Tag Archives: HP Lovecraft

My Grandfather’s House part 2

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Part Two: Waking Into A Dream

tzazanoth4

Read My Grandfather’s House part 1 first.

I awoke to myself again, swaying and grasping gratefully at the handle of a door. It gave way under my weight and I near fell into the room within. The house’s energies had drained me and I collapsed, sweating coldly and trembling, gratefully into the chair set separately and centrally in the room. On seating myself I noted its perfect position amidst the scrawlings of arcane and improbably alluring geometries that spiralled outwards from its legs. Instantly I knew that I had erred, perhaps fatally. I felt appallingly passive, my mind leeched by the revolting appendages that lined the room circuitously, wending their labyrinthine passages through our reality and into the next. The tears they wrought in the walls led out to the room adjacent but between these hollow parcels of human comfort.

The gash across my palm that I had thought healed reopened and wept vitally down my hand and through the open cuff of my shirt, staining it with my essence before spilling down my trembling fingertips. The sight transfixed me, its drip drip drip hypnotic in its regularity. Idly I wondered how long I could maintain its metronomic sapping and how I would look at the centre of a pool of myself – inverted and converted into a glimmering sheet of crimson.

The steady mesmeric trickle stole my mind and it was not until my jacket grew grossly wet and dark against my ribs that I realised to my horror that it was not only the wounds of an occult origin that split freshly in the terrible womblight that sank and stole horribly through the fabric of my grandfather’s house. Attracted no doubt by the curious and horrifying objects of ancient power which he had collected for their ageless evil and concentrated in this ill-chosen room for slumber, or for sitting, as I had foolishly done.

The visions that pierced the brutally shredded brick and plaster (overlaid with eldritch paper detailing the swirled patterns of a madman) violated the shivering veil of sanity we habitually draw across the fearful nightmares that lurk breathingly beyond that damask rustling. That haze, normally only dissipated by the force of insurgent dreams too keen to fortify themselves with the fresh cerebral matter of our minds was here surrendered with insulting weakness and torn from the railings of my thought and being. I was naked to them, as the blood ran down and stained the beds of my nails.

As my strength ebbed and the awful light waxed ever stronger through the edges and corners of the room I grew aware of a lightness in my mind, detaching itself from the blackened pool which lay dying inside me, its dark vacuum fed by the expulsion of my lifeblood. It was as if I drifted above myself, I felt my skin roll past like an ectoplasmic illusion and as I became free of my flesh that womblight embraced me, rushing hot and sour through the dimensions of the room. Achingly bright it ran greasily about the encased limbs – they extended through the glass, the alcohol-soaked lumps attaining their true state, flexing and flagellate. The room felt to me alive and throbbed with unusual vigour, as I imagine my heart would feel were I trapped within it. Each pulse was the beat of my heart expelling another drop of blood into the crimson tide which playfully chased the graven maze upon the floor.

I was dying. I knew that, and yet it felt ripe with potential. The ceiling surged towards me, heavy with lines of force that erupted, extending in ridges like bone towards me. A moisture ran from the infernal edges of the room along the ceiling and flowed up and down the twisted pyramid that reached out for me. At its tip hung a bell shaped lump that swelled as I breathed my insubstantial soul breath upon it. The light said to me “Choose”. I understood the vibrations which were not sound nor voice, but like the rattle of glass in a distant pane. The bell shaped itself, growing translucent and icy. The liquid that ran up the pyramid dripped down into the glassy fruit which twitched and hummed as it filled up. The light urged me to drink. I looked back at my body, grey-skinned at the heart of a sea of red. I reached up and took the strange glass object in my surreal fingers, and drank.

I drank the pellucid tears of a dead god. They burned, raw and bitter in my mind’s throat, pulling me downward as they raced into my being. I fell from the ceiling, through the greying flesh of my corpus and landed behind my own eyes. The womblight dimmed and the ceiling and the room’s marvellous shapes rushed backwards away from me. With a hiss I felt the floor uncoil beneath me, and the blood I had lost reversed its languid exit, sucking back into the gash in my hand and the wounds in my side and face. So vigorous was the rush that I was pulled to my feet and stood upright, tingling as the blood re-entered my body. I swayed on my feet, and then fell, overwhelmed at the sound of my heart beating once more.

