Return of the Old Ones: Apocalyptic Lovecraftian Horror

by Tim Curran

  Grantha’s faith is ancient and foreign; he stamps on a trigger-pad to generate a holographic representation of something he calls a curb: a dull grey rectangular slab of some porous stone, complete with small tufts of weedy plant material leaping from the cracks, and the suggestion of odd sigils cast upon a ghostly wall that float in the air behind the curb in traceries of neon light. The hexentech High Priest roots around in a satchel at his waist and produces a bottle of amber fluid, which he empties out onto the virtual object.

  “For my homies,” he says, not without a certain reverence.

  “I hope your old gods are looking out for us, priest,” I say as he waddles past me on his way to the gangplank. He grunts.

  “Homies got better shit to do, I’m thinking. Can’t hurt, though, straight up. What about you, Captain?”

  “Prayer doesn’t work, Grantha. It never did. And the gods that could listen choose not to.”

  Piotr pauses in his humming to look up. “Perhaps the very one we go to destroy this day, Captain. Why is that, do you think?”

  “Why is what, Tillich?”

  “Why do the Old Ones not speak? We have made our attempts, over the centuries, to send ambassadors. To open a dialogue. To come to terms with madness and filth, degradation and horror. With the true state of the Universe. To dream its dreams, and survive the experience. Yet not once has it spoken.”

  “We’ve had this chat before.”

  “Hm. Yes. You know my views, then, Captain. Since my abduction by the...well, you know my history as well. The trick to communication with the alien is knowing when you’ve got one on the line. For instance...”

  He drops into a sudden crouch and aggressively probes the carcass of some deep-sea abomination with a finger. In moments he pulls a foul R’lyehian grub from the red mess, its thrashing asymmetrical length all random pincers and eye stalks. Grantha huffs and makes his grumbling way back to the ship, while his hexentechs and Silattha gather round for the demonstration.

  “Look at this creature. It has no conception of me as a being, does not even know in any more than a rudimentary way that it is held between my thumb and forefinger. It does not even know what fingers are, or a hand. It has no language, other than perhaps the silent firing of its own nervous system. We are utterly unalike, it and I.

  “Now, say I wish to communicate with it. To tell it something. Relay some small truth about existence to it. How may this be done?”

  Before anyone can answer, Piotr drops the grub to the stone at his feet and crushes it beneath his heel. There is a sound of crumbling chitin and a strong acrid tang as the guts of the thing are exposed to the air. Piotr looks at us all, a strange expectant light in his hybrid eyes.

  “Do you think it misunderstood me?”

  Silattha smirks and licks her lips. “But they haven’t killed us. Or at least, not all of us.”

  “True. But then, whom the gods would destroy they first make mad, Parv. And are we all not such, after our various fashions? Only minds as functionally insane as ours could survive here.” He presses his heel into the stone again, twists it, rendering the pulpy tissue into liquid. “Perhaps our ultimate revelation awaits us still.”

  “That’s enough, Tillich,” I snap. “You want ultimate revelation? It’s up on deck, waiting for us to get that anchor to the coordinates.”

  “Of course, Captain. Of course. Our final statement.” He lifts his dripping heel and grins horribly at it. “Which may amount to little more than a pinch from a grub.”

  “The early bombs in the Severn Valley did for the Old Ones there, Fun Guy,” Silattha scoffs. “Same goes for the Wind Walker, and the Voltigeur King in the North Atlantic. Those were low-yield devices, but they bulked up the human life-wave enough to drive the beasts back.”

  People, I almost correct her. Low-yield souls. Perfectly enlightened, weaponized souls.

  “Minor deities, all,” Piotr counters.

  “And this one is major, right? Well, what kind of fhtagn difference does it make? Okay, so, we bring it some major ordinance. This is the biggest bomb we’ve got!”

  The meatpuppet laughs, a sound like stones clicking together at the bottom of a well.

  “What difference? My dear, look around you. Look around. This is R’lyeh. To say that the rules here are different borders on comedy.”

  “Enough, Tillich.” I signal to the hexentechs, who scramble to activate the grav-harnesses that support the anchor and our supplies. The loads lift into the distorted air with a dull thrumming.

