"A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land.... and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown."
- H.P. Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep (1920)
Here's a literary experiment. I've reimagined H.P. Lovecraft's classic story, NYARLATHOTEP. I've borrowed a few phrases and the outline of the plot, but changed the details. If you enjoy the story, check out my original supernatural horror fiction:
Nyarlathotep II
The chaos crawls, like an infant
exploring the world. It crawls, like a
man dying of thirst in a desert. Yet
this chaos is neither a newborn life nor an impending death, but something more
alien and obscene. It is the audient
void, the speech that is silence, the word that has no meaning.
It is perhaps a sign of how far I
have tumbled into that void that I can no longer discern or remember the
country in which I reside. I look out
the window and see twisted, skeletal faces that could belong to any people on
earth. There are no monuments left
standing that might demarcate a particular history or culture – all such
symbols have been pulled down by inarticulate mobs, or leering monsters that
imitate the mindless multitudes. Even
the seasons have undergone a daemoniac convergence, so that ashen snows follow
fast upon infernal heats, and gnarled spring flowers bloom while bloodstained
leaves adorn the groaning trees. The
world may be at war, or instead suffering through some torturous mockery of
peace and prosperity – I cannot tell.
Such things have little meaning in the wake of Nyarlathotep’s terrible
wisdom – even the numbers on clocks and calendars appear arbitrary and
insignificant.
They say he came out of Egypt, for
the earliest reports of him deemed that he was swarthy, and claimed he had the
bearing of a pharaoh. I think this
speaks to the influence and rumormongering of cults and cabals, rather than to some objective truth. Perhaps he began his work as an Egyptian, and
carried about him some unwholesome scent of embalmed princes. Yet how then can we explain that he speaks
the language of every country in which he appears, or resolve the fact that
some swear that he is as Chinese as Confucius, or mumbles with a Southern drawl,
or speaks with an Irish brogue and quotes William Yeats? Maybe Nyarlathotep was born in the black
heart of a pyramid, or tumbled from the stone womb of an apocalyptic sphinx,
yet there is evidence to suggest that he is not one man, but many – the
cacophony of Babel’s echoes rendered into a thousand forms of flesh, each
perfectly suited to command the attention of a different culture, each forming
a unique path to damnation, or whatever screaming madness will pass for
perdition in days such as these.
Word of his magic spread from
friend to friend, along whatever lines of technology might be available, in
whatever mediums of socialization existed in a given place. Every blessing of civilization became a
barbaric curse. News of him was everywhere,
and there were always crowds to hear his prophecies, and marvel at his hypnotic
science, and catch the plague of nightmares that he shared so readily with
fingers caked in blood. No two of his
performances were ever alike, though the results were always similar. These demonstrations were usually held beyond
a flight of stairs – either in some claustrophobic attic room or in some
rat-infested cellar, in which the corpses of ineffective cats could be found in
dark corners. He set up screens of uncertain
material – some said they were made of parchment or vellum, while others voiced
less pleasant theories. People always
smoked during the performances, so that the air was thick with acrid fumes,
somehow more noxious than any ordinary cigarettes or pipes could have produced. People would press tight against one another,
sweating and shivering, sickened by the closeness of persons who seemed
unaccountably repulsive once they had been packed into the dreadful spaces that
Nyarlathotep had arranged.
I was there one night. The others watched the horrific projections
with rapt attention, no longer much cognizant of the human life around them,
but utterly committed to the revelations of light and shadow upon the pale,
stained screens. No one could afterwards
remember quite what they had witnessed.
Were these scenes from the past, or from the future? Was that the hood of a cultist in some bleak
empire of eons passed, preparing a virgin body for sacrifice to some monstrous
god? Or rather a harbinger of what was
yet to come? Was that charnel planet our
own? Or had Nyarlathotep revealed the
place of his origin, to lure us towards the amorphous grasp of our new, elusive
master?
I don’t know how I managed to
avert my eyes from the intended spectacle, and thereby catch a glimpse of the
equally horrific events that transpired upon the bodies of the viewers. Strange lights seemed to flicker in their
eyes, like sparks dislodged from a malfunctioning soul – yes, the soul, revealed
at last as a broken machine rather than a spiritual organism. Strands of hair began to rise from people’s
heads, swaying like serpents that could hear the music of some damnable pipe or
whistle. Shadows slipped from the
corners of the room and hunched on people’s shoulders, chewing on their
clothing as though the mere existence of such fabric offended some malevolent
and abstract hunger. Then the bodies of
the people began to ripple and bulge, the fluid in their flesh displaced by
forces far stronger than the gravity of sun or moon. Sometimes a hand would puff up to twice its
normal size. Shoes creaked from the
swollen feet within. Shirts and blouses
heaved abominably. Delicate garments
strained to withhold mountainous and volcanic bellies. In several instances, the whole head of a man
expanded until I thought his skull should burst, and spill the damp
architecture of his consciousness across the transfixed crowd.
In the end, the deformations were
brief and temporary, and the shadows retreated from whence they had come,
carrying only small scraps of clothing, or tiny pieces of skin, or the broken
fragment of a fingernail. And when the
display upon the screens had finished, the members of the audience looked much
as they had done before. Yet I could not
help but notice a certain gaunt and withered look about them, as though the
turbulence of their inner fluids had been accompanied by some leeching of their
blood. Everyone looked older, more sour,
and more cruel.
Then Nyarlathotep laughed and
called the people slaves and cowards, and other names that I did not
recognize. He raised his hand as though
it grasped a whip with which he was about to torment us – and everyone fled in
terror. We scrambled up or down the
stairs – I cannot remember which direction, exactly – swelling and contracting
as an unruly herd, clawing at one another for space to move, or simply out of
innate contempt for what we now seemed to one another. Yet once our mass of people had spilled out
into the curiously empty streets, we slowed our movements, looking around to
see what kind of world remained to us.
“It’s just the same!” cried some,
and the idea was strangely terrifying to them.
Some people screamed, pointing
into the darkness. There was nothing
there to justify their horror – nothing that I could see. Yet they pointed with great urgency, and
screamed. Everyone was dazed, numb in
mind and heart, adrift in a spell of loneliness that no one could begin to
break. They were afraid, as they had
never been afraid since before Prometheus stole some fire to set against the night.
“Someone tell me where to go,”
sobbed one woman.
“Why can’t I wake up?” whined a
man, convinced he was in a dream.
Then, slowly, the chaos of the
crowd began to form into long, twisting lines, following some inexplicable
compulsion of organization, some hidden plan for their alignment and
arrangement. They had no place to go
that was not death and madness, no world that was not an abyss of sorrow and
confusion, no path that was not marked by terror and abomination. Yet, even so, this human chaos crawled onwards
into darkness.
I was allowed to watch, retaining
some remnant of my mind. I do not know
if this was reward or punishment, though I am inclined to think the
latter. I see them crawling still,
writhing across the haunted ruins of the earth, while I write to the music of
baleful drums and the slow symphony of Nyarlathotep’s flutes.
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