Shadows Out of Time by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror, Lovecraft
Publisher: PS Publishing
Published: 2023-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

Out of Time

GEOFFREY HART

The Adversaries knew they’d disappear from the galaxy after their too-brief existence, for they were mortal and bound by time—and they had attracted the attention of the Voices, who were neither. In what time remained to them, the Adversaries fashioned a trap they knew the Voices could never resist: a place with such a paradoxical relationship with time that even the Voices could never fully grasp its properties without entering the trap. Having entered, they found they could not escape. The trap had worked, and the physical forms of the Voices were imprisoned. The Adversaries knew that like all things material, the trap could not endure forever. But it might endure long enough for some future race to find a better solution.

The Voices could not tolerate the Adversaries; indeed, they could tolerate no voices other than their own. As they had done before, they swiftly imposed silence on those competing voices. Their whispers from the darkness infested susceptible Adversary minds, spreading like flesh-eating insects until they consumed all other thoughts and those minds heard only messages of madness and despair. The Adversaries’ civilization consumed itself in fits of suicidal rage and horrific violence. And the Adversaries fell into their final darkness, despairing, weighted with the knowledge that their best effort had been insufficient. Many subsequent voices that arose were extinguished similarly, until all that remained were the Voices.

For billions of years after they’d fallen into the Adversaries’ trap, the Voices chittered among themselves at the heart of the galaxy in a place where gravity curled so tightly upon itself that all sane descriptions of space and time ceased to apply. So tightly that even the Hounds of Tyndalos found no angles upon which to fasten. Then, as had happened before, a new vessel for the Voices arose outside their prison, far out on a spiral arm. They knew of its imminence, since all of time was one to them, but those lesser voices had begun to intrude on their eternal debate. That was unforgivable.

Though the Voices could not escape their prison in corporeal form, their thoughts were not bound by the mundane laws of physics and could range instantly throughout all of time. The strongest cannibalized their weaker siblings, then cast their thoughts outward. In space-time, they would have been bound by the laws of Einstein—and at the fastest speed permitted them by beings even more ancient, it would have taken tens of millennia to reach the new vessel. But their thoughts permeated time, stretching from what came before the most distant past to what followed the most distant future. Their consciousness crossed that vast gap in a blink of their tens of thousands of multi-faceted eyes, as they had done so often before.

And the vessel heard the Voices and gave them entry.

Sam raised his head from the keyboard, where it had come to rest when he passed out towards the end of an epic programming session. It wasn’t the Jolt Cola, nor his painfully full bladder that woke him.

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