ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE
ALL THE DEVILS ARE HERE
by Adam Newnham
At the end of the first year, we despaired.
Legion seethed over us, beyond counting, no two alike. They belched into being with their burned sugar stench, some shimmering ephemerally, some squatting in potent corporeality, and took us to hell. Cities fell, government’s collapsed, civilisations receded. We hid, too scared to mourn, praying to Gods we still could not believe in.
We tried to catalogue, to make the alien mundane, to render it sane, but they defied classification. A motley of glass skin or a hide of oleaginous tar-stuff; gliding rectilinear across highways and parking lots or striding on vast stilt legs, body lost in the clouds. Their miscellany of horrors was beyond us.
At the end of the second year, we hoped.
She came as suddenly as Legion had, an anti-body, a saint. She bequeathed to us weapons of exotic and unfathomable design. We learnt her strategies and embraced her beliefs. We retaliated.
Legion fled before us, and we cut them down with abandon, taking their fantastic skins, their teeth and claws, as our trophies. We gloried on hill-tops beneath the full moon, dyed in their alien blood, and sang her name.
At the end of the third year, we questioned.
Hermit-scholars, entombed in subterranean laboratories since the earliest infernal breaching, emerged into the sunlight with revelation. They had been learning the tongue of the invaders, had been communicating. We had been poisoned, they told us, our new exolinguists; misled by centuries of corrupt mythology. Legion were not our enemy, they were our saviours. They had not been bent on conquest or extermination, but rescue.
Something else was coming, they prophesied. Some doom-judgement that defied translation, something Legion could only intimate, warning us that we should hope never to see Heaven.
They accused our saint of being a false messiah.
She told us these were lies, of course. Desperate heresies. Those who spoke with Legion we burned, but we could not glory in their deaths, too soured by doubt.
At the end of the fourth year, I grieved.
They became so few, trapped on our plain. They severed the route to their own reality, marooned themselves, fearful that in the rabidity of our hate we would pursue them even there. The remnants of Legion quiver now, hunched within the scintillant, variegated shadows they cast, or cowering within the unbearable pressures of the deep ocean. We find them still; the hunts have the pageantry of empire, and our cornered prey pitch their inscrutable howls into the ether. Our world is now their hell.
She uses the threat of their return, a second demonic crusade, to hold us in thrall. We build temples to her glory. Dissenters declare her an agent of a great evil yet to come, and are burned. Few now defy her will.
But at the end of the fifth year, some of us will rebel.
We call the sundered remnants of Legion to our side, and they slink in from the night, cowed and incredible. We weep at what we have destroyed, and know that, even under this new alliance, we may be too few to succeed.
Fiction © Copyright Adam Newnham
Image by Daniel from Pixabay
Adam lives in the UK with his wife and a toddler who he is fairly sure was conceived when certain stars were aligned, and whose birth coincided with vivid nightmares amongst the world’s psychically sensitive. He has had stories published in Lovecraftiana and by Hiraeth Publishing and has publications upcoming in Scare Street’s Night Terrors anthology series, and Dark Horses magazine.
