She languidly lifted herself from the booth where she had been chatting to one of her oldest colleagues and joined her clique. She found a plain, ceramic pipe proffered by Ivan Kalinsky. The dark haired and brooding Kalinsky had been a failing writer in the 1950's when Cassie had turned him. Two and a half centuries later, nothing had changed for the man. “Tell her.”, Kalinsky pointed at Janet with his pipe.

“The word is there's a rave near the Mauri LZ. A big one.”, Janet Gao, a petite blonde with the distinctive and fine features of her Asiatic ancestry.

“It's near a Lift Zone. Tight security. You all know what happened last time.”, Cassandra cautioned. “Security's provided by the local Shield Inc. Most of them are on our payroll. Or want to be.”, Tamworth Gaines grinned.

“Sounds like you've all decided on this without me.”, Cassandra commented, not unpleasantly.

“Opportunities like this don't come along every week.”, chimed in Gao.

“Alright.”, Cassandra said.

The group of friends finished their pipes and drinks before leaving the old bar. It was in a side street of a nowhere suburb of the Greater Tāmaki Makaurau Metropolitan Region. Cassandra could remember when the mega-city had been separate urban areas called Kirikiriroa and Whāngarei. How times had changed. While some things got simpler, many more got extremely complicated.

The four friends caught a self-drive over to the West side of Tāmaki Makaurau proper, a place renowned once for beaches and surf. Vast towns had vanished into what was called the Mauri Lift Zone. Warehouses and vast numbers of robot workers who were keen to earn extra funds from shadow work made it the ideal place for illicit raves.

As the self-drive crossed the LZ boundaries, Gaines noted wryly they were being watched. Robots made excellent security staff. They could see perfectly well in the darkness and had enough firepower to dissuade even the most dedicated of officers. The four friends were not cops, so they had nothing to worry about. The self-drive stopped a hundred metres from the Dynamic Intel premises, abandoned the year before after the mysterious deaths of more than two thirds of their staff. Even now, no one had a clue about the cause. That boosted the appeal to the organisers of the rave.

Cassandra was the first out and she was mildly surprised that she could hear nothing at all. The gathering was well underway. Music would be thunderous wherever they were. The silence was almost eerie. The small group collected themselves and walked into a foyer where a dozen or more robots greeted them. They were scanned multiple times and allowed through. Cassandra was amused about already being on the guest list. The others would have added her knowing she would agree to this.

Neon markers shaped like arrows on the floors and walls conveniently pointed the way. As they descended through sub-basements, the noise slowly got louder. The choice of music was dredged from the annals of the past. Electronica that had not been made for a century or more. Retro was the flavour of the evening.

In a huge basement, lit with sparking Tesla coils and neon bio-luminescence painted over every spare surface, Cassandra found people and arties all mixed up and dancing. Some were making out and still others were openly making love. This was what the old Puritans had warned society about. Cassie could only thank whatever gods she did not believe that the Puritans had vanished.

Cassandra found a place by a Tesla coil, crackling and sparking as if it were having a riveting conversation with its neighbours, sending sparks overhead in wild colours. A robot waiter brought her a bourbon on the rocks. She smiled at it, appreciating that it had remembered her. The lone woman sipped her drink, enjoying the mellow burn of the liquid as it suffused her throat and body. She smiled warmly at those who happened to pass by with a glance. She did not have to wait long. Ample cleavage and pale skin soon attracted the type of attention she sought.

“Would you care for some company?”, he asked.

A tall, thin man with dark eyes and long, black hair smiled warmly at her. She noted his eye contact was constant and determined. He was dressed in a retro one-piece suit, a style more fitting two decades before he was born. He was a good looking man and Cassandra liked his smiled. She motioned at a chair next to hers.

“I'm Arden.”, he said as he took his seat.

“Cassie. What do you do in life, Arden?”, she asked in her most sultry voice.

“I'm an anti-grav engineer. It isn't that exciting, really. What about you?”, Arden replied.

“I run my own business. Antiquities, mostly.”, Cassandra said.

“Awesome. Do you come to these things often?”, Arden motioned around him.

“Not really. You?”

“Nah. My first time, hey?”, Arden smiled shyly.

“Would you like to get away from this noise for a bit? I'll get the first round.”, Cassandra suggested.

