Cthulhu's Reign

WHAT BRINGS THE VOID Will Murray

It was the dark season of the portmanteau word. Ragnageddon. Yog-Narok. Demondammerung. None of them caught on.

It was not the twilight of the gods long prophesied. It was sunset for the human race. Or sun blot. For the sun’s fate was the first cosmic sign of the uber-apocalypse.

In the Western hemisphere, it was past midnight when the moon simply winked out. Few noticed. It was still there, of course. In the Eastern hemisphere, the sun just shut down. No sun, no moonlight. In the darkness of the void, the stars brightened. Yes, there were fewer of them than before. That hardly seemed to matter.

A bluish filament of light traced across the utter night like a crazed comet. The Sothis Radiant had touched the sun with a groping tendril, extinguishing it with appalling finality. But few cared. Things shifted so fast that the past and its causes were lost in the torrent of violent ever-present change.

I was walking the streets of Washington, D.C. that first night of First Dark. I sensed the moon’s death. Darkly luminous, a weird cobalt-blue cloud rolled in, smothering the night sky. It seemed to hang lower than any terrestrial cloud had any right to hang.

Down from it had fallen two cloudy appendages, like fat tails of some boneless monster. I turned a street corner and there they were. Where they fell, they right-angled like torpid boas. At the blunt tips of each, the misty heads seemed to have taken on the form of squat dogs — a sheepdog and a bulldog. Or was one a chow? They were dull impressionistic apparitions. Both stared at me with their hollow cloudy unreadable eyes.

I reached out to touch one, thinking it some trick of the night fog. It shrank from my touch.

This cloud is alive, I marveled. The doggy form collapsed in on itself as the tentacle silently withdrew.

I found a rope and threw it toward the other — the bulldog. I thought to dispel it with its manila weight. Instead, the rope caught in its shadowy mouth — or was caught.

I felt a distinct tug. Dropping the rope, I fled.

Mankind was in a new reality.

The sun never rose again and what the moon did no one knew. An extinguished lamp, it was never seen again. Nor were most of the Milky Way stars. Without them, time simply stopped. It became 2012 forever.

No one knew what killed the global power grid. It simply stopped functioning. A greater night clamped down. Machines stopped cold. But just as importantly, world currencies — reduced to electrons moving unseen through fiber optic cables — collapsed. With no gold or silver to back paper bills or coin, the global economy popped like a soap bubble.

Civilization as we knew it was over within a month. Two unknown satellites rose in the sky eventually, twin orbs of emptiness, one a sickly bone white, the other the hue of coal. Those who knew their Necronomicon gave them names — Nug and Yeb. Need I say more?

The Old Ones were back, and Great Cthulhu drinking up the vast Pacific in his vaster gullet was the least of the legion. The Poles ignited, burning with a dark electronic fire. New place-names sprang up. Lake Ohio. Chesuncook Pit. Transyl- Pennsylvania. Kalifornia. Nyarlathotep again strode the whelmed Earth, reverse-engineering centuries of human civilization. It was terrible.

Mankind stood prepared to battle this hellish host — only to learn that the invaders regarded man as parasites on their newly reclaimed world.

Some said they merely wished to exterminate us. But there was more to it. Far more.

I was in a unique position to observe it all. Never mind my name. Call me ORV 004 — Operational Remote Viewer #4. I was attached to the External Threats Directorate of the Cryptic Events Evaluation Section of the National Reconnaissance Office.

“External threats” was our euphemism for extra-solar or other-dimensional concerns.

The Old Ones kept us hopping. But that was Back in the Day. Now there was no day — only endless night.

We had our first post-change briefing session by guttering candlelight, like a coven of damned witches.

The Director kept it simple. “I don’t want to hear any crap about end times. This isn’t the Rapture or Ascension. It’s a goddamned invasion, and we’re running a counterinsurgency out of this office.” Pounding his desktop, he growled, “I want intelligence — local and non-local.” He looked at me, the only surviving ORV.

