The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Don Webb views his story, “The Future Eats Everything,” as a “Lovecraftian intersection of the cosmically strange and impersonal, and the personal and mundane. Lovecraft is seen as the prophet of the former and ungifted as to the latter, but in reality it is he that showed that true fear happens when the cosmic rubs its legs against the sleeping human in the bed of the mundane.” Webb’s most recent book is collection Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (Hippocampus Press). He has had sixteen books and more than four hundred short stories published. He lives in Austin, Texas, and teaches creative writing for the UCLA Extension Writers Program.

The Future Eats Everything

It was the day of the flood that Matthew D. Smith discovered the human world faced a menace, always has faced this menace, and will inevitably lose out to it.

Central Texas had been enduring a three-year drought. The weather was so hot and so dry that even the staunchest global warming deniers had begun to doubt. The Catholics had prayed to Mary, the Protestants to God, the Muslims to Allah, the Wiccans to the Goddess, and the Thelemites had practiced sex-magick for rain. Someone or something had heard the call. Matthew pictured God as an old man in a white robe saying, “Me — damn it! I’ll give these S.O.B’s rain!”

It started with a lightning storm about eight the night before; a heavy rain in less than an hour. Matthew and his wife kept their windows open all night — if you haven’t heard rain in many months, it is a sleep-inducing bliss to hear it. Several times during the night Matthew had awakened from vague and uneasy dreams to the sound of the heavy downpour.

At 5:15 a.m. the emergency phone-calling service of Doublesign Data Systems Inc. informed him — in an automated voice — that the work day would start two hours late. “Great I can sleep late.” Matthew thought. Then at 5:25 a.m., the Austin Independent School District’s automated voice called Kathleen and told her that school would not start until noon. Then at 6:30 a.m. his assistant called him to ask if the message that work was delayed was for real. Finally, at 6:45 a.m. Kathleen’s principal called her to see if she had received the 5:25 a.m. message.

Common sense told Matthew he should allow extra time to drive from his south Austin two-story brick home to the one-story white stucco building in Doublesign. But the sweet sound of rain told him to sleep longer. After all, he had driven the same back-road route for nine years and the roads had never been closed. There had been one snowstorm and two other floods in that near-decade, and he’d had no problems.

Matthew took his old black Chevy pickup out at eight and headed south. He noticed no cars were streaming north of Austin on FM 118. Perhaps it was only an early morning traffic problem. The sky glowed with a lovely gray mother-of-pearl color. Matthew always drove to work in the dark; it seemed almost like a luxury to be driving so late in the day.

About a mile out of Austin, two orange sand-filled traffic barrels were set up with a ROAD CLOSED sign between them. But there was space enough to drive around the barricade. He could see a car a quarter of mile ahead where the road twisted through a grove of live oak. If that guy could make it, he could too. He was dammit, a man — even if his big blond wife sometimes disagreed. Matthew drove his truck very slowly between the barrels, its rear panel very gently brushing one of them.

After he’d rounded the bend, he saw a river, which was a surprising sight because there had never been a river there in nine years. There wasn’t creek there, or even a dry creek bed. There was scarcely a dip in the road. The cream-colored Lexus he had seen seconds before was making a difficult three-point turn to head back to town. Matthew saw he would have to turn around in the same spot, so he waited for the Lexus to navigate its turn, then pulled up slowly to the fast-moving river. It was at least waist high in the oaks, and Matthew could see an angry muddy gap in the pavement where the road had once slopped very slightly; chunks of asphalt were falling off into the foaming white water.

This would be a perfect picture to post on Facebook. Matthew pulled a little off the road. No other cars were coming; apparently others were not as foolhardy as he. He left his pickup and made his way to what was now a crumbling shoreline, slipping in the tall wet grass twice. Matthew planted his feet on an exposed limestone ridge and focused his phone at the exposed red earth bank, thinking how it looked like a wound. He was hoping the cloudy morning sky would provide sufficient light for his picture when he saw a really big bug break out of the crack in the earth. At least a foot in length and half as much in width, the pallid segmented creature looked like a cross between a trilobite and a cockroach. It had seven legs on each side of its thorax, and a pair of crablike pinchers glistening with mucus. The thing had tiny mammal-like eyes with light blue irises. As it pushed through the dirt, Matthew saw it had a few brothers or sisters climbing up on the grass — all heading straight toward him at a fast scurry. He broke into a run, fell, got up, and ran some more. He lost his iPhone in the process. Matthew got his pickup turned around in record time and was going down the empty highway at seventy miles per hour, before he could even begin to order his thoughts.

