Cthulhu's Reign by Darrell Schweitzer

Author:Darrell Schweitzer [Schweitzer, Darrell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-06-07T02:11:29+00:00

SUCH BRIGHT AND RISEN MADNESS IN OUR NAMES

Jay Lake

I

“Long have we dwelt in wonder and glory.”

The passwords are ashes in my mouth. The last of the First Resistance was crushed eight years ago, when shoggoths swarmed the final submarine base hidden in the San Juan Islands at the mouth of Puget Sound, but the Second Resistance struggles onward, ever guttering like a starveling candle flame.

My contact nods, his—or her? Does it matter any more?—head bobbing with the slow certainty of a collapsing corpse. The Innsmouth Syndrome transforms so many of us who were once human. The voice croaking a response bespeaks more of the benthic depths than any child of woman born. “Such bright and risen days these are.”

And simply as that, I am admitted to the tiled lodge here at the mouth of the Columbia, amid the ruins of Astoria. We meet with our rituals and our secret rooms in imitation of Dagon and the Silver Twilight, because their rites worked.

Oh, we were warned. Lovecraft, Howard, Smith—they had a glimpse of the truth, which they disguised as fiction. Who believed? People actually made up games about the Old Ones. As if the mile-long shattered corpse still rotting across the Seattle waterfront nine years after the U.S. Air Force’s last bombing run could be made into a joke or a rattle of dice.

All that saves us now is inattention. Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, all are like children in their godhood. Dead, they lay so long dreaming that they lost the habit of attending to the world, except through such rites as move them.

The First Resistance fought the elder gods themselves. But how does a B- 2 fly against something that can warp the very fabric of the stars with the power of its mind? The Earth’s new masters did not need their priests to awaken them to those dangers, not after the Dunedin and Papeete nuclear strikes.

The Second Resistance struggles against the priests instead. Dread Cthulhu could snuff my life with the merest of thoughts, but he will no more bother to do so than I will snuff the life of a single amoeba deep within my gut. Traveling across six hundred million years of time and space, then slumbering eons beneath the waves in lost R’lyeh, does not equip one for such minutiae. His priests are the immune system, seeking to eradicate the last, hopeless glimmerings of human liberty and free spirit.

This lodge meets within the battered Sons of Finland hall along Astoria’s deserted waterfront, in the shadows of the ruined Astoria-Megler Bridge. This was once a thriving coastal city of nineteenth-century sea captains’ mansions, twentieth-century fisheries and twenty-first century tourism.

No more. Not a mile out on the bar of the Columbia river loom the unearthly non-Euclidian geometries of one of the cyclopean Risen Cities, strangely angled walls that endlessly glimmer a feeble green while screams echo across the water. Our priestly enemies hunt far and wide, but even under their noses we are scattered and furtive. We never see the

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