“On it,” I said.

“Get cracking.”

“I’ll need a tasker and a monitor,” I pointed out.

Remote Viewing is an intelligence methodology devised in the 1970s for special military applications. One definition calls it “The ability to perceive, by purely mental means, persons, places and things usually inaccessible to normal senses, regardless of time, distance or shielding.” I was trained under Department of Defense RV protocols, at a sleepy place nestled in the Virginia foothills called the Monroe Institute.

The secret of Remote Viewing is to blind the viewer to the target. If you have no idea what you’re supposed to look at, your imagination can’t run away with you.

No deduction, induction, or adduction possible. Just pure psychic signal.

I lay in the dark and listened to the monitor’s voice. He had no clue as to the target any more than I did. The tasker simply handed him the coordinates, and the monitor read them to me. That way I couldn’t inadvertently access his mind and glean clues by common telepathy.

“Your coordinates are 8646 7944. Target is to be viewed in present time. Good luck.”

I went in. It was like walking through a dreamscape. Fleeting multisensory impressions swept across my mind’s eye. I scanned for resolution.

“I see a black blot,” I reported. “Huge. The size of a city.”

“Can confirm blot.”

I probed the image. “Blot was once a major city. City is no longer there. Not even ruins. I don’t even perceive a soil base. ”

“Keep going,” the monitor encouraged.

“Nothing exists there. It’s like a drop out in reality. There’s no matter there — as we understand matter. It’s vibrating on another level — slower, colder, darker.”

I shuddered in contact with the anomaly. That told me I had successfully bilocated to the target area. My senses felt like they were swimming through static.

The monitor commanded, “Move to a point northwest of the center of the black area, please.”

I found myself perceptually at a far different place. Something familiar about it. I reported my aesthetic perceptions.

“Concept of factory. Sense of purpose. Darkness and secrecy around the latter. I see beings. Bipeds. A mixture of human and not. Decoding as centaurs, but not centaurs. No horse attributes. Some type of bioengineered half-human hybrids. They function as slaves and slave-drivers.”

“Enter factory.”

I tried. I really did. But I was blocked. I felt an impenetrable membrane.

It reminded me of the time I viewed the current location of the Ark of the Covenant. I got in, but something forcibly ejected me. Something powerful.

“Denied area,” I reported.

“Recon vicinity for impressions, Number 4.”

The ground gave up nothing but a cold staticky energy. But when I shifted my focus skyward, I detected something.

“Sense of clouds above. But these are not meteorological clouds. They pulsate, then brighten. No recognizable atmospheric phenomena correlate to these changes. But I sense a connection between the activity in the factory and the clouds above.”

“Describe this connection.”

After a period of struggling with inchoate impressions, I reported, “Cannot.”

“Are you blocked, Number 4?”

“Negative. Feels more like I lack a frame of reference to comprehend the exact nature of the activity within as relates to the overhanging clouds.”

“Okay. Come back.”

When I attempted to sit up, I felt like a truck had hit me. My brain expanded against the cavern of my brain pan like a fat balloon. I closed my chakras down as best I could.

By candlelight, I wrote my report. Secondary impressions of a rendering plant danced in my head, but I left them out as imaginal artifacts.

The director had me in his office within the hour. My report was on his desk.

“Number 4, I want you to recon this so-called factory.”

“In person, sir?”

“Only someone with your clairvoyant abilities can get close without detection. Determine what’s going on in there.”

“But — ”

“This is not a request. You are not a volunteer. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.” It was a death sentence, but how could one care? The entire race was under a death watch.

The locality was outside the former Richmond, Virgina. A short ride. I took a train. Some were still running.

As the engine pulled me through the unrelieved night, I looked up at the star-starved sky. A narrow face stared down from the clouds. It was a confusion of luminous contra blue and purple, suggesting a sharp-featured demon with a round open mouth. Too round. Like a black orifice.

Once you train up to Master Remote Viewer, you are always in viewing mode. The only question is whether or not your inner perceptions reach the conscious mind’s level.

