Darker Than Weird: Fourteen Tales of Horror

The Embrace of Elder Things

Momma always said they’d come for me one day. She did everything she could to make me seem like a normal kid. It wasn’t her fault what happened. She used to tell me “Take responsibility for your actions.” So I’ll take all the responsibility for what happened to her.

The Lunar Police came to our pod at four in the morning. Someone had heard Momma screaming and reported it. Officers pounded on our door until I opened it, then they poured through the doorway with plasma rifles pointed at my head. The first one who found Momma threw up all over the carpet. The next one came at me like he wanted to stomp my head in. He grabbed me by the throat, which he should not have done. So he got what Momma got.

When the officers saw what I could do to one of their own, they had no more questions about what happened to Momma. I cried about losing her, but I was too angry to cry for the officer. I hadn’t meant to kill either one of them. It was the ants running around in my brain. Momma always said they were only emotions, but they were a lot more than that.

I had an ant-farm once, and I used to watch them crawling through their tunnels and running errands that I couldn’t understand. When she asked me about my tantrums, I told her there were ants running through tunnels inside my head. “My brain is an ant-farm,” I said more than once. She used to hold me close and tell me it was all in my imagination. “They’re just runaway emotions,” she said. She told me not to tell anybody else about the ants, or the accidents they caused. Whenever they began to squirm and dance inside my head, things usually got out of control. I had shattered plates, broken windows, and destroyed video screens without meaning to.

A new squad officers came to the pod wearing shielded helmets. I couldn’t read their thoughts through the headgear. They surrounded me like I was some kind of wild animal, and they escorted me across the city to the Institute. I walked between them, two in front, two behind, while the city-dome sparkled with stars above our heads. The ants in my brain were sleeping by that time.

As we walked through the city, I watched Earth sparkling above the dome: A huge blue sphere with swirls of white clouds. “It used to be green and blue,” Momma would tell me as we watched it together. “It used to be so beautiful before the floods.” I couldn’t imagine Earth looking any other way. I knew there was not much land down there anymore, but to me it was still beautiful.

At the Institute they stripped my bloodstained clothes off, made me take a shower, and gave me a tiny room to sleep in. It felt like a prison cell, but I had never seen a real prison. Everyone who attended me wore the same kind of helmets, so I couldn’t find any of their surface thoughts. The ants in my brain were still sleeping when the guards brought me to Dr. Silo’s lab.

Dr. Silo was older than anyone I’d ever seen. Momma told me once that he was an original founder of the Luna Colony, which means he was over a hundred years old. I asked her how he lived for so long, and she said it was his clever science. “You will be a great scientist one day too,” she told me. I didn’t bother to tell her that I had no interest in science.

“Hello, Jarden,” Dr. Silo greeted me with a big smile. “How are you feeling today?” His teeth were impossibly white, and his bald head was covered in brown spots and wrinkles. He did not wear a helmet, but I couldn’t sense his surface thoughts either. I had no idea why.

“You’re not wearing a helmet,” I said.

He smiled at me again. “I am not afraid of you,” he said. “And I want us to be friends.”

I looked across his cluttered laboratory and out the big window. I could only see the western hemisphere of Earth from this vantage point, and there were no island chains in view — just the endless blue of Earth’s single ocean. “There used to be seven oceans,” Momma had told me. “But one day they all flowed together and drowned the cities of man. Now there’s only one ocean.”

“Why do you want to be my friend?” I asked the doctor. Most kids and adults hated to be around me. A side effect of knowing what everyone was thinking. People didn’t like me for that reason. So eventually I learned to stay in the pod with Momma. I’d see other kids playing outside, running through the hydroponic gardens or playing tag near the dome’s edge.

Dr. Silo chuckled. “Well, because you’re a very unique person. Are you aware of that?”

“I’m different,” I said. “I know that. Can I have something to drink?”

He ordered a fruit juice for me, tapping on a holographic display linked to his office pantry. It came in a cup of black plastic, but tasted cool and sweet.

“Jarden,” he spoke my name again, “Can you tell me what happened to your mother?”

I was glad he asked. I needed to talk about what had happened. To explain it.

“We had an argument,” I said. “I wanted to go outside. Just for a while. She kept telling me that it wasn’t a good idea. ‘Wait until you’re seventeen’ she always said. That’s still three years away…”

“So, you hurt her…because she wouldn’t let you leave the pod?”

