The Dying God
by Dan Clore
The snug relationship between occult fantasy and the actual practice of the occult is well established in history. Writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs,progenitor of the Tarzan and Jane tales, were practicing occultists.
--Carl Raschke, Painted Black.
I.
The old man turned his goateed face to the three women inthe room with him. He nodded wearily, showing the greyed streaks running through his hair, and said: "Have you found a replacement for me?"
One of the women answered: "Yes. It took little searching this time."
"And did you invent another religion? I find this race has grown skeptical of the gods I have been in the past, and no longer bow in obeisance to Ung'gll-Tchtchrrl, or Yeb-Tsath, or Dumuzi the Shepherd, or Aqhat, or Atys, or Cernunnos the Cimmerian, or Iacchus, or Hou, or Janicot, the Master of the Forest, or the many others I no longer recall. One would never have suspected how the aeons weigh on one."
The second of the women spoke: "Yes, we had to invent a new mythology in accordance with the age."
"Even further from the facts, I assume? It seems, with the rise of science, that humans require even greater divergence from the real for their beliefs to carry conviction."
The third: "No. By some strange irony, we could alter the truth ever so slightly in this case. We had only to change one detail in our story for it to become utterly credible to the one chosen as your replacement. It seems that some of the Elder Lore which has leaked out into human ken has reached certain writers of weird fantasy, who have incorporated it in a rationalized form for use in their more outré novelettes, bringing it closer to thetruth in the process."
The man scratched his chin with his thumbnail: "Strange. Very strange."
II.
Just what has caused the odd transformation in the personality of Linwood Asshton-Urquhart no one can, at present, say. His parents, who no longer accept him as their son--a sentiment which seems to give him no displeasure--have refused to turn over to him his old manuscripts and papers. The police decline to investigate a case for which, they assert, no evidence exists--as the former leader of the cult seems merely to have moved, and upon request Lin has produced letters of recent date in his handwriting, although their experts declare that they show signs of difficult or painful inscription; the answer that the elder had a degenerative disorder of the nerves has sufficiently removed any lingering doubts on the matter. The Anti-Cult Lucidity Organization, on the other hand, has openly proclaimed its belief in sinister shenanigans and unsavory goings-on; but they too find themselves stymied in the attempt to get to the heart of the matter. In consequence, they have resolved to search out the mystery on behalf of the young poet's parents; but they have expressed their conviction that deprogramming will not work in such a case, for it displays strange features not usual to induction into an obscure sect.
These then, are the facts as summarized from the interviews and documents which the investigators have succeeded in obtaining. Linwood Whitmarsh Urquhart was born on April 30, 1974, to Robert Aldridge Urquhart and his wife, Coral Urquhart, née MacGregor. He was their only child, and three years after his birth they moved from Port Townshend, Washington to Rainier, Oregon. The youngster showed precocious leanings, and had learned to read by the age of five. Full perusal of the works of writers such as Maturin, Poe, Lautréamont, Lovecraft, and many another of that eldritch ilk, had been accomplished by his eighth year. A favorite he found in a novel by his direct ancestor, Lord Weÿrdgliffe, the proscribed Gothick Romance The Unspeakable, which he read over and again in an inherited copy of the unexpurgated edition of 1796. At this point his parents began to worry for his sanity, fearing morbid inclinations on his part, for neither of them had read more than the first chapters of a work by a precursor who they took no great pride in owning, as his ideas and images frequently proved too shocking to bear; they did not even suspect that their son would later change his name in honor of his forebear.
Nothing, however, proved capable of altering the interests the boy showed for such uncanny works, and in lieu of discouraging them, his father soon changed his tack and encouraged the child to pen works of his own. By the age of thirteen the boy had amassed a good deal of verse and prose, and at fourteen set down to definitively polish his finest selections for publication. His inclinations towards the macabre, together with his shyness and social awkwardness, had lead to a total loss of popularity on his part, almost amounting to a complete shunning; and when, to compound the problem, he began to suffer from insomnia, which lead to his drifting off to sleep in class, from which he would quickly awaken screaming in horror at the bizarre nightmares which incessantly besieged him, his father, reasoning that he could make a living from his writing--which had begun to sell--allowed him to drop out of high school.
