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fantastical-cosmicism · 3 years ago

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A fragment of my incomplete, WIP short story: ‘The Jewel in the Crypt’

//This has been in the works for a while. As you can tell by just reading through this blog, I am an avid fan of Cosmic Horror, Yog-Sothothery, and the Cthulhu Mythos. I don’t often write much, but I hope that if I can get to completing this tale, I will have made a worthwhile contribution to the writings in the realm of the weird. This is the ending section of the short story, and I will seek to complete the tale by starting from the very beginning soon. I will post that completed tale on this blog when it is complete. For now, I give you the WIP of my Cosmic Horror short story, ‘The Jewel in the Crypt’, intended as a prequel to H.P. Lovecraft’s 1920 short story, ‘Nyarlathotep’.

...

The dreams only continued to grow in intensity, and certainly were not helping the ongoing condition of my mental state. Night after night, I found myself almost taking the role of another person, a witness to secret events from the earliest millennia of Egyptian civilization. The voice I had mentioned before had appeared with damning regularity, whispering to me in the midst of my dreams, and promising some sort of power in exchange for my servitude to its source.

I was to return to Miskatonic University back in the States in a few days, and I hoped deep down that those days would pass quickly, despite my wavering outward display of academic fervor.

The latest of the dreams to that point were unspeakably terrifying, and once more I woke to find the dark gem we recovered from the crypt in my hands, though in a way that, juxtaposed with the dream’s abrupt end, filled me with a mortal terror beyond anything experienced to that point.

I dreamt of being the figurehead of some blood-laden and terrible ritual in a torch-lit chamber of carved-out natural stone, where one after the other, rope-bound individuals were cut at the throat, and their blood added to a collective pool in a ritualistic bowl. For a reason at that point unknown, I was compelled to keep count of each individual ritualistic slaughter.

For every thirty-three of these sacrifices, an incantation in some elder tongue was spoken, and each time, the collected blood was transfigured by a strange-colored light into some nauseating, unfamiliar liquid substance. Yet my sensations in this phantasmagorical reel would run deeper than simple sight and smell.

I was compelled to bring the bowl to my lips, and drink from it each and every completed sacrifice. I once more say ‘compelled’, yet like with any dream, my actions still strangely felt as my own, despite my simultaneous feelings of revulsion and disgust.

The taste of this gathered blood was far from what one might expect in such an act of vampirism- not of what I would imagine to be the taste of warm iron and the like. It was repugnant, of course, yet not simply horrible in some earthly sense, but also, alien- familiar and yet unknown. It was familiar in that, it tasted paradoxically of both the scent of afterbirth and necrosis; as if in some nightmare reality between life and death, a corpse were giving birth, and these were its excretions of the womb. Despite my want to vomit in the dream, I kept it down; and repeated this sordid process twice more. Each ritual ended with a chant to some dreaded name in the Necronomicon of the Mad Arab; Shub-Niggurath, Yog-Sothoth, and finally, Azathoth. The terrible implication of that twisted communion was like that of some uniting with these essences, a transubstantiation of the blood to lead to some unholy transubstantiation of the body of myself, the leader of the rite.

Then it was time for the anticipated hundredth sacrifice. This would be the sacrifice to conclude the rite, so it seemed, yet this final offering was nowhere to be seen. As the ninety-ninth corpse was removed from me by the two assisting cultists, the dark Trapezohedron praised me in its echoing voice, and I raised the dagger to eye the thing directly, intent to inquire it as to the final ritual offering. It was immediate, however, that I began to feel a terrible change within me. I doubled over in a full-bodied agony of a burning sun within me, and those accompanying me approached me in a single step of uncertainty, as none were certain what was to happen next. Shaking and convulsing, I was suddenly compelled to rise to my knees, and hold the dagger before me to continue my agonized conversation with the Trapezohedron set in the dagger’s hilt.

“What...who...who are you, o stone, truly? What is your name?” Both I myself and my dream pharaoh body asked in unison, the ancient Egyptian language paradoxically both unfamiliar yet absolutely understood. At my struggling inquiry, the stone answered in its hideous whispers:

“Ah, yes, let me properly introduce myself to you, my wonderful, devoted servant, Nephren-Ka. I am the messenger of those Outside, whom on my instruction have you reached out to and taken into yourself. I am Their mind and soul, reaching from Outside into your worlds. I am the agent of their will across the Cosmos. In your tongue...I suppose you may call me Crawling Chaos. But the more important question you should ask, dear Nephren-Ka, is who are we?”

“We?”

