In the Belly of the Beast and Other Tales of Cthulhu Wars Read online

  In the Belly of the Beast and other Tales of Cthulhu Wars is a work of fiction. Names and characters are fictitious, and the incidents described won’t happen until the stars are right and Cthulhu rises from his eternal slumber. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art by Richard Luong

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9995390-3-3

  Published simultaneously on Yuggoth and Carcosa.

  Copyright © 2018 Petersen Games, LLC

  All rights reserved.

  www.PetersenGames.com

  IN THE BELLY

  OF THE BEAST

  AND OTHER TALES OF

  CTHULHU WARS

  by Ben Monroe

  For Beth

  Part One

  Tales of Cthulhu Wars

  “It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests...”

  –H.P. Lovecraft

  The Darkness Within

  The desert at night is cold and unforgiving.

  Through the barren copper sands, the blacktop of the highway winds like a scar. At the horizon, black meets black as the road becomes the sky, and the sky becomes the road; an uncertain embrace where both lose themselves in each other. Silent night birds crease the sky, blotting out the winking stars for moments. One plummets to the dusty ground, snapping up a skittering cold-blooded morsel and flaps off into the dark.

  In the distance, a groaning rumble as a pinprick of white light rolls over the horizon, searing the night, blinding the nocturnal creatures which flee in terror back to their subterranean hovels.

  He rides through the night on his wild hunt. Dust coats his desert-parched throat, dry from miles of the ride. His brown leather jacket bundles him in against the worst of the night’s chill, but he is stiff from the cold. His long black hair is blown back over his shoulders, filthy with the dirt of seven states. Moonlight reflects off of the twin mirrors of his sunglasses like pale gibbous eyes rimmed with night-blue velvet shadow. He rides, his past behind him; ahead, only the future. His twin-wheeled beast charges forward, eating up the miles, chasing dawn, and he smiles.

  Up ahead of him are lights—the glossy, neon glow which rails against the dark of the desert. He thinks of the last time he’d stopped to eat. It had been somewhere in Louisiana. He remembers the girl behind the counter at that roadside eatery. Black hair, black as the secret under-feathers of a raven’s wing, a silver ankh dangling on a glittering chain around her thin neck. How ironic. And her eyes. He always remembers the eyes. Hers were like twin sapphires, glittering out from a moon-white face. She had rimmed them with kohl, to frame them. Such pretty eyes.

  He shifts his grip, roaring off the beaten path and into the lot of the tiny all-night diner, and glides past the derelict vehicles before the place. His journey stops in front of a pay telephone stall. He kills the engine and stops for a moment, letting his body get used to the sudden lack of thrust and vibration that have been with him for hours. His ears soak up the night sounds, the insects, a faint howling, and the buzz of electricity sucked from the generator by the livid neon sign. “Eat” it tells him, “All Night.”

  He climbs off the bike, his boots crunching the gravel of the lot as he stands, stretches, and stalks to the payphone, lifts the receiver and places it to his ear. The buzz of the phone comforts him like an adventure about to begin. He dials the number and shovels in change until the tinny voice on the other side has told him he’s paid enough. The phone rings. Again. After the third ring a woman’s voice answers.

  “Hello?”

  He listens, exhaling steam into the cold night air. That voice.

  “Hello? Who is this?” He would cry if he could. The voice, that sweet lost voice.

  He places the receiver into its cradle and turns back to the diner. Its lights beckoning, promises of comfort, of warmth, of life.

  Gravel crunches under the soles of his cracked leather boots as he approaches the diner. From his mouth issues a thick cloud of steam, his life’s heat drifting into the night air. He pauses for a moment, thinking of clouds in the sky. The buzzing of honeybees on a warm summer day, laughter as he splashed in a lake with friends. So far away, so long ago.

  A bell rings, snapping him from his reverie. The diner’s door swings open, and a tired, gray old man steps out into the night. The old man tightens his thick collar around his pencil-thin neck, papery skin pale from the sudden cold. He nods to the Stranger. “Evening” he grunts.

  The Stranger nods his acceptance of a fellow nighthawk.

  “Colder than a nun’s tits tonight, eh?” continues the old one. The Stranger nods again, places his hand on the door.

  The old man tightens his cap and lumbers off toward a mud-caked pickup truck. The Stranger watches as the truck pulls out onto the blacktop. The crimson glow of the taillights speeds to the horizon, then vanishes, snuffed out like a pair of candles.

  He shakes off the cold, stamping his feet, then opens the door to the diner, stepping through into the bright, gleaming, white-tiled sanctuary. He removes his gloves and rubs the heat back into his hands. The girl behind the counter looks up from her dog-eared paperback.

  “Evening, sugar” she coos. “Just put a fresh pot on.” She’s lovely, he thinks. Her chestnut hair swings loose above her jaw, cut in a tight bob. She smiles at him, and he admires her eyes, green like verdigris bronze, shining bright in the fluorescent light of the diner.

  He approaches the counter, taking a place on a swiveling stool. The girl turns to the pot of coffee and pours.

  “How do you take it?”

