Anonymous

I wasn't sure if I should post this in the short story section or not...I looked at it, briefly, and the stuff seemed to be mostly nonfiction. Anyhoo I hope you enjoy the following!

NUMINA

Hear me! Since I now face my end I have decided to take down the account of the extraordinary events that have transpired over the course of the past few weeks. I have exhausted all monetary funds and the source of drugs I inject into my arm will soon run dry, leaving my mind nothing more than a dried cinder of what it once was. I don’t know if anyone will ever find this, however I have no doubt that I will find some solace in even the minute possibility of this story being discovered. Even minute peace before my death is welcomed.

Being within the throngs of the upper class, I found myself making enemies left and right with actions I must admit were less than benevolent. I fired many more workers than required, solicited shady business deals with the mafia, several of which went awry, and purchased the support of many senators and world leaders. I grew fabulously rich at the head of my corporation, an aircraft manufacturer, and delighted in the fats and profits that I could suckle from the wars and skirmishes brought on by current and past conservative administrations. I don’t know who it was, the traitor within my own ranks who did me in, but—in any case, one night I was knocked unconscious in my bed by a shadow I noticed all but too late. I awoke an indiscernible time later, my mouth gagged, my feet and hands tightly bound, my eyes useless, for the room was blacker than oil. I could feel the thrum of a jet engine under the cool, metal floor I was tossed like a doll upon. Only a few minutes of my being conscious passed before I heard the groans and whines of mechanical cogs below. My eyes widened in the darkness, and the floor fell away, the abrupt light all but blinding me.

I was in freefall; many thousands of feet above what my eyes told me was a desert. The sky was a sickly orange and the few clouds that hovered silently sported black undersides. I looked up; to see the small pinpoint I had fallen from circling in the air, an airplane, no doubt of my own design and of my own manufacture. The wind grew unbearable and the dunes rushed up to meet me. I didn’t have the time to feel terror.

To my surprise I awoke, remembering the fall immediately. I didn’t bother to wonder how I had survived, and with no immediate injuries, at that. I was still bound and gagged, but I quickly used the various techniques I had procured from my shady business partners, loosening the ropes in no time at all. I stood, found myself on the desert, the crater from my fall disintegrating before me as the arid wind forced pockets of sand back into the hole I had created. I quickly noticed my hard, cracked tongue—dried now for a long time. I felt then an amazing desire for water, but knew that I could find none.

I didn’t have the faintest idea as to my location, deciding just to head in one direction and hope that it would lead me somewhere, an oasis, a city, a town—before the desert claimed my body. For many days and nights I crossed the tall crests of dunes, the sun peeling away my skin. I could only hear the faint sound of sand sliding down the desert carpet, like it was some kind of ethereal snake. My mind was running away, gliding away—and in my desperation I began to sing my favorite rock songs from the sixties, my eyes all but blinded from the never-ending furnace above. Eventually the air became even staler, and the hot desert breeze that had once blown loud enough to rival the jet engines of my airplanes was now no more than a mere whisper.

The dunes flattened out, and I discerned that this was the place that I would die—in a sandblasted basin that stretched on forever into the horizon. Night fell on what I believed to be my last day on earth, at this point I could hardly manage a steady crawl. The sweat had long ago dried up from my armpits, from my forehead, and there remained not a cell of my skin not ravaged by the burning sun. There was a full moon, the first I had seen in a great while, and as I lost myself in its beauty my legs found a weak spot in the desert carpet, and I fell through, my throat too dry to scream, and long exhausted from singing the songs from the sixties.

I plunged into a deep cushion of icy water, and had to fight to stay afloat while at the same time drinking from the pool I had fallen in, the moon’s light falling through the skylight I had created. After a long while I was contented, and with new strength swam until I found the pool’s edge. I seemed to be in some kind of subterranean cave, a place long ago hallowed by ancient waters that had settled here or gone elsewhere. Curtains of light danced on the walls from the water, which seemed to have a kind of spiritual glow that is hard to explain. I walked for a long while in the gloom, noticing odd inscriptions on the walls in texts that I had never seen before, the letters thin and jagged, almost like the claws of some primordial monster. Eventually it became so dark that I had to feel my way through the cave, and as time wore on it became smaller, barely large enough for me to walk through (and my stature is fairly short). My hands continued to see in the stead of my eyes, sliding along the ruffles of rock and sand on either side of me, until they met at a door.