But it proved impossible for him to earn money at his chosen career, as the small-press journals which accepted his work paid only in copies or a meager pittance; and even when his poems appeared gathered together into a collection entitled Fast Rots the Corpse he saw no significant returns, nor did his chapbook of three short stories, Lords of Atlantis, provide any meaningful funds. His father now soon tried to convince him to return to school, and over the teenager's protests, which repeated many times the comments of critics who had compared his work to that of such figures as Baudelaire, Justin Geoffrey, Clark Ashton Smith (with whom he claimed distant relation), and Thomas Ligotti, he soon succeeded in convincing the University of Oregon to admit him as a student on a probationary status, in spite of his checkered academic past; for he indisputably showed great promise.
So it was that Linwood Asshton-Urquhart, as he now styled himself in life as well as on paper, enrolled as a French major, hoping to gain--so he said--a greater understanding of the Decadents, Frenetics, and Hydropaths. His story there has had to be pieced together from the accounts of such of his fellow students as could be located. Lin moved into the dormitory Carson Hall at the beginning of Winter Term in 1993, taking a single room. There, he failed utterly at making friends; his social gaucherie precluded any starts he attempted with the bulk of the population, while in any case he felt little interest in such mundane personalities; he found that the hippies--of which Eugene has a substantial number to this day--shared a little bit of his occult leanings, but inclined too far to the optimistic for his taste; he maintained ties with a few members of the lower strata, not all of them students, but merely local teenagers, for the purposes of carnal gratification; but even in the latter cases, he found no spiritual companions, and generally kept the relationship strictly to the matter at hand. In all cases, he had a tendency to frighten away any who displayed interest in him, by allowing them to read his still-unfinished novel, The Silver Succubus, which hints darkly at extra-dimensional realms accessible through obscene ceremonies and practices, and of what answers the calls sent to those nameless regions. In all fairness, that work's blasphemy-tainted enormities would shock even the jaundiced libertines of a Marquis de Sade into asemblance of sanity and sobriety.
The poet succeeded fairly well as a student, earning steady As and Bs, though he occasionally missed class due to attacks of insomnia and nightmare. Despite having made no friends, he declared that he preferred that setting to his home-town, and stayed there through Summer Term. Not long into Fall Term, a group of three women, known for often frequenting the University even though they seemed never to take any courses there, had heard vague rumors of his novel-in-progress, which had become something of a sensation on the gossip circuit, and sought out the young man. These women disturbed most of the other students who paid them any attention, for their facial features seemed to betray an inexplicable mix of races in their ancestry; and while they all appeared--at first glance--quite youthful, whenever you would look into their eyes they would seem to betray the burden of aeons unknown to the entire human race. Little could be learned of them, save that the young writer had told those who inquired about them that their names were Yiangh, Mlaon, and Nhaovin. They had laughed, exchanging knowing glances, when asked the nationality of those names. Many had found themselves attracted to them, only to find their erotic emotions tinged with an unwelcome eeriness. Indeed, if not for their fey personalities, they would have become the sexual idols of the fraternity houses; but their shapeliness was over-ridden by the uncanny knack they had of anticipating each other's movements, almost as if they shared a single mind.
It will not be wondered at that Lin took to them immediately, and a letter from this time reveals that when they discovered his study of French, they told him that they had once lived in Averoigne, and would gladly speak French, whenever with him, to give him the practice he would need. Needless to say, this rendered their conversations wholly indecipherable to the other students, though his French Professor informed the Anti-Cult investigators that when she once overheard him and them, passing by on the street, the three used an argot which seemed to combine a great number of archaic constructions and pronunciations with a more modern lingo, as if they had stepped from the pages of Rabelais or La Queste del Saint Graal, and wereclumsily attempting to hide the fact with an updated pattern of speech.
