Visions of a Dark Horizon

In honor of Necronomicon 2024 starting this week, I have written a new story that’s been bouncing around in my head for a while now. It’s a weird little tale about time travel, philosophy, the origins of horror, and drinking black coffee with H. P. Lovecraft in 1935. I hope you enjoy it.

Coffee with Howard

By Chad Anctil

I looked at myself in the mirror, trying to ignore the health diagnostics display in the corner. My heart rate was elevated, but I didn’t need the diagnostics system to tell me that.  Instead I looked at the brown suit I wore; tweed, classic lines, even the buttons were period authentic.  Every stitch was crafted to blend into my surroundings seamlessly.  

I removed my ear links and the drone of the command communications channel faded away, leaving me alone with my thoughts, my anxiety. It was really happening after five months of preparation, and I was understandably nervous. Active historical archeology – or time travel, as it was most often referred to – was both a breathtakingly powerful technology and a sacred trust, its purpose to actively learn about those parts of our history that we no longer had complete records for, all without impacting the course of future events.  I took a deep breath and headed into the launch chamber.  

The chamber was cold as I expected, and there was an electricity in the air that had nothing to do with the banks of machines powering the jump systems. As I walked in, preparations momentarily stopped as the technicians all looked up from their touch screens before returning to the myriad tasks that needed to be completed for a jump to happen.  

“Are you ready for this?” 

I turned to see Rebeccah Stillman, the period consultant assigned to the jump. She was a well-fed woman with thin lips and kind eyes, and she was responsible for making sure I brought nothing with me that would be anachronistic to the timeline and place I was targeting, 1935 East Coast America. 

“Born ready,” I smiled weakly, and we went through the entire checklist – shoes, socks, undergarments, slacks, shirt, jacket, tie, hat, wallet, ring. The ring was the only piece of technology I was allowed to bring with me, it was the tether that would allow me to return to the present once my allotted time in 1935 was expended, but it was quantum technology, impossible for even the greatest scientists of that age to detect. 

“Now for credits, or what they called cash in 1935, our recent research indicates that the one hundred dollar amounts we had been sending with travelers was too much and drew unwanted attention, so you have multiple smaller bills in your wallet, all of the proper time frame. Their method of currency exchange was base ten so you should have no trouble, should you need to make any purchases.”

“Thanks, was just going to ask about that,” I nodded and opened the wallet, looking through the well-worn slips of paper that the era used as currency. The wallet was made of real, actual animal hide, which was both luxurious and illegal in my time, but was apparently commonplace in 1935 America. 

“Traveler to the launch pod,” came an electronic voice over the chamber speakers. I tucked my wallet into a pants pocket and headed onto the glowing blue-white circle of the quantum tunneling temporal displacement platform and closed my eyes.  

“Traveler, your allotted time in period is sixty minutes.”

“Sixty minutes confirmed,” I nodded, eyes still closed. Five months of prep and nearly three million credits spent on one sixty minute trip. It was a lot of weight on my shoulders, but I knew I was ready.  

“Traveler ready?” the speakers squawked. 

“Traveler ready!” I confirmed loudly. 

“System ready?” a question to the technicians.  

“Dark matter reaction levels nominal, Higgs-Boson injection commencing. System ready.” came the reply.  

“Quantum tunneling launch in five, four, three, two, one -” 

I have never been able to adequately describe time travel via quantum tunneling. You feel nothing, technically – the process is instantaneous – but your mind knows ‘something’ happened to your body, and so it sends a bunch of different signals, all at once. I felt a little dizzy and there were strange, momentary signals of what could have been discomfort if they lasted a millisecond longer, but then I opened my eyes and I was there.  College Street in Providence, Rhode Island.  The year would be 1935.

I breathed in deep, immediately assailed by the smells of impurities in the air, but I always thought there was something strangely wholesome about that. In my time the air was recycled and purified and it just always seemed fake to me, especially after a travelers’ mission.  

I knew my allotted time was ticking by so I headed up the street, seeking my target. I had spent months memorizing his face and figure; tall, gaunt, with striking features, intense eyes, a powerful jawline, and dark hair he kept neatly combed back. 

This was usually the most stressful part of a traveler’s mission, making contact with the target, but every aspect of the trip and the timeline drop were designed to minimize the chance of failure. I trusted my team, and I scanned the streets looking for that distinctive profile.  After less than four minutes, I saw him.  

“Well done, team,” I whispered under my breath and rushed to approach the man I had traveled over twelve hundred years to see.  

“Excuse me, Mister Lovecraft,” I said, hurrying to catch up to the man walking casually down the rough sidewalk.  