What the hell were they?

Should he go back and get pictures?

Who should he call?

Damn! He’d lost his phone.

Is there any money to be made from this?

Should he keep his trap shut so that he didn’t look like a nut?

Matthew thought of Gordon, the school teacher on Sesame Street, who never saw any weird phenomena that kids and Muppets saw. So he became the voice of skeptical reason — he was always wrong, of course, but he was supposed to be the smart, credible adult.

Matthew assumed his wife, Kathleen, would be a “Gordon.” She taught high school science and would, no doubt, be all practical and skeptical about the bugs.

Instead, she was thrilled. She tossed back her mane of (dyed) blond hair and demanded they drive out to the site immediately.

“Look, the road is still closed,” she said. “If you wait until morning, it will be open again and the insects will probably be gone. If we go now, this could be our Discovery.”

He definitely heard the big “D.”

He called the office and said the road was washed out so he would not be making it in today. Kathleen still had three hours before her school opened — if they opened at all, which was beginning to look doubtful.

It was a scary drive. Rain had continued to fall, albeit much more gently, and the road was slick. There was no oncoming traffic, apparently no one else was foolish enough to risk the drive. Matthew didn’t pull his car into the red mud of this morning. He figured it would be way too squishy now and the truck would get stuck. Kathleen practically flew out of the car, carrying the giant flashlight she had bought for emergencies. She found one of the creatures almost instantly. “Matt hold the flashlight while I snap some shots.”

The pale-fleshed trilobite (or whatever the fuck it was) didn’t seem to like the light. It began pulling itself toward the scar in the earth.

“Matt — grab it.”

Matthew made a grab, dropping the flashlight. The bug hissed at him, and he jumped back. It had three rows of sharp-looking teeth — translucent and serrated like some sharks’ teeth, but much smaller.

“Okay. Maybe don’t grab. Can you get the flashlight back, sweetie?”

Matthew recovered the flashlight and kept the scurrying bug in the center of the beam. It climbed over a gray-green rock as it headed toward the mud. Matthew swung the beam in long gentle arcs across the area. No other creatures were in evidence.

“Move the light back to that rock.”

Matthew did so, and he observed what Kathleen was about to comment on.

“Something is written on the rock.”

Something was. A rectangular piece of gray plastic — somewhat smaller than a credit card — was embedded in the siltstone. On it, in black letters: XUTHLTAN. Matthew picked up the stone. He tried to knock the plastic tag off, but he could see it was truly and firmly embedded in the rock.

“Hey it’s really stuck in there. I mean it’s part of the rock — like the rock formed around it. Why would a rock have a piece of plastic stuck in it?” asked Matthew.

“I don’t know. Time travel maybe. Maybe some future person journeyed back to trilobite times and dropped his portable . . . Xuthltan . . . in the muck, probably when one of these little fuckers hissed at him.”

Her large brown eyes were shiny with excitement. This was suddenly the sexiest moment of their marriage in the last ten years. Matthew stepped forward, but Kathleen said, “Look!”

They were everywhere. Matthew could see at least twelve of the bugs all headed toward him and Kathleen. Suddenly they all started to whine like summer locusts. Each bug had a slightly different pitch and each seemed to be modulating its tone. As he grabbed Kathleen by the waist, he thought they might be talking. He had the presence of mind to shove the rock into his pocket.

The warm Texas sun ruled for the next three days. Floodwater receded. The middle-class neighborhood of Onion Creek dealt with property damage and insurance people; the poor neighborhood of Dove Springs dealt with homelessness and need. The closed streets were opened and Matthew found the strange insectile visitors on his route had vanished. No tiny claw marks in the drying mud. No sign they’d ever been there. All that was left were a few badly lit photos and memories of a night of fear and then lovemaking.

Kathleen pointed out that in an era of Photoshop, bad pictures didn’t mean squat.

But there was the rock.

