Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013

by Various Writers

  All right then, so ... what started you writing Lovecraft?

  Well, I was a hardboiled detective writer at the time, when I got the idea ... what would happen if a cop or detective or some kind of investigator was looking into something that couldn’t be solved, where the clues didn’t add up unless you were willing to think outside the box. Like ... okay, well what if the killer didn’t need to breath oxygen?

  I was great friends with Robert M. Price back then (still am, we just live many states apart now), and he encouraged me to do something with the idea. I didn’t want to do anything simple, some stupid vampire or werewolf or whatever. Once I got started, I wanted it to be a mythosian menace ... I wanted to explore the idea of the overwhelming horror, the thing so terrible, so mind-shattering that one could not raise a hand in self-defense.

  Writing about single-minded men of action, the whole can’t-do-a-thing attitude left me a little cold. Well, long story short, once I got into it, I found that if you were going to be true to the concept, you couldn’t just throw it out. The mythos was harder to beat than I thought. But, I followed through, and I ended up creating the first supernatural detective series since the pulp era.

  That was the Teddy London series, yes?

  Yes, sir.

  And was it an easy sell?

  Nope, not at all. At the time, no one had crossed-genres. All the major publishing houses were aghast. Their major concern was “where will we put it in the bookstores?” They really didn’t know what to do with such a book.

  No, the first time the series was in print was a rocky period. They didn’t know how to market it. People enjoyed it. The series launched my career. It’s back in print now for the third time, new novels in the series, audio books, one of the characters has their own comic, and of course, there are all the other writers who have similar series now, and all the television shows and movies that follow similar lines, so ... it was a success ... (laughs), it just wasn’t all mine.

  Feeling like you got cheated a little?

  No, not really. I mean it. First off, I was borrowing heavily from Lovecraft to create the series. And, although the London gang, and the other investigators I’ve created over the years, have met up with other horrors, I’ve continued to harvest mightily from HP’s works. Also, I’m certain I was influenced by the character Kolchak: the Nightstalker. In 1973, that movie was the highest rated TV movie of all time. Its sequel did great, but the single season of the show did not.

  Simply put, they didn’t take it seriously and so the show failed, and it was another decade before I came along to bring back the idea so ... we’re all dipping into the same well. Besides, the owners of Kolchak came to me to do the new novels for the character, so what goes around comes around, I guess.

  Now, here’s a question ... if London is your biggest hit, why didn’t you go with a Teddy London series story for this collection?

  I thought a long time on what to submit. Since I don’t do any self-publishing ... nothing against it, just have never had the opportunity ... I wondered what to do? London? Someone new? One of my non-series mythos stories? I could see pros and cons to every choice. Anyway, I thought, if it wasn’t for Bob Price, it would have probably taken me a lot longer to get involved with the mythos, so I decided it should be something Bob inspired.

  Now, of course, he was there at the beginning of London, but he was also the editor that asked me to do a sequel to “The Tale of Inspector Legrasse,” the middle story in Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu.” And when I remembered that I thought, that’s the perfect story.

  By putting this one in, I give the readers a real chance to judge me as a mythosian. Here I am, daring to write a sequel to one of the most famous bits of Lovecraft of all time. Also, since “Call” was his first mythos story, and this would be my first direct sequel ... well ... it seemed a good choice.

  Back to Top

  About C.J. Henderson

  CJ Henderson is the creator of the first modern supernatural detective, Teddy London, as well as many others. Besides his own characters, he has also brought new life to older occult investigators, such as Lin Carter’s Anton Zarnak and Lovecraft’s Inspector Legrasse.

  Over the decades he has had some 70 books and/or novels published as well as hundreds and hundreds of short stories and comics and thousands of non-fiction pieces. He has had work published in every genre, as he says, from high fantasy to low comedy. In comics he has handled everyone from Archie to Batman and from the Punisher to Cherry Poptart.

  CJ has been selling his tales for over thirty-five years. His works have been released to the world in editions in numerous languages from thirteen different countries. More, if you count those nefarious lands that decided not to pay him.

  For those who would like to shop, feel free to do so at www.cjhenderson.com, or to use this site as a menu from which to then go to your favorite place to make purchases.