The surface before me was hard, cold, and flat, shaped like a rectangle. I found a groove for a hand and pulled. The door opened, quite silently and unexpectedly easily, and before me, in an amphitheater below an opening to the moonlit sky, stood a dark monolith. I approached it, feeling greatly uneasy. I crept up to it, dared to touch it with my hand. It was warm. My hand darted back. It seemed, then, that the light in the room grew, in a subtle fashion, mind you, but yes, the light in the room grew enough so that my eyes could pick out the details on the tall obelisk before me.

Hideous bas-relief met my eyes—giant, bipedal monsters danced about on the stone surface as others were skewered by spears or sabers. Flying beasts with cylindrical jaws wheeled about in the sky in dizzying flocks, swarming about their terrified prey on the ground. I don’t know how I could see all of this through the stone, but it was there, a vision playing itself through my mind. Their statures were stunted even though they walked on two legs; their mouths seemed to be roaring in sync with each other, each baring great sets of glassy, carved teeth that beckoned the taste of flesh. This carved stone, whatever it was, held some kind of great significance, and I felt that the depicted creatures must have gathered here, in some antediluvian time, to dance about its circumference in a wild orgy of death and mayhem, cackling and reveling as they maimed each other for whatever god or slew of gods this thing was meant to represent.

My knowledge pertaining to the field of archaeology was somewhat limited, but as I studied the monolith I became convinced that it could not have been fashioned by human hands. The creatures depicted before me were completely alien to the world in its current age—all of them, and I knew that even the most ancient stone structures or cave paintings mentioned a human here or a familiar creature there. And yet there was none of this. What I was looking at was a relic from some long forgotten civilization, one that must have died out long before the age of humanity. With renewed curiosity I touched the slab, with my right hand, then with both hands, rubbing my tortured skin over its surface, feeling the grooves worked by horrific, clawed appendages.

And then it came, from some unforeseeable depth, from out of an orifice I had not originally espied. A cloud of dizzying black drained itself from the floor and shaped itself into a fiend I shall never forget, its deep, maniacal voice akin to the sound of raking claws and the guttural moaning of lions before the kill. I could hear it calling to me, the sound even penetrating my mind, trying to force me to remain in my current position, so it could catch me and drag me into whatever underworld collective it had detached itself from. I backed away, the unearthly fear so great in me that I would have fainted had some degree of perseverance remained in my mind. I stumbled behind the doorway and slammed it shut, searching with my hands in the dark for a locking mechanism of any kind, but finding none. It shouted my name, as a mother would to a disobedient child. The door’s mouth widened, and I hurled myself against it, screaming such screams as men never scream. It hurled its hellish form against the door, knocking me away into the hallway. I lay there, dazed and hopeless, and its pitch colored body, which had now manifested itself as a solid form, began to encroach upon my position, its many appendages opened wide, beckoning angrily for my body, for my soul, and for whatever else remained.

Such fear throbbed through my body then, such a paralyzing feeling, enough to nearly detach me from consciousness, but I fought it, I fought the fear and I remained awake, the thing still approaching and nearly on top of me. I felt its touch, felt its sick, amphibious skin pressed against mine. I think it was then that I lost my mind, that whoever I once was drowned in the cavernous depths of terror. I backed away, still on my back, my screams now coming in harsh rasps. Its tentacle darted out and I kicked it away, the claw on the end of it slicing the skin of my leg. I stood, my blood draining away to the floor of the cave, and fled to the distant, almost otherworldly gurgling sound of the water. The thing roared, and I smelt its breath, a vaporous aroma of decaying, rotting fish. I fell into the water, swam away, hoping to find some way to the surface. I saw the hole in the ceiling I created; saw the moon above, and then looked back to the cave. The thing was slithering into the water, and when its skin touched the surface an inky stain began to spread about and uncoil, swirling about like the storms of Jupiter.

How or if I escaped to this day I fear I shall never know, and it was weeks later that I was found by a desert caravan. They tell me now that I was ranting both ranting in tongues and singing songs from the sixties, that I screamed strange words at them and made gestures that they could not interpret. When I awoke from this sickly dream in the city of Cairo I managed to regain some of my original self. I told them my name but they didn’t believe me, and I looked at a picture of myself and found that even after shaving my scraggly beard and hair that I looked nothing like who I once was. Without enough money to travel back to the states I remained in the humble homestead that had rescued me, purchasing drugs to keep awake for extended periods of time so as not to dream of the terrors of the desert. But now I have run out of the drugs, and the family has left me on the street, and every night when the moon rises I see the thing’s shadow basking in its light, I see it glaring at me with lidless eyes, and I feel the touch of its amphibious skin.

