Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Future Lovecraft

“Maybe,” said Pipaluk thoughtfully. “Maybe not. Surprised you didn’t take your chances with it when you saw me coming. Surprised you warned me off it.”

“Despite your slanderous campaign of character assassination, I’m a devout Klarkashian,” said Laila, straightening her shoulders. “I would never allow a fellow servant of the Sleeper of N’Kai to unwittingly fall into that devil Hziulquoigmnzhah’s realm without a sure means of escape. I told you and I told the Quorum time and again, I’m not a heretic. I’m just—”

“Hush!” said Pipaluk, her com-membrane rippling. The second airlock had just been activated. The politibetjents were coming to arrest them. “They’re coming. For both of us—I violated orders by pursuing you and got a few subgineers killed in the process. That puts us in the same bath, so let’s make a break for it. I’ll take a possible death of my own making over a certain one of theirs.”

“Pipaluk, Pipaluk, Pipaluk,” Laila chided. “Where is your faith? There is nowhere to run. We have committed crimes, you and I, and must be taken to the Eiglophian Plains for punishment. It is written that they who err in the service of the slothful ebon god shall be forgiven, so long as they are purified by a sacrificial death. I go willingly to my justice and suggest you—blargh!”

Laila doubled over in agony, retching into her bio-helm. A faint wisp of stench danced at the end of Pipaluk’s pistol as she tucked the hot weapon into her belt and went to the incapacitated Professori. The final airlock was beginning to open as Pipaluk hoisted her former adversary and shoved her headlong through the Eibon Gate, the back of the hinged metal panel banging softly against its gneiss setting as the Voormi disappeared into the misty haze that obscured whatever lay on the far side. Without a backward glance at her pursuers, Pipaluk hoisted herself up and squirmed after, through the door to Saturn.

The team of politibetjents and formless spawn sent to capture Pipaluk waited for days in the mossy ruins, neither wishing to follow the Ingeniøri through the mysterious portal, nor daring to leave in disobedience of Provost Ole’s orders. At length, they were recalled, but the result of the whole affair was highly regrettable from the standpoint of the Quorum. It was universally believed, due to a leaked bio-helm file here and an uploaded simcreation there, that Professori Laila and Ingeniøri Pipaluk had not only escaped, by virtue of the luminous science they had learned from Hziulquoigmnzhah, but had made away with a dozen formless spawn commandos and fail-safe behemoths in the bargain. As a consequence of this belief, the public’s trust in the Quorum declined and there was a widespread revival of the dark worship of Tsathoggua’s paternal uncle throughout Mhu Thulan in the last century before the onset of the great Solar Firestorms.

Bryan Thao Worrais an award-winning Lao American author whose work has appeared in Illumen , The Book of Dark Wisdom , Tales of the Unanticipated , Mad Poets of Terra , Historical Lovecraft , Innsmouth Free Press , and G-Fan . His books include On the Other Side of the Eye, BARROW , Winter Ink , and the Tuk-Tuk Diaries: My Dinner with Cluster Bombs . You can visit him online at: http://thaoworra.blogspot.com.

Orrin Greywas born on the night before Halloween, and he’s been in love with monsters and the macabre ever since. Never Bet the Devil & Other Warnings , his first collection of supernatural stories, is coming soon from Evileye Books. You can find him online at: www.orringrey.com.

BEYOND THE WALL, the first moon has already risen. Kendrick stands still for awhile, getting used to the changes to air, to gravity. He can taste the last bitter dregs of the cigarette he stubbed out just before hooking up to the machine, can still smell the antiseptic tinge of the room he’s left behind, as a breeze perfumed by distant and unnamed glades carries it away.

Down below him, at the bottom of the hill, is a forest of tall, white trees and, beyond that, the beginning of the Labyrinth. He’s been here before, maybe not right here, but near enough. He’s seen this moon before, stood under its light. He’s been in that forest, even if maybe some other part of it. He’s seen the split-headed giants that live there, the doors that they build in the ground, the men with cloven hooves and the heads of dogs, the black shapes that occasionally flit in front of the moon. All of this is familiar to him, but something about the night, this night, feels different. A smell in the air, like the ozone smell before a storm. Something.

Maybe it’s because this trip is different. Not some hapless dreamer he’s riding in, this time, but another rider, another professional. McCabe, lying in a drugged coma in his hotel room. McCabe, a few milligrams of noxitol short of dead, lying there on his bed, hooked up to monitors and IVs and to the machine. McCabe, waiting somewhere in the Labyrinth for Kendrick to come in and find him, to learn why he’d gone to the needle instead of his oldest friend.

The company is paying for the hotel room now, for the monitors, and paying Kendrick double his usual rate, but this one he’d do for free. He has to know what happened, what changed. Or, the worse answer, if nothing has, if this was always what waited at the end of McCabe’s street and he’s just been blind to it until now.

One way or the other, he has to know, and so, he starts down the hill, toward the Labyrinth.

It probably started with the drugs, the new kinds of sleep aids to help a world full of light and motion find the time to dream. But it was the machine that ultimately did the job, that brought the wall of sleep crashing down. And what we found on the other side wasn’t what we had expected, not at all. Not a changing jungle of Freudian symbols, not personal, not subjective. An actual place: the Labyrinth and the lands that surrounded it.

It took the machine to find it. The dreamers themselves never remembered, somehow, that they all went to the same place. On their trips back to consciousness, the details of the dream world were lost, their minds replacing them with the minutiae of their memories and their own imaginations, the things that they remembered as their dreams. Always keyed to events in the Labyrinth but never identical to it.

The machine was the silver key. With it, another person, a rider, could piggyback in on the dreamer’s trip to that secret world. Not asleep, not really, and therefore, not subject to the forgetfulness that true dreaming entailed.

It became a fad, a drug, an industry. In the waking world, there were dream parlours in every mall, where you could hook into someone’s sleeping mind and take a ride to the Labyrinth. But most people were nothing more than tourists in the dreamlands, children stumbling along the turns of the Labyrinth. Kendrik and McCabe, they were professionals.