by Khurt Khave
merciful things
First United Church of Cthulhu anthology rights 2016 authors retain all copyrights to their works
placid islands of ignorance
the following images CC BY 2.0
front cover Chico Iwana ~ back cover wetribe
Kurt Bauschardt 4 ~ Ray Boyington 13 ~ Draigona Vampire Obsession 46 wetribe 50, 197 ~ Anne Meadows 60 ~ Robert Bajil 74 ~ vxla 80 ~ Alex Barth 84 Christ Christian 115 ~ Ole Husby 116 ~ Russ Nelson 127 Christopher Dombres (base images) 128, 142, 172 ~ Derek Lee 165 Logan Campbell (base image) 178 ~ Oakley Foxtrot 208
all other images copyright Khurt Khave
black seas of infinity
fucc.it
table of malcontents
“Little Gods” by James Pratt ~ 5
“Sects and the Single Girl” by Steven A. Roman ~ 13 “The Kings in Rebel Yellow” by Khurt Khave ~ 31 “The Face of God Within” by Brian H. Seitzman ~ 51 “The Black Metal of Derek Zann” by Aaron Besson ~ 65 “Cosmic Cavity; or, the Mouth of Man” by Carl R. Jennings ~ 75 “Along the Shore of Old Ridge” by Stuart Conover ~ 83 “Sleep Talking” by Jeff C. Stevenson ~ 91 “Matriarch of Skid Row” by M. C. Bluhm ~ 99 “Uncle Lovecraft: The Complete Oral History” by David Acord ~ 107 “Strange Communion” by Allen Griffin ~ 119 “Death in the Sunset” by Guy Riessen ~ 133 “The Abomination of St. Jude” by David F. Gray ~ 145 “Flesh-Bound Shadow Sun” by M. S. Swift ~ 157 “Doorstepping” by Kelda Crich ~ 163
“Saturday Night at the Esoteric Order of Dagon” by Jill Hand ~ 169 “City of our Lady, Queen of the Angels,
Virgin Mother of a Thousand Young” by Kevin Wetmore ~ 189 “Warm Red Sea” by Jaap Boekestein ~ 199
In the dark recesses of the world's cities lie the hidden altars and secret cathedrals dedicated to the blasphemous beings from out of space and time. And they want in!
We're evil – join us.
Little Gods James Pratt
I’m going to ask you a question, state an observation, and give you a caveat about that statement. There’s always a caveat and, as is often the case, the caveat is the important part. I know that nobody likes a caveat but they encapsulate the nature of the universe so well. No matter how wise we are or how well we think we understand the situation, there’s always more to the story. Sometimes we reason things out in time, sometimes not, and sometimes it doesn’t matter either way. The thing to remember where the universe is concerned is it isn’t personal so there’s no use getting angry. Cause and effect don’t have an agenda. They don’t even know you’re there. But I digress. Okay, here we go.
First, the question: Do you believe in gods?
Now the statement: I believe in gods.
It’s not an act of faith. Gods are real. I’ve seen them. They aren’t
spatially and temporally remote like the gods of Abraham and Mohammed but they’re elusive nonetheless. They’re as much a part of the natural order as the fundamental forces and the laws of thermodynamics. Everything exists for a reason. Gods exist therefore there’s a reason. As counterintuitive as the idea of divine beings might seem within the framework of modern science, they serve a function and have their place. Specifically, they represent things. Gods are living placeholders for ideas born in the human mind. When you invoke a concept, you’re invoking the god who represents it. That makes it an act of worship, thus solidifying the existence of the god and in some cases lesser manifestation embodying that concept. Come up with something new and the universe creates a god to represent it. That’s right. Mere mortals are the catalysts for the existence of the divine. The gods need you more than you need them. And they don’t care if you cheat on your taxes or touch yourself in the shower. Gods aren’t micromanagers. They only care about what they represent.
