The Starry Wisdom

by D. M. Mitchell

  We begin to hyperventilate, rapid-inhaling the city and the night. The plastic reality of R’lyeh goes flat, silent and cold on the out breath then swells with life, colour and depth on the in. We continue the meditation synchronising our chopping frantic puffs. Then we reverse the whole sequence, accelerating until R’Lyeh polarises from figure back to ground and the Pyramid becomes obvious in all its impossible constriction.

  Five and a quarter miles on each side, seven miles from base to apex with one thousand three hundred and twenty floors, the Millennium Pyramid was a deliberately cyclopean eyesore which never changed shape or purpose and was surrounded by a lethal hex circle extending a full mile beyond the perimeter wall. It was designed and maintained for one purpose only: to keep us out.

  The Pyramid was the handiwork of the last few million proto-sapiens left alive and unchanged by the arrival of the Great New Ones. Its walls contained one thousand three hundred and twenty cities with laws and statutes, schools and factories and clocks and armies. The ignorant millions within this appalling stable solid had defiantly barricaded themselves with Euclidean geometry, denying our existence while fearfully cataloguing our manifestations with their telescopes and cameras.

  “They’re our Dho-Hna, the negative conceptual image of R’Lyeh,” Oubliette says. She wants to fast forward to the fight stuff but there are last minute preparations for a Breaching of the Boundaries like this one.

  First of all, the Pyramid existed entirely in past tense.

  “I hate going into past tense,” I say miserably.

  “I used to hate it,” Oubliette corrects. She’s cute like a boot and for just a moment I imagine her stamping on a human face forever.

  On the star-slicked streets of R’Lyeh, it’s still raining...afterbirth, ambrosia, pennies, dead fairies and we vow eternal love and betray one another twenty three times each, laughing, on our way to raid the tomb-head of H.P. Lovecraft.

  CHAPTER THREE: THE WHORE BENEATH THE FLOOR

  Stairs descending like deformed spines into the toadstool city near the flaking edges of the THIs/NOTTHIs screen generator. Dim titan figures bled into the margins of perception. Hidden in the blind spot at the corner of our eyes we were aware of the cast shadows of the great anti-concepts, the spaces between of the ever present always invisible macroverse... crackle and scuzz, the fractal embroidery of galactic entrails.

  The pyramid’s defenses gave way... there was always someone inside trying to summon us for some insane personal reason...

  Death was imminent.

  There was a reprogrammed Shoggoth in the room with us, selected for its aggression. Ignoring for a moment, the poisoned flower head which opened and closed like a golf umbrella, showering mind-control spores on everything within a ten foot radius, we went for the mid-section – a mass of seething, pistoning carrots and rotting, clutching tubers. These sex organs were on such open and flagrant display, that it should have come as no surprise to the shoggoth or its remotecontroling operator when Oubliette scythed in close, fingers strobing and superheating the air as she castrated the monster in a brief storm of chopped vegetable material and primitive protoplasm.. …and as the mass of perfectly-evolved jigsaw biology spun on its radial axis to inseminate our auras, howling like a mandrake ripped out by the roots. I ran through billions of evolutionary strategies per second. Natural selection as a martial art – fasts forward, pause, rewind – we melted together, minds in stereo and were a thing like a church organ – wheezing stops and pulsing pipes halfway between a crab’s mouth and the ..glass and rusty iron hoses, spraying an organic DDT across the shoggoth’s vulnerable sensory lichens...

  We decided to abandon all mercy as the creature went down. It’s operator would still be experiencing vestigial Central Nervous System mapping and could feel everything the shoggoth felt. Four hundred pointed metal hooves went in like ..and kicked the fucker to chicken salad in seconds

  We were breathing deeply, expressing a red fog and

  “This had better be fucking worth it.”

  CHAPTER FOUR: CTHULHU VS LOVECRAFT

  Oubliette looked like Adam, I looked like Eve We were in an enormous world of intricate, inexplicable machinery left here by the time-travelers.

  Clumsily, using two five-fingered barely-articulate tentacle stubs we uncovered the submerged head of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, late of Providence, Rhode Island.