 

My Grandfather’s House part 1

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Part One: Waking From A Dream

tzazanoth4I sat in silence. The watch, that horrible grisly thing that would not leave me, pursued me through the house, lay on the arm of the Chesterfield. Its vile anatomy seemed as if it were a broken spur of wrist protruding from the deep red flesh of the upholstered chair. Though it did not tick conventionally, as a clock of man might, I felt its uncanny hands pound through my pulse and the fabric of the house. I sat in silence. Around me the walls thrummed with dark animation. Shudders ran through the wallpaper, lifting the flowery relief images in waves of menacing faces.

I had not left the house in weeks and its presence oppressed me and constricted me. Blearily I pulled myself to my feet and staggered from the reading room. The hot breath of the house was as normal to me now as that of a dog one allows to share one’s bed. Its rank, organic stench barely touched my nose. The staircase loomed out of the hallway, spiralling upwards like gleaming bone – the spine of the thing that had inhabited my home since I first unearthed the watch from my grandfather’s attic. I staggered and rested my hand on the door frame, and yelped for the contact pressed harshly upon the wounded skin of my palm. It brought back to me that stumbling run from… from what? The watch, with its sharp bracelet that cut into me when I squeezed its ghastly living links. In fear I had tossed it into the drawer and locked it. The drawer where it would not stay. Even now I realised it was wrapped about the wrist I held up to the door. I was sure I had left it on the arm of the chair.

That awful night’s sleep, the dreams it had pressed upon me. I felt as if I had not slept since, and yet surely that is but my imagination for I lived still, if one could call it a life, stumbling about the body of this beast. A man must sleep, how else can he tell his dreams from reality? Without the sweet succour of slumber I led a drifting life, my mind and skin fluttering on the dead breath that stroked at my soul. I found myself at times lurching to wake from my bed, or a chair, or while mounting the stair or raising my head from a book. My life was being lived, but not by me. I merely borrowed it for moments when its new owner was absent. In these precious seconds when I was myself and could briefly grasp at the frame of existence I dwelled alongside I felt torn between horror at my impotence and dread of what my awful schemes my body might be engaged in.

Books and artifacts lay in rows and stacks along the hallway. I had been unpacking my grandfather’s collection in my not-sleep. The tomes were leathery and ancient. They hummed with malice and whispered sibilantly in my mind. Terrible things about the end of the world, about bleeding my memories away and worst, of reading the blood-inked whorls and sigils within them. I walked amongst those arcane horrors, piled to waist height throughout the house. I had no sense of the time I must have lost while I wandered absent from my mind, emptying the attic and the cupboards to produce this new labyrinth within the house.

As I drew past swaying piles of books I flinched, for their whispers grew guttural and glutinous, promising awful delights whenever my shoulder brushed their unhealthily hued bindings. I knew that I ought to be hungry; I felt weak and light headed, though that may have been merely the heat that sent shuddering beads of sweat down my back. The kitchen would be cooler, and with luck not entirely empty of goodness. The dull progress of my feet pulled me nearer to the smoothly tiled floor that broke from the threadbare carpet. I believed I might attain that haven (or so it appeared to my delirious and desperate mind). That was before I caught sight of the figure standing behind the staircase, blocking the way to my imagined sanctuary. Blackness enveloped me, as my eyes rebelled against me, denying truth to the monstrous shape I had seen uncoil from the underside of the steps. I felt its crenellated limbs reaching over me, its thorny fingertip touches seizing my dumb, listless body and dragging me limply, blindly into its embrace. It seemed as if I slept at last.

To be continued next week…

My Grandfather’s Book

My Grandfather’s Watch

My Grandfather’s Carpet

My Grandfather’s Watch

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After the sudden death of my grandfather I had discovered that I was his sole heir. It came as some surprise to me as I had spent many years estranged from my family and had only recently returned to town. It came as an even greater surprise to my kin. During a tense reading with daggerous looks between his remaining relatives, his house and properties were willed to me alone. I was uneasy with the estate for my prior experience of home ownership extended little beyond possession of a sleeping bag and a talent for cadging a sofa by night. Failing even those luxuries I had camped out beneath the stars in a series of tents and rough spots. Drifting, always drifting. Yet I had returned home at long last and thanks to the quixotic will of my grandfather I had a reason to stay.

I had a house of intriguing and oddly shaped rooms to do with what I wished, and the considerable enmity of my cousins. So it was that I came to be alone for much of my time browsing aimlessly through my grandfather’s vast collection of intriguing trinkets and the countless leather-bound tomes of strange subjects and suggestive titles which littered every room of the house and surface within it. There is something tiring to the eye of such incessant jumble and I sought out quieter vistas.