  Also by C.J. on Kindle

  Brooklyn Knight (Piers Knight Book 1)

  Central Park Knight (Piers Knight Book 2)

  Radio City Knight (Piers Knight Book 3)

  The Things That Are Not There (Teddy London Book 1)

  The Stench of Fresh Air (Teddy London Book 2)

  The Sleep That Rescue (Teddy London Book 3)

  An Eternity of Self (Teddy London Book 4)

  What You Pay For (Jack Hague Book 1)

  Jack Hagee, Private Eye (Jack Hague Book 2)

  Lai Wan: Tales of the Dreamwalker

  The Tales of Inspector Legresse

  The Spider: Shadow of Evil

  Where Angels Fear

  Degrees of Fear

  The Reign of the Dragon Lord

  Kolchak and the Lost World

  The Supernatural Investigations of C.J. Henderson

  The Occult Detectives of C.J. Henderson

  Connect with C.J. Online

  Website: www.cjhenderson.com

  Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/C.-J.-Henderson/e/B001JSBLR8/

  Back to Top

  Radiant Dawn

  Cody Goodfellow

  The follow Chapter 27 is an excerpt from Radiant Dawn, published by Perilous Press.

  From the porthole in his sleeping compartment in the Spektr science module of Mir, Dr. Sherman Moxley could see the spacecraft grow from a speck to a silhouette against the cobalt backdrop of the earth, 250 miles below. For a moment, before he blinked and rubbed his eyes and took a good look, he thought, I’m going home.

  The ship was black and sleek and predatory, and looked more like a fighter-bomber, or Lockheed’s old SR-71 spy plane, than a shuttle. It was less than a third the size of big white school buses like Atlantis or Columbia, but bigger than the unmanned Progress drones that brought their supplies and took their garbage. They were two weeks past their extraction date, and had all but decided to abandon ship in the Soyuz capsule by week’s end, but he knew from looking at it that this was not their ride home.

  Moxley climbed out of his sleep-sack and swam through the Spektr module, threading a painfully memorized route through the maze of shadowy scientific gear, to the three-foot circular hatchway leading into the node.

  A spherical chamber of hatchways, the node was the intersection of the six modules that made up Mir. From inside the modules, Mir was like a cruciform chain of interlocking motor homes, but inside the node, Moxley saw Mir for what it was. It reminded him of the plastic Habitrail hamster tube cities his parents bought for him in the Seventies. The ever-expandable habitat of modules and tubes, complete with treadmills and bottled food and endless busy-work, even smelled like the gerbil cages he had lovingly tended for a few weeks, then abandoned. That’s us, he thought ruefully, swimming faster through the node and into the core living module: abandoned pets in a fancy cage.

  One of the wags in his NASA support team had packed him some supplementary light reading that he only discovered a week after he’d arrived on the station. It was the full text of the 1998 House Science Committee Report, itemizing
the many potentially lethal safety hazards aboard Mir, the rigidified incompetence of the Russian Space Agency’s TsUP ground control, the cash-and-carry duplicity of cosmonauts who routinely covered up disasters, and the corruption at Energiya, the mostly private contractor that designed and operated Mir before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, and which had run the station and its human cargo into the ground. The recommendation of Congress two years ago had been that Mir be decommissioned and allowed to fall out of orbit, burning up in the atmosphere. In his dreams every night, it did, while they were still inside.

  Ink-stamps in the margins beside the especially gut-wrenching passages gave the anonymous donors away: the PUSHies, a Bible-study group of spiritually flabby, childishly vindictive born-again astronauts. They were the kind of Christians who drove Moxley to lone-wolf spirituality–the well-fed, spoiled yuppie mystics who thanked God for everything, but asked for even more, as if God were a whipped parent with nothing better to do than stage-manage their super-biblically comfortable lives. If God did hear all their prayers, it logically followed that they were hogging His attention, and thus partly to blame for all the unchecked famine, disaster, plague and genocide in the world. He’d pissed them off once by posing this question at one of their weekly prayer brunches, and again by getting himself shoehorned into this mission. Their ubiquitous ink-stamps bore the two four-letter acronyms that defined the alpha and omega of their tedious creed: WWJD–“What Would Jesus Do?”–and PUSH–“Pray Until Something Happens.”

