Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

Day Two

Many in my life have indicated to me that a woman’s only real power is that of procreation. That, if she cannot conceive, she is nothing but a slab. I can’t conceive because I have no interest in doing so. Not a mortal child, anyway. But something has happened. There were strange growths on the inside of that staircase. I breathed them in. I felt something change in me. I am pregnant now with something I cannot define. Not in my belly but in my mind.

Day Three

The change is growing more voluminous. It scares my haggard mom half to death. When she saw me this morning, she screamed herself into unconsciousness. You see, journal, the wires are growing.

Day Four

Space is no longer of the sky. It is of me. 5510 A.D.? Ha! Try 15,510 A.D. and you may have the more accurate year. But the year is of no consequence. Not without my blood to guide it, anyway. Give me all the centuries untold and I’ll give you the gluons of a million universes, ten million years in the future. Innsmouth is quaking under the overcast rain of a sneaking, summer deluge. It’s uncommon for Innsmouth to have this much rain this time of year, but then again, there is no time, anymore.

Day Five

I went to the waterfront. They were waiting for me. They know what’s happened and are proud to say they knew it would. They assured me that they would not forsake me. Cthulhu knows how valuable I can be to his dreams. They would not let me remain a skulking mortal, to rot to dust. The change is still happening. My flesh is starting to slake off in scaled fragments. The town of Innsmouth is truly now one belonging to the Deep Ones. The human fraction that has caused me discontent for so long is beginning to quake with fear, because now they are seeing, as if for the first time in their whole, benighted history, that there really are beings that stalk their shadows that are far more powerful than they. And I am now one of them. The fungi growing in my head are sprouting exponentially. Soon, like Athena bursting forth from Zeus’s head, my dreams will give birth to the Kadath Angle: the angle of dream that will engulf the future with my azure rapture.

Day Six

Genesis is always painful. Parthenogenesis, in particular, because we virgins have no one to give a hoot about us in the waiting room. That’s not really true, though. At least, not anymore. The Deep Ones are ecstatic. All night long, I hear their yelps and cries echo over frightened Innsmouth. They know what is coming. When the Kadath Angle bursts forth from my head, it will be the birth canal for all star spawn upon the Earth.

Day Seven

God forgive me.

The Kadath Angle burst forth over Amy’s prostrate form on the floor. Her mother had starved to death in the upper room, thus she was not disturbed. Like a great serpent, it burst from the Gilman House, shattering the roof. Star spawn rained down over Innsmouth, over the world. The atrocities in Asia whimpered and paled before the spawn of Kadath. The Earth tilted under them as they littered the sky with the protoplasmic slush of universes born many eons before. 5510, 7510, 125,510, 750,500, 5,000,000,000.

My name is Amy Gilman and I am a monster. I didn’t think about the ramifications of what was happening to me when I first experienced what I can still only call ‘azure rapture’. I have allowed myself to become Mankind’s exterminator, simply because I did not believe my own humanity was fair. I had Deep One ilk in my background. I believed I deserved to live with the Deep Ones. I would have done anything to make them accept me, as no one else ever had. They accepted me, all right. Strictly for their purposes, as these things always go. There is not one trace of humanity left, for they have been undone. My mortal blood touched that which should never be touched and now, not only has Mankind been exterminated, but it has never existed at all. The Earth is what the accursed Necronomicon always hinted it would be if star spawn ever regained control of it. Now their cities are laced upon the barren world. There is no water, save for the terrariums that the Deep Ones constructed to meet their occasional, water-frolicking needs. The Fungi from Yuggoth, which I now know to have been the fungi I suspired from under my staircase, though how they grew there, I am still at a loss to define. Now, I am the fungus that grows under the stately staircase of a Deep One. Winged visitors from Vermont, or what used to be Vermont, are staying over tonight and I have been instructed not to say a word, which is why I’m recording my thoughts on a beam of light in a distant part of the universe. It is my sincerest hope that some passing explorer may find this haphazard message in a bottle and learn from it. Learn that the only way to save mankind is to kill me before I have a chance to become impregnated with the Kadath Angle. This will be most difficult and I can’t think who, or what, lifeform that may even have the technology to decode this message would even bother to do so. Even if they do, who can reach that far into the past and rewrite what I have done?

Forgiveness comes slowly.

Ezeiyoke, Chukwunonsois a promising young writer of 24. His short story was among the long listed stories in the Golden Baobab Prize, 2010. His poems have appeared in ANA Review , a literary journal and Sowetan Online Magazine . He was born in Eastern part of Nigeria. He lives there. Currently, he studies Philosophy, with much interest in the Philosophy of Arts.

WHEN THE GOVERNMENT announced their ban on what they termed ‘non-essential foodstuffs’, I didn’t fully understand the implication until two weeks later, when I went to buy a Sprite, a drink I was addicted to. My father had been, too. When he was still alive I remember people calling him “Mr. Sprite”. If you were near, he would shake hands with a smile. With children, he stroked their hair. When he was in a hurry or a distance apart, he waved. He only rushed when he was going to the coal mine at Coal Camp, Enugu, the site that had first attracted white men to Enugu City. They had then established their house at New Heaven, leaving peasant workers in Coal Camp. My father had preferred living in Abakpa, a town on the outskirts of Enugu City, with a lot of indigenes of our own tribe, but this was where he could find work. That was before independence.

At the store, they said Sprite was not in the stock. Not in stock? That was silly.

I was still battling to comprehend this when they made subsequent bans. Numerous food items were added to the list. Indo-mie, Spaghatti, Macromie, Bobo, Biscuit, all were given their final funeral rites. The Minister of Information, said that we were in a state of emergency, fighting ADAIDS. The production of those banned foodstuffs was a waste of manpower and would not help the majority of the citizens suffering from the epidemic.

Advanced Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (ADAIDS) had a long, complicated history. Rumour had it that a couple of scientists from Germany and America were sponsored by UNICEF to conduct a genetic experiment, using an AIDS virus. The experiment allegedly took place in the Sahara Desert, near the northern part of Nigeria, in an underground lab. Nobody has ever given a correct description of the place. Most people believed it was destroyed immediately after the experiment failed. The experiment, aimed at producing a cure for AIDS, instead ended up producing a mutated type of AIDS that could be contracted from sexual intercourse, even when one was wearing a condom. Worse, the disease remained dormant until three months before death, making it easier to spread. Once someone contracted it, the person never lived beyond three years. After the experiment was shown to be a failure, UNICEF came in and silenced all who needed to be silenced. Some said that all those who had anything to do with the experiment were assassinated. Others believed they were heavily bribed.