Amongst the seeming endless ring of keys that had been pressed into my hands by the sweating fingers of my grandfather’s executor was one labelled ‘attic’. I had not yet ventured within. Indeed I had not yet gone above the second storey of the tall Victorian house.

As I fingered the key and ascended the stair to the third storey I felt a speeding quiver in my heart – is there not always a thrill to exploring an attic or cellar? Somehow they bind a house with mystery and potential. I left behind the halls of open doorways and found myself in a hallway in which were five doors – two to my left and right and a fifth facing the stairs.

All locked and unmarked, save for one which must have been at the back of the house (I had gotten somewhat turned around in my ascent and there were no windows in the hall – a room must have been built to enclose the sources of natural light). That door was also closed, but held an ostentatious lock on its outside with a bolt that plainly ran deep into the wall. Its frame was deeply scratched around the lock and lacerations ran its full height from ceiling to floor as if something had deeply desired entrance, yet lacked the key. I felt little desire to test it myself.

At the end of the hall a hatch was set into the ceiling, directly above the fifth door. The attic key was the only one so marked and it fit smoothly into the heavy padlock which lidded the attic shut from beneath. A twist and a tug removed the chain and the hatch swung open eagerly. I was almost struck by the shape which thrust at me with sudden violence from within the darkness above and fell back in alarm. My shock gave way to laughing relief as I realised it was just the folding ladder leaping to greet a visitor.

Heart still pounding and resolute I climbed the ladder and pulled at the cord which hung from the ceiling. Dim lights flickered into life along the length of the attic, blocked and channelled by the hundred trunks and crates which populated the space. A weave of dust hung in the lamplight and tickled at my nose and eyes. With no particular aim I wandered about the huge room, which plainly stretched over the entire plan of the house. I marvelled again at my grandfather’s fascination with collecting and wondered how I would ever manage to dispose of his assets.

I opened a few trunks and examined the disturbing contents: a series of child-sized death masks, a quartet of verse on The Nature of Unions in Undeath, candles and statuettes depicting crude physical acts, a necklace made of teeth and a straw doll with the face of some amphibious creature. I felt dizzy with confusion and the dust eating at my lungs and restacked the oddments where I had found them. I prepared to leave, taking a last look around this warehouse of intriguement. Perhaps I would be able to find a specialist evaluator to examine the house’s contents.

My attention was captivated by the light rebounding in a dazzling arc from an object which hung above the trunks and parcelled books. The arc was almost a rainbow in shape, though it offered none of the rainbow’s jolly hues. The singular item which cast the achromal arch swung by a lightbulb from a leather thong binding it to the rafter above. It was a slender tube of around a foot in length made of some supple and slick artifice that my fingers could barely grip. My eyes slid off the patterns embossed on its curious surface. The shapes hinted at hidden meanings and glamorous twists in perspective.

I gazed at it, entranced by the mandalas and I was scarcely aware of removing it from its resting place and sitting cross-legged upon the floor with the unusual cylinder in my lap. The glyphs and script upon it seemed as if they might be the cousins of a text I’d perused in my grandfather’s study. There they had been described as the words of an ancient people who claimed to perceive time in reverse and whose rites prescribed mutilation and promise of fearsome revelation.

Idly I traced a spiderweb of ancient wisdom with my finger. The tube hummed, grew warm and separated with neat clicks… like the teeth of a skull. Within lay an object which seemed familiar to me and yet had not the familiarity of such items as I had handled before. It was, perhaps, a time piece, for its shape resembled that of an ordinary wristwatch. Yet the chronometry which ringed its face meant nothing to me, telling only the time belonging to an occult and ancient calendar.

The hours were too many, or at least those things I assumed to be the prime divisions of an inhuman day were too great to match our revolutions. The hands were numerous and sprouted in interlocking shapes across the face. Worst of all, it appeared to be made of a glistening gristle; it lay swaddled in the velveteen packaging like a stillborn bone child.

A tremor of fear thrummed in my heart and yet my fingers reached out of their own accord and plucked it from its bed. It was wet and cold in my hand, like a bleeding fish. The lights in the attic dimmed until I was left in blackness. A grisly ticking commenced immediately and with its beat a rush of blood filled my head as if my heart were powered by the engine of a monstrously vigorous furnace. I felt hot, heavy. And then nothing.

I awoke in the dark, though not the dark of the attic but that of night. I lay on my bed, in the guest bedroom (my grandfather’s chamber is too rich with his interests to permit a peaceful slumber). I faced the open window and the starry night sky beyond. Often have I gazed in wonderment at the vastness of the universe with hope that there must be beauty in its vastness and a future for mankind out there. I felt also a calm contentment with our tiny slice of it. For all the petty annoyances of man’s life (and mine had had its share) there are fresh air and butterflies to balance it.

