Through a Mythos Darkly

by Glynn Owen Barrass

  THROUGH A MYTHOS DARKLY

  Glynn Owen Barrass & Brian M. Sammons

  Introduction

  YOUR EDITORS, AS WELL AS YOU READING THIS, ARE FANS OF THE Cthulhu Mythos. Well…let’s say you may be reading this as a potential fan, or a fan of horror in general. But we’re pretty sure most of you readers are fans of the Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraftian Horror. Weird Fiction. Cosmic Horror. Whatever this kind of weird and wonderful storytelling is being called these days. So no matter if you are a diehard fan of the dark wonder H.P. Lovecraft gave to the world, or a neophyte member of the cult of Cthulhu, we are very happy you are with us here. We have edited many books between us, the majority of which feature Cthulhu and his minions. The themes we have covered include Steampunk, Cyberpunk, war, and a series of books themed by decade. One thing we have noticed, while reading for these books, was that certain authors not only provided us with top notch tales in the crossed genres we asked for, but fully turned the tables on the Mythos, and wrote stories which shook everything up, creating realities all of their own, undreamt of by good old Howard Philips Lovecraft.

  Now, it could be argued that every work of fiction, in and of its very nature, is set in an alternate reality, and all of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos stories were set in realities quite distant from our own.

  But, as some of our authors kept showing us, sometimes it is not enough to purely write a story in Lovecraft’s worlds, sometimes you have to just take that extra leap through time and space. And thus this anthology was born.

  For our guidelines, we asked this of the writers invited:

  Take a steampunk world, fill it with giant steam powered robots, and have them herding shoggoths for the ‘betterment’ of mankind. Have the shoggoths rebel, and have do-gooders set about trying to free them. Fill a world with Deep Ones, Ghouls or what have you, or create a world where magic exists and is a part of everyday life. Take a world where America was never discovered because something kept eating the ships, or the Nazis won WWII thanks to outside influences. Perhaps the Chinese built the Great Wall to keep something out other than Mongol hordes.

  Think about the history of the Cthulhu Mythos, and create a future, a past, or a now, where the Serpent Men or the Elder Things reign supreme. What if Wilbur Whateley didn’t die during his robbery of Miskatonic University, or what if Charles Dexter Ward’s ancestor’s plans came to fruition? What if the great, lost civilizations of prehistory were never lost and were still thriving today? We want stories where the Mythos had a huge, lasting impact on the Earth, changed history as we know it, not just destroyed it or cleansed it of all mankind. The more unique, wonderful, amazing, and horrifying your tale, the better. Historic heroes and fantasy worlds are fair game, and you could have great fun with something created by Edgar Rice Burrows, H.G. Wells, and Lewis Carroll. The legends of Robin Hood and King Arthur are useable, as are Biblical apocalypses, and let’s not forget the alternate reality connected to The King in Yellow created by Robert W Chambers.

  So, how did our writers do?

  Fantastically of course! They took our simple, nebulous ideas and rolled with it on an epic scale, not utilizing what we mentioned, (although King Arthur and the worlds of H.G. Wells do make an appearance), but going their own way with their reality bending tales. Some stories expand upon previous Lovecraft tales, such as what could have happened after the events of the Color Out Of Space? Or more specifically, what if that wasn’t the only meteorite to crash into the earth? Weird western and war stories make their appearances in these pages, always in worlds firmly tainted by the Great Old Ones. The American Civil War ends as it shouldn’t, Arthurian and Viking Britains exist in contemporary times, famous monsters from cinema are reimagined, doctors fight ills not born from nature as we know it, whalers hunt larger, more terrifying prey, religious mania grips nations but the gods worshiped are not the ones you would expect, the dead rule the living, all this and more awaits you here.

  These are realities somehow familiar, yet also strange and horrifying. You may like to visit one of them, a brief sojourn around these strangely twisted environs, but leave while your life and sanity are still intact. Curiosity though, we assure you, will have you leaping into a new alternate reality story straight after the last.

