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 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.