The man turned to greet me, his eyes catching mine, and then they seemed to freeze. He looked me up and down with an intensity I was unprepared for, then he took another step towards me and sniffed the air twice. His shoulders dropped and he sighed audibly.  

“I take it you are a traveler in time, then?” he said with a higher pitched voice than I had expected. His regional dialect was pronounced, but his words were very clear and I immediately began to panic internally. Detection was one of the worst offenses a traveler could make. That I was marked as a time traveler the instant Lovecraft saw me meant I could lose my job, my entire career for this.

“I’m not sure-” I began, but the tall, thin man waved a hand and shook his head.  

“Come on, we will have coffee. There’s a good little place nearby,” Lovecraft said, and led me to a small corner diner where we sat at the table furthest from the door.  

I looked around nervously. Could everyone tell I was from a far distant, technologically advanced future? Should I abort the mission?  

“What should I call you, then? Your kind seems to go with ‘Smith’ more times than any.” Lovecraft asked in his sophisticated drawl, again catching me off guard.  ‘Smith’ was my cover name, it was standard issue for travelers, but how could Lovecraft know that?  

“Yes, Mister Lovecraft, Howard – may I call you Howard?” 

“You may not,” Lovecraft replied flatly, and my anxiety jumped another twenty percent.  If I was home the med monitor would already be dispensing a pill and calling the medtechs for vitals like this.  

“Of course, Mister Lovecraft,” I replied respectfully. “Apologies. I am Jonathon Smith, yes, and it is a pleasure to meet you,” I hesitated, then continued in a lower voice. “Why do you think I’m a time traveler? Time travel isn’t real, you must-” 

“You are the fourth of your kind I have met in the past eleven months,” Lovecraft said, and I felt like the floor had dropped out from under me. Lovecraft was a first contact file, no traveler should have ever spoken to him before, and no traveler after me would be allowed to approach him in an earlier timeline. To have met four in under a year seemed impossible.  

“Fourth, that is… concerning,” I said honestly. “And how is it that you can tell us apart with a simple glance?” 

Before he could answer, a rail-thin woman came to the table and greeted Lovecraft genially and took our order for two black coffees.  She returned a moment later and filled the white porcelain mugs with steaming, dark coffee that gave off a rich earthy aroma. 

“Your clothing is always a little too neat, a little too clean,” Lovecraft continued, looking at his coffee as he stirred it for a few moments, then he looked up at me. “But it is your aroma, sir. You all have a scent that is clean to an antiseptic degree, and you all give off the faintest whiff of ozone. I could not understand it at first, but as I thought about it, it is possibly related to your method of conveyance through time.” 

There I sat at a gleaming white diner table in 1935 Providence, across from Howard Phillips Lovecraft himself, and listened to him explain intricacies of quantum tunneling transportation that I and an entire team of active historical archeologists had never considered. I suddenly grinned wide, the absurdity of the situation finally hitting me.    

“And before we go any further,” Lovecraft said, looking back down at his coffee, “There are two rules I must insist on. The first I assume you are already in agreement with, that you may not disclose any detail of my future life, or death.” 

“Of course, that is one of the rules,” I replied, nodding and secretly thankful that Lovecraft understood the gravity of the situation.  “And the second rule?” 

“That you pay for the coffee, of course,” he replied with the faintest hint of a grin. “As long as you are able to. One of the last fellows tried to complete the purchase with something he called a ‘Visa Card’ and that caused a bit of a stir. Another gentleman had an actual one hundred dollar bill. Can you imagine paying for a ten cent coffee with a hundred dollar bill?” He shook his head, in disgust or amusement I couldn’t tell, but I was suddenly thankful that Rebeccah had given me small bills for this trip. Clearly there were travelers out there not getting the proper briefings. I was definitely going to have to report this.  

“I am confident that I can cover both conditions, thank you sir,” I replied gratefully, and then stirred my coffee as well.  I had never had a cup of ‘real’ coffee, but I had the synthetic version enough times to expect how it might taste.  

“You have clearly come a long way to talk to me, so please, Mister Smith, ask your questions.” Lovecraft leaned back and took a slow sip of his coffee, his eyes alight with sharp intellect.  

“Thank you, Mister Lovecraft,” I said eagerly, knowing my time was quickly running out. “I really want to know about your inspirations, how you came across the ideas for Azathoth, Nyarlothotep, the Great Cthulhu? How did you come to imagine such perfect cosmic malevolence?” 

