Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2013

by Mike Davis (Editor)

  I took another step into the room, and was overcome with vertigo. Intellectually, I knew I was in a small room, but in the total darkness, I felt like I was in some boundless space, and if I weren't careful, I could lose myself in the blackness, or fall into an invisible yawning abyss one careless step away.

  The scraping noise resumed.

  “Mike?” I called again.

  “I'm sorry I got you involved in this, Eric,” Mike replied from the far corner of the room. “For what it's worth, I didn't know it was going to be like this.”

  “Mike, what are you talking about?”

  “The problem is, once you've seen something, there's no way to un-see it. And once you've seen the Eye, it's seen you, and it wants to see more. It always wants to see more.”

  “Mike, you're not making any sense,” I said.

  “I tried not seeing it,” he continued.

  Skrrrrrrritch.

  “I blindfolded myself -- that worked for a little while, but I couldn't go on like that forever. I painted the room black, tried to give myself a sanctuary, but that didn't work either.”

  I took another step toward Mike and stumbled as I put my foot down on something slick and squishy. It popped as I stepped on it.

  Skrrrrrrrritch.

  The noise gnawed at me. It was familiar, but I couldn't place it.

  Skrrrrrrrrritch.

  “It was already too late,” Mike said. “It was behind my eyelids. My own eyes were betraying me.”

  Skrrrrrrrrrritch.

  I recognized the sound: Mike was sharpening a knife.

  “Mike,” I said slowly. “What did you do?”

  The sound of the blade being sharpened stopped.

  “I did what I had to,” he said. “I put them out.”

  My blood froze as I realized what I had stepped on a moment before. I started breathing faster, but the air was so foul, my head spun and I collapsed. The still-moist carpet squished under me, and my stomach heaved as I tried to tell myself it was only paint I was kneeling in.

  Mike sighed.

  “That wasn't enough, though,” he said. “The Eye's still in here, up in my head. I know it backwards and forwards, inside and out. And it knows me. But not for much longer.”

  I heard squelching footsteps cross the room to me, then a hand patted me on the shoulder.

  “I appreciate your concern for me, Eric,” Mike said. “But I've figured out what I have to do. I'm going to be OK. Really, you should be thinking about yourself.”

  He patted me on the shoulder again.

  “This is all for the best, really.”

  “Mike?” I cried. “Mike!”

  I heard a knife slicing flesh, followed by a wet, gurgling sigh. Then Mike's body hit the floor. I tried to move, to go to my friend, but my body was paralyzed. Something hot and wet enveloped my legs.

  I blacked out.

  I awoke slowly from a dreamless sleep that left me feeling rested for the first time in weeks. And when I opened my eyes, I was staring at a blank, white ceiling. No little textures for the Eye to catch and twist, no patterns for it to hide in. I felt free.

  It wasn't until I tried to sit up that I realized I was strapped to my hospital bed. Then the memories flooded back.

  The doctors were the first to come to me. I asked why I was in restraints, and they told me I was a danger to myself, though they wouldn't say why.

  They wanted to know what I remembered. I told them about Mike, his blacked-out room, his suicide. After that, I said, I didn't remember anything.

  They told me I'd tried to burn down the apartment building. When the firefighters arrived, I'd tried to keep them away from the building, pleaded with them to let it burn, and fought with them when they didn't listen. No one else should see what was up there, I'd told them, it was too dangerous.

  The police were next. They had pictures of Mike, of his apartment. They had some of his papers. When I saw one of Mike's sketches of the Eye, I recoiled. They wanted to know what sort of cult we were in, whether we'd been taking drugs, who else was involved.

  I tried to explain. I begged them to destroy the papers, destroy Mike's computer, my computer, even the Book of the Eye. I told them to find Professor Grechi -- he could explain.

  The detectives rolled their eyes as I told them about alien minds and ancient symbols. One of them left the room for a bit; when he came back, he told me the university had no record of a visiting Professor Grechi, and that the Book of the Eye had been stolen from the rare books collection twenty years ago.

