“Good evening, my good friend,” said Meng Zan, leafy tentacles waving in the still air, as Hastur-the-Unspeakable shambled into existence in the three-dimensional world of the planet Cretion.   “What can I do for you, my good friend?”

Hastur used telepathy to communicate his dilemma, and Meng Zan readily agreed to allow him to leave the forbidden tome with the Cretion for safe keeping.

With Meng Zan’s assurance, Hastur folded up into himself (as close as he could come to sitting down), then opened the yellowing tome to the final chapter, “Last Days of the Human race”.

Sighing wistfully, Hastur recalled their grand design, the plot so carefully hatched between Beelzebub and himself, to create a nuclear war to devastate the Earth, wiping out the human race in its entirety, to give them both what they sought: Beelzebub six billion more souls to add to his vast collection; Hastur a new home planet to replace the crumbling monstrosity called Yoggoth.

Knowing already where they had gone wrong, Hastur nevertheless turned toward the back of the chapter and read:

All had gone exactly to plan…Or so it had seemed.   However, we had made one fatal miscalculation.   In the days of Perestroika the Soviet Union had been greatly down-grading its nuclear arsenal, to the point where their once vastly superior arsenal was no more than on par with U.S. nuclear capabilities.

The idea being that if neither superpower possessed superior weaponry, then neither nation would be in a position to actually win the war, and the resulting stalemate would lead to the annihilation of the human race, leaving the surface world for the Ancient Ones and the nether reaches for Beelzebub and his legions.

Our one big error had been in not checking our facts properly before starting the war.   If we had done so, we would have discovered that in the years since the overthrow of Mikhail Gorbachev the right-wing regime in the Commonwealth of Independent States had been secretly building a new super bomb: a thermonuclear device too destructive ever to be tested on the surface of the Earth.

The Russian government had been planning to test the bomb by launching it in space from a shuttle, to blow up one of the moons of Jupiter.   Instead the super bomb was detonated by accident by an American cruise missile, on Earth….

Looking up into the black void of space, to where the scattered debris of what had once been a planet still orbited the sun between Mars and Venus, Hastur read on:

The resulting explosion completely disintegrated the planet Earth, wiping out the entire human race, as planned.   But also obliterating most of Beelzebub’s legion of devils.   Although a few dozen demons managed to escape with their leader to the lifeless wastes of Mars, whilst Hastur and the Ancient Ones were banished back to decay-ridden Yoggoth.

Sighing wistfully (although what seemed wistful to Hastur was enough to send lesser creatures scampering for cover, shrieking their fear and agony) Hastur handed the forbidden tome to Meng Zan for safe keeping, then stretched his great wings wide and began his epic flight through space and time, back to the forbidden wastes of Yoggoth.

THE END