  —Glynn Owen Barrass

  & Brian M. Sammons

  12-4-16

  The Roadrunners

  Cody Goodfellow

  IT WAS A HELL OF A WAY TO LEAVE THE FLYING FORTRESS THAT HAD been their home through three wartime years and forty-four missions. Might’ve come to mutiny, if she weren’t sinking in the red mud that covered the whole Gulf shore up to the top of Galveston’s most inspired Protestant steeple, and erased the Fort Butler aerodrome off the map.

  “Don’t take it so hard, ace,” Captain Schwering told his co-pilot. “You put us down dead on top of the airstrip, anyway.”

  They beached the dinghies on a sandbar on top of the old San Jacinto battleground. Cowles played Taps on his harmonica. Norman laid his Norden bombsight on a boulder and smashed it to bits with another rock, then threw the wreckage in the water.

  From higher ground, they could see nothing alive but the huge, freakish jellyfish things wheeling in the sky. They’d flown forty-three runs over Germany, and after the Nazis folded, they volunteered for the task force to go back to America when communications were cut off and it became clear that some kind of Axis endgame had played out at home. So far as they knew, they were the only ones out of the thirty-plane group to survive the Atlantic crossing.

  They’d seen things adrift in between Iceland and America, living islands and horrible flying things the size of Junkers, but none of this had prepared them for the first glimpse of home.

  “Don’t come near New York,” the ghostly voice said over and over on Armed Forces frequencies. “Washington even worse. They rule the skies…”

  They landed and refueled at a private airstrip in Port Royal, but had to scramble when the local wildlife came calling, and moved on over the savage new coastline.

  Florida, beyond Jacksonville, was gone beneath green waves. New Orleans was a new Venice, a logjam of burning riverboat armadas choking the black mouth of the Mississippi.

  They tried to land outside Galveston. The monstrous things came crawling down the wind to kamikaze the props of the B-17G as it dropped out of the soupy green cloud cover over the Gulf of Mexico, shredded them like anchor chains thrown into the blades. Half the starboard wing was ripped off in the impact, but Balthazar “Buzz” Arneson, the copilot, fought them in on a weird updraft that let the bomber belly-flop and go bobsledding across the feature-less coastline before they came to a rest and the mud began to gulp them down.

  It took two days to find survivors digging for clams in the tidepool ruins of downtown Houston. They called the flying things blackbirds, though they weren’t black and they looked nothing like birds.

  “’Cos of how they get born,” one bucktoothed 4-F type told them. “If they ever carry you off, boy, you better blow your brains out ’fore they get to laying in you, I tell you what…”

  They prowled inland on foot for another day and found nothing to eat, never mind a working shortwave. Local frequencies were full of screaming static like Shickelgruver in high dudgeon, and there were no phone lines left standing.

  Ever the malcontent, Harrigan started riding Arneson that he’d somehow missed America.

  “May look and smell a mite different,” Mayor Corcoran said as he jabbed the elephantine pig carcass on its slowly rotating spit, “but it’s still America.” Tipping a wink as he pushed a jug of white lightning into the Captain’s hands, he added, “And maybe with Washington off our backs for good, it
’s more like America than it ever was, under those Yankees.”

  Captain Schwering nodded vaguely, staring at the skinny Mexican kid turning the pig over the massive open-pit barbecue. Long sleeves in sweltering heat barely covered dirty bandages down to his wrists. The Mayor assured them that all those that they’d seen in chains around the walled Houston compound were liberated from the jailhouse where they surely would otherwise have died, and were working off their sentences rebuilding the city and its new fortifications. But Schwering couldn’t help but notice that all of those he’d seen toiling in shackles were blacks and Mexicans, with not a single white man.

  Schwering took a grudging swig of the jug and passed it to Lt. Arneson with a warning glance. Buzz didn’t need the warning. His head was swimming already, just from eating something other than C-rats. By the time it reached Kirazian, the tail gunner, it was more full than when Corcoran uncorked it.