At this time the student seemed to become preoccupied withthe ideas which these three women fed into him, and when he stopped to say a word to a passer-by in the hall or on the street, he would mumble references to such obscure conceptions as "the Elder Lore", "the kteis of the mother-goddess", "the Goat with a Thousand Young", "the primal white jelly", "wicked Voorish domes", and "the mysteries of phallic and non-phallic generation". Together with the reputation caused by even the less explicit portions of his novel (few have read any further than the first three chapters, while none seem to have perused the entire outline of the uncompleted four-fifths of the novel), these strange phrases caused speculations concerning hidden sexual activities on the part of Lin and his three companions, which the more learned among the students linked to the practices of Tantrik Yoga, pointing to the undeniably Asiatic cast visible in the women's cheekbones and coloring. Once, in particular, when he had been offered a few drags on a marijuana joint out of courtesy, he seemed to go into a sort of trance, and his mutterings about "retraining his nervous system", "what the voolas mean", "the Xu language", and "the apotheosis of the wizard-priest" had positively frightened his auditors with their unthinkable implications; whereas he, on the other hand, seemed to take a positive pleasure in mystifying them with insinuationsabout the reality hidden behind the immemorial allegory of Tao.
These whispered conjectures seemed to gather confirmation when, during a routine fire-drill, the Resident Assistant of the dorm opened the door to his room, which the resident had nicknamed "the Waughters" after the estates of Lord Weÿrdgliffe, his forebear in life as in literature, to make sure that he had evacuated with the others. There, to his dismay, he found Lin and one of the three women sitting motionlessly in a copulatory embrace, their concentration so intense that they could not even hear the bell, the two other women--seated separately on the room's second bed--equally melted into ecstasy. In any case, it seems certain that the young poet had taken up the practice of some sort of Ceremonial Magick, for his neighbors overheard absurd syllables echoing in the night. The Lane County Police Department's Satanism experts confirm the Anti-Cult Lucidity Organization's surmises that these incidents provide definite proof of involvement with Fantasy Role-Playing Games.
Lin's parents, hearing rumors of this activity, believed that he had merely fallen in with the wrong crowds, and that psychoactive drugs--which he had frequently, if obscurely and obliquely, mentioned in his creative lucubrations--had deleteriously affected his already unstable psyche. However, Lin's professors report that he had steadily decreased his attendance of his courses, until the school determined that he should fail his probation--which he had believed ended--for his bad grades. At this point Lin's story becomes obscure, for he moved out of the dorm and into an apartment building, the funds used to pay the rent coming from checks bearing the name Francis Tomesen. His parents, at the time, thought that he must have gotten involved in narcotics trafficking--a logical outcome of involvement with drugs,--and despaired of his fate. Later investigation has shown, however, that a group of three women, who answered in most particulars to the ones who had befriended the young man, but differed in enough to preclude identity, had leased the apartment and delivered the rent-money. Anti-Cult investigators understandably consider this as proof that the obscure sect with which he had gotten involved had now wholly taken him under its wing, and they point to the events which havefollowed as confirmation of their views.
III.
One can now only reconstruct the novel mythology whichLinwood Asshton-Urquhart learned from his tutors in the cult at this time from scattered mentionings of it in letters and notebooks (left in the possession of his parents, and not returned) of the time, and from his continued production of verses. Many of the odes and sonnets he composed during this phase take the cult's mythos for their basis, while others makepassing references to it.
It seems that in the depths of space, a group of cloud-whorls in the Spiral Nebulae attained sentience. These scarlet-hued vaporous brains, referred to only as the Elder Ones, attained prodigious developments in the sciences, most especially those dealing with mental phenomena. In this department they discovered that the mental and material levels are not separate, but correlated levels, nor does one result from the other as an epiphenomenon. Rather, they result from still another level which precedes them, and only appears to become separated in the limited view of consciousness. Utilizing this knowledge, they learned the secret of immortality: the mind requires a physical body, but does not depend upon a particular physical body for its survival; rather, through appropriate manipulation of the level preceding the mental and material split, the mind can journey from one body to another, and even take up physical habitation in it. By voyaging from a senescent body to one newly-born, they found, they could ensure themselves eternal life. And this did not harm the young creature who accepted the psyche of the old, for they would merge into a single entity, thus in effect making the young one into a deity, for they would share all of the knowledge and power which the elder had gained through the aeons. The old body would be allowed to expire as an empty husk.
