There is an eclipse every day, here, when the sun passes behind this rip, and night falls for a brief time, fifteen, twenty minutes at most. We have not so far been able to record what happens in this shade; sending a person failed spectacularly the last time, and it seems that even electronic equipment can’t really handle it.

I try to be back at the van when this happens, a brief respite from the containment suit and the proximity display, my load of sensory and recording equipment. There’s time for lunch, maybe, and some nervous joking with the military guys who drive the truck full of expensive equipment there and back to a safe distance. I know that my presence makes them a little uneasy, especially after the first attempt to ask me out, when I told Dennis or Daniel or whoever-politely, mind you-that I wasn’t interested in men. They also don’t know what to make of me because I initially volunteered for this though I am getting quite a bit of hazard pay.

I don’t talk to them too often. Just enough to not make it worse for everyone.

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I never thought she’d call me.

“I knew you’d be worried,” Anna had said.

“I was,” I said, shocked into honesty by the realization she’d actually given me a moment’s thought.

We spent most of the time talking about the storm’s aftermath. “Arkham’s flooded,” she said. “They canceled classes at Misk until further notice. Newburyport’s a mess….”

“How are you?” I asked.

“Innsmouth pretty much got through it unscathed,” she said.

Not the answer I was looking for. This didn’t surprise me. Neither did Innsmouth’s shelter from the storm, despite the town being situated right on the coast. After its revival in the nineties as a place where artists and hipster students with trust funds – like myself – could thrive, nothing could slow Innsmouth down. Not its own sordid history, nor the recession, not even the weather.

The tired old joke was always, “What did Innsmouth sell its soul to this time?”

We did some perfunctory catching up and had gotten to the part where we both mentioned about how little had changed in our lives over the past year, when I blurted out, “I want to see you.” I hung my head down between my knees and waited for another rejection.

“Eliot,” Anna said with a sigh.

I was mentally kicking myself, thinking stupid, stupid, stupid.

“One last visit,” she said. “One. For old time’s sake.”

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She walked into my office like she owned the place, sweeping in with a presence that filled the room the way she filled out a dress. Mrs. Tabitha Barnes was beautiful; blond hair fell down her shoulders and back like spun gold, and her skin was so pale and smooth it looked like fine china. The dress in question was red, tailored, and fit her like a second skin and she layered it with a fur-lined coat that did little to hide the body underneath. Fierce green eyes studied me as she took the seat across the desk from me. She’d called before to introduce herself and the job she was offering, but I wasn’t ready for her, not in the slightest.

I could tell you about the job she hired me for. Her husband, Professor James Barnes, had gone missing. A scientist working at Miskatonic University, he was an astronomer; three days before her call he’d vanished, never returning home from work. She wanted me to find him because she was worried he might be having an affair.

I could tell you about how from the moment the job started it went bad. The gorilla that kicked in my door had to turn sideways to enter, a mountain of a man wrapped in a gray trench coat, black gloves covered hands as big as Christmas hams. A black fedora was pulled low over his eyes so I could only see his broad, broken nose and his sneer as he glanced her way. The sound of my pistol firing as he reached for her was like a thunderclap, the bullet spinning him to the floor. I grabbed her hand and fled.

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1.

Always wondered what Jason was writing in this journal. All musicians are sensitive artistes, I guess, I just never knew he wrote poetry. Anyhow, I’m commandeering the thing since wherever the hell he is, he doesn’t need it any more.

Jesus, I can’t believe he’s gone. I wish I’d told him.

-Vic

2.

This is the kind of shit you see in movies. Guy goes out for a day-trip with his friend, storm picks up, beats the hell out of them, guy gets knocked out by a falling piece of the boat. Guy wakes up in open water, GPS fried, his friend staring blankly–like he’s the one with the head injury.

He kept talking about faces in the water. Jesus.

Goddammit, why did I go to sleep? Why didn’t I stay awake and watch him?

I’m probably going to burn this fucking diary when I get home – well, my parts at least. But I need something to do or I’ll go crazy. I’m washed up on this rock, Jason disappeared overboard (or into thin air, I guess) three days ago, and there’s still no rescue.

Weird, but that’s not a complaint. I don’t want one. Not after I let him down like that.

Ran around the edge of the island today–the thing is small as hell, and nothing in any direction.

Fuck, why can’t I cry?

-Vic

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Mamie Bishop and I had been courting for a number of years before I proposed. I think that we would still be courting now had it not been for the incident involving that local misfit, Wilbur Whateley. The details of which are too vast and unsettling to go into here – only have it known that following his disappearance, a gloom seemed to settle over the town. Inhabitants unwilling to discuss the event hid away behind closed doors, avoiding each other’s gaze for fear that mentioning “the unspeakable name” of Whateley would bring some unknown terror lumbering to their door.  For Mamie, who had visited their residence on past occasions, the effects were far more pronounced.

She became withdrawn, her skin affecting a sickly pallor. More than once she was found walking alone in the hills at night, her head tilted up to the sky as though she was searching for some sign or movement in the clouds. Naturally, I became concerned, and after ushering her back to her parents’ home following one of those midnight jaunts, I sat her down and poured out my heart. Racked as I was with worry, I would say, and do, anything in my power to help alleviate whatever concerns gave her cause to act in such a manner. Anything to have the Mamie I loved safe.

I will never forget the way she looked at me then.

Her face wet with tears, black hair raining down upon her brow, she raised her head and said, “A child, Earl. I want a child.”

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“Turn it on,” she said.

When he didn’t move, she cocked the gun. Even so, Marc hesitated, his hand over the knife switch at the heart of the sprawling machine.

“It’s not safe,” he said, trying not to whine.

“I know,” she replied. The raw silk in her weary voice turning to rusted steel. “That’s why I need it.” She laid down the gun, certain of his obedience, and began to unbutton her long black dress. It slithered off her angular, hungry curves to pool round her feet. Her stockings were the color of smoke. She wore nothing else. The sheen of her perspiration made her pale body glimmer in the moonlight. Her long burgundy bangs hid her eyes. “Turn it on, and open it up all the way.”

He had built it for her, with the weird old components she always seemed to find just when they were needed, and the yellowing circuit diagrams stamped PROJECT BIFROST: ABOVE TOP SECRET. Whenever he asked her about it, she had fucked him until he forgot his questions. But this morning, he had done some digging and found out just enough about what he had built that he tried to destroy it.

Thus, the gun.

She’d told him some of it, when she had to. She didn’t have to spell it out. She had to be an idiot or crazy, not to realize how far out of his league she was. When they’d met on a makers’ message board thread about teledildonics and orgone generators, he’d played along with what he was sure was a joke. Something that’ll make Sex and Drugs obsolete, was all she had to say. Meeting her in person was a shock. Her picture didn’t begin to do her justice.

Like most girls who dyed their hair a new color every week and covered themselves in tattoos, there was damage behind her intriguing façade, desperation and despair between the whirlwind binges of thrill seeking. She warned him she was “a bit of a nymphomaniac,” and there was a sleepy confession that she’d been to rehab, been committed, experimented on. He didn’t care about her past, any more than he cared if she really loved him, or what the hell a Tillinghast resonator was, until it was too late.

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It was an unfortunate and shameful predicament that led me to seek lodging with my estranged older brother. We were strangers raised by the same parents with more than a decade between us, like serial lodgers with only a house and a pair of kindly if distant landlords in common. I knew nothing of his secrets, nor he of mine.

His was a stately row house on a venerated downtown block. It was the sort of street along which young businessmen walk with ambitious longing, and ladies make a show of disembarking from their carriages so that other ladies might see them welcomed inside. I came to his doorstep in the evening, in the rain, with the glow of the streetlight forming a halo behind my bedraggled, dripping hair. My brother was a stern-looking man, but I was accustomed to charming my way into the hearts of stern-looking men. The words spilled past my lips: I confessed to him that a grave misunderstanding with a young gentleman had ruined my station, and that I had nowhere else to go. Upon my repeated apologies, sobbed between solemn assertions that I would not inconvenience him and only needed a safe place for my reputation to convalesce in privacy, he took me in with a nod and a long-suffering sigh.

