To Mars and Providence

"To Mars and Providence" is a science fiction short story that serves as a crossover between H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. It was written by Don Webb and published in the 1996 anthology War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches.
==Synopsis==
The story is set in 1898, at the beginning of the Martian invasion of Earth. An eight-year-old boy named Howard Lovecraft sees a Martian cylinder crash-landing nearby and leaves home to investigate. At first, he believes the invaders might be the night-gaunts that have appeared to him in dreams. Instead, the creature that comes out of the ship is a tentacled, octopus-like Martian, which Howard watches from a nearby church tower with his binoculars. The crowd surrounding the crash site is decimated by the Martian's heat-ray weapon, and Howard faints.
When he wakes up back home, his mother tells him that the Martians have spared him and took him inside their ship, from which he was rescued by a librarian named Armitage. At this point, most families are trying to get away from the chaos of the invasion, but the Lovecrafts will stay until grandfather Whipple comes home. Feeling a strange compulsion to return to the church near the crash-site, Howard observes the Martians with a telescope, admiring their machines and their oversized brains. He sees one of them deposit a golden box into the tower of the church.
At night, Howard sneaks out and enters the church, where he finds a shining trapezohedron. When he touches it, his consciousness expands, and he sees a living colour that reaches into his brain and communicates with him. As it turns out, the colour is a manifestation of the Martians' communal mind, and tells Howard about the race's history.
The Martians, Howard learns, are descended from the same ancestral species that colonised both Mars and Earth, the latter in Antarctica, but evolved in a completely different direction by modifying their bodies and their brains. They eliminated all their emotions except for fear (as the latter was deemed necessary for survival) and built an advanced civilisation, making contact with a fungoid species from a world at the outskirts of the solar system. Through them, the Martians discovered that they weren't the first species to settle on Mars, and eventually started to uncover artifacts of a mighty race of long-faced, ghoul-like creatures that they called the Elder Gods. Finding that the Elder Gods haven't died out, but are merely asleep, the Martians grew fearful of their return, and ultimately decided to abandon Mars and take over Earth, leaving the red planet to its dormant masters.
The colour also informs Howard that some years ago, some Martians have sent their minds through space to inhabit human bodies and gather information about the Earth. While most of them have returned, a few experienced amnesia and are still living as humans. Sensing Howard's feelings of being an outsider among his own people, and knowing that his mind was strong enough to activate the trapezohedron, the colour asks him if he might be one of them.
Howard considers the possibility, thinking of how his dreams of other worlds have always felt more real than his mundane life on Earth, and agrees to be mentally transported to Mars, where his mind will manifest itself in a physical shape reflecting his real nature. Howard expects to show up as a Martian and be welcomed by his peers, but instead finds that the Martians are scared of him, as a look at a mirror reveals him to be one of the ghoul-like Elder Gods. The shock sends Howard's consciousness back to his body on Earth, and makes him forget all of the adventure.
==Publication History==
*War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches (1996)
*Eternal Lovecraft: The Persistence of H. P. Lovecraft in Popular Culture (1998)
*Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft (2014)
==Trivia==
*"To Mars and Providence" contains numerous references to Lovecraft's works. Notably, the last eight words are the same as the ones from "The Outsider".
Category:Expanded Mythos Works
Category:Don Webb works
Category:Crossovers