“Yeah. Sounds perfect. Whatever you're having.”, Arden pointed at Cassandra's glass.

“Bourbon on the rocks?”

“Perfect.”, he smiled.

The pair of new friends returned to the surface and found a small garden nestled between two warehouses. The type of place that tried to fool people into thinking they were not in an industrial heartland. Among the manicured paths and greenery were benches and ponds. Cassandra and Arden found a small rotunda with bench seating around the circumference inside. They sat close and sipped their drinks in silence. The stars in the sky were invisible, flushed out by the lights of the buildings and the LZ's launch towers.

Cassandra nestled closer to Arden. She found an arm around her shoulders. She moved in even closer, feeling his warmth against her. He gently stroked her cheek with his thumb. She turned her mouth towards his hand and he lightly touched her lips. Despite herself, Cassandra could feel the old emotions welling up. Arden shifted so he could gently kiss her neck while his fingers continued to follow the contours of her face and lips. Cassandra leant back into him.

An eruption of agonising fire exploded down Cassandra's throat, into her stomach. Her face imploded with searing brands of flame that torched her nerve endings. She tried to scream, but the wracking waves of pain constricted her throat. Arden yanked his arm from around her and jumped up.

Cassandra glimpsed his face. It did not bear any sign of surprise. Through tears of sheer torment, Cassandra watched the charming man observe her in cold detachment. She tried to ask what was happening, but the sound was strangled off in her pain-infested lungs and throat. The effort only made her start coughing up bits of her esophagus lining. Before long, it was followed by blood.

“Ah, you want to know what or why? They all do.”, Adren smiled as he sat down three metres away from the collapsed Cassandra. “A ruse, dear Cassie. How many times have your kind ravaged the innocent at gatherings just like this one? Two can play your game.”

Cassandra looked at him. His eyes were cold and calculating. He rubbed his chin in thought, but about what, she had no idea. The paroxysms brought on by her torture reached new areas inside her. She felt herself lose control of her bowels and bladder. It was the liquefied remains of her internal organs escaping from the confines of her body. She collapsed to the floor of the rotunda, too weak to hold herself up.

“It's amazing what a little natural garlic and special water can do, isn't it? A pity that natural anything is so hard to find these days.”, Arden mused lightly. “By the way, don't worry about your friends. We're taking care of them, too.”

Cassandra gasped and looked into his eyes.

“Oh, yeah. We work in teams. A bit dumb not to, really.”, Arden smiled coldly.

A final, convulsing cough from the core of Cassandra's being brought up the shredded and burnt remains of her lungs and throat. Contorted in her last thoes, Cassandra sank to the floor. A faint pall of smoke and the stink of burnt flesh hung in the air.

Arden simply walked away. In less than hour, there would only be dust. A light breeze would do the dirty work for him.

#Horror #Macabre #ShortStory

No matter how far down he went, he could not find it. Sitting among the remains of incense sticks poking up like rotted reeds on the bank of a stagnant river, Ulthar Greigg tried to focus his mind on nothingness and the impermanence of the world around him. The solidity of his inability to delve deeper was a glaring argument against the doctrine. A friend had once suggested psychedelics, but Greigg was a purist. He might be a lot of things, but taking short cuts for immediate gains was not his style. His knees cracked as he unfolded himself from the lotus position. He almost gasped in relief as the blood flooded back into the old injuries sustained from a previous life. A previous career, really, of which Greigg still felt the very non-karmic results in his present. Another argument, though weaker, against the impermanence of things. Unless death was considered an end to all pain, Greigg chuckled to himself as he walked into his kitchenette to get a coffee.

The single, not-too-hard-on-the-eye architect had been searching for something deeper for a few years now. The delusion that his career was a fulfilling service to humanity only covered the truth for so long. After awhile, even good money could not conceal the fact that he was enabling the whims of society's richest to find form in concrete and glass. The realisation that his greatest works were symbolic representations of others' phallus' hit hard when it finally slammed into the desiccated remains of a soul sold long before.

With a black coffee in hand, Greigg strode into his office to check the last emails of the evening. Most of it was spam and general twaddle from colleagues. He sat at the modern desk sipping his drink and swiping emails into the trash or spam folders. He barely registered one whose subject was 'Appointment: During Third REM Cycle'. Into the spam it went.

