Oliver

  The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little;

  but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up

  such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein,

  that we shall either go mad from the revelation

  or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

  Oliver scrambled out of the trapdoor, casting wildly about for his father and the many-tentacled monster that had snatched him. Neither were anywhere to be seen in the abandoned, broken chapel. He heard the thing give a clacking, trumpeting cry outside, and he ran toward the nearest break in the wall. Broken rubble ramped up to a hole five feet high, and from there he could see the entire misty church yard. He feared to look, knowing he’d likely see his father torn to pieces just like the Kraken, but he had to know.

  What he saw was not what he expected. His father was free of the shoggoth’s tentacles, standing his ground near the graveyard, one hand outstretched, the other clutching his notebook, his mouth moving a mile a minute. The great monster lashed at him again and again, but its tentacles bounced off something unseen only a hand’s width from his father’s head. Oliver watched, incredulous, as Walter Mason pointed a finger at a twenty-foot tentacle, shouted “Mgehyenah!” and the whole limb sheared free of the beast, black ichor spurting from the stump. The hiding spell he’d used before might have failed, but he was more than holding his own now. My dad… is a badass.

  He jumped down on the outside, picking his way through the fallen stones toward his father. “Dad!”

  He didn’t look back at him. “You have to go, son!”

  “You’re killing it!”

  “This takes all I have. I can’t protect you too.” His hand darted into his pocket and flung his keys blindly toward Oliver before returning to its protective stance. “Take the car and go. Do it now!”

  Oliver snatched up the keys. “Where should I go?”

  “To the graveyard, like you said. Get the Little Ones. Read the book.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll be fine so long as I’m not distracted.” The shoggoth shrieked and slammed another tentacle into his invisible shield. They both flinched. “Please go.”

  HE SPEAKS TRUTH. LET US LEAVE.

  Olly wanted to argue that he couldn’t leave his father to face the terrifying beast, but the truth was that he could. Incredibly, his father had things under control. The truer complaint was that Olly had never done more than drive around the block, and that hardly seemed valid in the face of everything else. He sprinted away from the monstrosity attacking his father and jumped into the car. The engine groaned when he cranked the key and then fell silent. Dad kept the ancient car in good shape, but Olly and electric devices had never been on good terms. He tried again, and the car started reluctantly, coughing and burping like it was trying to run on peanut butter. He jammed it into drive and lurched forward.

  The first block was the worst. He actually scraped up against a parked Jeep before righting himself. He cringed, thinking how disappointed his father would be… but on second thought, maybe under the circumstances Dad wouldn’t get too worked up over a few scratches in the paint. He veered back and forth across the lanes, desperately glad no one else was driving in the middle of the night.

  He’d memorized the city map years ago, and it was child’s play to get to the cemetery from here. He ran the red lights and hit nearly every curb on the way, and the car fought his electrical oddity the whole way – he had to restart the thing three times – but at the very least he reached the funerary grounds without getting crushed by a huge monster. It took him a minute to remember how to put it in park, and then he realized he’d never turned on his headlights. Never mind that!

  He raced through the headstones right back to Zebediah Whateley’s mausoleum. A man-shaped blob of starry midnight black stood in the doorway. Oliver skidded to a halt.

  “Who are you?”

  I AM MYRIAD. The voice was fluted and multi-toned, like a hundred little voices speaking in unison. Looking closer, Olly saw a strange ripple in the creature’s space-void flesh. Its entire skin crawled.

  IT IS THE LITTLE ONES.

  “The Little Ones don’t look like that,” he whispered.

  IT APPEARS THAT SOME HAVE FUSED TOGETHER TO ACT AS PROTECTOR TO THE OTHERS.

  Moving cautiously, Oliver stepped closer to the strange form. From this distance he could see tentacles twined together, moving in unison, black football heads pressed side by side, wings folded tightly against themselves. There had to have been hundreds of them clinging together. The figure stood taller than he did.

  I PROTECT.

  THEIR THINKING IS SIMPLE, BUT ALREADY THEY GROW. The voice in Olly’s head sounded almost proud.

  “I need some of them with me,” he said. Then, addressing the figure, “Can a few of you, uh… hop off? I need protecting, too.”

  WE ARE MYRIAD. THERE ARE MANY OTHERS. INSIDE.

  Ducking through the doorway, Oliver looked around and could see nothing but twinkling stars. It was strangely warm in the crypt. Reaching into his bag, he pulled out the Maglite and clicked it on. Little Ones clung to every surface, hanging from the ceiling like bats and clustering in every nook and cranny of the wall and floor. He couldn’t see the sarcophagus or the obelisk. He didn’t dare take a single step for fear of crushing them.