  “Yessir, the Army wasn’t much use when push came to shove, tell you what. No offense—I know you boys fought like hell against Tojo and the krauts and the wops, and all—but not once since the War of 1812 has this nation taken a hit on home soil, and now…Well, I can’t say as I blame those other Army boys for pulling up stakes when the sky went weird…”

  “You don’t know where they went?”

  “Somewhere up in New Mexico, I reckon. Heard tell there was still a big mess of brass up there…Hiding from the Germans. They must be laughing their asses off, over what they done to us…”

  “No Germans were laughing,” Arneson said, “when we left.”

  Elbowing his copilot to silence, Schwering said, “We heard that the bombs went off in every major American city on the same day…”

  “Bombs!” Corcoran repeated the word, to braying laughter around the campfire. “Weren’t the bombs that brought this nation to its knees, no sir. Bombs shed blood, and the blood opened the Eye in the Sky.”

  Fearful muttering went round the circle and rippled through the drunk, dirty mob of hungry Texans.

  “And only the blood can shut it again, and bring peace to the people of Texas.” His smile went kind of cross-eyed, and he clapped Schwering on the shoulder. “Eat up, boys. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

  Having seen the crops outside and the servants inside, Buzz doubted that very much. Schwering took a spoonful of corn chowder from the bowl the Mex kid put in front of him, trying not to make a show of gulping it down, so he almost swallowed the bit of napkin somebody dropped in it.

  Turning to look a warning down the line of his men, he picked the paper out of his teeth. From the looks of the sad, weird crops they’d seen being coaxed out of soft soil the color of ripe bruises, rain didn’t come very often any more, but when he’d mentioned it, some of the halfwits tending the scrawny, discolored corn had thought that was the funniest thing they ever heard.

  The Mayor had been all kinds of curious after news from Europe, but when time came to return the favor, he’d turned to any other subject he could lay his tongue to. “You boys fought the good fight, but the war’s over. We got our own problems to tend to. Takes some getting used to, but real Americans can get right with just about anything, if they put their minds to it. Boys like you with skills could make a name for yourselves down here. Maybe settle down…”

  “I imagine each of my men is anxious to get back to his own hometown and family…” Coughing into his fist and clearing his throat, Schwering looked into his fist at the wadded napkin and read the single word on it, then mouthed that word to Buzz.

  “I surely wish I could persuade you boys to stay on a bit longer, but duty calls, I’m sure…”

  “No, you’re right, Mr. Mayor. We shouldn’t be so standoffish.” Taking up the jug, he stepped forward, nearly lost his balance. “To the 303rd, and the Mighty Eighth, boys! To the Angels!”

  “God damned us, and the Devil blessed us!” all eight men shouted back.

  Schwering shouted, “The food’s poisoned!” He punched the mayor in the throat and took a huge swig, forcing his throat wide open to let the searing raw corn liquor sluice his belly. The explosion in his gut sent a whiplash wave up his spine that threw him back into the rows of Texans, who caught him and tried to drag him down.

  A seizure wracked the captain. Hot vomit exploded from his mouth and nose into the faces of the men beating him. Buzz lost his feet, but he saw Kirazian spitting moonshine out over the yellow-white flame from his Zippo, into the faces of the looming wall of blood-simple Texans.

  Buzz went all woozy, legs turned to noodles. His stomach revolted at the stench of vomit and the clench of panic. Going down, trying to swim after his captain, he threw up all over himself.

  Schwering lashed out and kicked the pig carcass off the spit. The crowd stampeded, screaming, from the blazing carcass and barrage of hot coals. One man jumped on Schwering’s back and flipped into the BBQ pit.

  Buzz lurched to his feet, his head momentarily clear in the afterglow of his nausea and caught sight of Schwering just as he caught the Mayor around the neck.

  In moments, his men surrounded him and held the Texans at bay. They were outnumbered twenty to one with only three pistols and five knives between them, but to a man, in the red primeval fireglow, their feral features bore no awareness of such a thing as mortality, let alone the fear of it. Cowles, the port waist-gunner, looked pretty bad, but his starboard mate Brewer caught him by the waist as he tripped. Kirazian snapped off a shot that clipped a torch, sending the angry Texans dancing back from the sparks.