  The head was motionless in a cylindrical tank filled with little aquarium ornaments – a ceramic castle, rocks crawling with Plutonian spores, dank rotting vegetation and tiny alarming fish. We bent closer and compressed to look through holes the paperthin skull. All that remained of the mouth pouted and puckered like an arsehole.

  “Who’s there?”

  The eyes opened like manhole covers, breaking a thin crusty seal of conjunctivitis and revealing mournful onionskin pupils.

  “I didn’t believe...the fountains on Yith. The way minds are gathered up and threshed. the sieves that destroy human feeling, leaving only cascades of horror and tainted dreams.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  We had no way to respond, having no sense of the passage of time, or even of the concept of time as applied to a universe of constant change...

  “Monstrous. Blasphemous. Squamose. Rugose...” the wartime radio mike at the base of the cylinder sparked and hummed as syntax makers clicked into ratchets rotating home...My brain was placed in a jar and transported...I saw visions of the future, then realised that my visions were not of the future at all...”

  “They were simply memories of a state I had...I had become one of them..the Yithians...unifold extension into eight dimensions...”

  This was playground stuff. Lovecraft’s attempts to translate Aklo concepts into English seemed laughable. We said nothing yet but we could clearly see that the brain in the tank was rotted through with Green Germ. The Germ probably broke through into the Pyramid as microscopic spores, to enslave humanity from the cellular level up.

  We saw the book only once – it disintegrated as it was read, like a dream. The pages fluoresced. Or perhaps there was only one page. It was that kind of book. Glowing tides of letters washed in superblue waves of text across the flashing primary colored

  As we ogled the Ultranomicon, Lovecraft narrated his last most horrific story.

  “ABBBCAGDBACGCGAAABBBCAGDBACGCGAAABBBCA

  GDBACGCGAAABBBCAGDBACGC

  GAAABBBCAGDBACGCGAAABBBCAGDBACGC

  GAAABBBCAGDBACGCGAAABBBCAGDBACGC

  GAAABBBCAGDBACGCGAAABBBCAGDBACGCGAAABBBCAG

  DBACGCGAAABBBCAGDBACGC

  GAAABBBCAGDBACGCGAAABBBCAGDBACGC

  GAAABBBCAGDBACGCGAAABBBCAGDBACGCGAA”

  Four hours later, the punchline was nowhere in sight and yet Lovecraft’s head literally oscillated with spasms of cosmic horror in its eerie submarine pigstye as his voice synthesiser cranked out endless flatly-intoned looping strings of four of the most boring flatspeak letters. It was like Stephen Hawking struggling with the later stages of Alzheimer’s, his titanic brain going the way of his fused, blown body, three funnels down into the cold Atlantic, gobbling like a retard.

  “ABB..”

  My attention was drifting like the devonian shelf; an inch every fifteen trillion years a continent. It was Hal 9000 having a breakdown in front of everyone at Stanley Kubrick’s funeral. This was boredom extended into ... It was almost erotic.

  “BACG”

  We evolved mood shields so that we could listen to Lovecraft without caring what was happening in his weblike disintegrating cortex . As the recital reached its flat crescendo, the effort was causing his fragile brain to shudder like a beautiful flower that’s been dropped into concentrated sulphuric acid. Delicate neural structures fell away like collapsing buttresses in a cathedral. Lovecraft’s brain glowed, miasmic through the paper-thin head. Dissolving grey flakes sifted away as he coughed out the last few letters and fed the bonsai monster fish that shared Lovecraft’s dank aquarium. Little human-faced scre
aming malarkies that darted through the lattice corridors of Lovecraft’s fucked cranium. Whatever the tedious parade of flatscale letters were doing to Lovecraft did not translate. He seemed increasingly terrified, pushing his bland robot voice building to pitches of implied drama as the tin can hum and spellcheck anonymity of his voice struggled to convey claustrophobic vistas of celestial terror and disgust . With only four letters to choose from his efforts were failing miserably.

  “The world’s so terribly hideous..” moaned the decapitated pulp writer. “I can’t feel anymore...”

  “I thought you’d have been happy,” said Oubliette.

  “You hated the cold, you hated other people..”

  “Only at first,” Lovecraft droned. “Now I just miss them. I miss everything except this hideous view...No-one understands me...”