  Moxley crept across the core module, scrambled over the bundles of cable and ventilation hoses choking the mouth of the hatchway, and floated into the Kvant docking module, danger-close behind Arkady, who crowded the sealed docking port.

  The Kurs automated docking system engaged as the ship approached the Kvant docking module, but true to form, the software crashed and aborted when the shuttle was only ten meters from the docking port. It backed away and immediately shot back at them at reckless speed, rolling to accept the docking collar on its dorsal surface, just behind its cockpit.

  “What is it, Arkady?” he asked.

  The mission commander only shrugged, grunted, “No radio contact.”

  There was no point in asking whether they’d heard from earth; out the porthole, he could see the piebald face of the South Pacific. They had radio contact for only fifteen minutes of every ninety-minute orbit, and were currently at the bottom of the black-out.

  He found himself leaning as far over Arkady’s shoulder as he could in hopes of getting a breath of fresh, or at least different, air from the ship. The air on Mir was synthesized from water distilled from their own urine, with all the springtime freshness such a process implied. The air of Mir stank of sweat and farts, fungi and the scorched maple syrup reek of antifreeze from leaks in the coolant system. Nobody trusted the SFOG solid-fuel oxygen generator canisters, which had caused a major fire in the Kvant module, four years ago. Every breath had been breathed in, and yawned, belched and farted out thousands upon thousands of times. Every story was told to death after the first month, and their faces had become meaningless elements of the cluttered environment of the station. Any change was welcome.

  At the same time, he fought the urge to back away as far as he could. This ship had not come to take them home. Ergo, it was more people coming into an already unbearably claustrophobic place. They were practically castaways here, already, with only two more weeks worth of food and potable water left, and no resupply shuttle, no Progress drone on the way, which was probably a good thing, since one had crashed into Mir in 1997, and almost killed them all.

  In his months aboard Mir, he had learned nothing if not how to think like a Russian. Astronauts expect safety and comfort; they expect good things to happen. Cosmonauts expect disaster, and they are seldom disappointed.

  This was not what they needed, right now. It was one more enigma in an already unfathomable, unacceptable mystery. Literally anything could be behind that hatch, but nothing good.

  “We’re not expecting anybody?” Moxley probed.

  Behind him, Ilya, the engineer, laughed and shoved aside billowing plastic sacks of trash they stored in the docking module. “We were expecting not to be here, so why tell us anything?”

  The shuttle manually docked, and the docking port gasped and popped open readily enough after Ilya beat on it with a spanner. A crew-cut head on a meaty bull-neck jutted into the Kvant module. The cosmonaut regarded them blandly for a moment, then shook out a cigarette and lit it. Moxley watched the flame with a caveman’s mixture of awe and fear. In zero-gravity, the flame from the gunmetal blue Zippo lighter was a perfect, expanding sphere, like a new sun.

  #

  There were three of them. Their commander took Arkady aside for a brief, heated exchange while the other two swooped through Kvant and the core module, ducked through the node and into Kvant 2 as if they had the layout memorized, and had been training in zero-G all their lives. Moxley looked to Ilya, but the engineer’s morose frown kept him from speaking up. The commander barked something at Ilya, and he retreated, presumably to help the other two cosmonauts.

  Arkady settled into the command center, a foxhole amid stacked computer monitors, joysticks, clipboards and manuals. He punched up EVA protocols. Moxley was aghast. Before an EVA was even seriously discussed, the cosmonauts always wrangled for hours with Energiya. Contracts had to be revised, bonus allotments had to be posted, and insurance rates adjusted. But their visitors weren’t regular Energiya employees. These men moved like the cosmonauts of yore, like the second coming of Yuri Gagarin. They moved like soldiers. They wore black jumpsuits with a single red star on the shoulder. The commander had a silver eagle on the collar of his tunic. He had a pistol in a holster at his hip.