  Before they left, they said they'd be charging me with arson and assault. They hadn't decided yet whether to charge me with Mike's death.

  I lay there for the rest of the day, alternately dozing and staring at the ceiling. I asked the doctors to take my restraints off, but given what had happened to Mike, and the story I was telling, they refused.

  The police came back later that afternoon, and they brought a laptop. They'd done some research on the web, and they'd found something they wanted me to see.

  It was on one of the more popular video-sharing sites. It wasn't a long clip, just a couple of minutes. It started with a black screen, then growing and surging arcs of light erupted across the field, drawing out the pattern I knew so well, and had come to fear. It zoomed through four or five iterations of the pattern, and with each one, I shrank further and further back into my bed. The last thing it showed, just for a few seconds, was the equation.

  It was out. The Eye was on-line.

  I looked at the page hit counter -- the video had more than 100,000 views. A knot formed in my stomach. Then I looked at the poster ID: EricKwal93.

  Me.

  I lay there in shock as the police told me they'd found more. I'd been posting things like this all over the Internet for more than a week, they said. Questions in mathematics forums, pictures to on-line photo galleries, the video was on two or three different sites. Why, they wanted to know, had I posted this image I claimed was so “dangerous” where so many people could see it?

  I didn't answer. I knew why -- the dreams of me sitting in front of my computer, staring at the Eye, suddenly took on a new and horrifying significance. But I knew the police wouldn't listen, so I didn't speak. I just sank deeper and deeper into myself. They threatened me with more charges, but I didn't care. It didn't matter anymore.

  Eventually they left.

  So I stared at the ceiling. The more I stared, the more I noticed it wasn't perfectly flat. There were imperfections in the paint job, in the surface of the drywall itself.

  Something was watching me.

  I couldn't help myself. Almost reflexively, I started tracing the arcs, the whorls. The slightest bump or scratch fit easily into the pattern I was building.

  The Eye was there, staring down at me. And I was trapped beneath it.

  In desperation, I closed my eyes, not to sleep, but just to not see.

  But there was no escape. Even there, in the darkness behind my eyelids, the dancing lights coalesced into the familiar shape. I had nowhere left to hide.

  I'd seen the Eye; soon everyone else would, too. I tried to console myself with the knowledge that, eventually, they would understand that I wasn't crazy.

  Then I started to giggle.

  “I see the Eye, and the Eye sees me. God damn the Eye, and God damn me.”

  Justin Munro is an IT security auditor who writes speculative fiction in his spare time. He hails from Frederick, Md., where he lives with his wife, daughter and four cats in a house where the angles are all wrong. This is his first publication.

  Story illustration by Nick Gucker.

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  A Glimpse of the future

  by Stewart Horn

  We live trapped in four beautiful dimensions, each curved so infinitesimally that they appear straight, and our physical laws seem constant. There are many more dimensions, so tightly curved in on themselves that they cannot interact with anything outside – no light
can escape; nothing can enter or leave, only dreams.

  The Old Ones predate not just our world, but our universe. The big bang was the moment when our dimensions expanded and sapped the energy from all the others, leaving them as tiny snail-shells of memory. If the Old Ones exist still in some form in those infinite spirals of nothing, how sane can they be after ten billion years? What does time even mean in that place?

  And if the only way they can re-enter this place is to expand those dimensions again, that will spell the end of everything, not just for us, or Earth, but for everything the universe has ever been. It will be a glorious end, and we may even glimpse the Old Ones’ return before our world starts to crumble!

  Forum post from forums.wooo.org

  It always starts like this. I’m an actor on a film set, filming on location in the middle of the desert, next to this huge crater.

  I’m the hero, because obviously every film needs a lanky, foul-mouthed, Glaswegian builder in it, and the director has made me do a lot of running away from vampire girls, and a lot of standing looking into the hole. I never see the vampires; in fact I never see anybody, no other actors, or crew, and no equipment. But I know I’m on a set, the way you know these things, and I know my lines and what I have to do.

