The Faith Read online

  Cthulhu Attacks!

  BOOK 2: THE FAITH

  © Byron Craft 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Cover art by Putnam Finch

  Cthulhu Attacks!

  BOOK 2: THE FAITH

  A NOVEL BY

  SEAN HOADE

  &

  BYRON CRAFT

  CTHULHU ATTACKS! BOOK 2: THE FAITH

  The final act! Cthulhu walks the land. It’s killing everything on Earth; instant death for billions, trillions of life forms. An apocalyptic force of shoggoths is at the forefront of the Old One’s advance.

  A ragtag group scrambles to fight back in a last-ditch effort to salvage the remnants of humanity.

  Read on, if, you have the courage!

  “Cthulhu Attacks 2: The Faith fuses two talented Mythos authors; pulpmeister Sean Hoade’s “Cthulhu Attacks! Book 1: The Fear” with the nightmare cinematic vision of Byron Craft, into a terrifying new hybrid. You have been warned!”

  — David Hambling, author of the Harry Stubbs series

  facebook.com/ShadowsFromNorwood/

  “Byron Craft goes places HPL never dared.”

  — F. Paul Wilson, author of The Keep, The God Gene, and the Repairman Jack series

  http://www.repairmanjack.com

  “Ready for an eldritch ride through cosmic horror, insane religious fanaticism, and a landscape decimated by Deep Ones? Climb on the Cthulhu Attacks bus!”

  — Derek M. Koch, Monster Kid Radio

  monsterkidradio.net/

  “‘The Call of Cthulhu’ introduced us to the potential that a beast of unimaginable horror could be released on our world. Sean Hoade’s Cthulhu Attacks! Book 1: The Fear shows us a world where that potential is realized.”

  — Matthew T. Davenport, author of

  the Andrew Doran series

  authormatthewdavenport.wordpress.com/

  Table of Contents

  Foreword by Sean Hoade

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The Vanishing

  Chapter 2: Shoggoths

  Chapter 3: The Absence

  Chapter 4: The Underground Pentagon

  Chapter 5: Inadvertent Rendezvous

  Chapter 6: The Deep State

  Chapter 7: Maisie’s Liquors

  Chapter 8: The Wheels on the Bus

  Chapter 9: The Northern Route

  Chapter 10: TV Time at Maisie’s

  Chapter 11: Death Comes to POTUS

  Chapter 12: On the Road to Minot

  Chapter 13: The Battle of Minot

  Chapter 14: The Plan

  Chapter 15: Land and Sea

  Chapter 16: Geneva

  Chapter 17: The Front

  Chapter 18: Eventless

  Foreword by Sean Hoade

  In late 2017, my brain broke.

  This came after more than a year of worsening illness—which presented itself as constant, tooth-grinding nausea—that no one could find a cause for. My writing output slowed down, then stopped entirely. This is because the universe has a cruel sense of humor, and the nausea spiked horribly if I looked at any kind of computer screen for more than five minutes at a time.

  Finally, in November of that year, inflammation in my gray matter caused a blinding migraine that lasted for two months and turned the nausea up to 11, leading to an eventual diagnosis of parathyroid disease that was causing life-threatening hypercalcemia. Exactly one year later, I finally underwent surgery to remove the tumors. This arrested the condition, but the damage already done is irreversible.

  Thus my writing career comes to an end. As the disease progressed, any writing went from very difficult to completely impossible. This meant that the sequel to Cthulhu Attacks!, as well as the epic Tesla Trilogy I had planned (and which was funded by a Kickstarter campaign) were less than half done more than two years after they were first due to be released. The publishers for both canceled the contracts because I had postponed things for so long. Things were dark, to say the least.

  But then … a point of light appeared. His name is Byron Craft. A friend and fellow Lovecraftian with several books under his belt, Byron agreed to take on the job of finishing my 23,000-word manuscript for Cthulhu Attacks! 2. Without him, my friends, the book you hold in your hands would never have seen the light of day.

  Although I provided my notes for the second and third books, Byron was free to make the series his. As you will see starting on page 80 (after the giant tentacle) where my part ends and his part begins, he really lived up to that challenge, perhaps most dramatically in making this the final book in the series. In addition to that, he has the characters doing and saying things that I never would have thought of, and the entire book is truly his from this point. It’s now his vision rather than my original one. You may like it, you may not like it, but there wouldn’t be anything at all to like or not like if Byron hadn’t bravely stepped up and finished this book. Thank you, my friend.

  I will never again be quite like I was before, this illness having taken from me what used to be the center of my life. However, I am alive, and I greatly appreciate every reader who liked Book 1 enough to wait for Book 2. I hope you enjoy this final example of my work, and I hope you enjoy Byron’s second half so much that you’ll rush to read more of his.

  All love,

  Prologue

  From Is the King of France Bald? And Other Conundra I Have Solved by Martin Storch:

  But enough about Cthulhu. Let’s talk about an evil Superman.

