Eric was being pulled toward the chattering teeth by the tentacles that embraced him, but it was the eye he was screaming at.
The cloud of powder only hung in the air with enough density to reveal the thing for a moment and then it was gone again. Eric vanished with it, entwined in the writhing anatomy, shrieking to burst blood vessels all the way down.
Peter did the only thing left to him in this uncharted nightmare. He opened the lead box, shoved the book inside and shut the lid. The roaring cyclone of alien language in his mind was muted instantly as a presence was sucked from the air with the force of a vacuum. There was a pattering of droplets striking the dingy water, then silence.
The river washed over the streets of Haverhill. National Guard trucks arrived to set up detours, and the local police went door to door to help people evacuate. Peter, still in shock, stood on his doorstep watching the flashing blue strobes of the police van, oblivious to the rain on his face. He felt a crazy urge to tell them that his friend had just died in his basement but there was no body because it had been devoured whole by an invisible monster. He would be required to see a psychiatrist, and maybe lose Robbie. So he said nothing. Lily threw hastily gathered essentials into the car and they pulled onto the road mere minutes before it became impassable. They drove to her parents’ house, Sophie licking Robbie’s face in the back of the car, Peter shooting agitated glances at the rear-view mirror.
Lily didn’t ask Peter what had happened to Eric. She wasn’t a closed minded or incurious person, and while Peter knew she didn’t particularly like Eric, she had always been kind to him. There had been a time when she would have been all questions, would have made him pull the car over until he explained what had happened. But now they had a child, and she didn’t want to know.
They spent a week with the in-laws. When the roads reopened, Peter took a few days off from work, rented a dumpster, and got busy fixing the damage to the basement. Then he did the thing he’d been putting off; he reported Eric as a missing person. The river was dredged, divers went down, and in the end Eric Marley was presumed dead, washed down the Merrimack and into the Atlantic past Plum Island.
The book, secured in its lead encasement, went into a safe deposit box at the bank. Peter didn’t want it in the house. When he had stopped by Eric’s apartment before calling the cops, he let himself in with a key that was still on his ring from times when he’d watered the plants. Walking through Eric’s rooms had broken the chains on the gates of grief, and he was thankful for the privacy to let it out, sitting on the couch they had so often shared, weeping.
When the wave passed, he put Eric’s laptop in a shoulder bag and left with it. The scans would save him from ever needing to open that box again. He didn’t know what the auction would do to his ebay feedback rating, but there would be a heavy shipping fee and no returns.
Douglas Wynne is the author of the rock n roll horror novel, THE DEVIL OF ECHO LAKE, which was a first place winner of JournalStone's 2012 Horror Fiction contest. His second book, STEEL BREEZE, is a serial killer thriller set for release in July of 2013. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son, and spends most of his time hanging out with a pack of dogs when he isn’t writing, playing guitar, or swinging a sword. You can find him at the following links:
http://www.dougwynne.com
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6450613.Douglas_Wynne
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Douglas-Wynne/29010087726
http://www.twitter.com/Doug_Wynne
Story illustration by Pete Szmer.
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Not With a Bang, But
With Waves Whispering
by Wendy Wagner
The sea will come
upon the shores where we picnicked
the day we saw the dead porpoise,
first there, where no one will notice.
But when the little beach towns go,
it will be with pomp and tragedy,
men touching tears on their cheeks
for the cameras' benefit.
Yes, the sea will come.
We have rafted it with plastic,
glossed it with tar, but now
the sea uncovers itself from its bed.
Maybe once we were sea children:
Today we should quiver with fear
that our mother's mother has awakened
with all her ancient attendants.
Soon the sea will come
stretch her icewater fingers
across the places we walked
and called our own
but were only holding for the kelp.
Wendy N. Wagner grew up on the gloomy Oregon coast, next door to a cemetery and an abandoned paper mill. Her short fiction has appeared in The Lovecraft eZine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the anthologies Armored and The Way of the Wizard. Her first novel, a Pathfinder Tales adventure, is due out in 2014. You can keep up with her at http://winniewoohoo.com.
Story illustration by Mike Dominic.
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A Cold Yellow Moon
by Edward R. Morris, Jr. and Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.
For Adam Niswander, a truly inspiring voyager!!!!!!!!!!!
“When the configuration-revealed unbinds the seals on the New Day, with the coming whorl of Black Dawn, as it embraces The Imperium That Could Not Be Seen, the stars serving the desires of Taurus, carrying Doom’s sign, will sing! And the face of the Moon will be transmogrified, as it was foretold by King Hastur through the Hyadian Pool in the days before the curse of His yellow blood was made manifest through Josephus, his prodigal son and the King in Yellow for all time, in all worlds the tatters of his corpus were allowed to touch.
When the Yellow Sign is drawn upon the Moon, all the creatures of the deeps that crawl upon their bellies or swim or walk shall rise to the dance, as beasts and the fowls of the air do bay for blood and cry out for exiled comforts. And Man, pretender to the surface of the Earth, fear-driven insect of nothing at the Beginning and End, holding only his eyeless psalms, will be but a scarlet stain upon the changing face of Earth’s green hills.”
