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?
Humans have no knowledge we seek.
Then what —?
I sensed a lascivious energy. Your container is broken.
My soul froze.
Then its maw opened — empty and black as interstellar space. and I understood what Shub- Niggurath meant and more dire, what it sought on earth.
Humans were containers — for souls!
As I was sucked into that blackest of black holes, cheated of all hope of an afterlife, realization crystallized. All over the Earth the globe-girdling clouds hung poised to capture freshly liberated souls every time men died. And we are all predestined to die.
Around me, others like me continued collecting. Soon we began pulsating in resonance to our swelling host. All one. Yet also individual. Parasites, yet prisoners. Powerful, but helpless. Nothing but something. Something yet nothing. Neither matter nor energy. Not particles and not waveforms. Only blind self-aware voids in an unknowable plenum.
I send these thought-forms out to my surviving colleagues. Take drugs. Seek madness. Pray for the gift of amnesia. For there is no other escape.
Absorption finally came, and I became another cold, yet still conscious corpuscle of the insatiable, eternal void that is and always will be Shub-Niggurath.
THE NEW PAULINE CORPUS
Matt Cardin
Seated at a small wooden desk, a humble piece of cypress wood furniture elevated to veritably mythic status by a heaping of fabulously ornate decorative flourishes, he spreads out the papers on the smooth surface before him. A rushing murmur, like the sound of ten thousand voices melding into an oceanic hush, flows through the doorway that stands open and waiting on the far side of the equally ornate room.
The papers are crammed to capacity with a chaotic jumble of handwritten markings. Rows of text run from left to right and then, often, meet the edge of the page and instead of breaking to the next line simply continue on, rebounding from the barrier in curling coils and tracing the paper’s edge in circles that effectively form a written frame around the rest. Some lines appear in ink, others in pencil. Some words are minuscule to the point of near-indecipherability. Others shout hugely in hysterical looping letters.
None make sense. Not on their own, at least. Fragments. That is what he has in his possession. Pieces of a puzzle. Scraps of a portrait. Shards of a mirror, each reflecting and refracting the image of all the others to create a dazzling maze of meanings whose infinity encompasses enormous blank spaces.
The more I dwell on it, Francis, the more I am convinced that the single most fruitful result of the frightful transition which has overtaken us is the resurrection of our collective passion for story, for the specifically narrative understanding of our lives on this planet. I now view the trajectory of my former theological writings toward an almost exclusive emphasis on ontological matters as an egregious error. More than any other religious tradition in human history, our own Christian faith, along with its Jewish forebear, has always been centrally rooted in a cosmic- narrative understanding of human life and the cosmos itself. A reverence for story — as we have now been forcibly reminded — is not symptomatic of a regressive intellectual and theological naiveté but of an unblinking realism. It may simply be the case that the story in which we find ourselves existentially involved as living characters lacks any obvious correspondences with the charming drama we were told from childhood about the Eden- to-Fall-to-New Eden arc of our race. Or perhaps these elements are indeed discernable in our new tale, but in a jumbled order or — more likely — as inversions of themselves. I hope to say more about this in a future letter.
In any event, happily for me, since it means that I do not have to jettison the entirety of my former theological corpus, is the fact that theology-as-story does not preclude ontology but incorporates it. In fact, what has now been revealed to us in our dreadful recent disruptions is the express unity of these two categories of thought. That is, we are living the story of a war between levels of reality. Our metanarrative is the tale of how space-time, the cosmos, the created order, was usurped by a reality that is more fundamental, primary, and ancient.
This story, our story, is a tale of the deeply inner and primordial turning with hostility upon the objectively outer and evolved, and reshaping it according to a set of principles that are incomprehensible and, as we can see all around us in the fact of our wrecked cities with their new and growing populations of squamous, octopodan, and quasi-batrachian inhabitants, thoroughly revolting to the latter.
Under red-glowing smoke-filled skies I thread my way through a boulder field of shattered buildings. Fires blaze and smolder in places where no fuel ought to burn. Twisted chunks of steel and concrete burn like dry-rotten wood. Sparkling shards of shattered windows and doors and street lamps catch the flickering orange glow and ignite from the pressure of the images on their glassy surfaces. A sea of flaming rubble, fifty miles wide. This is what remains of my city and of all the others like it dot-ting the surface of the round earth like piles of autumn leaves raked together for burning.
Here is the heart of the matter, Francis, in a rush of analogies intended to distill the essence of the insights I lost when I shredded my manuscript on that terrible day.