  We decide to confirm his worst suspicions by mercy-bulleting him between the cavernous eyes. A sunken bindi appeared slowly and unravelled like a navel taking Lovecraft’s hangdog expression with it. He seemed satisfied as his consciousness collapsed into unity with the millionfold expansion of the Yithian celestial Monad.

  Wouldn’t you?

  Or at least that’s what we assumed must have happened. When we looked up from frenching one another’s clitoral arrays into symphonic orgasm, the great man was so much swirling intelligent snow, flakes sifting to powder in a twisting screw of water – the cylinder glowed briefly, turning the little castle into a haunted house, lit inside like a Halloween face in the debris and weed forests. The head like a nightlight to make children mad. Then the tiny Innsmouth Horrors moved in to snap up each and every turning flake and neuron.

  “He’s pure consciousness now – unencumbered by concept or line.” I said without much conviction.

  I looked at Oubliette.

  “Did you get all that?”

  “What?” she said, genuinely baffled by my question.

  “His last message. What Lovecraft just said...” Neither of us had thought to bring even the most basic recording device, such as a notebook, pen or reliable memory into the Pyramid. I’d staked all on the semi-autistic recall of a constantly-mutating reality abuser. To my relief, Oubliette was able to recite the entire dreary text by heart, having memorised the Hypernomicon with one dismissive glance. I made her prove it, although I had no way of knowing if the abstract strings of abaccc she was parroting were accurate. The procedure took another eighteen hours even on fast forward.

  “Do that again,” Oubliette said.

  At speed we noticed something curious about the rhythms of the letters. A structure visible in the…

  “DNA,” I whispered. “The book is the code for Cthulhu’s DNA. Someone in the pyramid intends to build a replica Cthulhu! Probaby to attack us!”

  We intended to invoke Jodie the pig from the story of the Amityville Horror – Jodie, suckled by giant termite pigs in the eastern styes of Hell, could be summoned only by rites involving taboo-smashing family breakdown scenarios enacted in a creepy house. Oubliette and I adapted to become genetic twins. We were identical down to the zygote and immediately begin to have sex behind our parents’ backs in the sinister home I grew for the occasion. It rose up like a skeleton then shrouded itself in bricks and mortar and clapboard, it haunted the vacant lot where it had disappeared into a dimension sphincter years earlier. The house was perfect for the type of illicit gender-bending incest that was going on under cover of the bleeding walls, distorted judgmental voices and regiments of buzzing demonic bluebottles. Our parents rapidly showed signs of madness surpassing even our own. It was here that the less adept could lose control and continue in a spiral of mental decay and bloody murder behind closed doors...we held the moment on pause and brought Jodie through all unsuspecting...

  Two red eyes at the window, checking out the mayhem. first time he’d seen Shoggoth porn, ten million images per second deep. The snout quivered.

  We had him...

  The Great Old Ones ate our souls without even thinking about what they were doing. Humanity is a form of BSE in them, eating their minds from the inside. They really wished they’d just stayed where they were, safe in Lovecraft’s head or page...

  BLACK TIDE

  Aishling Morgan

  ‘Josepina is a wanton, Brother Florian, no more than a wanton.’

  ‘Indeed, Brother Siward, yet we must persevere.’

  ‘Just so, Brother Florian. Doubtless her obstinacy is sent to try us. Her sin?’

  ‘In essence, gross moral turpitude. Do you wish the particulars?’

  ‘Name them to her face. Who knows but she might feel shame and thus begin to repent?’

  ‘As it is willed.’

  Florian struck a gong, admitting a girl, slight, dark-haired, freckled, gently rounded at haunch and chest. Her expression, initially of trepidation, altered to sullen defiance, her snub nose turned deliberately up.

  ‘You have erred, child,’ Brother Siward addressed her.

  Josepina remained immobile.

  ‘Possibly when confronted with your sins you will show less impudence,’ the Brother continued.

  ‘To whit,’ Brother Florian stated, ‘a series of acts so base as to seem animal, yet distinguished by an intricate sensuality that discounts all possibility of your pleading blind lust. Self-abuse, on occasions too frequent to numerate. The sucking of members, three times at the least.

