Cthulhu Attacks!: Book 1: The Fear (24 page)

The suggestion:
Cthulhu is real. This is all real. You believe this implicitly. You do not have to worship these entities in order to believe they are all very real. They are all very real.

Just in time for the Security Council videoconference, Patterson finished Berry’s instruction. They walked out of the side room and into the Sit Room, where three completely unfamiliar faces were on the screens for Great Britain, China, and France. The Russian President, Zhikin, was the only face the Americans recognized, even if it was redder and puffier than before.

Patterson, Steele, and Berry exchanged glances that said it all:
The other leaders are dead or insane. And Zhikin is alive only because he is dead drunk.

“I have one question for you all,” Steele said, knowing that none of them were likely to have translators. He just hoped that somewhere in the ranks of their respective countries’ diplomatic corps, someone who could speak English had survived. Zhikin, he knew, could understand English even if he could barely put a sentence together in that language.

The other leaders, two of whom looked very young indeed, nodded in acknowledgement and listened intently.

“Are you in possession of your country’s nuclear codes?”

Zhikin let out a belly laugh, leaving the others to nod again after a few seconds of conferring with other survivors of their chain of command. They looked frightened—actually, they had looked frightened and sweaty under the lights before Steele had even spoken—but they all nodded.

“Good,” Steele said. “Time to dust them off.”

To a man (and one woman), they looked confused at this bit of English idiom.

“Excuse me. Let me say it another way,” the President said. “It is time to shoot every nuclear warhead we have against the
monster
.”

This they understood. And all nodded again.

Basement, Office of Science and Technology Policy

Event + 34 hours

The seven scientists who had cracked open a high-grade mercury thermometer, volatilized the liquid metal, and breathed deeply of its fumes spent the next hour insensate, rolling around on the floor of the basement lab and muttering to themselves at varying levels of volume. Eventually all of them lost consciousness and dreamt of Cyclopean cities at the bottom of the sea, sublime in their terrifying beauty.

When they awoke, one by one within five minutes of one another, each scientist’s first thought was that the power must have finally gone out due to no one being left alive or sane to maintain the power grid. It was midnight and the basement lab had no windows, so of course it would be pitch black without electricity.

Except the emergency lights should have been on. They automatically came on if their sensors told them no power was flowing. Besides, they were on the White House grid, weren’t they? Betty Baker wondered.

We might be on another grid entirely
, came Norm Tyson’s voice. Except it was in Baker’s head.

Norm?
went Baker’s voice.

Betty?
went Tyson’s.

Are you reading my mind? I’m not talking—I’m thinking.

But we ...
Tyson’s thought trailed off as he and the rest of them remembered that they had taken in concentrated mercury fumes to induce psychosis or other mental disorder—hopefully temporarily—and truly did not feel any malign influence from the antipodal creature sending out its psionic waves. But sense it they did.
Oh, boy.

Can
everybody
hear my thoughts?
Betty Baker enunciated within her speech center but without speaking aloud, still lying prone, as they all were.

No,
Len Sibbald replied silently,
that is ridiculous. Breathing poison doesn’t give you magical powers.

Baker thought the words
Telepathy could be accomplished if our brains had more electrical power, or maybe this ‘psionic’ energy Great Cthulhu has the power to reach every human mind in the world. His energy could be acting as a ‘carrier wave’ and allowing our thoughts—

Whoa,
Norm Tyson thought,
what is this ‘Great Cthulhu’ business? Have you lost your … Oh, boy.

It worked,
Sibbald thought.
We’re insane. Now I crave the presence of Great Cthulhu in all his glory. I feel Him in my mind. I think I’m going to kill myself—I don’t want to live in Magicland.

Take it easy, Len,
Tyson thought.
This might just all be in my mind. I could be imagining all of you sending your thoughts. Insane people think that all the time.

Len thought testily,
If anyone is the one hallucinating, it is I.

Li Clarke thought something in Chinese that none of the rest of them understood.

Molly asked,
Does anyone here know any Chinese?

A round of
No
followed, except for Li, who thought,
I do!

Mental laughter from all.

Bob?
Tyson called into their shared thought-space.
Bob, wake up, man!

Nothing. Tyson could feel the anxiety in all of the other minds.

