Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond Read online

  RESONATOR

  New Lovecraftian Tales

  From Beyond

  edited by

  Scott R Jones

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  Martian Migraine Press

  electronic edition 2015

  RESONATOR

  New Lovecraftian Tales

  From Beyond

  © 2015 Martian Migraine Press

  edited by Scott R Jones

  All Rights Reserved

  H. P. Lovecraft’s From Beyond made its first appearance in The Fantasy Fan (June 1934 Volume 1 Number 10)

  Cody Goodfellow’s Infernal Attractors first appeared in the anthology Cthulhurotica (Dagan Books, 2011)

  Robert J. Santa’s Professor Hilliard’s Electric Lantern first appeared in the anthology Book of Tentacles (Sam’s Dot Publishing, 2010)

  Scott R Jones’ Turbulence first appeared in Issue 14 of Innsmouth Magazine (Innsmouth Free Press, December 2013)

  Cover illustration

  PRIMAL SPERMATOZOA

  OBLONGATA ENLIGHTENMENT

  (and interior illustrations)

  © 2015 Nick Gucker

  This book is a work of fiction, portraying situations and events intended for mature readers. All events and persons within it are fictional; any similarities to actual events or to individuals living or dead are coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the authors or Martian Migraine Press, except brief passages for purposes of review.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  ISBN (ebook) 978-1-927673-05-8

  ISBN (print) 978-1-927673-07-2

  martianmigrainepress.com

  contents

  Introduction

  MAGIC CIRCLES, NOXIOUS MACHINES

  FROM BEYOND

  H. P. Lovecraft

  IPO

  Darrin Brightman

  INFERNAL ATTRACTORS

  Cody Goodfellow

  SATORI

  Rodney Turner

  PROFESSOR HILLIARD’S ELECTRIC LANTERN

  Robert J. Santa

  FILM MAUDIT

  Christopher Slatsky

  NINESIGHT

  Christine Morgan

  BUG ZAPPER

  Richard Lee Byers

  PROGRAMMED TO RECEIVE

  Orrin Grey

  MACHINE WILL START WHEN YOU ARE START

  Matthew M. Bartlett

  PARASITOSIS

  Lyndsey Holder

  THE HAPPINESS MACHINE

  Edward Morris

  TURBULENCE

  Scott R Jones

  DERESONATOR

  Leeman Kessler

  RESONATOR SUPERSTAR!

  Anya Martin

  THE WIZARD OF OK

  Scott Nicolay

  THE DIVIDE

  Damir Salkovic

  About the Authors

  About the Editor

  About Martian Migraine Press

  Other MMP Titles

  MAGIC CIRCLE, NOXIOUS MACHINES

  In his seminal work of occult philosophy, In the Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker devotes a lectio to H. P. Lovecraft’s story From Beyond, ruminating on the nature of the traditional “magic circle” and the changes Lovecraft wrought upon that tired old stand-by of horror fiction by introducing the infernal boundary-dissolving machine of Dr. Crawford Tillinghast...

  “During the story ... the device itself gradually recedes into the background as the characters can only look about in a state of horrified awe. It is as if we get the effects of the magic circle without the magic circle itself. Nearly all the traditional uses of the magic circle adopt the model of spectator and spectacle – inside the circle is the audience, and outside it is the dramatic action ... In From Beyond, however, we lose this separation, and there is no spectacle that we may view from inside the safety of the circle. Instead, natural and supernatural blend into a kind of ambient, atmospheric no-place, with the characters bathed in the alien ether of unknowable dimensions. The center of the circle is, then, really everywhere...and its circumference, really nowhere.”

  Lovecraft has famously been called “the Copernicus of modern horror”, and in this short piece of fiction we can certainly see why. From Beyond is a tightly-wound story, no more than a single scene, really, obsessively narrated by a scientist driven mad by the revelations his work has brought him. That claustrophobic attic room, the two chairs on either side of the simple wooden table upon which rests the fiendish machine, the madman, and his victim: it could easily be a one-act play, performed on a very small stage... and yet that stage opens up, engulfing the audience, the theatre, and the world outside, opens up into an entire universe of gnawing, incomprehensible horror, a universe that we are given to understand is always present, just on the other side of a tweak in our perception.

  And, worse, Tillinghast’s Resonator does not force the revelation upon us. Our means to perceive (and be perceived by) that other universe, has been within us all along: the pineal gland, tucked away in the very centre of our brains. Descarte’s “seat of the soul”, properly activated, grants this uncanny sight. There is no separation, no escaping the horror, for we are, in a very essential way, part of that horror.

