Flower of Scotland Read online

  People screamed.

  The plasma surged.

  It took thirty minutes to muster the National Guard. In that time, the plasma spread by five blocks in every direction.

  If there was a noise, it consumed whatever made it. Trucks, people, dogs and subway cars, all fell under the surging protoplasm, and all served to feed its exponential growth.

  The National Guard brought in jeeps.

  The plasma ate them.

  They brought in choppers.

  The plasma ate them… protoplasmic tendrils shooting skyward to suck the machines out of the air.

  The Guard used bazookas.

  The plasma surged, and suddenly, the Guard were gone.

  The city was full of noise.

  The plasma fed.

  The President got involved twenty minutes later. Assembled in his room were the chief of staff, the head of Homeland Security and the Director of the FBI.

  "So what is it doing now?" the President asked.

  "Still growing," the head of Homeland Security answered. "And still feeding." He was white as a sheet, and visibly trembling.

  "How many casualties?" the President whispered.

  "Too many to count," the chief of staff said. "It has taken most New York State… and we don’t know if anybody is still alive in the area. It will be here in minutes."

  "That’s it," the President said. "Call in the Air Force. We’re going to nuke it… and somebody shut that window!"

  Outside, the crazed fluting of Rickman’s plasma filled the air.

  The plasma lay along the eastern seaboard covering most of New York and New Jersey.

  Flocks of birds cawed and fluttered.

  The plasma ate them.

  Three passenger jets inward bound from Europe passed overhead at thirty thousand feet.

  The plasma threw up tendrils and ate them.

  The bomber carrying the nuke came in at over a thousand miles per hour.

  The plasma ate it.

  The nuke exploded creating a fireball of white heat and radiation at more than a million degrees centigrade.

  The plasma ate it, surged, and headed for Canada.

  The President of the European Union got involved an hour later. Assembled in his room were the heads of the UK, France and Germany. The President of Russia was on a TV screen, linked in by satellite.

  "So what is it doing now?" the President of the EU asked.

  "Still growing," the Russian President answered. "And still feeding." He was white as a sheet, and visibly trembling.

  "How many casualties?" the President whispered.

  "Too many to count," the Prime Minister of the UK said. "It has covered most of North America and is heading South and East fast… and we don’t know if anybody is still alive anywhere. It will be here in minutes."

  "We only have one option," the President said. `We hit it with every missile NATO and Russia have, and hope for the best. And somebody close that window!"

  Outside, the crazed fluting of Rickman’s plasma filled the air.

  Over a thousand nuclear weapons were launched in the next fifteen minutes… enough firepower to start, or finish, a global war, enough mega-tonnage to destroy every city on the planet.

  The plasma ate them all and surged.

  The last human beings on the planet got involved an hour later. Assembled in a lab at the South Pole were scientists from the US, Brazil, France and Germany.

  "So what is it doing now?" the Brazilian asked.

  "Still growing," the head scientist answered. "And still feeding." He was white as a sheet, and visibly trembling.

  "Is there anybody left?" someone whispered.

  "I doubt it," the Frenchman said. "The last we heard it had covered the rest of the planet and was heading south fast."

  "We only have one option," the head scientist said. `We keep quiet, and hope it passes."

  The crazed fluting of Rickman’s plasma filled the air.

  The scientists sat in silence, barely breathing.

  Their generator kicked in noisily.

  The plasma surged.

  ~-oO0Oo-~

  Can You Hear Them?

  The noise came again just as Jim Reagan reached the edge of the field - the same high singing as before.

  He tried to peer though the growing gloom of dusk, but all he could see was an expanse of whiteness - a completely snow covered landscape.

  "Probably a fox" he told himself, but deep down, even though he would never admit it, he knew that no fox was capable of making that noise. Something was trying to get past his mental filters - something from his childhood - but it wasn't getting through. Not yet.

  He made a note in his book that the south fence needed repairing again and was just turning back towards the house when someone spoke.