  Five minutes later, the two commandos emerged from the airlock at the far end of Kvant 2 in Mir pressure suits and speed-crawled, hand over hand, down the science module and back out onto the core. The one time Ilya had outfitted Arkady for an EVA, it had taken an hour to suit them up and check all the safety systems. Moxley had never asked, or been invited, to go outside. Ilya crawled back into the core module and hovered by the hatch, staring hard at the back of the shuttle commander’s head.

  Moxley resisted an absurd urge to tap on the glass and salute as they passed his porthole. Had they been detailed to repair some critical experiment Arkady couldn’t be trusted with? But no, they were creeping over the skin of their own ship, of which Moxley could only see the nose from Kvant. He moved nodewards to find a better vantage, but the shuttle commander blocked the way.

  “What do you know about it?” he demanded. His accent was so thick he might have been cold-reading from a phrase book. Moxley didn’t answer, couldn’t, so lost was he in the stranger’s face. It had been three months since he saw any living, breathing person aside from Arkady or Ilya. After such a lapse, a new person is a new species, speaking a new language, and must be acclimated to. Compounding the problem was the officer’s face itself, which appeared carved out of flint, and turned molten before Moxley’s startled eyes. “You were sent here to study. What did you learn?”

  Moxley blinked. This was about him? About his wasted time in a can in orbit, watching something that defied all his understanding of astrophysics, and being able to tell no one on earth about it?

  He told the commander what he’d told Houston. He made a production of it. He got out his charts, his spectrographic analyses, his gamma ray and X-ray images, hundreds of photographs.

  From Mir he had logged eighteen separate events, documenting many of them extensively, given the limits of the outmoded, cranky Russian equipment, and the indeterminable nature of the event itself. At infrequent intervals, at a fixed point in space about a thousand miles above Mir, ordinary sunlight underwent an almost alchemical transformation into an energy that spiked all wavelengths in a complex pattern that overloaded his instruments, but left no quantifiable record at all, for a duration of one to six seconds. It was like hearing
a cosmic symphony, when he could only perceive one percent of the notes.

  That it was doing something meaningful, he could not dispute. It occurred at irregular intervals, but at very fixed locales, over the same precise points on the globe. Hovering just behind the terminator, it deflected the dying light of the setting sun onto northwestern Idaho; near Kiev in the Ukraine; several points in a belt across equatorial Africa; the Mato Grosso, in Brazil, and the foothills of coastal Peru; southeastern Iraq, hard by the Iranian border. He was no closer to knowing what caused it. He watched the sky and saw nothing until it occurred, and then he could see only the light. He showed the commander the few photographs that captured even a breath of the ugly majesty of the phenomenon. How the light twisted on itself and seemed to curdle as it poured down. It lasted for only a few seconds, and was visible for even shorter duration, but each glimpse was like a vision of some new, unimaginable eternity.

  The commander sat back from the dining table and studied his work. He lit a cigarette, oblivious to Moxley’s hacking. For weeks after arrival, Moxley had been prone to sneezing fits from the fungi that thrived in every nook and cranny of the old space station. Ilya once told him that the cosmic radiation had warped the stray spores that cosmonauts brought up on their feet and in their hair. Athlete’s foot learned to live on nylon and vinyl, and bread molds became free-floating colonies of black nastiness that burst if touched. The cigarette smoke was many, many times worse.

  “What do you think is, that does this?” the commander finally asked. He held up a photograph of the light over the Ukraine. Lines around his eyes deepened, and his mouth contorted into a mirthless smile. Moxley had seen this look enough at Star City to know it meant he was being tested.

  “May I speak freely?” he asked, looking around for support. Arkady stayed welded to his screens, too keyed-up by what he saw to blink. Ilya, wincing and clutching his stomach like always, nodded at him. The commander’s face reddened, released tiny bursts of live steam. Fine, then. “I think it’s a manmade object, maybe some kind of directed energy weapon, except I can’t see it or ping radar off it, or read heat from its thrusters or its power source, even though it ought to be hotter than Chernobyl for hours after it discharges, if it’s a laser. If it’s some kind of solar-powered lens, it should be the size of Texas, to register gamma rays like it does, but I can’t see it. And I don’t have any idea what it’s doing. Right now, I couldn’t even tell you for sure that it wasn’t God, signaling the Second Coming.”