Greigg could afford a huge bed for one and that was exactly what he got. He dumped his coffee mug into the washer and crawled into bed after cleaning his teeth. He slipped between the Egyptian cotton sheets and pulled his doona over himself. Snuggled into the warmth and comfort of fresh sheets, Greigg was soon slipping away.

Mr. Ulthar Griegg, I presume?, the deep, resonant voice came from behind him.

Greigg spun around to face a grey-skinned man of gigantic proportions bursting out of a woman's business suit. The man wore full make up and the size of his fingers belied the skill with which he tapped at his computer keyboard. The man smiled at Greigg. The yellow teeth did not bother him as much as the vertical eyelids that blinked at him.

Um...yeah., Greigg murmured in confusion.

Good. He will see you now.”, the grey man replied, gesturing at a door in the wall that Greigg had only just noticed.

As Greigg approached, the door opened by itself and then closed again when the architect had fully entered the office. It was on a high floor of a building that Greigg remembered as a project from his early days. He was standing on the seventy-fifth floor of Yumikon Tower facing a translucent facsimile of himself seated at a large desk that was the same as the one in his home office.

Ulthar!, blob cried as it lurched onto jelly-like appendages to approach him. The voice was that of his mother and father switching on alternate words.

Greigg could only stand rooted to the ground as the thing wrapped him in a warm, damp embrace. As it pulled away, its body slurped and slopped. Air rushed into the gaps opening between them. It motioned at sofa.

Come. Sit, love. A mother needs to talk to her son., the thing said.

Greigg found himself unable to do anything but follow it to the couch by the window outside. Unlike the view from the Yumikon Tower Greigg had helped design, the windows before him were shrouded in mists. The grey masses roiled and swirled along the glass. The facsimile noticed what he was looking at.

The Mists of Truth., it giggled and guffawed in alternation. A hideous sound.

Greigg was sitting on the sofa with the thing snuggled right next to him, its appendage, an arm, laying on his leg. In an unnerving caress, it started stroking Greigg's hair gently, just like he remembered his mother doing. He so desperately wanted to jerk his leg away, but something stopped him. It was more than terror. There was something deeper at work. Something plunged into the core of his own very self.

You look for truth. You want to find Truth. And you are dumb enough to think it is within you., the being said, almost kindly.

A single nod was all Greigg could manage.

Despite all the failure, you still want to find it.

Another nod.

Then it is yours., it declared as its arm snapped out and grabbed the back of Greigg's head.

He could not resist the force of the thing's arm as it shoved his face towards its chest. Waiting for him was a pearly, almost transparent breast, complete with a nipple. Underneath Greigg could see the blood vessels and the fluid pumping through them.

His face was shoved down so hard he could not help but open his mouth over the nipple. On contact, the thing cooed in motherly love. Greigg could feel the engorged breast vibrated with the force of liquid racing to the surface and into his waiting mouth. The warm, acrid liquid rushed in and washed his tongue, teeth and throat as he tried to swallow fast enough to keep up. Bitterness flooded into his body, the taste of the fluid a rancid staleness.

The nipple grew and softened as Greigg drank his fill and more. He felt his face ooze and slide into the nipple and then the breast. The cooing from the thing receded, like it was going down a tunnel. As he dove deeper, the warmth grew and he felt the damp clamminess of clinging jelly and stickiness. After a long while of having his body squeezed more and more by the jelly-like tunnel, Greigg was on a hill naked.

You tried to escape impermanence by understanding it. It should have been clear to you that no thing can be a key to escape from that thing. You cannot escape a prison by understanding the prison itself. You need something else, another item., a voice whispered.

Greigg jumped. The voice came from a foul-smelling mouth next to his ear. A homeless man who had not washed in months was spooning him. The man's face was exactly like Greigg's, except for the copious stains.

All that effort and you failed. Without impermanence, there can be no salvation. Impermanence is the very source of potentiality. Looking for it within yourself is delusion., the homeless Greigg continued.

What do you mean?, Greigg asked.

Impermanence is a good thing, plonker., the homeless man wheezed as he erupted into a coughing fit.

The spoon was broken. Greigg was laying on his bed covered in sweat. He could still taste the milk from that breast and smell the man. He shuddered and got up. There was no sleeping now. Emails and work awaited.

