Peng had recovered swiftly from his stunning. His eyes were wide with wonder but dripping blood as he watched Calder’s rift tear the bridge apart. “We’re almost home, Captain—”
Anything further Peng had to say was lost as the Wellington cracked asunder.
The air was violently expelled as the bridge separated from the aft of the ship, and with the air, Walker, too, was expelled into the vacuum of space. He hurtled end over end. With each spin, he watched in strobe as his ship was torn apart. The explosion, when it came, lit up the system like a tiny second sun, but after that, the only light Walker had to guide him as he floated through space was the dirty reflection of the entity he knew as Osiris II.
#
In the days that his exo-suit’s life support provided him, Walker had no choice but to endure the ravings of the planetary entity as it writhed and thundered. Every mind-numbing vibration stripped part of him away, wore him down. After days of violent rage, the monstrosity settled into a semblance of peace once more, and as Walker floated amongst the multitude of dead things, he finally came to understand.
The dark energy emanating from the leviathan flooded him, and as it gained strength and robbed him of his own, it drew on other life throughout the galaxy to sustain its endless cancerous aura. Rifts in the fabric of time and space opened around him like momentary sores on the flesh of the universe. Some opened close by, others mere flashes of light thousands of kilometres away, but all of them brought another life, another soul, plucked from some alien world kicking and flailing into the fatal void. Each was a spark to drain, to expunge, to power the leviathan’s infernal battery.
Like the others, Walker eventually gave up the struggle and accepted his fate as just another lost soul plucked from the web of life and destined to become a star floating in a graveyard orbit.
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Interview with Shane Jiraiya Cummings
Tell us more about your short fiction
My most recent short story collections were the four volumes of the Apocrypha Sequence. This is a series of dark fantasy and horror collections with interwoven themes and interconnected stories. They are Deviance (stories about the darkness within the human heart), Divinity (religious-themed fantasy and horror stories), Insanity (dark stories about madness), and Inferno (shared world pre- and post-apocalyptic stories set in Australia). So why ‘Apocrypha’? Well, these mini-collections are akin to a recording artist remixing their tracks.
I consider that I have two major collections – Shards, which showcases my flash fiction (a form for which I am well known), and The Abandonment of Grace and Everything After, which is my full-length collection. These are my ‘gospel’, so to speak. The Apocrypha Sequence was an opportunity to arrange my stories in different ways and publish stuff that didn’t easily fit into either of my main collections. The Apocrypha Sequence as a whole was a finalist in the Australian Shadows Award – Australia’s top honour for horror fiction – and each volume is well worth checking out (Deviance is free, and the others are $1.99 or less).
The Abandonment of Grace and Everything After represents the best of my non-Lovecraftian horror and dark fantasy short stories and novellas and is a ten-year career retrospective. It will be published very soon. If you’ve read one or two of my stories (here, in Scott Nicholson’s Gateway Drug, or elsewhere) and you want to really know more about me and my work, this collection is the definitive Shane Jiraiya Cummings. Every story has a detailed afterword, where I explain the inspiration behind each story and provide snippets about my life. It’s very revealing in places, but I believe the connection between author and reader is a personal one, so that’s what I’ve provided.
What is your Ravenous Gods cycle of stories?
Ravenous Gods is the name I have given to my Lovecraftian stories that feature protagonist Captain Max Calder. These stories are all at novelette or novella length, and when I’ve completed several more, I will publish them in a collection unsurprisingly entitled Ravenous Gods. These stories are the centre of an expanded universe that I hope will one day span different media – namely books and graphic novels. The Ravenous Gods cycle intersects with three lines of comic books I’m writing – one which will pick up from where the Ravenous Gods book will finish and two others where the Ravenous Gods mythos will be a background element. The cycle will be underpinned by a Max Calder novel set in an alternate history World War One, which will act as Calder’s origin story. Wish me luck in bringing it all together!