Five years before, when Kathleen was getting her degree at the University of Texas, she had dated a man named Randall Wong. Randall, who worked in the Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Lab, was a careful and thoughtful lover — and was dating three other undergraduates. (These AMS lads were like catnip to the ladies.) All the girls dropped him but Kathleen, who remained his friend (at least on Facebook). He had said to her, jokingly, in an IM just days ago: “If you ever need any carbon-14 dating, just ask me.”

Now Kathleen wanted Radall to radiocarbon date the rock.

Matthew wasn’t too keen on the idea. In his heart he knew — or was at least 85 per cent sure that Kathleen and Randall had had a little affair last year when he’d worked in Dallas for six weeks. But she seemed so excited by the mystery . . . and seeing the bugs had led to them making love for the first time in five years. Besides, he still cherished the hope that “solving” the mystery would mean leaving his dead-end day job.

Dr. Randall Wong was (of course) quite surprised by the rock. It’s not that often you see plastic encased in siltstone. In fact, it was impossible. Still, it seemed genuine enough.

Kathleen told Randall she couldn’t tell him any details about the artifact, but hinted her uncle in the CIA needed to know and had instructed her to approach her friend on a hush-hush basis. (Kathleen did, actually, have an uncle employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. But as Uncle Fitz only did payroll, any top secret instructions would be unlikely. In fact, impossible.)

Randall didn’t like the results.

“Look don’t tell anyone the university lab had anything to do with this,” Dr. Wong told them after the test. “I could lose my job. This will bring every nutcase out of the woodwork for miles.”

Kathleen and Matthew had met him at the Kerbey Lane Café. They looked up from their pancakes and said, “Why?” almost at the same time.

“I’m not giving you the printouts. I’m not giving you anything. The plastic is from now, which shouldn’t be a surprise, but the stone matrix was . . . I mean will be . . . laid down about fifty thousand years in the future.”

Randall dropped the stone on the café table. Before they could speak, he said, “No. Just no. No, I don’t understand it. No, I don’t want the publicity. No. Stuff like this ends careers. Investigate if you want, you’re a high school science teacher — and you do whatever it is you do, Matthew. But for me? No.”

Randall walked out. He had not finished his waffle.

Matthew and Kathleen stared at each other.

Of course the next step was the Internet.

“Xuthltan” was the name of a government official in the Maldives, a word for an evil village in a short story by Texas writer Robert E. Howard, a character in a multi-player online game, and a church in a bad Austin neighborhood.

Austin it was then. The phone number from the website did not work, so Matthew decided to visit the next Saturday. He told his wife to stay home “in case there was any trouble.” Matthew didn’t know what sort of trouble you could have with people that had artifacts embedded in siltstone formed thousands of years from now; the Internet didn’t have any information on the subject.

The Church of Xuthltan was a storefront, part of a cheap-looking row of shops in East Austin. It shared its parking lot with a pawn store, a 7-Eleven, a store that sold knock-offs of famous perfumes, a tattoo parlor, a loan office, and a botánica. Some guys were working on a white car near the church’s door.

Matthew peered through the church’s grimy glass door. The light was off, but Matthew could see someone inside — an old white guy in faded blue jeans and a dirty white T-shirt. He had a long scruffy white beard and wore a blue baseball cap. He was watching a tiny television. Matthew knocked on the thick glass of the former-shop window. The old man looked up and gave him a wide grin, perhaps one of idiocy. The guy got up and started ambling to the door.

From outside, Matthew could see the church had four rows of rusty folding chairs facing a pulpit that had seen better days. Behind the pulpit stood what could be a marble baptismal font and a square folding table. A cash register stood on the table. There were bookshelves on two walls. The old guy turned on the overhead fluorescent lights and unlocked the door. He smelled like he had not bathed in a while, but there a cinnamon-y odor coming from the church itself.

“May Xuthltan eat your woes!” said the old man.

“Hello,” said Matthew.

“Come in,” said the old man, “The Grand Chronopastor is not here, just me. Are you here to buy a book? Light some incense, say a prayer? Or just shoot the shit?”

Matthew saw the pedestal he had guessed was a baptismal font was fake marble; its basin was full of gray plastic rectangles with the word “Xuthltan” printed on each in black letters. These were identical to the one embedded in the stone he was carrying in his left pants pocket. Matthew pointed at the basin as he walked in.

“What are those?”

“Prayer stones.” Said the old man. “they’re free if you are a member, and a buck (tax included) if you ain’t.”

“What do you pray to?” asked Matthew.

