And That Night It Came

NOTE: To say I had a ‘poetic period’ in my writing is perhaps inaccurate. Better to say I’ve always had the instinct, and this was another one of my explorations into the more Lovecraftian style of writing, with hopefully less racism.

I sit now at my desk, hand trembling to spite my dark intent. I have no recourse but to place in writing the terrible and ominous portents that have been visited to me this night, as I sat reclining in my grandfather’s chair, reading from one of the many ancient texts that line my library walls. Until now, I had thought these books were at worst a boast. A casual conciliatory gesture to my literary past, and a knowing wink and a nod to any guests I may once have invited to my home. Now I do detest the sight of them, these rusty tombs of crusty ink and decaying papyrus. I see them now for what they are — vile corpses of living plants, once full of seeds and spores, now skinned and drained of life, with acidic brackish ichor carving the feeble gibbering of children and mad men into their bones, all bound together with the dry skins of dead animals, long since past this mortal plane. Macabre collages of decay and madness.

I did not always think this way. I once revered these glorious tombs of ancient knowledge. I would spend days upon end in my youth in this room. With time and parents permitting, I would make meals for myself, and create a survival bundle like a tribal hunter of old, or a mountain climber preparing for a mighty ascent. I always chose the same table cloth, for it was slightly yellow, and matched the hue, if not texture and scent, of the old and weathered books. I would take the broom from the old closet, and fashion a serviceable tent between two straight-backed chairs, and spend hours, days, reading of far off lands and ancient heroes. I would submerge myself like a baptism in philosophy and history, drinking in the ancient wisdoms. Such wonders!

I loved the smell — the crisp and dusty smell of dried pages and crusty inks. Some of the books were so old that the black ink had faded to a deep sea-blue, covering the page like lilies or rhododendrons peeking through a field of soft golden wheat. Now the smell reminds me of charnal houses, and crumbling brickwork, or dry and brittle bones, yellowed with the passage of eons.

Even as I grew, I loved these books, and whenever I returned home from university I would always spend at least a day a week reading, learning of old medicines or explorations up the Amazon. My peers thought this passion but a minor aberration of my character. They scorned the passion I held for learning and self-improvement through the mind, and instead spent their hours in physical trials with arbitrary rules — a pastime I could not comprehend the value of. I confess I thought the worse of them at the time, pitying their embrace of ignorance and superstition. Even now, in my old age, I found myself returning daily to this library and its oaken shelves. Late at night, like a boy looking for some late-night sweet, I would carefully scan the shelves, looking for some new book that I had not yet read.

The wakings began seven weeks ago. I would find myself shivering awake in the darkness, mutely terrified by some great portent I could not fathom. I spent a week like this, sleeping poorly and fitfully, before I heard the scratchings. Something, outside was haunting my grounds, rustling among the bushes and shrubs of my estate. Periodically, I would hear a sharp barking noise, or snapping cough, like the shot of a gun. In the morning light, I was always able to convince myself some bear or wolf had taken residence in the nearby forest and traveled to my home to scavange, but in the night, the terrors that shook my imaginations conjured terrible beasts and demons to horrify my mind. It became so unbearable, that when I awoke in my awful clutch of foreboding I would rise immediately, and run to the library — a room of solace — so I would not hear the terrible noise from outside my window.

There, in my library I could rest, and calm my nerves with some facinating depiction of far off lands or exotic peoples. It was on one such occasion, hunting for an interesting evening’s read, that I became aware that the books in front of me were illuminated not only by the dim light of the reading lamp, but by a pale effervescent blue from the other side of the library. Filled with the same curiosity that caused me to waste countless hours in the room in the frivolous pursuit of self-improvement, I turned to inspect the origin of this sapphire glow.

Oh! If only I had not turned! If only I had strode out of the room, eyes lowered, I might still be the man I was, and not the hollow shell I am now, tormented by what I have learned! But no, I was not concerning myself with the dangers or consequences of my curiosity. I was only consumed by my quest to know and learn. To discover what strange and luminous blue object was covering my eyes with it’s sheen.

I could not say it hovered, for it was not in one place, but it seemed to be everywhere, quivering and convalescing in haggard heaves of sickness. At once it was before me, shivering in the cold darkness of the room, and then was I inside it, seeing its inner spasming covering the walls and floor and ceiling as though it had turned itself inside out and the center was now the only thing recognizable as my once sanctified library, and then back again. I tried to tear my gaze away from this vile and corrupt event, but no matter how I tried, my vision was locked on the ever shifted quakes that rippled the air between me and it. I cannot say how long I stood, my mind consumed with this grotesque apparition. It may have been hours, or seconds, but all at once I felt the Thing move, flickering between the spaces in my sight.

