“Yeah,” the punk said, suddenly growing a pair. “You were being incredibly rude to those men. Then everything went dark.”

  “Are you seriously suggesting that my being rude somehow resulted in…this?” She gestured to the empty platform.

  The businessman jabbed his accusatory finger at her. “He’s right. The first rule of subway travel is not talking to strangers. You broke the rule, lady, and now we’re in some…some sort of purgatory.”

  She couldn’t help it, but a giggle escaped her. She’d heard some things in her incredibly long life, but this was a statement worthy of note. “That’s priceless, that is,” she said, pulling her head-covering around and tying a fresh bow. “So what you’re saying is that by reprimanding those men for their insolence, we’ve been shifted sideways through time and space and placed in some sort of holding cell for the obnoxious?”

  When she put it like that, the man realized how insane it sounded. “Well, I don’t fucking know, do I? One minute we were on the train, the next…the next we’re on King William Street…is that even a station? I don’t think so.”

  “It used to be,” she said, pacing casually across the platform. “It closed a long time ago, from what I can remember.”

  “Well, colour me impressed,” the businessman sneered. “What are you, a history teacher?”

  She didn’t deem his question worthy of a response and decided to ignore it. “What’s fascinating,” she said, “is that the three of us are here.”

  “Yeah, why me?” the punk asked, though he could barely be called a punk now. He was a preppy with spiked hair and a leather jacket.

  “We were the three closest to those men,” she continued. “The men speaking in tongues.” It was the only way she could describe it.

  “Something grabbed me when it all went dark,” the businessman said. “I felt it. Wrapped around my throat like a giant dick, only cold and wet.”

  “Yeah,” the punk said, as if the businessman’s recollection had suddenly ignited memories of his own ordeal. “I thought something was crawling on me, and then I passed out. At least, I thought I did.”

  The old lady smiled, though if you were to ask her why, she wouldn’t be able to tell you. “Those three men weren’t men at all,” she said, nodding her head as if the words passing her lips made any sort of sense.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts, lady,” the businessman said, shuddering—which was a contradictive reaction, considering his words. He glanced across his shoulder, suddenly aware of their surroundings and the impossible manner in which they had arrived at them.

  “I’m not saying they were ghosts,” she said. “But I don’t think they were human, either.”

  “Oh, great,” the punk sighed. “Demonic triplets. All we need now is a spider-clown and my nightmares are complete.”

  Something rumbled overhead, followed quickly by the screeching of brakes. The echoes travelled along the tunnel on either side of the platform. It was genuinely unnerving, like a thousand voices groaning and hissing all at once. The punk didn’t make a big deal of it, but he suddenly felt the urge to urinate.

  “We’re beneath the other stations,” the businessman said, staring fixedly on a spider-web crack in the ceiling. “Which means that we’re still in the real world. We just need to get back up there.”

  The punk was already on it, checking for doors, windows, anything he could fit through or throw himself at. The lady and the businessman watched as he frantically searched the platform, neither wanting to interrupt, neither willing to tell him that his searching was fruitless.

  It was clear there was no way out. The one door to the platform had been welded shut, perhaps years ago. The steps to the left of the platform led up to a solid brick wall, as if the architect had been drunk at the time of its creation. The place was sealed tighter than a gnat’s chuff. The tunnel running through the station was cordoned off with orange bollards and neon-yellow tape. It was like a crime scene.

  “Nothing!” the punk breathlessly announced as he returned to the platform. “Whatever this place is, there’s no way in or out.”

  “Then how the fuck did we end up here?” the businessman said, tugging at his tie as if he’d suddenly discovered it was a salamander. After a few seconds of failed tugging, he gave up and tore it off completely. He was beginning to ooze sweat; a thin film of panic and despair coated him. The old lady wouldn’t have pegged him as a claustrophobic. Maybe he was in the closet about it. The thought tickled her insides.

  “We were teleported here by those fucking men,” the punk said. “That’s the only way to explain it.”

