Future Lovecraft

ACCORDING TO THE BUREAU of Colonial Records, the abandoned remains of the New Roanoke settlement were discovered on Independence Day, 3916 (Year 475 under the revised Imperial Calendar). The settlement was located on the northwest coast of Idris, the largest island on the surface of the planet Iranon.

Founded just 18 months prior to the tragic event (or so it was estimated), the colony of New Roanoke was the 5th colony to be established on the planet. The location of New Roanoke was selected because of proximity to both fertile soil and rich mineral deposits.

The proposed location of the colony had been contested by the regional governors, at first, as the site earmarked for the settlement was over eighty kilometers from the nearest sister colony. Ultimately, however, the board of governors gave Osiris Smith the charter and groundbreaking at the colony commenced in February of 3915.

The following items were removed from the site and catalogued by a team led by DCI Shane Yang and Lieutenant Colonel John Chastewick (assisted by Arianna Armitage, Professor Emerita of the Oread Theological College), and are currently housed in the Colonial History Collection at the college.

Our entire understanding of the New Roanoke Event is based on these 17 items.

Exhibit 01: Child’s stuffed bear, brown-and-white fur. Approximately one-third of the animal has been burned away, with the remaining portion of the toy covered in heavy smoke stains. The button eyes have been removed. Examination of the remaining threads under magnification showed a clean cut, indicating the eyes were deliberated removed from the bear, rather than lost due to normal wear and tear.

Exhibit 02: Cracked ceramic serving platter, blue-willow pattern. Stamped marking on the back reads: “Bell & Dobson 6871.”

Exhibit 03: Twisted lengths of metal (6). Believed to be the wheelchair of Dr. Thurston. Five of the fragments appear to be from the frame of the chair, with the last piece of debris resembling a modified tread-style wheel. Thurston had been paralysed from the waist down since her mid-thirties, and had preferred to use a wheelchair with tank-like treads, which allowed her greater mobility on the uneven terrain of the settlement.

Exhibit 04: The field journal of Dr. Zulema Thurston, partial. Some pages believed missing, or possibly out of sequence. Handwritten notes on bound pulp, transcribed below:

Day 471: Several days ago, the engineers tried unsuccessfully to dig a new well. After Mr. Farre’s team abandoned their previous dig site, they attempted to draw water from a site farther to the east. However, the efforts at this site were also unsuccessful. Rather than uncovering more red water, however, the team broke ground into an underground cavern that the initial survey team must have missed.

There is still further digging to be done at the site, but Mr. Farre and Mr. Tydway brought me into the conversation, as some type of ancient writing adorned the walls of the cavern. As the debris is shifted, they say they will bring me images of the walls and any artifacts they find.

Who would have guessed I’d have a chance to use my doctorate out here in the colonies?

I’d expected my retirement to be boring. This could be the making of me.

Day 492: I got fed up with the digging team today and blew my top at poor Ananais. It’s no damn fun at all for them to bring me stray bits and pieces, so I’ve convinced them to increase the diameter of the dig and create an angled ramp into the cavern pit, so I can catalogue all of the findings myself.

It’s a testament to Mr. Farre’s character that he’s making way for me. I know, by rights, his priority ought to be finding more water, but, truth be told, I think he enjoys a good mystery more than most.

Except for books and the occasional show on the wi-vane, there’s not much in terms of entertainment out here. I think he likes this almost as much as I do.

Day 517: We had no idea. Or, at least, the survey team gave us no indication.

This planet, this whole planet, and our settlement in particular, had to have been populated. If not by an advanced civilization, then, at least, by a people who had a religion, writing and architecture.

There’s so much under our feet. There must have been a whole city, once.

I can’t translate it. Not yet. We need more text.

Day 533: The last bit of rock got chipped away, today. We found the source of the river, but more importantly, we found the center of the ancient city.

There is a stone ziggurat at the centre of the centre, a sacrificial altar at the top of it all. The altar is carved with circles and spheres, and it appears to be made of a red stone, while the rest of the pyramid is moss-covered greystone.