  This is, of course, one of Lovecraft’s more enduring themes and certainly one of his greater contributions to weird fiction. In Lovecraft’s world, nothing is inviolate. Everything is either corruptible or already corrupted, and those with the eyes to see that corruption will see it. And once seen, it cannot be unseen. Madness and death follow. In a way, From Beyond takes William Blake’s elegiac promise of “a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower” and subverts it: if Blake’s “doors of perception” were truly cleansed, the infinity glimpsed would send us scurrying for a dimly lit corner somewhere in Lovecraft’s “peace and safety of a new dark age”.

  It’s a powerful little story, and the wicked inspiration for the book you hold in your hands. There are hints of greater wonders in Lovecraft’s tale: architecture dimly glimpsed, dizzy vacua that tease with possibility, and an ecosystem (or as I came to call it while working on the book, an “EEEK-osystem”!) that suggests layers and levels beyond the squidgy horrors we are briefly introduced to in those few terror-filled moments before the unnamed narrator puts a bullet through the device.

  It’s those hints that we wanted to expand upon in RESONATOR: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond. What, for instance, are the implications of a machine like the Resonator for such diverse fields of study as physics, biology, medicine, and transportation? What would the military, or a megacorp, or a monastery, do with the tech? We read a lot of stories for this anthology, most of which were of the “I built a
machine in my garage/attic and oh no! Monsters!” variety (some of which were quite good), but we wanted to see Resonators humming further afield, in doctor’s offices, vehicles, broadcast booths, and bedrooms.

  Ah, the bedroom. Thanks to director Stuart Gordon’s gloriously over-the-top film adaptation of From Beyond, it’s difficult to get away from pairing sex and the Resonator...and why would we want to? Is there anything as Freudian in horror filmdom as the sight of Jeffrey Comb’s pineal stalk thrashing around between his eyebrows? We think not! And so, within these pages you’ll find engaging treatments of that stimulating theme: the neon-lit psychedelic terror-tantra of Cody Goodfellow’s Infernal Attractors; Anya Martin’s tone-perfect Velvet Underground-inspired RESONATOR SUPERSTAR!; Christopher Slatsky’s grim and schizophrenic Film Maudit (redolent of Ramsey Campbell at his best), and the delightfully gross Machine Will Start When You Are Start by Matthew M. Bartlett.

  Not all the action is between the sheets, of course. In Richard Lee Byer’s Bug Zapper, we visit an Earth reduced to an interdimensional wasteland by irresponsible military use of Tillinghast technology; and in my own small contribution here, Turbulence, military application of the same gives a pilot the flight of his life before taking his sanity. Scale is something we wanted to explore in RESONATOR, and in both of these stories, as well as Robert J. Santa’s excellent Professor Hilliard’s Electric Lantern, we are exposed to the sheer vastness of the over-full, writhing cosmos revealed in the light of the Resonator.

  Crafty CEOs, hucksters, and megalomaniacs feature as well, victims of hubris, all. Tillinghast’s heirs and relations make appearances, naturally: Edward Morris gleefully relates the decline and fall of great-nephew Jason Tillinghast, a crazed and delusional uber-geek hungry for revenge at a horror convention, in his story The Happiness Machine. Lucinda Tillinghast (a great-niece) patents Crawford’s tech and makes millions repurposing it for the Transportation Security Administration before history repeats itself in Darrin Brightman’s IPO. In Leeman Kessler’s Deresonator, a grifting Tillinghast heir hits upon a perfect health-and-wellness scam when he inherits the family secret...until he meets the one patient he can’t “cure”.

  Not everyone deliberately seeks out the hellish light, though, and the unlucky souls who stumble into the Beyond are represented here as well. The curiosity of a child and a freak accident reveals “that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight” in Christine Morgan’s Ninesight; and a renegade Zen mystic on a search for ultimate Truth reaches a terrible enlightenment in Satori by Rodney Turner. Others come in contact with more sentient (but no less deadly!) denizens of the Beyond. Orrin Grey’s brilliant Programmed to Receive is a series of chilling snapshots detailing the influence of the utterly alien upon a girl genius; and in Lyndsey Holder’s Parasitosis, debased entities of that other realm use accelerated synaesthesia to enslave an inventor for their own perverse purposes.

  In the end, though, it’s the madmen and visionaries that occupy the shifting centerless center of our magic circle. In the anhedonic far-future of Damir Salkovic’s The Divide, a jaded trio of dreamers employ illegal technology to plumb the black heart of Reality itself; and the always excellent Scott Nicolay brings us to a desolate graveyard of the Universe where the meth-and-magic-fueled experiments of The Wizard of OK have stranded an unsuspecting mother and son, who realize (too late) that there really is no place like home. We’re very proud to have The Wizard of OK make its first appearance in RESONATOR. We love this story, and every story here, and we think you will, too.

