Cthulhu's Reign

“You’re a genius, John.”

“Now and then.” They loaded the last of the duffels and then Stipe’s into the barrow. “We’re still going to have to leave the third one here. Three’s too heavy.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll stay with it,” Detwiler said. “I know how you like to make off with the goods. And I can wait.”

Stipe lifted the wheelbarrow onto its single wheel. “Yeah, I can handle this okay. I’ll be back in under an hour.”

“Be careful.”

Stipe headed off, shortly disappearing over the rise and into the landscape. Amazing how dark it got without streetlights, Detwiler thought. No wonder we invented them.

He set to work. First he recovered his satchel, which he’d been careful to hide near the tunnel’s mouth. Now, in the dull greenish glow of the fungi at the opening, he pulled out the battered copy of Beckman’s Necronomicon, and with a few loose bricks set it up so that he could read from it. Next he unzipped the duffel. He’d put two of the seals in the bag in order to ensure that Stipe could transport the remaining duffels by himself. Now he hauled them out one at a time, afterwards rolling each to where he could see it clearly in the pulsating glow.

A low, shambling sound caught his attention, and one of the Twinkies slid sluglike into the edge of the tunnel’s luminescence. Detwiler edged back to the book and flipped through the pages. “Regna’d kesin,” he read. The Twinkie flexed as if something invisible had poked it. “K’la ye’hah!” It turned and scuttled away. “Bug- shoggoth.”

Detwiler glanced from the book to the seals. The runes on each were distinctive, and only one bore the correct symbols as illustrated in Beckman’s book. When he was absolutely certain he rolled the other one across the rubble to where an old fire hydrant still stood, anchored to pavement below the debris. Certain he’d end up with a hernia, he lifted the round stone over his head and then as hard as he could dashed it on the tip of the hydrant. The seal shattered. Somewhere, distantly in the night, something squealed like a lobster being immersed in a pot of boiling water. The sound faded. Thunder rumbled.

“Hey!” a voice called.

Detwiler turned. Stipe was approaching with the empty wheelbarrow.

Detwiler walked back over to his duffel and the remaining seal. He knelt beside the book and placed the seal face up on the ground in front of him.

Stipe set down the barrow. “Whatcha doing, man?” “Oh, this and that.”

Stipe stopped. “That’s the book, Detwiler,” he said. “Beckman’s book.”

“Yes, it is. Makes for interesting reading. For instance, I can tell you why Cthulhu’s been hoarding all these seals.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. But give it twenty minutes and he’ll be here anyway.”

Alarmed, Stipe looked around, up at the sky, at the repulsive towers. “He will?”

“Yeah, I got his attention.” He gestured toward the hydrant, the broken pieces of seal standing out in greenish contrast to the gray debris.

“John, you have any idea what even one of those is worth potentially?”

“Kind of. Pretty much all of humanity.”

Distantly, the air vibrated, a quiet, slow rhythm.

Detwiler gestured with his thumb at the book. “According to Beckman, this world of ours used to be Cthulhu’s domain. About eight or twelve millennia ago. He’s responsible for this local area, which is big, but not compared to all space and time. The realm he got booted to from here was a kind of limbo between dimensions. Thing is, honestly, he’s a cousin to the Old Ones. I mean the real Old Ones. They’re not like him.”

“No?”

“Infinitely worse,” said Detwiler. “They’d likely have scorched the whole solar system by now, melted the planets and reassembled them as something you and I can’t even comprehend, Stipe. We don’t perceive enough dimensions.”

“How you know this?”

“Well, I don’t, exactly. It’s what the book says. I mean, Beckman could just be nuts, like we both thought.”

The “whump” of huge and unseen wings grew steadily louder.

“If that’s the case, though,” Detwiler continued, “we’re in trouble here.”

“What have you done?” Stipe stood as if ready to bolt.

“This — ” he tapped the remaining seal “ — this is the second seal. Your Old Ones think of Cthulhu as the cousin you don’t invite to the wedding because he picks his nose and wipes it on the bride’s gown, you know what I’m saying? They gave him our backwater swamp to manage, just to keep him off on his own. The gates are in place to keep him out as much as us in. This seal is Yog-Tetharoth.”

The sound of wings seemed to be nearly overhead.

“You open this one” — he glanced at the book and yelled, “krel’bo’yni Kadath nar’whal Kaekeeba!” then went on as if nothing had happened — “and you’ll reopen that buffer space between Cthulhu and the rest of the family. Suck him right back out.”

Stipe’s eyes were huge. “What are they like, the Old Ones?”

“All it says is, you can smell them, but you can’t see them.”

Something huge, writhing, with red glowing eyes emerged out of the clouds above. Detwiler drew the crowbar from his duffel.

“Of course, it requires a sacrifice. Nothing personal.” He drove the sharp edge of the crowbar straight into the seam down the middle of the seal. With a flash, the greenish stone split in half.

Stipe put his hands out as if to push away from something. His mouth opened in a scream, but the more thunderous scream from the creature above him drowned him out. Cthulhu turned and vanished back into the clouds.

“That’s not right,” Detwiler muttered.

Stipe hadn’t moved or vanished. A pure blackness arising from the broken seal spread up and out, surrounding him but leaving him untouched, save that his face contorted into a mask of revulsion, his eyes watered and he clamped both hands over his nose. The blackness rose like smoke upon a breeze and faded.

Lying flat on the ground, Detwiler glanced over at the book. He read the relevant passages again. “Krel’bo’yni Kadath nar’whal Kaekeeba — that’s what it says. That’s what I said. I don’t get it.” Then the stench reached him. It was like the distilled essence of sulphuric eggs run through an oil refinery and then fired out of a skunk’s butt. He pressed his face into the dirt and groaned.

Stipe, on his knees, coughed and wheezed, “What did you do, John?”

“I–I was sending Cthulhu back to where he came from.” He leaned up on his elbows. “You know when I said Beckman was nuts?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, his translation’s screwy, too.”

Overhead, clouds floated, drifted. Then, as if a titanic soap bubble had reached them, they flew apart. Moonlight spilled down, but distorted and sickly yellow as though projected through old celophane. Detwiler could feel phantoms nearby, invisible, amorphous things that swelled against the very fabric of reality.

“You let in the Old Ones,” Stipe said.

“Uh, yeah. Let’s not mention that to the others, okay?” He got to his feet. He wiped at his eyes, sniffled, choked. “Listen, if we’re lucky, he was wrong about them melting the planets and stuff, too.”

Stipe got up, shook his head like a dog. “I can’t get that stink off me.”

The ruin of a nearby building suddenly flexed and distorted. As if liquid it drew together, the top of it curled like an ocean wave and then stretched into the clouds. The night filled with distant piteous cries of horror, not all of them human.

“We, ah, we might want to go back into the tunnel awhile,” Detwiler suggested. He bent down to pick up Beckman’s book. The stars in the night sky shuddered. “Just till things settle down.” He headed into the