I am glad, for one, that I will not live to see its armies overrun war-exhausted mankind, that I shall not see the world devoured by a merciless desert, that I shall not see the billions and billions of human beings reduced to slaves or ornaments or food for hungry, antediluvian monsters. Their time never ended, their story never concluded, for the history of the human race, from primate to Einstein, is only a paragraph in a book longer and greater than any human imagination can comprehend.
My time is over. The thing approaches. I will hide; it won’t get me—not again. The hand! The tentacle! The street! Oh, get away you fool—

Kimberly Bird

Hi Pollux, you know I really enjoyed that. He wakes up in Cairo! Ha. Fantastic ending.

Thanks for the read.

Kimberly

rcallaci

A fun fast paced joyride. I love stuff like this.

Warm Regards,
Bob

__________________
Nature weeps, the devil sings
at man’s greed and pride
and what it brings

Just lots of useless
little things…

God is Dead; He died yesterday from Nothing...

http://theoddvillepress.com

Anonymous

Thanks for the replies...I was beginning to wonder if anyone was going to say ANYTHING.

Hmm, well, take care.

Kitten Courna

You read Lovecraft, don't you? It's very much his style, very pulp horror, only without the tangible mood that he usually creates. Although your situations and descriptions were excellent, I feel like the mood of the piece was lacking, the most horrible parts and the normal parts very not very different tone wise. The hero lacks personality, he narrates too much without emotion, so the end turns out rather flat. However, the descriptions and events were too good to give an entirely bad review. If you work on your characterization, this will be worthwhile.

__________________
Cadmus: Poor child, like a white swan warding its weak old father, why do you clasp those white arms about my neck?
Euripides; 'The Bacchae'

Anonymous

Yes, actually at the time I wrote this I had just finished an anthology of his stories. I happened to have a study hall at the end of the school day and I wrote it more or less over the course of a week. I do value this advice, Courna, but would it be too much to ask for you to go more in depth? I do agree on the characterization, I guess my curiosity is more aimed toward the whole mood-thing. What do you mean?

Thanks for reading, writing, and take care.

Kitten Courna

*grins* It was very easy to tell, though I'm less versed in Lovecraft than I'd like to be. The genius of his works was his ability to make not only every scene tangible(which you also do), but to lure the reader into the mood of the character. If you'll look at the words you use, it isn't until the end that you start to develop a real tone. It's difficult to describe what exactly is lacking except for good solid tone words. And, it's possible that it's just my familiarity with Lovecraft that makes the problem stand out. You might have fallen into the trap of writing too much in another author's style without perfecting the technique first, or adding your own style in. I think if you'll re-read "Dagon" and "The Book" you'll discover what it is you're missing.

I would suggest you put less of Lovecraft and more of yourself in your writing too.

Kitten

__________________
Cadmus: Poor child, like a white swan warding its weak old father, why do you clasp those white arms about my neck?
Euripides; 'The Bacchae'

Anonymous

"I would suggest you put less of Lovecraft and more of yourself in your writing too"

This isn't what I usually do, the story itself was inspired from "Dagon." It's a pressing moral issue with me, because although in some ways the story is unique, if you look at it closely it has too many parallels with Dagon itself. I don't quite remember, but my inspiration may have been to have been to improve upon Dagon without actually rewriting it. I'm just not sure...

Thanks for the advice, I'll do my best to put it into effect.

Anonymous

edit: When I'm finished editing Numina I'll post the new version of the story here as vell.

Kitten Courna

awesome, I look forward to it. If you work some more on it, break if from Dagon, then it will be very ineteresting indeed to read

__________________
Cadmus: Poor child, like a white swan warding its weak old father, why do you clasp those white arms about my neck?
Euripides; 'The Bacchae'

Anonymous

Well the story is probably fairly close to being complete. I might edit here or there, but this is it, more or less. There are a few italicized words here and there but I'm way, way too lazy to go through the whole thing and plant in html markers. Constructive criticism is much appreciated.

Excluding the middle, the story has been completely reworked and is, in my opinion, much, much different from the other version. Enjoy.

