Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

The city in which he was born and in which he had died….

The city in which he had revealed to the world the existence of the Great Old Ones, and of the other Gods.

The chants reached a peak and would soon fall, to give the floor to Philips and his brothers and sisters. The chants did not act like constructed melodies, melodies that one could follow on a song sheet. They acted like a chaos of sounds, grave flights that chained themselves to magnificent, acute angles. In the spirit of the young man, colours devoured themselves, images of tentacles emerging from a cocoon of human flesh, succeeded to those of gigantic orbs, swirling about themselves. For a few heartbeats, Philips was Lovecraft. There appeared before his eyes the Revelations, the images which had enabled the Father to describe Cthulhu and all the others. He felt the fatigue that the Master had accumulated each day of his life, then the energy that ran through his body when he wrote out the Scriptures.

This night, the adepts of the Shadow Cult would invoke the power of the Trinity so that the city of R’lyeh might arise from the waves and, with it, He-who-Dreams-and-Waits.

“ Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”

With this phrase, the first group concluded their part of the incantation. Screams of terror punctuated the litany as the adepts were haunted, one after another, by nightmarish visions.

“ Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl nafl’ftaghn ,” answered the second group, including Philips.

The phrase that he pronounced in that moment, the words of Saint Derleth, was one of the most powerful keys for the Call of Cthulhu. They marked the commencement of Horror!

Over Providence, clouds gathered. Black clouds, charged with lightning, charged with hate, carriers of a creature rampant and magnificent. With the aid of bursts in his perpetually changing body, he attacked Reality, aided in this by tens of humans who prayed to him and the other Outer Gods. He was All in One and One in All. In this rhythm, there remained only a few hours before Yog-Sothoth infiltrated our world and ravaged it!

Some kilometers from the city, the ocean was agitated by gigantic mountains of putrefying flesh. Columns suddenly pierced the waves. Rocks reddened by blood even the seawater could not efface. A white building, made of bones, suddenly appeared.

A dome of tibiae and femurs, of skulls and ribs.

A sudden explosion. A flood of chaos, of abyssal monstrosities.

An opened tomb from which escaped indescribable creatures.

Then two wings. A head of an octopus.

A gigantic body of a man.

Cthulhu was walking.

Cthulhu was walking….

Great Old Ones and Outer Gods massed around Providence, more numerous with each word that Philips and the others pronounced. Creatures nebulous and bloody, horrors born from the Chaos Primordial and the Infinite Madness. Beings the sight of whom blinded the spirit and annihilated all forms of life….

In a world locked in a straitjacket of rules and pre-chewed thoughts, in this world where the Holy Fantastic Literature imposed its laws on creation, restricted the imagination of the most original, men and women still dared to defy the Church and the Inquisition. Persecuted for centuries, ever more fiercely and cruelly, they had decided to revolt in the most extreme fashion possible.

In the name of Lovecraft, of Howard and of Smith, their Sombre Trinity, they called in, with all their body and soul, the End of the World.

And on this night, the anniversary of the 15th of March, in this sacred city of Providence, It was at their door….

Mae Empsonhas a Master’s degree in English literature from Indiana University at Bloomington, and graduated with honours in English and in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mae began selling short stories to speculative fiction magazines and anthologies in July 2010, and can be found on twitter at @maeempson, and on the web at: maeempson.wordpress.com. Recent publications include “Little Rattle Belly” in Enchanted Conversation: A Fairy Tale Magazine (March 2011), “An Interrupted Sacrifice” in the Historical Lovecraft anthology from Innsmouth Free Press (April 2011), and “Pathological Curves” in Poe Little Thing from Naked Snake Press (April 2011).

“So, the Arctic is changing and it is changing faster than most people have predicted. This is leading to increased activity. As some of you know, last year, several German cargo vessels navigated the Northern Sea route unaided by icebreakers….In fact, this is about year three of the Arctic becoming essentially an adventurer’s playground, with yachts, cabin cruisers, folks seeking excitement and death in unusual ways….Fortunately, they have yet to find death in unusual ways, but we know that will happen, eventually; it is only a matter of time.”

This private cruise to Svalbard was financed by adventurous foodies, by gastronautic dreams

Of incomparable and illicit sights, aromas, and that first brave promised taste and swallow.

With the Arctic melting, icebreakers have widened the ship lanes further, and the roving eye

Of food frontier fashion has turned north, watching, hungrily, as the monster squid,

(As the tweeters named them) began to be found frozen beneath the melting lid

Of Arctic ice, where they’d apparently once, long ago, gathered to spawn and die,

The ice between them riddled by acres of unanchored egg cases. Spawn, freeze and die.

But are the eggs dead? You’re here because you’ve heard our claim, dream of dreams,

That Norwegian scientist-opportunists asserting their national rights over the icy lid,

Beneath which the frozen treasures waited, have experimented and, hard to swallow,

Hard to believe, but true as toast, the eggs can be hatched, live paralarvae god squid,

Infant monster squid, big as a man’s fist, miniatures of the adults, with each eye

No bigger than a man’s thumb. You know the largest of the adults found so far has an eye

Big as the TV screen in our standard cabin. These hatchlings are revived in order to die.

To die by the most delicious means possible. Sure, you’ve had calamari before, mundane squid,

But the god squid paralarvae preparation is in the Ortolan Bunting style; every Frenchman dreams

Of that taste, of the songbird first caught and fattened, force-fed, required to swallow

Twice its size in food, drowned in brandy, and tossed whole beneath the roasting pan’s lid,

To be eaten whole, bones and all. The diner covers his head and face with a towel, before the lid

Of the serving plate is lifted, so the rich aroma is trapped, and the diner’s face is hid from the eye

Of God—at least that’s tradition, mon Dieu , our tradition. The same God who counts the swallow

Before it falls. The sparrow. The songbird. But will he mourn the hatchling, the next to die?

I think another eye is watching. The dead, frozen, monstrous mother. I see her in my dreams.

Of course I dream of squid. It’s our livelihood now. Nothing to it. Just you wait to see the squid,

The Mother of All Squid, waiting in the ice hotel in Svalbard. They took the largest squid,

Carved the ice around her to a thin layer, an extraordinary ice sculpture. The base forms the lid