This time they were. I had the distinct feeling that the demon of the clouds was looking exclusively at me, and would swallow me if he could. Was it a presentiment — or a warning?

The demon passed from view. But I still felt its hollow eyes upon me. They reminded me of those nightmarish canine apparitions.

The train let me off short of the dormant crater that had been Richmond. I walked from there. It was like a trek through a minefield of the unknown. Even the leafless locust trees had a stark look, as if shocked by their new habitation.

Three miles along, I encountered trouble breathing. I backed up and worked around it. No-oxygen zones. They were growing. The Old Ones didn’t need oxygen, people said. I wondered if the factory was dedicated to atmosphere conversion.

Even as the thought glimmered my mind, I intuited that the truth was more dire. Far more dire. But I could not conceive how much.

People filed along the road, coming from somewhere, but going nowhere.

Everyone understood that, so talk was shunned. I was reminded of Springsteen’s mournful end-of-the-world song, “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Welcome to the new world order.

You don’t fully understand time and timelessness until the sun and moon and the familiar planets are no longer there to help mark the celestial procession. Against a fading blue web spun by the star-quenching Sothis Radiant, Nug and Yeb careened crazily through the vacant sky, confusing matters.

I walked for hours, but it felt more like an elastic eternity. Nothing to look forward to. No hope of natural light. My flashlight helped to guide me. Then I encountered a darkness it could neither penetrate nor dispel.

A black ovoid lay in the road. It looked unnatural, so I approached it gingerly.

Vibrationally, it reminded me of the black blot I had mentally come into contact with — the old Richmond. This was smaller. Superficially, it resembled a hole in the earth. But my light failed to illuminate the sides of the “hole.” And it lacked any sense of dimensionality.

I dropped a stone into it. It abruptly vanished, as if relocating to another reality.

Only then did I sense a disturbing connection between this hole and the gaping mouth of the demonic cloud face that had regarded me so singularly.

I rushed on.

When I came upon an orderly file of people, I joined them, as if to lose myself in their numbers. They walked along in a single file of the condemned.

I turned to one and asked, “Where are you going?”

He pointed to the others ahead of him. “Wherever they are,” he said dully.

“Don’t you know?”

He nodded. “This is the food line.”

“There’s food up ahead?”

“No, we are the food.” He said it without hope, fear, or caring.

I stepped out of line.

I saw my first centaur then. That is, with my physical eyes. My non-physical vision had detected one during the RV session.

This one stood taller than a man. From approximately the thorax up, he looked human. He was a big burly black man, muscular in the extreme. His skull was shaven and his torso rippled with undraped muscles.

Where his pelvis devolved into legs, no legs as we know them supported the rest. The pelvis instead flared out into a wide skirt of some unappetizing flesh, like a columnar snail. It stood on this pad, moved on it via some snail-like form of locomotion.

But the lower appendage was not flesh, or even organic matter. I sensed this, and my perception was confirmed when the centaur glided over a great patch of unrelieved black that lay off the roadside like a pool of tar.

The black patch supported it. It would never support a physical man.

Confirmation of this came almost immediately.

A maddened dog tore running out of somewhere and lunged for it. The dog charged across grass and brush and seemed oblivious to the blackness until its paws came into contact with its unreflective surface.

Then its snarling was swallowed whole — as was the damned and doomed dog.

Seeing this, a teenage girl detached from the line and approached the spot where the dog had vanished. I moved in to intercept her. She got there first.

“What do you think is down there?’ she murmured as she stared into the unrelieved abyss, Gothic eyes blank.

“Nothing,” I said firmly, reaching out with care.

“Nothing,” she said dreamily. “Sounds like a better deal.”

I snatched at her too late. She simply stepped in and virtually winked out of existence. Above, one of the evil low-lying clouds pulsated briefly. It had done that when the dog disappeared too. Something in me shuddered in sympathy.