NUMINA
IAN ********

Something seemed different. The room I was sitting in, the opulent skyscraper ground floor lounge finished only recently for one of my wealthy associates, was as spotless as it could possibly be, the marble at my feet gleaming under the warm lights above. The couch I was sitting quietly on had the feeling of never being used, its pillows felt almost painfully firm against my buttocks. I was quite alone; the only sound to accompany my thoughts came from a television on the other side of the lounge, where images of the war overseas played without commercial interruption. The screen would flash with gunfire every so often, with the cluster bombs dispersed from airplanes of my own manufacture rippling over the countryside, leaving green fields and modest homesteads nothing more than blackened craters and shrapnel for the world to gape at. Splashes of virile light burst over the marble floor, spreading periodically in the pattern of a beating heart, and combined with the high volume and the barrage of explosions the room seemed to thrum iridescently.
But it was just a screen, a small window into the happenings of the rest of the world, one that could be turned off at my leisure.
Above the television set there was a small, white dot, a special vision sensor. I stared at it for several seconds before the television flicked off. Now there was no noise, I was completely alone with my thoughts.

Quiet.

Quiet.

Why was it different?—This feeling, this pervasive thing blocking the cogs of my mind, forcing me to stop everything. What was different? Where were you, devious Chimaera, behind what folds of pink, pulsating brain matter were you evading my mind’s Bellerophon? I didn’t feel right. Not right at all. Long ago I had been able to silence my conscience, which had been, for a time, quite loud and annoying as I cheated friends out of deals, lied to family members and stole from those I considered below me. When I rose in the ranks enough to be a real power player my foes began to conveniently disappear, their bodies usually at the bottoms of murky lakes, corpses as silent as the skyscraper ground floor I sat in. I began to age, time passed and I learned that wars equal profits, the bigger the war, the bigger the profit, and soon the deaths of many, many more people could be easily attributed to the arms and extraordinary fighting machines I supplied multiple superpowers with. My corporation had been the neutral middleman—if you had the money, you could have whatever you wanted. No questions asked. Of course, it cost a few thousand public schools to purchase even one aircraft, so the western powers tended to be my better customers.

Harvester!

Was it returning? Was my conscience making a comeback? Would I feel remorse for the people overseas who were being incinerated in their sleep by my warheads day and night, as I had never felt?

No. Never. I’d never let such a weakness threaten me, not when I was at the top. Not at my moment of triumph.

Harvester of lives! Of the lower-denominator’s fate!

At the far end of the lounge one of the many elevator doors pinged, its surface gleaming as it slid open, revealing my friend and associate, his eye sockets dark in the pale elevator’s fluorescent lights, giving his bald head the appearance of a skull. It seemed quite eerie, even for him, however when he moved out of the elevator, his shoes clicking on the marble, he was bathed in the warm lamps of the lounge, and I could see his sharp, thin aging face for what it was.

Anton Morris.

“You’re not at the party anymore, Wes. Everyone’s been wondering where you’ve gone.”

Parties. I hated parties. Nothing but fake, smiling women in low-cut dresses, and their much-older dates, talking about mundane things, always skirting the issue of their employment, of how they profited from death—

“Wes?”

My eyes quickly refocused. “Sorry—booze is getting to my head.” I hadn’t had any. Not here. “I just didn’t feel like it tonight. Not in the mood, you know?”

He walked past the vacant couches and tables, gradually approaching me at a modest pace, each footstep louder than the last. “Something wrong?”

I sighed, eyes went to the floor. “Yeah…not sure what it is, though.”

He sat down next to me, the cushions sinking in a little deeper. His eyes focused on the television’s sensor, and the screen flicked on, the perpetual images of draconian carnage playing out once more, with the anchors discussing the importance to the military’s campaign that this bombing run had, all of them sounding like sports commentators.

It was…just…sick.

“Profits for Damocles quadrupled last quarter, I heard,” he said, a smile on his face, trying to cheer me up.

“Thanks to this,” I murmured, nodding to the war.

He sighed.

Uncomfortable pause—and silence.

“Are you having second thoughts, Wes? Thinking that, of all the wars you and I have funded together over the past twenty years, of all the profits we have made, of all the lives we have saved, in the name of freedom, that this war, this war here and now is somehow more wrong than the others?”

I shook my head. “We have them outnumbered ten to one. Why do we have to saturation bomb their cities?”

He looked to the flashing TV screen. “Cripples moral. Rebels lose support. Less deaths on our sides. Happier civilians back home. War goes quicker.”