Translation is getting closer. Ananais is coming over, later tonight, to help me cross-reference the inscriptions against some of the books he brought. He says his great-grandfather left him a strange, antique book that has odd writing in it, too.

Exhibit 05: A rubbing from a bas-relief, graphite on butcher paper. Pictured are a series of concentric spheres with beams of light emanating from them, hovering over a cityscape. A border of skeleton-shaped keys frames the entire image. There is some text in an unknown language along the bottom-right-hand corner of the rubbing. Red pencil has been used to write initials on the upper left corner: “YOG.”

When questioned by DCI Yang and Lieutenant Colonel Chastewick about possible meanings of the initials, Professor Armitage declined to speculate.

Exhibit 06: Unopened bottle of Tokyo-style whisky. Ju-On brand single malt, aged 12 years. Slight moisture damage to label and minor tears on the wrapper around the cork, but otherwise in excellent condition. In fact, the condition is quite impressive, given the disarray the settlement was found in and the state of many of the other New Roanoke items enumerated here.

The only unusual markings on the bottle are five bloody fingerprints, too smudged to be matched with any certainty to any of the colonists.

Exhibit 07: Damaged solid state drive. Files include the following:

A: Translation.txt: Contents: jibberish symbols, letters, and numbers, save for one fragment in English text, which reads, “He no longer lurks.”

B: Video file of iridescent glowing spheres, four seconds in length. Thought to be some sort of meteorological phenomena.

C: Image, likely from a colonist’s personal library. Depicts a naked shoulder with a key-shaped tattoo.

Exhibit 08: Polyphasic rifle, damaged in such a way that it appears to be melted like a candle. Yang and Chastewick identified it as Bell & Dobson Mark Seven, making it the second artifact from this conglomerated firm to be salvaged from New Roanoke. Both investigators were at a loss as to what sort of environmental conditions could cause this level of damage.

Exhibit 09: Femur. Likely from male in his mid-forties. Remarkable in that it is the only human remain recovered at the site. It is unknown whom the femur belonged to, as many of the men in the colony were around that age.

Exhibit 10: The diary of Ananais Farre, lead engineer for the colonial dig expedition (incomplete). Partial text follows:

Day 460: We attempted to dig a tertiary well to increase the amount of potable water available, and also with hopes to increase water pressure at the South facility. However, when we began the dig this morning, we found that all water brought to the surface for testing was a blood-red, as if tinged with ochre or a microbial bloom of some sort.

As the samples sat waiting for analysis, they turned brown and began to solidify. I would say, “to clot,” since the water was so vibrant and red, but, of course, it was water and not blood we extracted from the ground. Testing was inconclusive, but, for obvious reasons, we stopped drilling and will not consume the water from the area.

We will begin digging at an alternate site in several days’ time, after reviewing the remaining candidate sites.

Day 490: While we initially thought the underground cavern was completely useless (except as a diversion for our resident academic), further investigation showed that there was an underground stream of clean, fresh water at this site. My team will aid with the clearing away of debris at this site, in an attempt to find the aquifer from which the stream stems.

This news is of course pleasing to Dr. Thurston, as it means more strange linguistic puzzles for her to pore over. I often think she must be very bored out here in the boondocks of the galaxy. She must miss the libraries of the old great cities, since she’s always asking to borrow my books.

Day 507: Dr. Thurston has full access to the cavern system. The team hasn’t found the source of the water yet, but the doctor has begun her attempts to translate some of the writing on the walls and on the artifacts we’ve turned up during the ongoing digs, as we follow the river underground.

Zulema was particularly intrigued by some of the wall carvings, at least, the ones further down, where there starts to be art and not just text.

The look in her eyes…I’m not sure I’d seen her smile once since we settled here, not until today.

Day 520: We found a door, today.

Or a seal. A big slab of rock used, Zulema and I think, to act as a final barrier between the outside world and what we think we will find beyond.

There’s so much text on the slab that Zulema is sure she can crack the code of the language today. And it’s the funniest thing. I think I recognize a bit of it from an old book.

Another odd thing: the further we go into this cavern, the more slime is accumulating on the walls. It has the most peculiar odour.

Day 541: What have we done?

We never should have translated the inscriptions out loud.

