I WAS BACK.
Back in the vision of a blood-black future where the moon hung low and red in a tattered and falling sky, and the world burned and bled, and the stench of torn gut and violent death threatened to choke the air from my lungs. It all closed around me like a fist.
Squeezing.
Constricting.
Oppressing.
I blinked rapidly, trying to clear the tears that welled in my eyes, burning from the soot that hung in the air. Movement in front of me caught my eye.
I stood behind a monster, the monster I’d seen earlier, the one that held my little brother, Jacks. The one eating my little brother, Jacks, with jagged, gnashing teeth. I could just see my brother’s tiny socked foot around slowly flapping wings of stretched membrane.
My stomach clenched.
“Don’t move, Charlie. You can’t save him. That’s not why I brought you here.”
The voice came from behind me. It carried over my shoulder, a pleasant tenor with a muted accent that was vaguely Bostonian. I turned.
A man stood just a few feet away.
He was dressed in dark jeans with folded cuffs, a brown leather jacket over a skin-tight black T-shirt, and motorcycle boots, and his dark hair was greased into a pseudo-pompadour; he looked like a seventies version of someone from the fifties.
He had kind brown eyes and a large nose.
“Who are you?” I asked. “Really?”
“You know me, Charlie.”
“I don’t.”
He opened his mouth and spoke something in a language I could not understand, one made of feelings and urges instead of language and sound.
The moment he said the word, knowledge poured on me like boiling oil. He pushed against the magick inside me, sweeping back and forth like the tides. He felt immense, bottomless, near infinite.
I breathed his name.
“Cthulhu.”
He nodded, warm eyes twinkling.
“What are we doing?” This made no sense.
“We are having a conversation in a possible apocalypse.”
“Wait, why aren’t we in the cave?”
“We are.”
I shook my head. I didn’t understand.
“We are both avatars of ourselves. You are still beneath the Temple of Ba’althune next to your paramour. I am still in the golden city of R’yleh, and I still fight your master in the same temple where you are. All of these things are true. I splintered us and took a portion of each to the moment you chose your path, the moment you chose this future.”
“I didn’t want any of this.”
“You chose to help Nyarlathotep achieve his goals.”
“To stop this.”
He shook his head sadly, then lifted his chin, indicating the scene in front of us. “Watch closely.”
I turned to look. We’d shifted, now looking at the event from the side. I saw myself.
I looked terrible. Other Charlie looked like a child compared to the squatting monstrosity she faced. I watched myself scream in rage, face purple and knotted. The creature leaned to the left and broke wind, my brother’s body sliding on its bloated stomach.
“Watch,” Cthulhu said. Other Charlie took a step, her hands clenched in fists of rage, and then the night swirled behind her and coalesced into the form of a man.
The Man in Black.
He looked different now, his coat flaring off him in spikes and blades of inky black energy, his skull swollen and malformed around a shark’s maw of triple-rowed teeth. His eyes glowed crimson, pulsing in syncopated rhythm with his red right claw. He reached out, razor talons clamping on Other Charlie’s shoulder, spinning her around. He grabbed her, snatching her off her feet and lifting her into the air. Blood burst where his talons pierced her body, tearing a scream from her throat that cut into my bones, going on and on and on in an undulating wave of agony that stole her words away.
He grew, expanding and swelling, his shark maw swinging wide and vicious. She tried to fight, legs kicking, her hands moving. I could feel her try to use her magick like an echo inside my chest. The Crawling Chaos smiled around his slung-open jaw, arm-thick tongue slithering out, whipping the air. A guttural bark blew Other Charlie’s hair as he laughed at her futile effort.
Her tears fell, splashing against rows of jagged, jutting enamel.
Then he shoved her face first down his throat.
Cthulhu’s hand clamped on my arm, stopping me from running to save her. I jerked hard against his grip, but he kept his fingers closed.
A small part of my mind noticed they were webbed to the second knuckle.
“Let me go!”
“It would do no good.”
I pulled harder, jerking with all my body weight. “What’s happening?”
He let go of my arm, and I stumbled. “You were only shown a portion of this future. You were manipulated into using your power to guide reality to this future. Your choices have been tumblers in a lock, one by one falling into place until this future cannot be undone. It is almost too late. This is the reality if you allow the Son of Azathoth to win.”
I looked at the scene with Other Charlie and the Crawling Chaos. They were perfectly still, time-locked; everything around us was frozen in place. Her legs hung in a mist of blood freeze-framed around the monstrous countenance of Nyarlathotep. It was gruesome and gory, and the fact that I was looking at another version of myself made the horror even more surreal. It scratched at my eyeballs, picking away at the edge of my sanity.
I turned away, back to Cthulhu. He stood there as if he were innocent, the kindly old guy who would buy you beer but never ever try to feel you up after you drank it. It was a lie, and I recognized it. “Oh, and you want me to throw in with you?”
He shrugged. “It would be better.”
“I doubt that.”
“All I want is a home for my star-spawn. They swim the aeons of space, skirting through the Void without form, without a home. It…” A tear trickled from a watery brown eye. “… pains me to be separated from them.”
Loss struck me like a fist, blasting into my gut, leaving me scooped out. I felt as though part of me, part of who I am, had been trapped a million miles away, and I couldn’t get to it, couldn’t be whole, would never be whole again.
I felt like I did when I’d woken up so many years ago.
Cthulhu moved closer, his webbed hands moving to my arms, gentle this time. “Charlie, you have to understand, he is the Great Destroyer! He is the Ravening Lion. You are food to him and his kind. If he has his way, your world will be a feasting board. All I want is a home for me and mine. My children will come and bring everlasting life to this planet. No more death. No more illness. No more war. Just peace and plenty and an endless, pleasant dream.” His hand swept over his hair, coming away shiny. Before I could flinch, he swiped it across my face. My eyes slammed shut as they were anointed with a thin sheen of oil from an elder god.
When I opened them, I was flying through space, and I wasn’t human anymore.