  The problem of evil (known as theodicy by those with advanced degrees), is devastating to the concept of God in Christianity. There is an immeasurable amount of suffering in the world. If there is a God, then He must allow it in His universe, or else it wouldn’t exist.

  That said, God, in order to be God, must be all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good. If evil and suffering exist, then one of these must not be true. He may know all and be only good (and kudos to Him for that), but it doesn’t mean much if He cannot stop our suffering. Or maybe he is omnipotent and omnibenevolent but doesn’t have a clue about His creatures being in pain or we have been bestowed the gift of freedom, and He doesn’t interfere.

  But the best one, and the one most germane to discussing our Kryptonian quasi-deity is that God knows everything, instantly and everywhere; has the power to do anything with a snap of his immaterial fingers, and cannot die, but a fat lot of good that does us if he is inimical.

  Now, Superman is powerful, certainly intelligent, and does what he thinks is good and right. It is this last concept that poses the danger humanity would face with such a being: note that Superman does what he thinks is good and right. His conception of “good” and “right” are his own, and he can kill every human in the world to enforce it, of course, he hasn’t ... yet.

  In such a case, what are we to do? What do we do in the presence of Kal-El (or a risen Cthulhu; it’s hard not to leave out our green frenemy entirely) or that omniscient, omnipotent five-year-old who wishes people into the cornfield? (And who, I might add, does what a naturally self-centered small child thinks is right and good). We can try to fight this alien god, a fruitless act that will most certainly leave us dead and the being not even having broken a sweat. Elsewise, we could try to appease him, but that does nothing to protect us past the moment of offering and even less if the being doesn’t consider such tribute worthy of mercy.

  No, I believe the only road open to humanity under
an invincible tyrant who has drunk the “I make the world a better place” Kool-Aid is to become as the Muslims are to Allah: worship and accept that it is Allah alone who is in charge. Muslims solve the problem of suffering by going full Stockholm Syndrome.

  Perhaps this would be the only answer that would allow humanity to survive under a Superman-like being. If a being who can fly, shoot laser beams out of his eyes, and destroy anything with one punch wants all of humanity to kiss his feet, what option is left to us but to sink to our knees and obey?

  Chapter 1:

  The Vanishing

  The herald form of Cthulhu vanished near the South Pole of planet Earth, having completed the connection with this next stop on the four-dimension bridge between matter points in the three-dimensional realm. For the first time in hundreds of millions of years, this bridge had cut directly through the sunken city of R’lyeh and allowed the Old One to escape his tomb of non-Euclidean spacetime.

  At this moment, Cthulhu arrived on Earth, released from the five-dimensional loop that was R’lyeh. But his arrival was into a place three miles beneath the surface of Antarctica.

  Moving through three-space was a slow and distasteful process for a member of the Race that built the folding path through spacetime that had brought him to Earth, so it would take Cthulhu almost a full sidereal cycle (one day) to bring all of him onto the surface, even though he had already partially broken through the miles of permafrost. Once he was entirely standing on the ice, he could signal the Others that he still lived. There might have been another pathway formed during Cthulhu’s absence that didn’t include this planet, but now that he had finally established this matter point for the bridge, he would be connected to all other points.

  As Cthulhu rose through the ice, he released ahead of him endless hordes of shoggoth slaves, enslaving those that existed there after suffering their taunts for eons as they remained just out of reach and creating untold millions more. They would spread over this planet for the crime of being the site of his prison. The shoggoths flooded from him, as would other horrors, to lay waste to whatever potential threat, whatever life, they could find.

  Cthulhu did not know that humans existed on this planet, or what a “human” was; when he had become trapped within the looping fabric in this part of the universe, not even plants had made it onto land. But the Old One could sense life everywhere now, under the surface of the vast seas as before, and, naturally, upon the land.

  The shoggoths and the other things he excreted would rise in waves before him and end whatever life they encountered. For Great Cthulhu, the millions of shoggoths created by his psionic analogue of an autoimmune system played the role of antibodies against the infectious bacteria of three-space life. This all happened as with carbon-based lifeforms, the human body, that attacks and kills bacterial enemies: entirely automatically. His mind attended to other things.

  What caught Cthulhu’s attention almost immediately upon his escape from R’lyeh was that another spacetime loop existed on this very planet, or, rather, had existed here in the very recent past. It did not exist at the present moment, but Cthulhu could see the aftereffects in the fourth spatial dimension, they were invisible to beings limited to three-space, a clear signature of recent dissipation. And it would form again in the very near future; the clear signs were there as well. However, seeing these spatial signs would not guarantee he would be able to avoid the event horizon of this temporally proximate knot in

  space-time.[1]

  When ensnared the last time, when the stars had been wrong, their collective gravitational influence creating such a space-time loop, Cthulhu could see the knot beforehand. Then, however, he lacked knowledge of how a Being even as powerful as he could be trapped inside one, every direction he turned pointing inward, impossible to escape before the stars were right to untangle the knot.

  The Old One became old inside the trap. Cthulhu had thought of little else than the space-time prison for half a billion years. He recognized them now, had deduced everything about them, how to avoid them.