After many epochs, however, the Elder Ones found themselvesin a situation of dire peril, for their scientists had discovered the immanence of a near-by star going nova. In unison the Elder Ones migrated en masse to the furthest race their mental probings could discover, a bulbous, semi-vegetable race inhabiting the oceanic caverns of the outermost moon of a planet that wandered sunlessly through the Ghooric Zone. At this point the Elder Ones discovered, to their dismay, that the new bodies could not produce new minds belonging to the Elder Race, but only to the race of their new hosts. For their minds did not match bodies in a one-to-one fashion, but in varying combinations depending upon the particular sexual characteristics of the race in question. At this point they began a search throughout the universe for a race which, modified through their superior technology, could produce new psyches belonging to their race, for they wished to increase and spread through the galaxies.
At this point begins a dizzying succession of host-races, ofwhich no definite sequence can be formulated with any confidence from the scattered fragments left by Linwood Asshton-Urquhart. Most of the material here collated derives from draft fragments for a projected sonnet sequence, which apparently would have revealed the history of the Elder Race in a series of shifting, kaleidoscopic visions. There was a race of winged octopi which lived in submarine cities of doubtful geometry; the oven-tending insect people who dwelled beneath the white-hot skies of Minraud; the hermaphroditic worms that tunneled blindly through the husk of a dying sun; a fabulous, semi-fungoidal race who developed the ability to wing through the aether; the repulsive batrachian Annedoti of the Sirius system; the black, amorphous dwellers on Cykranosh who worshiped the batrachian Zhothaqquah; and many others too numerous to list. In every case, the Elder Ones devoted a great deal of attention to their attempt to re-create the race in a form which would produce new psyches conforming to their Elder Race's; for their numbers inevitably diminished greatly over the course of the aeons as the old minds died in unforeseen calamities and catastrophes: the process of body-possession required significant preparation.
In time the Elder Ones came to our solar system, at first inhabiting a coleopterous race dwelling on a trans-Plutonian planet known to occultist lore as Shaggai. When that species began to die out under invasion from a race which did not wholly conform to the properties of matter as known in this universe--a fact which made it impossible for the Elder Ones to choose them as their new vessels--the entire race migrated to the arachnid denizens of Europa's icy deserts; these spider-like poets would frequently send verses, woven into their gossamer strands, drifting into the outer abysses. The alien invaders soon attacked that residence as well, but retreated when the increased light from the sun proved harmful to them. Next, the Elder Race transported themselves to the semi-translucent, polypous inhabitants of the former planet which had its place between the earth and Mars, and which certain obscure speculations of the Theosophists refer to as Lucifer. When that planet met its unfortunate (and undescribed) fate, the Elder Ones drifted across space to earth, where they could not find any currently sentient race, but exerted their influence on the furry inhabitants ofThule to create the first homo sapiens which the world had known.
When the oceans had shifted and that continent lay under the waves, the seeds of culture had taken plant in the human brain. The Elder Race found it easy enough to create a place for itself, for they invented a number of cults devoted to their worship and preservation. They must remain secret, for the number of men greatly outnumbered the Elder Ones, and they knew (from bitter experience) that such a half-formed civilization easily turns against a fully sentient species, which it inevitably perceives as unknown and threatening. So the Elder Ones had each founded a cult, composed solely of the members of humanity which had received some portion of its psyche as an agent of apotheosis--for they were to men as gods,--and those who could, with suitable rationalizations, be convinced to act in their interest.
