Selected Stories Read online

  Was staring down at the valley. He was watching the many running small figures, and not so very far away the scarce microscopic pinpointed lights of the lit windows in the village of Freihausgarten. He was somewhere and nowhere yet; somewhere in him stars were burning that were a part of him, yet they seemed distant, not so much in space as in reality—as if several layers of reality intermingled, as glass plates stacked upon each other, so that he could observe several at the same time yet not all very clearly. He felt as if he were spinning a cocoon around the valley, closing his own body into a web in which time was suspended. An unimaginable vitality coursed through his body as he stretched it, changing and adapting all the time. There lurked a faint memory of a No-Place, a dreamlike, unreal memory of waiting, endless and sleepless waiting, and a knowledge of things so hideously alien that Herbert’s normal brain would never have been able to stand it. Yet now he felt as if he had always known them; he recognized these memories as part of his own. And he hated, hated with a ferocity beyond all his human understanding, beyond all his human reason.

  A small shard of him tried to keep his frail shell of humanity intact, but it all came too quickly; it was impossible to absorb it with human intelligence. The hatred flowed over and into his new being, and with a final shock of horror he realized that the hatred came out of him too, that it had always been a part of him, that he himself was part of the being he belonged to now. His mortal body had been only a messenger, one of the many fragments Cyäegha had used, a small shard of essential being, a demon seed sent out through the centuries, a combination of cells, a genetic structure engraved in the DNA chains of the amino acids in his brain cells, which one day would find the way, the necessary gate into darkness where its parent body was waiting, dreaming... and hating.

  It howled with Its body cells unfit to utter any human sounds.

  It howled with the essence of sound, a raw vicious cry of triumph. Then it bent and scooped up some of the small figures amid a lot of rubble. It brought them up to what passed for Its face, and then closed Its claw, afterward dropping the mess of crushed bones, bloody tissue, and dirt to the ground far below. It didn’t have to move; the whole of Its body was a cloak of alien darkness around and over the valley, completely enclosing the world It now had for Its own pleasure. Cyäegha’s servants, the Nagaäe, were hungry too; they were slow hunters, but very certain of their promised prey. Many of those were unconscious or just in shock, waiting to be taken and eaten, but the Nagaäe had their own idea of fun and hunted the running ones first.

  It watched the woman who had served as altar running, her nude body a clearly illuminated target, lit by the black light of Its own darkness, as she tried to avoid the Nagaäe’s greedy claws. There was no way out, they were everywhere now, and there came always more out of the black hell-pits of the Dark Hill’s innards. They encircled the girl, watching her turn in panic before they reached her, and very slowly dismembered her, eating each part they took off first before helping themselves to another piece from the insanely shrieking and squirming body. They had all the time, and she took all her time dying.

  It bent another time, now scooping up a random running human and bringing him up to Its own height. It was the vicar. Devoid of any emotions except the hatred, It squeezed the human being till he opened his mouth in agony, his body squirming as the ribs broke and speared stomach and lungs. Then It formed a long hooked nail and went down through mouth and throat, ripping the human open from his insides, and dropping the messy pieces It found.

  I am mad, Herbert was screaming soundlessly. Please let me die, please let me go mad so I don’t have to watch. Please, please!

  It turned Its attention to the waiting village now, and from Its outer body a rain of dark shivering tentacles went down to the houses, crushing them and those still inside them, ripping open the roofs and walls, exposing the houses’ innards as It even went down into the cellars, hunting for the huddling survivors. Its tentacles found them, as It cracked the houses open like eggshells, and absorbed them, and Herbert tasted their small essences in his own extensions, parts of the tentacles of darkness. It melted their bones and fed on the remaining shapeless mess, leaving only wet slimy skins behind.

  X. All-Time

  Herbert Ramon clawed down into himself, his entity now close to a mindlessly shrieking shiver, a spark of being, a shard of the total entity which knew Itself as Cyäegha, The Thing That Waits in Darkness. As Cyäegha grew, so Herbert felt himself expanding, and the rational part of him which still existed realized how strong the father/mother body was. This was not a lesser earth elemental as Its brother Nyogtha1 Herbert was somewhere, and yet nowhere, in a no-space, no-time plane of existence. The valley, the sky, the Earth itself all seemed unreal, as toys of his imagination, so fragile and unimportant. His spiritual body was expanding into no-space/no-time which was all-space/all-time in the same eternity. Stars were glowing cinders in Its/his body, gradually growing smaller as he grew outside the Earth and absorbed them, yet at the same instant he had the unreal impression that It/he was growing smaller, shrinking all the time instead of expanding, because all around It/him he now felt the presence of others, who were still greater than It/he, and still more frightening in their existence. He felt the icy fingers of the dreaming entity in R’lyeh and with hideous clarity saw and understood where R’lyeh really was, and he shrank away from the hostile fire-spitting thing which was Cthugha, which filled him with a feeling of utter hatred and revulsion. He crawled with Tsathoggua, the Toad Thing, and for a petrified moment of madness danced in the center of Chaos, twisting his microscopic/gigantic body before the Blind Idiot God, Azathoth, to the sounds of insane pipers. He absorbed lonely stars, then whole galaxies, yet didn’t really touch them, but tasted their reality and took it all inside him as he grew, feeling triumph and fear as he came closer to the All. Ubbo, his mind screamed, Ubbo-Sathla, The Unbegotten Source, help me now! Great Abhoth, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, break the bounds! Help me now that I’m free, wreck the barriers, I’m free, the Elder Star is broken and I'm free! Come now and help me, and help yourself. Shatter the stars, they are old and weak. Help me and you will be free too!