“No, it wasn’t like that,” I said. “I heard what she was thinking. I read her thoughts, like I read everybody’s thoughts. I can’t help it most of the time. And the ants in my head started buzzing. They were angry. It was their fault, not mine.” I didn’t know if that was true, but I wanted to believe it. I started to cry, wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand. “Only babies cry,” she used to say.

“You read thoughts?” Dr. Silo asked. “We call that Advanced Psychic Ability.”

I nodded and sipped the juice.

“What did you see in your mother’s mind?” he asked. “What made your ants so angry?”

“Hate,” I said. “She hated me. She wished that I had never been born. Can you imagine that? Your own mother wishing you’d never been born?”

“Then what happened?”

“I accused her, but she denied it. I saw the raw hate in her mind, and how she lied even to herself about it. The ants stomped around in my head, and then they started screaming. Before I knew it, I was screaming too. Then…. Then…”

Dr. Silo gave me a moment. A wall of digital displays blinked and flashed behind his head, and I scooted my chair to stare out the window again. The blue waters of Earth looked calm and warm against the cold stars.

“What happened, Jarden?” Silo asked.

“She died,” I said. “The screaming ants in my brain killed her.”

Dr. Silo sat quiet for a while, letting me weep in peace.

“I understand,” he said eventually. “It was only an accident. You didn’t mean to hurt her, did you?”

I said nothing. I couldn’t stop the tears. I drank the juice until it was empty. Wiped the snot running from my nose on the sleeve of my shirt.

“No,” I said. “Yes. I don’t know…”

“It was an accident,” Dr. Silo said again. He smiled at me like he had when he first saw me. “The same thing that happened to Officer Skeller. You didn’t mean to do that either.”

“Is he dead too?” I asked.

Dr. Silo nodded. “I’m afraid so. Neural disruption resulting in terminal brain hemorrhage. Like an overloaded processing unit.”

I remembered the blood spurting from Momma’s ears, mouth, and nose. Silo was right. I didn’t want to hurt her. I loved her. It was the ants. The screaming ants. They had built a series of tunnels in my brain and there was no way to get them out.

“What are you going to do with me?” I asked.

I tried harder to read his surface thoughts, but I got nothing. I had never met anyone whose naked thoughts didn’t swirl about my head like bothersome insects. It was another reason I stayed inside most of the time. “We have to keep this a secret until you turn seventeen,” Momma always said. “Then you’ll be old enough to apply for Mars Colony. There are too many people on Luna, and they’ll be afraid of you. Mars has less than a hundred miners, and they always need more labor. You’ll have your own pod there, and the pay is good.”

We argued about this plan frequently. “I don’t want to be a miner,” I told her. “I don’t want to live on Mars either.”

“You don’t have any choice,” she would say. “If they find out what you are — what you can do — they’ll dissect you or kill you. Or both. So we have to keep your secret.”

Dr. Silo gave me another glass of juice.

“Well, we’re going to run some tests,” he told me. “Take a look at your very special brain with magnetic imaging and some non-invasive neural mapping. Nothing to be worried about. It won’t hurt a bit. You’ll stay here in the lab with me for a few days.”

“Why?” I asked.

Dr. Silo took off his spectacles and rubbed his chin. “We’ve been waiting for someone like you,” he said. “The first evidence of APA in a lunar colonist. You could be the key to our future.”

“Why can’t I read your thoughts?” I asked. “You don’t have a helmet on, but I can’t see anything. Are you a robot?”

Dr. Silo laughed. “Have you ever seen a robot this lifelike? Human technology isn’t that advanced yet.” I had to admit that he was right.

“Then why can’t I read you?” I said.

“Perhaps you’re not trying hard enough,” he said. “Go ahead. Take a look. Give it all you’ve got.” The smile disappeared from his face. I stared into his green eyes and listened for his thoughts. The ants buzzed in my skull again. Annoyed, but not enraged. Not yet. Some kind of invisible barrier protected the doctor’s mind, like Luna City sitting under its protective dome of super-glass.

“Perhaps this will help,” said the doctor. He reached out slowly and took my hand.

All at once his thoughts came flooding out. Images, memories, formulae, concepts without name or explanation. I was a tiny thing caught in the flood, and it threatened to wash me away completely. My hands gripped the edge of the table.