  “Not men,” the lady corrected. “I knew it the moment they stepped on board.”

  “Well, you should have stuck one of your gnarly, old feet out and waited for the doors to shut in their faces,” the businessman snapped. “We wouldn’t be in this mess if you had.”

  The lady sighed. “Yes, well, it’s too late now. We need to figure out how to get out of this place.”

  “I know this might seem rude,” the punk said, which usually meant that what followed would be exactly that, “but would you mind taking those glasses off? All I can see is two of me, bobbing around. It really is distracting.”

  The woman thought about it—even went as far as lifting a hand to oblige—then said, “I’m afraid I can’t. Cataracts.”

  “Look, can we forget about the old lady’s optical affliction just for a minute,” the businessman somewhat unceremoniously interjected. “She’ll be telling us about her piles next, and we don’t have time to…”

  That was where he stopped. His eyes bulged from their sockets, threatening to drop out and roll along the platform. His mouth quivered as he fought to find the words that would not come. He lifted his hand and pointed across the station. The punk and the old lady turned to see what had spooked the businessman so effectively.

  Standing beside a single stanchion, the trio of spiderlike men gazed towards them. There was something in their eyes—those infinite whirlpools that had seen universes implode and civilizations fall—which suggested they weren’t here to ask the time or discuss economic growth in the banking sector.

  “This can’t be good,” the businessman said.

  And it wasn’t. A sudden torrent of wind whipped through the station; ancient dust and brown paper whorled up into the air, creating a grotesque miasma. Rats squealed—where the hell did the rats come from?—as they were forced to join the ever-expanding tornado of debris. The triplets took a step forward, away from the stanchion holding up the Northern Line in its entirety. As they touched, they began to merge, a liquefied mess replacing what had only a moment before been limbs. Their heads distorted, melting into the singular, cyclopean ichor. It was, the old lady thought, really quite revolting.

  “We’re gonna die down here!” the punk screamed as he threw himself down onto the tracks. A rat slapped him in the face as it whizzed through the air to join its brethren. The tornado of rodents and century-old litter was now circling the expanding blackness. Occasionally, a rat would fall out of orbit and dissolve amongst the mass. Such was life…

  “What the hell is it?” the businessmen yelled, though it was barely audible over the tumultuous din of the cosmic anomaly.

  The old lady didn’t know. Why would she? Why would this fool even ask her opinion?

  The viscous blob rushed suddenly forward, scooping up the punk from the tracks. As it washed over him, flesh peeled and burned. The thing was consuming him, but there was no way it was doing it raw. The punk’s skin charred and bubbled for a moment, and then he was gone. As the floating ichor rose up into the station’s atmosphere, the old lady glanced down to where the boy had been a moment ago. A carbonized outline of the punk was all that remained; his orange Mohawk hair floated up, luminous porcupine quills, and joined the tempest.

  The lady staggered back, trying to distance herself from the approaching form. This was not how she had expected to die. A simple stroke would have been quite acceptable. At a push, she would have envisaged a nasty fall—perhaps when the gritters failed to suitably take care of the small avenue in which she lived, as was usually the case—resulting in a fractured hip, six weeks in a hospital and a nasty bout of MRSA, which would certainly do the job.

  Being swallowed by an inter-dimensional deity was something one could never seriously entertain, at least not in this particular part of London.

  “It’s getting biggerrrrrrrrrr!” the businessman astutely pointed out as he forced himself back into the platform’s central stanchion. The old lady was grateful he’d chosen that moment to speak, for the ichorous mass suddenly turned to him, forgetting, for the time being, she was present.

  “Oh God, no!” the man screeched.

  The darkness moved towards him; as it did, the businessman’s suit tore from his body, leaving him standing against the bollard in nothing but a pair of Superman briefs. The Armani two-piece did three laps of the form before being sucked into the obsidian conflagration. The man appeared more shocked at losing his favorite suit than he was by the malevolent being.

