The Low Places

“In the low places, below even the damp crevices sandwiched 'neath ruined layers of centuries old buildings collapsed, lies a cold and quivering thing. An immobile god, once worshiped and fed by prehistoric men, now spends its ageless evenings muttering a mixture of tongues, both forgotten and otherworldly. Rambling with its half-remembered insanities, the creature forms words to grip at the fabric of this world, but the magicks those tongues once held have long since faded. The stars have changed too much and the creature will remain buried. Forever…” spoke the storyteller leaning back into his chair and drinking deeply from his steaming cup.

Bitemarks

Sauntering over to the medical examiner amidst his duties, I took a long drag from my cigarette, squinted my eyes and did a little examining for myself. The now nude corpse on the table was a young girl. Brunette. An easy early 20s… Jogger probably. I had already seen her, well I don’t know if clothed is the right word but, at the scene before being moved here to the county morgue, she was draped in a ‘mostly’ shredded tracksuit, blood, and filth. Her pale bloodless skin now approaching a blue-grey, was covered in a contrast of gashes almost like a primitive series of hieroglyphics; Sharp braille-in-reverse bitemarks that read ‘O-Slippery snack, I like how you fight back’.

“What do you reckon, doc? Pack of wild dogs loose in the park?”

“Honestly, I’d put my money on werewolves.” He half-joked looking over his thick-rimmed glasses that somehow teetered at the tip of his nose without falling off . “Or... Something like that. Very clearly teeth and claws.” He pointed with gloved hand and metal probe.

Welcome to the Hyperseam

"The lights of the sprawling city refract into brilliant cyan-blue hues against the containment fields of the outer coil, it's shed photons bouncing steadfast against an atmospheric shell of oscillating teso-magnetic anti-velocity. It is a bustling worm-shaped mega-metropolis sidled just slightly adjacent to the edges of the pulsing lanes of geodesic space-time and built in a place beyond dymaxic ley-line entropy, beyond the grip of any singular universe, a place between places, a moebius-fold in the fabric of omnicosmal reality. It is the Hyperseam. A lusterous poly-municipal conurbanation built around a dimensional rip. A paved-over section of void-beyond-void, spangled with the customs and technologies of countless connected universes."

"Plasmid futures are up today as the regent of Archriox-6b announces the privatization of Lenkwod Argonomics. The formerly government subsidized producer of genetic by-products had this to say regarding the issue, 'We have no idea what's going on, but it's probably a good thing." In other news; Zot! Cola introduces 3 new enticing flavors. Brample-Pizz, Lemolade, and Grebis. Enjoy a Zot! today."

Crypto

Vendors walk the pews transacting non-fungible tokens that commemorate the event. The din of commerce is suddenly hushed as the as presiding official finally speaks.

"Do you Phomals P. 'SlickKidd3032b' take this positronic entity in digital matrimony?"

"Bruh, I do."

"With the power invested in me, by the conglomerate states of the transfederated union, I pronounce you man and wi-fi. Phomals, You man now digitize your consciousness and begin the combinate upload. I wish you two all the very best in becoming an amalgam in the virtual realms. Praise be."

"Pog."

Dust Bowel

The roving machinations of the 'Dust Bowel' languidly flail their limbs in sand-trudged step along dunes specked with rusting debris. They are animated by remnant magicks, the sorrowful fallout of an old war, the final breath of a people who's name is long forgotten. The howling wind in this place, sharp with vengeance, repetitiously echoes their death knell. An eternal resounding chant, imperfect and decayed, woven from their will in the midst of slaughter. It is a song haphazardly stitched in the very fabric of this place. The hum of the Dust Bowel. The Dead-Kanticum.

Spume and Spore

Sick and churning, sacks of human pudding burp out a percussively flatulent song that carries with it an aroma like spoiled eggplant and dead leaves. Barricading themselves from their enemy's lingering tune, another series of sacks, equally well-versed in foul-scented serenades, belch spore-laden clouds that fill their lair. Odors seep from crack and crevice, snaking tendrils of a smoky-sour sonnet mixing it's notes with the putrid thumping petrichor already dancing on the breeze.

