Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (18 page)

“He is our Shiva. He is the Destroyer of Worlds. He clears the way for a new age of fear and death for those who do not or cannot believe.” He coughed up blood, staining his teeth as his smile grew wilder. He was fading fast now.

“What do I do now? What do I do with all of
them?
What do I do with this knowledge? Help me, Howard!”

“It was my job to await the one who would spread our dark gospel. You are here now”—he coughed hard, and Kristen’s face became dotted with red—”and you have performed the sacrifice of the one you needed. Now go and tell the world Cthulhu is to be worshiped—all of them are to be worshiped.”

“All of
who?
” she cried, although even as she spoke she could feel the knowledge entering her mind as her mentor slipped away. “I don’t … Howard?
Howard!
” But he didn’t answer except for a smile still upon his face even as he died.

And Kristen knew her father in the Faith was dead and gone to Dagon because her mind—even the soul in which she had always been a resolute nonbeliever—filled with the love of the provider, Dagon; the love of the destroyer, Cthulhu; and love for the many, many others in a pantheon she had never before even dreamed of but now recognized each member as if they were standing together in a well-worn photograph from her childhood. She now knew
everything
about
everything
that mattered and that Howard had known. She now learned everything he had learned from sacrificing the young man raised in
Tulu
worship, the keeper of secrets whom he had he saved, and back to that man’s sacrifice of the former keeper, and back and back. This encyclopedic knowledge was the boon of her sacrifice, and of Howard’s. Of all of them.

I am a murderer
, she thought as she looked at her victim.
All for the good of Cthulhu
.

She stood then, with a broad smile on her face and her own heart utterly eradicated of dread now, and sang out, “
Ïa! Ïa! Tulu fthagn! Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Tulu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
” She knew the words that she had just called and exactly what they meant, knew every word of R’lyehian now, in fact. The chant meant
Praise! Praise! Tulu waits and dreams! In his house at R’lyeh, dead Tulu waits and dreams!

The assembled tribe shouted it as loudly as it could: “
Ïa! Ïa! Tulu fthagn! Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Tulu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!”
And again:
“
Ïa! Ïa! Tulu fthagn! Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Tulu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
”

They found themselves turning to the idol on the altar, chanting again and again and again in R’lyehian, and Kristen could understand the ancient language as if it were sung in English: “
Praise! Praise! Tulu waits and dreams! In his house at R’lyeh, dead Tulu waits and dreams!
”

But that wasn’t quite right anymore, she realized, and held up her hands for silence, which immediately descended. “We must make a
correction
, my dear family! Beloved of Dagon!
Ha ha
, yes, we must!”

They all looked upon her with excitement and reverence.

“We must now sing
Cthulhu m’glhal!
” she called and led a new chant, pronouncing the unpronounceable without error: “
Ïa! Ïa! Cthulhu m’glhal! Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh m’glhal!
”

All of the assembled “degenerate cultists” immediately knew why it now was “Cthulhu” now instead of “
Tulu
.” The name “Cthulhu” was the form of
Tulu
used when he was no longer dead, no longer sleeping while trapped in his sunken city of R’lyeh. The other new word, “
m’glhal,
” meant “awake.”

They all chanted, as if they had known this altered song from birth: “
Ïa! Ïa! Cthulhu m’glhal! Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh m’glhal!
”

Kristen Frommer tasted each word as it melted into English in her mind:

Praise! Praise! Cthulhu is awake! Cthulhu is free from R’lyeh, alive and awake!

And her mind added:

Awake ... to destroy!

***

From Martin Storch’s essay, “Where Are the Aliens?”, in the Festschrift
Billions and Billions: Thoughts on the Legacy of Carl Sagan
:

Doctor Sagan famously declared that visits from alien lifeforms of any kind were not only unlikely given the tremendous distances involved, but virtually impossible. The gulfs of matter-free space between planets and stars, let alone galaxies, are much more vast than the human mind can even envision except by analogy, and even then only roughly because the analogous distances used (e.g., if the sun were one foot in diameter, then Proxima Centauri—the nearest star to our solar system—would be
five thousand miles away
. The Andromeda galaxy would be
sixty billion miles
. And the sun, you may have noticed, is a whole hell of a lot bigger than one foot in diameter) are themselves too large to be really understood by brains evolved to figure out how far away an apple is on a tree or a mammoth in a field.

No alien—or human being, for that matter—could travel these galactic distances in a spaceship, being inherently limited by Einstein’s cosmic speed limit. What about from other parts of our own galaxy, then? No luck there either, I’m afraid. Although the planet-free, boring binary system of Proxima and Alpha Centauri is “just” five thousand miles away in our one-foot-diameter sun universe, the radius simply to the center of our own Milky Way would still be 1.5
billion
miles. (In the universe we live in, with a sun-sized sun, that’s about the actual distance from Earth to Uranus. Which takes more than a decade for our probes to reach even though they travel at tens of thousands of miles per hour.)

However, Sagan didn’t explore in depth other ways that distant civilizations could visit Earth, probably because he was trying to save the world from nuclear war and other trivial side projects. (Why aliens would want to come to such a speck of dust around an average, variable star on the edge of an unremarkable galaxy is a question we’ll put aside for now as well.) There is the tried-and-false idea of opening “wormholes” in space, a concept that would be more enticing, perhaps, if the energy to create such a hole weren’t more than the entire output of our sun during its entire 10-billion-year lifespan. Even with some kind of gift of magical energy from the universe, however, there is no theory, educated guess, or even wild conjecture made by even the most speculative of mathematicians or physicists about how a wormhole could be held open for more than a nanosecond. As with most
Star Trek
physics, the idea of keeping a wormhole open is more conducive to philosophical, rather than scientific, investigation.