  How to destroy them.

  It did not matter to Cthulhu exactly where this five-space loop would be positioned in three-space on this planet, because once it formed, it might remain for another five hundred million, another billion, years, too near the bridge’s Earth matter point for his Race’s safety. He would need to destroy the loop before it formed this time before it could oppress him again. A gravitational disruption at the formation point in three-space would keep the loop from forming there in any spatial dimension. Cthulhu could create the mass, virtually any amount, with his mind alone, as the waves of new shoggoths demonstrated. This mass would force the loop to collapse before it could ensnare him. He had played it in his mind ten trillion times; however, he never imagined it would come to pass so soon.

  No matter. Cthulhu would ruin the new spacetime loop, and then he would reduce this planet to a cinder, make into a literal stone on which the Race could step on its way to the next three-space point in the galaxy-spanning bridge.

  He had arrived.

  Eisenhower Executive Office Building,

  Washington DC

  38.89°S 77.03°E, 2528 km from Point Bombadil

  Arrival minus 3 hours

  The first scientist, physicist Molly Gibson, opened her eyes just five minutes after losing consciousness.

  For a moment, she had no idea where she was. White tubes behind beveled plastic shined harsh light painfully into her eyes. Then she remembered: she was on the cold floor of the lab inside a science lab in the basement of the Eisenhower Building. She had lain down—no, she remembered now, fallen.

  How was she alive? Wait—hadn’t they all gone blind from mercury poisoning? Wait, again—wasn’t she in one body with other people or something? Wasn’t the city destroyed? She very slowly and carefully got herself into a standing position and looked out the window. The street outside—that would be Pennsylvania Avenue, half a block from the White House—was mostly empty, but Washington was intact, or as intact as anywhere was after 80 percent of its residents had, over the past two days, died in unparalleled agony and fear.

  She didn’t care much for foul language, so she softened the expletive and said out loud, “What in the hell, maybe this was truly hell!”

  She had looked into the most fundamental basis of the universe, the quantum, and relativity, but at that moment, she felt she didn’t know what reality was at all.

  She felt utterly alone, but she was not alone.

  Gibson spun around and looked back at the room to confirm it. There were people everywhere, motionless on the floor. These were her colleagues on the panel working to guide U.S. science policy under President Judith Hampton. They had, all of them, inhaled mercury fumes in an attempt to “go insane enough” to escape the psionic effects of Cthulhu, the Old One of Lovecraft’s story … or at least something almost exactly like it.

  Molly knew, even though some of them must have been on the far side of the marble-topped lab island, that they were still on the floor. There was the U.S. Cabinet Secretary of Science and Technology, cosmologist Norm Tyson; his Undersecretary, climatologist, and TV presenter Bob Nye; geologist Ronald Leib; fellow theoretical physicist Li Clarke; cognitive scientist and biologist Betty Baker; and mathematician Len Sibbald.

  In her nightmare—or hallucination, whatever it was, brought on by huffing one of the deadliest elements in nature—Ron Leib and Bob Nye were dead. But she could see Bob starting to stir, as were the rest she could see.

  They had all breathed in mercury and passed out, but for no more than a few minutes. Inside the hallucination, it had felt like five or six hours. Always a scientist, she reminded herself to read up on the effects of mercury poisoning beyond the madness of hatters who breathed in fumes while shaping wool and felt on blocks. Mad hatter disease was an occupational disease among old England felt-hatmakers who used mercury to stabilize the wool in a process called felting that caused neurological disorders affecting the cen
tral nervous system.

  “Bob,” she croaked at him. Her throat felt like she hadn’t spoken in a thousand years.

  He moved more at the sound of her voice, then opened his eyes, squinting at the light as she had a few minutes earlier. “Mol? What’s going on? Where are we?”

  “Mercury.”

  “The gravity’s wrong,” Norm Tyson said, apparently awake enough now to act pedantic.

  “Not the planet,” Molly said. “The element. We breathed it in. Remember?”

  Li Clarke’s heavy accent floated out: “We dead?”

  A shallow cough came from Len Sibbald. “I hope not,” he said. “I don’t think Heaven would have fluorescent lights.”

  Betty Baker rasped, “What a nightmare. Holy crap, mercury gives you nightmares!”

  “Oh my God, I had the most horrible one!” Gibson said, all of them gravitating to stand at the island in the middle of the small lab. “Is that what mercury does? I knew it makes you insane or dead, but lucid dreaming? With nuclear bombs and mind-melds and—”

  “What?” a startled Sibbald wheezed.

  She blinked, not sure what the issue was. “I’m just saying that mercury must give you lucid nightmares, not to mention a headache. When we were passed out for these couple of minutes, I had a very vivid nightmare that two nuclear explosions hit Washington. We were all there, but like as one.”

  Len looked around the table and saw the shock on every face except that of Bob Nye, who just looked confused. He said, “Molly, I just dreamed that.”

  “I do not believe this. I dreamed of this, too.”