“Well I ain’t much of a theologian,” said the old man, “I’d say they was bugs. Hardy bugs of the future, I’d say. Makes more sense than praying to a dead Jewish carpenter, if’n you ask me.”

“Why’s that?” asked Matthew.

“Well what can a dead carpenter do fer you? Build something in the past? Heck that’s over two thousand years ago. Let’s say you wanted some bookshelves. You could pray ‘Dear Jesus, make me some bookshelves and hide them so I can find them!’ Well even if he did make them and hid them real good, you’d have to get on a jet and head off to the Holy Land and try and find them. And if you did find them, they’d be two thousand years old — and what kind of shape do you think they would be in then, I ask ye?”

Matthew wasn’t prepared for this line of reasoning. So he asked, “Uh, what can future bugs do?”

“What do reg’lar bugs do? Eat of course. They can eat up your problems if you chant on ’em.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Praise Xuthltan! I had two no-good sons. Never took care of me. When they was out of jail, they would literally rob me out of house and home. Took my car. Took my tiny savings from the bank. Hell, they tried to steal the silver jar that held their mother’s ashes. I used to live over on Chicon Street. One day I walked past this place. Door was open on account of the AC not working. They was all prayin’ and chantin’ up a storm. Xuthltan! Xuthltan! Xuthltan! And rubbing these little doodads. Then one of them jumped up and said, ‘Praise Xuthltan! My husband’s gone!’ And she showed everybody her ring finger and there was no wedding band on it. I came in and asked just what the holy hell was going on.”

“And these bugs had eaten her husband?”

“Of course I didn’t believe it at first. But I was hurtin’ so bad from the way my no-good kids had done me. I dropped down and started chantin’ along with the rest of the morons. I took the talisman home and chanted for three days. Then I looked up. I used to have a picture of my son Ed in his graduation robe in a little frame on the mantel. It was gone! I looked around my house — it ain’t very big, so it didn’t take me very long. There was nothin’ belonging to Ed. There was still some of his brother Mark’s stuff, so I went back to chantin’, and guess what?”

“Mark’s stuff disappeared, too?”

“Well eventually. He called me on his cell phone. All I got is a landline. He called me and told me his house was full of roaches that were hissin’ at him. Could I come over and help him? I told him I could’ve — had he not stole my car. Said I’d ride over on the bus tomorrow. Told him he could’ve called his wife — ’cept she was smart enough to leave his ass. Hung up. Unplugged the phone. Chanted for three hours. Next day I took the bus to his neighborhood. Different family livin’ in his house. Looked like they been there for a spell. They had a swing hangin’ from the sycamore in the front.”

“Don’t you feel bad?”

“No. That’s the beauty of it. The bugs are just tryin’ to get here. They’re in some crazy war with flyin’ octopi or something in the future. When the Reverend Nadis first found them they were a hun’erd million light years away. Now they’re maybe a million.”

“Closer than that,” said Matthew.

“You’ve received Word?” asked the old man with a look of holy awe, his backwoods craziness suddenly set aside.

“No,” said Matthew, “I don’t know why I said that.”

“They can come through inattention, through synchronicities through certain shapes, as well as the shape waves of the mantra. Their name is not really Xuthltan. That just has the right vibrations. You need to meet The Reverend Nadis.”

Matthew felt the hairs on the back of his head stand up. He didn’t want to meet The Reverend Nadis. He looked over at the books for sale. Most were used paperbacks on the paranormal — The Truth About Mummies, The Truth About Werewolves, UFOS in Colonial America, etc. There were a few antique hardbound books with hard-to-read titles in German and French. Money. Money could buy time. Little church like this must need money.

“I would like a couple of the Xuthltan talismans. And let me make a little contribution toward the church.”

Matthew took a twenty out of his worn black wallet. Kathleen had given it to him four years ago for Christmas. He never bought wallets for himself, he hoped that she would notice it was time to get him another.

“You don’t have to give us anything. We may look like nothing now, but the time will come when this little church in this little strip mall will be the only thing standing.”

Matthew could picture what the man was saying. This stupid strip mall on a gray featureless plain surrounded by the bugs. They must have great intelligence to have worked this all out. Somewhere there would be vast insect cities, haunted hives where they fought another incomprehensible race. And they used pure human selfishness as a weapon in their war. Matthew stood there, shocked at the vision — it as though he was really seeing it. He could almost hear their hissing song.