Each individual of the Elder Race found itself, as atmultitudinous times in the past, obliged to divide the various portions of its psyche among a group of individual bodies, composed of twelve women, who would continually re-create their living community, and a single man, who must be renewed on a regular basis, lest that portion of the Elder One die and so destroy the whole. So had they formed in prehistoric times cults composed of these members alone, and these groups had survived to the present day in a secrecy broken only infrequently.
Just such a group, it appears from notes in diary format left in the possession of the Asshton-Urquharts, had the young Linwood stumbled upon. If one can trust the surmises of the Anti-Cult Lucidity Organization, then the thirteen members of that order consider themselves but a single entity, known as Nigguratl-Yig; a name further divisible into Yig, the Father of Serpents, a symbolic conception of the solar-phallic principle, and Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, representing the female principle incarnated in a multi-bodied, self-reproducing and chthonic form.
Such a cult they find unrepresented in any of their voluminous files on those groups which they have succeeded in infiltrating. But they point to disturbing similarities between this sect and several guarded descriptions in the questionable Bridewall edition (1845) of Fvindvuf von Junzt's DieUnaussprechlichen Kulten, which differs greatly from theDüsseldorf edition (1839) which is known as The Black Book, andwhich gives the author's christian name as Friedrich Wilhelm; they report thinly veiled hints in the essay on Gilles de Retz inGuy-Ernest Clouët's Les Abîmes; while they find obliquereferences in that forbidden fountain of uncleanliness, LordWeÿrdgliffe's Gothick Romance, The Unspeakable. The latterfinding particularly disturbs Linwood's parents, for they knowthat he had thoroughly studied the work of his obscure ancestor, however unpleasant others might find its perusal, and that those elements which most shocked others he often found appealing. Nonetheless, the Anti-Cult Lucidity Organization maintains that all of these sources, however much the analogies may seem to illuminate the case, have been thoroughly discredited; and in this they compare them with the philosophy of a Theosophical splinter group known as the Chaosophists, who worship the blind, idiot creator-god Demogorgon, and who claim to have made telepathic contact with a reptilian conclave of immortal Lemurian hierophants, who remain entombed in the innermost sanctums of their temples at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Their speculations about cosmic cycles and grotesque, unheard-of races display great similarity indeed to those of the unnamed sect which Lin had joined; but they have received thorough debunkings in the Skeptical Inquisitor, and no one can now take themseriously.
From a few letters addressed to scientific periodicals, posed in the hypothetical mode, one may infer that the Elder Ones
have maintained a close connection with each other, forming inessence a world-wide network of cults, and that they have made great strides in their goal of creating bodies which can reproduce their minds. Indeed, it seems that certain recent discoveries--among them the third form of life, the Archaea,--when connected in quite novel ways, render the effect virtually inevitable. Toward such a goal has the Elder Race directed humanscience.
IV.
Lin stood on the stone edge of the raised pool in the center of the chamber. He wore nothing but the ceremonial robes which they had provided him with. Never before had he come to this place, where he--as the God Yig, Father of Serpents--would preside over the sect; never before had he so much as met Francis Tomesen, the current incarnation of the Serpent-God; never before had he so much as met the nine women who completed the coven with the other three and their lord; never before had he so much as suspected the location of the temple, where he would rule as a Wizard-King from now on. In the old farm-house past the edge of town, no one would overhear any of the actions occurring inside, regardless of how cacophonous.
He had thoroughly practiced his part in the upcoming ritual;the three priestesses had explained to him that while the Serpent-God could abandon its former vessel, in order to possess the new one, without the aid of the ritual, they nonetheless found that the Rite of the Shedding of the Old Skin made the transition from one host-body to another more seamless and unproblematic; the death of the old vessel they found unfortunate, but given that life after abandonment by the god had proven an unbearable burden in all previous cases, they deemed it as merciful as necessary. Imagine it, he reflected: a Walpurgisnacht orgy, on his twenty-third birthday, in which he would indeed experience a rebirth!