At once, he arranged for me the sorts of diversions appropriate for a lady: music lessons, and embroidery, and dancing. It was an unexpected kindness, perhaps evidence of how deeply he had been moved my plea. Or perhaps to keep me occupied while he was away all day, toiling at whatever labor provided him the financial resources for such a well-situated home. He did not discuss his work with me, and I did not ask. When he returned home in the evening, we dined in formal silence at opposite ends of a long, impersonal table. After coffee, he received callers and retreated to his study, leaving me once again on my own.

I rarely saw him. Still, hints of his secrets soon began to make themselves apparent. The servants – for he had several – were not at sufficient ease with me to treat me as one of their number, as I would have preferred. However, they were unaccustomed to another presence pacing the halls by day, and forgot to guard their tongues. They whispered about him, about the house, about the visitors, about the need to keep a vigilant eye on me to prevent me from wandering where I shouldn’t. There were doors, I learned, that were perpetually locked. To these rooms the house servants were forbidden entry, and strict punishment might befall any well-meaning girl who rearranged his books, or so much as shifted his papers.

A locked door, however, had never been a match for my curiosity. Indeed, I had made my livelihood upon the riches and secrets they shielded. Willpower and gratitude held me back for a full two days, but on my third day in residence I claimed headache in the middle of my piano lesson and sent the tutor away. It was, I thought, something a spoiled lady might often do, and indeed the nice gentleman seemed willing enough to escape my dreadful playing while presumably keeping his full afternoon’s fee. With the servants distracted by the afternoon bustle as they prepared for their master’s return, my slender lock picks and I crept into every room on the upstairs floor, in search of a bit more background on my closest blood-relation.

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We want to expand on the first book, without discarding any of it. The stories from Cthulhurotica are bold, sexy, creepy, empowering and frightening. What we’re looking for now is more … We want stories which use more of Lovecraft’s settings and characters. We’ve got Innsmouth and Arkham, but what about the mountains, the Artic, aboard the Emma? We met Nyarlathotep, the Mi Go, and the King in Yellow, but what about Ithaqua, or the Hounds of Tindalos? Tell us about Charles Dexter Ward’s neighbor, or the secretary in Professor Peaslee’s office.

What if Richard Upton Pickman painted pinup girls too?

Read more about what we’re looking for, and submit your unpublished original story, HERE

Humanity, as portrayed in Lovecraft’s fiction, is not only incapable of resisting the impact of racial and hereditary degeneration, but also incapable of maintaining itself ‘properly’ via sexual reproduction, an act that for Lovecraft gives birth to nothing but nightmare. – Brian Lord, “The Genetics of Horror: Sex and Racism in H.P. Lovecraft’s Fiction“, 2004

Most fans of  HP Lovecraft’s writing will concede that as a person, he was a jerk. Racist, misogynistic, anti-sex tendencies appear over and over again in both his published writing and his personal letters. Contemporary authors have struggled to reconcile his vile opinions with his work as the creator and shaper of the Cthulhu Mythos, a universe too much fun to ignore. (Read Nnedi Okorafor’s discussion of the Lovecraft-shaped World Fantasy Award, which she won.) In the first book of the Cthulhurotica series, we talked about the need to create more fiction in his world, in order to show a wider range of characters living and breathing and making love there. But can we really separate the man from his Mythos?

We don’t have to. The simple solution is to realize that Lovecraft was mad, in the classic sense of the word. It just wasn’t the Mythos that made him that way.

Lovecraft was right about his monsters. Cthulhu is out there, sleeping in the darkest depths of in-between space. Innsmouth exists, as does Arkham, if not on our maps than in the maps of thousands of authors and artists and musicians and filmmakers in the last century. Deep Ones float on ice cold currents at the bottom of the sea. Cultists chant, Shoggoths squish, the Black Goat bears a thousand young, the terrible trees lie in wait, and Dagon passes the time on a tiny island you can never find unless you’re trying to get away from it. There is much more to our existence than we can comprehend without a little madness of our own.