I knew then that it was no mere “it,” but a living thing — as much as passes for a soul as anything in this cold unfeeling universe. Not living as you or I, perhaps, but as a viral and inevitable intelligence, spreading through my mind, sending spidery tendrils to root and branch between the folds of my brain. I tried to cry out, to run, to escape the sinister invasion into my soul, but I could not move.

How to explain the sensation of telepathy? For not a word was spoken and yet I know we communicated together, the Thing and I. Not in words, for what use are words to two minds unfamilliar with each other? Perhaps some solace can be taken from the fact that the Thing had memories or thoughts to share, but I can take no such balm, for I know what memories and feelings the Thing had.

And I saw, or rather remembered, a rotting history of our wretched race. I saw mankind sliding like grease across this planet in the coming centuries, and outward towards the stars. Our foolish scientists plumbing the depths of our depraved brains, searching for scraps of truth and shards of deduction. No star or planet was beyond our reach, as we built mighty arks to infect other wet balls of mud in the barren universe. We experimented with our bodies and our minds in a fool-hearty attempt to improve what was already broken. Bits of silicon and copper filled our soft gray brains, and steel replaced our bones. Cold and heartless computers studied our souls, and prescribed thoughts and feelings. Our apotheosis was neigh!

I know not what it was — whether drug, or tool, or philosophy — that brought us to our transcendence, but I know what was left behind. A by-product. A cast-off leftover of a wretched unholy ritual that now quivered and shook around me in a hideous display of familiarity. And now the thing had flown through the centuries, back through the ages to find the ancestors of those who birthed it’s fetid form. And though I cannot bare to call the swirling web of sticky senses that I touched a mind, or dare suggest that the twisted afterbirth had any unholy part that could be called an soul, it was through some woeful connection with the thing that I saw our destiny.

Woe to us all! My worst fears were realized in that moment, for I saw a million universes stretching out beyond the nine senses we will cultivate. An empire that covers a billion billion stars and planets, until our never ending search for the new finally reaches its grim and inevitable conclusion — the multiverse is finite! With no boundaries of time or space left to us, in the span of a million years we learn all there is to know, and become as a God — our omnipresence leaves us no room for confusion or ignorance, and with the equations and alchemies of the universe laid bare, we turn our single eye across creation, and realize there is nowhere left to go!

And yet the eons continue to turn, with our infinite wisdom and madness screaming across the ages. No mysteries left to satiate our curiosity, no thoughts yet to be thought, no dreams that have not been dreamed. Nothing left but the boundless wastes of empty and the boring equation of eternity, mapped out before us like a railroad. And our numbing madness will spread across time, pressing down on us all like a foul rotting cloud of carrion, begging us to avoid this fate. Demanding we cease our passion for mysteries and discoveries.

My books. What once I thought was food for an eager mind I can now see is nothing more than fuel for a mighty engine that is driving us unavoidably towards a hell we cannot fathom. My peers whom I scorned I do beg forgiveness from now. I thought them fools for scorning my pursuits. I see now that I was the worser fool.

Time is running out so I must be brief. I will burn the library tonight — I hope the others who live within these walls will wake and smell the smoke before they die a gruesome death, but if they do not it shall perhaps be the better for them. For me, I cannot share a fate so merciful. Already I can hear in the shrubs and bushes outside a maddened expulsion, like a rabid dog barking at a decomposing carcass it has found. There is the scratching and beating at the windows, and I know my new kin, my fellows have come for me. The madness we share is already seeping through the corners of my mind, scratching at the doors of my sanity — and I welcome its comforting balm. My kin and I who have seen this hell shall return to the forests and swamps from whence our unhappy race first crawled. And in our maddened revelry, in dark and forgotten places, we will praise the Thing that saved us from the fetid curse of sentience. We will worship the foul stool of our future apotheosis into hell, until blessed oblivion shall take us all. For my mind touched its, and I know in the harsh and twisted core of its mind, beyond word or thought, it loves me, and wishes to feel me as I wish to feel it.

Weep not for me, whoever finds this warning, but cleanse yourself of the human frailties of thought and justice. It is a universe of chaos, and all our efforts to find order are futile. For all our philosophies and prophets cannot save us from the unavoidable boundaries of reality. Do not seek, my former fellow race of man, because ye shall find.