And so he stood, motionless, in silence, mentally recitingphrases in the Aklo language in order to enter into an alternative state of consciousness, the physical correlatives of which would aid the transition to godhood. The door opened behind him and he heard footsteps entering the room. Still, he maintained his concentration, as they had instructed him, and not a single muscle budged. Three women--whom he did not recognize, though they bore an unmistakable resemblance to the trio of Yiangh, Mlaon, and Nhaovin, brought a cloaked man to the X-shaped cross erected immediately before him. With thorny vines they tied his arms and legs to the cross, after disrobing him and leaving him naked. He was placed so that Lin could look directly into his eyes, which seemed to hold a fire that had burned since the beginning of the universe beneath its green irises and gaping pupils. One of the women took his own robe as he gazed infascination.
Now three other groups of women entered the room, and began,in unison with the first group, to dance in an intricate pattern, chanting under their breath words and syllables of the secret tongues. Seeing them through the corners of his eyes, Lin deemed that they created such a spectacle as not even the Corybantes of the Bacchanalia could present, for they enveloped themselves in an ecstasy that utterly absorbed their awareness of the world, and yet maintained a dance in which each group of three acted as though a single person, and the four groups of three combined together into a singular unit of motion.
Faster and faster they danced, and soon they began thelitany which would lead to the sacrifice. "Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!" shouted one of each three, and the other two responded as chorus: "Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!" They spun dizzily around the room in innumerable permutations, each leaving its group to join another, then regrouping in varied combinations, to return to their original positions, the whirling circle of their nude bodies reflecting the light of torches through the hazes of incense and smoldering herbs, and again they cried: "Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!" and its answering echo: "Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with aThousand Young!"
The women continued their intricate dance as they continuedto shout in unison; you would think them, performing that age-old rite, a coven of witches at some hellish Sabbat orbiting the ithyphallic Goat of Mendes; or ivy-chewing Maenads circling about their to-be-sacrificed god Dionysos; or the frenetic priestesses of a cavern painting come to life, readying to dismember their antlered shaman in the reddish glare of the leprous moon. All of these visions and more passed through the fantaisiste's febrilebrain as he gazed upon the scene surrounding him. But he mustconcentrate.
Now the old god began to answer to their chants, and they correspondingly began a differently patterned dance, which seemed to Lin to reflect on certain geometric designs which occultists had found dimly reflected in the stars. "Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!" shouted the four centers of consciousness among their respective groups, and "Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!" replied the eight others, twisting like the arms of an octopus, now to discover the reply "Ya-Yig! Great Father of Serpents! Lord of the Woods and the Caverns!" On and on for what seemed an eternity to the waiting youth the dancers and the crucified elder god echoed their incantatory invocations through his awareness, and he carefully counted the times that he heard the shouted "Ya-Yig! Great Father of Serpents! Lord of the Woods and the Caverns!" so that he would recognize the correct moment to beginhis part in the Rite of the Shedding of the Old Skin.
In spirals the dancers spun through the clouds of reddish vapor; "Iä!"--they screamed; "Ya-Yig!" came the answer from the lips of the crucified god; and again, a third time, the litany echoed through the hall; and again, a fifth time, and a sixth--
A twenty-first time the chorus of women screamed their alien screed and the elderly man, staring into the eyes of his new shell, drooled onto his goatee as he shouted his affirmative reply; a twenty-second time, and Lin readied the dagger held in his hands; a twenty-third time, and at the precise end of the phrase, "Ya-Yig! Great Father of Serpents! Lord of the Woods and the Caverns!" he plunged the silver-embossed dagger into the guts of his old self. If anyone should discover what he was doing, they would think it murder, not understanding-- But he must concentrate wholly on the ritual-- The god needs perfect concentration on the prescribed thought-forms to make the most perfect transition--
Now the women whirled in a phantasmagoric frenzy around thecircumference of the room, looking like galaxies in the depths of nethermost outer space. Again, the chanting resumed, and now Lin whispered, in an inaudible voice, the line which the dying god reiterated like an infernal mantra. Again, he carefully counted the number of repetitions, and when they had reached twenty-three, and his voice--which he had steadily increased in volume--had become equal to that of his predecessor, he again jabbed the dagger into him, pushing it upwards beneath the ribcage. Madness they would think it-- humans are fools to think such thingsmadness--
Once again the chanting continued. Now, the old man's voice slowly declined in volume, until, at the twenty-third and final shout of "Ya-Yig! Great Father of Serpents! Lord of the Woods and the Caverns!"--where Lin's own voice had reached a fever pitch of excitation and exaltation, he had become wholly inaudible, and at the precise split-second he had fully enunciated the phrase, the poet rammed the dagger home and left it dangling from the man'seviscerated abdomen.