Star-Soaked

The skull-cobbed passageway spewed dust as its blockages crumbled. Poorly mortared stone stood little chance against the muscle of workmen with modern tools. Behind debris, centuries old, lay the object of this archeological expedition. A meteorite. A fallen star, an artifact of great significance to the long dead ancient people of this region. So significant that they cloistered it away in these long forgotten tunnels.

I ordered the workmen to stop digging and watched dust flow from the jagged opening like a settling fog. Lantern held out in front, I entered the resting place of the artifact and beheld a luminescent stone perched upon an altar. A supernatural urge took hold of my psyche and bid me to possess the damned thing. I had to have it. I wanted it too badly. I took it. Goldmanite! I took the thing.

Workmen lingered at the opening shouting warnings that were masked in their thickly accent-soaked broken English. I ignored them, my hands trembling as I lifted the glowing lump from its pedestal. My perception at that moment was that I was taking the stone, but in truth the stone was the one doing the taking.

Star-soaked energies of that space-born stone radiated into the flesh of my arms singing shifting alien hymnals of wild permutations and a whispered, half-forgotten purpose. The change was inside me, shaking at the rungs of every twisted ribonucleic ladder that had once instructed me to be human.

Feverish, I collapsed. The workmen moved me to my tent at the dig’s surface. I dreamt of space debris colliding with far off worlds. Of traveling endlessly through both illuminated nebulas and blackest voids. Of bizzare places, like a drifting mass of crawling things both insect and plant squirm against each other communicating with sensation. A moon-sized accumulation of space-born life.

Awakened, in more than one sense, I found that the human part of me had eroded. My mind was an addled blur of primitive survival instinct coupled with a malign alien intent. I became a roving thing, barely a man, running on all fours, or was it sixes now? I killed and ate them that night. All of them… Every worker on the dig site. Further even. Every man, woman, and child caught in the radius of my now heightening senses. Dammit, I could smell them and not just the stink from their skin, but deeper. I could smell their organs…. Their insides… It had all become nourishment for what I was becoming. What ‘we’ were to become.

The Little God

A piercing warble pours from the thing's lungs as we open the long-sealed stone sarcophagus serving as it's cradle. Shifting shapes form in a swirl from it's breath, surrounding those of us not already bleeding to death on the ground. Acolytes, summoned from a plane unseen, buzz betwixt their world and ours, called by the child-god's splintering wails. They observe us. Mocking our frailty as we fail to cling to the quickly fading coil of our mortality. They laugh with a strange rhythm as we slip into unconsciousness becoming part of their void. It's black song.

The Skinless

Thumbing something like a bug from it's exposed teeth, the skinless stood dripping clods and clots of polluted swamp scum back into the sickening pool where it once crouched. It's body-shaped hole filling with waters heavily polluted by rainbow-tinted runoff from the industrial dump lines of nearby Sump. It issued a groan noise that's source was indistinguishably from either the creak of it's joints or a raspy pained moan from it's lip-less mouth and acid burned throat. Slowly it began to trudge toward me, stirring up and spattering unexpected colors in the chemical laden mud.

How things are.

"There was a big collapse in the mines long while back. The ones that came out were not the men that come in, but more like shambling skins filled with a black sludge. I guess they dug too deep in their search for that good 'ol anthracite coal, the hard stuff, the stuff that fuels industry, and well... I reckon they disturbed things that aught'not be disturbed. Black crawling things that can puppeteer men, or at least, what's left of 'em once that oily crap makes it's way inside. Killed a lot folks at first, but we fought back and figured 'em out pretty good. Thinned their herd, so to say. You see 'em every now and then trudging from the dark of the wood trying to snatch up a new skin. I tell yah, round here, you see somethin' weird coming at ya you shoot first, bud. Then you either set it on fire or run the hell away. That's just how things are round here."