  “I really think they mean to eat us,” Bernstein said.

  A wizened, mule-faced little man of the type invariably found skulking behind big men like the Mayor, roared at the crowd to charge the bomber crew. “The soil must drink, that the people may eat!” In an ecstasy of hatred, he leveled a finger at them and the rest of the Texans began gobbling deep in their throats. Speaking in tongues, the Pentecostals called it. The white witch doctor screamed over the idiotic din, “They’re Hun spies, all of ’em! Come from the Old World to gloat over our ruin! Let their blood wash clean the land and shut all the Eyes!”

  The crowd broke like a wave over the crew, but they froze when Schwering put the blade of a trench-tool to the Mayor’s throat. “You want blood? You can have his, if you don’t step back!”

  They followed the captain as he dragged the Mayor backwards through the gate of the inner compound. Twice, they pounced on the bomber crew, and twice, Brewer shot a man dead through his eye without dropping his partner. “Cowlick’s fading fast, Cap…”

  Norman stuffed his cigar in the neck of a jug and smashed it at the feet of the mob. A wall of white fire washed over the crowd, giving them space to get out of the fort. The Texans stopped following, but their blood-curdling ululations rose to a fever pitch. The little white witch doctor wailed, “Expiation! Wash us in blood!”

  Schwering looked around, realized they were on the edge of the cornfield. The Mayor struggled in his arms, just catching his breath. Schwering kicked him away and stepped back. They were free, but sick, maybe dying, and no better off than before…

  The Mayor bellowed curses on them. The little mule-faced man sprang on the Mayor and plunged a knife into his plump belly, chopping down his flailing arms. “Let the earth drink, that the people may eat!” he screamed, over and over.

  “Señor,” whispered a voice at their backs, “if you are seeking to leave…perhaps I help.”

  Schwering looked at the lean, wolfish face of the young Mex who’d put the note in his bowl. “What do you know?”

  “When they pull out, the Army, they leave many machines…” He waved and pointed at a Quonset hut against the back wall of the compound, behind the compound’s stable. The Mayor said they had only a couple cars and no gas to spare.

  “Thank you,” Schwering said and made for the hut, but then he turned at a jingling sound.

  The Mex shook the chains between his feet, the shackles on his wrists. “I know where they go,” he sai
d.

  “Bernie, Pat, cut him loose.” Brewer set Cowles down and tried to induce vomiting, and the rest followed the captain to the hut.

  Just inside the doors were a deuce-and-a-half and a row of low, sleek shapes under canvas tarps. Schwering ripped away a tarp and nodded his head. Four jeeps and four Harley-Davidson motorcycles. “Omar, get all the gas you can find into the back of that truck. Rest of you guys, get these bikes ready to roll.”

  “What in hell happened here, Captain?” Arneson looked ashen. He’d barely tasted the drugged chowder and skipped the moonshine entirely, but now he could reflect on it, the memory of those bestial, moaning faces shook him worse than anything he’d seen overseas.

  “From basic training,” Kirazian said, “this is very much how I remember Texas.”

  “Shut up,” Schwering said, without much conviction.

  They’d all thought the war, and all its madness, would at last fall behind them, when they came home. In spite of all the bad news, and then the total absence of any news from home, they’d thought folks would welcome them back, and things would be somewhat like they were, even if none of them would ever be the same. “It hasn’t even been a year, has it…?”

  “A long year.” Schwering knelt beside a bike and checked the oil, the tires. They were practically new; the Mayor couldn’t see using anything he could trade for, and these were as precious as dragon’s teeth, now. He doubted Mr. Harley or Mr. Davidson were somewhere in this great, broken land, plotting the next model year.

  “Hey kid—”

  “Eladio Ruiz,” the Mex kid said. He was sitting behind the wheel of a jeep.

  “We can’t take you with us, kid. Sorry…”

  “OK. I don’t have to come with you. You can follow me, and let me know when you need help.” Nodding to the open doorway, where the wailing and gnashing of teeth had built to a new highwater mark, Eladio added, “We should go soon, I think…”