The
train let me off a block from my apartment on the eastern fringe of the
city. I clutched Hopley’s journal to my
chest along with several other books on arcane languages that I thought might
be useful to me. It was night, and the
streetlights were shrouded with the kind of fog that streetlights get shrouded
with in stories like these. It was
exactly the kind of night where one might expect a mysterious figure to accost
me about the stone artifact on my way home, and in fact, that is precisely what
happened.
“Show
me the stone,” said a figure in the shadows.
He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt that said “Miskatonic” on it in
collegiate lettering. I’d heard of the
school, shrouded in legend though it was.
“Why?”
The
figure moved toward me at an angle that didn’t make sense. It startled me, and I nearly dropped my
books. Then the figure was in my face,
and I realized he didn’t have one. A
face. The sweatshirt’s hood was a black
void, and I felt myself falling into it.
I screamed. My scream disappeared
into the sweatshirt’s hood.
“Show
me the stone,” the figure repeated, the voice coming from somewhere in the
blackness.
I
turned and ran. It was the only thing I
could think to do. I was amazed that it
was even possible for me to run. I
thought the creature had me in its thrall, but apparently not. So I ran.
A
train arrived at the station heading in the other direction. I jumped on it, not daring to look behind
me. Then I dared to look behind me.
A
black void. The creature was right in
front of me. As if it had never changed
its position while I ran – just stuck to me like gum in a perm. It was there.
Waiting. Silent.
“Show
me the stone,” it said, and grabbed me.
I screamed. A black whiteness
clouded my vision, a color I couldn’t really describe if you asked me to, but
it obscured the world for a moment. When
my vision returned, I was back where this had all started, standing on the street
corner, the creature in front of me, the void under its hood menacing, cold,
empty in the way a grave shouldn’t be.
“The
stone.”
I
shuffled my books under one arm and pulled the stone out with my other hand,
the blackness where the figure’s face should be lulling me into hypnotic
compliance.
The
figure reached out and took…absorbed…the figure had the stone. Just like
that. I had no control. I swear, if this was the moment when I
failed, when it all went wrong, when the horror started, just know this. I had
no control.
Then
the worst thing of all happened. The
voice – I couldn’t stop it. It said the
words. It said the words on the stone. Out loud.
The
stars…my god. What was wrong with the
stars? They started moving. Overhead.
Forming shapes and patterns. Was
I the only one who noticed? What awful
creatures had the power to move the stars?
Blackness
took me. I wish something more had
happened, but what else does the body do when faced with extreme stress and
horror but simply let go of consciousness?
***
“Wake
up,” said something very far away. I
swam in darkness, a wet, slithering darkness, a darkness that…
I
woke up.
I
was lying on a bed in a concrete room with one dim bulb in the ceiling. A bearded man stood over me. He wore a professorial tweed suit and a look
of concern on his face from which his brown hair receded as if in fear.
“Well
you’ve done it,” he said.
“I’ve
done what?” My voice seemed to come from
somewhere else, my mouth disconnected from my consciousness.
“You
gave the stone away.”
“Well
it’s not like I had much of a choice,” I protested as I tried to sit up. The world swam away from me. I winced and forced unwilling consciousness
to return.
“If
you knew anything about those creatures, and you should, knowing what we do
about your background and credentials, you’d have known how to prevent it
getting the stone from you.”
“But
those…those can’t be real. Those things
exist in lore and legend. Ancient
legend, only scraps of which still exist today.”
“You’re
telling me the thing you saw with your own eyes can’t be real?” The man reached over and handed me a glass of
what I could only hope was water. I
sipped it, then drank it down, my mouth a desert.
“I’m
telling you…” But I wasn’t sure what I
was telling him. “I’m not sure what I’m
telling you.”
“That
you’re useless and stupid?”
“Hey…”
“Very
eloquently put, Mr. James.” The sarcasm
dripped off the man like ichor.
He
did have a point – I had just given
the creature the stone. I was useless
and stupid.
“Who
are you, anyway?” I asked.
