It was too late, he thought as the waves twisted and warped, falling downwards even in the middle of the sea. Three centuries and more we had battled the forces of darkness, sometimes winning, sometimes not. But in the end, even when they lost it hadn’t mattered.
People died and nations fell, but humanity had gone on.
But not this time. As he picked himself off the deck, he could see John Kirkman laughing his head off as he stood on the water as if it were land. It wasn’t a pretty laugh, it was the laugh of the villains on the holos. Or rather, what the programmers strived for. A laugh that chilled the bone, that ate the soul. The situation was made even worse by the fact that the setting was beautiful. A warm August day in the middle of the ocean, even though too polluted to swim in the sea reflected the white sun’s rays, unblocked by ozone, magnificently.
The hole in the ocean widened, and from it tentacles rose, in numbers beyond counting.. No, not tentacles. Cilia. Now a real tentacle came out, and it was horrible beyond words. And through it all, the same silence, with only Kirkman breaking it.
“I have done as you asked!” he screamed. “I have freed you, Great Cthulhu. Now, grant me my wish. Make me immortal, make me live forever.”
I WILL GRANT YOUR WISH, YOUR TRUE WISH. YOU WISH TO ESCAPE FEAR OF DEATH, AND SUCH WILL I DO.
A tentacle came down, and crushed the sorcerer where he stood.
There was only one thing left to do. The agent fingered the item in his pocket. It was an unornamented bar made of some material he couldn’t identify, and was his only hope. One of a kind, we had discovered it in 2035 and put it into a stasis field, waiting for the final battle. He threw it into the pit, in the way a dying man on Mars might struggle to suck on a bit of oxygen.
Now there was a scream, one on a million frequencies, one within the mind itself.
NO!! THIS CANNOT BE. THIS ISN’T THE WAY ITS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN!! The rate of closure began to slow, as Cthulhu fought the power of the item. But it did not stop. Any Mythos creature hated the Elder Sign, and the item he had thrown in was the ultimate Elder Sign. A manufacturing error had created it, produced a material which by pure chance had a unique molecule which repeated the Elder Sign over and over, tens of millions of times. And every one of them was affecting Cthulhu.
The scream did not die away, but was cut off as if with a switch. But the agent knew he would remember that scream for the rest of his life.
Slowly he picked himself up, walked past the bodies of the rest of his unit, went to the quantaphone. He punched a number, and a face came up.
“Since we’re not all dead, I presume you were successful.”
“Yeah. But can I ask a question?”
“Depends on what it is.”
“That item, what were they manufacturing, when they produced it by accident?”
“There’s no harm in telling you. They were trying to produce cheese.”
BEHOLD THE POWER OF CHEESE