“Not good enough,” I said, quietly, a disgust I had never felt for the man next to me growing with every confident flutter of his thin lips.

“We make more money, Wes. They die, we live. They stay poor and we stay rich. That’s how it works—”

I grabbed him by the collar with both hands, my wide, enraged eyes nearly touching his. “Not good enough, damnit!” I shouted, “not good enough!”

Uncomfortable pause.

I released my grip, stood from the sofa and backed away. My eyes found the TV. I briskly walked toward it, the current image one of my nation’s flag being hoisted above the charred remains of a thousand year-old city by a grinning soldier. I closed my eyes, tightly, thinking, knowing that I could have prevented this. I caused their deaths, each and every one of them, and if I hadn’t been so damned obsessed with garnering money and profits that I never had the time to use then I might have actually taken someone else’s welfare into account. I grabbed the television set with whitened fingers and smashed it on the marble floor, for once breaking the silence that encompassed the skyscraper lounge.

It had to stop. End. Conclude. Now.

All of the strings I had pulled to get this war off the ground I would pull even harder to stop. I had powerful connections everywhere, possibly more power than anyone else on the planet. Like my predecessors before me, those that had wielded power had chosen only to give into the demands of the populace when their lives were at stake, and when there lives and profits were not threatened, the upper class would squeeze every copper that they could from the many peons below them, who could barely feed themselves, let alone pay the exorbitant taxes instituted upon them. This was the story of civilization, of the more fortunate cheating the less fortunate, again and again and again. This cycle would end with me.

Without saying anything to Anton nor giving him the satisfaction of a dirty look I stormed out of the warmth of the lounge and into the wild, raging blizzard outside, the bright necklace of lights that was New York nearly obscured by the thick weather. My apartment wasn’t far from where I stood, and my limo didn’t appear to be nearby—although I couldn’t quite tell from the lack of visibility—so I decided to walk home, my shoulders hunching and my breath puffing into the chilled air. I had forgotten my coat.

There wasn’t a person on the sidewalk nor a car on the road. In this tempest I realized that I was quite alone, I, the richest man on Earth, was without escort. I reached for my cellphone, lifted its body closer to my eyes and dialed my own phone number, but couldn’t get through the storm. I swore, and at the same time a powerful gust of wind nearly lifted me off my feet, its breath powerful enough to knock the phone out of my hand, my eyes following its body as it quickly faded from sight in the vortex of snow. I found myself gazing at the warm, golden doors of the skyscraper lounge once more, even though I was some distance away (I could barely see them) however, it looked like—yes, yes one person, no, three people, large people, large men, were emerging, their heads looking left and right. One of them stopped in his tracks when his silhouette faced me.

The three of them bolted.

I turned and fled, my old body not as athletic as it had used to be. My muscles became weary almost immediately, and I panted in exasperation. Too many dinners and meetings and not enough exercise kept my pace slow, and it wasn’t long before I felt something large and hard smash the back of my head. I grunted and collapsed into a heap on the sidewalk, my vision narrowing to a pinprick.



I awoke an indiscernible time later, my mouth gagged, my feet and hands tightly bound, my eyes useless, for the room was blacker than oil. I could feel the thrum of a jet engine under the cool, metal floor I was tossed like a doll upon. Only a few seconds of my being conscious passed before I heard the groans and whines of mechanical cogs below. My eyes widened in the darkness, and the floor fell away, the abrupt light all but blinding me.

I was in freefall; many thousands of feet above what my eyes told me was a desert. The sky was a sickly orange and the few clouds that hovered in it sported black undersides. I looked up; to see the small pinpoint I had fallen from circling in the air, an airplane, no doubt of my own design and of my own manufacture. I watched as its retro-boosters flared a bright blue, allowing it to ascend to the void of the heavens. I remembered thinking up that idea, making it efficient, allowing planes to engage in orbital spaceflight with ease. I designed the machine that would ultimately kill me, and I had designed countless others like it, each with almost magical technologies, each generation more efficient at killing than the last. What a life to lead, what a life to end.

I saw myself as a child, when I was young, very young and very happy—I was in a forest, a wall of trees before me, shimmering in a cool breeze, the sky bright and blue above. I heard the call of a bird, a twitter piercing the growing chorus of leaves upon zephyr.

The wind grew unbearable and the dunes rushed up to meet me.