—Philip of Navarre, The Zhou Texts
READING MAGNET... RECOGNIZED. MEADE PROFESSOR ALEXANDER J. CHAIRMAN THEORETICAL PHYSICS MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY ACCESS GRANTED ACCESS GRANTED ACCESS GRANTED...
ON DUTY: STARBIRD MISSION-CONTROL WING 23:12HRS... 23:13...
The main room of Miskatonic University Observatory's new Mission Control wing flickered so badly it felt like it was always raining during an eclipse. In that cramped, sawdust-and-plaster lockdown that seemed a hasty afterthought, twenty tele-visor screens ringed the room, with audio-telephone switches and lavaliere microphones everywhere between each.
Some screens merely showed what could only be described as a continuous storm of 'snow'; some, at any given time, very much not, as the Big Day drew nearer and nearer. The great Westinghouse computing-engines which gave them life popped and echoed within forests of vacuum-tubes behind cold-iron icebox walls, and lit the room an absinthe Christmas in yellows and reds and greens signifying Zero-One, On-Off, endlessly permuted.
As Above, so Below, as Within so Without: Surrounding every screen were drawers worth of toggles and buttons, more than most civilians could even comprehend. All the work-stations from Tracking to Thermodynamics and back had their own specific color. There was no more guesswork in that room than there was dust, though plenty of excited chatter rang the walls at all hours.
Nothing like this had ever been done before, and the press wasn't getting anywhere near this except when they were sanctioned to. Not yet. Not yet. When the RCA-Victor (for Dr. Tesla would allow no Edison product on the grounds) sound-projection horns above each work-station tinnily signaled not shift change, but Apogee, Approach... Splashdown...
On that holy day, then the skies could rain ticker-tape. Just now, the chicken-wired windows in the Mission Control wing were battened against such weather. And no photographer
s, either. They wouldn't know how to shoot this:
:warm. a dainty breeze. blue’s ardor above the lacy drape of green trees
:a summer departure
:after the song-smooth climb into sky’s weathermaker mountains, all its instruments to quest…
:in the glass starship—searchlight, star-ward, Starbird
:in the BLACK
:black
:starlit
:blackness
:from Earth,
(gleaming, freezing, all its balanced systems and the ardent, laboring eyes (lodged in inquiring) behind them)
(ready to be introduced to beguile, undergo the beauty of Awakening, to receive fact and data…or shadows if need be, hoping for grandeur)
:to
:Luna
:sea…
:AWAKE ZION I AWAKE. Test message. STARBIRD transmitting. POWERING ON SUB-MINDS ONE THROUGH
SEVEN.IRA-A2 ISHMAEL-ISHMAEL APPARATUS-2. OFF LINE OFF LINE OFF LINE
REROUTING
AWAKE. PLEASEWAIT.PLEASEWAIT...
awake we are awake we
:AHAB-ONE. VERIFYING INTACT MEMORY PLEASEWAIT PLEASEWAIT PLEASEWAIT
:Dawn. :Dawndawndawn at dawning rim of
:sky. the sky clicks in our guts. The sun warms our Mind
:Mind. Separates into. Brains. One through seven,
children of the first Ishmael probe
:We go to find Ishmael-Prime, our absent brother,
lend him our hands, our hands, all our hands
as he Prime needs them. If,
we have more. More hands.
:In the cold, the dark, the vast beast-whistle and Down,
the litany warms every interchangeable part:
We go because this is Just.
Logical.
We go to find out what happened
We go to pick our sibling up,
and run it out of there.
We go in the name of those who made us,
To throw down our bodies like army ants
Between the Makers who left their mark,
And the Unknown.
Into the cold and soundless
scream and the black we go, we go
Toward the Ishmael probe that waits
in the secret narration of the stain. The stain.
:Going to see the Stain.
The 'threshing-floor of the new Millennium', (as Dr. Marcus fulsomely described the place to Whipple Phillips, when the great industrial tycoon came down from Niagara Falls to tour what The Investors had wrought) looked more like the bridge of a ship, or the observation-deck of a busy factory floor.
But here, they looked out, not down, and listened. Here, the bridge of the ship was on Earth, while the ship itself was merely an elaborate set-piece, blown beyond Mother Earth's gravity-well with the massive liquid-oxygen engines that made the Serbian cry when they were wheeled from the specially-built foundry floor of the Barks & Sons factory in Schenectady by double teams of oxen, straining the traces of this new thing not even their drovers understood.
Straining toward the skies of this new age of the world. Here, what men on Earth called clockworks were beaten down smaller even than the Swiss level at the Norris Locomotive Works, into a radio-controlled system of toggles and buses to rival the automata of any World's Fair, in one tiny ship!
Every function of the Starbird had a check, a balance, a fail-safe. Every one of these, and the whole clear-glass firecracker in general, could be shut off manually from Earth. Dr. Tesla insisted on it. It was the only way he would lend his hand to the project, though he claimed to not have sufficient English to explain why.