  Overhead, a train soared through its tunnel. Passengers going about their daily grind were blissfully unaware of the terror unfolding beneath them. The cowering lady wondered how often this occurred, how many innocent souls this aberrant demon had enveloped. Missing person reports that remained unsolved suddenly made sense; the cases involving city-dwellers failing to reach their destinations had been solved. You could close the book on hundreds of London citizens’ mysterious disappearances. It was just a pity that nobody would ever know the truth.

  The businessman screamed as the mass of swirling rodents began to pick flesh from his naked torso. Bits of him flapped loosely as they feasted. The blood floated from him the way it would from a suicidal astronaut—in one solid, crimson globule. His screams turned to gurgles; his gurgles turned to inaudible whimpers as his lips were chewed away. The rats were making a right old meal of him, and as the meaty chunks were stripped from him, the tarry being sucked them in. The colossus had expanded exponentially. As the blood and flesh disappeared into it, it sighed and groaned as if in pleasure.

  It was quite possibly the most disgusting thing the old lady had ever seen, and she had dined with the royal family…

  As the thing swallowed the final morsels of the businessman, his Superman briefs flew across the platform and landed in the old lady’s lap. Disgusted, she hooked a trembling finger into the leg-hole and flipped them away, shuddering at the sticky texture.

  The thing turned on her. It had no eyes, not to speak of, but she could feel its stare boring into her, delving into her thoughts and plucking from them the things that terrified her the most.

  It paused. Rodents fell from its orbit and scurried down onto the tracks and into the dark tunnels. Their distended bellies prevented them from making a hasty exit, though they did their best with what they had to work with.

  The old lady clambered to her feet. She was tired, sapped of energy and barely able to stand, but she knew she couldn’t just sit there and let the thing engulf her the way it had the punk and the businessman.

  More rats toppled from the rotating miasma as the darkness contemplated its next move.

  The lady grinned. Her teeth were not as clean as they once had been, but they were still all her own. “You weren’t expecting me, were you?” she asked. Despite feeling her age—which was closer to three-hundred than it was to two-fifty—she knew she had the upper-hand. The thing knew she had the upper-hand. The thing also knew that she knew she had the upper-hand, which was why more and more bloodthirsty rodents dropped from the air and scuttled off into the tunnels.

  “You’re an abomination,” she said. “You should be damned ashamed of yourself, feeding off these innocents like this. It wasn’t like this in my day. Noooo. We had to keep a low profile, try not to piss off the…” she poked a skeletal finger upwards. “Things have changed around here, that’s for sure. That Lovecraft fellow has a lot to bloody answer for.”

  The creature growled; though it was an uncertain noise, as if it was not quite sure how the rest of the day would pan out.

  “That’s right,” she said, stepping tentatively towards the floating blackness. “You’re one of his, aren’t you? One of old HP’s? I should have bleedin’ well known it. Where are your tentacles? Huh? Don’t tell me he forgot to give you tentacles? What, so he spent all that time and effort on Cthulhu and made you a giant ball of black? No wonder you’re angry.”

  The Nyogtha snarled, for that was its name. Now that it considered it, Cthulhu had a ring to it. It rolled off the tongue…Cthooo-looo. Not like its own name. Nyogtha sounded like something you ate with cheese and pickles at Christmastime. It was ridiculous.

  “So while he’s out there, living it up in R’lyeh, you’re in London feasting on these poor saps? I must say, seems a little unbalanced to me. Talk about favouritism.”

  The old lady was really starting to grate, but there was something about her that prevented it from attacking, something it’d seen inside her mind that told it, “No, best not…”

  “Well, I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure,” she said, “but it hasn’t. So if you could just put me back up there, you savage little git, and I’ll forget we ever had this little meeting.” She straightened her glasses, which had slightly skewed on the bridge of her nose.

  The silence that followed was fairly uncomfortable; more distressing than watching a man stripped to his underpants get eaten by floating rats, she surmised.