  The last scene of the day is of me at dusk, standing at the edge of the pit, staring in and looking scared. It’s completely black inside, and I’ve to be afraid to go too near the edge. Then the scene’s finished and I realise the rest of the crew has gone home without me, and I have to stay by the black pit all night.

  So I stand and watch the darkness in the pit get deeper until it looks like a huge black pupil in a sandy eye made red by the last rays of the setting sun. Then the knowledge creeps into my mind that something is rising from the depths of that chasm, and when that something reaches ground level we’re all in deep shit, especially me. I have an image in my mind of something big and black, made mainly of tentacles and toothy mouths, and big enough to swallow the world. And I can feel its age, the chains of millennia that it drags with it. I stand and watch as it climbs, closer and closer, just below my line of sight, and finally I turn and try to run.

  I used to wake up before actually seeing anything. Those were the good old days.

  The first time the dream came was the day me and Jessie split up, so the flat was empty, and the dream was scary enough to wake me up in the night. I swear I’ve never been that scared of a dream in my life, not even when I was a wee boy. There’s a thing that happens in the movies when someone has a nightmare, and they wake up suddenly and sit up straight, all out of breath as if they’ve actually been running through treacle instead of just dreaming about it. Then they calm down and act all relieved – “Oh, it was all a dream”. And they lie down again and go back to sleep all snuggled up to their co-star. Well that’s pish. Here’s what actually happens.

  I realise I’m awake and it was a dream, but that doesn’t mean I’m all relieved and fine - I’m still fucking terrified. I pretend I’m still asleep and listen to all the tiny sounds of the flat and the street. I can feel the monster right behind me – it might be as big as a city but it’s in my bedroom, just out of sight, and if I even move it will pluck me out of bed with one tentacle and pop me into its nearest mouth. And I’m pretty certain that being eaten won’t be the end and that even death won’t stop the agony.

  Fuck sake – I’m shaking just writing this down. I’m nervous as fuck right now, but I’ve got good reason. The whole world has good reason; most of you just don’t know it yet.

  Anyway, the dream was well fucked up. But apart from going to work on half a night’s sleep I was fine that first time. Till it came back. Almost exactly the same but this time I was on the other side of the hole so I could see the sun setting behind it. I knew that when the last of the daylight vanished it would be all over, and I think that at the last moment the darkness in the hole started to bulge like a giant bubble just before I woke up

  A few days after that it came again, and again. Not every night but often enough, and every time I stayed awake for the rest of the night like some fucking daft wee wean. I started getting scared to go to sleep, so I would sit up till two or three, sometimes on the net, sometimes watching some old crap on the telly, putting off the moment when I would have to face The Dream. If it did come on one of those nights I might only get an hour of sleep.

  Today I finally saw the city in the pit – it was a place of infinite immensity and impossible angles, where everything could be a different size and shape depending on one’s perspective. I saw what I knew to be a dwelling, but it had too many walls – they were at right-angles to each other, but it took more than four to complete the circuit. The precise number changed as I watched.

  And I saw something like a cathedral, in the city but bigger than the world, at the centre but encompassing everything. That too had too many walls, and more than one roof, and I knew that there was a God inside, and if I could find the perfect angle I would be able to look inside and see Him.

  I circled the building until I was certain that just round the next corner would be the vantage point I needed, when I woke. I have been that close to an Old One.

  Forum post from forums.wooo.org

  I tried medication, you know - alcohol, weed, Horlicks, sometimes in combination. Not only didn’t it make any difference, but those things make it harder to wake up, so I got scared I’d be stuck in the dream and have to watch when the thing emerged from the pit. Just thinking about it makes me sweat, now that I’ve seen.

