But if they’re not gods, then they can be stopped.
Stopped! This is their world. It always was, and will be again. They do not seek our extinction, but only to hasten the day when the world will be ripe for their dominion, and His awakening. They redraw the faultlines of the ocean floor to drive the continents back beneath the waves, and raise the Pacific seamounts to the sky, as it was when they came down from the stars.
But it’s not their world, it’s ours! We’ll destroy them, or send them back where they came from—
If you could but see them, you would know how insane that is. And why should you care? In two thousand years, their plans will bear fruit. In two hundred years, the ice caps will melt, the ocean will rise and drown all human cities, anyway. But this is not their concern—
Ingrid ripped free of Sergei and fled away across the shattered abyssal plain, back to the bottomless pits. Diving into an octagonal well, she made her focus into a sword that slashed at the darkness. Before she could find anything upon which to practice her attack, something found her, and seized her in talons of icy, paralyzing pain.
A gargantuan humanoid form reached up out of the pit with mammoth forelimbs cloaked in crawling, viscous flesh, and unfurled vast black wings or outsized dorsal fins that effortlessly beat back the lead-dense water.
Trapped and suddenly feeling as corporeal as she was helpless, she cried out.
Sergei answered, instantly beside her as always, yet even he trembled in fear before her captor. See! he raved. Behold what we hoped to destroy, and what you hope to plunder, and what will bury us all!
It stretched out to nearly fill the vast pit, yet only the roughest outline of its titanic form could be picked out of the darkness, for its body was festooned with crinoids, clams and tubeworm colonies. So glacially slow and deliberate were its movements, that life thrived on it undisturbed; and yet now, it flew faster than she could perceive to draw her bodiless ghost up to its inscrutable, luminous eyes.
A rugose, boneless sac bearded with restless coiling tentacles, the creature’s head was an octopoid of obscenely magnified proportions. There was no escaping those clutching, prescient tentacles, or the piercing gaze of its hideously lambent eyes, which seemed to turn her mind inside out.
For all its awesome size and unfathomable intelligence, the godlike monster seemed to retreat into a fugue for an age of endless moments, until some decision was made.
What does it want? she demanded.
Suddenly, the colossal prodigy bombarded her with convoluted psychic hymns. It sang to her of One older and more terrible than all its kind beneath the sea, the One who slept until the world was perfect, and of the rapture of His imminent return.
I am most disturbed to report, Sergei numbly sent, that it wishes to… what is your word…? Negotiate.
What could such a creature want from her, that it could not simply take? Ingrid retreated into the innermost bolthole of herself and pulled the cerebral dirt in after her, but the psychic onslaught only redoubled as it sought to crush her with understanding.
What do they want?
They want to share their knowledge with the human race. For your benefit and theirs.
Why would they do this?
The power to harness the fire of the earth’s core… they want you to have it. They have come to understand only dimly how quick, how fragile, is the human mind, but how devastating the effects of its tiny genius. In human hands, that power will hasten their ends a hundredfold.
But why? Who would have given them such an idea?
I believe you did, my dear…
Ingrid feigned shock and let herself seem dead, until the tentacles and talons relaxed their grip. She pulled away and forced herself to visualize her body, miles above her, lying prone on the table in the holding cell on the research ship.
She willed herself across that distance instantly, as she would will herself out of a nightmare. For in the end, that was all this was. Sergei was a master manipulator. Somehow, he got inside the minds of his mercenary captors and drove three of them to suicide. Surely, he was trying to do the same to her, but she was not so powerless.
She opened her eyes, and the cell, dingy and too brightly lit, surrounded her. Her body hung heavy from her exhausted mind, an exquisite assembly of dead weight that trembled when she sought to draw in a breath of fresh air.
Her hands lay on the table, trapped in the scarred, stained hands of Sergei Lyubyenko. His eyes floated up behind drooping lids, regarding her with empty, bloodshot orbs.
Her arms dangled from her shoulders like concrete counterweights with the cables cut. She struggled to make her body move, to sever the contact from her that seemed to hold her still, that yet trapped a part of her beneath the sea.
Abruptly, Sergei’s eyes opened impossibly wide and stared at her. An eerie, yellow-green light kindled within them and ate through the cornea and iris, spreading until his slack, waxen face gleamed like a torch blazed within it.
“I will negotiate with your masters now,” he said, with no trace of an accent, no scintilla of humanity.
Ingrid fought to free herself. She raked his hands with her nails and hurled herself back in her chair to sprawl across the uncarpeted steel floor. Sergei made no move to pursue her, but repeated his demand in the same flat, untenanted tone, as he shuffled towards the door.
Ingrid had to stop him. She had to get to Mankiw first, and try to make him understand what they would be dealing with.
Her head boiled with the opening salvo of a five-alarm migraine. Her body resisted her best efforts to climb to her feet. The door swayed and rocked before her, but she was resolute, even if her body was not.
Blood dripped from both her nostrils, and her muscles began to ache, then to tear themselves apart. Her bowels and bladder explosively evacuated and swelling bubbles of pure agony erupted in her belly and chest and every muscle, in the marrow of her bones, and the pressurized cage of her skull.
She screamed, but she could hear only the teapot whistle of compressed gases pouring out of her burst eardrums, her tear ducts and sinuses, forcing its way out of her pores.
It made no difference that she had been sitting at the table with Sergei the entire time, or even if the entire jaunt was only a dream or a telepathic fantasy. The mind plays tricks, Sergei had said, and he was not lying.
The agony of explosive decompression swept aside all doubts and points of debate and devoured her whole. And still, she tried to stop them. Still, she tried to beat Sergei to the door.
She almost made it.
Her outstretched hands were blue-black with burst capillaries and liquefied muscle tissue. The steel mirror on the back of the sealed hatch showed her only a shapeless red collage, doubly filtered through the blood flooding her eyeballs. Her tongue swelled to fill her mouth and block her throat, but her brain exploded out her eye sockets before she could drown on the briny tide of her own fluids.
Ingrid flew away, taking the only escape left to her—out of her body and down into the dark to claim a sleek new body. And this time, she felt no fear, for she was going home.
•
“Once More, from the Top . . .”
A. Scott Glancy
“This is the fourth time,” the old man grumbled, shifting his gaze out the window to the sparsely planted grounds of the VA hospital. “How many more times do we have to go through this?”