Yet tonight I felt different. My heart ached still from its earlier pounding and there was a dry nausea in my mouth. Frowningly I regarded the starscape anew. It was… wrong. A perverse irreality of the night intruded upon my senses. Where were my astrological friends whom I nightly greeted and goodbyed before I slept?

The Hunter no longer hunted. Instead he cowered, shrinking back from his spectral quarry. New constellations, or rather – ancient skies? I saw the hints of stars I knew, but paled in comparison with the devilish reds and putrescent yellows that dominated the night, threatening my astral familiars. The wrongness of the air threw my head into a spinning dread.

I drew the curtains to evade the portentous sky. It was then I noted the grotesque time piece which lay like a streak of eviscerated organ upon the bedside table. It seemed to me that it throbbed hungrily for the witch lights I had curtained. I resolved to ignore the foul thing and so I swept it into a drawer and resumed my slumber, for even these brief minutes of wakefulness had wearied me.

I fell into bleak dreams pierced by strange threads of symbolism which drew me into a tapestry of sweating horror. Great staring eyes tormented me and penumbrally monolithic structures haunted me vertiginously. At the end I was repeatedly horrified by a trilobite crawling in and out of my slipper as I lay alone on a cold wet floor. I felt unable to draw them forth from beneath the bed when I awoke, slick with fear. I stepped barefoot and fearful to the window and steeled myself to draw the curtains asunder.

The world was as it normally was in the afternoon. I had slept late and the sun was beginning to diminish. Red tinged shadows stretched across the roads outside, their talons reaching through the gardens and scratching at the window, keen to be let in. I looked up to where the dark moon was rising, jaws spread wide to consume our native satellite. I thought nothing of it and turned away from the outside. My hand was drawn to stroke at the cartiliginous thing that wrapped about my wrist, its hands whirling and its pulse beating blackly in counterpoint to my own.

This week, Monday 30th July 2012

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Oh, it’s another week… already.

Okay, sort of back on track… every weekend seems to be busy at the moment. This weekend contained lots of being awake and improv shows with MissImp, which was great fun, despite a tiny Friday night audience (damn you Olympics) and having to be awake on Saturday for Nottinghamshire Pride shows in the comedy tent. Not to worry – it won’t stop the yarn-spinning.

I also caught the new Batman film today The Dark Knight Rises – I enjoyed it, but have not been thrilled. They tried to wedge too much stuff and characters into it without maintaining a decent action quota throughout; it’s almost like they’re reluctant to put the Bat on screen. I still prefer the first of Nolan’s Batman films. I am however, absolutely loving the current series of Primeval. They’ve upped the stakes from dinosaur hunting adventure to apocalyptic science fiction on a low, trashy budget. I can’t get enough of it – this week we got to see a hideous Gollumesque future predator rip one of its mates’ arms off in a Graeco-Roman wrestle and beat it to death. Awesome.

This week’s scribbles

Tuesday:  the fourth part of the mini-serial The Peninsula Creature. With the beast revealed it’s munching time for the archipelago.

Thursday: My Grandfather’s Watch. I love HP Lovecraft and can scarcely resist scribbling what I think of as homages, but are probably just bad parodies. Anyhow – enjoy!

Pleasingly I have some travelling to do this week so while my absence from work will undoubtedly generate quite a bit of stress I will at least get some extra writing time on the train (in the exciting run up to a week off I’ve ended up with just two and a half days in the office). There are a couple of short flashish stories that I need to tidy up and I’d lke to put some effort into Alex Trepan too. I have a determination to get my sleep back on track this week in readiness for a week of my own time wasting, so that should get me some morning writing time too.

Round Up of Last Week

24th July: The Peninsula Creature – Part 3 – a cryptozoological expedition gets into serious trouble

26th July: The Lobster Adventure – Captain Pigheart faces marooning and evil lobster monsters