  So, make yourself comfortable, engage in a little pineal massage if you’re able, throw the knife switch on that glowing box on the table, watch the cats carefully, and get ready to experience wonder and horror, ecstasy and insanity! And remember, there is no safety within this circle. In these rays you are able to be seen, as well as see. So, remain perfectly still. And should you tremble with anxiety to see the ultimate things Tillinghast discovered, don’t worry, for they are coming... Look, look, curse you, look! It’s just over your left shoulder!

  Scott R Jones

  12 February 2015

  Victoria, BC

  FROM BEYOND

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Horrible beyond conception was the change which had taken place in my best friend, Crawford Tillinghast. I had not seen him since that day, two months and a half before, when he told me toward what goal his physical and metaphysical researches were leading; when he had answered my awed and almost frightened remonstrances by driving me from his laboratory and his house in a burst of fanatical rage. I had known that he now remained mostly shut in the attic laboratory with that accursed electrical machine, eating little and excluding even the servants, but I had not thought that a brief period of ten weeks could so alter and disfigure any human creature. It is not pleasant to see a stout man suddenly grown thin, and it is even worse when the baggy skin becomes yellowed or grayed, the eyes sunken, circled, and uncannily glowing, the forehead veined and corrugated, and the hands tremulous and twitching. And if added to this there be a repellent unkemptness, a wild disorder of dress, a bushiness of dark hair white at the roots, and an unchecked growth of white beard on a face once clean-shaven, the cumulative effect is quite shocking. But such was the aspect of Crawford Tilllinghast on the night his half coherent message brought me to his door after my weeks of exile; such was the specter that trembled as it admitted me, candle in hand, and glanced furtively over its shoulder as if fearful of unseen things in the ancient, lonely house set back from Benevolent Street.

  That Crawford Tilinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair, if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed. Tillinghast had once been the prey of failure, solitary and melancholy; but now I knew, with nauseating fears of my own, that he was the prey of success. I had indeed warned him ten weeks before, when he burst forth with his tale of what he felt himself about to discover. He had been flushed and excited then, talking in a high and unnatural, though always pedantic, voice.

  “What do we know,” he had said, “of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break down the barriers. I am not joking. Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table will generate waves acting on unrecognized sense organs that exist in us as atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas unknown to man and several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation.”

  When Tillinghast said these things I remonstrated, for I knew him well enough to be frightened rather than amused; but he was a fanatic, and drove me from the house. Now he was no less a fanatic, but his desire to speak had conquered his resentment, and he had written me imperatively in a hand I could scarcely recognize. As I entered the abode of the friend so suddenly metamorphosed to a shivering gargoyle, I became infected with the terror which seemed stalking in all the shadows. The words and beliefs expressed ten weeks before seemed bodied forth in the darkness beyond the small circle of candle light, and I sicke
ned at the hollow, altered voice of my host. I wished the servants were about, and did not like it when he said they had all left three days previously. It seemed strange that old Gregory, at least, should desert his master without telling as tried a friend as I. It was he who had given me all the information I had of Tillinghast after I was repulsed in rage.

  Yet I soon subordinated all my fears to my growing curiosity and fascination. Just what Crawford Tillinghast now wished of me I could only guess, but that he had some stupendous secret or discovery to impart, I could not doubt. Before I had protested at his unnatural pryings into the unthinkable; now that he had evidently succeeded to some degree I almost shared his spirit, terrible though the cost of victory appeared. Up through the dark emptiness of the house I followed the bobbing candle in the hand of this shaking parody on man. The electricity seemed to be turned off, and when I asked my guide he said it was for a definite reason.

  “It would be too much...I would not dare,” he continued to mutter. I especially noted his new habit of muttering, for it was not like him to talk to himself. We entered the laboratory in the attic, and I observed that detestable electrical machine, glowing with a sickly, sinister violet luminosity. It was connected with a powerful chemical battery, but seemed to be receiving no current; for I recalled that in its experimental stage it had sputtered and purred when in action. In reply to my question Tillinghast mumbled that this permanent glow was not electrical in any sense that I could understand.

  He now seated me near the machine, so that it was on my right, and turned a switch somewhere below the crowning cluster of glass bulbs. The usual sputtering began, turned to a whine, and terminated in a drone so soft as to suggest a return to silence. Meanwhile the luminosity increased, waned again, then assumed a pale, outré colour or blend of colours which I could neither place nor describe. Tillinghast had been watching me, and noted my puzzled expression.

  “Do you know what that is?” he whispered, “That is ultra-violet.” He chuckled oddly at my surprise. “You thought ultra-violet was invisible, and so it is—but you can see that and many other invisible things now.