These events are all peculiar to me, but the rest I think you know. For my personal story is a microcosm of that greater story in which we are all now trapped. Each of us has his own story of how he personally experienced that terrible moment when our world was overturned by the eruption from beyond, and all of them bear a generic character that marks them as belonging to this new proclamation, this New Testament, which we are not reading but living.
“And did you truly experience such a vision with a statue of Saint Jude?” the voice asks, still located behind him. Its tone is overlaid with a scummy film, like the surface of a thick and slow-boiling stew, and he maintains his reverentially averted gaze. After pausing to regain his bearings in the relatively solid surroundings of the chamber, he softly shakes his head.
“I don’t think so. Or rather, I don’t remember. Reading the documents is like reading the transcript of a dream that I never knew I had experienced. Every line feels like a half-memory of something I had forgotten without ever knowing it at all.”
He considers the description of the demon-dragon, and imagines it transplanted onto the patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes. The apostle’s beard is a nest of writhing gray-green tentacles. Their tips caress the image of Christ hanging at the figure’s breast.
He asks, “And how did these papers come into the Church’s possession?” Maybe this time the answer will contain something new.
“By strange channels and unknown messengers,” the voice replies, as if chanting a litany, “the writings of the new apostle came to the Church to illuminate the shadows of these dark days.”
“But the timing is all wrong,” he says, unable to restrain himself. “The author must have written these things before the cataclysm began. Weren’t they delivered on the very day when the great face appeared in the sky and the cities erupted into madness?” The voice remains silent, of course, for these details have already been analyzed and discussed ad nauseam within the Roman episcopate. He considers for the hundredth time the ramifications of the fact that some unknown individual who shared the name of the last apostle had written of these things in the past tense, before they actually happened, and had addressed his dark visionary rantings directly to the Holy See in Rome. The Church’s frantically launched investigation had been hindered at every turn not only by the fantastic events unfolding around the globe but by false and disappearing leads that appeared positively supernatural in their abrupt and strategic occurrences. No publisher knew of a book offering a blasphemous reading of Isaiah. Only the vaguest of hints spoke of a renegade theologian writing a self-described magnum opus. The papers had been sent via a route that looked impossibly circuitous when staked on a map. The trail dead-ended simultaneously at indistinct locations in North America, Central America, Eastern Asia — and Rome itself.
The more he ponders it, the more it sounds and feels like a narrative being altered and overlaid by multiple redactions, each intended to accomplish a greater opening to an emotion compounded of equal parts bafflement and spiritual revulsion. In the latest revision, the letters are addressed directly to him, and their author is rendered fictional, to await complete obliteration in a version yet to come.
“Why me?” he asks, even though he is growing increasingly terrified at the thought that the specific identity of the New Paul may be supremely unimportant in one sense and all-important in another.
The voice responds to his unspoken fear: “In the beginning was the Logos, which speaks not only in the lines of Holy Scripture but in the lines of the real itself. Our new apostle’s writings and their accompanying signs and wonders declare a great rewording in which the notions of ‘me’ and ‘thee’ may be forgotten.”
A pen, formerly unnoticed, rests beside the pages on the desk. His hand begins to itch. The voice intones, “The Word is a living thing. Like a farmer sowing seeds, one sows the Word but knows not how it grows. If all were written down, the world itself could not contain the books.”
The multitude gathered outside in the piazza emits a sigh of anticipation and agreement.
He watches with shock and fascination as his hand picks up the pen and begins to add to the words of the final page, defiling its inviolable sanctity, writing in clean, crisp, orderly lines that cut across the jumbled chaos like the bars of a cage.
ITS IMMANENCE: Jerusalem and R’lyeh — might they always have been interlaced with each other? The physical Jerusalem and also the mythic vision of its bejeweled celestial fulfillment — both revealed as mere shades, devolutions, abstractions of the primary reality of those crazy-slanted, green-dripping towers and slabs emerging like the archetype of a chthonic city from the subterranean waters of the collective psyche, like bony black fingers rising up from Mother Ocean.
Christ and Cthulhu — might they both be hierophanies of the same awful transcendent reality? Christ as high priest in the order of Melchizidek, Cthulhu as high priest in the order of the Old Ones, both of them bridging the gap and healing the division between our free-fallen souls with their burden of autonomous, inward-turned selfhood and the greater, all-encompassing reality of God-by-whatever-name; both implanting their own deep selves within us, thus undercutting and overcoming our categorically contradictory attempts to heal the primordial rift through conscious effort. These psychic disturbances that have so terrified us of late, all of the collapsing distinctions between thought, imagination, and physical reality, so that a stray wish or undisciplined notion may cause finned, clawed, and tentacled atrocities to appear, or may even alter one’s own physical body in awful ways that some of us have been unable to undo afterward, as in a nightmare from which one cannot wake because one has awakened inside the nightmare itself — may these not be the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to send the paraclete to “guide us into all truth” and “convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment,” and of his promise that his followers would perform even greater miracles than he himself had performed, and of the apostle Paul’s teaching that the divine spirit living within us will show us directly those primal mysteries which “no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived”? Surely these last words, quoted by Paul from the prophet Isaiah, aptly characterize the marvels and monstrosities we have recently witnessed.
Still writing, still horror-struck, he sees in his peripheral vision the Voice moving away from him in a swirl of smoky shapes. The new scriptural corpus is complete. The Church can now achieve alignment with that which truly is. What might be a wholesome human form dressed in liturgical vestments and wearing the papal mitre might also be a mutated manshape sprouting dragon’s wings and surmounted by a head like a cuttlefish, and this dual superimposition of high priest might be walking on the floorstones or gliding above them.
The crowd assembled in the piazza might be a wild-eyed multitude of ragged and terrified survivors or a stalk-eyed horde of flopping fish and toads.
The vast visage painted across the dome of the twilit sky might be a white-bearded transposition from the nearby chapel ceiling or the imprint of an extra-cosmic monstrosity now burned eternally onto the face of heaven.
The granite obelisk planted in the piazza’s center might be a skeletal black finger rising from Mother Ocean. The curved walls enclosing the crowd might be alien stone hewn into an architectural impossibility.