Baker thought,
Also, where’s Ron? Ron, give us a shout-out so we know you’re okay!

Again nothing. Not only did Nye and Lieb not answer, but none of the others could feel their mental presence like they could feel one another’s … and Cthulhu’s.

Tāmen dōu sǐle!
Li cried in Chinese, then translated immediately:
They dead!

“Not necessarily,” Norm Tyson said out loud, trying to will himself back into what he thought of then as the
real
world. “They could still be unconscious, or just not able to communicate telepathically.”

As he said these words, Tyson realized he couldn’t hear himself speaking. He could feel the buzz in his skull as his vocal cords made the sounds, he could feel his mouth moving, but it was completely silent in the room.
Did anyone hear what I just said?
he thought.

Variations of
You didn’t say anything
came from all of the people Tyson could sense in the room. And that was another thing:

Do you guys
feel
each other in here? I mean, without seeing or hearing anyone normally? The way that we feel … shit, the way that we can right now feel Cthulhu far away.

Tyson could feel the vibrations of loud shouts and maybe screams in the room, coming from the people he sensed were there.

We’re deaf!
Molly Gibson thought with shock.
And blind!

I think the lights are just out
, Sibbald sent out.
And maybe the deafness is only temporary. Mercury is some bad juju, but its effects don’t last forever once it’s removed from the environment of the sufferers.

Unless it kills you,
Gibson added.
We could be dead
.

Everybody stay calm
, Tyson thought as he uncurled himself from the floor and shakily, achingly, pulled himself up by feeling around for and then clutching the marble tabletop of a lab station. Every single joint in his body—including the fused ones in his skull—ached like … well, like he had just ingested a deadly substance that very nearly killed him.

It was absolutely pitch black, but Tyson had spent many hours down in this lab and remembered even without seeing where it was that Bob Nye and Ron Lieb has been standing when they inhaled the mercury. He couldn’t sense them like he could the other people in the room (and now that he was getting his bearings, people outside as well). His foot pushed against something on the floor, and knelt down carefully to feel what he now knew was a person. He found the face and felt only slightly stubbly skin, not Ron’s bushy beard.

This was his longtime friend, Bob Nye. Tyson traced his fingers across to Nye’s jugular and pressed.

No pulse
.

What? Who has no pulse?
all of the other living scientists thought, approximately, in unison.

Bob is dead, guys
, Tyson thought.
He must have just gotten too much.

Ron is dead, too
. It was Sibbald’s voice in their heads now.
I just reached him.

We all dead,
Li thought.
Just spirits now, looking for our next rebirth
.

That’s not helpful, Li.
Sibbald sounded annoyed at metaphysical talk even in his telepathy.

Let’s take a moment, guys
, Tyson sent out to them. Even though he knew time was of the essence and no one could see him, Tyson stayed to his friend’s side and bowed his head.
The world has lost two most beautiful minds.
He placed his fingers on Nye’s eyelids and closed them. He could feel them immediately open back a bit, making Tyson smile a bit at reality once again disproving what worked in the movies.

Oh, no … Ron,
Betty Baker’s mind moaned from the other side of the next lab station. She too knelt down and was joined by Li and Gibson, who had also revived themselves. They could all feel one another’s presence. By the time Sibbald joined them, Baker was already asking the group,
Should we say a prayer for them?

Every single one of them—including Li, despite her knee-jerk cultural comment—knew that they were all materialists to their very marrow, but somehow a prayer still seemed right. Together they chanted, in a tongue no one in the group knew, but which all could understand as if it were in the plainest English. The R’lyehian meant

In thy name let us behold the Father,

From the depths of the waters I come,

And from the depths the Deep Ones also have come,

Hail to the ancient dreams,

Hail to Dagon!
             

Well, good thing
that
wasn’t weird
, Sibbald thought.
By the way, I just checked the time using the glow-light on my watch. Couldn’t see a thing. We’re blind now, I believe.
”

No screams this time. The room had been
too
dark, without even the light from red blinkers from battery-powered computer backup systems. The news wasn’t really a surprise to any of them.

But we can sense
people
. Maybe we should go toward them?
Gibson thought.

I’d rather go toward Great Cthulhu
, Sibbald responded.
I think I’ve lost my marbles.