Here’s what I know and still holds true for the little gods and manifestations of this world. The idea of “god” is born in the mind which sees patterns and uses them to create archetypes but it’s the soul which gives them a face and name. Souls are magic cauldrons from which all sorts of crazy things can arise. This isn’t unique to human beings though. Like people, places have souls. A place’s soul is a gestalt formed from the souls of the people who inhabit it. That’s why a town or city is the spitting image of its inhabitants, like a mirror reflecting them back at themselves. And like people, places have gods.
Cities in particular are god-prone. As melting pots of culture and innovation, cities breed divinity like cockroaches. No matter how sprawling, a city is a small matter in the scheme of things and so its gods are small but still important. They’re like oxygen and gravity. They don’t need to be seen, felt, or even acknowledged to serve their purpose but if they vanished you’d know it in an instant.
How do I know this? I’m a bit of an expert on gods. See, I ride the subway a lot which gives me time to think. The city’s soul resides there at the very heart of the subway where gods are born. Many of the city’s gods live there still, safely hidden from mortal eyes in the creases of folded space. But I can look through the creases. I’ve seen some of the little gods and know them by name. There’s Flees the Light, the rat-god of vermin and crawling things. There’s X’s For Eyes, the ghostly child-god of the lost and forgotten, and the Ragman, the god of poverty. There’s Babylon Bob, the man in the expensive suit and cheap, garish makeup who’s the god of secret bargains and whores in all their many flavors. There’s the Smoke Thing, the formless god of pollution and industry, and Crumble Down, the god of urban decay. Those are just a few of the entities percolating in the subway lines. Once there was a god of breakdancing but he’s gone now. He was big for a while but the world moved on.
How can I see the gods? I see everything in the subway. It’s my chapel and my home. I know every length of track and all the secrets that they hold. I am the Passenger, the traveler whose journey never ends, and I am a god of the city.
Didn’t see that coming, did you? You did? Oh. Well then, on to the caveat:
The little gods of this world are here for your benefit. We’re the Higgs boson that gives particles their mass, the Granting Unified Theory linking everything together. We’re the gods of the small places. And that’s the problem. I didn’t realize until recently just how little we are.
It all started in the subway as these matters often do. I was on the A-Train heading toward the Second Street Station, looking out the window when I saw something in the dark. I caught a glimpse of a massive, humped shape. Curious, I got off at the next station and went back for a closer look. The thing was still there, hiding behind a fold in space as gods are prone to do, and it quivered as I approached. It wasn’t just a humped shape but one big knotty hump of diseased flesh, basically a giant tumor. Tumor-gods existed but being people-gods they tended to congregate in hospitals and clinics so its presence was unusual if not unprecedented. Some of the knots of twisted flesh opened like unclenching fists, revealing eyes that stared back at me. Some of the eyes were large as melons and I could see right through them. They were like windows looking into other worlds, awful, terrible worlds where something went wrong and everything was backward and death was life. Disturbed, I returned to the Second Street Station and waited for the next train. Over the next few days I caught glimpses of other manifestations I couldn’t easily categorize. Some seemed to harken back to a more primeval age. There were towering, armored things with eyestalks and snapping pincers. There were billowing, cephalopodan horrors that slid through the air as if they were
swimming through water, trailing tentacles thick as a grown man’s wrist behind them. Most of the time when I saw a new god or manifestation, I could put a name on it but these things defied description. The creases in the fabric of space were getting bigger, making more room for more and more things. I saw sentient polyhedrons and spheres that burned and sizzled like miniature suns, and once ventured back onto the tracks to inspect a colossal sea anemone that was only visible from certain angles. One day I encountered a disembodied nervous system; no flesh or bones, just a neon-bright roadmap of bioelectrical impulses streaming through a ghostly, inhuman silhouette. That’s not even the weirdest part. When I turned away from the window, I saw other passengers still staring out into the dark as if they’d seen it too.
That was new. The days of wandering gods impregnating random virgins ended over a thousand years ago. These days, revealing oneself to mortal-kind is considered to be in very bad taste. Whatever these things were, they clearly didn’t care about the rules. I decided to see how widespread this phenomenon was and so, for the first time in forever, I left the subway and went to the streets. It was night when I emerged from the subway but I was momentarily blinded by the full moon. Its natural light seemed unnatural to me. After my eyes adjusted, I took a good long look.