What of higher-dimensional entities, then—that is, if such an idea if even physically coherent? Theoretical speculation reveals that a two-dimensional “being” could travel instantly from one point on a 2D plane to another without having to travel the distance (in two dimensions) between the points by “folding” their two-dimensional world through a higher dimension, our familiar third spatial dimension. (Think of it as having the two pages of a newspaper laid out flat—this is our 2D creature’s literal plane of existence. But by folding the pages together through a dimension one higher (3D space), a 2D creature sitting on the upper left corner could simply step to a spot in the upper right corner and be instantaneously transported to a spot on the upper right corner of the opposite page.

Three-dimensional creatures such as ourselves would “fold” 3D space (if such a thing exists) to travel from point to arbitrarily distant point, appearing briefly in 2D space for the actual transfer. Four-dimensional creatures would fold their dimensional space and appear briefly in 3D space to make
their
leap, and so on.

This is all very well and logical mathematically, but how does one “fold” their dimension “through” a higher dimension? Other than the fact that it would take mathematics and technology far beyond our current understanding, no one has any idea, of course (except perhaps for Madeleine L’Engle, as she “wrinkled” time), and perhaps that’s why Carl Sagan chose to focus on issues literally much closer to home.

What has this to do with my wheelhouse of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and his stories of cosmic terrors? A great deal, in fact, since his Old Gods and Elder Things, although godlike to little carbon-based, oxygen-addicted beings such as ourselves, were actually mostly portrayed as powerful, super-intelligent alien beings that crossed through to this dimension from their own higher plane. Sometimes they were summoned, but most of the time, they found us on their own and for their own nefarious purposes …

NSA SIGINT Data Collection Center, COMINT division

Event + 30 hours

In a traveling wave there are alternating crests of highest intensity and troughs of lowest intensity. The NORAD facility in Colorado happened to sit where it was exposed to the very top of the cresting wave, and its amplitude had jumped arithmetically since its issue from the mind of Cthulhu traveling through our 3D spacetime toward Antarctica thousands of miles away.

Every door leading into the COMINT control room—just like every door and hatch leading into the NSA facility as a whole—had been sealed from entry from outside for the past 30 hours and would remain sealed until the crisis was officially deemed to have passed, which was standard procedure in a security crisis situation like the Event. It was stocked with supplies for a three-year siege, kept at levels and continually adjusted to provide every person in the facility with 2,000 calories and 64 ounces of clean water per day. No one from outside the facility could get in until the security lockdown was lifted by order of the President or highest-ranking surviving member of the US chain of command. The concrete walls were thick, lined with six feet of lead, and of course the mountain surrounded them with a kilometer of rock at its thinnest, making the NORAD facilities impervious even to gamma radiation.

Psionic waves, however, passed through it all like sunlight through a freshly washed kitchen window. Possibly like neutrinos, if neutrinos made you rip people’s faces off in frustration when you can’t get through a thick concrete wall lined with lead inside a mountain.

That rendered moot all of the careful planning to keep its secure personnel well-fed and healthy, because what no one had anticipated was that the people inside would
en masse
try to get
out
during the siege protocol. Such prospective escapees would not able to get through numerous blast shields and other emergency barriers—until the electronic order from Washington opened them, it would be impossible even if one had 50 years to do it. But even if they could magically pass through the barriers, and even if they were not shot (and they were supposed to be shot, according to protocol) before attempting to unlock or bust through the outer doors, going outside in a doomsday situation was inadvisable. So it made sense that this was not much of a consideration by the survival planners inside NORAD and the NSA. No one would be getting out until the threat was officially considered over.

That this was a flaw became immediately evident when the screaming started and all anyone wanted was to escape the terror, the panic, shrieking inside them, making them rush to the north wall of whatever room or hall they were in when the wave struck, to do anything to
get away
from the psionic source thousands of miles to the south.

These men and women, now clawing at their own eyes and smashing their heads against impenetrable bulkheads, had, since their first assignment to SIGINT, to submit to near-daily testing to make sure that they were the most psychologically stable—the sanest of the sane—personnel in the entire US Armed Forces. They had to be, since they were the soldiers and airmen not only with their eyes on other countries’ nuclear arsenals, but also with the keys to launch a world-ending nuclear attack within two minutes of confirming the order.

These most-tested and repeatedly confirmed most psychologically stable enlisted men, officers, and civilians with the highest security clearance possible moved as one animal as they jumped back from their computers and activity monitors, fell over in their chairs, and scrambled to get away from conference tables all at the same time and with equal intensity. Screams filled every room and corridor, shrieks like someone was pressing a hand onto a sizzling frying pan.

To a person, they slammed themselves against the walls facing north, some of them—men and women with slightly different brain chemistries from the rest—realizing that they could not get out this way and thus running for the doors to the room and then to the main doors, screaming even harder to keep the panic from overwhelming them. They had to contain the panic enough to allow them to adjust a few feet to the south—
toward
the horror
—to get out of a room even though they almost lost control of their bladders from terror moving even an inch in
that
direction.

But those with more average, completely healthy serotonin reuptake—no OCD, no repetitive thoughts, no ADD, brains in perfect chemical balance—were utterly unable to push aside the icy terror that was forcing them to flee in a straight line away from the psionic source, away from
Cthulhu
, reducing their faces to pulp and bloodying the north walls of control rooms, bathrooms, hallways, everywhere a barrier to due north stood before them … and everywhere to the north inside the complex ultimately led to a barrier, since the system of doors and hatches to exit the complex was located to the south.