"Recrudescence"

 by Leonard Carpenter

originally published Amazing Stories, January 1988

Olin is a prof of paleontology at a California university.  One day he gets a call from Jean, a former student now working on an offshore oil drilling platform in the SoCal bay.  It seems they've found something that may interest him.  It seems the recently-divorced Olin has always had a thing for Jean,  So off he goes.  

The something turns out to be bizarre, hexagonal flat stones of uniform size and shape that the drill is digging up out of the ocean floor.  Puzzled and intrigued, Olin also thinks he sees a living trilobite while he's poking around in the water.

Later, Olin is drawn to a protest rally where he meets some unusual characters who wear some of those hexagonal stones as religious symbols.  They manage to get him on their bus, take him off to their remote lodge, and give him several earfulls of their weird, cultish beliefs.  To wit: the earth was inhabited, back in the dawn ages, by a race of alien refugees of indescribable technological, or perhaps flat-out magical, gifts.  They refer to this race as "The Shapers".  But The Shapers also had alien enemies, who unleashed a holocaust upon them, crushing them into the depths of the earth and then sealing them away (for The Shapers are immortal or semi-immortal [is that even possible?] by covering their civilization over - with the hex-shaped flat stones.  These stones form a barrier The Shapers cannot pass.  But they can send out psychic waves, which affect the dreams and meditations of those sensitive enough to receive them.  One such alleged sensitive is Emil Sturla, a wild-haired old whack job who emerges from seclusion to give the cultists a pep talk: The Shaper's are making their Big Comeback - tonight!

Realizing this is all a bit nutso, Olin makes his getaway and manages to get himself home.  Believing that the offshore oil platform will be targeted by the loonies, Olin first tries the authorities, then, when they blow him off, steals a boat and tries to make his way to the platform.

Something happens.  A massive - and I do mean massive - wave hits his boat and the next thing he knows, Olin is waking up battered and bruised on a rocky shore - a rocky shore that didn't used to be there.  It seems the ocean has receded - big time.  What's more, its now crawling with thought-to-be-extinct, paleozoic life forms.  

Spotting some of the cultists, he surreptitiously follows them, taking in the now-alien landscape, to the swamped ruins of the platform where they rendevous with some deep ones (or things very like deep ones), and then play host to what may be Cthulhu himself - something enormous and icky with "mouth feelers" - something which proceeds to start eating the cultists.  Having a flare gun with him, Olin decides to shoot the big blob - not such a bad idea since there's gallons of oil all around from the destruction of the platform, and the whole scene bursts into flames, with the big blob writhing in agony before an explosion sends Olin flying through the air and into unconsciousness.

When he comes too, not-so-badly injured, the world seems to have returned to normalcy and the seas risen once again.  Olin is rescued and returns to civilization, cared for by Jean who had the good fortune not to be on the platform that night.  No one believes his story and it is thought that what wiped out the platform and neighboring towns that night was some kind of vaguely-but-scientifically-defined natural disaster.  

But Olin knows...

Woo what a ride!

Now I just came across this sucker in the 1989 Year's Best Horror Stories XVII, edited by Karl Edward Wagner.  I became a devotee of this series in 1982 (Volume IX) and faithfully collected every volume as they came out, year-after-year, until the series ended with Wagner's untimely demise.  I've been in the process of slowly re-reading various stories this year.  But Volume XVII is a mystery to me - there's some pencil notes on the contents page in my handwriting, but I'm not sure what they mean.  I have no memory of ever reading any of the stories in this book, though it's been on my shelf for 30+ years, and certainly no memory of reading this one (and believe me I would have remembered it).  The YBH volumes reliably came out late in the year (Oct-Dec) and the last few months of 1989 was a seriously shitty period of my life, so its possible I never did actually sit down and read this volume.  In any case I've now read "Recrudescence" and boy did it give me a happy!

Here we have that rarity of rarities, a successful Lovecraftian tale that not only uses his ideas without naming them (though any self-respecting `thu fan would recognize the deep one and ol' tentacle-puss from a mile away), but also successfully uses classic Lovecraftian structure - a scholarly, lonely gent is slowly drawn into a revelation of cosmic horrors - first by an oddity, then by the uncovering of bits of knowledge that prove said oddity is odder and linked to odder still - an accumulation of information and dire portents, finally giving way to a full-blown explosion of cosmic horror goodness.  This is how its done, peoples!  Sure, Derleth and Lumley et al have tried imitating HPL's structure - not always unsuccessfully - but Carpenter does it with so much more panache.  A big part of this is that he makes zero attempt to imitate Lovecraft stylistically - the tale is written in a straightforward, modern style - almost breezy in the early portions.  Carpenter never once drops a single name*** (unlike, say, all of A. Derleth's characters, Olin apparently never once dropped by the Miskatonic U for a go through their restricted section), but there's zero doubt what these deep sea beasties are supposed to be.  And finally he delivers the goods and then some in the stories final pages which are exciting and gripping and scary all at once (I really wasn't expecting a [relatively] happy ending).  And through it all there's a strong sense of fun, as if Carpenter was having a good time playing in Lovecraft Land, and it shows.  

*** one could argue, if one were a dumbass, that the tale is questionably Lovecraft since not a single Lovecraftian name is dropped, no Necronomicon is mentioned, etc.  Nevertheless it is obvious that Carpenter is referencing Cthu and His Crew - and equally obvious that he's making no attempt to hide it.  However, if one needs some seal of approval please note that Robert M. Price included this tale in Chaosium's The Cthulhu Cycle, and while Price has been know to cast his trawl net pretty wide (I have it on good authority that Price had to be physically restrained by his publisher from including Erich Segal's Love Story in one of his Lovecraft anthologies because, y'know - it does have "Love" in the title, right?) that little factoid oughta give it some street cred with any tentacle-splitters out there.