Cthulhu Lives!: An Eldritch Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft Read Free

the empty street. “Paul?”
    But there was no response.
    I’m dreaming, she thought. It’s just a nightmare. I’ll wake up in a moment.
    So that was fine. Just a nightmare. Not like you’ve not had nightmares before. That last time, the time that you swore you’d never eat so much brie before bed again? It’s just like that, only no robots this time. Just another boring old nightmare.
    She felt cold. Had she felt the cold in a nightmare before, or was this new? Maybe she’d just always dressed warm in dreams before, so she wouldn’t have even noticed if she’d been dreaming of the cold.
    She shivered.
    She was in bed with Paul, she knew that. They’d gone to bed, and she was dreaming. She was snuggled up next to him, bodies warming each other in the bed in the night, and there was nothing to be afraid of. Just another boring old nightmare.
    There was something, though. In the distance. She could feel it ahead of her in the dark, and she knew, suddenly, that she didn’t want to go there any more, didn’t want to keep taking step after step in this empty city with no people, didn’t want to keep heading towards (what?) to keep walking towards (what was it?) the thing that was ahead of her in the dark day which the sun didn’t light.
    Yet she carried on walking down the empty street in the darkest of days with the blazing yellow sun in a sky of purest black and she knew that she had to wake up (she was getting closer to it now) had to wake up really quickly, because she didn’t want to see what was there (it was big, she could feel it in the distance) and any moment now it would perceive her (how?) and then it would know where she was.
    She tried to call out Paul’s name, but she couldn’t. She whimpered. A low sound in the throat.
    She couldn’t wake up.
    She moaned again.
    She needed to wake up because it could SEE her and she didn’t know how long (how fast could it travel?) before it was upon her and she NEEDED TO WAKE UP NOW and she made the noise again, moaning as loudly as she could through her closed mouth (why couldn’t she just open it and speak?) in the dark city with the yellow sun and the black sky and the empty stars and the ruined buildings and the thing that was moving towards her and it was larger than the buildings and god it KNEW WHERE SHE WAS and she moaned again, low sound in the throat, urgent, and it was almost upon her –
    – and she was lying in her own bed, Paul shaking her awake and looking concerned in the half-light leaking through the closed curtains.
    “What was going on?” he asked. “You were making this horrible sound.”
    She grabbed him, and held him as tightly as she could, as if she could squeeze the life right out of him.
    “Hey. It’s all right. Nightmare?”
    “Yes.”
    He held her in silence for a while before she spoke again.
    “I needed to wake up, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t wake up. But I knew you were next to me, and all I needed to do was let you know, and you’d wake me up.” She squeezed again.
    “That’s all right,” he said. But it came out muffled, because she was holding him so tight.

    ♦

    The web had grown overnight. It seemed to have taken over most of the room now, and the furniture was gone.
    “Professor Glay?” she called into the office.
    “Over here!” The voice came from behind the door.
    Weaving gently through the web, Rebecca made her way to where Glay was sitting on the floor. He held half a dozen strings, and was busily tacking them into the carpet.
    “I’ve been tracking the frequency of the shifts. Look, they’re all converging here.”
    “Here?”
    “Mm? Oh, yes, I’m using the floor as a fourth dimension. Once we get down here, then we can start to see the primary. See? When the beams start to stutter, we can map the frequency here. And look!”
    Rebecca looked up at the tangle of thread over his head. From where she was it haloed him like a religious painting.
    She knelt beside him. “We’re not going to