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Lovecraft Steampunk story (working title)

Xahmen

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Posted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 7:27 pm

Chapter 1: The beginning

It was said that everybody in all of North and South America could see the beast at the same time, looming and writhing in the horizon, obscured as it was by clouds and sheer, incomprehensible distance. It wasn't until the Brits showed up that we realized that most of Western Europe and almost all of Africa could see it as well, just lurking on the horizon; a horror that was impossibly large, and loud enough to cause all of the windows in every single household in England and France to shatter when it first made its bellow known to the world in the middle of the night.

We all remember that night, it was right before the New Year, and I thought it was a particularly loud firework at first.
I think everybody in my town did.

The animals went crazy, and my own dog bit me in a frenzy to get out of the house and get away from the noise that had risen to a roar that was almost inaudible in how intense it was. I ran outside into the cobble street, my wife and my three year old boy in each hand, and somehow I knew to look to the sky, it was as if my mind had accepted before me that something ungodly was happening.

“Charles... Charles, look in the clouds... Charles, look in the clouds.” my wife had begun stammering, pointing at an angle at the horizon.

The night was dark and we had no moon, so the only thing I saw at first was just a black sky with slightly less black clouds in front of it. I told her that I didn't see nothin', but out of the corner of my eye I saw it; the clouds were movin' too fast, and they were winding in an out of each other.
The roar died down, and for a minute we all stood there in the street staring at the sky in hopes that we would be able to get a better look at whatever had disrupted our perfect world.

I remember a woman was crying right behind me, she was saying that it was the end of the world and that the Devil had come. My boy (being too young to understand what was happening) tugged on my hand and whispered to me that he had to pee. A small part of me admired how brave he was, standing out there among the terrified and the crying, dressed in only a pair of skivvies and wearing one of my long linen shirts; his mind too busy handling the complex messages of his own body to care about the issues of the outside world.

I scooped him up in my arm and snuggled his head with my cheeks; the gleeful giggles of a child rose lonely into the night air as a monstrosity screamed and twisted in the distance.

Myself and a few of the other of the townsmen stayed awake that night to stand guard at the entrance to the town (which was named Littleton) to protect it from rioters and looters, and maybe just to give our townspeople some peace of mind of mind for sleep. There was nothing our peashooter pistols would have done to whatever that beast was in the distance.

We talked a great deal about what we thought it was on the horizon, just out of reach of clear vision.
Franklin thought it was the Devil.
Albert thought it was God.
Joseph thought it was an alien.
William thought it was the Brits, and a new weapon to try and take back the states.
In retrospect, it was Joshua who was the closest to the truth.

Joshua had always been a strange fellow, and at twenty-three he lived alone on the outskirts of town by the woods in a little shack. While the rest of the town (Hell, the rest of the country) was powered by steam and coal, Joshua seemed determined to harness electricity; a source that was more abundant, but far less reliable and more volatile. When he turned sixteen his mother and father sent him across seas to France to study abroad, and the boy just came back weird. He turned away from conventional methods of energy and conventional tools, plus he went and got a tattoo of a star on his back like one of them romantic poets. His mother had passed while he was abroad, and his father passed shortly after he came back a year ago; the kid was alone and didn't seem to want it any other way.

“It's from inside the planet.” he whispered as the rain began to fall on us, “It's from under the sea, we would have heard it come into the atmosphere if it had fallen from the stars.”

We talked into the night at great length about whatever lurked for us at dawn.
Unfortunately nothing compared to the ugly truth that daylight brought.

Let me go ahead and explain a little bit to you about how the horizon works.
We can see in all directions at most ten miles out when we find ourselves on the ground, that's the way the Earth curves. We aren't supposed to see anything past that, and it wasn't until a frantic Joshua explained this to me that I fully grasped how immense that monster was.

I dozed lightly, but woke to my wife shaking me violently by the shoulders.
“Charles! Oh God Charles it's the Devil in the sky” my wife ranted at me through tears.
At first I thought I was still dreaming, or that my eyes were unfocused; I couldn't grasp what I was seeing, and to this day I still don't believe it.

Rising from the horizon, blurred by the clouds and by the distance, what looked like a multitude of massive necks twisted and wove into each other, a devilish screaming head topped each ungodly neck.
It was large to the point of absurdity, and such a beast surely was too large to be real.

I held my wife and child and I cried.