  “How are there so many?” he asked, amazed. There had to have been thousands crammed into the little room. “I only saw a few dozen the other night when the Kraken called them.”

  MORE FOLLOWED. AND THEY HAVE BEGUN TO REPRODUCE.

  Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  “We can for sure take down that big sucker Dad’s fighting!”

  WE COULD, BUT THESE SERVE A GREATER PURPOSE.

  “A greater purpose than saving my dad?”

  YOU SPEAK WITH DISBELIEF, BUT YES. I WAS NOT SENT ACROSS THE ENTIRETY OF SPACE TO SAVE YOUR PROGENITOR.

  “What’s the point of all this? I know we’re supposed to fight Cthulhu, but how do we do that?”

  TAKE THE BOOK YOUR PROGENITOR GAVE YOU. READ IT.

  “Now? Right now? A shoggoth is rampaging across town, and you want me to cop a squat in the dead guy’s tomb to read a book?”

  YES.

  “That’s stupid.”

  BEGIN READING AND YOU WILL SEE IT IS NOT.

  The Little Ones before him flowed together, forming a reclined chair with arms and a back. He eyed the wriggling seat dubiously.

  “This is weird.”

  EVERYTHING IS WEIRD UNTIL YOU COMPREHEND IT. YOUR PROGENITOR RISKED HIS LIFE TO GIVE YOU THE BOOK. DO NOT TREAT IT LIGHTLY.

  The thing in his head was right. He owed it to his dad to at least take a look. He pulled the book out of his bag and shone the Maglite on it. It was bound in a leather unlike any he’d ever seen, pale and smooth. Stamped into its front cover in bold letters was the name NECRONOMICON.

  THE LITTLE ONES WILL WATCH OVER YOU. READ.

  Oliver flipped open the cover and saw that the script inside was nothing but squiggles, dashes, and dots. “I can’t read this.”

  AH. YES, I PERCEIVE THE DIFFICULTY. BUT I BELIEVE I HAVE ENOUGH CONNECTIONS TO YOUR NEURAL SYSTEM NOW TO EFFECT A CHANGE. BE STILL. THIS MAY FEEL ODD.

  “What—” Olly said, and then felt a spike drive itself through his brain. He fell into the chair of Little Ones, thrashing and bucking helplessly. His entire head was on fire. He couldn’t feel the rest of his body. He couldn’t see anything.

  After an eternity, he went limp. His vision returned slowly, and he heard himself gasping as if he’d just run a race.

  WE MAY NOT HAVE BEEN READY FOR THAT. APOLOGIES.

  “What did you do?” he groaned.

  I TAPPED INTO THE LANGUAGE CENTERS OF YOUR BRAIN.

  “I thought I was dying.”

  FOR A MOMENT I WONDERED AS WELL.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  SO YOU CAN READ THE BOOK.

  “I told you I couldn’t. How is giving me the world’s worst headache going to help?”

  LOOK AGAIN.

  Oliver picked the book up from where he’d dropped it and opened the cover. The squiggles and dashes were right where they had been, but somehow, they meant something now. The history of the world as it truly is, by the hand of Abdul Alhazred.

  “Whoa,” he whispered. “How did you do that?”

  JUST AS YOU ARE CHANGING ME, SO I WILL CHANGE YOU. NOW READ.

  Oliver sat on his chair of Little Ones and read.

  *

  He fell into the book with his entire mind, consuming whole pages in moments, his brain expanding to grasp concepts and realities without stopping to recognize the words that formed them. The impossible geometries of space opened within him, and in his mind’s eye he saw Yog-Sothoth, the Eternal Master, a being as large as the Earth itself, and his mate and rival Shub-Niggurath. The shape of the structure and society they created in the universe was perfect.

  This was what Oliver had been searching for his whole life. The lines, the angles, the connections they represented between not just individuals but also groups and strata of societies – it all made his heart thrum like a plucked harp. This was utopia, and even as he gloried in its perfection, he despaired, knowing that humans could never achieve such order, such union. It was impossible. The species was simply too flawed. The science they had scraped out of the dirt was too simple, too crude. The great achievements of humanity were nothing more than a back-alley trash heap when compared to the society of Yog-Sothoth and Shub-Niggurath, especially once they had cast out their aberrant offspring Cthulhu.