  She knew, in that moment, that the creature had made a decision. As the orbiting rats and dust gathered speed once again, she sighed. “But you read my mind,” she said. “You know what I’m capable of.”

  The low thrum became a deafening groan once again. The time for talking was over. The Nyogtha meant business, and despite what it had seen inside her, what it had witnessed inside that fucked up head of hers, it was pretty sure that she was an old lady now, incapable of things she had once so easily managed.

  “Fine,” she said, whipping her glasses off to reveal two silvery orbs. The Nyogtha lunged across the platform towards her, leaking mice and rats—and somehow a possum—as it went. Passing the central stanchion, it was relatively confident of reaching the old bag in time. It hadn’t counted on her preternatural speed.

  Her hand was a blur as she unpeeled the silken scarf from her head. The Nyogtha managed another foot before freezing.

  Snakes. Hundreds of coiling, writhing snakes sat atop her head where one would usually find a nice, tight beehive or a plaited bun.

  There came a crackling sound as the black ichor began to solidify in mid-air. Even the rats turned to stone, and as they did they landed on the platform tiles, shattering into millions of rocky shards. It was a shame, for this Gorgon had a particular affiliation with animals that was rarely seen.

  The floating ichor tried to outmaneuver the stone creeping up from its bottom. It spilled out over the top, like the remnants of toothpaste from a fast-emptying tube, only to find itself hardening along with the rest of it.

  It groaned, moaned, hissed and said, “Fhtagn…” before gravity finally won and it toppled over the side of the platform and onto the abandoned tracks. She expected it to break up, the way the rats had, and so was slightly disappointed when it rolled onto its side in one piece the way an elephant might snuggle in for a nap.

  “Well, that wasn’t part of my plan for today,” she said as she covered her serpentine hair and tied the scarf securely. She pushed the mirrored shades onto the bridge of her nose and sighed.

  “Well, something to tell the grandkids, I suppose,” she said as she stepped down onto the solidified Nyogtha and then onto the tracks. Rats raced away into the darkness, either scared of her—which was understandable since she’d just made paperweights of their siblings—or willing her to follow.

  “After you,” she said, ducking under the bright yellow cordoning tape and stepping into the darkness of the eastbound tunnel. She hoped it wasn’t too far to the exit. She wasn’t as young as she used to be.

  Vicious Jelly

  Craig Mullins

  The pre-cosmic clusterfuck El Camino rode like a tank, but Herbert West was proud of it anyway. He had gone to great pains to overhaul the vehicle to withstand what the new world would throw at them. Manhole covers had been welded over the wheel wells, and corrugated steel, with narrow slits for sighting and shooting, over the windows. Herbert had even fashioned a rudimentary cow-catcher out of a large green highway sign that read “Arkham, Massachusetts 100 miles” for the front end. The bed of the car was piled high with corpses and equipment…but mostly corpses. The tarp that had covered them had blown away miles ago.

  While driving through one of the many small towns that littered the scarred landscape, they had encountered a Cancer Demon that had popped in front of the car, and then was plowed up and over the roof—which caused both West and Jehovah to duck—and into the bed of the car. It was the first time Herbert had ever seen a Cancer Demon die; it twitched for miles.

  Jehovah was curled up on the floor in a blanket West had removed from a corpse in one of the random houses they had searched. He stood, stretched and hopped up into the seat.

  “This might be the best road we’ve traveled so far,” he said.

  “This is no road, Jehovah. This is what remains of the mighty Mississippi River,” Herbert replied.

  Jehovah looked out the window at the bone-white riverbed. It stretched a mile or more wide and went on for as far as he could see. Up ahead he saw something that made him pause: the skeletons and carcasses of locomotive-sized catfish.

  “I see,” is all Jehovah could say.

  West dodged one of the catfish corpses, its head the only thing sticking out of the dried mud. It looked to be large enough to swallow the car and its occupants whole. At one point, West actually swerved into the exposed ribcage of one of the fish and proved the point.