For the first time, Howard Phillips Lovecraft looked curious. “How did I come to imagine otherworldly, indiscriminate evil? Mister Smith, I envy you and your world if you cannot look out your window and see that cold, cosmic malevolence yourself. Evil is a cloud of sickly yellow fog rolling across a battlefield and choking everyone it touches to death, man or woman, child or livestock, the gas didn’t care. Death doesn’t care if you are a pious man or a wicked one, not in this world you find yourself in.” 

“We have tragedy in my time as well, of course,” I responded, thinking of the Luna 3 core explosion, the Martian famines. “But is there something more to your writing? You write of these indefinable monsters, black gods of chaos and madness that live between the stars. Was that all just-” 

“I do not understand the thread of your questioning, sir.” Lovecraft interrupted, brows furrowed.  “Though I suspect it is something you may not be able to better articulate, lest you break the first rule?” 

I sat there, stirring coffee across the table from Lovecraft himself, and thought of the Lovecraft cults that had caused so much turmoil in my world, in my time. The manuscripts recovered from before the great fall, ‘The Mountains of Madness’, “The Call of Cthulhu’, ‘Azathoth’, and more. Books that became important, then revered, as new deep-space scans began to come back with strange images and undiscovered wavelengths that certain people believed were evidence, incorrectly interpreting the results as proof that the stories and horrors written about in those ancient tomes were prophetic. What started as small pockets of doomsday cults slowly became a wave of Lovecraft worshippers who heralded the man – this man sitting across from me – as a prophet who was trying to warn us against an oncoming doom. I took a deep breath.  

“In my time, there are many wonders, but there are many things that we still do not understand, and sometimes those things we don’t understand are attributed to forces that-” 

“Ancient man did not understand the thunder, so he created God,” Lovecraft said quietly across from me, nodding slowly. “Do you still have the Christian bible in your future world?” 

I shook my head, unsure of what he meant. “No, I don’t believe so. Many things were lost-”

“It doesn’t matter, you’re better off without it, I believe,” he continued. “In the bible, God – a great, omnipotent deity, was displeased with mankind, and so he flooded the entire earth, as the story went. Destroyed everyone and everything, except a chosen follower named Noah and his family. With the help of their god figure, this family loaded a breeding pair of every kind of animal onto a huge wooden ship, and when the floods came, the family and those chosen animals survived while everything and everyone else on earth was destroyed.” 

“How horrific!” I exclaimed. This was a horror that seemed extreme even amongst the tales of Lovecraft that had been recovered after the great fall.  

“You see, that’s the interesting part. In this time, it is not a horrific story, it is one that we cherish. It is a story of triumph, of good conquering evil. School children even draw the happy chosen family and smiling animals upon the floating ark, never contemplating the horror of a loving god that can mindfully do such things to his own creations.

“So this is where you find your inspiration, then?” I asked, understanding finally. “It isn’t real, it isn’t some knowledge of deep secrets of the cosmos, it is simply an understanding of man’s fears and how to sharpen them, deepen them.” I felt strangely relieved at the thought.  

“They are just stories, Mister Smith,” Lovecraft said, shaking his head. “And most of them are not very good, if I am being honest. That something of my legacy lives on, so far beyond my time here on this insignificant spinning globe… I hope to someday understand what my true significance is, but I suspect that I will not. Not in my mortal lifetime, at least.  Whatever your reasoning for traveling here, to speak with me, I thank you for giving me even a small glimpse at larger possibilities.” 

With that, Lovecraft said goodbye to me and left the diner. I sat there, knowing I had only a few minutes before my transport back, and for the first time lifted my coffee cup to my lips, sipping the dark brown liquid.  It was bitter, much more bitter than the synthetic beverage I was familiar with, but it had a richer, more complicated flavor that I really enjoyed. I smiled. My mission may have been a success, I realized, in more ways than one.  

As I walked back to the discrete alleyway where I would be transported back to my own time, I realized something that might not only diffuse the Lovecraft Cult situation, but might also explain it.  In my time, centuries after the great fall and enjoying all the benefits of the Second Elysiu Empire, people had everything they needed: technology that could provide anything they desired at the push of a button, great art, entertainment, a life of leisure and peace, but, like their synthetic coffee, there was no bitterness, there was no depth or complexity in life. 

I finally realized that there was no real conflict in our lives, and maybe that was the problem. Maybe these Lovecraft cultists were just looking for that bitterness in their coffee, hoping for some monstrous cosmic cataclysm because somehow maybe it was better than an existence without the dirt and smells and rough edges of the world before the great fall.  

I stood in the designated spot and closed my eyes, and was instantly transported back to the displacement platform.  

I took in a deep breath and it smelled too clean, almost antiseptic, with the faintest hint of ozone.