  “We’re here to break a few rules.”

  Forty-one minutes into the Hour of the Itinerant Showman, the hexentech Jeff Thurman crumples to the ground with a shriek. Before anyone can get to him with a hypo of sedative, he manages to rip out his tongue at the root / disembowel himself with a graphite blade / shatter his own spine with a single self-induced convulsion. As he lies dying at our feet, he lists a number of concerns with each ragged expulsion of breath.

  “I’m worried about my kids. Little Sarai and Tim-tom.

  “Those who Sit Above In Shadow have your number, Captain Strunk, and it’s not one you can count to, not in the whole of Time’s vast expanse. Didn’t you get the memo?

  “I’m pretty sure I left the gas on at home. I don’t know what that means.

  “In his House at R’lyeh, he waits, awake. He dreamed us, but now he’s awake, and the dream is over, and we are nothing but sleep-grit the Prime Minister of Horror flicks from the corner of his terrible eye. A microbe on the grit. Gritty stuff, Captain.

  “People. There aren’t any, you know. I don’t have any kids. Tell my non-existent wife I...”

  Poor bastard. His fellows strip him of gear and rations, then roll his corpse close to where two massive blocks of stone meet in a headache-inducing angle. The weird physics of this place do the rest, and the hexentech slides away into an impossible oblivion, the shape of him dopplering into the distance at speed while his colour and the outline of his bones remain to leave a print on the rock. Piotr is at my elbow suddenly, a still presence of unnatural calm.

  “That’s one down. Madness takes its toll.”

  “We’ve enough left to manage.”

  “Hm.”

  “The simulations prepared us for this. Everyone here has clocked years in the Tryptamine Baths, mastered the Oneiric Steeplechase at elite levels, run every track at the G’hnath-Carter Angles. There is nothing this place can throw at us— physically, mentally, spiritually—that we haven’t anticipated.”

  “And yet...” Piotr murmurs as we watch the last of the dead man fade into the ravenous stone.

  In the Hour of the Fleshless Mask, in a claustrophobic canyon of columns that throb and glisten with an ichor that reeks of kerosene and rotting uranium, we turn a seemingly endless corner to be greeted by a R’lyehian citizen, the first of many, and I am forced to remove Silattha’s collar. The spurs exiting her flesh drag gobbets of meat at their tips.

  The ghoul-girl begins her serenade. Not everyone gets their hearing protection on in time, and these join the star-spawn in the wholesale dissolution of their molecules. It’s a slow process, accompanied by much screaming, and the delirious howl of an ancient, unkillable thing violently changing state, painting the walls of the canyon in a phosphorescent gore-mist.

  When she’s done, Sil clamps her deadly mouth shut and signals for her collar. The air hums with the last notes of her attack and the lingering consciousness of the beast that still permeates the spaces between space, seeking ingress. I slide the spurs back into her seeping wounds with gratitude. Then I empty my guts on the stuttering tiles and bas reliefs to the sound of the hexentechs mourning their fallen.

  “Quite the solo,” I manage after a few minutes. Sil pants with happiness at my small praise.

  “I had an appreciative audience. Can you believe I had to target all of its hyper-chakras? Just wow. Wait,” she says, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Okay. Okay, it’s still here. I don’t know if I’m up for an
encore.”

  Piotr looks up from the strobing displays that hover in a holographic coil around his head. He nods, confirming what we all feel. “We should move, Captain.”

  The air and rock of the canyon split at his last syllable. For half a moment, the thing finds physical form again. A maelstrom of viscid flesh and hissing pinwheel claws with multiple entry points into reality. I’m raked across my dorsal plates and fall to the ground. The hexentech MaryJo Cherry is split from neck to groin by a whip of spikes. Silattha and Piotr dive below a pistoning limb that strikes the anchor, reducing four of the device’s grav-harnesses to sparks and dust.

  The moment passes, and we’re alone again with our wounds and the dead. The anchor lists to the right, the harnesses on the left side shrieking in protest, and impacts the wall with a sickening crunch.

  Our curses ring out and return to us strangely echoed by the maze that is the Dreaming City, the First City. R’lyeh.