A smelly homeless man far away shook his head in disappointment. A blob-like thing lamented its wasted milk.

#Horror #MindPuke

Loaded Weapon had dragged on for days. Days fueled on Dual Caffeine Boost cola and energy drinks, the likes of which are banned in at least a hundred countries. At seventy-five levels, Doug Turner had never gotten so close. Out of six on his team, only two of them were left. Him and some dude from San Diego. Canon-fodder. Doug leaned into the screen. He needed a better look at where he thought on of the Hissing Vipers was hiding. The Vipers had already sprung two ambushes on them. There would not be a third. He focused so hard he could see individual pixels begin to fractionate. That got his attention. He tried to shake his head and re-focus his eyes, fingers working the controller furiously as he led San Diego Dude through a confined alley between two buildings.

The concrete started lifting from the ground. The walls of the restaurants on either side of the alley began bending and merging in the middle. The sky collapsed in drops. Everything became a maelstrom of colour and light in the middle of Doug's screen. He pulled away to get a better look at the anomaly.

“You seeing this?”, he asked San Diego Dude.

There was no reply.

Doug pulled back even more, but the swirling mass of pixels moved with him. Then they came for him. It looked like a whirlpool reaching out of the screen searching for connection. It fragmented into numerous smaller tendrils that swayed in circular motions, each one reaching for something to attach to. Like a string of seeds trying to anchor themselves in a solid surface, the thin slivers of digital light and shade darted in and out.

Suddenly Doug felt the ice cold touch of something on his hand. He looked down to see a tendril had latched on to his right hand. He tried to drop the controller, but his fingers refused to obey. He felt the dizziness of panic rise as another tendril caught his other hand. More and more of the blue digital lines lunged for him and hit their marks. The cold of each touch spread through him. He tried to jump up, but he was held in a vice of steel. Somehow, they were holding him down as thousands were now leaping from the screen into the hapless player.

He tried to scream as he started to surface through his skin, like someone coming up for air in the sea. He heard a dull snapping sound. He lurched around to see red anchors breaking between him and the physical self he saw behind him. The snapping increased in speed until it became a continuous hum of Doug's psyche being torn from his flesh.

The screen was gone. The room was no more. Reality for Doug had vaporised and vanished.

From the headset on the floor came urgent cries from across the country.

“Pal! Where the hell are you? Dammit! Covering fire! Covering fire!!”, screamed San Diego Dude at increasingly high pitch.

#Horror #ShortStory

Photo by Luke Jones on Unsplash

A singular motorbike crash after a singularly bad day at work just crowned a wonderful Monday. Commuting home, I was confronted by an SUV stopped in the middle of the lane. The drive just gawped at me as the magnitude of his error started firing his synapses. It was a pity that they didn't fire any faster. I hit the skids, the front shocks compressed and the whole thing locked up. It was only a fraction of a second before the bone crunching impact and my brief flight across the SUV's bonnet. Somehow, the windscreen collapsed just before I arrived and my right foot got caught in the frame. Exit stage right, right foot and my boot. They never found the foot or the boot. I remember nothing of the ride to the hospital. They operated, apparently, and waited until I regained consciousness. That was when the first soiling happened. I was still groggy and half out of it, so I wasn't too sure about how real things were. But then, questions of reality take a back seat when your doctor is talking to you with a huge, amorphous mass of bubbles standing over her left shoulder. I was even more freaked out when I noticed six eyes peering at me though the black, gelatinous goo-bubbles. That was when my bowels let go. Doctor Sarah Turner was not a happy camper, but she soon had nurses taking care of my mess. Monos don't really get it.

Having still been doped up, there was at least that hopeful explanation. You see stuff. But even that possibility was wrenched away two nights later. I awoke in the middle of the night, about three o'clock. The other patients in the ward were sound asleep, one of them snoring like a band-saw. I must have gasped when I saw him...or it...or her...whatever it was. Bent over my amputated right foot, a stump just above where the ankle should have been, was a skinny person, dressed in that same clothes I had seen on the Lost Treasures of Egypt show. The person's skin was completely black, like it had been burnt to charcoal. Even its eyes were pitch black, inky wells of horror in its face. When I gasped, the thing turned to me.

“Does this still cause you pain?”, it asked.

I think I passed out without answering.

