Cthulhu's Reign

time I RVed Dachau. The spiritual emptiness was oppressive and overwhelming. I never wanted to go back, physically or otherwise.

And now, here I was — facing a far worse environment. I could sense it.

Lines of yoked and chained people were being driven into the main gate by a dozen centaurs, some of which had birdlike heads and tentacles for lower limbs, like the ancient representations of the suppressed Egyptian godlet, Abraxas.

I made a nest of branches, brush and other debris and hunkered down to observe closely.

When I had absorbed all my physical eyes could perceive, I closed them and eased into an alpha brainwave state, then cycled down to theta. I do my best work in theta. When I don’t click out.

I focused on the line of victims filing into the factory. What did they represent to the Old Ones? What was their value?

My first impressions were representational and confusing. I saw soda cans, milk cartons, liquor bottles. Clearly I was operating on my right hemisphere. I tried to switch to the left to invoke the clairaudient function.

I heard a single clairaudient word. A mere whisper bubbling up from my unconscious mind: containers.

My eyes snapped open. “For what?” I said under my breath. Can’t be blood. Or H2O. The Old Ones are non-physical. They were busying terra-deforming the Earth — clearing it as the Necronomicon once prophesied — so that it will be vibrationally supportive of their kind. Could they be energy vampires?

I shut my eyes and tried again. This time I set a different intention: containers for what?

A vivid image sprang up. Clouds. The cobalt clouds that had been forming above the Earth, growing by the immeasurable hour. What did that mean? I focused on those eerie apparitions.

In my mind’s eye, they brightened and pulsated. I saw turbulent faces, boiling like thunderclouds shown in time-lapse photography. Demonic faces roiled and shifted and regathered madly. The clouds spread. I recalled reading about the phenomenon of noctiluminescent clouds — mysterious atmospheric vapor formations that had been reported for over a century now — were they somehow more than mere clouds?

Orifices opened in those clouds. Many of them. Thousands. They irised wide, then snapped shut. I was reminded of gulping piranha. What were they doing? Making faces at hapless mankind?

I gave it up. Rolling over in my makeshift shelter, I stared up at the night sky. Metallic-blue cumulus clouds began gathering over the factory like scavengers to a corpse. That meant something. But what?

I upshifted my breathing and climbed back to a beta state. I needed a clear head. The deeper I went into non-ordinary states of consciousness, the fuzzier my thinking would be until normal baseline beta consciousness reasserted itself. The dreaded downside of being operationally psychic.

An hour passed. Two. A dismal line of people continued filing into the factory. Chopped-off screams broke the stillness. But I could glean nothing further on any level of perception at my command.

It had been years since I had astral-projected. I was never very good at it. Just looking and down at my body lying there was enough to give me a jolt and send me snapping back into my physical self.

Yet I had to try. It was the only way in — the only safe way. Or so I assumed.

I lay on my back and drifted into a deep meditation. Fighting a rising fear, I pushed my jagged beta brain- waves flatter and flatter, till they were sine waves, then shallow waves. As they moved toward flatline, I unexpectedly went delta.

The delta state is trance sleep. I don’t know my way around it. But somehow I achieved separation.

Below, I saw my body entangled in brush and hoped I’d get to return to it.

Carefully, I moved away. I was now in the thought-responsive aspect of reality. I had but to think of a place, and I would translate there. I approached the factory with the care of a visible man — which I was not.

At a far corner, away from all centaur activity, I eased in through a broken window. Inside, furnaces massed. The place was full of great smelters and electrical furnaces and the like. Whatever this had been, it was the fiery pit of hell now.

Centaurs with their scourges stormed about. Some wielded clubs. They drove people into the fire. Some humans quailed before the flames. Centaurs quickly dashed out their brains and flung them bodily into the glowing furnace maws.

This was a crematorium!

I was almost disappointed. That’s all?

No. Not all.

It was not a voice. I would not have heard a voice. For I had left my ears behind.

It seemed to be coming from above. I moved to the shadowy vault of a ceiling, through it, and floated above the roof.

Above hung the low-lying clouds. Dull blue, they stared down at me with hollow interest.

Suddenly I felt an irresistible force, pulling me up, higher and fast.

I willed myself back into my resting body. But the force tugging on the eternal me was strong.

Frantically, I looked around and saw the silver cord that anchored me to my mortal form. Still intact!

With a dawning horror, I spied the smoky tendril drifting down from a nodular cloud. It quested coilingly for the silvery filament that guaranteed my survival.

Just as its leading edge bloomed into a scorpion with snapping claws, adrenalin kicked in — and I was yanked back!

I sat up, gasping, clothed in flesh once more. A coldness settled into the pit of my lower chakras and I knew a hyperventilating terror beyond anything I had ever experienced.

“What are those damned clouds?” I called out to the Almighty.

As if in answer, the clouds above pulsated menacingly. God, if he still ruled the created universe, said nothing.

Cold fear turned to hot anger and I resolved to complete my mission.

When my brain cleared, the obvious became obvious.

Back in my days as a lowly NRO Signalman, I was taught that every thing in creation had a unique energy signature, and from it flowed non-local signal information about its identity and fundamental nature. You just had to learn to tap into it.

For a Signalman — and here I mean a Remote Viewer in training — it was as hard and as simple as sending a telepathic interrogative to the target. They explained it that it was like bouncing a signal off an orbiting satellite. Or transmitting an IFF — identify friend or foe — transponder signal to an approaching aircraft.

You simply directed a thought at the target. But the thought couldn’t be couched in words. Sometimes the target was not human or did not speak your native language.

Other times the target was inanimate. They had us practice on vehicles to train us how to interact with non-conscious targets.

The trick was to formulate the question conceptually, or visually, without brain-based language. It was tough, but we learned to do it.

Lying there under the mocking cloud, I mustered up that old training.

I had little to lose and less to fear. After all, it had already attempted to seize my incorporeal form, and failed miserably.

What are you? I beamed up.

Back came an inchoate chaos of thought impressions — largely consisting of roiling cumulonimbus clouds en-mixed with gaseous nebulae, and a sense of ultra-deep spacial regions.

Are you cosmic?

The cloud pulsated. I sensed an affirmative and a secondary sense of greatness. Extra-cosmic, I intuited that to mean.

I sent up another interrogative, and waited for the bounceback signal.

I didn’t quite catch it. Was it calling me the N word? That made no sense. I’m white. I tried again. This time instead of asking what it was, I inquired of its name.

It was sentient. Therefore it must possess a name — if only for self-reference.

The bounceback decoded on the wrong side of my brain. I saw an image. It was a lowly shrub. I had no