The man stared directly into his eyes staring directly into his own eyes, and he felt his body recede into the distance, crossing the horizon of awareness. A momentary darkness, and he seemed to regain himself. The Serpent-Father must be taking over. He must be feeling the deity combining with himself. But what do I see?--
It took a moment to focus his eyes, which seemed somehowunresponsive to the signals his mind sent them. Even in the haze he could now make out a little. There, that body standing. Why, it looked precisely like his own!--And why did he feel such pain in his arms and his legs, and his gut-- God, his gut-- It felt like it had been torn apart, or wrenched out by some unknown creature's ironic claws--
Everything differed from before, colors appeared slightly different, the room smelled fainter than before, a faint ringing echoed in his ears, his body seemed ungainly and uncooperative, and there-- There, his own body stood before him, now, the body fell backwards into the pool. He struggled against the thornybonds tying him to the cross-- He couldn't--
The women screamed and shouted. Now, they approached the pond and pulled the reclining body out of it, covered with a liquid he did not recognize, and a look of incurable satisfaction seemed to cross its face before it became unconscious again.
Deceived me-- This wasn't the deal they described-- Nowonder they maintain such secrecy about the god of the cult-- Black ridges against red suns-- Robed forms with inhuman outlines in a desert of ashen sand-- Too late now-- The pain, the pain,--in my chest, my gut-- In my gut-- Mother Hydra, they said-- How much truth and how much falsehood in the stories they told?-- Never know now-- Never-- Arms and legs-- Why don't they finish me?-- Merciful God in heaven!-- Finish the sacrifice now-- Darkness-- "Ya-Yig! Great Father of Serpents! Lord of the Woods and the Caverns!"-- Dying for real-- The Waughters-- Dark spirals of unfolding in the vaultless skies-- Opening to the light of the Seven Suns and the Gate of the-- Unfair-- not what they said-- Portal of the-- "Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!"-- Opening-- Shed skin all right-- sloughed off and put new one on-- in the dark spirals-- spinning to the-- Caverns winding down to the phosphorescent plasma of the unbegotten source-- end now-- they kiss his hands-- light at the end--
Darkness.
V.
In light of the wholesale change in his personality, the parents of Linwood Asshton-Urquhart no longer own him as their son. They have kept all of the writings and other belongings of his left in their possession at the time of his transformation, and after it became clear that they had photocopied all documents included in his papers, he dropped his legal suit. He no longer associates with them, in expression of a mutually felt emotion, and has, after his strange metamorphosis, entirely dropped hisinterests in literature.
Nevertheless, the Anti-Cult Lucidity Organization has found it advisable to follow his career, but at the present date have made few significant findings. He quickly enrolled in courses dealing with scientific subjects, and has shown a predilection in class session for questioning his professors on rather arcane topics, taking any pretext he can find to shift discussion to his obsessions. The professors, however, consider him an unaccountably brilliant pupil, with an odd intuitive grasp of certain areas of novel research barely known outside of the research community. He will shortly have completed his Master of Sciences in Biochemistry, and apparently intends to pursue a Doctorate in that field.