Some members of the procession saw this. They broke away from the others. Into the patch they leaped, lemmings on two legs. Into the void they vanished.

A booming voice lifted. “Humans! Escape into the void! Escape and you will not be consumed. Escape into death! There is freedom in death. And from the new masters of Earth!” It was a centaur.

A surge of humanity responded to that hellish promise. They stampeded for the blackness. Some were trampled. Others stumbled over them to seek dark oblivion. Soon, the greater portion of them were gone. Utterly gone. I felt a coldness in my soul.

Above, the clouds pulsated wildly, as if laughing uproariously in delight.

Recoiling, I put distance between me and the patch of voidy non-matter. As I ran, the glowing eyes of the centaur tracked me. They burned a weird pumpkin orange, like a seared jack o’lantern.

“Beware the voids!” he called after me, as if to taunt my flight. “Voids become vortices. Vortices become vornados. And vornados — ” He began laughing raucously. His laughter boomed and cannonaded like thunder.

The rest was lost to hearing.

I reached a hill and found shelter among the dying trees. They drooped, blackened leaves wilting, as if in despair.

As I watched the ragged line of humankind close up and reform itself to trudge on toward an unknowable destination, like some segmented worm, the great black void that lay upon the field began to swell. It spun. Black as it was, I could sense this inner churning. No sound came forth. But the void rose up and began to wheel and lift ponderously, growing in size as it reared to life.

It became a vortex. And as the vortex found coherence, it elongated, became towering, mighty, hungry.

Vornado! I thought wildly.

The vornado twisted and spun on its ever-changing ropy funnel, got itself organized, and moved for the line of humans with deliberate intent.

“Alive! It’s alive in some way!” I cried.

The vorando sought the last stragglers and ingested them, lunging after the rest. The screaming that followed was wild, but brief. The line broke, scattered, but the vornado moved about, with unerring instinct and consumed them all.

None were flung about or ejected by its centrifugal force, nor wasted.

When the last of the fleeing ones was gone, the vornado spun and searched in forlorn disappointment. Finally it sensed the laughing centaur.

It bore down on him too. His laugher chopped off. He turned to flee, urging himself along on his semi- fleshy pedestal. But it was designed for non-matter. The pad dragged on earthly grass, retarding him.

The centaur screamed until the last possible moment of life. After he was gulped up and digested, his scream seemed to linger, and the vornado gobbled up the echoes in a final voracious effort.

Then, howling with hunger, it moved along the road in search of new prey.

Above, the clouds danced with an unholy bluish-gray light.

Somewhere in the deep of the night, I came upon a man in black. He was fiftyish, with a deeply- lined face and gray stubble hair, charred eyes set in bony craters like spent meteorites.

I did not recognize him for what he really was.

“Can you show me the way to the plant?” I asked.

“Have people lost their faith so much that they seek hell itself?” he countered.

Then I noticed his soiled collar and crucifix.

“Sorry, Father. I’m with the government.”

The priest spat. “And you’re here to help, I suppose?”

“That’s classified.”

I noticed his crucifix. The broken hands and feet of Christ were present, still nailed to the cross, but the body had been forcibly wrenched off.

“Where’s Jesus?” I asked.

He lifted a gnarled hickory cane in my face. “Where’s Jesus, you say? That’s the question of the hour. Of the century! Isn’t it?” His voice rose in righteous indignation.

“All my life I preached the lesson of the cross. Now the world is tumbling into the abyss, and where is our Lord? The greatest battle between good and evil in human history and Jesus Christ is nowhere to be found!”

I could see he had a point. But I said nothing. He charged on.

“If this is the Day of Judgment, where is our Savior. Late? Overdue? Perhaps he’s busy on some other planet saving the sinful souls of lizard men. Do you think it likely? How else to explain his absence? For if the Second Coming is tomorrow, he’s a bit bloody late, isn’t he? Can he put back the entire world? Can he restore sanity? Has the Rapture been postponed? Or rescheduled like a damned pink tea?”