To my surprise I awoke, remembering the fall immediately. I twisted about in the sand, trying not to wonder how I had survived, knowing that I shouldn’t have, knowing that something extraordinary had occurred, with myself as its only witness. I was still bound and gagged, but I quickly used the various techniques I had procured from my shady business partners, loosening the ropes in no time at all. I stood, found myself on the desert, the crater from my fall disintegrating before me as the arid wind forced pockets of sand back into the hole I had created. I quickly noticed my hard, cracked tongue—dried now for a long time. I felt then an amazing desire for water, but knew that I could find none.

I didn’t have the faintest idea as to my location, deciding just to head in one direction and hope that it would lead me somewhere, an oasis, a city, a town—before the desert claimed my body. For many days and nights I crossed the tall crests of dunes, the sun peeling away my skin. I could only hear the faint sound of sand sliding down the desert carpet, like it was some kind of ethereal snake. My mind was running away, gliding away—and in my desperation I began to sing my favorite rock songs from the sixties, my eyes all but blinded from the perpetual furnace above. Eventually the air became even staler, and the hot desert breeze that had once blown loud enough to rival the jet engines of my airplanes was now no more than a mere whisper.

The dunes flattened out, and I discerned that this was the place that I would die—in a sandblasted basin that stretched on forever into the horizon. Night fell on what I believed to be my last day on earth, at this point I could hardly manage a steady crawl. The sweat had long ago dried up from my armpits, from my forehead, and there remained not a cell of my skin not ravaged by the burning sun. There was a full moon, the first I had seen in a great while, and as I lost myself in its beauty my legs found a weak spot in the desert carpet, and I fell through, my throat too dry to scream, and long exhausted from singing the songs from the sixties.

Water!

I plunged into a deep cushion of icy water, and had to fight to stay afloat while at the same time drinking from the pool I had fallen in, the moon’s light falling through the skylight I had created. I gulped the liquid in an ecstasy, feeling the coolness drift down my neck and into my chest, my stomach. After a long while I was contented, rejuvenated, and with new strength swam until I found the pool’s edge. I seemed to be in some kind of subterranean cave, a place long ago hallowed by ancient waters that had settled here or gone elsewhere. Curtains of light danced on the walls from the water, which seemed to have a kind of spiritual glow that’s hard to explain. I walked for a long while in the gloom, noticing odd inscriptions on the walls in texts that I had never seen before, the letters thin and jagged, like the claws of some primordial monster. Eventually it became so dark that I had to feel my way through the cave, and as time wore on it became smaller, barely large enough for me to walk through (and my stature is fairly short). My hands continued to see in the stead of my eyes, sliding along the ruffles of rock and sand on either side of me, until they met at a door.

The surface before me was hard, cold, and flat, shaped like a rectangle. I found a groove for a hand and pulled. The door opened, quite silently and unexpectedly easily, and before me, in an amphitheater below an opening to the moonlit sky, stood a dark monolith. I approached it, feeling greatly uneasy. I crept up to it, dared to touch it with my hand. It was warm. My hand darted back. It seemed, then, that the light in the room grew in quick pulse, subtly, mind you, but yes, the light in the room grew enough so that my eyes could pick out the details on the tall obelisk before me.

Hideous bas-relief met my eyes—giant, bipedal monsters danced about on the stone surface as others were skewered by spears or sabers. Flying beasts with cylindrical jaws wheeled about in the sky in dizzying flocks, swarming about their terrified prey on the ground. I didn’t know how I could see all of this through the stone, but it was there, a vision playing itself through my mind. Their statures were stunted even though they walked on two legs; their mouths seemed to be roaring in sync with each other, each baring great sets of glassy, carved teeth that beckoned the taste of flesh. This carved stone, whatever it was, held some kind of great significance, and I felt that the depicted creatures must have gathered here, in some antediluvian time, to dance about its circumference in a wild orgy of death and mayhem, cackling and reveling as they maimed each other for whatever god or slew of gods this thing was meant to represent.

My knowledge pertaining to the field of archaeology was somewhat limited, but as I studied the monolith I became convinced that it could not have been fashioned by human hands. The creatures depicted before me were completely alien to the world in its current age—all of them, and I knew that even the most ancient stone structures or cave paintings mentioned a human here or a familiar creature there. And yet there was none of this. What I was looking at was a relic from some long forgotten civilization, one that must have died out long before the age of humanity. With renewed curiosity I touched the slab, with my right hand, then with both hands, rubbing my tortured skin over its surface, feeling the grooves worked by horrific, clawed appendages.