Current Ravenous Gods stories are Requiem for the Burning God (published as an ebook), “Dreams of Destruction” (to be published in Cthulhu’s Dark Cults 2), and “Graveyard Orbit” (reprinted in this collection). Note that these stories were published out of the story arc’s chronological order, but later stories will fill in the blanks.
Why do you describe your Ravenous Gods stories as ‘Lovecraftian’ rather than ‘Cthulhu Mythos’?
As much as I enjoy the mythos that Lovecraft, his peers, and his followers have created, I would rather be inspired by them than imitate them. There’s nothing wrong with imitation – especially given the imaginative pantheon of the Cthulhu Mythos – but I’d rather forge a new path. More importantly, the fear of the unknown that drove Lovecraft’s original tales is missing in derivative work. The moment you label something a ‘shoggoth’, ‘deep ones’, or ‘mi-go’, it instantly paints a mental picture for the reader. This is the antithesis of fear of the unknown. In some of my stories that link in with others (such as “Requiem for the Burning God” and “Dreams of Destruction” for the Cthulhu’s Dark Cults series), I used established Mythos characters (e.g. Kurpannga) but I extrapolated from them and created new monstrosities. In essence, I like to draw on the spirit rather than letter of Lovecraft’s genre tropes and build from there.
What will your next book be about?
Aside from my about-to-be-released collection, The Abandonment of Grace and Everything After, I don’t know what my next book will be, to be honest. It’s a refreshing place to be. I have a few manuscripts in development. My problem is that I’m not focused enough to complete a novel, although I’m striving to be more disciplined in that area. The likeliest candidate for a next book will be Ravenous Gods, a collection of Lovecraftian stories featuring hero Captain Max Calder (and which intersects with some of David Conyers’ Harrison Peel stories). Other possible candidates for next book include my first Yamabushi Kaidan Japanese fantasy novel, Circle of Tears, or my in-progress great Australian zombie novel. Given that 2014 is the 100-year anniversary of the First World War, I also wanted to write Max Calder’s WW1 origin story as a novel.
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About Shane Jiraiya Cummings
Shane Jiraiya Cummings has been acknowledged as “one of Australia’s leading voices in dark fantasy”, had more than 100 short stories published in Australia, North America, Europe, and Asia, and his work has been translated into Japanese, Spanish, French, and Polish. Shane has won two Ditmar Awards, and he has been nominated for more than twenty other major awards, including Spain’s Premios Ignotus.
Shane is an Active Member of the Horror Writers Association and former Vice President of the Australian Horror Writers Association.
His upcoming releases include the dark fantasy and horror collection The Abandonment of Grace and Everything After and the Lovecratian collection Ravenous Gods.
In his youth, Shane was trained in the deadly arts of the ninja, and the name Jiraiya (lit. “Young Thunder”, after the legendary ninja Jiraiya) was bestowed upon him by his sensei.
Also by Shane on Kindle
Requiem for the Burning God
Rage Against the Night
Shards
Phoenix and the Darkness of Wolves
The Song of Prague
Apocrypha Sequence: Deviance
Apocrypha Sequence: Divinity
Apocrypha Sequence: Inferno
Apocrypha Sequence: Insanity
The Smoke Dragon
The M
ist Ninja
Connect with Shane Online
Website: www.jiraiya.com.au
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1130457.Shane_Jiraiya_Cummings
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Shane-Jiraiya-Cummings/e/B002BLSDHS/
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The Weaponized Puzzle
David Conyers
The following novella appeared in The Weaponized Puzzle, the second in David’s collection of Major Harrison Peel tales.
McMurdo Station, Ross Island, Antarctica, June 1995
The South Pole mid-winter was a world enveloped in both ice and darkness, and Coaldale hated everything about it.
McMurdo was the largest official bastion of human settlement in the great white continent, the only location for hundreds, if not thousands of miles where the lights were on. It was two in the afternoon, base time, but only stars shone beyond the settlement. US SEALs and Rangers newly deployed to the ice were being inducted in the temporary facilities recently commandeered by the US Department of Defense.