“I don’t have answers for you, Father,” I said gently.

“The world of our fathers is no more. It was all for nothing. Nothing, I tell you. Nothing! A sham. Not just the Holy Church. But the Jews and the Muslims and the Hindus. They too followed a lie. A damned lie!”

“Father,” I said carefully, “we still have our souls.”

“Yes! Our immortal souls. Death is our only hope now. One solitary means of escape from this earthly torment. Jesus has turned slacker. We must take salvation into our own hands. Look!” He took two long needles from his tunic. “Do you see these?”

“I do.”

“All my life I have railed against the mortal sin of abortion. But now I perform them. And do you know why?”

“It’s better not to bring children into the world as it now is,” I replied.

“Far, far better!” he thundered. And he broke like a rainstorm, weeping uncontrollably, his dark threadbare shoulders wracking with unleashed sobs.

“Direct me to the plant, Father.”

He croaked the words out. I had no words of comfort for him. He was a broken priest, but yet also a driven man. Something was about to snap in him and only death would cure it.

“Go with God, Father,” I said.

After I had moved on, he seized control of himself and cried out, “Heed me! Trust not the Lord! Look to Satan himself for succor! Lucifer was at least once an angel! But these hellish things, they — ”

I walked away from his retching anguish. I was a lapsed Catholic. I had long ago put all belief systems behind me. I had been out in the matrix of all creation. I knew what the real score was. God was more of a hologram than a unitary being. But human consciousness was inextinguishable. There was no death, only transition to other realities. This hard-won knowledge kept me sane through all the horrific earth changes. Detachment became my baseline emotion. What was the worst that could happen to me? Death was inevitable, Old Ones or no Old Ones. If in the end the universe were devoured by the eternally-beating nuclear chaos called Azathoth, there were other universes, adjacent dimensions in which my immortal soul might dwell.

It was a strange unanchored courage, but I had learned it in the matrix. Thus fortified, I prepared to brave the locus of local activity that should explain the One Ones’ fell objectives.

The factory sat in a dell or hollow not far from the corpse-choked James River.

It looked like a coal plant, but smelled like a crematorium. The flaring smokestacks reminded me of that time I RVed Dachau. The spiritual emptiness was oppressive and overwhelming. I never wanted to go back, physically or otherwise.

And now, here I was — facing a far worse environment. I could sense it.

Lines of yoked and chained people were being driven into the main gate by a dozen centaurs, some of which had birdlike heads and tentacles for lower limbs, like the ancient representations of the suppressed Egyptian godlet, Abraxas.

I made a nest of branches, brush and other debris and hunkered down to observe closely.

When I had absorbed all my physical eyes could perceive, I closed them and eased into an alpha brainwave state, then cycled down to theta. I do my best work in theta. When I don’t click out.

I focused on the line of victims filing into the factory. What did they represent to the Old Ones? What was their value?

My first impressions were representational and confusing. I saw soda cans, milk cartons, liquor bottles. Clearly I was operating on my right hemisphere. I tried to switch to the left to invoke the clairaudient function.

I heard a single clairaudient word. A mere whisper bubbling up from my unconscious mind: containers.

My eyes snapped open. “For what?” I said under my breath. Can’t be blood. Or H2O. The Old Ones are non-physical. They were busying terra-deforming the Earth — clearing it as the Necronomicon once prophesied — so that it will be vibrationally supportive of their kind. Could they be energy vampires?

I shut my eyes and tried again. This time I set a different intention: containers for what?

A vivid image sprang up. Clouds. The cobalt clouds that had been forming above the Earth, growing by the immeasurable hour. What did that mean? I focused on those eerie apparitions.

In my mind’s eye, they brightened and pulsated. I saw turbulent faces, boiling like thunderclouds shown in time-lapse photography. Demonic faces roiled and shifted and regathered madly. The clouds spread. I recalled reading about the phenomenon of noctiluminescent clouds — mysterious atmospheric vapor formations that had been reported for over a century now — were they somehow more than mere clouds?