  Can you hear them?

  He turned, wondering how a person could have got so close without him noticing, but there was no one within sight, and the only tracks in the snow were his own.

  Two minutes later he was standing in the hallway of his cottage, his breath coming in hot steaming gasps, his boots shedding compacted snow onto the hardwood floor.

  "It was jist a wee bit o' wind" he whispered, and indeed, as if to counterpoint his thought, a gust whistled through the eaves of the cottage. But he knew that it wasn't the same thing. Not by a long way.

  He left his notebook and pencil on the telephone stand in the hall and headed for the drinks cabinet. It took two large glasses of whisky for his mind to turn the memory of the voice into something more resembling a breeze, but even then it still nagged, still lodged way down deep in a place he didn't want to remember.

  He tried to settle, but the television was broadcasting its usual inanities and the radio reception was so bad that he was forced to switch it off after a while. He sat at the window, watching a storm build up, until it got too dark to see. And even then he sat, watching his reflection for long minutes before drawing the curtains and closing himself in.

  Silence settled around him.

  Eventually the wind dropped and, apart from his trusty, wheezing, generator there was only the soft patter of snow on the window. Soon he began to hear rhythms in the noise, the weather sending him a coded signal of danger which he was only just unable to decipher.

  "Music," he muttered aloud, needing to break the silence. "That's what I need. Something good and loud."

  He rummaged around in a box of old tapes discarded by his wife, his ex-wife, when she left. He put on a compilation of pop songs from a happier time and let the mindless mania wash over him.

  For nearly half an hour he managed to lose himself in the intricacies of police work in Ed McBain's 87th Precinct while the music washed around him. He had even found himself singing along at one point, but then a drum beat kicked in that he didn't recognise.

  Twin guitars started to wail, then the vocal began, a vocal whose first phrase was echoed by another, deeper voice in his left ear.

  Can you hear them, singing their songs

  If you listen, they'll soon be a throng

  He was up and out of the chair before the voice could continue and switched the player off by pulling the plug out at the mains so that the song died on a slow, ever deepening, chord. For long seconds he stood there, the plug in his hand, his heart pounding its own drumbeat in his ears. He half expected to turn and find that he was not alone in the room, but there was only a spilled glass of whisky and a book beside his chair.

  "You're getting daft in your auld age." he said, and almost managed a smile as he realised that talking to himself was probably the first sign that he was right.. But when he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror over the mantle he knew that he was only fooling himself.

  Haggard eyes stared blankly back from sunken, blackened sockets. And that was when his mental filters dropped.

  It was the eyes that did it - the same, dark blue eyes that his father had, the same eyes that had twinkled on a long ago night when stars filled the sky.
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br />   Jim had been twelve, and a vessel ready to be filled with wonderment.

  "They're oot there," his father said. "Watching us. They come on quiet nichts jist tae see what we're up to. If ye jist haud yer wheest for a bit ye'll hear their wee voices singing ."

  They sat there together, father and son, in the quiet dark

  "Can ye hear them?" the older man whispered, and Jim tried, he really did, but there was only the wind in the trees.

  "Never mind," his dad said. "They'll be back. They always come back."

  Jim stood, staring deep into the mirror, hoping to read meaning in the eyes, trying to connect with the boy he had been, but no illumination was forthcoming. Maybe if Isobel had still been around she might have given some insight, but he refused to let his thoughts drift that way - one year wallowing in self pity hadn't brought her back and he was damned if he was going to go on wishing the rest of his life away.

  He dragged his tired body off to bed and was asleep almost as soon as his head rested on the pillow.

  The reverberations of some unrepeated noise startled him into wakefulness. His room was hazily lit by moonlight and for long minutes he watched the lazy crawl of shadows across the ceiling. Far off in the night a cow lowed, and it was only then that he realised that his generator had stopped, its ever present clunk and hum suddenly silent.