My Grandfather’s Carpet

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Though I was finally free from many of life’s worries I found the shame of feeling so pierced my high spirits. My heart burdened with the weight of an uncommon liberty; this freedom granted me by death. So distracted was I that much of my day was spent mooching from room to room, idly tugging a volume free from a shelf or inverting some curio that had come from who knows where. As I spent more time in my grandfather’s house I found that a hyperactive nausea began to lie thickly upon my soul.
Late in the evening my fingers quavered with inactivity, for I could not bring myself to settle and achieve any one thing. At length my feet took me to the bedroom at the rear of the house. My grandfather had filled the room with dark wooden furniture which hemmed me into a leathered chair in the corner opposite the bed, worn through years of use. A glass sat on a round table at my right; on a bureau sat a silver tray with a decanter of some amber liquid. I found it to be a whiskey. Maybe it would soothe me.
As the drink passed my lips I began to relax. The window gave me a narrow sliver of the night sky, the moon swollen and part-shrouded in mauve clouds. The silvery light cast curious shadows from the figurines which stood guard at the window sill. The house was full of such artifacts and I should make some inventory of them, eventually. My gaze fell to the floor, on which lay a glorious weaving. Something in the pattern intrigued me, drew me into the weave. My earlier restlessness returned and I could no longer sit still.
The twitching unease roused me from my seat and took me on a nervous curlicue of the intricate carpets. The paths I traced were surely unknown to the skilled carpeteer whose only design was that of ornament, and yet- and yet… Were not those patterns which my spirit sought out through the elocution of mine toes as they plunged admirable into the weft those patterns which had been framed in my very mind? Framed and presented to my waywarding soul in the dark resplendence of the waking dreams into which I had been lured by those awful vilified peerless ancients whose dead breath I felt in my mind’s ears. Those very treads marked the stain they had left in me.
And exposed, I saw them – naked in the furrows ploughed by my toes and heel. In a panic of fluttering wrists and palsied eye I took pen to paper to record the daemonic maze I had limberly scribed. Paper was not enough and I tore from the walls such decor as I had looked upon with former affection and littered the bed with them. High-kneed I over-stepped my footed pattern and mirrored it on the four walls of my quarters.
My work completed I fell back amongst the ruin of treasures, broken jags of frame and torn tapestry my mattress. About me I could truly see the messages the ancients had so crudely couriered to our world through the unwilling postiary of my half-woken mentation. It was only as I traced my psychic horrors on the chamber walls with a faltering thumb that I realised my error.
How stupid, how ignorantly rapt in their eldritch influence I had been. Laid bare about me I saw the nightmare gate I had etched in first ink, then, my bleeding wrists attested in the blood of my veins. And wrought a dire magic.
The runic gateway I’d mindlessly daubed were filling with a ghast light, from that place beyond emotion and life where they dwell. And from where they would soon return.

The Eldritch Entertainment

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The gnarl-tongued lizard man coiled itself for another strike. I slapped it firmly about the scaly chops and earned a moment of respite. My incarceration in the Halls of the Soulless Ones had been alternately tedious and freighted with menace. Worse still I had long exhausted my supplies of travelling brandy and caravan opiates. It was doing my nerves no favours at all.

The nameless horrors grew more horrible and nameless by the hour. A fearful dread struck me whenever they laid their cold unidentifiably alien minds upon me. The chill terror they wrought in me I diffused by allocating them disparaging nicknames. ‘Old Cock Stalk Eyes’ was unamused when I named him so and through my hysterical laughter I stepped back from the brink of madness.

They tormented my frail humanity in that weird place between the stars and moon. Only my environment seemed fixed while time ran amok like an epileptic lady-gibbon: the hours raced by or dilated for seeming days. The hands of my watch disported themselves energetically which helped not at all. I sprawled, bored and confused upon a slab of stone so unusual in hue that I hesitate to grant it colour at all – perhaps its colour was in my mind only and there are not words to represent it. Walls of stone rose high above me. I imagined that they met in a vast arch in the sky – if sky there was. The vault was filled with windows subtly aglow with a gross tantric haze and behind them a darkness that grew blacker the longer I looked, as if I were being drawn into a bleak pupil of my own death. Gloomy.

I contented myself with staring at the floor, for the windows were too terrible to contemplate. Through the floor I grew dimmingly aware of another man such as myself, leaning against a similar slab of prisonhood. I attempted a tapping Morse upon the stone, with hopes of conveying a greeting through its resonant essence. He stirred not, though the sound was returned to me thrice-fold and punchy to my ears. As I watched (in a manner unlike voyeurism, for I was lonely in this space with only the grimming faces of ‘Old Gashey Face Spume’ and ‘Lady Horn Buttocks’ to oppress me) the man started in alarm and cowered by the slab.