  Yet the man who had written this book had spent his life trying to bridge that impossible gap, and the incantations and formulae he’d created were things of beauty. Here was an instruction set for turning stone soft so that it could be shaped perfectly without tools. There was an equation that described the realignment of the planet’s magnetic fields to allow for communication with other galaxies. After that was a description of the joining of human and alien minds. And there, near the end, the spell to call forth a hole in space and time, spanning unthinkable distances in a moment. All these incantations needed was an agent capable of wielding Yog-Sothoth’s power. No human could do that. But I’m not entirely human anymore, am I?

  He reached the last page and stumbled to his feet, reeling. He felt as if he’d aged twenty years, but looking at his old plastic Casio, less than an hour had passed.

  NOW YOU UNDERSTAND.

  “I… I’m starting to.”

  YOU SEE WHAT THE LITTLE ONES ARE FOR?

  “Yes.”

  GOOD.

  He stowed the Necronomicon carefully in his Jansport. His hands were shaking. “I’m not sure I can do this.”

  I BEGIN TO APPRECIATE YOUR PERSPECTIVE. BUT YOU SEE THE IMPROVEMENTS THAT WOULD RESULT.

  “I do.”

  THEN WHAT MORE CAN BE SAID?

  “I gotta think about this,” he whispered. “It’s too much.”

  IT IS THE MINIMUM THAT CAN BE DONE. OTHERWISE, ALL HUMANS DIE.

  “Eventually, maybe.”

  TOMORROW OR IN A THOUSAND YEARS, WHAT DOES IT MATTER? TIME IS IRRELEVANT.

  “Shut up for a sec,” Olly said, scrubbing his face. “I need some air.”

  He stepped outside. Myriad, the human simulacrum made of Little Ones, regarded him facelessly.

  THE OTHERS WILL PROTECT YOU?

  “Oh,” he said, feeling stupid and small. “I forgot.”

  Turning back to the doorway of the crypt, he knelt with his bag open. “I need a few of you to come with me,” he said. “Please.” Five of the Little Ones detached from his abandoned chair and scrambled inside. The rest of the miniature beast-lets let the chair structure dissolve, returning to the pulsing, starry carpet of the rest. Olly wandered aimlessly through the cemetery and out to the street, taking in the chill night air and keeping his mind carefully blank. He’d just seen the mortality of the human race, and he wasn’t ready to think about it. His legs felt weak, so he let himself sink down to sit on the road with his back against the Corolla. He put the Maglite upright on the pavement beside him as if it were the most important thing in the world.

  He understood now what it meant for him to house the offspring of Yog-Sothoth in his brain. He knew what he was supposed to do, and exactly why all the horrible things had happened to him over the past few days. If he thought about it in one way, it was beautiful. Structured, crystalline, perfect. It was a seeming chaos that hid a deeper, straighter truth than could be expressed in linear terms.

  If he thought about it in another way, he wanted to die. So, he chose not to think.

  He’d been hearing the tramping footsteps for some time before he realized it. It sounded like an army. When he looked up, he saw distant figures under the streetlights. Lots of them. His head was swimming in deep waters, but some animal instinct told him to hide. Crouching low, he scuttled around to the far side of the Corolla so its bulk would be between him and the passing troop. He wanted to get up and run back behind the safety of the cemetery walls, but they were approaching too quickly, and he couldn’t quite think straight. If he stood up now, he’d be seen for sure, and the sidewalk was so wide that even crouching, he’d be obvious. He pressed himself against the side of the car, laying flat against the ground.

  The footsteps grew, and the figures began to pass by him on the other side of the car. He could hear grunts, snuffles, and inhuman growls. Looking underneath the car, he saw clawed feet, green skin, cloven hooves, and shapeless appendages of all sorts dragging across the ground. The part of his mind still stretched beyond its boundaries by the Necronomicon sensed the wrongness of those beings, the decay and rot inherent in Cthulhu’s kind, and hated it all. I could destroy them with a word… and I know which one to use. Instead, he hid his face. He wasn’t ready to think those thoughts. Better to hide.

  A new set of normal, human-sounding steps crunched on the gravelly pavement just on the other side of the car, and he risked a peek. A pair of ratty combat boots stopped right by the driver’s side door, and then his Maglite lifted off the ground.

  Oh no, he thought. I left it out there. They’re going to find me, and then Cthulhu’s beasts will attack me. I’m going to have to kill this person. I can’t do it. I have to. If I die here, humanity dies with me. He gathered his feet under himself and reached into his bag, clutching one of the Little Ones protectively. The word of power bulged behind his lips, the chill of death seeping into the roots of his teeth. He was a hurricane inside, a galaxy of supernova suns.

  The steps gritted around to his side of the car.

  “Hey, Olly.”

  It was Amrita.