"A CTHULHU MYTHOS STORY"

by DF Lewis

Jeremiah often watched the sky for tell-tale signs of alien hovercraft scything into Earth orbit.  His farm was already going to seed since so many of his labourers’ eyes were upon the same sky ... watching for their own preferred brand of fearful-unknown.  The new fiction was the new truth.  A comic strip was, even as they watched, being sketched lightly across the sky, eventually to be coloured in.

One day, there was an ominous sign to end all signs. Jeremiah believed in signs.  He saw signs as something much stronger than omens. Stronger even than the words that constituted them. Words were simply signs for deeper things than themselves, deeper and realler things that the words were merely supposed to denote.  Words were weaker than the signs.  It bears repeating.

Jeremiah saw in the sky that day the arrival of Great Old Ones appearing like vast untieable knots of tentacular substance (or ‘ligotti’ as he preferred to call such ‘end’less knots) all of which seemed to enter into our religious visions of post-cataclysm human existence that we all lived through at the time without ‘really’ realising it.

The farm labourers crooned endless nonsensical doggerel as they gawped at the squared off ‘proscenium’ to which the sky had by now shrunk even as the visions it contained appeared (by special effect of assumed puppetry) to grow proportionately even vaster than they had at first appeared when the sky itself was vast. 

Jeremiah watched these labourers sadly. Each had dug a hole for themselves in which they stood, cigarettes smoking. They were soon to die, mid-doggerel ...mid-narration ...

He could only hope the hovercraft (like the ancient world’s cavalry) would soon slant into their pre-configured sign-shapes in the sky to destroy the invading Great Old Ones.

Jeremiah then saw an ominous sign in the squared-off sky that put paid to any hope.  This sign indicated that the various lovercraft (monstrous transport constructions of bone and metal) had brought the ligottum-creatures in the first place and were purposely lovering off-stage during an interminable self-imposed Pinteresque pause before the tentacular skeleton-crew started googling noisily to create the actual ominous sign that Jeremiah had just seen - a sign in the form of this last paragraph in which the sign first appeared.  Not even the luxury of repetition was left.

written today and first published here