“Ridiculous!” he tried to cry. His right eyeball fell, trailing the debris of nerves and blood vessels, and dozens of jelly-like tentacles writhed in the gaping wound.
“You’re an occultist! You of all people should know that metaphors and analogies can be truth! We painters have known that for centuries!”
“Just playing with words. ”
A smile bloomed on Manabe’s face. A smile of understanding? A sneer of self- mockery? Before I had a chance to find out which, his face was hidden behind a twirl of ropey tentacles, wrapping him up.
Tentacles were already bursting from his ears, from the bottom of his pants legs, squirming, writhing.
“Kanako! Where’s the remote?” I cried.
“Here! But. what?”
I answered as I took the remote control from her outstretched hand. “We’re leaving. Getting out of this spherical hell!”
We ran toward the exit, urged on by a bestial roar from the dining room behind us. Kanako flinched.
“It’s all right.That’s Manabe’s death rattle.”
A horrible
The doorway irised open, a camera shutter revealing a pitch-black world awaiting us.
“Beasts, global catastrophe. Bring it on! Even with angles, it’s better than staying here!”
Wrapping my arm around her shoulders, we plunged through the circular doorway.
WHAT BRINGS THE VOID
Will Murray
It was the dark season of the portmanteau word. Ragnageddon. Yog-Narok. Demondammerung. None of them caught on.
It was not the twilight of the gods long prophesied. It was sunset for the human race. Or sun blot. For the sun’s fate was the first cosmic sign of the uber-apocalypse.
In the Western hemisphere, it was past midnight when the moon simply winked out. Few noticed. It was still there, of course. In the Eastern hemisphere, the sun just shut down. No sun, no moonlight. In the darkness of the void, the stars brightened. Yes, there were fewer of them than before. That hardly seemed to matter.
A bluish filament of light traced across the utter night like a crazed comet. The Sothis Radiant had touched the sun with a groping tendril, extinguishing it with appalling finality. But few cared. Things shifted so fast that the past and its causes were lost in the torrent of violent ever-present change.
I was walking the streets of Washington, D.C. that first night of First Dark. I sensed the moon’s death. Darkly luminous, a weird cobalt-blue cloud rolled in, smothering the night sky. It seemed to hang lower than any terrestrial cloud had any right to hang.
Down from it had fallen two cloudy appendages, like fat tails of some boneless monster. I turned a street corner and there they were. Where they fell, they right-angled like torpid boas. At the blunt tips of each, the misty heads seemed to have taken on the form of squat dogs — a sheepdog and a bulldog. Or was one a chow? They were dull impressionistic apparitions. Both stared at me with their hollow cloudy unreadable eyes.
I reached out to touch one, thinking it some trick of the night fog. It shrank from my touch.
I found a rope and threw it toward the other — the bulldog. I thought to dispel it with its manila weight. Instead, the rope caught in its shadowy mouth — or was caught.
I felt a distinct tug. Dropping the rope, I fled.
Mankind was in a new reality.
The sun never rose again and what the moon did no one knew. An extinguished lamp, it was never seen again. Nor were most of the Milky Way stars. Without them, time simply stopped. It became 2012 forever.
No one knew what killed the global power grid. It simply stopped functioning. A greater night clamped down. Machines stopped cold. But just as importantly, world currencies — reduced to electrons moving unseen through fiber optic cables — collapsed. With no gold or silver to back paper bills or coin, the global economy popped like a soap bubble.
Civilization as we knew it was over within a month. Two unknown satellites rose in the sky eventually, twin orbs of emptiness, one a sickly bone white, the other the hue of coal. Those who knew their
The Old Ones were back, and Great Cthulhu drinking up the vast Pacific in his vaster gullet was the least of the legion. The Poles ignited, burning with a dark electronic fire. New place-names sprang up. Lake Ohio. Chesuncook Pit. Transyl- Pennsylvania. Kalifornia. Nyarlathotep again strode the whelmed Earth, reverse- engineering centuries of human civilization. It was terrible.
Mankind stood prepared to battle this hellish host — only to learn that the invaders regarded man as parasites on their newly reclaimed world.
Some said they merely wished to exterminate us. But there was more to it. Far more.
I was in a unique position to observe it all. Never mind my name. Call me ORV 004 — Operational Remote Viewer #4. I was attached to the External Threats Directorate of the Cryptic Events Evaluation Section of the National Reconnaissance Office.
“External threats” was our euphemism for extra-solar or other-dimensional concerns.
The Old Ones kept us hopping. But that was Back in the Day. Now there was no day — only endless night.
We had our first post-change briefing session by guttering candlelight, like a coven of damned witches.
The Director kept it simple. “I don’t want to hear any crap about end times. This isn’t the Rapture or Ascension. It’s a goddamned invasion, and we’re running a counterinsurgency out of this office.” Pounding his desktop, he growled, “I want intelligence — local and non-local.” He looked at me, the only surviving ORV.
“On it,” I said.
“Get cracking.”
“I’ll need a tasker and a monitor,” I pointed out.
Remote Viewing is an intelligence methodology devised in the 1970s for special military applications. One definition calls it “The ability to perceive, by purely mental means, persons, places and things usually inaccessible to normal senses, regardless of time, distance or shielding.” I was trained under Department of Defense RV protocols, at a sleepy place nestled in the Virginia foothills called the Monroe Institute.
The secret of Remote Viewing is to blind the viewer to the target. If you have no idea what you’re supposed to look at, your imagination can’t run away with you.
No deduction, induction, or adduction possible. Just pure psychic signal.
I lay in the dark and listened to the monitor’s voice. He had no clue as to the target any more than I did. The tasker simply handed him the coordinates, and the monitor read them to me. That way I couldn’t inadvertently access his mind and glean clues by common telepathy.
“Your coordinates are 8646 7944. Target is to be viewed in present time. Good luck.”
I went in. It was like walking through a dreamscape. Fleeting multisensory impressions swept across my mind’s eye. I scanned for resolution.
“I see a black blot,” I reported. “Huge. The size of a city.”
“Can confirm blot.”
I probed the image. “Blot was once a major city. City is no longer there. Not even ruins. I don’t even perceive a soil base. ”