And then it came, from some unforeseeable depth, from out of an orifice I had not originally seen. A cloud of dizzying black drained itself from the floor and shaped itself into a fiend I shall never forget, its deep, maniacal voice akin to the sound of raking claws and the guttural moaning of lions before the kill. I could hear it calling to me, the sound even penetrating my mind, trying to force me to remain in my current position, so it could catch me and drag me into whatever underworld collective it had detached itself from. I backed away, the unearthly fear so great in me that I would have fainted had not some degree of perseverance remained in my mind. I stumbled behind the doorway and slammed it shut, searching with my hands in the dark for a locking mechanism of any kind, but finding none. It shouted my name, as a mother would to a disobedient child. The door’s mouth widened, and I hurled myself against it, screaming such screams as men never scream. It hurled its hellish form against the door, knocking me into the hallway. I lay there, dazed and hopeless, and its pitch colored body, which had now manifested itself as a solid form, began to encroach upon my position, its many appendages opened wide, beckoning angrily for my body, for my soul, and for whatever else remained.

Such fear throbbed through my body then, such a paralyzing feeling, enough to nearly detach me from consciousness, but I fought it, I fought the fear and I remained awake, the thing still approaching and nearly on top of me. I felt its touch, felt its sick, amphibious skin pressed against mine. I think it was then that I lost my mind, that whoever I once was drowned in a cavernous depth of terror. I retreated spuriously, still on my back, my screams now coming in harsh rasps. A tentacle darted out and I kicked it away, the claw on the end of it slicing the skin of my leg. I stood, my blood draining away to the floor of the cave, and fled to the distant, almost otherworldly gurgling sound of the water. The thing roared behind me, and I smelt its breath, a vaporous aroma of decaying, rotting fish. I fell into the water, swam away, hoping to find some way to the surface. I saw the hole in the ceiling I created; saw the moon above, and then looked back to the cave. The thing was slithering into the water, and when its skin touched the surface an inky stain began to spread about and uncoil, swirling about like the storms of Jupiter.

My eyes widened, and I clawed at the water with my hands and feet. I searched desperately for some kind of exit, something to save me, but there was nothing. I was trapped. The stain spread about, wheeled and thickened like a tempest, blotting the light reflected from the water. The mass lurched toward me, just above the waves, its vocal cords chanting my name, the rhythm and beat quickening as it drew closer, in sync with my throbbing heart. I backed against the jagged cave wall, and as it neared me all of its appendages lanced forth through the air in a thick phalanx, many of them wrapping around my body, pulling me from my position through the waves, toward its gelatinous form. My muscles were weary, unable to fight any longer, and my body went limp, my face twisting in revulsion as I drew closer.

Its chanting stopped.

I could hear a distant, otherworldly rumbling, then, it sounded like…no…it couldn’t be…machinery? The form that held me condensed itself, a tongue of black, gleaming skin jumping toward the hole in the ceiling and pulling both the creature and myself onto the cold, moonlit desert, the water from below dripping onto the dry sand, my breath coming in puffs like it had before on the streets of New York. I sensed a kind of excitement emanating from the thing that held me, it was enthralled, and as I looked out to the desert horizon I could see why.

I saw a city, silhouetted against the backdrop of the stars, and could see the minarets of mosques, palaces and other Arab-themed architecture. I must have missed it in my delirium. Lights were flitting about the skies above it, like fireflies, and periodic flashes would result in a chorus of delayed booms and thunderclaps. Orange explosions bloomed from time to time, and the resulting sound would pain the ears to hear. Groundcars and groundtanks rolled from the other ends of the desert, some blasting away with shells and conventional weaponry, others firing beams of condensed, barely-visible plasma. Troops were dropped from enormous vehicles hovering in the skies above, vehicles so huge that they dwarfed the aircraft of any other era. The soldiers were in special suits of my own design and manufacture, they made the modern warrior more machine than man, linking the brain through wires implanted in the cerebral cortex to a device that could leap dozens of feet in the air, lay down enough gunfire to level a steel building, and have armor sufficient to protect the person inside from most forms of attack. They were invincible, and like breadcrumbs they were scattered from the fireflies above, sprinkling over the city in a spectacle I had never before seen with my own eyes, but had instead observed through the eyes of cameras countless times before.