One of those Rangers was Captain Byrd Coaldale. He was late arriving, having been delayed by another briefing, but he also didn’t care that he was late. His only show of respect was to enter the building quietly, to sit towards the back where he rubbed his hands together warming them. Listening to the inducting officer drone on had to be preferable than enduring the bitter outside cold.
A silent black and white film ran through a digital projector at the far end of the briefing room. The footage was circa 1950s. A man in a fur coat with UN insignia stood adjacent to what resembled a gigantic cucumber with a starfish on its apex and five vine-like appendages emerging from its mid-section. Then it moved. As Coaldale recovered from his shock he realized he was staring at a living entity.
It was one of those aliens everyone in the Pole had talked of so often since his arrival, spoken of in tones that painted the creatures in reverence and awe. The projected black and white UN man played a pipe, although there was no sound with the footage. The monster presumably responded with piping of its own. Coaldale had thought it some kind of put up, until this very moment. Like a switch had been turned on inside him and suddenly he was interested in everything the inducting officer was saying.
“This,” spoke up Robert Lynch, the Navy SEAL Lieutenant leading the briefing, “is a Pentapod.”
Lynch gave the crowd a moment to let the words sink in. If the officer was expecting awe, they gave none. They were silent like corpses.
“Any questions so far?”
No one answered.
Standing half in the light of the projector and half hidden by it, Lynch pointed to the cucumber shape like he had seen one every day for a year, and perhaps he had.
“This is project RESOLUTION ZERO archive footage. The man you are looking at is Colonel Doctor Wingate Peaslee, who was a legend in our circles. Back then we had limited communications with the ‘Visitors’, as the RZ guys like to refer to them, and Peaslee led much of our work. The Pentapods taught us a thing or too. Things we really didn’t want to know…”
Coaldale shuddered and not from the cold. He had heard all about the Pentapods, read all the reports, but he had yet to see one in the flesh. Film footage was the next best thing, and had proved more disturbing than he had expected. The problem was it didn’t look fake, despite his recently marveling at the digital special effects in the Jurassic Park movie a few years back. Anything could be doctored, and yet an undefined and very sinister element captured in the footage made it genuine.
“These days we rarely see the Pentapods, yet we continue to carry on the tasks they burdened us with all those decades ago. The Pentapods however,” Lynch emphasized, “are not our problem.”
He changed video files. New footage from the same era was of an icy desert seen from an airplane. At first Coaldale didn’t know what he was looking at until he identified men on the ground, tiny individuals filmed from an airplane high above the fields of Antarctic snow. They were running, fast and away from a threat Coaldale could not see. He looked for the pursuer, until he realized his mind wasn’t imaging a hunter much bigger than the men. When he spotted the amorphous shape the size of a mining dump truck, all white and tentacles and eyes and mouths that seemed to shift in and out of a jelly-like consistency, he squirmed. The pulsating shape rolled over one man crushing him without slowing an iota. It was like watching a tsunami engulf unsuspecting bathers on a populated beach.
Lynch let the film roll, as one by one each fleeing man was crushed. They had no hope, but they all ran regardless, until the very end.
“That,” explained Lynch, “is a shoggoth.”
A private up the front puked. The acidic smell quickly filled the room, and he puked again. No one said a word and all left the young soldier to soak in his mostly digested lunch. The private quickly excused himself until Lynch told him to sit down. There was more learning to do.
“This shoggoth was spotted in 1961,” the inducting officer explained. “It disappeared shortly after this footage was taken. We haven’t seen another one this big since, but we know they are many more in the depths of Pentapod City.”
A young Navy officer raised her arm. “Sir, how do we fight them?”
Lynch laughed unkindly. “You don’t. You run as fast as you can, and you hope you can run faster than your buddies.”
Coaldale laughed too, understanding the sick joke he had signed up for. All the men in the footage had run. It proved only that the advantage of speed was in being crushed last. It would be him running soon, for it was his mission to lead a team of US Rangers into the depths of the Pentapod City and map it, and that was where the shoggoths presumably still existed.