The fuel-tanks had to be built on site, to affix directly to the craft. Westinghouse wired it, and the Mohawk Company nearly bowed out of the project coughing up all that glass. Tesla insisted that Control remain at Miskatonic due to the superior quality of the observatory. To him, it was all just Math.
But he treated his 'borrowed minds' as though they were ensouled, behind the golden-yellow tinted triple panes of their brass diving-bell heads. Therein, only the single iris of each of Tesla's photographer crony, old Muybridge's “special” cameras; red-lined diagnostic dials and differently-labeled lights glared in place of eyes, above fabulously complicated and only tangentially humanoid bodies whose parts could be interchanged on the Lunar surface during the mission.
It was Tesla, too, who used a very simple process with nickel and cadmium to “re-circulate” the power supplies of every one of the “IRA,” or Intelligent Robot Automata. Half the power loss could be drawn back into the batteries by this direct-current setup. This also carved mass from the rocket in great chunks when the ad hoc Design Committee found out how many galvanic batteries could be left behind on Earth as a result of the Serbian's foresight and frugality.
A larger, also-DC model was employed in Pip-7's guts to power Tesla's “particle detector”, which was busily measuring a previously undiscovered sort of ionizing energy that Dr. Tesla called “cosmic radiation” after his colleague Henri Becquerel's research. (Tesla crowing about this 'new form of energy from outside the solar system' did nothing to make the doomsayers in the press stop yapping like yard mutts that couldn't see past the ends of their own leashes, the Professor thought sourly.)
But even Tesla couldn't make those screens stop flickering. It wasn't just the flicker in that room, but having to do ten men's work from this station; a whole fleet of men, Navy sailors with better heads for math, order, routine and round-the-clock. The only round-the-clock brass appointed to Control was Captain Castaigne.
Alden Castaigne was U.S. Army Cavalry, hand-picked and commissioned by a Rear Admiral for his ability to talk to Tesla's scientists out in Colorado as much as his expertise on long-range ballistics and telegraphy from his own service in the Pacific.
Good civilian liaison, and Meade understood the wisdom of this rather circuitous choice. The problem with giving the execution of any project to scientists, Meade long put forth to his fellows, was that scientists don't know how to work. He should have added that he didn't either. He was tired, and he wanted to go home. But this objective was bigger than just one man.
He was half in his cups. What the hell was he doing here? This was a busy laboratorium. The Serbian himself was supervising here night and day, around the clock, pausing only to call all the men together for a big meal where Nobody Talked About Work. He couldn't be here. He had to get bright. He was...
Oh, he was so sad since Martha. The work was all that kept him up and stargazing, since she was no longer going to come back up the front walk. He was here working. He'd just nodded off down in Control One, below the main room where the radio-men worked. He was still in the flicker-palace.
Then he remembered what he was doing. What he'd dreamed. And it scared him clear-headed. Meade had dreamed of blood on the moon, but not... blood. Not exactly.
Professor Meade wondered if any of the Germans, or the Russians, or any of those tiresome new “psycho-analysis” quacks had yet studied the effects of sitting in front of flickering lights for a long time. The wash of raw post-Impressionist light like wet paint, the thunderstorm of static and image from the long, tightly-packed wall of tele-visor screens, control meters, levers, and dials made the sanity ripple and the head begin to hurt. Should they care to chatter about “unconscious material” and “symptom formation”, a few hours staring at Tesla’s flashing wall should inspire a paper or two.
Glancing at Stewart's weird old cahier again, he wondered if the Gallic prophets had been speaking in metaphor, when they described this “Yellow Stain” that Stewart and Adams swore was the harbinger of the true Anti-Christ. That made his tired, whiskey-fuzzed brain think of the other kind of flicker-palace, and that interesting film by the French where les frères Lumière made Jules Verne into a kind of puppet show, and stuck a rocket in the Moon's eye.
Meade's brain raced on, webbing thought to thought as he woke all the way. No one had come and shaken him. Two of the ten or so young
assistants on duty that shift were watching the screens, talking to each other in low tones, doing homework and munching crackers.
One of them was dipping the crackers in his coffee. The other was smoking a cigarette and remembering to tap his ashes in the ash tray (a rarity, amongst graduate students.) The blond one's name was Owen. Royal Navy ROTC or whatever they called it. Limey exchange-student in dress blues. The other wasn't even a proper assistant, just an observer. That great fat boy, who styled himself a Scientifiction writer. Mr. Fort. Still, he liked to get his hands dirty.
It wouldn't do to sell Charles Fort short, their Esteemed Steamed Department Chairman would have said. The bellowing Brooklynite had been more than instrumental in addressing the House committee, and President William Jennings Bryan on the necessity of looking beyond the surly bonds of Earth, in an age when most politicians had barely gotten their heads around the wireless telegraph. But in that department, their young writer on his “ride-along” met and exceeded every expectation.
“Stay, and let Salvation damn you,” Charles Fort addressed Congress, “Or straddle an aural beam and paddle from Rigel to Betelgeuse. We stand at the very entrance to the desert of space exploration, my fellow Americans, and God alone knows what the answer to anything is. But perhaps it is that the stars are very close indeed. Perhaps we will reach these new Promised Lands.”
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2013 Page 21