When I came to, the nurses and Doctor Turner were around the end of my bed. Turner looked furious. The nurses looked chagrined. I looked. The doctor pointed at my right leg in angry pokes of her finger. I saw that the dressings had been removed and there were marks in my skin, like someone had been scraping at the wound.

“Where are the dressings?”, Turner asked me, menace in her voice.

I screamed. This was getting ridiculous. Turner and the nurses spun around, but they could not see what horror stood behind them. The charcoal Egyptian was back, this time it was sucking the dressings from my leg, sucking them clean of any fluids or stained.

“Mind if I indulge?”, it asked me, quite cheerfully, before slurping away on its snack.

If I thought I was getting discharged any time soon, I learned that I was mistaken. I now write this from Arkham Asylum, an institution that specialises in ailments such as my own. The staff here have surmised that I am no harm to myself or others, so they allow me to write on pen and paper.

I don't sleep much. Even other night, I find gelatinous bulges of eyes peering at me or I have to endure the questions and comments of the charcoal pharaoh, as I now call it. The next time you see someone on the street talking to themselves or screaming, just remember. You see nothing. You are blind to everything.

#Horror #Lovecraftian #ShortStory

© 2022, Bryan Kēhua

Photo by Linus Belanger on Unsplash

Obsession is a funny thing. Not in the ha ha sense of the word, but in ways that are ironically humorous when you really get down to it. Mine landed me in the Miskatonic Asylum for the Ontologically Bereft. After months of treatment, I have finally been allowed a pen and paper on which to write the scattered thoughts of a fractured mind. That is what they will think. People only see what they are ready to see. Those with eyes to see and ears to hear will understand more. A warning. An augury of what is to come.

College days are times of youthful self expression for most. I was the one hunkered down over obscure tomes into the small hours of weekend nights between essays, reports and exams. Miskatonic University encourages the curious, even though I needed little to slake my thirsty for knowledge. I never read the infamous work of that crazed Arab writer. Even I was not that stupid. Bent over the rabid scribblings of prophets and acolytes of the Great Old Ones, I became more and more consumed by the quest for knowledge and mystical enlightenment.

The scratchings inside the walls of my dorm started about six months after I had read a little known manuscript from the Antipodes called Servants of Ry'leh. I had decided to study it because it promised to be a report on the ancient cult of Cthulhu. It turned out to be more similar to a grimoire or book of rites. Little did I know that merely uttering words aloud imbued them with power. My whispered readings had been heard, though weakly and incompletely. It was still enough to elicit a response.

The scratchings inside the walls kept up and got louder and louder with each passing night. I rarely slept and even when I did, I was awoken every hour or less. After two weeks, my friends (those who remained to me) began to comment about my pallor. I would mumble some excuse. Trevor Bainwright even suggested seeing a doctor. Advice I dismissed as an over-reaction. The sounds, like fingernails being dragged over blackboards, continued into the night, depriving me of slumber all the more. It was not a sound that one could become accustomed to.

Then the dreams began to emerge from the mists that descended during the light dozes that I managed to steal in the small hours. At first, they were impressions and etherealities, nothing more. Over the coming weeks, the dreams coalesced into more concrete forms. And more terrible visages. The immensity of the horror that reached out for me through these nightly visitations was not apparent until about the fifth week, just before All Hallows Eve.

Many cults of various kinds consider the time around All Hallows Eve one of especial closeness between this universe and others. It is precisely this time when the barriers are thinner between us and other entities that the Great Old Ones can begin to send out their calls. When I saw the disfigured monstrosity covered in tentacles and dripping black seawater, I felt my mind distend and warp. Thoughts became fragments of myself flicked into space and time. No anchor. No connection. I could feel the fingers of darkness and the silence of its summoning squeeze into and pry the parts of my self apart.

I knew it was that book. I knew also that it had been my reading aloud. Yet, I could not stop. Page after page, I read and whispered into the night.

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nfah Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

Sibilant whisperings as if they were spoken in water, bubbling with menace and venom. I was later told that Trevor, worried at my absence from classes for four days, eventually found me howling the above words in an undeciphered tongue in the university's chapel crypt. More embarrassing than anything, I was said to have been utterly naked and unwashed when Trevor stumbled upon my location. What I was doing there, I have not a clue. What I was saying in those words, I have even less idea.