But Lovecraft had issues before he ever conceived of that which should not be named. He was already afraid of women, and of people of color, and of the world in general, and of himself. He reached out and saw the Mythos universe looking back at him, and in an effort to understand it, he wrapped it in the fears he already knew. He looked into the unknowable, the creatures and places that drive you insane. It’s genius, really, that he engineered a way to survive that. By convincing himself that the real monsters were girls in short dresses, and Jews (and blacks, and Asians, and gays, and lipstick and nail polish and a pretty smile) he could keep his mind in one piece.

We’re stronger than that. We don’t need to make excuses for our monsters. We don’t need to hide behind lesser fears in order to comprehend the greater ones. We can look upon the Mythos and we can love it for what it is.

Be braver than Lovecraft. Put down your defenses, find the unmarked door, turn the ancient key, and go inside. Bring a date.

Or meet someone there.

- Carrie Cuinn, Editor

Erotica [ih-rot-i-kuh] is literature or art intended to arouse sexual desire. It is not pornography, which is understood to have sexual arousal as its main purpose. Erotica includes a sexual aspect but it is only one part of the larger aesthetic. In other words, writing erotica is not about graphic descriptions of people having sex, it’s about making your reader want to have sex. It’s a tease, a flirt, a seduction …

Who is Cthulhu?

H.P. Lovecraft wrote smart, surreal, supernatural horror stories in the early 20th century. Cthulhu is one of several fictional creatures created by Lovecraft in the early 20th century. Lovecraft’s stories, and some of the works of his followers, outline what we now call the “Cthulhu Mythos”. Mythos characters include both the monsters and the men who discovered them.

Cthulhurotica is the place where sex and madness meet.

What are we hoping to get from Volume 2?

We want to expand on the first book, without discarding any of it. The stories from Cthulhurotica are bold, sexy, creepy, empowering and frightening. What we’re looking for now is more … We want stories which use more of Lovecraft’s settings and characters. We’ve got Innsmouth and Arkham, but what about the mountains, the Artic, aboard the Emma? We met Nyarlathotep, the Mi Go, and the King in Yellow, but what about Ithaqua, or the Hounds of Tindalos? Tell us about Charles Dexter Ward’s neighbor, or the secretary in Professor Peaslee’s office.

What if Richard Upton Pickman painted pinup girls too?

There is so much, both in Lovecraft’s work and in the associated Mythos stories by other authors, which hasn’t yet been explored. If you do want to revisit a location or monster from the first book, make sure you do so in a completely new way.

More importantly, we want to see more variations on the human theme. Female main characters, people of color, queer folk, polyamorous families, people with disabilities – if they exist in the real world, they should exist in Lovecraft’s world as well. (Yes, you can still send us a story with a straight, white, upper-middle class male as your main character if you want to.)

Some references which might help:

http://www.hplovecraft.com/creation/whoswho.asp – A Who’s Who of Lovecraft’s characters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu_Mythos – The Cthulhu Mythos

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovecraftian_horror – The Style of Lovecraft

What do we want to avoid:

Non-consensual sex, underage characters, slash fiction which features actual people (you can’t use August Derleth as a character in your story if he’s participating in any sex acts), poetry.

What we’re buying:

Stories of up to 4,500 words. Must be original; no reprints, no simultaneous submissions. Worldwide print and ebook rights (exclusive for 6 months, non-exclusive for an additional 30 months).

What we’re paying:

2 cents per word, paid within 90 days after publication. Contributor copy of print and ebook (can choose between .epub or .mobi/Kindle versions).

Submissions open May 1, 2012, and will close at 11:59 EST on July 31, 2012. Please submit your story as a .doc or .odt file. Use 12 pt font, do not insert two spaces at the end of each sentence (one is sufficient), and your story must include your name, address, telephone number, email address, and approximate word count on the first page.