  The taking of seed in your mouth. Enjoining the shippen-men to spill their seed across your face, with offering to share the pallet of he would could perform this revolting act in the least time. Bedding with Grey Simon. The wilful surrender of your cunt without intent to procreate, much less within the sanctity of marriage. Urinating in the boiling-vat. Sodomy.’

  Josepina made no response, save to shift her weight from one foot to the other.

  ‘Revolting child,’ Brother Siward added. ‘Do you have no plea? Will you not say you were forced to these uncouth acts?’

  Again Josepina stayed quite.

  ‘Dishonesty, at least, cannot be numbered among your vices. Will you at the least show remorse?’

  The girl shook her head, the tiniest of movements.

  ‘So be it. Fifty strokes. Bare yourself.’

  Without a word Josepina turned her back to the men.

  Bending, she flicked her long dress onto her back, revealing culottes of coarse linen, loose around the thighs, tight at the waist and across her buttocks. Her hand went to the drawstring with a motion indifferent, almost contemptuous, tugging the bow out to allow the garment to drop to the level of her ankles. Naked, her bottom formed two chubby hemispheres of girl-flesh, firm, yet heavy, each marked with a scattering of freckles. Between them, her sex showed clearly, a soft mound richly covered with black hair, the pout of her lips and the knot of pink flesh between them conveying not shame and misery, but insolence.

  Tugging the waistband of her dress high, she let her breasts swing loose, two plump handfuls of dangling meat marked with the same freckles that decorated her face and bottom. Each nipple was stiff, a dark bud that gave the same message as the single bead of white fluid that had formed at the mouth of her vagina. Resting her hands on her knees, she composed herself for punishment, serene and to all appearances indifferent both to her nudity and the coming pain.

  ‘Incorrigible,’ Brother Siward sighed as he rose to his feet.

  ‘Take heart,’ Brother Florian answered. ‘I have a cut of blackthorn fresh from the vinegar barrel. Perhaps it will have some effect where lesser instruments have failed.’

  Brother Siward nodded, his eyes never leaving the girl’s exposed body. Brother Florian moved to one side, opening a chest to take up a length of black wood, thin and pliable, its surface reflecting dull gleams in the sunlight.

  Josepina watched from the corner of her eye, her expression betraying nothing of the responses of her body. Making a polite inclination of his head, Florian passed the whip to Siward.

  ‘Beat her well, Brother,’ he intoned. ‘Who knows
, she may yet be moved to repentance.’

  Josepina’s flesh tightened as the wicked instrument of punishment was raised, her bottom cheeks tensing to part and hint at the dark pucker of her anus. Her eyes closed as the whip lashed down. It hit, making the flesh of her bottom bounce and quiver and her lips peel back from her teeth, briefly. A line of white sprang up across the smooth globes of her bottom, quickly turning to a fresh pink bordered in red.

  ‘Make comparison,’ Brother Florian addressed her, ‘as you are beaten. Your habit against that of your sisters, in particular Epiphany. At the quiet hours she prays; you perform lewd acts with menials. Commands she follows with placid obedience; you respond with poor grace, if at all. Her answer to the ribald calls of the churls is a shy blush and a turn of her head; you give back ripostes that bring colour to the cheeks of your tormentors.’

  Three more cuts had landed across Josepina’s naked rear as he spoke, and three times her bottom had bounced under the impacts, the flesh deforming briefly before returning to its natural, female shape. Each time her teeth had drawn briefly back, but not so much as a grunt had escaped her lips.

  Brother Siward continued with the beating, aiming hard cuts to make the girl’s buttocks jump and jiggle, one after another until her bottom was a mass of purple welts and double, scarlet tracks. All the while Brother Florian lectured, commenting on the Josepina’s depravity and comparing her with the virtuous Epiphany. At last, red faced and puffing, Brother Siward threw down the blackthorn whip.

  His colleague took the stick up, measured his aim across Josepina’s quivering bottom and brought it down with all his force across both nates. Brother Siward, his breath recovered, began in turn to berate the girl, remarking on the vulgarity of her exposure.

  ‘Do you not feel shame?’ he demanded. ‘Bent, with your cunt flaunted for all to see? Have you no modesty? Does revealing your breasts and buttocks mean nothing to you?’