Shadows Out of Time

Just how those rocks could have exploded into islandscouring fire by any natural means was hard to explain, but we didn’t have to. It had happened. Detailed examination, a matter of record, had established that the rocks were unique. The police had to conclude in the end that they’d been even more extraordinary than we knew. There were the usual fringe theories about everything from terrorists and CIA black ops to extraterrestrials, and that last was correct in a way. Yog-Sothoth is as extraterrestrial as any being can be.

The island had been scorched clean of its grass and other growth. Even the moss on the standing stones had been burned off the sides facing the blast, but not one stone had fallen, or so much as shifted. That didn’t seem natural, and Connie and I are sure it wasn’t. Were those stones there at the time of the cataclysm recorded in the Nemedian Chronicles? Were they untouched even by that? Is the same true of the Plateau of Leng (my own curt answer to that is hell, yes), that cannot be approached by the same route twice, and can’t be located precisely even by EarthWatch satellites?

Whatever else is true, we had a miraculous escape that night. I don’t mean just Connie and me. We resorted to a lot of neat brandy after our hospital checkups, but not enough to dissolve our memories. There isn’t that much brandy. I’m a stolid type, and my teeth chattered on the rim of the glass. My hand shook.

“Th-that was a pinprick to what might have happened,” I said. “Christ! It could have been the whole state!”

“It could have been the Solar System,” Connie said. “We’ll never know why it wasn’t. Never. I suppose Tindall messed up the conjuration somehow.”

Almost plaintively, I asked, “How could a little human being’s conjuration summon — something like that? Why would it pay attention?”

“They are always paying attention to openings to this universe, from what the Necronomicon says. Hints in von Junzt, too. Human beings can open those ‘Gates’, even by mistake. Most can’t be opened, except from Earth, from inside orderly space-time. That’s how it seems.”

“Where did he get the rite, the chant? From the Necronomicon?”

“Maybe from that, combined with other ancient scrolls, or from papers of Charles Dexter Ward’s that weren’t destroyed. I think most of them were. But some might still exist.”

That rang in my head. A hundred years ago, only rich men or scholars at prestigious seats of learning could gain access to books and papers like that. Or members of witch cults. All those are pretty restricted groups.

Now?

Now, the Necronomicon is online, and any crazy person, any nut cult, any half-baked dabbler who fancies himself a genius, can consult it — or a version of it. Probably the Book of Eibon, too. Certainly Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten in English, or the original German. It had almost vanished by the early twentieth century, but then it was reprinted again, in both languages. Ignorant tyros would be even less fit to attempt those rites than Tindall was, but that wouldn’t stop them trying.

You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.

Connie and I are haunted. We wonder, who’ll be the next loon who chants litanies to Yog-Sothoth? Maybe accompanied by a mass sacrifice of willing dupes like the Heaven’s Gate crowd? Or ritual murder in the style of Manson?

What will the outcome be? Will that primal age of magma and rock and lethal furnace air reach across the ages to merge with our time? Connie is right, we wouldn’t be kissing anything as trivial as our asses goodbye. These days just about any fool can gain enough of a smattering to try something. They’d nearly all fail to get any kind of result, but God help us — if he’s even interested— it only takes one.

The Moth in the Dark DARRELL SCHWEITZER

I

So we begin innocently enough with two brothers, aged fourteen and twelve, tramping up a wooded hillside behind a motel on the coast of Maine, where their family vacations every year. The ostensible purpose of this expedition is scientific, the collection of insect specimens, so that both are equipped with cheesecloth butterfly nets and rattling knapsacks in which they carry killing jars and specimen containers. Admittedly most of the rattling actually comes from the older brother, Clifford, who is obsessed with anything that’s got wings and/or six legs, and who tends to babble on about moths like a radio commentator you can’t switch off.

The younger boy, Thomas, is silent. He is beginning to lose interest in this hobby, but he likes the woods and he tends to follow his brother.