Cthulhu's Reign

The sizzle of the bacon in the skillet doesn’t completely drown out water rushing onto tile as Lynda showers. He can do this almost without thinking: the bacon first, then eggs to soak up the flavor. Lynda always tsked him for that vice, frying eggs in bacon grease, but she can’t stop herself from wolfing down the results. Just an evil way to show my love, he likes to tell her.

He raises the knife above a helpless onion, then stops short. There’s singing, coming from the shower. He freezes, listening, because it’s Meaghan’s voice that sings, and that doesn’t seem right, and part of him knows the many, many reasons it’s not right, but that part of him refuses to share its concerns aloud. And so he shrugs it off. It’s not important.

Back to his task. He realigns the onion and steadies it for the killing stroke. Then something catches his eye. He lifts his hand to his face. His heart starts to pound.

A black growth shivers on the back of his ring finger, just below his wedding band. It extends as he watches, reaches out with twin protrusions akin to a snail’s eyes. They twitch toward him. He feels a painful, pricking sensation, but under his skin, and for a brief flicker another vision imposes over his own, a vision of his own face, monumental in size and monstrous. The inner voice he always hears, the one that comforts and warns him, speaks again, but only says, We wait.

His wife’s singing has stopped. The bathroom door opens.

“Sweetie,” Lynda calls from the shower, “can you bring me a towel?”

“Sure,” he answers, as he positions his hand on the cutting board. “In a minute.”

SPHERICAL TRIGONOMETRY Ken Asamatsu

1

What I saw just before I awoke — the mountain road, winding away beyond the front windshield of the car. Darkness crowding close to the left, the right. Bulging, pallid beasts appearing and vanishing again in the headlights, beams always stabbing on. Their faces, human, on the heads of wild-eyed, shambling things. The monitor built into the console and the scenes of the city it showed. The city was crumbling, turning to rubble from the sky down. The images, washed away under a flood of noise. noise wavering like jellyfish tentacles. The woman wearing glasses in the passenger seat, smoking. I could sense her irritation clearly. I glance into the rearview mirror, see the couple in the back seat. He’s mid-fifties, she’s maybe around thirty. His arm around her shoulder, he whispers something in her ear, then unexpectedly looking forward, speaks.

“We’re here, Kanako. See, the Womb!”

At last a giant white sphere, half-buried in the ground, looms ahead, then suddenly changes into a giant eyeball, staring at us. Their eye.

I scream, half jumping out of bed. Nightmare. No, what I just saw wasn’t a nightmare, was it. it was a fragmentary memory. A memory of the night of April 30, well after midnight, when I arrived here at the Womb.

The Womb, Manabe had named it, keeping the pronunciation even in Japanese. He said the name suited the birthplace of the next generation of humanity. Manabe never refers to it as a “refuge” or a “shelter.” Whatever. So I’ll call it the Womb. But the Mother who holds that womb within her is terrified, facing death.

My name is Tatsuya Izumo. I’m a painter. Hardly the sort of person fit to be the “father of the next generation of humanity,” as Manabe says. He really wanted my wife, not me — I was just sort of baggage she happened to bring along.

My wife Sayoko was a scientist and the architect of the Womb. When rich occultist Manabe asked her to design it, she accepted and took complete command of the project. Then, Sayoko had never thought that the Change he always spoke of would really come.

After all, there were a fair number of rich men and women who believed Nostradamus’ prediction that the world would end in 1999, or the Mayan calendar’s prophecy of catastrophe in 2012. Rich people always tended to lean a bit toward the occult. In Japan, there was no shortage of company presidents who would consult fortunetellers to learn the most propitious date to sign a contract, or turn to feng shui when decorating their company headquarters. So when Manabe asked her to build a shelter without angles, in preparation for the coming “Change,” Sayoko figured it was just another wacky job and accepted. The money was excellent, and as a scientist and an architect she was intrigued by the challenge of building a shelter “without angles” where people could live in safety for fifty years.

Manabe bought up a huge tract of land deep in the mountains of Nagano prefecture, the site for the Womb. The occultists, fortunetellers, and psychics hired by Manabe all agreed that it was the most sacred spot in Japan. In fact, a certain “new religion” had designated it as holy, building their headquarters and temple there. During WWII, their surging strength lead the feared kempeitai police to accuse the religion of lese majesty, destroying the temple and arresting all officials and believers at once. He said nobody had set foot on the land in the eighty-odd years since. And now Manabe was building his Womb on that sacred spot, no matter the cost.

At the beginning, Sayoko thought Manabe was simply using a metaphor when he demanded a shelter without angles. She thought he just wanted a safe refuge. She realized he was speaking quite literally when he saw the first design drawings and refused them outright.

With the haughty expression the rich reserve for their lessers, he berated her: “What do you call this? This is nothing more than a simple bomb shelter! And full of angles! The entrance, the walls, the ceilings. angles, angles everywhere! How could you possibly imagine this could be a shelter! Do it again, and better!”

“Yes sir, President Manabe,” she asked. “Can you provide some specifics for the design?”

“I need a facility without angles of any kind,” he answered, changing instantly from the president of a mega-corporation to an occultist. “You seem to be bright, but obviously haven’t a shred of esoteric knowledge. Fine. I’ll teach you.

“Since it was created, our universe has been the battle-ground for a never-ending conflict between curves and angles. What we call ‘good’ is expressed in the abstract by curves, and what we call ‘evil’ by the angles. The black magicians of the West treasured the pentacle because it held five angles. The mandalas of the East were round, curves without angles. Atzous says that the purest evil in all creation is symbolized by the triangle: it is the evilest shape, because it is formed of the smallest number of angles. The ancient Chinese knew the esoteric meaning of triangles, and so named the triangle formed by the triangle of Sirius the ‘Evil Stars’ for just that reason. Even Homer knew Sirius was evil. ”

And he ordered Sayoko to build him a shelter without angles as quickly as possible, because there was so little time left.

Sayoko thought it was just a figure of speech, his saying there was no time left. She didn’t worry too much about it, shrugging it off as just another obsession of an occultist client.

A little less than a month after Manabe urged her to push ahead, though, it happened. Four prefectures facing the Pacific Ocean — Ibaraki, Chiba, Kanagawa and Shizuoka — suffered a catastrophic earthquake and vanished. They didn’t burn down, or sink, they literally vanished. Naturally the government, the earthquake experts, the mass media, even my wife and I, believed it was the work of some giant earthquake and the resulting tidal wave.

Manabe called us very early the next morning. I distinctly remember being rudely awakened at four in the morning by the phone. I picked up the receiver, and the first thing I heard was “Put Sayoko Izumo on.” Manabe was extremely excited, sounded almost furious.

“It’s started,” he told Sayoko. “Exactly where Teizo Akechi predicted in his Traditions of Esotericism, and exactly as catastrophic. They are returning, and the Gods and Buddhas cannot save us any longer. It is the End Times. We must flee to the Womb in Nagano at once!”

“Sir? Excuse me, sir?” Sayoko broke in. “The Womb is still incomplete. Your plan calls for fifty years, but I doubt it would support people for even twenty the way it is now.”