The moons are down.

I can’t find her anywhe—[End of log]

Exhibit 11: Hutch, the New Roanoke mouser. During this period of colonial expansion, it was common for colonists to bring a cat to their new settlement. The cat was something of a communal pet for the community, but its main role was to kill pests in the fields or in food storage areas. The cat was alive and seemingly healthy at the time that the abandoned New Roanoke site was discovered.

However, when the cat was removed from the surface of the planet (along with the rest of the salvaged items), it coughed up a hairball, went into a paroxysm, and died shortly thereafter. One of the crewmen on the transport ship, whose father was a taxidermist by trade, stuffed and mounted the cat for posterity.

Exhibit 12: Heart-shaped locket, nickel plate. Clasp damaged, chain found knotted three times. No pictures within the locket. Testing revealed trace amounts of a gum adhesive on the interior of the locket, suggesting that there were once images of one of the colonist’s loved ones within.

Exhibit 13: An antique leather-bound copy of Dire and Akashic Chronicles by John Dee, with certain passages underlined. The notations seem to be in two hands: One uses red ink and a single underline, while a reader who used a blue pen (and much more pressure when writing) underlined certain passages twice for emphasis. While some sections are underlined by both parties, most are not.

It is worth noting that all of the sections containing dual underlining are written in Duriac, with one exception: “July 13th, Mr. Talbot came abowt 3 of the clok afternone, with whom I had some wordes of unkendness. He confessed that he neyther heyrd or saw any spirtual creature any more and left my howse.”

The Duriac passages remain untranslatable, according to Dr. Armitage.

Exhibit 14: Partial map of New Roanoke, hand-drawn on butcher paper. What remains of the map shows the location of the settlement’s water wells, mineral deposits, and nearby geographical features.

A green ink square has been used to note the coordinates of some important locale, but the missing section of the map is positioned just under this green marking, prohibiting the reader from determining what this mystery location could be.

Exhibit 15: Gamer’s dice (3). Hand-carved from bone. Six-sided, roughly cubic in form, approximately fifty millimeters tall. No further testing has been done on them to determine what kind of bone was used to create the dice.

Exhibit 16: Signet ring in 10 carat gold. A lion is formed from three initials, though there is some dispute as to which letters are used. Armitage believed the intertwined letters were BCH, while Yang argued that the letters were, in fact, PCD. Neither set of initials matched the name of any colonist, leaving Yang and Armitage to concur that, whatever the initials were, they referred to an ancestor of one of the colonists: possibly Elyoner Dare or Dyonis Harvie.

Exhibit 17: The “Eldritch Slime”. So named by Professor Armitage for its strange volumetric properties. The slime is semi-opaque and pale-green. Collected from the ground at New Roanoke by the salvage team, it has been stored in a liter storage jar (pharmaceutical grade).

Armitage found the slime unsettling for several reasons, the most prominent being that the slime has the ability to increase in volume by approximately ten cc every eleven months.

No plans are currently in place to “re-plant” the slime in a larger container, as no consensus has been reached regarding the proper procedure for safely doing so. Professor Armitage estimates that, within the next four years, the slime will have grown too large to be contained within its original storage jar.

THE KADATH ANGLE By Maria Mitchell

COSMIC SHORES AREN’T so distant when they nestle themselves between the synapses of self-sacrifice. Or what Amy thought to be self-sacrifice. She followed the zodiac into the sea and stood before a crystal promise. Glancing at the darkness over the Gilman House, she walked back to her house. Her mother, having never fully come to terms with her age, sat desolate in the corner.

“I’ve told you before not to go to the waterfront. It makes you stink of rot,” her mother said, and plucked a flea off her scabbed arm.

“The whole town stinks of rot, Mom. It’s been that way for thousands of years.”

“Or maybe not so little.” Her mother wheeled herself over to the window. “What do you see when you go out to the waterfront? All you see is the litter and dead fish that clog the shore.”

“Filth can be seen everywhere. It is inescapable.”

“That’s no reason to keep going back to see more of it, Amy.”