Visions of the Earth below flowed into my mind, not the images from old movies and documentaries that showed the planet’s past. No, these were recent memories from Earth’s surface as it existed now, a century after the great floods. I saw a single continent rising from the world-ocean, a range of black mountains rising at its middle like the spined ridge of some gigantic monster. In the shadow of these mountains stood a city I recognized from historical studies. Built of ancient stone devoid of color, it grew like a fungus on the side of the black mountain range. Its walls were the size of lesser mountains. Twisted towers defied the Earth’s gravity, rising between domes and bridges of alien design. This was the Original City of the ETs, the Elder Things. The creatures who inherited the drowned Earth when they woke from their long sleep beneath the Antarctic. Everyone on Luna knew this, the most important event in recent history. But now I saw it all in Dr. Silo’s mind, horrible things that most people only suspected of existing down there.

The Elder Things glided between their towers on leathery wings, thousands of them, barrel-shaped oblong bodies with star-shaped heads and a row of five arms like wormy tendrils growing radially from their middles. They resembled plants more than animals, but I saw them feed on earthbound humans harvested from distant islands. The hairy primitives howled as they were forced into huge corrals like so much livestock. They reminded me of the carefully bred sheep we kept in Luna City, and they served the same purpose for the Elder Things.

So it was true. There were humans still living on Earth, spread across those island chains.

I knew the ETs would feed on lunar citizens too, if they could.

“We’re 239,000 miles from Earth,” Momma used to say. “ETs don’t even know we’re here, so we’ve got nothing to fear from them. They roam the Earth, and the waters of the Earth. We’re safe here, where they can’t reach us.” All parents told their children a version of this comforting truth. We could look down on the horror of Earth-life, maybe even understand it. But it could not touch us. The ants inside my head buzzed and whined.

Dr. Silo’s visions continued flashing inside my head. I saw the deep sea bottom now, and a mountain of quivering, snapping flesh that rolled across the sea bed. A seething mass of eyes, fangs, and tentacles swept up every living thing it its path: octopi, swordfish, coral forests, and entire schools of eels. The Elder Things glided through the water like rockets, directing their formless servants across the undersea. They rumbled through through the streets of drowned human cities, toppling hollow towers and further reducing the cities of man to gray mud. Eventually there would be nothing at all left of human civilization. What the ocean didn’t destroy, the servants of the ETs would annihilate.

“They’re called shoggoths…”

I heard the words inside my mind, but they weren’t human words.

Somehow, I understood them anyway.

The shoggoths swept out of the sea like living monsoons and poured over islands one by one. Wailing savages attacked them with flaming torch and spear. The Elder Things flew above the fray, letting their fleshy slaves do the hard work. Shoggoths grabbed up the tiny men and women, tearing them to bits, absorbing human flesh into their own pulsating masses. Hungry ETs swoop down to feed as well. Snake-like tubes with fanged mouths swelled up from their five-pointed heads, wrapping about their victims to slurp at fountains of spewing blood.

The ants in my skull danced and raged.

I blinked, pulling back from the table as I pulled my mind away from Dr. Silo. The images disappeared, and I was back in his sterile lab again. He spoke to me without moving his lips. Now I heard only the thoughts he wanted me to hear.

“Do not be afraid, Jarden,” he said. “You are not like the others of your kind. You are special. We hoped that one day we would find someone like you. It was only a matter of time. It is why we allowed this colony to survive.”

“I know what you are,” I said. My skull buzzed and I heard the crackle of electricity. The lab room was quiet, the Earth spinning blue and silent beyond the window.

“Of course you do,” he said. “And now you know why I don’t need a helmet.”

“You’re one of them,” I said. “An ET.”

Dr. Silo pulled a small device from his pocket and showed it to me. It looked nothing like the other technology in his lab. More like a smooth, five-pointed amulet of green stone. “Molecular manipulation,” he said inside my head. “This device allows me to assume a human form, so I can mingle with your kind. So I can monitor them.”

“How long?” I asked. I remembered the tales of Silo’s advanced age. He certainly looked a hundred years old, if not older. But that wasn’t his true flesh. He was far older than a mere century. Nobody knew how long the ETs lived, or if they ever actually died.

“We don’t,” he responded to my unspoken thought. “We are immortal.”