I was committed to this place of healing soon after my sojourn in the chapel. Cthulhu calls and waits. His return is imminent. It can be seen in our world. The seas invade the land. Land sinks into the realm of Cthulhu. Learn to swim.

#CthulhuMythos #Lovecraftian #CosmicHorror #Horror

Photo by Matt Hardy on Unsplash

Aden stared into the maw of his own demise. His mind could not quite grasp what was happening to him, until Greg pointed out that the maw was a half-drunk bottle of cheap bourbon. Aden stared at his best mate blankly. He was sure he felt some dribble wander down his chin.

“You sure you're ok to walk home?”, Gregg asked, looking at Aden on the street.

From his place leaning against a shop window, a Gucci boutique whose doorway he had just used to relieve himself, Aden nodded vague assurances that he was perfectly capable of getting himself home. Greg was half cut himself, or he would not have accepted Aden's promises. He did. Aden feebly waved as Greg walked over to the taxi rank to get a ride to his own pad, a few miles away. Aden managed to get his feet under him. He ambled and shuffled only to find himself in a side street with oddly old shops and buildings all around him. He might have been drunk, but he was sure he had never seen this street before. Some of the shops were ramshackle and dilapidated. Paint was peeling on most and had totally gone on many. Weeds pushed through the pavement, a stark contrast to the rest of the pristine city that only the Swiss could keep so clean. Aden gawped about like a lost child. He peered around him, suddenly realising that a miasma had crept up on him. Choking and smothering, it followed a sickly mist that clung to every fibre of the man.

Aden pushed on along the street. Cheap bourbon promised that the street led somewhere close to home. About three hundred yards along the street, Aden found one store that looked as new as the day it first opened. The bright sign out front identified it as a book shop of rare quality and erudition. It assured passers-by that the store catered to the most refined of minds. Aden liked to think he would be among them. Most of the time, people would have agreed. With a bottle of bourbon in him, that was less apparent. Still, the promise of books and a store that was open all hours was too much for the man to walk past.

He pushed the door open, a little too forcefully. He apologised to the attendant at the counter against the far end of the store. On his left and right, Aden saw shelved piled with dusty tomes, some leather bound and others paperback. All of them were in perfect condition. There was not even a mote of dust on any. Aden squinted at them and leaned in to check.

“Greetings, reveller. What brings you to our humble store?”, the attendant asked, a little too obsequious for Aden's taste.

“I'm just browsing.”, Aden said. At least, that is what he hoped came out.

“A reader of your obvious erudition and refinement might find the counter volumes more to your tastes.”, the attendant suggested.

Aden looked at him for a moment. Something was odd about the man and the way his seemed to be choking on his words. But then the promise of rare and exotic tomes tore all such thoughts away. Aden approached with his eyes firmly fixed on the tomes that were locked inside the counter.

Aden screamed.

Howled.

Wailed like a sick banshee.

Thin tendrils of soft, cartilage reached out and grabbed his arms. Very quickly, more had anchored his legs. All of them were dragging to the counter. All he could smell was mould and fungal spores as the tendrils hauled him closer. Aden made a dumb, but understandable, decision. He looked up.

The attendant's mouth was wide open, much more than humanly possible. He looked like a snake swallowing a rat. The thin lines that had wrapped Aden up extended from the attendant's mouth. A writhing mass of living, alien matter that was hauling Aden in. Aden struggled and pulled, but to no avail.

Darkness. Depth. Void.

#Horror #Lovecraftian #ShortFiction

Image: Photo by Warren Umoh on Unsplash

The resonating harmonies of All is Violent flowed from the stereo system that was worth three times as much as Greville's rusted, puke yellow 1974 Datsun 710. “Cartographers of Human Purpose” alternated between deep sonic wells and soaring highs of pulsating sound born on the fingers of master musicians. Greville drove the damp, glistening road, his headlights scintillating on the rough, black stone. His mind was divided between driving and watching his soul rise on the currents of meditative harmonies. The Seeking must go on. He was aware of this and always had been. The drive toward the inexorable fate and goal of his own mortality kept the Datsun moving, chugging and belching to itself as the old engine, poorly serviced, struggled to fulfil its purpose. The stereo was the only thing that worked properly, or anything close to the concept. The dashboard lights flickered as the battery and alternator fought furiously to keep the entire machine running. Each dimming of the light had long since fused into those before and after. Greville saw none of it and heard even less.