Amy turned away. She didn’t want to hear any more. She knew what it was that really bothered her mother, but it was pointless to bring the issue to her mother’s attention. Silence was always the best response. Silence, however, teaches one to brood, but not to think, and therefore, is detrimental.

She had remained by her mother’s side for many years. She liked to think it gave them both a purpose, since they were of little consequence to anyone else. Innsmouth hadn’t changed much since the most recent war with Asia, but for the fact that it had grown more impoverished. Disaffected, unemployed, burly youths, fresh home from the war, wandered the streets like sharks prowling the water, looking for any scent of blood on which to feed. For a withered, shadowy person like Amy, their incessant sauntering through the neighbourhood was a constant dread. Worse was when the church women would stroll up to the door and ask to see her mother. Their lickerish eyes loved to feast on the deformity. The hags would squeeze their rolls of fat into their pale cars and drive away, searching for another fresh victim. Amy and her mom weren’t fresh enough, after having lived in Innsmouth all their lives, but the church women still liked to smell the deformity.

When her brother didn’t return home from Asia, Amy thought about leaving. Living in Innsmouth had never been pleasant for her, yet it seemed that Innsmouth was everywhere and, therefore, there was little point in leaving. A dull rain began to thump over the attic window. Amy knew rain always pleased the jars, so she glanced over to her mother, just to make sure she had fallen into stupor before she crept upstairs to talk with them.

They stood at the east wall, facing the window. A few raindrops trickled onto the wormy chest they stood upon. She knelt before them and began arranging the stones around them.

“I don’t want to stay here, anymore. I want to leave. When will I be able to go?” she asked the jars. The magenta one snickered unpleasantly.

“You could always kill someone and go to prison. Then you’d be gone from Innsmouth.”

“I’m not sure anyone goes to prison for murder, these days. It is 5510, after all. Now, speaking freely, that’s a different story,” said the green jar.

“Will I never change? Will I always be like my mother?” Amy appealed to them desperately. The blue jar snorted.

“You knew from the time you were small that your mother was defective. That she would never change enough to take to the sea. There’s no hereditary reason why you won’t end up the same way. The same thing happened to your aunt. That’s why she starved herself. She couldn’t go on living, caught between this world and the sea.” The blue jar expelled a deep, philosophical sigh. “I remember Irene very well. She was such a vibrant scrap of a thing. I used to love thinking about the day she’d change and begin her new life among the anemone. She was so found of beachcombing when she was your age. I just knew she’d have the most impressive anemone garden in all of Innsmouth Harbor. Fancy my horror when she turned 17 and we saw the mark of defection rise on her. You think you’ve got problems, Amy? You can’t even imagine how disappointed I was. She had everything going for her. She was well-educated in the texts; she was in regular contact with Cthulhu every time she shut her eyes. She had cursed the entire state of Massachusetts with a plague of raining human excrement for three days on her 16th birthday. We were so proud of her. But then, one year hence, it turns out that she’s basically human, after all. She doesn’t have enough of the Innsmouth blood to take to the sea. Somewhere along the way, the bland, indifferent God of Baptists must have wrenched her boundless potential for the Necronomicon into a skulking subservience for the mortal plain. As a consequence, Cthulhu can do nothing with her and she will never be a part of the sea.”

“She won’t be a part of anything, now, because she’s dead.”

“Well now, don’t go too far, Amy. I mean, who are addressing right now?” the blue jar said.

“No one. I am mad,” Amy replied. She got up and went back downstairs. This staircase was so old that it seemed it must fall, soon. The paneling needed to be mended, but there was no labourer Amy was willing to let in the house after one brawny workman had broken the pale-pearl jar when trying to fix the hole in the attic. Amy looked about the house and wondered how it had fallen into such disrepair. There wasn’t any reason for it to be like this. It had been beautiful, once. It was the only thing that was. The last few years had aged it to an ugly, leering edifice that echoed with the sound of creaks magnified to a feverish dissonance. She steeled herself to try and fix a few of the panels, herself.