  "Bloody thing can wait till the morning" he said, but he knew it would be too late by then. The outside temperature would already be well below freezing, and it would still be dropping. He knew from bitter experience that the house would be one big block of ice before dawn if he didn't get down to the cellar and kick start the machine.

  It was only when he got out of bed that he realised just how quiet the night was. He pulled the curtains back and stared out of the window, out across the bare expanse of snow to the forest beyond. The sight that met him almost stopped his heart.

  Out there, just at the top of the tree line, a shimmering, dancing rainbow of lights hovered among the trees, illuminating the canopy with a cold steel blue that pulsed and quivered as if alive.

  A voice whispered in his left ear

  Can you hear them?

  And this time he could. At first it was little more than a whisper, but it grew into a chorus of high pitched chanting unlike anything he'd ever encountered. To start with there were no words, just a formless wall of sound, but then patterns began to form and the melody slowed to an air, a lullaby that he almost remembered from childhood.

  He stepped back as the lights flashed once, brightly, and, pulling the curtains shut, fought off the urge to get back in to bed and huddle under the covers. His first priority was the generator. Strange lights in the woods would just have to wait - if he didn't get the generator fixed he was going to be a prime candidate for hypothermia.

  His fingers were slow to respond to his brain's commands as he fumbled with the buttons of his cardigan and his shoe laces proved impossible to manipulate. Silence had returned by the time he was fully dressed and when he pulled back the curtains all he could see was the dark shadow of the forest and the moonlight on the snow.

  "Definitely goin' daft in the heid," he muttered to himself, and put it to the back of his mind. He realised that there was a lot of detail back there now, things that he'd have to confront later, but for now he had to get to the generator.

  The hallway was in darkness as he came down the stairs and the only sound was the squeak of his shoes on the old wooden boards. It was as he reached the bottom step that the hallway seemed to explode in bright, almost blinding, light, and the accompanying singing echoed loudly in his ears, a steadily rising chorus that threatened to lift off the top of his head.

  Can you hear them? his father's voice cackled in his ear.

  Through the glass panes of the door Jim could see movement: thin, almost skeletal, long-limbed and big headed, they cavorted and danced just beyond the doorstep.

  Their song was enticing, promising happy days in golden fields and dancing under the moon. Isobel would have understood - she would have gone with them. But not Jim. Jim had responsibilities .Jim was made of sterner stuff. He wouldn't run away on a whim.

  He picked up the only weapon available to him as the door rattled on its hinges and the voice in his head echoed in a loop.

  Can you hear them?

  Can you hear them?

  Can you hear them?

  It was the village postman who found him two days later. He had trudged all the way up to the house, leaving huge gouges in the deep, unbroken snow. When Jim didn't answer his knock he lifted the letterbox and peered through.

  The sight sent him running and it was big Sandy McPherson, the local bobby, who actually broke open the locked door.

  At first they thought it was a heart attack that had got the big farmer, but when they turned him over they found the true reason.

  The last inch of a pencil protruded from his left ear, almost imperceptible amid the pool of congealed blood. Crumpled up in his left hand they found a note, but they would never understand its meaning.

  There was only one word.

  No.

  ~-oO0Oo-~

  #dreaming

  @greatcthulhu Feeling sleepy LOL! #ryleh

  Darren was amused to see the Dreaming God turn up in his Twitter feed that January morning, amused enough to follow whoever had set it up. Over the next few weeks he noticed the handle turning up with increasing regularity. Somebody was having fun.

  @greatcthulhu Hey @yogsototh Whassup dude? Tekeli-Li! LOL!

  All over the world people joined in with the @greatcthulhu in conversation. Darren recognised a lot of the users from Mythos-based games and knew many of the writers from Lovecraftian anthologies and magazines. They all kept the joke going, re-tweeting @greatcthulhu to an ever wider audience.