“Indeed. For I still will give you the power and immortality which you desire, as agreed. In doing so, you and I, we shall become one. I will emerge within your world as you, my cherished vessel upon the Earth.”

It was at this point that, despite my terror and resistance, the dagger raised, my hands grasping it as if to stab downward. It continued, the voice growing louder and more pronounced.

“Yet, what shall we call ourselves? Hm? Perhaps...a unified name of sorts, symbolic of our physical oneness. A name to remind you that, from this point, you shall never be alone, for I shall always be with you…”

It was at this point the sharpness of the dagger entered my sternum. Distorted red began to bleed into my sight, and darkened into a deep, abyssal pitch.

“How about... Ny-?”

I awoke on my knees, apparently having sleepwalked, with the gemstone held to my sternum. I shook with a scream, dropping the gemstone and staring at it in terror. It was at this point which my mind accepted the realization that a terrible power lay within this cursed object, something that should not be released to the world; the very fact that we opened that tomb in the first place was an existential travesty for not just us, but potentially the entire world as we knew it.

My screaming had woken the others, and so I quickly re-acquired the gemstone, intent to have it destroyed in some way. I intended to convince them to do the same to the body we found. To hell with our findings, I thought, if it should mean the world is spared this infernal force from places incomprehensible. Yet it seemed this course of action would be complicated, for one of the more nervous of the others declared:

“The body- it is gone!”

A chill of dread coursed through my veins at this revelation, and we all frantically looked about for any sign of where it had gone. Though my first instinct was thievery, I already knew deep within that that true answer was much more baffling and terrible. And this fear was affirmed, for our next discovery in the next tent immediately sent my fellow archaeologists running and screaming from the encampment.

We first heard a strange chanting emanating from one of the other tents. We immediately went to investigate, and it was there that all explanations of an earthly sense of possibility utterly failed us.

We found in that room an array of the natives of the nation whom we had hired for our venture, all fallen prostrate, and uttering something in what I thought must have been a lost variation of ancient Egyptian; that of which I spoke and heard in my recent nightmares. But even this could not prepare me for witnessing the object of their worship; before them was a single nude, lean, bald figure, his visage that of native blood, and exceedingly, terribly familiar.

There was no denial in my mind that this was the preserved corpse we found in the uncovered crypt, along with that damned jewel.

His arms were raised, as if commanding the worship of the native countrymen. I stood there frozen, unable to move, and unable to understand how all of this could have been possible, thinking that it all had to be some inexplicable hallucination or hashish-dream.

A few moments had passed in this icy air of apprehension, before the corpse’s reanimated gaze fell upon me, a simple smile and look of strange recognition in his features. And somehow I knew this face, more intimately that should be possible than simply seeing it as that of a still corpse.

I swear next that I saw his eyes glaze over in deepest black, like the darkest of night skies. His smile deepened, and three names echoed in my mind as I remembered the Necronomicon, and that single, most hideous name among them which I had suppressed from hearing in my last wretched dream.

Nephren-Ka.

The Crawling Chaos.

Nyarlathotep.

Any and all doubts as to the prophetic authenticity of those ancient, predictive hieroglyphs within the tomb we found swiftly melted away, my mind rapidly eating away at these towards a realization of the existential dangers that I saw in those abyssal eyes. My paralysis of terror gave way to a panicked and utmost urgency, and so, I ran.

By the time I had escaped from the campsite, I realized that I had dropped the cursed gemstone, yet I did not care. I was furthermore barely conscious of the fact that I had run back into Cairo screaming and gibbering of all that I had seen, as well as of the fact that I was next being transported back to Miskatonic University.

My next moment of clarity found me in a padded cell. It was soon after this resurfacing of my consciousness that the wardens of my confinement had ordered that I be given a notebook and a pen, apparently to write all of this down here in hopes of achieving an assessment and diagnosis.

This will not do. I have to get out. I have to warn the people of the impending opening of the portals to Outside, the doom that awaits us all if this is not stopped. He must be stopped. He cannot be allowed to summon those dread powers from between and beyond the stars, else our brief age upon this Earth will be set for an early annihilation. They all think me mad, and they may be right, yet I know with certainty of what I have experienced, and I have no choice. I must continue to try and escape from this place, before it is too late and all is lost.

…

A newspaper article published in Providence, Rhode Island a few weeks later reads: ‘The Great Showman, Nyarlathotep, Comes to Providence’.

#lovecraft #cosmic horror #nyarlathotep #yog-sothothery #cthulhu mythos #prequel #short story #weird fiction #my stories #wip

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