I wonder if the creature knew that I had created these things.

And I also wondered why I was not yet dead.

As if it heard my thoughts, the thing replied. Their species, the horrific race of monsters I had thought long dead, had merely been in a great slumber, and this thing that held me, that called itself their ‘overlord,’ was the first to awake after all these eons, so that when the proper time came their race could arise again, and so that he could rule them as he had long ago—with absolute authority. They had depleted Earth of her resources long before the time our scientists thought life had been born, and they had left the monolith in the cave below sensitive to the slightest organic touch, so that when a complex life form finally found it the hibernating creatures near the planet’s core would awake and claw their way to the surface, knowing that there were sufficient resources to sustain their form of life, as their had been so far in the past.

In my mind’s eye I saw the radar screens back near the headquarters of my nation’s commanders, the soldiers there on edge but not afraid, for it had been a very long time since they had lost a battle. Suddenly their screens were alive with activity, overflowing with data as the beasts from below fought their way to the top of Earth’s crust. They shouted to the middle-aged general on duty, whose eyes widened at the sight. “Get me Washington,” murmured his thin lips, as if he were in a trance.

“Why am I here?” I asked, “how…did I survive that fall?”

“I am fate’s sickle,” it replied, its grotesque voice forcing me to shudder, “come to reap harvest.”

The tremors in the earth grew, and the breadcrumb lights above the distant city of Arab spires wheeled about and began to speed toward my position, blue tails of flame and ozone in their wake. A clawed hand burst from the ground near my feet. A hideous head followed, its eyes black and glinting in the moonlight. It turned to me, hissed. More of the earth fell away, and the blob of amphibious skin ascended a bit higher into the sky, its tentacles wheeling about like the snakes of Medusa. From the newly forged caverns an eerie, subterranean glow spread about. The air nearby danced and shimmered with Gaia’s inner wrath, and the temperature, once freezing, began to rise. The flying creatures soared into the sky; their bipedal counterparts pouring like black ants from the wounds in the planet’s skin. The desert was no more, and the war had begun.

“Slaves,” it said, “we need slaves. You are their ruler, their slavemaster, and so you shall be in charge of them. You enslaved them your whole life, only now they will know it. With this magic in the sky and on the ground you may have been able to defeat us, had you been united and loved, but your hatred and your greed kept you apart, even though you were one species, as we are. There is strength in togetherness. There is togetherness in omnipotence. Strength in omnipotence.”

I was speechless.

The mechanical soldiers in the sky landed on the melting desert, their machine guns streaming arcs of metal into the throngs of black creatures, knocking them down, slicing them apart. One after another the cannons overheated, steam hissed out of their dark nostrils, and the savage claws of the monsters tore the machinery away from the humans inside. One after another the airplanes and helicopters fell apart in the sky, their smoldering wreckage flailing to the earth. One after another…one after another…

I was going to help people. Stop hurting them and help.

…not going to be slaves…not my slaves…

I struggle desperately and manage to free myself from the mass of tentacles, I fall to the desert, hit the ground, feel its warmth. The creatures don’t wait; they attack from all directions, a horde of them, a collective, working as one, working together.

Being immortal.

I feel the first claw tear open my chest. I am not immortal.

Anonymous

It's been a long time since I posted the latest draft...sorry to be a prick but would anyone be interested in saying anything?

Kitten Courna

sorry about that, friend. I'm getting to it, however it will take me a while to get anything worthwhile. I missed seeing the revamp posted up, but I will comment again.

-Kitten

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Cadmus: Poor child, like a white swan warding its weak old father, why do you clasp those white arms about my neck?
Euripides; 'The Bacchae'

Anonymous

Don't worry about it. You're doing ME a favor, remember?

Kitten Courna

Wow, I must apologize for being so late. The length of it dautned me at first, then other projects got in the way, but I've finally made it back, and found it well worth my while. What an excellent story. It's far from Lovecraft now, though the descriptions and happenings are certainly worthy of his, horror wise. It possesses a different tone now, it doesn't sink into delerium, it remains entirely rational, or seems to, at least. It isn't meant to scare, but rather to haunt, just leave a residual horror, and it does so. WEll done, Pollux, I shouldnt' have waited so long to finish.

-Kitten

__________________
Cadmus: Poor child, like a white swan warding its weak old father, why do you clasp those white arms about my neck?
Euripides; 'The Bacchae'