The Feast (draft)

Loosely based in the Cthulhu mythos of H.P. Lovecraft Illustrated by the art of Zdzislaw Beksinski.

What force was it that made our ancestors quit the ocean? What pushed them to climb out onto the land and grow larger? Was it perhaps out of fear of the horrors down there in the depths: The things of tendril and chela and mandible? Did they flee in panic from the violence of the abyss to crawl on solid ground, the strong biting at the heels of the weak as they escaped toward the light and out of the soup?

But the brutality of life goes on. The relentless competition over food, sex and territory. Everwhere it is written: Life is war. The violence is all around us, and within us. It drives us. The history of life is the history of this war and it is not merely written by the victors but written with the blood of the vanquished. From the virus invading the eukaryote to the barbarian hordes raping and pillaging down the dark epochs. We, the living, are the surviving mutants of the holocaust of evolution.

Disgusted with this way of things civilization was born as a revolt against nature. Men wished to free themselves from the shackles of life and place their dominion over it. They took seed and planted it in the ground and they watered it with the blood of their neighbour. The growth of cities demanded an ever growing supply of resources. Tyrants developed the mega-machines of slavery and war. Mankind spread like a plague upon the earth and their appetite could not be satisfied. There was nothing to hold the population in check and with the globalisation of humanity the cities became ever more crowded. So men and women came to look to the stars, seeking new sanctuary.

* * *

It was like a teardrop falling from the heavens. Enveloped in the glow of atmospheric re-entry the craft traced a downward arc across the alien sky. It slid down from the stratosphere and the parachutes bloomed into life, the module feathering down to the martian surface.

Settled down in the dust, the landing craft opened its mouth and extruded its tongue. A catterpillar wheeled buggy lurched out into the sand blown mesa. The three cosmonauts dwelt in silence. Before them rose the pile. The dark mountain greeted them with malignant immplacability as they angled towards it under a hostile sky.



The world trembled and groaned as a schism reached out from the foot of the eminence. The crack yawned open, beckoning their entry. A strange glow rose up from the scar, a shifting aurora of sickening colors. The strange hues of the auroral anomaly seemed to creep into the compartment with them as they descended into the rift. As they went deeper, they became aware of massive skeletal things reaching out from the cliff faces, as if trying to escape from the rock. Giant things like the leviathans of earth's prehistory but of too many bones, as if parts of different organisms had been fused into singular abominations. Now, in front of them, they were piled in their multitudes.

The cosmonauts were in sight of their destination. A piece of alien architecture broke out fom the precipice at the end of the canyon. The shape of it resembled that of a gothic cathedral, though of decidedly unholy aspect and of dimensions dwarfing anything human. The construction of the frame, somewhat eroded by the passing of the ages, was a grotesque carcass of bony scaffolding, echoing the delicti that was heaped up in front of the temple. Adding to the aura of death and decay, the alien shrine and the area surrounding were suffocated in some kind of fossilized fungal growth. A latticework of mycelial cords clung to everything and enormous mushroom bulbs sprouted up the sides of the towers like cancerous growths.




When the rover could get no further through the mess they abandoned it and continued on foot. Everywhere were strewn bone piles and stone ruins; black obelisks and sacrificial alters. As they went onwards they had to struggle on through remains that were now hideously regenerating flesh, pieces knitting themselves together. Yet they bore on through the madness, scrambling through the gore, hypnotised by the call emanating from the sacellum. Its presence grew stronger with every step, crying out for communion.

Their pilgrimage was only half complete when they eventually arrived at the bottom of the enormous steps which led up to an alien god's doorway. The stairs were of stone blocks too large for human feet and they had to climb laboriously from one step to the next, crawling all the way. One man slipped and stumbled in the muck, he tumbled down into a chest cavity. his face landing impaled on an up-thrust rib. The others showed no sign of noticing, merely clambering onwards.

Finally they stand before the massive doors; Finding the surface of the stone covered in strange reliefs - alien heiroglyphs - which, as the men gazed in revery, begin to change shape, morphing in a nauseating kaleidoscopic fashion; An hallucinatory slideshow of images unfolded behind their eyes. Some intelligence has reached into their minds and was revealing to them its histories in its terrible cosmic narrative.

It tells them of the elder things arrival here when the sun was young; Of their black science, the experiments and surgeries performed in their shadow labs, the creation of their servants and their pets. It tells them of the earth and how these entities tilled the land, sowing the seeds of life as a farmer sows his crop; How, on time scales, measurable only in aeons they did first by mass destruction but proceeded to do with more exacting methods: By coppicing, weeding and selective pruning, they shaped the tree of life into a chalice for their wine.

It shows them, in its hunger, salivating inside their brains as it suckles on the milk of their dreams and memories, its view of the world: a vantage that could best be described as a cook looking down at the lobster in his pot. But its appetites are quite beyond mere flesh. It craves the ripeness of civilization; All that stored energy of the human spirit. They can feel its anticipation at sinking its teeth into the cities, snapping the bones of human endeavour and sucking at the marrow of a thriving culture.




Now it shows them what is to come: Mankind will be strung up and bled of its humanity. The flesh and bones will be collected for the engineering of new monstrosities, the waste ground up for fertilizer. They see the furnaces of the rape-camps for the human soul powering the over-entropy engines of oblivion.

Presently, a sound, like a demonic chorus, vibrates through the world, signalling the opening of the gate. The stone doors have been replaced by an un-mirror of dark matter and all around now, the horrors are shaking off their slumber and rising from their graves, with the hunger of their long rest...

* * *

As a post script, I wrote the original of this story when I was here in 2010 before I had an unfortunate accident and had to withdraw. The original was entitled "Deep Sky Horizon" to evoke the Gulf Oil Spill that was then happening. Before I started writing, my idea was to base it on earth and have Cthulhu awoken as the result of drilling operations.

Now, it would be silly to think that the writers of South Park stole my idea but in November 2010, there appeared on US television a three episode arc of South Park in which that is the exact premise.

Anyway, this weekend I was sick and bored and I got playing about with Avid and I made this funny little thing: