The lurid red of the sunset sky vanished. A shadow blotted out the newborn stars. And from above, the merest limb of a force of unimaginable size descended with a thunderous mass that shook the world.
Andrew’s boot scuffed idly across the pavement, dragging dozens of lives with it, and then he was off the sidewalk onto the stoop and into his house, taking off his boots and briskly knocking them together to shake off the dirt and corpses.
He didn’t mean anything by it. They were just ants, and he’d had a bit of a bad day at work. There was this GUY. This GUY, man. If you knew him, you’d know what he meant, and you’d be sorry. Be happy. Be happy that you didn’t know this GUY.
Indoors was free of that sort of thing. It was rich in comfortable surfaces. It had beverages and foods. It had shining surfaces that told him things he liked.
Andrew went for the foods first. Nothing like foods after a long day of his. Especially when it contained that GUY.
A meal. Sustenance. After literally hours crawling across the endless ceiling searching desperately, at last it was at hand. He flitted down to it, avoiding the slow-moving mountain of a monster with ease. As he nabbed a stray crumb of cheese, a bizarre sight struck him and he froze in confusion: a square of indescribable size and colour had appeared in the corner of his compound eye.
And then it moved.
Whap.
About time that fly swatter paid off. Dollar-store crap but hey look the entertainment value alone was good for it. Except now there were fly guts on his counter. Well, he’d get them later. For now, he had a sandwich and a wonderfully public-domain copy of The Call of Cthulhu waiting on his Kindle. He was feeling too sophisticated for Netflix tonight. And besides, the story made him feel comfortable. He knew it like the back of his hand, like the seat of his favourite chair, like the walk to his house.
This was a good web. She had a good feeling about this web. There were flies up there, somewhere. She knew it. And they’d love this spot; it was redolent with tiny particles of decaying food. They’d flock to it like it was feces.
The air was her first hint. It felt…heavier somehow. Thick with humid heat.
There was a rumble, then a roar, and finally and very quickly, the vibration of her web’s strands snapping one after another.
Ugh. Spider. In his favourite chair no less. It was like the whole world was being that GUY today. Not fair at all.
He popped up the story and began.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of etc etc etc and so on and so on until For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern which was where Andrew always put down the story for a moment to have a quiet chuckle at how a man could hint at horrors beyond time and space and then have them be stoppable by being bonked on the head with a steamship manned by a single angry Norwegian. Even for a 1920s New Englander who spent half his life high as a kite on xenophobia, that was a bit much, wasn’t it? Truly, mankind was as ants before the Great Old Ones who worship the Elder Gods, whose motivations were unfathomable, whose goals were indescribable. Except, you know. The bit where all they were trying to do was wake up from a nap and clear the raccoons off the trash cans, and a bit of pluck and an outmoded junker of a transport could pop their noggins in.
Beyond time and space. Sounds good, but then you put it up a bit of ingenuity and can-do-it-ive-ness, and look what happens. Who gives up in the face of that? Those GUYS.
And that was the last coherent thought Andrew Kamp had before the floorboards lurched under his feet.
The first thing he did, of course, was sit up straight and back away. Well, that’s what he tried to do, before the webbing held him to the chair. He tried to scream, and his mouth was suddenly full of angry humming wings and spindly, buzzing bodies.
Then the floor gave away entirely under the persistent, furious might of a million tiny mandibles, and down he dropped.
Andrew wasn’t the only person who learned something that day.
That GUY learned that something was up after three consecutive missed shifts.
The police learned that the motives of the killer – assuming that this hadn’t been some sort of bizarre suicide – were unknowable. Unfathomable, even.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft learned that he’d been even more incorrect than he’d ever dreamed, on entirely new levels. But he was dead, so it didn’t help him much.
The arthropod population of Andrew Kamp’s home learned a valuable lesson about the inconceivable that humans had been persuading themselves to believe for a long time: that it wasn’t invulnerable. This was extremely applicable to their lives and they felt it was their responsibility to share it.
And shortly thereafter, the human population of the planet Earth learned something similar, with less pleasure and more screaming.
Even so, on the whole, it was a good Tuesday. From a certain, incomprehensible point of view.
It wasn’t squamous, though. More chitinous. He’d gotten that all wrong, too.