Thunderous, pounding violence reached out from the speakers, a fist from the sub-woofer grasping for Greville's heart and soul. Dark riffs punctuated the air like stark colons glittering through the windshield and night beyond. They reached higher and higher, vertiginous swirls swamping Greville's vision. The steering wheel warped and merged into the dark dashboard, taking his hands with it. Greville tried to scream. He thought he did, but no sound could overwhelm the guitars emanating from his speakers like the denizens of the Pleroma.

Looking down at his feet was a mistake. They too had vanished, consumed by the Datsun's lurking shadows and hidden recesses. Waves cascaded. Forces rolled. The winds of deepest Tartarus erupted from the speakers that were feeding Greville's mind and psyche. His entire head now filled with the crescendo of wild, unrestrained guitar solos of which no hint had been given at the start of the twelve minute song.

The great emptiness surged into the core of Greville's mind and he felt his own life and history vanish into the mists that followed. He did not hear it. He much less recognised what it was. “Memory Complete”, the last track of the EP, kicked into its own rhythm. Greville bowed out of his.

#Mindpuke #Horror #Surreal

Endnote: The music that I listened to while writing this was All is Violent, based in Melbourne, Australia. They can be found HERE.

For millennia, the slumber had continued since the first seed had been planted there among the other giants. Giants whose boughs reached to the clouds that scudded on the winds of ancient breath, standing watch over a vast land denuded of civilisation or those who would come to establish it on these shores.

The slumber was deep and comatose until those first bipeds arrived and began to make noises around him. The whispers were no more than a brushing graze against the very limits of his consciousness, a ripple on the surface of the calm unconsciousness that had been his for aeons past. As more came, more whispered and the whispers became sounds. Sounds added to sounds and became voices. More voices added to voices and they became words and then strings of words. Words imploring and need. Words of reverence and awe. The voices knew nothing of what heard their words of request and honour. They new nothing of the his slumber that had started to end, an awareness that began to rise from the shadows of the dark prison in which he found himself. With tentative ripples that emerged from the core of his mind, he stretched and tested his awareness, sending his spirit out in small steps.

The once great giants were gone. All that remained was himself and the pathetic remnants of a place now desecrated by the bipeds. The voices had begun to dull and recede from his hearing. The words were no more, but by then it was too late. The point of his own rising had passed and he was destined to rise again.

Lights, noise and voices came suddenly to him. He watched and observed from the safety of his prison, now his refuge in his time of weakness. The words reached him again from those who were nearby in the failing sun of the ending winter's day. They had noticed one of their own missing. He had seen the biped wander too close to his prison three nights before. A morsel, a snack. Someone had found the physical husk a day earlier today.

The taste of bipeds lent energy and recovery began to accelerate towards awakening. He felt his mind and soul expand and he was able to reach further. He took another. And another. And more.

The voices returned. Louder and more solemn than he could remember. These voices were tinged and stained with fear. They did not come too close. They remained a distance from him and he left them alone, as the ancient ones had agreed with him.

Yet more came. Thrill seekers who came at night, on a dare or challenge. On the 13th of May, the last one came. A name was spoken from the biped to himself. Sornorthq. He then remembered himself. Sornorthq the Many-Aged. The Sundered. Sornorthq the Slumberer.

No more. The last one, a thing called Jason Tribett, ventured too close. A tentacle reached for him and snatched him from off the ground in a flash of speed. No more slowness for Sornorthq. He pushed open all of Tribett's orifices, ripping soft organs out of the way. Tribett had no time to even cry out. His throat full of Sornorthq's imploding being that was crushing his own soul in the weight of aeons of patient anger.

And then the mind collapsed. Sornorthq fed on the last vestiges of Tribett's life and memories. Every one torn from his psyche and soul with merciless vengeance and hate. A hate born of the natural order of things. A hate birthed in the very nature of the universe, that unknown, terrible darkness of ice and heat that hated all life in it. Sornorthq laughed between the fragmented shards of Tribett's being. Sornorthq was the anti-thesis of life. He was the servant of the universe's natural order.

His awakening showed him a waiting planet. Ignorant and asleep, more so than he had ever been. A feast.

#Horror #Supernatural #Lovecraftian