My heart leapt into my mouth and I was obliged to swallow it lest my fevered pulse choke me. Approaching him clawfully was a vile nightmare brute: half fish-scaled goat and half horse-lobster, its head a single hugely glistening eyeball rimed with bloody sleep. The poor fellow fled, but the eerie chimera was before him at every turn. My unique eyrie gave me an unrivalled view, though I’d have traded it for a blinding. The ocular beast held the man down, and its dire pupil widened as if plunged into night. A chitinous nether spout unfurled from the gaping orb and jerked ominously before loosing a wetly spurting string of ichorous insectile oospore into the man’s terrified eyes. He screamed, which struck me as entirely reasonable, as the monster’s roe burrowed into his face.

The cackleberry-headed thing retreated, with its spiny recoiling pistil. I realised the rime was not bloody tears but the crusted rudiment of its own lost progeny. The man lay on the unhueable slab, hands over his eyes sobbing with horror. As the only other human present I felt I ought to pat him on the shoulder, or offer him a handkerchief. Some well-intentioned platitude or other in this dark and gruesome place. He was unreachable – as cut off from my cotton kerchief as man is from the mind of woman. He began to shudder and buck as if swiving a reluctant tiger. For the eggs were hatching. Those appalling nuclei of the Soulless Ones delivered by Captain Jism-Eye himself had completed their awful gestation in mere seconds, though to our time-shagged senses it might have been years.

The man threw back his head and his face was seamed with writhing ridges where those horrid oculist spawn roved. The spectral germs opened his mind like an origami crane handled by a child, rippingly and without grace. His inner eye floated free and was drawn into the future. I saw what he saw, a future rife with flames and misery: the Soulless Ones returned to our realm with their cold hatred of our life, a terrible insight into the future these creatures desired for us. It was as I shared in these visions that I had cause to wonder how it could be that I, pitying this fellow’s plight from above whose fate I envied not at all, could be twinned with him for this portentous glimpsing…

Aaagh! The worms wriggled under the flesh of my beautiful features – it was I, not he! For there was no he – only I suffered in that hellish Hall. It was my eyes into which that opthalmic bastard had spurted its embryonic eyeballs. I bellowed and raged, scratching at my face as I blundered about the hall cursing the Soulless Ones with all the names and mockery my gifted tongue could muster.

Apparently displeased by my description of its majesty as ‘Buttock-clad mal-faced leper-fist of faecal croco-chickens’ one of the ancient creatures stirred into motion. I named each one of those cruel and unfriendly gods and derided them loudly in their sacred space. With a victorious squeeze of my cheeks I exploded a gout of wriggling oculant horrors from my flesh. I took no little pleasure in stamping them to an ectoplasmic smear. It was perhaps this which roused their wrath for they all rose from their slumber; walking, dragging or even hopping dreams made flesh (albeit from half a hundred ill-chosen species, blended with the skill of a coprophilic artiste) hating at me with their emanations of terror.

I was beyond their reach, so agog with their seeding of my brow that my anger impelled my imprecative oratory to ever greater heights of insult. I realised I might have pushed the cockish jerk monkeys too far when I found myself standing in one of those bleak window arches, the darkness pulling at me- a mortuary ghost suckling on life. With wide, crazed eyes I stared defiant into their many, many eyes and found myself free. A roaring filled my ears and I fell backwards into the gloom.

A billion stars rushed around me and were still. I lay in a rose bed, ringed by the concerned faces of my neighbours from Harleigh (a small town temporarily unstained by my reputation). They helped me to my feet and I was grateful for the warm crush of their hands. Laughingly, I attributed my battered state to a gardener’s combat with an aggressive weed. I fended off further aid by declaring that whiskey and a hot bath would doubtless set me aright.

It was as I lounged in my tub, steaming clean the stink of the ancients that I felt a popping by my ear and heard a splash. An undulant tremor of horror ran through my belly. A grub of optic flesh waggled through the water. I splashed it ineffectually in my panic before anger strengthened me. I leapt from the bath and seized a jar in which I trapped the disgusting parasite. I sloshed it full of with paraffin and grinningly set it ablaze. The worm thrashed and swelled alarmingly, growing to the size of a burning horse in mere moments. Resuming my panic, I hurled the remainder of the oil at its maddened head-orb. The explosion blew me into my drawing room where I dazedly seized the bare necessities of life and fled the house.

I squatted in a robe, sopping wet and drinking whiskey in the street, and watched the flames spread through the neighbourhood with dreary predictability. The ghastly optomobeast ululated its immolatory end in a slow death of taking its pyre to the rest of the town. At least I’d leave this place with my reputation intact, for it seemed there would be no survivors. Damn those Soulless Ones, I feared that their bitter reign already begun.