Orifices opened in those clouds. Many of them. Thousands. They irised wide, then snapped shut. I was reminded of gulping piranha. What were they doing? Making faces at hapless mankind?

I gave it up. Rolling over in my makeshift shelter, I stared up at the night sky. Metallic-blue cumulus clouds began gathering over the factory like scavengers to a corpse. That meant something. But what?

I upshifted my breathing and climbed back to a beta state. I needed a clear head. The deeper I went into non-ordinary states of consciousness, the fuzzier my thinking would be until normal baseline beta consciousness reasserted itself. The dreaded downside of being operationally psychic.

An hour passed. Two. A dismal line of people continued filing into the factory. Chopped-off screams broke the stillness. But I could glean nothing further on any level of perception at my command.

It had been years since I had astral-projected. I was never very good at it. Just looking and down at my body lying there was enough to give me a jolt and send me snapping back into my physical self.

Yet I had to try. It was the only way in — the only safe way. Or so I assumed.

I lay on my back and drifted into a deep meditation. Fighting a rising fear, I pushed my jagged beta brain-waves flatter and flatter, till they were sine waves, then shallow waves. As they moved toward flatline, I unexpectedly went delta.

The delta state is trance sleep. I don’t know my way around it. But somehow I achieved separation.

Below, I saw my body entangled in brush and hoped I’d get to return to it.

Carefully, I moved away. I was now in the thought-responsive aspect of reality. I had but to think of a place, and I would translate there. I approached the factory with the care of a visible man — which I was not.

At a far corner, away from all centaur activity, I eased in through a broken window. Inside, furnaces massed. The place was full of great smelters and electrical furnaces and the like. Whatever this had been, it was the fiery pit of hell now.

Centaurs with their scourges stormed about. Some wielded clubs. They drove people into the fire. Some humans quailed before the flames. Centaurs quickly dashed out their brains and flung them bodily into the glowing furnace maws.

This was a crematorium!

I was almost disappointed. That’s all?

No. Not all.

It was not a voice. I would not have heard a voice. For I had left my ears behind.

It seemed to be coming from above. I moved to the shadowy vault of a ceiling, through it, and floated above the roof.

Above hung the low-lying clouds. Dull blue, they stared down at me with hollow interest.

Suddenly I felt an irresistible force, pulling me up, higher and fast.

I willed myself back into my resting body. But the force tugging on the eternal me was strong.

Frantically, I looked around and saw the silver cord that anchored me to my mortal form. Still intact!

With a dawning horror, I spied the smoky tendril drifting down from a nodular cloud. It quested coilingly for the silvery filament that guaranteed my survival.

Just as its leading edge bloomed into a scorpion with snapping claws, adrenalin kicked in — and I was yanked back!

I sat up, gasping, clothed in flesh once more. A coldness settled into the pit of my lower chakras and I knew a hyperventilating terror beyond anything I had ever experienced.

“What are those damned clouds?” I called out to the Almighty.

As if in answer, the clouds above pulsated menacingly. God, if he still ruled the created universe, said nothing.

Cold fear turned to hot anger and I resolved to complete my mission.

When my brain cleared, the obvious became obvious.

Back in my days as a lowly NRO Signalman, I was taught that every thing in creation had a unique energy signature, and from it flowed non-local signal information about its identity and fundamental nature. You just had to learn to tap into it.

For a Signalman — and here I mean a Remote Viewer in training — it was as hard and as simple as sending a telepathic interrogative to the target. They explained it that it was like bouncing a signal off an orbiting satellite. Or transmitting an IFF — identify friend or foe — transponder signal to an approaching aircraft.

You simply directed a thought at the target. But the thought couldn’t be couched in words. Sometimes the target was not human or did not speak your native language.

Other times the target was inanimate. They had us practice on vehicles to train us how to interact with non-conscious targets.

The trick was to formulate the question conceptually, or visually, without brain-based language. It was tough, but we learned to do it.