  Yet there was a strange fear in his plea for help, a fear that was accumulating as he expanded and touched the All, as he was taken into the All, where no-time and no-space were all-time and all-space. He gibbered and screamed, spitting out the sounds as gulps of hideous black vomit which left the All and came back to It. His expanded body was absorbed into the All, and became part of It, part of the eternal torture and being the all, the distorted, torn One Existence. Alien powers ripped at him, and he felt and recognized and understood them and shrieked in mindless, eternal alien agony. Old Ones and Elder Gods, the Beginning and the End of All Creation, black and white, night and day, the start of life and its final telophasis, they all were the torn shreds of a continuing never-beginning, never-ending circle, a shattered puzzle of a mindless composite Being which was all-time!all-space. He felt himself splitting, his being torn apart by powers coming from himself, yet each one of the separate powers was greater and mightier than he, an implosion of utter terror, and it all was in balance. He had found the way into alien darkness, and the Total Darkness was a composite of all colors, not in the black holes between stars, and not in the alternate worlds of primitive black and white magic, but inside, inside the All and inside each one of the innumerable things, and beings who had created the All and kept it in existence by being.

  The screaming part which once had been Herbert Ramon then realized that there was no help to be had from the others, because they were all fighting themselves; they were all only fragments, isolated shards of the All, reflecting Its eternal duality in themselves, their own prisoners, their own guardians, battling their own inner minds, and he was as much part of them all as he was part of the All, and they all with him. There were no emotions, no thoughts, only the balance. Cyäegha screamed.

  It/he kept on screaming, the scream becoming an essenti
al part of Its reality, a scream of utter despair in the realization that all was lost because it never could have been gained, because the winner, the loser, and the stake were all the same one continuity. It started contracting, imploding in Itself, Its gibbering scream sending convulsive nova shudders through Its innards. It spread across an eternally dying and reborn cosmos of utter unimportance, Its eyes blazing supernovas, Its claws far star-clouds still unborn in the abyss of all-time. Dying, It began to fall into the pit of Its own self-recognition, and part of It felt every microsecond of life in every amoeba and in every insect on the microscopic planet called Earth by the idiot beings who formed its leading race. The part of It that was still essentially Herbert Ramon felt the duality of life/death in each life-form on that planet, and strengthened one part of the balance. Something started its own cancerous growth inside It, and It was unable to fight the newcomer. It fed on the new thing, which kept on growing as Cyäegha died, and on Earth insects died and animals ran crazily, and men ran amok and slaughtered without a reason, or simply went quietly mad through the centuries. A drinking and suicidal poet by the name of Edgar Allen Poe, who had seemingly found his way back to reason, was found delirious in the gutter, and died in a hospital uttering words in a gibbering language. An unimportant outdated story writer named Howard Phillips Lovecraft threw insightful flashes of abysmal horror into his stories, masquerading his second sight as fiction. A European author of weird tales, at the start of a promising career, had such horrible visions and nightmares that he started drinking and finally threw himself out of the window of his flat on the sixth floor.

  And all the time, the part of Cyäegha which once had been called Herbert Ramon grew, while other parts of It died and were absorbed by the needs of the balance of the All. That balance was changing, adapting, as it was doing all the time, without the need of conscious thought or intelligence, and the Dark of Cyäegha was shrinking until it met the balance. Stars streamed out of Its body, and It kept on screaming mindlessly when they reached the barrier of the dark gateway. It was still screaming as the Gate of Darkness closed in on It, as no-time spread like a cancer through Its body, changing It as the reversal went more quickly than Its growth had been, and as time was shrinking, and then reversing to reinstall the precious balance of the All. One day... two days... a week... The something which once had been Herbert Ramon came back into its body, somewhere on a small unimportant planet, where once had stood a hideous Dark Hill, and below that hill with its ultra-dimensional temple was an enormous crypt, sealed by a dark gate, where once something had been sleeping and waiting for centuries, and now was waiting again.

  And just as Herbert Ramon had returned to his mother/father body, so now his own body was adapting to this new condition as it returned through time, to the Dark Hill where once Cyäegha had risen, but this had been no more in no-time, and what once had been had become a could-have-been in the Now.

  The balance had been restored as it had always been and always would be in the All, self-destructive and self-procreating, Old Ones and Elder Ones, good and evil, angels and demons, something less than all these and something more than all these, and each was a small shard of the entity which was Cyäegha and Herbert Ramon, the Prisoner and the Guardian, the Prison and the Gate, the Past and the Present and the Unborn and Never To Be Future. And none of them were really dead or really alive, or had ever been completely alive in the reality which was being reborn to a past present.