  “This fucking place. Worst spot on the planet,” Sil sighs. The remaining hexentechs are frothing at the mouth with despair as they adjust the grav-harnesses.

  Piotr snickers. “There’s decent evidence that it’s not actually on the planet, engineer. Such efforts to get here, after all. Your doggie-powered engines, just as an example. The old records state that R’lyeh wasn’t here before. The sea floor at these coordinates was sea floor and nothing more. And then it was here.

  “Massive, an entire continent. Ancient cities of primal evil. Infinite suburbs of existential mirror-muck, sprawling slums constructed of discarded, croaking anti-languages, laced over with living circuitry telepathically transmitting a constant insect-chitter stream of flash-cut reverse-universe pornography! I can’t be the only one who watches the broadcasts on the back of his eyelids, so don’t give me that look.

  “R’lyeh! Suppurating districts of unspeakable shopping malls that give ferocious new meaning to consumption. Thumping hyperdimensional everlasting-night clubs, every bouncer a shoggoth, every dancer a coruscating chaos of perversion and alien sensuality!

  “R’lyeh! Suddenly, it had always been here, because it had never left. The stars were right and there was nothing for us. Nothing but what the Old Ones gave us. Nothing but their gift.”

  Sil hisses and hawks a bloody mass from the back of her throat onto the stones. “Dagon’s Teeth! Listen to him with the fuckin’ poetry! The Fun Guy loves the place. You’re sick, puppet. You’ve got spores for brains.”

  Piotr smiles and winks. “Such a literalist, Sil.”

  “You can give your guided tour some other time, Tillich,” I say. “We all know the stories.”

  “Hm. Stories which suggest that R’lyeh occupies, or somehow is, a highly artificial bubble of space-time. This place could be their ship, occupying multiple points in the Universe but only manifesting at certain times. When the stars are right, they plunge from world to world.”

  A hexentech appears at my side and whispers into my ear. I don’t like what I hear. I cut him off and address the team.

  “Enough speculation. The anchor’s in the air again, but it won’t be for long. We need alternate transport, and that means your specialty, Piotr.”

  Tillich rubs his hands in glee / tears at his hair / consults a holo-readout at his wrist / spontaneously bleeds from his eyes and smiles.

  “Move with a purpose, people.”

  It takes half a day to haul the limping anchor to the nearest shoggoth midden. By the time we arrive it is already the Hour of the Guarded Quotation and the setting sun is a rusty disc in a lowering grey cobweb sky. We are bone-tired and psychotic: Sil paws at the ground like a muttering animal, Piotr is skittish with wild eyes on constant scan, I’m full of remorse and anger. The sight of the midden does nothing to help our dispositions.

  “They’re not like that in the simulations,” Sil whines.

  “They’re not like this anywhere,” Tillich affirms. “Not even on Yuggoth. So calm. I’d say this is hibernation, but look at the colour spectrum. They’re awake but there’s a lack of autonomy here.” He punctuates his statements by vomiting down the front of his armour.

  “We need one, Piotr,” I clip.

  Tillich grimaces and wipes at himself with the edge of a hand. “It’s a single mass, Captain. It’s a pit. Two clicks wide and who knows how deep and...it’s a single shoggoth-mass. I don’t...”

  I glare at him in utter fury, and for once he seems perturbed.

  “I’ll scout around the edge. See if I can locate a young one.” He cracks open a supply pod, begins strapping equipment to his back and arms, places an enhancer circlet on his scalp. “The fresher the bud, the more susceptible to command.”

  “Just make it happen.”

  A hexentech fires up a thermal plate and we gather round for warmth, assuming various meditative positions and practicing our ujjayi breath. The stone beneath the plate begins to seep oil and blood as it heats; the smell of petrochemicals and scorched honey fills the air like cancer. We quit the ujjayi in discomfort and instead watch Tillich move around the midden, the spastic perspective shifting him near and far, reducing him to a collection of sticks, a bloated mass, a cartoon. He pauses, or seems to pause, and there is a frenzied frothing in the pool of sentient plasm near him. In moments, the sound of his screaming reaches us. I key my radio on.

  “All good, Tillich?”