Lying there under the mocking cloud, I mustered up that old training.

I had little to lose and less to fear. After all, it had already attempted to seize my incorporeal form, and failed miserably.

What are you? I beamed up.

Back came an inchoate chaos of thought impressions — largely consisting of roiling cumulonimbus clouds en-mixed with gaseous nebulae, and a sense of ultra-deep spacial regions.

Are you cosmic?

The cloud pulsated. I sensed an affirmative and a secondary sense of greatness. Extra-cosmic, I intuited that to mean.

I sent up another interrogative, and waited for the bounceback signal.

I didn’t quite catch it. Was it calling me the N word? That made no sense. I’m white. I tried again. This time instead of asking what it was, I inquired of its name.

It was sentient. Therefore it must possess a name — if only for self-reference.

The bounceback decoded on the wrong side of my brain. I saw an image. It was a lowly shrub. I had no idea what it meant, and sent that puzzlement upward.

I sensed laughter. It was cruel. It mocked and threatened the way a storm cloud threatens rain. I felt as if any minute now I would be rained on by the most hellish precipitation imaginable.

Visions of viscous black rain came to my mind. I could not tell if this was precognition or in the nature of an imminent threat.

But no rain came, black or otherwise. I relaxed, remembering that it had not rained since the night of sun blot.

I got up and reached into my backpack where I carried my E-reader. It was standard issue, loaded with only one text — the Necronomicon.

I started a word search. First I tried “shrub.”

Not Found, it read.

I next tried “cloud.” I got several hits. But the first was “cloudy.” I almost skipped on to the next one when my eyes fell upon a phrase: “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young.”

Not “shrub.” Shub-Niggurath!

I looked up. There was nothing goatlike about what was floating above my unprotected head. Nor was it truly black. Dark yes, but in the way a thundercloud is blue-gray.

Could the ancients have got it wrong.?

I raced through the other hits and they made my blood run cold. Finally, I was back at the first hit. This time I read more carefully.

The Necronomicon described in spare terms the malign intelligence called Shub-Niggurath as “a vast cloudy entity of unknown source or purpose,” almost always spoken in the same breath as the Black Goat of the Woods, which has long been identified as Shub-Niggurath.

What if Abdul Alhazred was in error? What if they were two separate beings, linked ritualistically, but not otherwise?

What if staring down from the unreflective sky where the alien satellites Nug and Yeb raced drunkenly was the hellish incomprehensibility, Shub-Niggurath?

They say if you possess the name of a thing, you gain control over it. So I made my next move.

Are you Shub-Niggurath?

Back came a splintery confirmation. I did not understand the splintered aspect of the nonverbal reply, but since more clouds had gathered under the perpetually night sky, perhaps Shub-Niggurath was in the nature of a colony of beings, or something that could separate and reform like amoebae.

What is your purpose?

Back came a stark clarification. It was virtually in English.

To help clear.

Clear what? I beamed back.

The Earth.

Of what?

Of all.

What is your specific function? I was thinking in English now, and was answered in kind.

Back came a sense of a box being opened. It turned into a tableau — a sea of humans seen from the waist up, eyes dead, the tops of their heads opening like a soft-boiled eggs being shelled, and a golden light streaming upward toward waiting clouds.

Hungry clouds, with rapidly irising orifices.

“Knowledge? You drink knowledge!”

Shub-Niggurath only communicated a thirsty impression.

I ran then. Foolish flight or fight conditioning, I knew. But I had to get this intelligence back to headquarters. Damn, for a cell phone that worked!

The cobalt cloud followed me, hurling a chilling thought at me: No escape. No escape for any human.

Three towering centaurs abruptly converged on me, responding to commands from my pursuer, I sensed. Loops of some rubbery matter dropped over my head, constricting my neck. Helpless, I was dragged back to that hellish factory.

We came to a fenced-in yard where debris and detritus lay in forlorn heaps, lit by fitful flames. A charnel odor hung over all.