Most importantly, or so it seems to the investigators into cult activity, he has founded a network of individuals with interests similar to his own fascinations. Many of these individuals seem to also have cult ties, although no one has yet managed to infiltrate their sects. In every case of approach, the approacher has met with a stern rebuff, as if the newly-altered Linwood Asshton-Urquhart somehow knew intuitively whether someone belonged or not. It has been determined, however, through interception of mail between the members of this hiddennetwork, that the network publishes a newsletter entitled TheOutsiders Bulletin, devoted to technical information relating tosuch subjects as the Human Genome Project; to the recently-discovered third form of life--the Archaea; to the evidence of life on Mars and Europa; to developments in the doubtful field of parapsychology, certain forms of which seem to receive an undue credulity not shown in regard to other scientific topics; to astronomy and astrophysics; to nanotechnology and especially its biotechnological implications; and to speculative interconnections between all of these arcane areas.
Indeed, one researcher has discovered a document, sent in acode, which seems to him to put beyond all doubt the sinister motives of this secretive cabal. Others have retorted that he has by no means proven that he has found the only legitimate solution to the cipher, and believe that its statements can only be taken as fortuitously meaningful, arising from sheer chance. The researcher who has put in so many painstaking hours devoted to testing varying possible solutions, however, denies that any other fits as properly, and declares that the revelations made so clearly define the malevolent--if not absolutely sociopathic--motivations of the cult, as to call for drastic action to suppress it. Needless to say, law enforcement has seen fit to deny such violations against the separation of church and state, and has itself threatened the Anti-Cult Lucidity Organization with prosecution if ever again it should violate federal laws protecting the mail, for this time (as many times before) it had very nearly gone too far. Richard Lunster, the investigator who obtained the letter in question, has utilized the aid of one Andrew O'Leary, who gave the Anti-Cult Lucidity Organization one of its greatest successes when he joined them in their fight against the Chaosophists, his former sect, after his deprogramming. He claims to have identified the language as the Senzar-influenced hieratic dialect of the primal Naacal tongue thought-projected by a race of luminescent jellyfish in Mu, which he had mastered despite attaining only the first of the seven grades of the order. Reason dictates that one laugh at this speculation outright, since nobody relies upon the "scholarship" supposed to restore knowledge of that ancient tongue as trustworthy; while the contents alleged by the collaboratorsremove any doubt of the inauthenticity of their interpretation.
The letter, which Linwood Asshton-Urquhart had addressed to a young man who had recently changed academic course in mid-stream from an English major to become a laboratory technician,runs as follows:
Brother in Chvrvnzvn:
Success has exceeded our expectations. We have madegreat strides in our efforts, for we have enlisted the aid of humans as well as our own. These scientists and researchers we have deceived; we have not told them how long we have existed, or how long we have inhabited earth. We have tailored our stories to the individuals' susceptibilities; most accept us as mere extraterrestrial visitors in need of aid. With this belief, they willingly act in secrecy on our behalf. Only a few have suspected thetruth, and with them we have easily disposed.
Together, ours and theirs have advanced to a stage nearing the creation of novel bodies for us. Use of genetic coding from Annelids and Archaea should prove fruitful. Soon we shall be able to abandon our human forms. With exploration of the asteroid belt, we could perhaps obtain useful material, since we neared this stage there as well. In any case, we should have fully restored our breeding ability within fifty years. For some time now, before we have fully readjusted to our former state of grace, we will require aid from men to reestablish the Elder Race's society. This aid need not be given voluntarily. However, we will for some time need men as manufacturers of raw materials, before we have fully created a functioning ecosystem composed of more pleasant entities to provide forour requirements.
After that, we will have no further need for humanity. Considering that our efforts to endow the species with sentience of its own, and so create useful allies for us, has met with failure, as if we had stumbled by accident upon an evolutionary dead end which no amount of manipulation can improve, we may as well dispense with them once they have become no longer useful. For, while by no means a serious danger, they have the ability to make themselves into quitea nuisance.
Yours by the Untranslatable Sign,
--Sll'ha-Gn'wgn-ll'ah-Sgn'wahl.
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