Cthulhu's Reign

phosphorescence.

With a final glance at the world, Stipe stumbled into the mouth of the tunnel, too, but abruptly drew up. “Detwiler,” he yelled, “what did you mean you needed a sacrifice?”

THE HOLOCAUST OF ECSTASY Brian Stableford

It was dark when Tremeloe first opened his eyes, and he found it impossible to make out anything in a sideways or upward direction. When he looked down, though, in the hope of seeing where he was standing — for he had no idea where he was, and was sure that he wasn’t lying down — he saw that there were holes in a floor that seemed to be a long way beneath him and that stars were shining through the holes.

There seemed to be a conversation going on around him, but there were no English words in it; the languages that the various voices were speaking all seemed to him to be Far Eastern in origin. The voices seemed quite calm, and in spite of the impenetrable darkness and not knowing where he was, Tremeloe felt oddly calm himself.

“Does anyone here speak English?” he asked. The words came out easily enough, but sounded and felt wrong, in some way that he couldn’t quite understand.

For a moment, there was a pregnant silence, as if everyone in the crowd were deciding whether to admit to speaking English. Finally, though, a voice that seemed to come from somewhere closer at hand than all the rest, said: “Yes. You’re American?” There was nothing Oriental about the accent, but that didn’t make it any easier to place.

Tremeloe thought that the other might be near enough to touch, and tried to reach out in the direction from which the voice had come, but he couldn’t. His body felt strange and wrong. He couldn’t feel his hands, and when he tried to touch himself to reassure himself that he was still there, he couldn’t touch any other part of him with his fingers. The idea struck him that the conviction that he wasn’t lying down, based on the fact that he couldn’t feel a surface on which he might be lying, would be unreliable if he were paralyzed from the neck down.

“Richard Tremeloe, Arkham, Massachusetts,” he said, by way of introduction. “Have I been in some kind of accident?” He tried to remember where he had been before falling asleep — or unconscious — and couldn’t. “I think I’ve got amnesia,” he added.

“More than you know,” said the other voice, a trifle dolefully, “but the others are a little more relevant in their concerns.”

“Can you understand what they’re saying?” Tremeloe asked, knowing that it was the wrong question, but reluctant to ask one whose answer might provoke the panic that he had so far been spared.

“Some of it,” the other boasted. “There’s an animated discussion about reincarnation going on. The Buddhists and the Hindus have different views on the subject, but none of them really believes in it — especially the ex-Communists. On the other hand. ”

“Who are you?” Tremeloe demanded, wondering why the anxiety that he ought to be feeling wasn’t making itself felt in his flesh or his voice. “Where the hell are we?”

“If I’m not much mistaken,” the other replied, “we’ve been reborn into the new era, beyond good and evil: the holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. I’m not at all sure about the freedom, though. or, come to that, the ecstasy. I shouldn’t be here. This shouldn’t be possible. The memory wipe should have made it impossible.”

“Reborn?” echoed Tremeloe. “I haven’t been reborn. I’m not sure of much, but I know I’m an adult. I’m fifty-six years old — maybe more, depending on the depth of the amnesia. I’m a professor of biology at Miskatonic University, married to Barbara, with two children, Stephen and Grace. ” He trailed off. He was talking in order to test his memory rather than to enlighten the mysteriously anonymous other, but it wasn’t an awareness of pointlessness or a failure of remembrance that had caused him to stop. It was the realization that the stars really were shining through gaps in. something that wasn’t the floor. “Why has up become down?” he asked. “Why aren’t I aware of being upside-down? Why can’t I feel gravity?”

The voice didn’t try to reassure him. Instead, the other said: “Miskatonic? Have you read the Necronomicon?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tremeloe snapped — or tried to, since his momentary irritation was a mere flicker, which didn’t show in his voice. “It’s been locked in a vault for decades. No one’s allowed to see or touch any of the so-called forbidden manuscripts, since the unpleasantness way back in the last century. Anyway, I’m a scientist. I don’t have any truck with occult rubbish like that.”

“Do you know Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee?”

That question gave Tremeloe pause for thought. He blinked and squinted — and was glad to know that he could still feel his eyelids, just as he could still feel the movements of his tongue — in the hope that he might be able to make out his surroundings now that his eyes were adapting to the extremely poor light. He couldn’t. Above his head — or, strictly speaking, below it, since he seemed to be hanging upside-down — the darkness was Stygian. Around him, he had a vague impression of rounded objects that might have been heads, not very densely clustered, and wispier things that were vaguely reminiscent of fern leaves, but he couldn’t actually see anything. except the fugitive stars, shining through gaps in what was presumably a dense cloud- bank. Occasionally, the stars were briefly eclipsed, as if something had moved across them: a giant bird, perhaps.

Around him, the chorus of foreign voice was still going on. If any of the others could speak English, they were content to listen to what Tremeloe and his companion were saying, without intervening.

What was remarkable about the other’s question, Tremeloe reminded himself, when he came back to it reluctantly, was that Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had died more than a hundred years ago. or, at least, more than a hundred years before Richard Tremeloe had turned fifty-six. He was long dead, but not quite forgotten. just as the university’s famous copy of the Necronomicon was unforgotten, even though no one had clapped eyes on it since before Tremeloe had been born. Having no idea how to answer the other’s question, Tremeloe prevaricated by saying: “Do you?”

“I did, briefly — but that was in another place and another time. I infer from your hesitation that he’s long dead, and that you. died. sometime in the twenty-first or twenty-second century.”

“I’m not dead,” Tremeloe retorted, reflexively, although he did realize that if all the other hanged men in this dark Tarot space were earnestly discussing reincarnation, he might be in the minority in holding that opinion, and might even be wrong, in spite of cogito ergo sum and all his memories of Miskatonic, Barbara, Stephen, Grace, his hands, his legs, and his heart.

His heart would have sunk, if he’d had one, and if its sinking had been possible. I can’t feel gravity, Tremeloe thought. Aloud, he said: “Are you telling me that I really have been reincarnated?”

“Yes — probably not for the first time, although it’s impossible to tell how many layers of amnesia we’ve been afflicted with.”

“How?” This time Tremeloe succeeded in snapping. “When? By whom?”

“If you’d read the Necronomicon,” the other voice replied, with a leaden dullness that probably wasn’t redolent with panic because it had no more capacity to hold an edge that Tremeloe’s own, “you’d know.”

“And you have?” Tremeloe riposted.

“No,” the other came back, quick as a flash. “I wrote it — and no, I don’t mean that I’m the legendary Arab with the nonsensical name who penned the Al Azif. I mean that I too, like Peaslee, have lived in Pnakotus. except that to me, it was a home of sorts, though not Yith itself, and I’m not supposed to be out of it any more. The human brain I inhabited for ten years was supposed to have been cleansed of every last trace of me. I shouldn’t have been available for. this.”

“Has it occurred to you,” Tremeloe asked, “that you might be barking mad?”

“Yes,” the other replied. “How about you?”

Good question, Tremeloe thought. This is a nightmare — a crazy