“So you’ve been here all along,” I said. “You helped found this colony.”

“Not exactly,” he said. “But decades ago I replaced the original Dr. Silo.”

“What do you want with me?” I asked. My head hurt now, the ants stomping and wailing, filling my skull with a dull pain. Usually if I stayed calm, they would go away. I tried, but my pulse was racing. For the first time since coming to the lab, I was afraid.

“I told you before that we wish to study you,” he said. “I was not lying.”

“I could tell the police your secret,” I said. “Everyone will know.”

My eyes glanced at the comm button on the nearby wall. I wondered if I could reach it before Dr. Silo could stop me.

“You might do that,” he said. His lips still hadn’t moved. “But your Lunar Police are not likely to believe a child who murdered his own mother. You have no proof.”

“I’ll tell them anyway,” I said.

“If you do so, I will destroy this colony and every last human life in it.”

“What do you want from me?”

My heart beat faster inside my chest. Pressure in my head continued to build.

“You will come with me,” Dr. Silo said. He stood up and began speaking with his mouth again. He stared out the window at the watery Earth. “There will be a special place for you in the Original City. A place of honor. We will study your brain and see how we can reproduce it in our lesser servitors. The shoggoths are much too dimwitted for interplanetary application. Once we have remade them with the ability to think and reason, to communicate via telepathy, and taught them the arts of telekinesis, we will be ready for the next Great Migration. As I said, you are the key to our future.”

“You want my brain,” I said.

“Correction,” said the doctor. “We already have it.”

The ants screamed then, louder than they had ever screamed.

Their screams poured out my eyes like invisible flames. Dr. Silo screamed too. His fingers fumbled with the device he was holding, and he dropped it to the floor where it shattered into pieces. His skin bubbled and bulged. Blood poured from his ears, mouth, and nose, just like Momma’s had done. But unlike Momma he didn’t die. He changed…

His bald head exploded, and a pink, star-shaped organ burst like a bloody flower from his neck. His arms withered and folded into the main substance of his body, which bloated and swelled until his clothing was torn to shreds. At last I stopped screaming, and I backed away from the gore-splattered table. The ants fell to silence in my mind again, but Silo’s transformation was not yet finished.

His body swelled into a barrel-like shape, and five segmented appendages burst from his lower portions, the meat of his legs dividing themselves and lengthening with the sound of cracking bones. Five major tentacles emerged in a ring about his midsection, each one topped by a mass of lesser tendrils. Five bloodshot eyeballs stared at me from his starfish-shaped head, and his fanged feeding tubes quivered in the air. There was nothing left of his false human shape, except for a single layer of shredded skin on the lab floor.

Silo stood more than twice my height now, and five fan-like wings raised from the vertical ridges of his bloated torso. I huddled in the corner of the lab, weeping and shivering. The ants in my head weren’t angry anymore. They were spent. I wondered if they would let this thing devour me now. I had no more anger left. Only paralyzing terror.

“Your power is impressive,” said the ET, speaking inside my head again. “You are a true prize.” He shambled closer on his five lower extremities, two upper tendrils reaching out to caress my face and body. In some horrible way the creature attempted to hug me like a human.

“Leave me alone,” I said. “Leave Luna City alone. You don’t belong here.”

“That depends on you,” he said. “Come with me willingly, Jarden. No more resistance. If you do this, I will spare your colony.”

I sensed the thought-forms streaming from his mind. They were louder than ever now. There was much I could not identify there, but I could tell he was telling the truth. Making me an honest offer. I stood up from my sanctuary in the corner of the lab. The tendrils waved expectantly. If he wanted to kill me, I would already be dead. I was too valuable to kill.

“If I go with you,” I said. “Will you keep your word?”

“Of course.”

“But how?” I said. “There are no more Earth shuttles. How can we get…down there?” I pointed to the blue Earth outside the window.

“My kind are nearly indestructible. We can pass through the void without need of metal shells or external technology. We engage in deep hibernation and soar like meteors toward our destination. It will take me less than three days to glide from Luna to the Earth.”

“What about me?” I asked. “I can’t survive a trip like that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said the Silo-thing. His five sets of tendrils quivered. “All I require is your brain, which I will store and carry safely within my carapace.”

The meaning behind these words made me tremble.

