Archive for CthulhuNow

originally published American Atheist Magazine 1998

For nearly five years I have brooded a ghastly and horrifying secret. A secret so dark and blasphemous, it blurs the edges of my consciousness and tinges my every thought with stark blue terror. When I sleep, it haunts my being and stains my nightmares the dripping, blood red of madness. And now it seems my unwholesome labors have brought forth a dreadful and appalling issue.

At first a bothersome thing, the bug noise became a lulling rhythm of nature for Pike Ansblath.
He accepted the ruffled whistle as part of summer.
One night, while lying on the couch, Pike tried to pin down what the noise sounded like.
It was, he determined, basically a whistle … with a little ripple effect.
A neighbor who overheard it one day likened the sound to a muted chirp.
Yeah, he could see that. Continue reading »

I never should have let Jesus in. When you allow something in, you risk infection.
“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but new wine is for fresh skins.”
Once I let Jesus into my heart he wouldn’t stop talking in my head: parable after lesson after reproachment, repeat, and all in a surprisingly brusque voice. My childhood memories are infected with it since first communion. The shockingly mocking voice. The voice was the first warning of a danger that I was too young to heed. The second sign of danger was the vision I received, not from God divine but a hateful god infernal—the threat of interdimensional demons borne of horror so old and unnamable that the Lord Himself is inaudible, replaced with a chaotic choir of cosmic dread in a thousand R’lyehian moans.
“Ya stell’bsna chtenff hupdgh n’ghft!” Continue reading »

David Hambling is the author of two Mythos novellas, “The Elder Ice” and “Broken Meats” (available on Amazon), and a new collection from PS Publishing “The Dulwich Horror and others.”

“The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones… the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”
HP Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

I visited Josh a week after his world ended, bringing him a takeaway curry and six bottles of Cobra beer.

Josh had not been diagnosed with cancer. He had not suffered a stroke, or any of the other medical emergencies that set phones ringing at three in the morning. His wife was safe and healthy, not killed in a car crash. When I say his world ended, that’s exactly what I mean.

Josh’s Armageddon ran to a timetable, and we had been through the countdown. It had started months before, when Josh began sending me emails about the coming apocalypse, cut-and-pasted web collations studded with PHRASES IN UPPER CASE about aliens and quantum physics. Continue reading »