“It gets through to you, doesn’t it?” said the old man, his eyes now full of intelligence, his hick accent still gone. Matthew wondered if this were The Reverend Nadis. The old man went on, “I see you have a wedding ring, that means you’ll be wanting two of the calling cards. Here you go.”

The plastic felt slimy in his hands. Almost as if the tokens were alive. He felt — or imagined he felt — the rock twitch in his pocket.

“How long? How long have you known about them?” asked Matthew.

“Now that, sir, is difficult to explain. Working with them plays hell on your time sense. Your mind gets more and more hollow the longer you know them. On the one hand you remember them. But on the other hand you have a great hollowness in your mind. Things echo in hollow spaces, you know.”

Matthew turned to leave.

“Come ag’in!” The old man’s voice had gone all hillbilly stupid again.

Matthew said, “I won’t. I’ll throw your plastic prayer stones away, and I’ll forget this place.”

“Don’t matter,” the old man said. “Just you comin’ starts another cycle in motion. Don’t you even want to show me the rock in your pocket, boy?” He laughed a little.

Matthew turned his back and stepped out of the shop.

“Praise Xuthltan!”

On the way back to his house Matthew edited and re-edited the story he would tell Kathleen again and again. He stopped at McDonald’s and had a large chocolate shake. He would tell her about the talisman’s supposed ability to make people disappear. He would portray the old man as a crazy hick. Overdo the accent when he told his wife — make him sound East Texas, bayou country. He wouldn’t mention the vision, and of course nothing about the bugs. The whole thing should be a dead end. He thought about throwing away the talismans, but found he didn’t want to handle them. He needed to see Kathleen laugh at them. She was so sensible. She was a science teacher for god’s sake. Then after she had destroyed their magic with a good laugh, he could drop them in his document shredder. It was strong enough for credit cards, and these were not much thicker.

By the time he drove home he was all smiles and sheepishness. It had been such a waste of time.

“So he really chanted his sons away?” Kathleen asked.

“He was a crazy old man in a closed-down storefront. He was probably homeless. You should’ve seen the junk they had for sale.”

“But you bought two of the cards?”

“I offered him twenty bucks for them. I figured the guy needed to eat.”

“And he turned your money down?”

“I told you he was crazy.”

She looked at the cards, shrugged, laid them on the kitchen counter.

She spent longer than usual on her computer that night. He felt sure she was chatting with Randall. He took a long bath, listening for the sound of her going to bed. When he left the tub about midnight, the plastic cards were gone, and she had taken the rock out of his pants pocket.

A day passed, and then a week, and eventually the memory of the strange bugs and the stranger church were obscured by bills and problems at work. WDS lost two technicians, so everyone had to pull an occasional extra shift. Matthew drew Sunday morning. He crept out of the house at 6.45 a.m. and drove into Doublesign. He took great pride in not waking Kathleen, although she got two months off in the summer plus Christmas, fall and spring breaks. He stopped at the Sac-n-Pac store and bought his Diet Dr Pepper and multivitamin packet and let himself in at work. The mainframe was up, the satellite systems were (mainly) up; he checked the night log and the emails. He put coffee on and raided a banana from the boss’s fruit bowl. He’d begun file maintenance, when he heard something in the server room. Probably rats. (Rats had given Arjay a huge fright a couple of months ago.) He ignored the sound. Then he heard someone say something. He jumped out of his chair. Should he dial 911 or confront? Probably kids from the Discipline Alternative Program.

He moved to the back and threw open the white painted door. The servers were warm, happy and alone. He stepped in and walked up to them.

Something fell from the ceiling behind him.

He turned.

It was one of the bugs, even larger than before. Two feet long, still the same but bigger sharp legs on each side and pinchers in front. It was bigger now, he knew — somehow — because it had eaten its way closer in time. Two more were crawling along the walls, their blue human-like eyes focused on him. One spoke — not a hiss this time — with his wife’s voice, “Xuthltan!” Matthew could see the three rows of glasslike serrated teeth clearly reflecting the yellow, green, and red lights of the servers.

Two scurried out from under the server rack. One spoke with the slightly Chinese accent Dr. Randall Wong affected, “Xuthltan!” Another hissed.

Then they rushed him.

It was quick, but not quick enough.