“So you are going to kill me,” I said. The ants began to dance and buzz again. I touched my face and discovered that my eyes had been bleeding. I blinked and my vision blurred.

“No,” said the ET. “You misunderstand. I will preserve your prime organ inside a jar of specially treated nutrients. When we reach Earth I will transplant it into a fresh human body acquired from one of our island preserves. None will dare to eat your flesh, or to harm you in any way. You will be studied, honored, and revered. I will give you a new body, an older body, stronger and more fit. Haven’t you always wanted to visit Earth and see its glorious waters for yourself?”

So he had been reading my mind too. Every child of Luna dreamed of escaping into the past where the Earth was green and fertile and free of flesh-eating monsters. Every child of Earth wanted to go home. Even those of us who were born on the Moon.

I stepped closer to the waving tendrils.

“We have a deal,” I said. “Leave Luna City in peace. I will go with you.”

There was nothing left for me on Luna anyway. I had no parents, no family, no friends.

“Excellent,” said the ET. The creature’s tentacles reached across the room for a cylindrical jar with a pressurized lid. A clear fluid sloshed inside, but there was plenty of room there for a human brain. The ET asked me to lie on an operating table, and it dosed me with anesthetic. As the lab and the monster began to fade, I remembered my mother’s face.

“I don’t want to be a Martian,” I whispered. Sleep came fast and deep.

I did not think there would be any dreams then, but somehow there were. I saw my father, walking me through the public parks of Luna years before he died in a shuttle accident. He and my mother looked so happy together. They held my hands in each of their own. Together we looked up at the Earth, so blue and gorgeous against a backdrop of stars. The dream was also a memory.

“Someday we’ll get back home,” my father said. “Someday…”

I dreamed about many other things during the time my brain was separated from my body. Some were only memories, some were pure inventions, and others were indescribable visions that I would never be able to put into words. After some unknown interval of time, I opened my new eyes.

A council of Elder Things stood about me, wings fluttering, eyeballs and tendrils aquiver.

I looked down at my new body: A muscled brute, shaggy and naked except for a dirty loincloth. I flexed my new hands, which were calloused with the marks of spear, harpoon, and axe. I looked up, past the alien towers, and for the first time I saw what the Moon looked like from the surface of Earth. From this distance Luna City was only a small dot of light, sitting alone on a barren moonscape.

The Elder Things bleated and whistled and croaked in their excitement, wrapping curious tendrils about my stitched skull and bearded face. Strange machines rose behind them, and they conducted me into a maze of tubes and circuitry and alien contraptions. Here they would study my unique brain and learn how to recreate it in their cloning vats. For a while they tinkered and fussed over me, running tests with glowing rods, casting lights through my skull and out the other side, and indulging many other processes that I did not begin to understand.

Later they flew me up to my own private chamber atop a strangely shaped tower. They even brought in a captive island girl to accompany me in my high prison. She spoke no language that I could understand, but I read her simple thoughts easily. At first she feared me, but then seemed to recognize me. She cuddled close and slept beside me on a carpet of seal fur.

As I slept that night, the ants inside my brain returned. They moved like shadows in my dreams, scuttling and chirruping and growing larger. I had never heard them speak before now. But they spoke in some kind of dream-language that I understood only because they willed me to.

“You have served us well, Little Host,” they hissed. “Now our invasion begins.”

Ancient enemies of the Elder Things, they had found access to this world through the tunnels of my brain. Now the fleshy ant-farm in my skull broke open, and its occupants flooded the Earth. I saw that they were not truly ants at all, but giants made of living darkness. Their eyes were orbs of solar flame. I woke shivering in the darkness next to my new mate, and the nameless ant-giants came pouring from my brain. They flowed like black blood from my new eyes, ears, and mouth, slinking across the floor and rising into massive insectoid shapes, one after the other filling the room with their massive bulk. They flowed from my high tower cell as the oceans had once overflowed the continents.

In the streets of the Original City they demolished towers and trampled domes into dust, catching Elder Things like flies in their hungry jaws. A war of monstrosities raged below my high prison, and the Earth itself rumbled with the strain of it. The island girl leaped screaming through a star-shaped window and fell into the chaos below.

Dr. Silo’s words echoed inside my hollow mind.

“You are not like the others of your kind. You are special.”

My new body lay dying, smiling, listening to the howls of shoggoths and shadows.

I was home.