  The bulk of the traffic came through one particular hash-tag, #starrywisdom, and seemed to be concentrating on collecting information from world-wide sources on dreams, and in particular, dreams about the end of the world. Darren decided to play along.

  @dazza Last night it was ice-giants and Ragnarok LOL Anyone else gone #viking? #starrywisdom

  His expectations of any comeback were low; he only had a couple of dozen followers and his tweets were infrequent and rarely commented on. So he was pleasantly surprised the next morning to see that his follower count had risen to number fifty-two, and that @greatcthulhu was responsible.

  @greatcthulhu Hey dude THX for the new dreamers at #viking. Y’all should be following @dazza

  By mid afternoon Darren’s follower count had risen to the low hundreds and he was hooked on the rush. He started posting using hash-tags that he knew had large numbers of followers.

  @dazza Hey #kindle #ebooks Check out #starrywisdom for some cool reading material

  He checked his follower count before going to bed. It was over a thousand and rising fast.

  He thought he was too excited to sleep. He was wrong. He dreamed.

  He is alone, in a vast cathedral of emptiness where nothing exists save the dark and the boom of a pounding beat from below. Shapes move in the dark, wispy shadows with no substance, shadows that caper and whirl as their dance grows ever more frenetic.

  He tastes salt water in his mouth, and is buffeted, as if by a strong, surging tide, but as the beat grows ever stronger he cares little. He gives himself to it, lost in the dance, lost in the dark.

  He wanders, there in the space between. He forgets himself, forgets everything in a blackness where only the dance matters.

  He woke to a crumpled, sweat-stained bed, upset that he had been taken out of the dream. But a ping from his laptop got his attention and seconds later the dream was forgotten as he read his Twitter follower number.

  Five thousand? How high can it go?

  The #starrywisdom tag was now showing as a trending topic, in the top ten of all subjects being discussed on Twitter. The @greatcthulhu handle seemed to be enjoying all the attention.

  @greatcthulhu Any m
ore of this and I might have to wake up early LOL! #starrywisdom

  Darren spent the day tweeting to a large number of hash-tag topics, funneling more and more people towards the #starrywisdom topic. By the time he went to bed he had ten thousand followers on his own account, and #starrywisdom was the hottest topic in the Twitterverse.

  He floats, mere shadow now, alongside tens of scores of others, in that cold silent sea. He has no thought for anything but the rhythm, the dance. Far below him, cyclopean ruins shine dimly in a luminescent haze. Columns and rock faces tumble in a non-Euclidean geometry that confuses the eye and brooks no close inspection. And something deep in those ruins knows he is there.

  He dreams, of vast empty spaces, of giant clouds of gas that engulf the stars, of blackness where there is nothing but endless dark, endless quiet. And while the slumbering god dreams, they dance for him, there in the twilight, dance to the rhythm.

  He is at peace.

  Coming up out of the dream felt like surfacing through hundreds of feet of water. He woke, panting and exhausted, physically drained. But mentally his mind buzzed with new ideas for promoting #starrywisdom and he wasted no time in putting them into action. He didn’t even bother checking his own follower count. If he had, he’d have seen it was now over thirty thousand.

  By late afternoon #starrywisdom was the hottest trending topic in Twitter history, with millions of people posting to the hash-tag, all of them including other tags in their posts, all of which further emboldened the @greatcthulhu poster.

  @greatcthulhu 200K followers. Whoo-Hoo! #countdown brought forward. #starsareright

  That next night Darren was at the keyboard for hours, posting a tweet every minute to as many new hash-tags as he could find. He also started to see new tags trending across the planet, all seemingly related to what he was doing. The #dance tag in particular got a lot of attention, with tens of thousands of people looking for information on a strange dream involving a great city deep under water and a dance in shadows.

  At some level Darren knew he should be worried, and that something was spiraling out of control, something that had wormed its way into the Twitterverse and seemed intent on taking over. But as sleep took him he was thinking of yet more ways he could help #starrywisdom in the morning.