A singular motorbike crash after a singularly bad day at work just crowned a wonderful Monday. Commuting home, I was confronted by an SUV stopped in the middle of the lane. The drive just gawped at me as the magnitude of his error started firing his synapses. It was a pity that they didn't fire any faster. I hit the skids, the front shocks compressed and the whole thing locked up. It was only a fraction of a second before the bone crunching impact and my brief flight across the SUV's bonnet. Somehow, the windscreen collapsed just before I arrived and my right foot got caught in the frame. Exit stage right, right foot and my boot. They never found the foot or the boot. I remember nothing of the ride to the hospital. They operated, apparently, and waited until I regained consciousness. That was when the first soiling happened. I was still groggy and half out of it, so I wasn't too sure about how real things were. But then, questions of reality take a back seat when your doctor is talking to you with a huge, amorphous mass of bubbles standing over her left shoulder. I was even more freaked out when I noticed six eyes peering at me though the black, gelatinous goo-bubbles. That was when my bowels let go. Doctor Sarah Turner was not a happy camper, but she soon had nurses taking care of my mess. Monos don't really get it.

Having still been doped up, there was at least that hopeful explanation. You see stuff. But even that possibility was wrenched away two nights later. I awoke in the middle of the night, about three o'clock. The other patients in the ward were sound asleep, one of them snoring like a band-saw. I must have gasped when I saw him...or it...or her...whatever it was. Bent over my amputated right foot, a stump just above where the ankle should have been, was a skinny person, dressed in that same clothes I had seen on the Lost Treasures of Egypt show. The person's skin was completely black, like it had been burnt to charcoal. Even its eyes were pitch black, inky wells of horror in its face. When I gasped, the thing turned to me.

“Does this still cause you pain?”, it asked.

I think I passed out without answering.

When I came to, the nurses and Doctor Turner were around the end of my bed. Turner looked furious. The nurses looked chagrined. I looked. The doctor pointed at my right leg in angry pokes of her finger. I saw that the dressings had been removed and there were marks in my skin, like someone had been scraping at the wound.

“Where are the dressings?”, Turner asked me, menace in her voice.

I screamed. This was getting ridiculous. Turner and the nurses spun around, but they could not see what horror stood behind them. The charcoal Egyptian was back, this time it was sucking the dressings from my leg, sucking them clean of any fluids or stained.

“Mind if I indulge?”, it asked me, quite cheerfully, before slurping away on its snack.

If I thought I was getting discharged any time soon, I learned that I was mistaken. I now write this from Arkham Asylum, an institution that specialises in ailments such as my own. The staff here have surmised that I am no harm to myself or others, so they allow me to write on pen and paper.

I don't sleep much. Even other night, I find gelatinous bulges of eyes peering at me or I have to endure the questions and comments of the charcoal pharaoh, as I now call it. The next time you see someone on the street talking to themselves or screaming, just remember. You see nothing. You are blind to everything.

#Horror #Lovecraftian #ShortStory

© 2022, Bryan Kēhua

Photo by Linus Belanger on Unsplash

Obsession is a funny thing. Not in the ha ha sense of the word, but in ways that are ironically humorous when you really get down to it. Mine landed me in the Miskatonic Asylum for the Ontologically Bereft. After months of treatment, I have finally been allowed a pen and paper on which to write the scattered thoughts of a fractured mind. That is what they will think. People only see what they are ready to see. Those with eyes to see and ears to hear will understand more. A warning. An augury of what is to come.

College days are times of youthful self expression for most. I was the one hunkered down over obscure tomes into the small hours of weekend nights between essays, reports and exams. Miskatonic University encourages the curious, even though I needed little to slake my thirsty for knowledge. I never read the infamous work of that crazed Arab writer. Even I was not that stupid. Bent over the rabid scribblings of prophets and acolytes of the Great Old Ones, I became more and more consumed by the quest for knowledge and mystical enlightenment.

The scratchings inside the walls of my dorm started about six months after I had read a little known manuscript from the Antipodes called Servants of Ry'leh. I had decided to study it because it promised to be a report on the ancient cult of Cthulhu. It turned out to be more similar to a grimoire or book of rites. Little did I know that merely uttering words aloud imbued them with power. My whispered readings had been heard, though weakly and incompletely. It was still enough to elicit a response.

