July morning. Family of five in a white SUV. Driving to the cottage.
The highway bends.
They see—
Father jerks the steering wheel, but the speed is too great. The vehicle flips, and to the melody of Bach:
Gravity died.
Or so it seemed to us, who were to die. All loose objects vortical yet static, car spinning, side over side. The policeman said, “No one could’ve survived.” Radial blur. All in the rearview.
Thud of impact.
Thud—
of stillness.
No screams till the spinning wheel ceased, and then only one, melting gently, like snow upon asphalt.
The scene is gruesome. Silence baked under a hot sun. Vehicles scattered. Structural damage—
Fortunately, they are just a child’s toys.
—to sanity.
But the child is five hundred metres tall, and increasing; smiling dumbly at the carnage before its seated body.
Police officers and soldiers run this way and that.
News helicopters circle.
The child laughs. A strong, booming laugh that echoes up and down the eastern seaboard.
Bored of its human toys, it rises.
Its ‘pulpy, tentacled head surmount[s] a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it [is] the general outline of the whole which [makes] it most shockingly frightful.’
It ambles toward the Atlantic.
Submerges—
swims across the ocean until it reaches the Old World—
surfaces, gazing at the sandbox that is the Sahara, then breaks off a chunk of West Africa and throws it toward Europe, where it crushes the Iberian peninsula, pressing Spaniards and Portuguese into the Mediterranean like human tomato paste.
“Stop,” says the movie executive.
“This is unfilmable.”
The screenwriter touches his tentacles. He’s nervous. He’s been chewing his claws. “It is filmable,” he says. “And it gets better.”
The child grows. Planetary destruction looms.
The earthlings are helpless.
As it grows, the child’s mass increases. It begins to exert greater and greater gravitational force. The trajectory of Earth becomes altered. The galaxy is thrown off-kilter.
As if:
Earth has become two planets:
Earth itself, the host; and Planet Cthulhu, the symbiont.
A group of earthlings therefore hatches a desperate plan, to migrate onto—and into—Cthulhu, before the Earth is turned to cosmic waste.
“Do they?”
“Yes,” says the screenwriter. “A cult enters Cthulhu, and deep within him they make a home for themselves. The picture ends with Cthulhu spreading his wings and flying gloriously from the Sun.”
“It still sounds unfilmable,” says the executive. “Just the s/fx—”
“No effects. The Solar System is the set.”
“Documentary?”
“Yes, and there’s even already a brand new camera!”
On Earth, two events transpired:
The James Webb Space Telescope malfunctioned, slipping suddenly out of human control (“No idea, sir. It’s as if it’s possessed.”) and a Chinese scientist decoded a particularly bizarre fast radio burst.
”What does it say?” his director asked.
”It’s English,” said the scientist. “The message is:
and action!”
Presently:
Somewhere, a girl—future cult leader and saviour of humanity—opens an epub called The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft. She begins to read…