“I
am Professor Erik Crane, most recently of Miskatonic University’s archaeology
department. We look for things like the
stone you lost for us. Such items –
artifacts belonging to the Old Ones and the Deep Ones and even great Cthulhu Himself
– have a peculiar quantum signal that is slightly out of phase with the rest of
the known universe. That’s a gross
oversimplification, of course, but the point is that over the past few decades
we’ve developed methods to track down these artifacts and gather them for
safekeeping in the University’s secure vault.”
Crane’s
utterance of the name of that dread god of R’lyeh – He Who Lays dead but dreaming in his impossible
fortress of nightmares under the sea – sent such shivers through me I worried
my spine might spontaneously detach and run away. I had studied the Old Ones, of course,
through the writings of Lovecraft and others, but always with the understanding
that these were legends, myths, clever fictions at best. To now be faced with the reality…therein lay
true madness. Still, asking the
professor to repeat himself, to confirm, to reassure me that what he’d told me
was indeed true – that seemed a waste of time.
I let the knowledge wrap scaly tentacles around my mind, let it settle
there, resisted the urge to rip my own head off my body and hurl it at the
man.
“H….” Words.
I needed words. I blinked at Dr.
Crane.
“I
can only assume you are about to ask how you can help me, Mr. James. And in fact, you can.”
He
handed me Copley’s journal. I blinked at
it. My mind was full of tentacles and
static.
“We
don’t have much time, Mr. James. Please
come to your senses.”
I
shook my head from side to side, slapped myself in the face, and let out a
barbaric yawp. I blinked at Dr. Crane
again and nodded slowly.
“I
think…I think I have my senses.”
“Excellent
news. Now. Please turn to the page with the etching of
the stone.”
I
did so. There was the symbol…the symbol
of something I now knew to be as real as the sun, as real as the mattress upon
which I was perched, as real as the mustache on Dr. Crane’s face. Ia! Ia! The chant came unbidden to mind.
“Tell
me, Mr. James.”
“You
know I also have a couple of doctorates, so… you can call me Dr. James. If you, you know, want to.”
“Is
that so? Tell me, Mr. James, what Mr.
Copley’s notes say about how to stop the Shoggoth that stole the stone from you.”
“That
was a Shoggoth? I…I don’t know. I expected more tentacles.”
“Evolution,
Mr. James.”
“Yes. Well, ok…according to Copley’s journal, I
have to …find another stone to …sync
with the stone that was stolen, and I can use the second stone to find the
first one? Sounds too easy.”
“Keep
reading.”
“Ah,”
I said, furrowing my brow. “I see. Then I have to find the first stone, throw it
into the ocean, and say the incantation backward while facing away from the water.”
“And
if you get the backwards incantation wrong?”
“It
would be bad.”
“You
should have thought of that before you said the incantation,” said Dr. Crane.
“I
didn’t say that. The Shoggoth said it.”
“The
Shoggoth made you say the
incantation, my friend,” said Dr. Crane.
I
remembered now. The void in the hooded
sweatshirt…it had engulfed me…had pried my mouth open…had taken control of my
lips. Had made it seem like the creature
was saying the words, but in fact…it was me.
I had said the
incantation.
My
mind began to crack. I whimpered. I mewled.
But before I could get too far into my psychotic break, we were
interrupted by a low rumble from outside.
“It
has started,” said Dr. Crane.
“What
has?” I managed.
“The
ascension. That Shoggoth was the key to
unlocking something much, much worse. A
dread force that lives now…lives
now…” The way he said “lives” filled me
with a kind of terror that I cannot, even now, after all that has happened,
begin to describe, “that lives now
underneath the Cascadia Subduction Zone.”
“The…fault
line that’s supposed to destroy half of the West Coast when it blows?”
“The
very same! And through arcane means that
no human can possibly understand, under the fault line lies R’lyeh itself, and
it is beginning to rise. And with
it…with it comes dread Cthulhu, the greatest and most terrible of the Elder
Gods. The stars are right once more, my
dear Mr. James, thanks to your incantation, and Cthulhu wakes from his horrible
slumber and begins to rise!”
I
think I screamed. The earth shook. Dr. Crane grabbed my arm, chanted something,
and I found myself somewhere else.
