The Feast

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



What makes the grass grow?

Myths:

War: The virus invades the cell. The bee pollinates the flower. The shark consumes his brother whilst still in the womb. The spider eats her mate and the children eat their mother. This is love.

What makes the grass grow?

Man holds his voice up to the sky: Behold! I have become the lord of the Earth. Does not my stomach encompass the world? I stand upright above all the other animals. I eat all but nothing eats me. I alone, hold the knowledge of good and evil and the power to decide who lives and who dies. See these cows? They are mine. They live because I choose that they live and because I am hungry, they die. Am I not a god?

And the grave-worm laughed.

* * *

Like a teardrop falling from the heavens the craft traces a downward arc across the alien sky enveloped in the glow of atmospheric friction. It slides down from the stratosphere, the parachutes bloom open and the module feathers down to the martian surface.

Settled down in the dust, the landing craft opens its mouth and extrudes its tongue. A catterpillar wheeled buggy lurches out into the sand blown mesa and angles toward a mountain in the distance.



The ground trembles and groans and a tear opens in the world - a schism that reaches out to them from the foot of the eminence. The crack yawns open, beckoning to them, welcoming their entry. They descend into it.

As they go deeper they become aware of massive skeletal things reaching out from the cliff faces, as if trying to escape from the rock. Now, in front of them, they are piled in their multitudes. They are giant things, like the leviathans of earth's prehistory, but of too many bones, as if parts of different organisms have been fused together into singular abominations.

Soon, the cosmonauts come within sight of their destination: A piece of alien architecture that breaks out from the precipice at the end of the canyon. The shape of it resembles 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, is a grotesque carcass of bony scaffolding, echoing the delicti heaped up in front of the temple. Adding to the aura of death and decay, the alien shrine is suffocated in some kind of fossilized fungal growth: A latticework of mycelial cords that clings to everything and enormous mushroom bulbs that sprout up the sides of the towers like cancerous growths.




When the rover can get no further through the mess they abandon it and continue on foot. As they go onwards they find themselves having to struggle through remains that are now hideously regenerating flesh, pieces knitting themselves together. The human mind is not made for contact with such things but they do not recoil in horror as you would expect, their minds being emptied of any thought but of reaching that infernal abode. So they go on through the madness, scrambling through the gore, hypnotised by the call emanating from the sacellum, its presence only grows stronger with every step, it pulls at their blood, which pulses in their veins, crying out for communion.

As they climb atop and stumble through those heaped mounds of undeath, one man slips in the muck, his face lands on a protruding rib and his head depressurizes inside his helmet. His companions are oblivious, drowned in their fevered delirium they merely clamber onward.

Their pilgrimage is not yet complete when they finally arrive at the bottom of the enormous steps which lead up to their final destination. The steps are of immense stone blocks, far too large for human feet so that they have to climb laboriously from one step to the next.

After much effort they finally surmount the last step and they find themselves facing a massive doorway that reaches far up above them. The surface of the stone doors are covered in strange reliefs, alien heiroglyphs, which, as the men gaze in revery, begin to change shape, morphing in a nauseating kaleidoscopic fashion. An hallucinatory slideshow of images is unfolding before them. Some intelligence has reached into their minds and is 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 gentle coppicing, weeding and selective pruning, they shaped the tree of life into a chalice for their wine.

In its hunger it salivates inside their minds as it suckles on the milk of their dreams and memories, and of course, the sweet fear that now courses through every fibre of their beings. It shows to them its view of the world. It is a vantage that could best be described as a cook looking down at the lobster in his pot but its appetites being 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. Being good, organic farmers, and not wasteful, that which is not eaten will be used as fertilizer for the next crop cycle. They see the furnaces of the rape-camps for the human soul powering the over-entropy engines of oblivion.

Now, these heroes amongst men, these supposed conquerors of worlds, fall to their knees as their brains rupture to the orgasm of horrific revelation; Eyes, ears, noses and mouths stream blood as it evacuates through what orifice it can find; Bowels open as organs try to escape the body. Their hollowed out minds are sucked dry like the last of the milk shake or the emptied juice-box.

The doors have now been replaced by an un-mirror of dark matter. And all around them now, the horrors are shaking off their slumber and rising from their graves, with the hunger of their long rest...