At first I only saw the normal sights and sounds associated with city night-life. Car horns, blaring music, catcalls, and angry shouts echoed off canyons of concrete and glass, providing the soundtrack for countless dramas unfolding all around me as thousands upon thousands of souls ambled and rushed up and down litter-strewn streets and sidewalks to destinations ranging from life-or-death scenarios to nowhere in particular. But then I looked a little closer.
I saw people with strange deformities that no one else seemed to notice. There were people with too many eyes, people with limbs that wriggled like drowsy snakes, and people who weren’t people at all. I saw horns and hooves and shawls of scalloped flesh and great waddling things that should have collapsed under their own weight. I saw pale, long-fingered ghouls dragging bodies into alleyways and manta-ray shapes silhouetted in the moonlight soaring overhead. Red eyes stared at me, their owners hidden beneath sewer grates, behind lampposts, and within the creases of folded space.
Pausing beneath a streetlight, I considered my next move. A man in mismatched layers of heavily stained clothing emerged from a nearby alleyway, blinking in the moonlight as I had done when I emerged from the subway. His gaze moved up and down the street then fixed on me. He continued to stare at me as he approached. It was a strange feeling being watched. I was usually the one doing the watching.
“You look human,” the man said. You’re one of ours, aren’t you?”
Figuring he was high or drunk, I decided to humor him. “One of your what?”
The man smiled back. His yellow teeth were perfectly straight. “You know what I mean. I won’t make you say it though. I know how your kind likes to stay incognito. I’ve been watching the subways entrances, waiting for one of you to show up.”
I almost asked him what he meant by ‘my kind’ but decided to let it pass. “And why’s that?”
“The other gods are in hiding and I want to talk about something only your kind would understand.”
As far as crazy ramblings went, that was pretty close to the mark. I sensed nothing unusual about him. He seemed like any one of the thousands of homeless people who slept on a concrete bed every night and yet he seemed to know what I was.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I bet I know what happened,” the man said, ignoring my question. “Things are getting weird down there and you wanted to know if things were getting weird up here too.”
“Yeah, that’s right. It’s getting weird down there, and up here it seems. . .What do you know about it?”
“It’s them. They’re coming back.”
I sighed. There was always a ‘them.’ “Who’s coming back?”
“The terrible old book says they’ll come back when the stars are right,” the man said, motioning toward the sky as if that explained everything. His fingers were partially melded together, forming a crustacean claw of flesh and bone. “That doesn’t make sense though. If they’re not subject to linear time, they can travel to a set of space-time coordinates where the stars are right whenever they want.”
Dismissing his conspiracy theory-esque statement about stars and linear time, I asked the most obvious question. “What happened to your hand?”
“Like I said, it’s them. When they start to come through, things get all funny. Our world becomes more like the place they’re from. The rules are different there. Heck, the rules are whatever they say they are.”
“And where do they come from?”
“Outside the curvature of space-time,” the man said in a perfectly reasonable voice.
A moment passed. “What did you say?”
The man chuckled. “Hell of a time to be alive, isn’t it? The way I figure it, the first to come through will be the little gods who hide in the cracks. You know what I mean by cracks? If space can fold, it stands to reason it can also crack. That’s where the gods go when whatever race or culture created ‘em die off. And I’m not just talking about the human race. We’re just a blip on the radar of geological time.”
I thought of the unknown gods I’d seen and couldn’t offer a rebuttal so I asked another question. “If these prehistoric gods are first, who’s next?” “The Old Ones. That’s what the big, bad book called them.” The man snorted and shook his head. “A book of magic and we were using it like a science manual.”
“What book? Who are the Old Ones?”
“The book’s the Al Azif. It’s filled with magical formulas that bear a hell of a close resemblance to the equations describing string theory, quantum gravity, and fun things like that. As for the Old Ones. . .” pausing, the man shrugged. “Hell if I know what they are. The Al Azif is purposefully vague about ‘em. I read up on ‘em and no two stories tell the same tale. Gods, demons, extradimensional aliens, what they are depends on who you ask. Personally, I think they’re primordial entities who sprang from the same quantum foam that gave birth to the singularity which gave birth to us. They’re the universe’s older siblings. Before the Big Bang, all this was theirs. Now they’re coming back and there ain’t a thing anybody can do about it.”
“How do you know these things? Who are you?”
“Nobody now,” the man said, scratching his stubbly chin, “but once I was a, I think I was a physicist or something like that. I remember experiments, with gravity, electromagnetism, you know, the fundamental forces.”
“You’re kidding, right? You were a physicist?”
The man’s eyes narrowed and his shoulders squared up a bit. Fumbling in his pockets, he produced a credit card-shaped ID badge and handed it to me. The badge was for a Dr. Walter Mitchell and showed a picture of an ordinary, clean cut man in a lab coat staring back. I looked from the ID to the man standing in front of me and I had to admit, the person beneath all that grime could have passed for the man on the badge.
“Things change,” the man said. “What I am now isn’t necessarily what I always was.”
“Fair point,” I conceded. “So what happened?”
“My team found something. A pocket dimension is what they’d call it in a science fiction story, I guess. It was a sliver of non-contiguous space-time tucked inside the cosmic brane. You know, the sheath between our space-time and the void of hyperspace. We thought it was natural, that we’d finally found one of those anomalies quantum mechanics allows for but nobody believes could ever really exist. But it wasn’t. Something made it and that something was still there. I was the only one that made it back alive.”
“Back from where?”
“From the pocket dimension, of course! We accessed it via an Einstein-Rosen bridge powered by an artificial singularity. We were pioneers, the first human beings to step foot in an alien space-time. Even powered by a singularity, the bridge didn�
�t last long but it lasted long enough for me to make it back.”
His already crazy story was becoming even crazier by the minute and I couldn’t help but smirk. “And how did you get your hands on an artificial singularity?”
“Our team leader had access to all sorts of special resources,” he replied, tapping me on the chest. “She was one of you.”
“Impossible,” I said but it actually made sense. When gods involved themselves in the affairs of mortals, things tended to go south pretty quick.
“Okay, who was she?”
“Necessity. You know, the Mother of Invention.”
I laughed out loud, not to mock him but because that definitely made sense. Necessity couldn’t resist interfering in mortal progress. “How did you find out? Did she reveal herself to you?”
No longer smiling, the man shook his head. “When I came back, I could tell that she wasn’t human. Being in that other place did something to me. It changed me.”
“And that’s how you recognized me?”
“That’s how I knew you were different, yeah. Now I can see things nobody else can see. I talk to those things and sometimes they talk back.”
“Gods?”
“Gods and other things.”
“And they told you everything you just told me?”
“No, I figured that out by myself. I know about the other gods because I saw them first. They were in the pocket dimension. Only it wasn’t so much a dimension as a crack. When I mentioned cracks I was speaking literally. It’s a crack in space-time and I think. . .”
“What?” I prompted. “What do you think?”
“I think all this is my fault.”
A smelly guy in rags just told me he’s responsible for a fundamental shift in the nature of reality. It took all my self-control not to laugh again. “How could all this possibly be your fault?”
“I think when we created a bridge to that crack in space-time, the crack widened and pierced the cosmic brane. I saw outside the curvature of space-time. The Old Ones were out there in the void, just like that damn book said. I saw them with my own two eyes. Great, squamous things devouring and vomiting themselves back into existence, viruses the size of skyscrapers, geometric impossibilities wrapped in fire and flesh. After that I couldn’t think straight. I lost my job, my family, everything.” The man tugged on the lapels of his frayed jacket. “That’s how I ended up like this. I take whatever I can get my hands on to stay awake. I can hear ‘em in my dreams, as if a part of me is still out there in, that other place.”
