Cthulhu's Reign

idea what it meant, and sent that puzzlement upward.

I sensed laughter. It was cruel. It mocked and threatened the way a storm cloud threatens rain. I felt as if any minute now I would be rained on by the most hellish precipitation imaginable.

Visions of viscous black rain came to my mind. I could not tell if this was precognition or in the nature of an imminent threat.

But no rain came, black or otherwise. I relaxed, remembering that it had not rained since the night of sun blot.

I got up and reached into my backpack where I carried my E-reader. It was standard issue, loaded with only one text — the Necronomicon.

I started a word search. First I tried “shrub.”

Not Found, it read.

I next tried “cloud.” I got several hits. But the first was “cloudy.” I almost skipped on to the next one when my eyes fell upon a phrase: “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young.”

Not “shrub.” Shub-Niggurath!

I looked up. There was nothing goatlike about what was floating above my unprotected head. Nor was it truly black. Dark yes, but in the way a thundercloud is blue-gray.

Could the ancients have got it wrong.?

I raced through the other hits and they made my blood run cold. Finally, I was back at the first hit. This time I read more carefully.

The Necronomicon described in spare terms the malign intelligence called Shub- Niggurath as “a vast cloudy entity of unknown source or purpose,” almost always spoken in the same breath as the Black Goat of the Woods, which has long been identified as Shub-Niggurath.

What if Abdul Alhazred was in error? What if they were two separate beings, linked ritualistically, but not otherwise?

What if staring down from the unreflective sky where the alien satellites Nug and Yeb raced drunkenly was the hellish incomprehensibility, Shub-Niggurath?

They say if you possess the name of a thing, you gain control over it. So I made my next move.

Are you Shub-Niggurath?

Back came a splintery confirmation. I did not understand the splintered aspect of the nonverbal reply, but since more clouds had gathered under the perpetually night sky, perhaps Shub-Niggurath was in the nature of a colony of beings, or something that could separate and reform like amoebae.

What is your purpose?

Back came a stark clarification. It was virtually in English.

To help clear.

Clear what? I beamed back.

The Earth.

Of what?

Of all.

What is your specific function? I was thinking in English now, and was answered in kind.

Back came a sense of a box being opened. It turned into a tableau — a sea of humans seen from the waist up, eyes dead, the tops of their heads opening like a soft-boiled eggs being shelled, and a golden light streaming upward toward waiting clouds.

Hungry clouds, with rapidly irising orifices.

“Knowledge? You drink knowledge!”

Shub-Niggurath only communicated a thirsty impression.

I ran then. Foolish flight or fight conditioning, I knew. But I had to get this intelligence back to headquarters. Damn, for a cell phone that worked!

The cobalt cloud followed me, hurling a chilling thought at me: No escape. No escape for any human.

Three towering centaurs abruptly converged on me, responding to commands from my pursuer, I sensed. Loops of some rubbery matter dropped over my head, constricting my neck. Helpless, I was dragged back to that hellish factory.

We came to a fenced-in yard where debris and detritus lay in forlorn heaps, lit by fitful flames. A charnel odor hung over all.

There was an altar. And before it a great black statue in the shape of a man.

But the man had no face. It was gargantuan, uncaring, pharaonic. It struck me as hauntingly familiar. But my oxygen-starved brain couldn’t process anything.

I sent out an interrogative. Back came an accursed name: Nyarlathotep.

But it was not the literal Crawling Chaos, only an idol created in his image, formed of fused bonemeal — human bonemeal. For the carbonized cremains of those who were processed through the human rendering factory were not wasted. All this I sensed in a pounding heartbeat.

They laid me on the altar, which had the coolness and shape of a gigantic anvil — an anvil on which mankind was now being hammered into extinction.

My wrists and ankles were held down. I struggled, but the centaurs were irresistible in their obdurate strength. I was finished and I knew it. A curious calm came over me then. I relaxed. Suspecting a trick, the centaurs tightened their grips.

I took several slow breaths and prepared to die.

When death is this close, the mind shifts into a pre-death mode. Inevitability helps the process. I would be killed, after which my soul could escape from my body. This time for eternity.

But I possessed spiritual tools most ordinary people don’t have. I made a prayer to the Infinite Spirit God whom I acknowledge, and prepared to commend myself to the Vastness.

Various theories and belief systems kaleidoscoped through my unnaturally calm mind. Would I be absorbed into the Allness like a drop of spiritual water into the ocean of God, surrendering all individuality? Would I transition to a place of astral regeneration, there to await a future existence? Would I plunge into eternal life, according my earned rewards?

I let all these concerns wash over me, then let them go. I would die soon.

And I would know the ultimate truth almost as soon. I had no fear.

For I was about to go beyond the reach of the Old Ones and their terrible universal hegemony. The Earth was now theirs. I only hoped that the realm which awaited me was greater than the spent one I was about to vacate.

I harbored no Earthly regrets. But I did have a spiritual ace up my sleeve. I waited for the beginning of the death stroke. It soon came.

One of the centaurs lifted a crude tool I could barely make out in the smokestack glow. Was it a cudgel? A blade? I could not tell. And I felt myself disassociating from all concern.

When the downstroke began, I departed from my body. Pop! Clean separation.

This way I would feel no pain of slaughter.

I floated face down. Fascinated yet detached, I watched my very brains being spattered about. The silver cord severed. I could feel it, see it — and I accepted it.

Slowly, with my mortal form jittering in death, I began ascending heavenward. A peace washed over me. I was going home. I knew that now. Home. I didn’t know its name or its form, but I could feel it tugging me toward its uncharted territory.

Smooth as a swimmer, I rolled my orientation skyward to focus on my immediate if unknown future. I half expected to see archangels in flight.

Instead, I beheld the awful nodular countenance of Shub-Niggurath. It gazed down with sharpening visage.

Out of my way, I directed. You can’t hurt me now.

Not knowledge, it said clearly.

What?