There was an altar. And before it a great black statue in the shape of a man.

But the man had no face. It was gargantuan, uncaring, pharaonic. It struck me as hauntingly familiar. But my oxygen-starved brain couldn’t process anything.

I sent out an interrogative. Back came an accursed name: Nyarlathotep.

But it was not the literal Crawling Chaos, only an idol created in his image, formed of fused bonemeal — human bonemeal. For the carbonized cremains of those who were processed through the human rendering factory were not wasted. All this I sensed in a pounding heartbeat.

They laid me on the altar, which had the coolness and shape of a gigantic anvil — an anvil on which mankind was now being hammered into extinction.

My wrists and ankles were held down. I struggled, but the centaurs were irresistible in their obdurate strength. I was finished and I knew it. A curious calm came over me then. I relaxed. Suspecting a trick, the centaurs tightened their grips.

I took several slow breaths and prepared to die.

When death is this close, the mind shifts into a pre-death mode. Inevitability helps the process. I would be killed, after which my soul could escape from my body. This time for eternity.

But I possessed spiritual tools most ordinary people don’t have. I made a prayer to the Infinite Spirit God whom I acknowledge, and prepared to commend myself to the Vastness.

Various theories and belief systems kaleidoscoped through my unnaturally calm mind. Would I be absorbed into the Allness like a drop of spiritual water into the ocean of God, surrendering all individuality? Would I transition to a place of astral regeneration, there to await a future existence? Would I plunge into eternal life, according my earned rewards?

I let all these concerns wash over me, then let them go. I would die soon.

And I would know the ultimate truth almost as soon. I had no fear.

For I was about to go beyond the reach of the Old Ones and their terrible universal hegemony. The Earth was now theirs. I only hoped that the realm which awaited me was greater than the spent one I was about to vacate.

I harbored no Earthly regrets. But I did have a spiritual ace up my sleeve. I waited for the beginning of the death stroke. It soon came.

One of the centaurs lifted a crude tool I could barely make out in the smokestack glow. Was it a cudgel? A blade? I could not tell. And I felt myself disassociating from all concern.

When the downstroke began, I departed from my body. Pop! Clean separation.

This way I would feel no pain of slaughter.

I floated face down. Fascinated yet detached, I watched my very brains being spattered about. The silver cord severed. I could feel it, see it — and I accepted it.

Slowly, with my mortal form jittering in death, I began ascending heavenward. A peace washed over me. I was going home. I knew that now. Home. I didn’t know its name or its form, but I could feel it tugging me toward its uncharted territory.

Smooth as a swimmer, I rolled my orientation skyward to focus on my immediate if unknown future. I half expected to see archangels in flight.

Instead, I beheld the awful nodular countenance of Shub-Niggurath. It gazed down with sharpening visage.

Out of my way, I directed. You can’t hurt me now.

Not knowledge, it said clearly.

What?

Humans have no knowledge we seek.

Then what —?

I sensed a lascivious energy. Your container is broken.

My soul froze.

Then its maw opened — empty and black as interstellar space. and I understood what Shub- Niggurath meant and more dire, what it sought on earth.

Humans were containers — for souls!

As I was sucked into that blackest of black holes, cheated of all hope of an afterlife, realization crystallized. All over the Earth the globe-girdling clouds hung poised to capture freshly liberated souls every time men died. And we are all predestined to die.

Around me, others like me continued collecting. Soon we began pulsating in resonance to our swelling host. All one. Yet also individual. Parasites, yet prisoners. Powerful, but helpless. Nothing but something. Something yet nothing. Neither matter nor energy. Not particles and not waveforms. Only blind self-aware voids in an unknowable plenum.

I send these thought-forms out to my surviving colleagues. Take drugs. Seek madness. Pray for the gift of amnesia. For there is no other escape.

Absorption finally came, and I became another cold, yet still conscious corpuscle of the insatiable, eternal void that is and always will be Shub-Niggurath.