The good that the world embraced now was something essentially alien, and neither Tremeloe nor any of his fellow human fruit — nor even the reluctant Yithian refugee from legendary Pnatokus — had any words or the slightest imagination with which to describe or get to grips with it.
As the star-spawn descended to enjoy the crop that had been hundreds of millions of years in the creative shaping, and mere hours in the final ripening, Tremeloe still had time enough to realize that his new hormonal orchestra, quiet until now, was not unequipped with sensations akin to horror and terror, agony and fury. and to appreciate the irony of the fact that those sensations too, just as much as his thoughts, his memories and his knowledge and consciousness of history and progress, of space and time, of matter and light, and most especially of strangeness, were all elements of a nutritive and gustatory experience that something so very like him as to be near- identical would have to relive time and time again, from the wrong perspective, if not ad infinitum, then at least until the star-spawn had finally had their fill, and had abandoned earth to the long-delayed Coleopteran Era.
The star-spawn fed, like patient gourmets, and the blazing sun moved on in its patient arc, heading for a sunset that Tremeloe would not see. this time. He ran the gamut of his new emotions, reacting with his thoughts and his imagination as best he could, even though he wished, resentfully, that he was disinclined to do anything different.
There was a long future still ahead of him, but even that would merely be an eye-blink in the history of the New Eden that earth had become. Eventually, the multi-tentacled monsters of dark matter would pass on to pastures new, nature would reassert itself, and the primal wilderness would return.
The only thing we were ever able to deduce about the mind of the God who was in charge of Creation before Cthulhu arrived, Tremeloe reflected, with obliging but slightly piquant serenity, as the matter comprising his delectable freshness was chewed, absorbed, and digested without his ever quite losing consciousness, is that he must have an inordinate fondness for beetles. And perhaps he had good taste.
VASTATION
Laird Barron
When I was six, I discovered a terrible truth: I was the only human being on the planet. I was the seed and the sower and I made myself several seconds from the event horizon at the end of time — at the x before time began. Indeed, there were six billion other carbon-based sentient life forms moiling in the earth, but none of them were the real McCoy. I’m the real McCoy. The rest? Cardboard props, marionettes, grist for the mill. After I made me, I crushed the mold under my heel.
When I was six million, after the undying dreamers shuddered and woke and the mother continent rose from the warm, shallow sea and the celestial lights flickered into an alignment that cooked far- flung planets and turned our own skies red as the bloody seas themselves, I was, exiled-potentate status notwithstanding, as a flea.
Before the revelation of flea- ishness, I came to think of myself as a god with a little G. Pontiff Sacrus was known as Ted in those days. I called him Liberace — he was so soft and effete, and his costumes. I think he was going for the Fat Elvis look, but no way was I going to dignify my favorite buffoon by comparing him to incomparable E.
Ted was a homicidal maniac. He’d heard the whispers from the vaults of the Undying City that eventually made mush of his sensibilities. He was the sucker they, my pals and acolytes, convinced to carry out the coup. Ted shot me with a Holland & Holland.50; blasted two slugs, each the size and heft of a lead-filled cigar, through my chest. Such bullets drop charging elephants in their tracks, open them up like a sack of rice beneath a machete. Those bullets exploded me and sawed the bed in half. Sheets burst into flame and started a fire that eventually burned a good deal of Chicago to the ground.
Bessy got a bum rap.
In sleep, I am reborn. Flesh peels from the bones and is carried at tachyon velocity toward the center of the universe. I travel backward or forward along my personal axis, never straying from the simple line — either because that’s the only way time travel works, or because I lack the balls to slingshot into a future lest it turn out to be a day prior to my departure.
As much as I appreciate Zen philosophy, my concentrated mind resembles nothing of perfect, still water, nor the blankness of the moon. When I dream, my brain is suspended in a case of illimitable darkness. The gears do not require light to mesh teeth in teeth, nor the circuits to chain algorithms into sine waves of pure calculation.
In that darkness, I am the hammer, the Emperor of Ice Cream’s herald, the polyglot who masticates hidden dialects — the old tongues that die when the last extant son of antiquity is assimilated by a more powerful tribe. I am the eater of words and my humor is to be feared. I am the worm that has turned and I go in and out of the irradiated skulls of dead planets, a writhing, slithering worm that hooks the planets of our system together like beads on a string. When all is synchronized and the time comes to resurface, a pinhole penetrates the endless blackness; it dilates and I am purged into a howling white waste. I scream, wet and angry as a newborn until the crooked framework of material reality absorbs the whiteness and shapes itself around me.
My artificial wife is unnerved at how I sleep. I sleep, smiling, eyes bright as glass. The left eye swims with yellow milk. The pupil is a distorted black star that matches its immense, cosmic twin, the portal to the blackest of hells. That cosmic hole is easily a trillion magnitudes larger than Sol. Astronomers named it Ur-Nyctos. They recorded the black hole via X-ray cameras and the process of elimination — it displaces light of nearly inconceivable dimensions; a spiral arm of dark matter that inches ever nearer. It will get around to us, sooner or later. We’ll be long gone by then, scooped up into the slavering maw of functionally insensate apex predators, or absorbed into the folds of the great old inheritors of the Earth who revel and destroy, and scarcely notice puny us at all. Or, most likely, we’ll be extinct from war, plague, or ennui. We mortal fleas.
The milkman used to come by in a yellow box van, although I seldom saw him. He left the milk bottles on the step. The bottles shone and I imagined them as Simic said, glowing in the lowest circle of hell. I imagined them in Roman catapults fired over the ramparts of some burning city of old Carthage, imagined one smashing in the skull of my manager and me sucking the last drops through the jagged red remnants while flies gathered.
I think the milkman fucked my wife, the fake one, but that might’ve been my imagination. It works in mysterious ways; sometimes it works at cross purposes to my design. I gave up fucking my wife, I’m not sure when. Somebody had to do it. Better him than me.
The flagellants march past the stoop of my crumbling home every day at teatime. We don’t observe teatime here in the next to last extant Stateside bubble-domed metropolis. Nonetheless, my artificial wifey makes a pot of green tea and I take it on the steps and watch the flagellants lurch past, single file, slapping themselves about the shoulders with belts studded with nails and screws and the spiny hooks of octopi. They croak a dirge copped from ancient tablets some anthropologists found and promptly went mad and that madness eagerly spread and insinuated itself in the brainboxes of billions. They fancy themselves Openers of the Way, and a red snail track follows them like the train of a skirt made of meat. Dogs skulk along at the rear, snuffling and licking at the blood. Fleas rise in black clouds from their slicked and matted fur.