  A moment’s hesitation; “Black,” he replies.

  The girl turns back to him and smiles. Oh, he thinks, she is beautiful, eyes like a summer glade.

  “You got far to go?” she says.

  “Why do you ask?”

  She approaches the counter with the steaming pot of black liquid, then pours the coffee into a blue mug. A drop splashes over the rim, stark against the polished white countertop.

  “Well,” she replies, “Most folks don’t go charging past here this late at night,” she pauses and looks at her watch “or this early in the morning, unless they’re trying to make time.”

  “No,” he sighs. “I don’t have far to go at all.”

  He lifts the mug under his face, inhaling the rising steam.

  “You going to take off those shades?” she asks.

  “No…eyes are used to the dark.”

  “I see,” she chuckles. “Want me to turn down the lights?”

  He sips the coffee. She’s beautiful; he thinks it could be different with her.

  “No. Not just yet.” He takes a mouthful of the coffee, letting the dark, bitter fluid burn his tongue before swallowing.

  The girl brings up a rag and wipes down the counter.

  “Excuse me,” he stammers.

  “Yes?”

  “Ah, nothing.” He sips the coffee.

  “What is it?” She takes a seat behind the counter, close to him.

  God, could it be different with her? the voice in his head debates with itself. She has such…

  “No… Well, I…you have beautiful eyes.”

  She blushes. “Thank you, that’s kind.”

  “Well, I’m sure you hear
that a lot.”

  “No,” she says, “hardly ever at all.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Would you take off those glasses?” She reaches towards his face.

  His head jerks back, out of reach.

  “No, it’s too bright.” he stands. It’ll be the same…never different, she’s the same as all the rest, he thinks.

  “I’ll turn down the lights.”

  Before he can tell her not to, the diner goes dark. He feels for something to steady himself with, and his hand comes to rest on the back of a peeling vinyl chair.

  He feels a touch, whisper-light on his cheek.

  “It’s dark now,” she says. “Take them off.”

  The same as all the rest…

  Her hand pulls the sunglasses away. His head sags forward, long hair spilling before his face, cloaking it in shadow.

  Her hand tugs on his shoulder, turning him toward her.

  The same…

  His voice, small and tired, finds itself. “Please don’t,” he says, as her hand reaches under his chin, lifting his face up so that she can see into his eyes. His strange eyes, solid verdigris green, lined with swirling, moving flecks of gold. The irises long, ragged slits, horizontal across the strange orbs. Something in the back of his brain, coiled around the top of his spine, twitches, stirs, wakes.

  She shrieks and backs away from the strange man with the toad-like eyes. She reaches for something, anything to defend herself with, and her hand comes to rest on a sharp steel knife. The woman snatches it up, brandishing it in front of herself, and tells the stranger to “Stay the hell away from me! What are you?”

  And the stranger rises from his stool. His clothing bulges and ripples; his throat swells to twice its size, and his mouth opens. Wide, so wide, and she has an image in her mind’s eye of a snake, or toad, or some awful scaled thing, trying to swallow something twice its size.

  And with a coughing, gurgling, retching sound, black slime erupts from the stranger’s mouth. Vomits forth, rolling down his chest and across the diner counter. And she screams as the slime coalesces, taking ropy, fibrous form. And her screams cut off as the black, viscous thing leaps at her face, forces its bulk into her mouth, her nostrils, her eyes…

  The desert during the day is a blasted, heat-soaked wasteland.

  Hours later, the sun has risen, heat waves are rising from the scorched dust of the desert. The diner is buzzing with corpulent black flies. Cherry-red siren lights beat a crazy kaleidoscope pattern against the wall of the eatery. Inside, a forensic crew tries to assemble the fragmentary clues hinting at the night’s events.

  A blue-clad officer stands amidst a sea of reporters; they thrust microphones at him as if for a blessing. Sweat rolls down his forehead, oozing between his jowls. He wipes his glistening face with a soaked handkerchief as he addresses the crowd. “There’s nothing more I can tell you right now…please, just let us do our job.”

  “Excuse me, officer,” a smartly dressed young woman interjects, the highway reflected in her silver glasses. “Is it true that the victim…” she glances at her notepad. “Is it true that when you found her, her eyes were torn out?”

  “No comment.”

  Deep Dreams

  It’s astonishing to realize how much pain a person can withstand and endure and incorporate into the everyday motions of life. Aches and sprains of minor annoyance become routine afterthoughts. Acquaintances’ snipes and barbs irritate at first, but over time are seen as character flaws and accepted. Like the proverbial frog in a pot, discomfort evolves into complacence in the normal course of life, as we go about our daily tasks and chores.

  Adam Marsh was aware on some fundamental level he was losing his grip on reality. But the descent had been so slow and gradual it never registered on his conscious mind. Over the past few months, he’d become more closed off, irritable, and disagreeable. However, his creative work had taken a turn for the better, and he felt a sense of productivity and accomplishment.

  Adam had been an amateur painter and sculptor most of his life. He found the act of creating art pleasing and meditative. Even the little moments brought him pleasure: mixing dabs of paint, or the scrape of the palette knife on rough canvas, feeling the pressure of his fingers molding clay, and getting into the small details with his tools. All these things brought him pleasure and served as an outlet for his daydreams and fancies.