  More screaming, a terrific wail of complete anguish, but cut with eerily calm assurances. “Five by five, Captain. In negotiations.” Further anguish ensues, so I key the radio off.

  Sil slides close to me, leans in to my neck to nip at an ear. There’s a rasp in her throat as she speaks and I can feel the quills on the side of my head sizzle and crisp.

  “Did you imagine it would be like this?”

  “Like what, Sil? Like the maddest madhouse to ever be built. Like a revolting graveyard of the Universe. Like the worst nightmares wrapped in perfect truth. Yeah. Yeah, I pretty much always imagined it to be like this.”

  “Not that,” she sighs. “That feeling you’ve got. You know?”

  “What feeling? Nausea? The near-constant urge to murder everything?”

  “Yeah. Only...you don’t have it? That feeling like you’ve been travelling your whole life, homesick since the day you were born. When I turned that spawn into powder back there, I just...

  “It felt like coming home, finally. Like I’d just turned a corner in the road, and there it was. I want to do it again and again. Does that ev—...”

  She doesn’t finish. R’lyeh pulls one of its messed-up physics tricks and Tillich is back with us in one stride, a fetid mass of sentient gelatin towering above him. He’s missing his left arm. There’s a twitching stump of bleeding mycelial tissue where it used to be and his face is a rictus of pain.

  “Negotiations complete. I could use some cauterizing. Painkillers.” The hexentechs shriek and scatter to the medpods. In seconds, there’s a dirty pink bubble of analgesic foam where the stalk was.

  “What happened there?” I say.

  “Show of faith. The master-slave relationship with these things is complex.” Tillich sips from a tube held to his mouth. “Give a little, get a little. I am it and it is I.” He wets his lips, whistles something in a minor key. The shoggoth heaves and with oozing grace slips its stinking bulk underneath the anchor. It lifts the device as if it were no more than a shell, or a small rock stuck to its hide.

  “It’s why they came here. To serve.”

  The beast expels jets of befouled air from a hundred ventricles and it sounds like a hissing tekelllliii-lliiiiii. We choke and gag while Tillich chuckles.

  “That’s right. Tekeli-li, motherfucker.

  “Now, mush.”

  The gutted remains of the violated moon lie heavy and fulgent in the blood-black night as we crest a final rise and look down / cast our eyes upward at the sickening crag formation / abyssal flood plain that lies at the centre / on the perimeter of R’lyeh. We have walked the Maze That Is Not A Maze, come close
to this point a thousand times, only to be shifted away by disobedient angles, monstrous lies of the light, chuckling spacial corridors, minutes that cross-dressed as millennia. But we are here, finally. R’lyeh. You tease.

  This place can only be called a landscape with tongue firmly in cheek; there are shifting planes of agitated stone folding in and out of perception, vast blocks of masonry behaving like water, like plants, and a conniving horizon that refuses to separate ground from air from sea. The whole is awash in an emerald fog of peculiar and malevolent density that soaks our skins and armour, slides with intention down the back of the throat to raise bile and fear.

  It is the Hour of the South-most Pinnacle, and we are on his doorstep, finally. There is the fabled door, near and far at the same time, slightly ajar in its twisting fractal frame set in the side of a mountainous slab of dripping stone, the bas reliefs leaping and foaming like a river on either side. I am thinking of the first dead hexentech and considering my next step.

  “So, do we, I dunno, knock?” Sil growls.

  “I thought it would be here,” Tillich says. “I’ve corrected for every deviation we’ve been through. These are the coordinates. I thought we’d see it.”

  “It doesn’t have to be here. It’s probably below,” I say. “Or between. Off-planet, even. It’s free now. Has been for thousands of years. Would you stick around if you had to?”

  Tillich’s face is blank, a bloodless mask of indifference.

  “You’re making assumptions about a being you can’t possibly understand,” he says. “And so am I. But in answer to your question, no. No, I wouldn’t stick around.”

  “Wherever it is doesn’t matter. This place is its throne. Every insane ley line on the planet converges on this spot. The high priests agree: we detonate here, and R’lyeh collapses. The event horizon we crossed to get here contracts, taking everything inhuman with it back to where it all came from. Back to hell.”