by J.R. McConvey
(800 words)
I hear the sounds first.
Coming back to consciousness, my eyes still locked shut, I think, music. But my brain knows that’s not right. It takes a few seconds to get it. Not music—language. It’s unlike any I’ve ever heard before. But I’ve studied enough languages, internalized their rhythms and cadences, to recognize when people are communicating.
People… or something else.
As I open my eyes, the light is impossibly bright. With vision, physical awareness floods back to me. I can feel my body, weighted against cold steel. I can see the silhouettes looming over me, bulbous forms with too many limbs and an oily inconsistency around the edges. My vision spins, the room sliding from side to side, like the bubble in a spirit level.
I close my eyes again and listen to the language. High notes that sound like the chirping of crickets. Mid-range pops and suctioning inhalations. Percussive bass, punctuating like a hammer.
A different sound, a tinny, toothy whine, makes my eyes open wide.
A drill.
One of the creatures is holding it in a long tendril, seeming to admire it in the light. A beam from the spotlight reflects off the drill’s metallic surface and flares in my eyes. But I don’t dare shut them again. It’s time to wake up, figure out how I got here. And how to get out.
I comb my sluggish memory for hints. Any shred to suggest how I ended up here, on this table, prepared to be made into sausage by a gaggle of incomprehensible aliens.
I get the standard tropes: a lonely highway, a light from above. I think I’m remembering movies.
Then something cuts through. A conversation, running like a worn-out film behind my eyes.
Blake, you can’t see what you’ve just seen. Do you understand me?
It’s my boss, Don. But something’s wrong. We’re in Don’s office, which is nothing unusual. Don is standing behind the desk, holding up his hand and pointing at me. Except instead of a hand, a large tentacle sprouts from the end of Don’s sleeve, black and mottled like mold, twitching in the dry office air. And there’s a feeling, a lingering dread, as though the whole world is opening up, as though dark bells are sounding.
The film ends. But having retrieved that particular memory—as far as I can tell, the last one before it all went dark—the full picture starts to emerge, pixel by pixel, from the darkness of forgetting.
My name is Blake Bissell. I’m an associate professor of languages at Darnell University in Rochester, New York. My wife is Deborah; she works in classics. I’m up for tenure at the end of this academic year; well-respected by my colleagues, if considered a little weird. Don Felton is my boss, the Dean of Language and Literature. If that memory reel and my present situation are any indicator, Don—who I have known for seven years, who was at my wedding, who has been to dinner at our house countless times—has either been taken over by, or is himself, a parasitic alien. When I saw that tentacle wriggling away where Don’s hand should have been, the cover was blown.
Now, here I am. The drill sounds again, vicious and hungry.
It occurs to me that anyone who says they have no regrets is lying. There are just too many unknowns, too many factors you never anticipate. The fatal omission comes for everyone, eventually.
I flex all the muscles in my body. I bite my lower lip.
Then, I whisper the name of the ancient fire, and thank the Old Ones for preparing me so well for every eventuality.
You see, I’m guilty of my own deception. And not all of my training is strictly academic. Old Don—or whatever he is—thought he was scouting a simple linguist.
The watchers so rarely stop to wonder who might be watching them back from behind the mask of normalcy.
I make sure my first breath is full, that I’m conscious of using my diaphragm to get as much volume and projection as I can while lying down. I need the words to rise above the alien babble. I need them to resound through the cursed heavens. I need them to summon the One who will make me free—truly free, this time.
In a voice pulled from beyond the borders of time and sense, I begin the incantation that will bring to this ship a horror that flesh and blood creatures from even the farthest reaches of space cannot comprehend. At my words, the bulbous, blurry creatures tense. The lights begin to flicker.
Soon enough, Cthugha, the Living Flame, will arrive—and what terrible, cosmic music will rain down on them then!
END
J.R. McConvey’s debut short story collection, DIFFERENT BEASTS, won the 2020 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for speculative fiction. His stories have been published widely in magazines and anthologies, including, most recently, Weird Horror #3 and Field Notes from a Nightmare: An Anthology of Eco-Horror. He is online @jrmcconvey & jrmcconvey.com.