“New vision requires radical treatment. This is the sacrosanct gift with which I have been blessed. Perhaps you lack backbone and prefer to sit here and quiver in your impotent existence. So be it. But, oh, I remember a time when your world was filled with magnificent language and stunning vision. You could find that world anew.” Her words were like needles in my brain. Weakly, I tried to rise from the chair, only to slip from it to the floor. Blinking streaming liquid from my eyes, I crawled to where she stood. My fingers found her shoes. I reached for but could not find her hands, the palsied flesh of which I ached to kiss.
Cool breath bathed my ear. “You must see Nyarlathotep. He is wonderful, and dreadful. He will show you prophecies of the cold bleak abysses between the stars, where dead gods fumble in dream-infested slumber. The great ones were. They are. They shall be.”
A hot tongue licked my lobe. I listened as she sucked in breath, then jolted as she uttered unearthly howling. Instantly afterward, I was alone.
II.
Thus it was in that hot October that I ventured forth one night in pursuit of Nyarlathotep. As I crept along the silent sidewalks, I passed certain individuals who looked at me queerly and askance. I sensed that they had been to see this foreigner from an alien land. How anxious they seemed to speak to me, and yet how timid and hesitant they looked, peering at me in silence as I passed them by. I came at last to the lecture hall and gaped at the throngs of lingering rabble. They leaned against the building and sat on the curbing; they congregated near the threshold that led to a narrow stairway. One man was especially fidgety. I watched as he snatched at his hair and muttered lowly. I watched as he rushed into an alley and disappeared from view, and I shivered at the sound of anguished howling that issued from that alley. The noise sent a quiver of emotion through the crowd.
Pushing through the horde at the threshold I climbed the silent stairway. From somewhere above I could hear low fluted music. I walked down a dimly lit hallway that led to the double doors of a lecture room wherein I would confront the alien. The piping of discordant music came from behind the closed doors, and my old flesh prickled at its sound. Shutting my eyes, I leaned my forehead against one of the doors, pushing it open. With eyes still shut, I stumbled into the room. I could smell the candlelight. My eyelids opened.
He stood on a slightly raised platform, the shrouded one. Swarthy, slender, sinister, he was robed in scarlet silk. On a table beside him was a device similar to a child’s magic lantern. Its diseased illumination cast obscene shapes that moved along the walls. My attention was caught by the nebulous form that squatted at the feet of Nyarlathotep, the thing that held in clumsy paw an apparatus of tinted ivory or pale gold. It was from this instrument that the fluted music emerged. Yet the more I tried to scrutinize the gadget, the more it seemed to subtly fluctuate in form, reshaping with a sensual movement that ached my skull. I listened to what sounded like whipping wings, as the music melted into silence. My heavy eyes demanded closure, and shutting them I saw upon their lids a multitude of spinning shapes that caused a vertigo that weakened my knees. I crashed onto the floor.
Weakly, I raised my agonizing head. He stood before me—grim, austere, merciless. My hungry mouth kissed his chilly feet. The room was still and silent, and I looked about but could not see the thing that had played the music of the spheres. Boldly, I clung to Nyarlathotep’s garment and pulled myself to my feet. Swirling light and blackness played upon his regal visage. Fantastically, he smiled; and as he did so his face slipped, as though he wore some tight-fitting mask that had momentarily lost its hold. He lifted a hand, and I saw upon his palm a living symbol. Tilting to it, I licked the pulsing insignia. It was sharp and ripped the tongue that touched it. As I swallowed blood, the daemon moved his hand away, then thrashed that hand against my forehead. Splinters of bubbling ice pierced my brain.
I was inside Lisa’s painting. The awful heat that had so plagued our autumn season weighed heavily in dead air. To breathe was to burn. He stood before me still, the black alien, in shapes that did and undid his being. I looked beyond him at the mammoth buildings, the ruins of distant time. It was a time over which Nyarlathotep was Lord Supreme. But how could he exist in future epoch? How had he escaped the nip of Death?
“That cannot die which stands outside time.”
Behind him I detected throngs of writhing black gargoyles that mindlessly pranced beneath a dying sun. Why did I ache to join in their frolic? Oh, how his liquid mark burned upon my brow. Scorching wind arose and pushed into my eyes, burning wind that blinded.
A large rough hand poked at my face. Rubbing torment from my eyes, I beheld the young man who gaped at me in desperation. I watched his mouth twitch in an effort to talk, but which was unable to function. I saw him pound with fists at his head, as if to knock some profane vision from his brain. I saw the blackness that crept into his eyes as he raised his head and wailed in lunacy.
I escaped, fleeing the place and running until I came to the street where Lisa lived with her epileptic mother. My brain buzzed with semi-vision, with a prophecy of disaster that I ached to share with she who understood. And I overflowed with lust to see again her painting. Not pausing to knock, I boldly entered the quiet house. A lamp burned with pallid light next to a sofa on which I saw the twitching form. The elderly woman did not look at me as she spoke.
“She’s quiet now, perhaps we don’t want to disturb her. Yes, quiet, quiet. No more howling now. What a funny sound. But she’s quiet now. You don’t need to stay.”
I left the creature to her confusion and walked the cluttered hallway to Lisa’s studio. I could smell incense, could smell that other fragrance of my friend’s altered state. Stopping before the studio door, I leaned my head upon it, pushing it open. Her lifeless form lay on the floor, its arms sprawled over a canvas. An overwhelming stench emanated from the stubs that had once been hands, those nubs that stank and smoked. I knelt beside her and saw that her terrible eyes wore a wild expression. I looked at the image on canvas, that image composed of a filament of transfigured flesh. I saw the hooded thing composed of soot. From deep within the folds of its hood I could discern the shifting features of his many forms. Yet even as I watched his image faded and was gone.
I raised my shivering face. I closed my liquid eyes. I stretched my mouth with noise.
•
Akropolis
Matt Wallace
Danny’s eight and the world is coming to an end. Chicken Little was right; the sky is falling. It begins as a big black ball high above the Earth, the blotted-out stars defining its shape. It burns yellow, then red before it descends over the farmlands of Danny’s home. It seems to draw the night, gathering the sky beneath it like miles of black silk sucked into a jet. The furls become a wave, fluid, chaotic, raging. Danny stands at the edge of the cornfield and waits to be crushed by it, his tiny mouth hanging open and the apocalypse reflected in the dark droplets of his pupils.
When the wave finally breaks against the Earth they feel the tremors five miles away. It’s the dry season, and the heat blast causes the cornhusks to burst, creating a pestilence of shredded seed membranes that fall like snowflakes siphoned of their essence. The autumn wind carries them away, and Danny realizes it wasn’t the end of the world. His house is still there, the three lighted windows that make up its jack-o-lantern face shining out at him across their back field. The stars return. It was just something that fell from the sky, like Dorothy’s house, only bigger. Much, much bigger. A falling star.