unreality. Hungry insectile mouths suckled her, licking sweet drops of red milk, glutting themselves on what she had left. All around her, unseen, but felt, were crawling things and throbbing things and sinuous forms, mewling with hunger. She crept forward, razored webs snapping, cobweb clusters of meaty eggs dripping their sap upon her. She was trapped in the soft machinery of something alive, some cyclopean abomination, a gigantic creeping biological mass born in the night-black pits of some malefic anti-universe. She was crawling over its rotten fish-smelling jellied flesh, sliding through its oily pelt, a speck of animate dust on a loathsome unimaginable life form that dwarfed her world and filled the sky with coiling black tendrils that she could not see but could feel crowding her mind and poisoning the blood of the cosmos.

  She was not alone.

  Just one of many colonial parasites that crawled through the mire of the beast’s life-jelly, swam its brine and foul secretions and oozing sap, her atoms flying apart in a storm of anti-matter and energized particles.

  And then—

  And then, it ended. A rehearsal, perhaps, for what was yet to come. She laid on the living room floor, drooling and gibbering, numb and mindless, giggling in her delirium. She wished only for night to come when prophecy would be realized and the stars would be right. There was a knob on her forehead, the bud of an optic stem that would let her see the time of the separating and the time of the joining, the rending and the sewing, the communion of this world and the next, as the Old Ones inherited the Earth and the Great Father Insect left his ethereal mansion of cosmic depravity with a swarm of luminous insects, and took to the skies on membranous wings.

/>   As spasms knifed her brain in white-hot shards, the stem pulsated and pushed free, opening like a hothouse orchid so it could show her what was coming: that most holy of nights when the world of men became a graveyard and the cities, tombs.

  MESSAGES FROM A DARK DEITY

  Stephen Mark Rainey

  Now:

  Blair finally realized that the things lining the roadside were severed heads.

  He had spent time in Iraq during a particularly violent spell, and if he were driving through Baghdad or Fallujah, he would have been just as disturbed, if perhaps less stunned. But this was Hinton, Ohio, a tiny smudge on the banks of the Ohio River. In every corner of the world, people made statements through violence, but in America’s heartland, they rarely did it this way.

  He slowed his Buick LaCrosse, keenly aware that the perpetrator might be watching him even now, intent on adding another cap to his collection. He counted nine of the awful things: three men, three women, three children, all placed neatly, about ten feet apart, on the road’s solid shoulder. Only a few trickles of still-wet blood leaked out from beneath the cleanly sawn necks, and all bore expressions of vivid shock, as if they were still alive and pitiably aware of their condition. The dead he had seen in the Middle East never actually looked like that.

  He brought the Buick to a slow halt, grabbed his camera, and clambered out, scanning his surroundings before moving away from the safety of his car. To the right, there was only high grass, a stand of oak trees, and a crumbling barn emblazoned with an ancient Mail Pouch Tobacco advertisement; to the left, a grassy slope led down to the banks of the river. He saw no other remains, for which he was grateful, and no one alive in his field of vision. When he thought about it, he could not remember the last car he had seen or which way it was traveling. This afternoon, he might as well be the only living soul in Hinton.