No, we all feel it,
Tyson thought.
Let’s try to get out of here and see if anyone can tell us what’s going on.

We
know
what’s going on, Norm,
Sibbald sent to him.
We may be the five best minds left on Earth—let’s not abandon evidence quite yet, okay? We know we’re blind and deaf from self-administered mercury poisoning, which killed two of our colleagues. We also know we can sense the presence of humans—now that I take a minute, I can sense the presence of
all
humans, near and very far away, in whichever direction my blind eyes are pointing.

Yes!
Li thought.
That’s exactly! Like electric torch beam spreading out, getting weaker, but still illuminating!

So many are running. Why are people running?
Gibson sounded stunned.

Sibbald continued,
And we can sense
Cthulhu
, moving along the ice toward the South Pole. So we
can
see, in a fashion.

I can see his vestigial wings,
Baker said, sounding awed.
He still looks like a cloud, though Why does He look like a cloud?

We have a lot of big questions to answer
. Tyson thought.
But first, let’s see if we can get ourselves out of this room.

30 km from the South Pole

Event + 34 hours

The entity that the world now called Cthulhu was able to move more quickly on the ice shelves of Antarctica than it did when just part of it was in this dimension, the herald form clearing the passage lane of any extraneous three- or four-dimensional obstacles. Even though it was just a projection of the actual entity, it still held the psionic powers of the corporeal Cthulhu. This was necessary to clear out any life forms that might possess sufficient intelligence to create obstacles that would interfere with the matter-to-matter-to-matter travel that the Old Ones used. What we call “humans” were to them like bacteria is to us: noticeable only when in large conglomerations that could cause unpleasantness. Even then, the psionic signal was pulsed without knowledge of or regard for what it would destroy; it was like spraying to kill bugs that may or may not have been there.

The passage lane from what we call Point Nemo to the southern pole of our planet was an important one to the Old Ones and other four-dimensional entities. The gulfs of space are vast indeed, and for them to voyage far, it was necessary for them to move from matter point to matter point. In their four-dimensional existence, these matter points in the third dimension could be reached simply by folding the fourth dimension until the two points touched. From there they could hop from matter point to matter point, able to cross the galaxy in less time than it would take to travel to the nearest star through a flat fourth dimension. The herald form had swept clear portions of every collection of matter massive enough for gravity to make it a coherent body.

What humans call the solar system exists far out on a spiral arm on the opposite end of the galaxy from the spiral arm of the realm of the creatures and entities of what Lovecraft listed uncannily in his fictional bestiary. The Old Ones have existed for hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years, and so their constant psionic waves, traveling at the speed of light, had reached Earth—100,000 light years away—long before mammals even existed. Very few lifeforms were sensitive to the content of these waves, which were of course extremely weak by the time they had traveled that far. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was no clairvoyant, but the particular chemical makeup of his neurotransmitters and receptors allowed him to “see” the content of their psionic emissions when he was asleep and free from sensory distractions.

Thus Cthulhu’s herald form had touched on every planet, dwarf planet, star, comet, asteroid, and other three-dimensional matter between its side of the galaxy and ours. Once it reached a matter point and dipped back into the third dimension, it was subject to the gravity and other conditions of that matter. On Earth, the path needing to be used stretched thousands of kilometers from Point Nemo to the South Pole.

Once the path was cleared on a matter point such as a planet, the corporeal forms of the alien entities were able, by using their folded third dimension, to hop through vast swathes of their four-dimensional universe. Being 3D, humans can’t perceive a folded area of spacetime, but to the higher-dimensional beings, our matter was like a path brought together only by the manipulation of the ground between disparate stepping stones.

When it reached the South Pole in a few hours, the herald form of Cthulhu would vanish from our portion of three-dimensional space and appear at the next matter point—maybe Earth’s moon, maybe Venus or Mars, depending on the orientation of the planets—having stepped from one folded portion of four-dimensional space to another. At that point, the matter point we call Earth would be the new farthest destination from the Old Ones’ realm, and the most curious or adventurous (if those terms even made sense when applied to these entities) creatures of that far-off realm would be free to explore this new sphere at their will, any sentient life above a certain level of complexity having been eliminated.

At least, this had been the plan when Cthulhu first visited Earth hundreds of millions of years ago. When the stars had gone wrong.