“Yeah, I got his attention.” He gestured toward the hydrant, the broken pieces of seal standing out in greenish contrast to the gray debris.
“John, you have any idea what even one of those is worth potentially?”
“Kind of. Pretty much all of humanity.”
Distantly, the air vibrated, a quiet, slow rhythm.
Detwiler gestured with his thumb at the book. “According to Beckman, this world of ours used to be Cthulhu’s domain. About eight or twelve millennia ago. He’s responsible for this local area, which is big, but not compared to all space and time. The realm he got booted to from here was a kind of limbo between dimensions. Thing is, honestly, he’s a cousin to the Old Ones. I mean the real Old Ones. They’re not like him.”
“No?”
“Infinitely worse,” said Detwiler. “They’d likely have scorched the whole solar system by now, melted the planets and reassembled them as something you and I can’t even comprehend, Stipe. We don’t perceive enough dimensions.”
“How you know this?”
“Well, I don’t, exactly. It’s what the book says. I mean, Beckman could just be nuts, like we both thought.”
The “whump” of huge and unseen wings grew steadily louder.
“If that’s the case, though,” Detwiler continued, “we’re in trouble here.”
“What have you done?” Stipe stood as if ready to bolt.
“This — ” he tapped the remaining seal “ — this is the second seal. Your Old Ones think of Cthulhu as the cousin you don’t invite to the wedding because he picks his nose and wipes it on the bride’s gown, you know what I’m saying? They gave him our backwater swamp to manage, just to keep him off on his own. The gates are in place to keep him out as much as us in. This seal is Yog-Tetharoth.”
The sound of wings seemed to be nearly overhead.
“You open this one” — he glanced at the book and yelled, “krel’bo’yni Kadath nar’whal Kaekeeba!” then went on as if nothing had happened — “and you’ll reopen that buffer space between Cthulhu and the rest of the family. Suck him right back out.”
Stipe’s eyes were huge. “What are they like, the Old Ones?”
“All it says is, you can smell them, but you can’t see them.”
Something huge, writhing, with red glowing eyes emerged out of the clouds above. Detwiler drew the crowbar from his duffel.
“Of course, it requires a sacrifice. Nothing personal.” He drove the sharp edge of the crowbar straight into the seam down the middle of the seal. With a flash, the greenish stone split in half.
Stipe put his hands out as if to push away from something. His mouth opened in a scream, but the more thunderous scream from the creature above him drowned him out. Cthulhu turned and vanished back into the clouds.
“That’s not right,” Detwiler muttered.
Stipe hadn’t moved or vanished. A pure blackness arising from the broken seal spread up and out, surrounding him but leaving him untouched, save that his face contorted into a mask of revulsion, his eyes watered and he clamped both hands over his nose. The blackness rose like smoke upon a breeze and faded.
Lying flat on the ground, Detwiler glanced over at the book. He read the relevant passages again. “Krel’bo’yni Kadath nar’whal Kaekeeba — that’s what it says. That’s what I said. I don’t get it.” Then the stench reached him. It was like the distilled essence of sulphuric eggs run through an oil refinery and then fired out of a skunk’s butt. He pressed his face into the dirt and groaned.
Stipe, on his knees, coughed and wheezed, “What did you do, John?”
“I–I was sending Cthulhu back to where he came from.” He leaned up on his elbows. “You know when I said Beckman was nuts?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, his translation’s screwy, too.”
Overhead, clouds floated, drifted. Then, as if a titanic soap bubble had reached them, they flew apart. Moonlight spilled down, but distorted and sickly yellow as though projected through old celophane. Detwiler could feel phantoms nearby, invisible, amorphous things that swelled against the very fabric of reality.
“You let in the Old Ones,” Stipe said.
“Uh, yeah. Let’s not mention that to the others, okay?” He got to his feet. He wiped at his eyes, sniffled, choked. “Listen, if we’re lucky, he was wrong about them melting the planets and stuff, too.”
Stipe got up, shook his head like a dog. “I can’t get that stink off me.”
The ruin of a nearby building suddenly flexed and distorted. As if liquid it drew together, the top of it curled like an ocean wave and then stretched into the clouds. The night filled with distant piteous cries of horror, not all of them human.
“We, ah, we might want to go back into the tunnel awhile,” Detwiler suggested. He bent down to pick up Beckman’s book. The stars in the night sky shuddered. “Just till things settle down.” He headed into the phosphorescence.
With a final glance at the world, Stipe stumbled into the mouth of the tunnel, too, but abruptly drew up. “Detwiler,” he yelled, “what did you mean you needed a sacrifice?”
THE HOLOCAUST OF ECSTASY
Brian Stableford
It was dark when Tremeloe first opened his eyes, and he found it impossible to make out anything in a sideways or upward direction. When he looked down, though, in the hope of seeing where he was standing — for he had no idea where he was, and was sure that he wasn’t lying down — he saw that there were holes in a floor that seemed to be a long way beneath him and that stars were shining through the holes.
There seemed to be a conversation going on around him, but there were no English words in it; the languages that the various voices were speaking all seemed to him to be Far Eastern in origin. The voices seemed quite calm, and in spite of the impenetrable darkness and not knowing where he was, Tremeloe felt oddly calm himself.
“Does anyone here speak English?” he asked. The words came out easily enough, but sounded and felt wrong, in some way that he couldn’t quite understand.
For a moment, there was a pregnant silence, as if everyone in the crowd were deciding whether to admit to speaking English. Finally, though, a voice that seemed to come from somewhere closer at hand than all the rest, said: “Yes. You’re American?” There was nothing Oriental about the accent, but that didn’t make it any easier to place.
Tremeloe thought that the other might be near enough to touch, and tried to reach out in the direction from which the voice had come, but he couldn’t. His body felt strange and wrong. He couldn’t feel his hands, and when he tried to touch himself to reassure himself that he was still there, he couldn’t touch any other part of him with his fingers. The idea struck him that the conviction that he wasn’t lying down, based on the fact that he couldn’t feel a surface on which he might be lying, would be unreliable if he were paralyzed from the neck down.
“Richard Tremeloe, Arkham, Massachusetts,” he said, by way of introduction. “Have I been in some kind of accident?” He tried to remember where he had been before falling asleep — or unconscious — and couldn’t. “I think I’ve got amnesia,” he added.
“More than you know,” said the other voice, a trifle dolefully, “but the others are a little more relevant in their concerns.”
“Can you understand what they’re saying?” Tremeloe asked, knowing that it was the wrong question, but reluctant to ask one whose answer might provoke the panic that he had so far been spared.
“Some of it,” the other boasted. “There’s an animated discussion about reincarnation going on. The Buddhists and the Hindus have different views on the subject, but none of them really believes in it — especially the ex-Communists. On the other hand. ”