The incarnate voice emerges onto the balcony. The crowd roars, raising hands or fins or webbed claws and screaming in desperation or delight, singing a hymn of horror to the face in the sky.
The voice begins to speak, delivering its opening blessing: “Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!”
Inside the ornate room he continues to write, binding the pages with a meaning that can only be known, not spoken.
The answer, Francis, must surely be found in the implicit order that lies buried in all of this chaos. Embracing it is our salvation. God’s ways are not man’s. To Him a thousand days are as one, and one as a thousand. He is terrible to behold. Our religion, all the world’s religions, may once have kept Him out, all unknowing of their true role, but now they, we, have become His conduit, again ignorant of our purpose until it is upon us to fulfill.
Gaunt faceless gargoyles hover on black leathern wings above the assembled multitude, showering whitefeather plumage as they beam benevolence from gold-glowing countenances.
The Lord God sits on His throne above the throng, towering above the basilica in a redblack inferno. His crown burns black. His beard coils green.
In these letters I intend to present you with the rudiments of a viable theological recalibration that will explore the avenues opened up by these shocking juxtapositions, and that, in doing so, will safeguard the possibility of our salvation, albeit in a much modified and, as I fear we shall be unable to keep from feeling it, far less agreeable form.
GHOST DANCING
Darrell Schweitzer
By the time he’s on the beltway around Boston, heading north, he’s got the road to himself. But the radio still works and, although it mostly picks up static, every once in a while there’s a clear voice, often just babbling or screams or frenzied prayers, but once or twice something approximating a coherent news summary, describing incredible scenes all along the coastlines of the world: mountains of flesh, miles high, roaring up out of the depths, tidal waves and tsunamis wiping out major cities in minutes. New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington are gone. The air overhead looks overcast, but he can smell the oil and smoke, and he knows that’s Boston burning.
North. He has nowhere to go, really, but he’s driving north, all because of a last-minute emaiclass="underline"
Eric — Why don’t you come up and see me? Now’s as good a time as any. Cthulhu fhtagn, old pal.
— Robert Tillinghast
He hasn’t seen Robert Tillinghast since college, almost thirty years ago, but Tillinghast is right, it is as good a time as any, because as far as Eric Shaw is concerned, time has ended, and his life ended too the day his wife and two daughters went to New York to see a show and just happened to be there when something the size of several dozen blue whales misshapenly lumped together with several giant squids tossed in for good measure heaved up out of the Hudson and came slithering up Broadway with tentacles flying like whiplashes, toppling buildings until the whole of lower and midtown Manhattan looked like “one vast pyroclastic flow,” in the words of a newspaper reporter filming it all from a helicopter before something suddenly shot up and snatched him out of the air like a frog’s tongue zapping a fly.
Once, when he stopped at a deserted rest stop along I-95 in Connecticut, he sat down in the McDonald’s concession after helping himself to a cold hamburger, and he opened his laptop, got on the Internet, and saw that footage again.
The net was still up then, miraculously. But that was hours ago. It’s gone now. In a fast- moving world, hours ago is forever. Now, he doesn’t need the net and its wild speculations to tell him the nature and cause of the worldwide catastrophe, of the ending of the reign of mankind on earth. He knows that. Robert Tillinghast knows too. It’s their secret.
Their guilty little secret, because just maybe they might have had something to do with how things have turned out.
So he can only drive, and by the time he reaches that little stretch where 95 crosses a narrow strip of New Hampshire it is getting dark, and a thick fog has set in. He is still too, too terribly close to the coast, when he hears a bellow like a thousand foghorns, deafening, and something best described as a centipede the size of the Queen Mary with legs as thick as telephone poles comes lumbering out of the woods to his right, grinding up the highway into rubble as its legs slam/slam/slam down in front of him, behind him, as the black shadow of the thing passes overhead and by some dark miracle he is not crushed. This is no dream, no hallucination brought on by fatigue or grief, but something definitely there. A minute later he is alone again, desperately trying to pick his way by the light of his headlights through the less mangled bits of the road surface until he can reach a more or less undamaged portion. By then there are more bellowing sounds, more of those things coming out of the woods from the direction of the ocean, but he is, at last able to reach solid, flat asphalt and speed away.
Maine, when he was a child, into his adolescence, was a summer wonderland, where the family went for month-long vacations every summer, his home away from home, where he had a whole different set of friends, where he met and dated his first girlfriend.
He starts to see familiar signs now: Kittery, York, Portland, Yarmouth, Bath. There he has to get off I-95 onto the more winding, semirural Route 1 and follow the coast. Too damned near to the water all the way. Why the hell couldn’t Robert Tillinghast live in, say, Kansas, for God’s sake?
He knows perfectly well why. It is their little secret and has a great deal to do with the present circumstances, if very little to do with God.
So it is when he finally, finally reaches the vacation-land of his youth, and winds his way through a half-destroyed, still smoldering Rockland, and has a bizarre encounter with a dozen men and women who come streaking out of the darkness clad in white, trailing tatters like something out of a mummy movie, screaming and babbling, clawing at the windows of his car. After that little snapshot of mass insanity, and a slow crawl through a deserted but picture-perfect Camden — yes, there’s the library, the Village Restaurant, that overpriced bookshop, the schooners in the harbor; he knows every brick of this place; nothing has changed in twenty years, except of course that the world has ended in the meantime — after all that, with no time, alas, for wallowing in nostalgia, Eric Shaw, grieving father, widower for less than forty-eight hours, finally arrives at the address he has been given, one of those huge halfgingerbread, half gothic Victorian piles he’d driven by so many times during vacations in the past, the sort of place that tends to get broken up into apartments or turned into resort hotels these days; except for this one, because the Tillinghast family has always been unbelievably, fantastically wealthy.
After suitably spooky preliminaries, including standing on the cavernous porch for a moment and looking down over sloping lawn into the blackness where something like a series of enormous, glowing paper lanterns seems to be rising out of the waters of Penobscot Bay, after he enters the darkened house through the conveniently unlocked door, makes his way upstairs, cringing at strange sounds, some of them like grunts or muted barks — at the top, in a fully- lighted room he finds his old “friend” Tillinghast seated in front of an immense flatscreen TV, control device in hand, clicking through picture after picture, laughing hysterically.
Eric can only stand in the doorway of the room, too stunned to react, thinking, Yeah, sure, why not? Millions of people are dead and I just risked my life to drive hundreds of miles to sit and watch TV with a crazy guy I don’t even like.