While she pulled at the planks, and pathetically tried to wrench the bolts off to reset the configuration to a more acceptable level of stability, she imagined how the house could look again if she succeeded. She was too busy thinking about this to notice that she’d plunged her pick too deeply into one of the posts. It gave way with an angry thrash and she stumbled back, terrified. The staircase somehow remained standing, but now, before her, stood a yawning blackness. There was a pocket behind the stairs. She tentatively looked inside, but found nothing. Returning to the scene with a flashlight, she shined it into the depths. She could see nothing except the gauze of spider webs and the miserable muck of water-damaged drywall. The mildew of dust pervaded her nose and she stumbled back from it, angrily. She could not define the purpose of this space, so she quickly tried to cover it back up with the paneling, but her mother wheeled into the room before she could conceal the damage.

“What have you done, you stupid fiend?” her mother yelled.

“I was trying to fix the stairs. I’m tired of living in filth, among fleas, rot and dust. I never could depend on you to clean anything, even when you could still walk. All you ever do is sleep and yell, scream, and cry.”

Her mother rolled to her and slapped her across the face.

“Don’t you ever speak that way to me again, you little snot. You know I am weak and limited in what I can do.”

“You’re not so disabled you can’t thrash me whenever you like.”

“That’s right, because I know how weak and stupid flesh of my flesh is.”

They stood before each other in a tableau of mutual hatred that seethed with barbed, suppressed rage.

“I don’t ever want to look at you again. If you continue to live in this house, you will stay clear of me,” her mother finally said, and turned away from her and wheeled back into her room. Amy surprised herself by not crying. She had shed so many tears in her life. Tears for her lost brother, tears for her lost aunt, and all the snide, unrepentant treatment she’d received. Yet, through it all, she did not cry. It was the first time that tears would not come since she could always cry so easily. She was always so easy to break. They didn’t come. For the first time in a great many years, she felt a sense of relief. Maybe she would never cry again.

After her mother had gone to sleep, she went back to the staircase and opened the pocket she’d exposed earlier. It didn’t have anything in it, but it seemed like it might be part of a larger network. She crept inside. She longed for the peace of dust, but that peace was unrequited. It did not want to give solace to her. It only wanted to be dust. She sat under the panel and in the darkness. She felt like she could sit there for a million years, without compunction about not getting to see what was happening outside. She did not want to know. Certainly, the entire town of Innsmouth already knew enough about all of them, from her drunken father marauding through the streets like a fool, blasting his idiocy to anyone who would listen. If Innsmouth had a dark reputation, then the Gilmans had a particularly slurred stance in a town in desperate need to make something worse than its own blackness.

Would gossip never tire and would burly brutes never be silenced? Would they continue to skulk through the streets outside her door? She lay down on the mildewed floor inside the stairs. She huddled into the corner amidst fungi and rot. She clutched herself. In a few moments, she felt something change. It wasn’t anything which she could readily identify. She breathed long, gasping breaths and felt something in her suspire that was alien in its comfort. She breathed deeply and, in her mind, she felt an azure rapture. Pale blue. Electric. The fleas stopped biting her. The tears would not come. She breathed again and felt it bubble in her blood, again. It was unlike anything she’d ever felt before. Suddenly, she could envision the horrid church hags forgetting who she was. Not only forgetting who she was, but having their gossiping tongues ripped off by some invisible spectre, if they ever dared to speak of her or her family again. She could envision the plutonian trash she’d worked for many years ago, now having to take back everything they’d forced her to cover for them. She could envision the tormentors of yesteryears gone, by melting away into a new light from which their evil was bound. If mortal she must remain, then mortality would not be her enslaver. It would be her liberator. She breathed in the rot and, instead of being repelled, she was delighted. Gossip may be a measure of power in some circles, but it was nothing compared to this: great, fabulous, azure light beaming inside her thoughts.

The seeds had been implanted inside her mind. Now began the countdown.

Day One

I have had the most incredible experience. I have no words for it except: azure rapture. I can’t define it as anything else. It is the most wonderful feeling I’ve ever known. It comes over me like a wave of light and sea. It washes away all my fears, all my anger, all my hatred. This morning, a punk kid plunged a rock through my window. I didn’t even get angry. I didn’t even feel abused. I felt as I do now. I felt incredible.

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.