  And you might say I should just have faced my fears – I should have sat up in bed at night and looked round the room, no matter how scared I was, and I would have seen that there was nothing there. I thought that too, loads of times, but only in the daylight. I went to bed full of courage and determination, but when it came to it, I couldn’t have moved if Hannibal Lecter had crawled into bed with me and shoved a rattlesnake down my shorts. It’s the way a monkey feels when it sees a tiger walking by just a few feet away – visceral, subconscious, uncontrollable terror, and all your higher brain functions just go bye-bye.

  Anyway, round about that time, I got fired off the site. If you know any Glasgow builders this won’t come as a shock - there’s quite a high turnover among site staff, mainly because they’re a bunch of alky arseholes. It was never unusual for guys to turn up a bit drunk after lunch, or disappear halfway through a Friday and start drinking their wages. That was kind of accepted, and I don’t think anyone was ever bumped for that. If someone didn’t show up on a Monday it was likely to mean they were still in jail, or reporting to the magistrate for whatever they’d got up to at the weekend. Sometimes somebody’s mum or girlfriend would phone, but usually they’d just show up on Tuesday, laugh it off and lose a day’s wages.

  The annoying thing is – I was never like that. I’m a fucking crane operator so if I turn up even once smelling like a jakey I could lose my licence and go back to a labourer’s wage – about a hundred quid a week less than what I get now – so I never take the chance. It helps that I’m a bit of a miserable cunt anyway; spending hours in a pub with half a dozen ugly morons really isn’t my cup of tea.

  So that day I was in the cockpit and I was tired; four hours sleep in three days will do that to you. But I was managing – running on chocolate and cans of Red Bull. I was lifting a palletload of gyproc up to the fourth floor and some guys were to take it in through the scaffolding – the kind of thing I do a dozen times a day and nobody ever gets hurt – and I was doing fine, taking it steady, the standard 4m distance.

  But as I watched, the building in front of me, the scaffolding, the dark sheeting and the men, all seemed to melt and morph into a monster. The loose flaps of cladding became waving tentacles; the window gaps ten-foot wide eyes staring back at me. All the terror of the dream came back in a gut-freezing moment. I could tell that the men were still men, but they seemed to be clambering on the beast to service it, the way those wee birds pick fleas off
rhinos. The monster was roaring and the men were shouting their adulation in some language I didn’t know.

  It only lasted a few seconds then I heard my name among the shouts and realised it was coming from the walkie-talkie.

  “Gerry! You fucking dozy cunt! What the fuck are you doing?”

  In a moment I was back in reality – the roaring was my own crane, the shouts in English, or as close as the knuckle-draggers could manage, and it was just a building again. My load, though, was about twenty feet too high and in a panic I let the lever go and stopped it dead. You’re not meant to do that because of precisely what happened next – the load’s own momentum made it swing away from the crane, and back, then in a circle until it inevitably bumped into a bit of the scaffolding. The strut it hit buckled and a whole section collapsed in on itself. The shouts got louder, higher and considerably more profane – I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word fuck so many times in a ten-second period.

  The walkie-talkie shouted at me again in the foreman’s voice. “Gerry! Get a fucking grip! Are you fucking dead or what?”

  I pushed the button and spoke into the handset. “Sorry man; I’m on it.”

  “You’re not fucking on it; you’re fucking in it! Get the load down then shift your fucking useless arse down here so I can fire you to your face. Fucking arse cunt shite bastard!” A few seconds later it crackled into life again. “Try not to fucking kill anybody on the way down.”

  Last night was different. The cave was inside me, even though it was just as big, and I could still see it.

  But because it was so close I could reach down inside and feel about. I closed my hand round buildings as big as moons; I felt the pull of gravity in every direction at once. Eventually I managed to pull myself inside out, then I woke up. That was freaky.

  Forum post from forums.wooo.org

  Nobody died, but big Pikey the plasterer got his arm broken by a falling steel pole – I think we all got off light, considering. So an hour later I was in Tod’s Bar, unemployed and already half drunk. I don’t remember getting home, or much else about that day, but I remember the dream from that night. I won’t ever forget it, because it was the first time the movie had sound.