voice in Ed’s head.
He was seeing all this through the memories of the demon-thing in the pit.
Now, the scene unfolded, hideous beings were teeming in an impossible city where blue-black crystalline towers rose to the clouds, and floating terraces hovered over avenues filled with—
Death.
Over time, they had engineered themselves--to make themselves smarter, immortal, and psychically powerful, able to control machines with thoughts.
BUT…
They changed themselves too much, remade every cell and atom in their forms. They no longer had a place in the pattern of the universe.
Reality rejected them. They started dying. I called it Dissolution—Dissolving—
Ed watched as hordes of the things writhed in their floating towers and down in the streets. Moaning, spasming, their flesh turned porous like thin-sliced sponge over aching organs and brittle bone. He was dimly aware of his own stomach contracting, clutching like a spasming fist—
Croatoan ! They pleaded.
Great Croatoan, maker of machines, master thinker, help us! Use your knowledge make us whole again, keep us alive!
So I toiled, I worked—
Our world was contaminated, dying itself, poison in the air, earth, water and the very fabric of reality there.
I told them: we must leave.
I opened a portal in the fabric of the universe, led them to a new world—blue-green with forests and oceans and life. The portal would barely stay open, only a few hundred survivors made it across…
But even on this new planet, the Dissolution proceeded. Slowed by still deadly…
They blamed me… ME! Who’d tried to save them! Called me a failure, a deceiver.
Still, I labored. I made deep, dark wells, protected in the Earth, where we might rest until a solution was found.
Ed saw the demon-things crawling into wells in the earth, crystal-lined shafts inlaid with crisscrossing veins of silver. They curled up, slept, hibernated. But their brains were still working on some level, there were whispers mind-to-mind in the dark …
Locked me away from the others. I, Croatoan, the savior of them! For my own safety, vital to the plan, they said. That was the consensus.
But they sought to punish me. I who had served and trusted them . Trusted!
So I was ISOLATED.
In the dark ALONE. Alone alone alone ALONE.
Awake in my well, can’t sleep, mind works and works and works and works and works. A thousand thousand years of mind working and no one and nothing and ALONE.
Now, eons of time and suffering flash by Ed’s perceptions before focus returns suddenly, violently—
There is a village on an island, men and women—Englishmen, colonists-- in the clothing of two centuries past.
I woke and still alone—
But the planet now is inhabited with pink-fleshed walking apes, creatures fragile yet adaptable.
Humans—my new materials for my experiment, my hope…
Ed watches as Croatoan—the name of the demon-thing—emerges from his pit to create a device of silver and glass. He uses it, nearly kills himself with the effort of his psychic push…
I wanted to take them all, possess their minds and souls! My body was dying but I, Croatoan, would spread my soul to ALL of the humans, becoming immortal—an entire race of ME.
And then the others of my kind who rejected me and locked me away by myself would PAY dearly. I would dig them up out of their wells and…
But the experiment went wrong.
Ed watches through Croatoan’s memories, horrified, as the men, women and children in the island village sicken, then die… Their very flesh and bone dissolving into nothingness, billowing away in clouds of dust and gas… Until the village is deserted, the people vanished—literally disintegrated.
Experiment FAILED, so I came north, to the place I had prepared eons ago before they locked me away. The cavern here…
I slept another century and more… and waited… and then a sympathetic one came—the one called “Rector”…
My tool he is! And now I shall continue my experiment and