  They had, however, never paid the bills. For the last few years he had woken early every day to pursue his art before heading off to his day job. For a living he fixed cars, working for an independent mechanic and body shop for most of his adult life. He enjoyed the work, using his hands to build, alter, and repair. But it wasn’t his soul’s work.

  A few months ago, the dreams began, and his sleeping mind picked up on something vast. At first, the dreams were of drowning. The same dreams again and again, where he was alone in a dark sea, floating in warm waves. Then thick and viscous water forced itself into his nose, down his throat. He was choking on the fluid while it pulled him under. Lapping waves and rivulets took on solid form, wrapping around him like the arms of drowned sailors seeking revenge. The stink of the ocean was in his lungs, cloying, salty, his brain on fire as the breath was expelled from his lungs and he sank beneath the surface.

  He’d wake in a cold sweat, his sheets soaked around him. For moments he could not take a breath, his chest still aching and constricted. And then reality would rush around him like waves crashing onto the beach. Long, merciful gusts of air would flood in as he gasped at the air and collapsed back into the cold, wet sheets.

  As the dreams intensified, Adam’s art became his obsession. He sculpted, painted, created, moving from one piece to the next, flitting amongst his projects like a raven on a field of bloated corpses. And corpse-like they were. Images of men and women drowning. Some singularly, some in groups, masses. Faces wracked in terror of something only they could see. One vile image showed a group of men and women fleeing the crashing waves on a dark beach. The vague outline of misshapen beings lurked in the deep, watching and waiting. Long, ropy tendrils slid from the ocean’s edge, reaching after the fleeing people. Another was a six-foot-tall extreme close view on a bloated corpse’s face, lying dead on a raft at sea. Crabs unlike any seen before on Earth scrambled up the side of the face, picking at the blistering flesh, gorging on the bloated eyes.

  All other exploits forgotten, Adam dreamed, and he created. He stopped going to his job, and a few days later, an angry voicemail from his employer told him his services were no longer necessary. He ceased even the most rudimentary of hygienic habits, and took sustenance with no pleasure in the act, only consuming the simplest of food found in his cupboards, chewing and swallowing while never taking his eyes off his art. When he slept, the dreams continued; he fell into them so that his waking hours became measured in handfuls. He became drawn toward them, called to the dreams despite his terrors. And the dreams got darker.

  He dreamt not just of being pulled under, of drowning, but of sinking to the deepest recesses of the ocean. The alien, stygian abyss where nothing of the surface world could survive. He drifted and floated along the eddies and currents, watching the strange horrors of the deep parade before him. The translucent luminous creatures of the deep parted before him as he roamed. Often, strange, quasi-humanoid shapes darted in the periphery of his vision. Shimmering, scaled hide glinting in the darkness, distant, yet familiar. On the longest nights of his dreaming, he would come to a great city beneath the sea. A corpse-city of spires, and tombs, and great vaulted chambers within which sinister, dark shapes lurked amongst the weeds and detritus of the ocean floor.

  The dreams called to him, gave him purpose. He found himself drawn to them, and to the deep. He wandered at night, leaving his meager home, and exploring out into the dark city surrounding him where he found kindred souls. Raving wanderers cast from the daylight world. Onc
e, at an all-night diner, he found himself in a deep discussion regarding the fundamental nature of the universe. He and the night-people picked apart the notion of God, the Big Bang and many other strange theories of the universe’s creation. In the end they came to grudging agreement that none of them made any sense, and therefore they were all mad. On another of his wanderings, he stumbled over the corpse of a drifter. Rather than being startled or dismayed by it, he found it fascinating. He dragged it back to his home and spent a week watching it rot.

  And all this while, the dreams continued. His nocturnal adventures did not slake his restlessness, nor did his art help any longer. His paintings had become more ragged, abstract. Almost more tones and emotions than images. To an observer, they were dark swathes of color and texture, representative of his growing mania more than any specific object or place. However, to Adam, they were his method of getting the images in his head out into the world. When he looked on the world around him, he saw in different ways than his fellow humans. Where we saw color, shape, logical angles and curves, he saw chaos, fluidity. The faces of monsters hid beneath the facade of humanity, and this was plain to Adam.

  Throughout all this, he felt the tugging call of the ocean. The dreams spoke to him, beckoning him, and drew him to the sea. In time, he could no longer resist the call. He abandoned his home, withdrew the rest of his meager reserves of cash from the bank, and bought a train ticket to the coast. Air travel would have been faster, but when he thought of being that high above the world, panic and dread filled him. The high places of the world were anathema to him.

  As the train progressed, hour by hour, day by day, he felt his anxiety lessen. He sketched and worked with pastel crayons in his cabin. Unsettling images which left the train’s cleaning crew fearful and anxious when they stumbled across them. Images of the plains and valleys through which they were traveling, but not fertile and alive as they were—rather, the images showed the landscape blasted, burned, and writhing with monstrosities.