Free Scary Story for Samhain!
Happy Samhain (Halloween), everyone! This is the new year celebration for Pagans all over the world. In honor of this I’d like to share a short story.
Years ago, while a student at UCLA, I was drawn to the strange worlds created by H.P. Lovecraft and by those who wrote stories focused on his Cthulhu Mythos. Most of my writing, for long years, had been non-fiction. But my fascination with Lovecraftiana drew me to write a couple of stories. One, called “The Thing on the Desert,” is lost. It was the story of a young man, driving alone across the desert between a mythical spot similar to the Parker Dam area of Arizona and Los Angeles. On the way he has a horrifying encounter with strange humanoid beings and, surprisingly, mighty Cthulhu himself. Clues point to the experience being a hallucination, but the final evidence, in typical Lovecraftian style, drives him mad.
The second story is the one you’re about to read. It was triggered by a combination of my interest in the Cthulhu Mythos and an article I read in the December, 1972 issue of a magazine called “Intellectual Digest.” The article, by Laurence B. Chase, originally appeared in “University, A Princeton Quarterly,” and was entitled “John A. Wheeler: The Black Hole of the Universe.”
Wheeler (1911–2008) was one of the world’s top theoretical physicists. He had worked with Albert Einstein and tried to achieve Einstein’s famous vision of a unified field theory. He invented the now-popular terms, black hole and wormhole.
The thing that interested me the most in this article was a simple question: what came before the Big Bang? Wheeler conceived of an idea he called superspace and that the physical universe exists within this superspace. I began to wonder, “What is beyond superspace? My conjectures, along with Lovecraft, resulted in the following story. For fans of the Mythos, the book Emet, briefly mentioned here, was meant to be my own contribution to the mythos. It was to be explained and used more thoroughly in a novel that would have been a sort of detective/spy meets Cthulhu. Yeah, in retrospect, that may not have been my brightest idea.
By the way, if you’re interested in some longer books that blend Lovecraft with real occultism, you should check out some of the books by Donald Tyson.
Well, here’s a link to my story. Titled “The Black Holes of Space,” it has never been published anywhere before.
Please let me know what you think.