The scratchings inside the walls kept up and got louder and louder with each passing night. I rarely slept and even when I did, I was awoken every hour or less. After two weeks, my friends (those who remained to me) began to comment about my pallor. I would mumble some excuse. Trevor Bainwright even suggested seeing a doctor. Advice I dismissed as an over-reaction. The sounds, like fingernails being dragged over blackboards, continued into the night, depriving me of slumber all the more. It was not a sound that one could become accustomed to.

Then the dreams began to emerge from the mists that descended during the light dozes that I managed to steal in the small hours. At first, they were impressions and etherealities, nothing more. Over the coming weeks, the dreams coalesced into more concrete forms. And more terrible visages. The immensity of the horror that reached out for me through these nightly visitations was not apparent until about the fifth week, just before All Hallows Eve.

Many cults of various kinds consider the time around All Hallows Eve one of especial closeness between this universe and others. It is precisely this time when the barriers are thinner between us and other entities that the Great Old Ones can begin to send out their calls. When I saw the disfigured monstrosity covered in tentacles and dripping black seawater, I felt my mind distend and warp. Thoughts became fragments of myself flicked into space and time. No anchor. No connection. I could feel the fingers of darkness and the silence of its summoning squeeze into and pry the parts of my self apart.

I knew it was that book. I knew also that it had been my reading aloud. Yet, I could not stop. Page after page, I read and whispered into the night.

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nfah Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

Sibilant whisperings as if they were spoken in water, bubbling with menace and venom. I was later told that Trevor, worried at my absence from classes for four days, eventually found me howling the above words in an undeciphered tongue in the university's chapel crypt. More embarrassing than anything, I was said to have been utterly naked and unwashed when Trevor stumbled upon my location. What I was doing there, I have not a clue. What I was saying in those words, I have even less idea.

I was committed to this place of healing soon after my sojourn in the chapel. Cthulhu calls and waits. His return is imminent. It can be seen in our world. The seas invade the land. Land sinks into the realm of Cthulhu. Learn to swim.

#CthulhuMythos #Lovecraftian #CosmicHorror #Horror

Photo by Matt Hardy on Unsplash

Aden stared into the maw of his own demise. His mind could not quite grasp what was happening to him, until Greg pointed out that the maw was a half-drunk bottle of cheap bourbon. Aden stared at his best mate blankly. He was sure he felt some dribble wander down his chin.

“You sure you're ok to walk home?”, Gregg asked, looking at Aden on the street.

From his place leaning against a shop window, a Gucci boutique whose doorway he had just used to relieve himself, Aden nodded vague assurances that he was perfectly capable of getting himself home. Greg was half cut himself, or he would not have accepted Aden's promises. He did. Aden feebly waved as Greg walked over to the taxi rank to get a ride to his own pad, a few miles away. Aden managed to get his feet under him. He ambled and shuffled only to find himself in a side street with oddly old shops and buildings all around him. He might have been drunk, but he was sure he had never seen this street before. Some of the shops were ramshackle and dilapidated. Paint was peeling on most and had totally gone on many. Weeds pushed through the pavement, a stark contrast to the rest of the pristine city that only the Swiss could keep so clean. Aden gawped about like a lost child. He peered around him, suddenly realising that a miasma had crept up on him. Choking and smothering, it followed a sickly mist that clung to every fibre of the man.

Aden pushed on along the street. Cheap bourbon promised that the street led somewhere close to home. About three hundred yards along the street, Aden found one store that looked as new as the day it first opened. The bright sign out front identified it as a book shop of rare quality and erudition. It assured passers-by that the store catered to the most refined of minds. Aden liked to think he would be among them. Most of the time, people would have agreed. With a bottle of bourbon in him, that was less apparent. Still, the promise of books and a store that was open all hours was too much for the man to walk past.

He pushed the door open, a little too forcefully. He apologised to the attendant at the counter against the far end of the store. On his left and right, Aden saw shelved piled with dusty tomes, some leather bound and others paperback. All of them were in perfect condition. There was not even a mote of dust on any. Aden squinted at them and leaned in to check.

