The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack: 40 Modern and Classic Lovecraftian Stories

by John Gregory Betancourt

Awakening once more, I gaze into the greater darkness, the great hole in space, the black mouth that swallows stars. Accelerating, close to the speed of light, the winged ones bear me into that darkness. Colors shift, stars streaming like some brilliantly luminous fluid, rippling from red to golden to unbearably brilliant violet.

Your theory was that other entities lay sleeping in the Earth, vast powers that orthodox science had never suspected, nor could ever conceive; that the Outer Ones came to speak with them, to exchange dreams, and humanity was no more a part of the process than if the greatest scholars and philosophers and poets had come together for some vast, sublime conversation and all these sages just happened to be infested with fleas, and we were the fleas.

Now an absurd image comes: the stars are swirling like the water down a bathtub drain; no, like a vast cyclone stretching over lightyears of space and aeons of time, and the great numbers of the winged ones are like gnats, like mayflies, swarming into that brilliant abyss, into the mouth of eternity, which shall swallow up the bearer and the stone together; and I shall dwell without pain in the Gardens of Ynath amid my companions, until the ending of time, when the Crawling Chaos takes shape and walks like a man. Then shall I fall down at his feet and worship, and, like an animal, reach up to lick his outstretched hands. That’s what you wanted in the end, isn’t it?

“Hush, now, child, this won’t take much longer at all. To baptize your soul we have to separate it from your body. Take heart from the fact that your suffering won’t be wasted. Even now your pain and shame are floating out like incense to feed those whose glory you can’t even begin to comprehend.”

My old neighborhood had become a hollow place of blackened brick and faded gray clapboard, peopled by phantoms from my past, by vanished friends, by deceased neighbors, by the aging effigies of my parents in their final, precipitous plunge into decrepitude—by everything I thought I had broken free of, the dust I thought I’d stirred for the last time, the chains I thought I’d cast off one evening, ten years before,

I thought I knew, or remembered, or dreamed, that the Castle of the Chronophagos, the Eater of Hours, Devourer of Time, was like an endless, dark labyrinth, from which no one who had entered there could ever escape, for once our days and hours, our lives have been taken by the Chronophagos, the Chronophagos may rehearse them over and over in memory like lines from an old song, or a half-forgotten prayer, while we must drift helplessly like paper cutouts on a black stream.

Father Gregorias sat with us and dismissed all talk of ghosts, discoursing instead about the Chronophagos, which, he said, was a remote cousin to the medusae, but far older, a thing made of living stone, out of the stone flesh of which this castle and the surrounding forest had grown, like hair from the head of a man who lies alive but sleeping in the ground for countless centuries; a thing older than Satan, about whom Satan had much to say; some monstrosity that fell from the unimaginably remote depths of the sky long before the birth of Adam; that which lay dreaming and waited until the stars moved in their courses to announce the world’s last night, when it would be so gorged with dreams and with the stolen lives and memories of men that it would awaken to break the Earth apart in its hands as a man might crush an eggshell.

I closed my eyes, and contemplated the incomprehensible stone face which had fallen from the stars and lay in the earth. It opened its eyes, and they were mine, and I looked out through all my memories and accumulated, stolen dreams, and understood that I was the Chronophagos.

I am afraid, when I lie in darkness, that the Chronophagos has already devoured the whole world, so that all our lives, all our histories and wars, are just the dreams of the Chronophagos stirring, as a child with a stick stirs mud on the bottom of a pool. Who can say that it is not so?

I must act now if I would retrieve the finger, which still might be reattached. And I was eager to demonstrate to that vile woman as soon and as forcefully as possible that a professor of anatomy, armed with a sword, should never be provoked to a competition in dismemberment.

A man kept in a lightless dungeon for twenty years could have been no more thrilled by that voice than I. I had lost all certainty that the world existed, that other creatures than myself existed, that I was not a mad worm in a demon’s bowels.

I was starved for light, color, distraction, and I found these in the stained murals. The antique hairstyles and unfashionable voluptuousness of the doll-faced wantons were like a peephole on my grandfather’s youthful daydreams. Even the graffiti had charm; but among the specimens of wit that was old-fashioned when I was a boy, the names of lechers whose fires no longer burned and praises of fair ones long past fueling them, my eye fell on one inscription that unnerved me. It may have been a joke or scurrility or even a religious message whose meaning had died with its author, but I doubted it: “Blessed are they that eat and are consumed not.”

Their faces were hideous staring masks, fishlike in contour, with parrotlike beaks and great staring eyes covered with a filmy glaze. Their bodies were amorphous things, half solid and half gelatinous ooze, like the iridescent slime of jellyfish; writhing tentacles sprouted irregularly from the ghastly bodies of the things. They were the offspring of no sane universe, and they came in a blasphemous hissing rush across the room.

The district’s religious diversity program, Different Voices, Different Ways, has been on the hunt for nontraditional faiths and yours certainly fits the bill. Mind you, I’m not judgmental. While I have never heard of Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, or any other Great Old Ones, I’m certain your beliefs are sincere and your books will contribute to the rich cultural mosaic that is Los Angeles.

From the artwork, I gather kids will be opening those doorways you’re so fond of and allowing Earth to be engulfed by nightmarish Great Old Ones who topple cities and crush horrified humans. Meanwhile, the children who opened the doorways will be honored and given power over continents. (As well as pesky brothers and sisters? I kid.) Clearly this message of perseverance winning out over adversity via belief in an underrepresented religion will be well received in diversity circles.