  Epilogue: Guardian

  There is a small railway station in that isolated valley, so you can go there by train, but not inside the valley, which you can reach only by car. And maybe, when you find that valley and stay there long enough, meet the gentle but backward people and get them to talk in the evening hours at the local cafe, they will tell you a strange tale. The pub is kept by a Frenchman, named Julien-Charles, but now he’s been living there so long, after he took over the cafe, that they just call him Johann. He’s also the owner of the only hotel the village Freihausgarten boasts, and maybe if you speak to him in French he won’t understand you. He has a weird scar around his neck, and if you ask him whatever caused that he will smile and you will notice a strangely absent look in his eyes, as if he tries to remember something which he knows he shouldn’t forget but can’t remember. He will then make a joke about it, that someone once tried to cut his throat but failed, and they will all laugh about it and forget it. He, or they, will not tell you that he doesn’t remember how he got that scar. Neither will repeated questions furnish any answer as to some very strange happenings which in fact never happened. Has something which no one remembers ever really happened? The houses are all intact in Freihausgarten, and so is the Dark Hill, Dunkelhügel. You can discover all this for yourself, if you search for the valley, and get through its barrier, which is only a barrier of the mind.

  Oh yes, if you ask them, they will tell you gladly about the day the stranger came, because they do remember that day. That man stepped from the train on a very hot summer afternoon. He stayed there and watched the train leave. Then he took his handkerchief and wiped his face, then bent down to pick up his two traveling bags. Maybe, if you can get one of the villagers drunk enough, he will tell you what they all know but can’t put into words, the strangest dizzy feeling they ever had, all of them at the same moment, which they later compared by their watches: a feeling, a stoppage of movement, a feeling of petrification, as if one second had been standing still in time. Some felt sick immediately afterward, but no one of them can tell you how it feels when something of your own mind and body suddenly turns alien.

  Anyway, the feeling lasted but one second or less, and they all blame it on the heat. But the man who had arrived at the station didn't pick up his bags. He froze, then remained standing there for more than half an hour without making any movement. Then the porter went to that man, and he said that it was strange: It looked as if the stranger's clothes didn’t fit him; they were too large for him. Then the porter saw the man’s face, and began screaming, as the stranger fell to the ground. The porter never told anyone what the stranger’s face looked like; he went straight to fetch the doctor, and together they drove the stranger’s body to the vicar. It seems that the stranger regained consciousness there, but no one knows what was said there behind closed doors. The stranger, who was named Herbert Ramon, died that same evening, and they buried him at the vicar’s request on the Dark Hill. The personal effects of the stranger mysteriously disappeared, but two nights later there was a fire in the vicar’s garden and he burned some things which carried strange smells into the village. But no one asked any questions. Two weeks later, the vicar hung himself.

  Maybe you will also meet the local butcher, a great bulky man, who is now kept alive by the village’s charity. You’ll never see his hands, as he always wears gloves. He can utter only the most simple sounds now. Maybe if you drop a remark about a girl who was once a local beauty, the daughter of an older farmer, you’ll get no response. She never shows her face in public now, and is completely paralyzed... and completely insane. Some memories cannot die, not even when turned backward.

  Of course, they will not tell you about the annual ceremony on top of the Dark Hill, which was not held the year the stranger came to die there, and which has not been kept since then. Even if you ask them they will not tell you that they once opened the grave of the stranger, but immediately covered it and never went there again. But ask the children, and maybe they will tell you about the Guardian of the Vaeyens: the strange old man whom they have never met face to face, but who they know is there, the Dead Man who lives on the Dark Hill, whose hair is as long and gray as the fog. But if you are not quick enough to ask the right questions, the mothers will come and take their children inside, and you will hear no more.

  Maybe, if you dare go up the Dark Hill, you will catch a glimpse of him, of his petrified white face, which is dark yet transparent, as bottomless as the starless deeps of the universe’s seas. And if you have the chance to look i
nto his eyes, you will see that they are not eyes but fathomless dark pits, tunnels into darkness, and if you dare look into them very closely, you might see yourself in there, very small, the prisoner of dark eternity...

  There’s no need to tell more, I think. You don’t have to ask me how I know all this, because now you know too. There’s an affinity between us, which I recognized immediately, or else I would never have spoken to you. The seed of Cyäegha is widespread. Herbert Ramon was not a fool, but he didn’t know enough; in fact he didn’t know anything at all, in reality. When he realized what he was, it was already too late. But you know, and I know. Herbert Ramon was alone, searching, and frightened by what he thought he discovered. We aren’t, you and I. Not any longer. Don’t try to push it; let the realization sink in, absorb it slowly with your whole being, dive down into the darkness which you now know is inside you. Memory will come, is coming—I see it—but you must give it time to be absorbed and understood by the whole of your being, the whole of your mind, so that we may not fail as Herbert Ramon failed. Remember, he was all alone: We aren’t.

  Yes, I know where Dunkelhügel is.

  My Beautiful Darkling

  Lorsque tu dormiras, ma belle tenebreuse