“Greetings, reveller. What brings you to our humble store?”, the attendant asked, a little too obsequious for Aden's taste.

“I'm just browsing.”, Aden said. At least, that is what he hoped came out.

“A reader of your obvious erudition and refinement might find the counter volumes more to your tastes.”, the attendant suggested.

Aden looked at him for a moment. Something was odd about the man and the way his seemed to be choking on his words. But then the promise of rare and exotic tomes tore all such thoughts away. Aden approached with his eyes firmly fixed on the tomes that were locked inside the counter.

Aden screamed.

Howled.

Wailed like a sick banshee.

Thin tendrils of soft, cartilage reached out and grabbed his arms. Very quickly, more had anchored his legs. All of them were dragging to the counter. All he could smell was mould and fungal spores as the tendrils hauled him closer. Aden made a dumb, but understandable, decision. He looked up.

The attendant's mouth was wide open, much more than humanly possible. He looked like a snake swallowing a rat. The thin lines that had wrapped Aden up extended from the attendant's mouth. A writhing mass of living, alien matter that was hauling Aden in. Aden struggled and pulled, but to no avail.

Darkness. Depth. Void.

#Horror #Lovecraftian #ShortFiction

Image: Photo by Warren Umoh on Unsplash

For millennia, the slumber had continued since the first seed had been planted there among the other giants. Giants whose boughs reached to the clouds that scudded on the winds of ancient breath, standing watch over a vast land denuded of civilisation or those who would come to establish it on these shores.

The slumber was deep and comatose until those first bipeds arrived and began to make noises around him. The whispers were no more than a brushing graze against the very limits of his consciousness, a ripple on the surface of the calm unconsciousness that had been his for aeons past. As more came, more whispered and the whispers became sounds. Sounds added to sounds and became voices. More voices added to voices and they became words and then strings of words. Words imploring and need. Words of reverence and awe. The voices knew nothing of what heard their words of request and honour. They new nothing of the his slumber that had started to end, an awareness that began to rise from the shadows of the dark prison in which he found himself. With tentative ripples that emerged from the core of his mind, he stretched and tested his awareness, sending his spirit out in small steps.

The once great giants were gone. All that remained was himself and the pathetic remnants of a place now desecrated by the bipeds. The voices had begun to dull and recede from his hearing. The words were no more, but by then it was too late. The point of his own rising had passed and he was destined to rise again.

Lights, noise and voices came suddenly to him. He watched and observed from the safety of his prison, now his refuge in his time of weakness. The words reached him again from those who were nearby in the failing sun of the ending winter's day. They had noticed one of their own missing. He had seen the biped wander too close to his prison three nights before. A morsel, a snack. Someone had found the physical husk a day earlier today.

The taste of bipeds lent energy and recovery began to accelerate towards awakening. He felt his mind and soul expand and he was able to reach further. He took another. And another. And more.

The voices returned. Louder and more solemn than he could remember. These voices were tinged and stained with fear. They did not come too close. They remained a distance from him and he left them alone, as the ancient ones had agreed with him.

Yet more came. Thrill seekers who came at night, on a dare or challenge. On the 13th of May, the last one came. A name was spoken from the biped to himself. Sornorthq. He then remembered himself. Sornorthq the Many-Aged. The Sundered. Sornorthq the Slumberer.

No more. The last one, a thing called Jason Tribett, ventured too close. A tentacle reached for him and snatched him from off the ground in a flash of speed. No more slowness for Sornorthq. He pushed open all of Tribett's orifices, ripping soft organs out of the way. Tribett had no time to even cry out. His throat full of Sornorthq's imploding being that was crushing his own soul in the weight of aeons of patient anger.

And then the mind collapsed. Sornorthq fed on the last vestiges of Tribett's life and memories. Every one torn from his psyche and soul with merciless vengeance and hate. A hate born of the natural order of things. A hate birthed in the very nature of the universe, that unknown, terrible darkness of ice and heat that hated all life in it. Sornorthq laughed between the fragmented shards of Tribett's being. Sornorthq was the anti-thesis of life. He was the servant of the universe's natural order.

His awakening showed him a waiting planet. Ignorant and asleep, more so than he had ever been. A feast.

#Horror #Supernatural #Lovecraftian