“How did you survive?” Coaldale demanded of Lynch, from the back and in the shadows.
The SEAL officer was all seriousness when he said, “I ran the fastest.”
“So the ‘shoggoth’ gave up?”
“No. I was in a team of a hundred men. Only three of us got away because we ran in the opposite direction, away from the largest flock of fleeing men.”
Flock.
Coaldale snorted. He knew then why he had been sent to Antarctica. He was just another sheep being led to the slaughter.
#
RAAF Base Darwin, Northern Territory, October 2012
Harrison Peel emerged from shadows cast by the morning’s sunrise, chambered the first round of his Glock 9mm sidearm and stepped into the Royal Australian Air Force hangar. He aimed his weapon towards three figures in the hangar’s center. Their leader was a tall thin woman who conversed with her male American pilot and co-pilot. The three corporate-types were running through final pre-flight checks before they boarded their Bombardier Challenger 300 private jet—except one of them wasn’t corporate, she was an enemy spy.
“Going somewhere?” Peel asked cheerfully while stepping into the light, his weapon never wavering. He’d shoot the Russian intelligence operative to wound if she challenged him, but felt certain it wouldn’t come to that. The pilots were civilian and would be no trouble. Already the men were raising their arms in surrender. In contrast, the woman’s cold stares were her only reaction, but then it would take a lot to rattle this senior SVR agent defiantly stealing secrets from the Australian Defense Force.
“Major Peel,” the woman replied with her husky American cover accent. For added effect she flicked her long dark hair over one shoulder and pushed forward a long skinny leg barely covered by a short skirt. She looked Peel up and down in his camouflaged army uniform. “Didn’t expect you so early?”
“You have a crate that belongs to me,” he responded confidently.
The two pilots’ eyes drifted to the wooden box in question alerting Peel to where the item was, not far from the aircraft and marked US GOVERNMENT: TOP SECRET. The Russian wouldn’t look at it. She was skilled at not drawing attention to people or items that could be used against her, not that it mattered now.
“You plan on stopping me, Major Peel?”
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“I do.”
“I am the most senior representative of Centaurus Limited in this base, their Chief Mathematician. Surely you know I’ve been Code-89 cleared, and authorized to deliver this crate to our Singapore office.”
Peel’s smile grew wider, for she did not yet know he had already identified her as a double agent. It seemed the perfect time to break the news. “Except that you aren’t Juliette Yaxley, and you don’t work for Centaurus, do you Zoya Reznikova?”
She hesitated for a fraction of a second before she said, “How fanciful.”
“Maybe, but you should take into account that Yaxley’s remains have just washed up on a beach twenty kilometers from here. The crocodiles you fed her to obviously weren’t hungry enough.”
She smiled then, but there was a flicker in her eyes, an edge of uncertainty betraying the fact that Peel had guessed correctly. “You got me there,” she slipped to her Russian accent.
“You can’t escape.”
“How droll.” She ran a long thin finger along her lipstick red lips. “Did you know, Major, that these aren’t Centaurus pilots either but agents from the Motherland? And this isn’t really a Centaurus jet?”
Peel had not been aware of these facts. He wondered if his expression let slip that he too had been caught out. The odds had changed, three against one. But he was the only one present with the weapon, so he’d be glad of those odds for now and work them.
“Doesn’t change a thing, Reznikova.”
“I think it does.”
She nodded sharply. Her eyes drifted beyond Peel to where he heard a figure shuffling forward, closing the space between the main hangar door and where he stood.
Peel turned quickly, but his Glock never waived from aiming at Reznikova’s chest, to identify a heavy set man with a dark mirrored sunglasses and a pistol of his own. That 10mm semi-automatic was firmly pressed into the temple of Peel’s girlfriend, Nicola Mulvany. The thick muscular arm was locked around her neck, pinning her to him. She might have fought him if her hands weren’t bound in a ziplock tie. She wore only a tight t-shirt and pajama pants, the clothes she had been sleeping in.
Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013 Page 28
