Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

But, then, Lovecraft’s colours . His dreams of far Yuggoth. Her own dreams, no less terrible for their having been lived once, of Hitler and Stalin, of KGB horrors. Poe, at his worst, still foresaw some brightness, some faint trace of Byelobog. While the other, his fellow American prophet of darkness….

She didn’t complete the thought. Something was happening. Lights played on rock spires—spaceships as she saw, but still looking stonelike to the others. And now behind them, as they climbed the talus of Tsiolkovsky’s mountain.

“Over here, quickly!” The voice was not Gyorgi’s. Rather, the Frenchman’s, also with an accent. She watched as the camera panned, saw his lights sparkle. And then…deeper darkness.

“I don’t know, Gyorgi.” The voices crackled. “What do you think, then?”

“A cavern of some sort.”

No, Gyorgi! she thought. But he could not hear her. Nor could she call down to the L.M. to warn them, because there was no one inside to receive the call, and their suit radios were designed only for communications between one another.

And so, she could only watch as they entered. Half-seeing, half-dreaming—was it a cave mouth? Some huge sort of airlock?

She still heard their voices, that much of her still tracking them on the monitor.

“Sloping down….”

“Smooth-floored. Almost circular in its cross-section….”

“Almost—what do you think?”

“Almost as if it were artificial…. “

She dreamed of Gyorgi, her vision widening, while, at the same time, she still stared at the TV. The sudden swirling beneath the men’s feet, as if their descent took them into a mist….

“Some kind of gas, maybe. Do you know what this means?”

“That the Moon has an atmosphere of sorts. But so thin, so tenuous that it exists only beneath the surface. Look, you go out—check the wire antenna. Make sure we’re still broadcasting up to the C.M. Then bring back a container of some sort for a sample.”

She dreamed of Gyorgi, her vision widening. She saw a huge comet, and yet, not a comet. A spaceship itself, crashing into the Moon.

Blasting a crater two hundred and more kilometers wide—the aftershock throwing up its central mountain. The occupant, wounded….

Byelobog shattered. Dead. Chernobog crawling out, once the Moon’s floor had cooled, finding a cleft in the newly formed mountain. A hole to bore into. To bide its time …hiding.

And on the TV screen, the mist coalescing. Shadowy, whirling.

Forming tendrils.

The vision of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds . A hollow stone turning, revealing metal. Tentacles reaching out. Except….

Except, much vaster.

Edgar Allan Poe’s horrors most stern and most appalling , yet vaster and darker still.

What she saw now, her mind’s grasp expanding….

To bide its time from the time the Moon was young, over the eons, until it was stronger. And while it was waiting, to draw others to it.

The children, perhaps, of spores it had scattered on its mad journey—some, even, that came to Earth—to draw their strength back into its own body.

And, even it, perhaps the smallest of entities….

Coalescing. She saw . In her dream, she tried to send —somehow—some warning to Gyorgi.

That something stared back at her.

Knowing. Not knowing. The myths were metaphors. Human and nonhuman, all of the same spawn. Dazhbog and Myesyats. Byelobog. Chernobog. All of them part of the same dark evil….

Tasha woke, crying, to NASA’s frantic calls via the Space Station, demanding to know why she had stopped transmitting. Outside, she could see the Earth, bathed in full sunlight. Yet, cold and colourless.

On the TV, static. There was no picture.

She closed her eyes, straining . Trying to dream again. Trying to find some trace of her husband.

Then, slowly, she sat up and straightened her clothing and opened the C.M.’s own, separate transmission link, wondering, as she did, what exact words she could use to tell NASA.

There would be no springtime.

Meddy Lignerwas born in 1974, in Bressuire, a small town in the western part of France. He spent his first 18 years there. He goes back frequently to see his family and to play baseball with the famous Garocheurs. He studied history. Afterward, he taught French abroad: in Finland, Russia and China. Since 2003, he has worked as a teacher of history and geography in Poitiers (France) where he is living with his wife, daughter and son. His website is: http://meddyligner.blogspot.com.

THEY WOULD FINALLY land. Expected and feared at the same time, the end of the voyage was very close. Surrounded by his companions in misfortune, who, like him, were backed to the metal wall, Maxim Brahms scratched at length his salt-and-pepper beard and reflected on the past.

He remembered the war that he had led in the course of these last few years. A war implacable, without mercy. A crusade against those who were called “the enemies of the people”. A devoted servant of the regime, he had fought the plotters, spies, saboteurs, and other counterrevolutionaries of every kind. In the course of this ferocious battle, Brahms had jailed them with a vengeance, separating whole families, deporting innocents, and obeying orders with zeal. For nothing. Or rather, to end up here, as one of the damned. He nearly retched.

Like so many others before him, he had ended up engulfed by yet another purge. His Party card, his advantageous position in the apparatus of the State, had done him no good. When they came to find him in his apartment, cozy in the middle of the night, Maxim had understood. The swine. He had barely time to kiss his wife and his son. Natasha and Alex, what are you doing right now? By the time he was brought to an unknown prison, he realised that he had seen them for the last time.

They accused him of deviation. Confessions obtained under torture. His trial was even more expeditious. He didn’t know why, but he’d escaped summary execution and was condemned to deportation in perpetuity. On Mars. But is that better than death? For a long time now, Siberia had gone out of fashion. That region, which had become a zone for the privileged population, had given way to another hell: the Marslag. The final step for those who disrupted. The asshole from which one never returned. Mars the Pitiless.

To reach this charming corner, the prisoners had to pass two months in the interior of a rotten cabin in the vessel October : a ruined engine that, for three decades, had watered insatiable Mars with new detainees. These miserable ones were stuck there, penned like cattle, packed like sardines, for the long and punishing voyage across the cosmos. They had become damned souls, errant spirits, empty of their human substance. In coming here, we have won a one-way ticket to the abyss.

With a terrible din, the October finally landed on the Martian soil.

Their chains were connected at the feet, as in the time of the tsars. The prison guards barked, violently pushing the slower prisoners. The aggressiveness oozed from every pore of their skins. Cudgels rained down. The guards drove the procession of phantoms to the exit of the spacecraft. With each step, his irons cut his foot, but Maxim said nothing. He knew that it was useless to complain. They were brought along an immense corridor with immaculate walls, connecting the October to the Martian base. Their metal chains rattling, the convicts trudged along the vast corridor. At the mid-point, they passed under a huge, red banner, on which stood out letters of gold: