#people just plain old dying of fright

[victorluvsalice]

AU Thursday: Tell Me Where To Find Shelter -- Weird And Complicated Video Game Crossover AUs Strike Again

Okay, so last week I offered you all an updated rewrite on my old Fallout 4 Sole Survivor!Victor AU, Tell Me Where To Find Shelter. And at the very end of said update, I let you know that I had an idea for fitting Alice into the AU --

Specifically, my Malkavian Alice from Vampire: the Masquerade -- Bloodlines.

Look, the fact of the matter is, Fallout 4 and Bloodlines have been rather closely connected in my head from day one of my purchasing them -- hell, I got them during the same Steam sale! (Along with the BioShock series entire, which is why I had a couple of posts about Tell Me Where to Find Shelter back in 2016, then it dropped off the face of the earth -- I played Bloodlines first, and followed up with that series.) And my “Londerland Bloodlines” playthrough of Bloodlines was done concurrently with my starting up Fallout 4, so -- yeah. Me wanting to figure out how to cross the two over was probably inevitable.

I know what you’re all thinking, of course -- “how the hell do you make this sort of crossover work?” Well, I have had a few ideas:

-->This version of Malkavian Alice and her adventures in 2004 Los Angeles would be much more like the standard fledgling’s, given that the Corpse Bride characters are now born in the future. So the person she saves in the hospital is Heather (who she does manage to send away in time to save her life), and the Giovanni party goes down without dragging an undead version of Lizzie into the mix. Obviously the story and setting would have to be tweaked to fit better into Fallout’s alternate history (though given what the computers in the original game are like, maybe that’s easier than expected). She still goes Independent, and escapes from Los Angeles in the wake of LaCroix’s explosive death, making her way slowly but surely to the East Coast because she has had enough of California and everyone there.

-->She manages to get on with her unlife, watching the growing tensions with China and the Resource Wars with unease, but keeping to herself and doing her best not to let her humanity slip as she gets older. When the bombs fall, she’s sleeping the day away in a basement bunker she set up in Boston -- but the destruction from the explosion ends up collapsing part of the ceiling, burying her in rubble -- with a chunk of timber piercing her heart. She ends up in a staked torpor. . .

-->Until Victor shows up at her location at night to clear out a few raiders who are taking over the place as a base. One of the raiders yanks out the stake to use as a weapon, has three seconds to wonder why it’s got fresh blood on it -- then Alice explodes from her centuries-long hiding place and drinks him dry. Victor is too stunned at first to actually shoot her, and once Alice’s blood thirst has been quest, she immediately puts her hands up and does her best to show she means him no harm. They talk, Alice explains what happened (and goes ahead and admits she’s a vampire when Victor explains about the nuclear apocalypse -- who gives a shit about the Masquerade when the world has ended?), she offers to help with the remaining raiders to prove her good intentions, Victor accepts, and they take down the assholes together.

-->Obviously, Alice isn’t immediately “unlockable” as a companion -- she’s still got her sunlight thing, after all! She and Victor chat about it, and Victor, feeling bad, offers his assistance. Alice accepts -- she misses the sun -- and says that she’ll stay where she is for the moment (after finding a non-partially-collapsed basement to stay in) and keep raiders and monsters out while he searches for information. And so the “Here Comes The Sun” quest begins, with Victor searching for a way to counteract the sunlight curse! I’m thinking this would end up interacting with the Cabot family stuff, because I don’t think it would be hard at all to change the source of their immortality, and the artifact upon Lorenzo’s head, from something alien to something vampiric. Maybe Lorenzo’s partially possessed by the spirit of an Antediluvian, and it’s turned his blood into something close enough to vitae it can make ghouls? At any rate, Jack manages to whip something up after examining some of Alice’s blood (which, naturally, she’s kind of nervous about, but what choice does she have?), and it successfully stops her from burning up in sunlight (though she is weaker in it). A grateful Alice thanks Victor (and Jack) and agrees to travel with him to experience the Commonwealth.

-->As they go on together, they end up getting closer -- Alice likes that Victor is generally a good guy and sympathizes with the story of his lost family; Victor likes Alice’s snarky wit and strong sense of justice. As they share more details of their lives, help out the settlements, and battle monsters together, they realize they’re growing feelings for each other, and eventually get together, facing off against the Institute as a couple and parenting Synth Shaun/Chester together afterwards. (Alice jokes a lot that it took both her dying and the end of the world in general to finally get a domestic happy ending.)

-->Alice’s starting clothes would be a simple blue dress and apron with black buckled boots (the dress would naturally have a big bloody hole right over her heart when she first wakes up; she patches this after you leave her to her own devices for a bit), and she’d have the Tal’Mahe’Ra Blade (her prize from her storming of the Hallowbrook Hotel, taken from Andrei’s lair) as her standard weapon. She has a unique bite attack, being a vampire, and can still use Obfuscate (turning invisible to sneak past/sneak attack enemies) and Dementation (inflict debuffs on enemies so they’re confused and can’t shoot straight, or kill a single enemy from fear alone), though both have a cooldown so Victor can’t rely on her just spamming that to take care of every raider for him! XD Her perk would allow you to drain blood from enemy corpses (which other companions would find less disturbing than outright cannibalism, but still fairly creepy) and/or increase the healing capabilities of blood packs. I’m thinking, once romanced, she’d also have a unique variation of the “Lover’s Embrace” temporary perk, “Love Bite” -- Victor wakes up with HP not fully restored, but the XP boost is greater than “Lover’s Embrace” (+20% vs +15%).

-->Other vampiric elements of the Commonwealth would include:

A) That blood bank you can find? Those bags of blood are warm and fresh because there’s a Tremere there who has built up their power and knows some rituals for preserving the stuff. Unfortunately, they’re also very low humanity by this point, so they end up being a nasty surprise fight.

B) There’s a secret settlement of vampires that is made up of all the various fledglings you could pick from in Bloodlines, having learned to live together after the destruction of vampire society along with human when the bombs fell. The local Tremeres managed some blood sorcery that infused a mutfruit tree with human blood, so plasma fruit, a la The Sims 4, is a thing for them, and allows them to live in relative peace with their human neighbors (though they’ll happily drain anyone who attacks them). They’d probably have a quest revolving around either talking down or killing some vampire hunters who have been eying their base, and they could be persuaded to allow Jack Cabot and family to study them in exchange for vitae to help them stay in their immortal states. Also, the Malkavians openly call Victor the “Sole Survivor” and offer roundabout tips on his quests -- if he can decipher them. XD

C) This is just one that amuses me -- this universe’s Mysterious Stranger is none other than good old Caine! He’s trying to be a little more helpful to mortal and Kindred alike in the post-apocalypse, and has decided this means “showing up randomly to help people out of tight spots before vanishing again.” Alice, upon seeing him, jokes that the cabdriver thing didn’t work out, huh?

D) I’d kind of like to make stimpacks developed from vampire or ghoul blood to explain just how it is they can heal crippled limbs so fast -- the wiki didn’t provide much of an answer there! Which means anyone who uses them is at least slightly a ghoul. . .which might explain a few things about carry weight and why some enemies are so tough. (Legendaries have more vitae in their system, prompting the power-up, maybe?)

So yeah -- that’s how I’d get Bloodlines and Fallout to work together, and thus have my Malkavian!Alice and Sole Survivor!Victor be a couple in the wasteland. Because why make a crossover simple when I could make it way more complicated than it needs to be? XD Look, I just like the mental images I have of them together -- and of Alice taking out a whole army of baddies by hitting them with Voice of Bedlam to throw them into absolute chaos.

#tell me where to find shelter #fallout 4 #vampire the masquerade bloodlines #vtmb #valice #weird ass AUs #look this was probably inevitable #given the whole 'Londerland Bloodlines' fic keeping my brain at least partially in vampire land #and the fact that I just really love vampire!Alice with Victor #still this is a lot of thought for an AU #that is going to be snippets of fic at BEST #I can only novelize one RPG #and it's going to be the one with a smaller world and fewer sidequests #still I like a lot of these ideas #and the resultant mental images #'Voice of Bedlam' is the top tier Dementation ability in Bloodlines btw #it inflicts all the below levels randomly on the target and anyone near them #so you'd have people laughing or crying maniacally #people experience weird hallucinations that drop their combat abilities #people just plain old dying of fright #and people attacking each other randomly #(naturally Alice would activate it via a Hysteria scream) #she'd be the most terrifying thing in the Commonwealth #I love it :D #as does Victor XD #queued

[spacecadetal]

fireworks

kakashi hatake/fem!reader

word count: 2774 warnings: descriptions of violence, descriptions of blood, descriptions of killing, alcohol use author notes: i wanted to write something a little different than i usually would i kinda got a little tired of my wips lol

the first time i saw him, i was eight years old with a shy curiosity about the world. long story short, his shoulder collided with my own. he wasn’t watching where he was going and neither was i, the hard jolt gave me such a fright that i yelled at him to watch where he was going. i had too much pride to admit i was at fault, lost in a daydream once again. he shared my reaction and my sentiment. saying i should watch myself too with great annoyance in his tone. i scoffed, he huffed, we went our separate ways.

i had always heard his name but never connected the dots until i was much older but still not much wiser. he was a prodigy, i was painfully just above average. as a bright eyed genin, i was out in the world and only starting to understand the true meaning of the path i chose at the naive age of six. his squad was babysitting my own on a mission. his mentor stands next to mine and introduces us and my face sours immediately. unlike him i don’t have a mask to hide it. he avoids me for the whole mission but his teammates are nice.

his red eye was making waves around the world, he was a myth and enemies across the land waited in anticipation for the day to come where they could finally see it in the flesh. great gain had come with great loss, i’m sure he wishes the second hand eye was back with its original owner. i remember the first time i saw him lift up his headband and expose it to the world. the blood red eye and it’s black swirls, chills shoot down my spine like pins and needles. engaging with an enemy was pure violence, animalistic and messy yet he made it seem so graceful. 

the pines and the dark forest disappear before my eyes; now he stands on a wooden stage with his foe, dancing under a spotlight. every dodge and weave is smooth and flawless. his strikes felt as natural and as quick as a snake striking at its prey. i watch his performance with a disregard for my own safety and when the last of our enemies hit the dirt, i wait for him to bow. instead he shakes the blood off his kunai and the famous eye is tucked away under his headband. i think i fell in love with him that afternoon.

the girl who died, her name was rin and that one time her team babysat mine, she braided my hair by a campfire and said i had a pretty name. she didn't deserve to die. they whisper about him when he walks by, terrible nasty things. but i smile at him, wave to him when i see him and hope it makes him feel less alone in the world. he sees it and he averts his gaze without reply or acknowledgement. rejection makes my chest tighten, if only slightly. naturally i assume he doesn’t like me, maybe he doesn’t like anyone. 

i'm in a village with my squad for a mission, it’s small but the green tea in the wooden cup and the smell of rabbit stew on the stovetop makes me feel at home. the excited teenage boy asks me about the things i've seen. the only thing he knows is chopping wood and shearing sheep. he asks me about a rumour he’s heard by a traveller about the boy that conjures lightning in his hand, he asks me if i've seen it before in the flesh. i smile and nod and confirm that i have. he asks me to describe it. i don't know how to at first.

first, you hear the static snapping and popping and it captures your attention instantly. then the pale blue light grows bigger and bigger in his hand, it takes on a life of its own and i won’t lie and say that it doesn’t make my heart beat out of my chest but he tames it like a wild beast, he has complete control. if you stand off to the side, you can watch the show. lightning surrounds him but he is never burnt. he’s like a god when he strikes, i've never seen something so terrifying but beautiful. he's beautiful. but i don’t tell the teenage boy that and i dont tell him that sometimes the loud crackle of his chidori haunts me when im alone. 

when i'm a chunnin, i feel much older than i am. it's not due to the title of my rank but because i keep plunging my kunai into grown men’s hearts and have to pretend it doesn’t faze me to see blood squirting from punctured arteries. i don't see him around the village much anymore. he lives in the darkness, in the shadows but sometimes he comes out into the light. he's grown so much older and taller and i think he looks handsome in his gear. toned arms and biceps and that tattoo on his left upper arm, the one that tells the world where his loyalties lie. walking past him, i prepare to feel the chill of his icy demeanor but i say his name, wave and smile. the only one of his eyes that sees the world widens and the veins of his arms bulge at my greeting, i can’t see his hands because they’re stuffed in his pockets. he always looks away but this time, for the smallest of seconds, he nods in my direction and then he is gone.

when the nine tailed beast attacks the village, i am kept away from the battle in a forest with the rest of the ninja around my age. he’s there, standing by his friend who talks and talks. i like his friend, he always greets me with enthusiasm. i try to ignore the sounds of my village being destroyed and the screams of the unfortunate dying people as i am powerless to do anything. my eyes move on their own in his direction only to find he has the same idea. for a moment, air leaves my lungs and i nod politely before i look away. his eyes meet mine one, two, three times. that night my home was buried under a mountain of rock and rubble and he lost the last person that knew the true extent of the damage this world had inflicted on him. 

the elderly lady at the stall with the hair clips told me i've grown into a beautiful young lady and i blush at her comment and insist it isn’t so. she tells me i must have a lot of boys' attention and i buy the deep blue hair clip with the faux sapphire gem. it stands out in my dark hair. it's been a long time since my house was crushed and a long time since he’s sat in the dango store with his friends but here’s there when i walk by. the compliment has me on cloud nine and i'm glad he’s not alone anymore. i smile at the group, say ‘ hey guys ’ and wave. for a millisecond my eye catches his as i'm walking by and my mind plays tricks on me. i think i see his cheeks tinge red.

kurenai came up to me one summer's morning and asked if i was attending the festival. i told her i was but likely alone. maybe i wasn’t such a pretty girl, no fish ever nibbled on the hook of the fishing pole i cast into the waters. her boyfriend looked bored as we spoke and her crimson eyes smile when she brings up the boy with the silver hair’s name, pretending she doesn’t notice my breath hitch for the slightest of moments. ‘ you should ask him, he’s not going with anyone either ’ she tells me and then she drags her boyfriend away. i sit alone on the cliffs for an hour thinking it through, my knees up to my chin as i wonder why she would suggest such a thing. iwashi is pissed that i'm twenty minutes late to meet up with them.

his group joins up with mine hours later and i greet him as i always do. he stands off to the side and plays with his hands and every time i catch his eye he looks as if he wants to say something to me. they say love feels like butterflies but when my eyes meets his, those butterflies turn into angry bees. i want to say something to him too, ask him where his friend got the idea that i should ask him to go with me but the bees within me sting and their venom prevents me from opening my mouth. i avert my gaze and pretend to listen to genma when he talks about his favourite order of ramen. 

we all part ways but we’re together again within the hour and i'm waiting nervously at the spot kurenai told me to come back to. my yukata is the colour of lapis and white periwinkles decorate the sleeves and i wonder if i look plain compared to the girls around me dressed in passionate pinks, gentle purples, and bold reds. he doesn’t see me at first but i see him. his yukata is dark grey with light thin stripes and it compliments his bright silver hair wonderfully. it’s the first time i've seen his hair down and his long strands are wild and stick out all over the place, i think i fall in love with him all over again. hes alone and i don’t dare to approach but he finally sees me. he waves, i nod. he's so handsome that i can’t stand to look at him so i don’t.

it’s dark and explosions of many colours light up the sky. i'm so distracted by the loud boom echoing off the hills and the blue, red, white and green lights on a black landscape that i don’t notice he's standing right beside me watching it too. knuckles lightly brush against my own, my chest tightens at the sensation. it’s distracting enough that i tear my eyes away from the sky show. they’re as wide as a possum when i meet his gaze. he doesn’t say anything, he just stares for a moment before he looks back at the fireworks. it was an accident and i forgive and forget but then his fingers awkwardly hook around my own, clinging for dear life. i cannot look, i cannot think nor speak. i hold my breath and blink rapidly while i cling onto his fingers just as tightly. when the fireworks are finished, we consider each other in silence for a minute. his hand leaves mine and we part ways without a word.

every time i see him, i see fireworks and feel the ghost of his fingers wrap around my own. he acknowledges me and we’re rarely left alone around each other; when we are we do not speak of it. we lean against a railing side by side and watch our friends fool around. courageously i say to him that the weather is nice today and he nods in agreement before his friend calls him over. when he leaves my side, his knuckles brush past mine once more. i jump in surprise and tell myself it was another forgivable accident but then he glances back at me as he walks away and i can’t be too sure. 

i am frozen still in a shrub waiting for the enemy to pass by. the sound of my heartbeat in my ears is so loud but suddenly it is replaced with the familiar crackle of electricity that haunted my dreams for the longest of times. when i turn around i see a man gasping for life, holding on tightly to the kunai i imagined would have been plunged into the nape of my neck if it wasn’t for the ball of lightning sizzling away in his chest. the man’s body drops to the ground and i finally see him standing there in the man’s place, his lower arm is soaked with blood from the fatal strike. he takes my hand and helps me onto my feet. that famous red eye is hiding behind a porcelain hound mask and he asks me if i'm okay. i assure him i am and thank him, he nods his head in reply and walks away. i don’t mind that he’s left my hand stained with our enemy’s blood. 

when i am given the rank of jonin i am months away from being twenty. i’m not allowed to drink just yet but my older friends buy bottles of sake to share in the park and i accept the invitation without giving it much thought. it’s sweet on my tongue and goes down smoothly, the aftertaste reminds me of potatoes for some strange reason i can’t put my finger on. i drink and i drink until half a bottle is gone and my cheeks are red and i laugh too loudly at asuma’s lame jokes. the stars are beautiful tonight but they just look like streaks of light in my blurry vision. i lay in the grass, my head feels light and my stomach slightly churns. out of nowhere he is in my line of sight, standing over me with a touch of concern on the features that aren’t hidden away. he asks me if i'm okay and i say i'm just fine and i think to myself that i'm glad to see him. 

when he takes me home, he lectures his friends that i'm too young to get drunk and they reply that i'll be old enough in a couple of months and it doesn’t make that much of a difference. he doesn’t mind my drunken babbling and how my head leans on his shoulder as we walk slowly through the dimly lit streets. his grip around my waist is tight and i try not to say something foolish like the way he fights is a form of art or that i want him to hold my hand again. he drops me off at the door and leaves once i am inside safely. i pass out that night thinking of the ways i want to be his.

i am twenty one when he leaves the anbu and i see him on the streets alone. his nose is in a book and he doesn’t notice as i walk by. i fight the urge to turn around and ask him how he’s going, i’ll be late to meet up with my old squad to train if i do. later when i walk home, i stare off into the distance and think about making dinner and sharpening my collection of kunai when i collide with something hard. i jump out of fright at the impact, ready to snap when two hands land on my shoulders to secure me in place. we’re not kids anymore and he smiles at me and apologises even when i'm at fault. i ask him how he’s been and he says he’s been just fine. he walks me home and we talk about missions and his new role as a squad leader. on my doorstep he says he’ll see me around and then he is gone and i am left greedily wanting more of his time.

one day when we are standing alone he tells me he is in love with me. it is is out of the blue and i brush it off with laugher, telling him he couldn’t possibly be; he takes my hand in his and insists it’s true. he tells me that he has been since the moment i collided with him in the street when he was ten years old. that when the world was unkind to him, i provided enough kindness to keep him going, all in a smile and a greeting. it is everything i have wanted to hear and more. the angry swarm of bees are back and i am stung over and over again. he can tell that i'm paralysed so his lips fall gently onto mine and it allows me to say the things i cannot utter out loud. my eyes are closed and i can see the very same fireworks from the night our fingers touched. when he breaks away from me he says we should get out of here and wordlessly i agree. we walk in the streets of the village and i am unsure of the destination he has in mind. his fingers are wrapped around mine.

#kakashi hatake x reader #kakashi hatake x oc #kakashi hatake imagines #kakashi x reader #my fic #my writing #f

[bold-writing]

The One With Silver Scars || 8 || Bleeding Innocence

Warnings: Swearing, descriptions of abuse, violence.

Words: 2700+

Previous || Next

~8~

All the years spent under the thumbs of her parents, Adelais learned skills that most people would disregard as useless. Among those was sleeping in some of the most uncomfortable conditions. She had slept on the stone-cold concrete of the basement floor, nothing to soften the surface or keep her warm. The drafty space of the attic where she encountered a disturbing number of bugs, only a moldy rug between her and the wood. Forced to stand in one place that would result in punishment if they found she had moved come morning.

 Sitting propped against the wall is far from the worst sleeping spot she had encountered so far.

 When her eyes opened the sight that greeted her was Claire and Marcia spooned together on one bed and Casey stretched out on the other. It must have been early; she woke at 4 in the morning like she was on a damned wind-up clock. But this was different. She hadn’t woken from the routine she had built up over the years, something had woken her.

That’s when she noticed there was more lighting in the room than there should have been. Only the small lights on the backwall were on, leaving just the faintest glow above the heads of the other girls.

 Casting her eyes to her left, she kept herself carefully emotionless when she came face to face with the body of Dennis and Patricia—because it was clearly not them—smiling at her almost manically. Wearing what seemed to be a black and yellow tracksuit, the zipper of the coat undone enough to show a plain white shirt beneath. Legs were crossed and he rested his back against the doorframe so he could face her.

 “Hello,” she greeted quietly, trying not to wake the other three.

 How many personalities did this person have? Which was the original?

 “I’m Hedwig,” he responded. The lisp that altered his words slightly caused her a moment of shock—a child? “How do you sleep like that?” he inquired a moment later, tipping his head to the side as he regarded how she was sitting against the wall—actually quite similar to him, since her legs were crossed, and her hands were tucked together in her lap.

 His voice was slightly louder than hers. Doubtless enough to wake the others soon. “Practice,” was her calm response.

 Before he even opened his mouth, Adelais lifted a finger to her lips to convey his need to be quiet. He paused at the commend, his smile dimming as his expressed became a mix of a frown and a pout.

 “You’ll wake them up,” she explained quietly, using the same finger she had shushed him with to point over to Marcia and Claire.

 The scoff he released as more like air pushed between his bottom lip and his top teeth, like someone blowing a raspberry. “So?”

 Ducking her head closer to him, like a secret was being shared, Adelais kept her eyes carefully trained on his. “I don’t want to wake them; they’re mean to me.” His expression hardened, finally looking similar to Dennis. “They say I’m crazy.”

 Hedwig sucked on his lip, maintaining the sour look on his face. “The others used to be mean to me,” he responded in a much quieter tone. “But Miss. Patricia and Mr. Dennis keep the others away. Now, Miss. Patricia sings to me sometimes—she’s not mad at me anymore.” He smiled, but it wobbled slightly as he tried to mask the turmoil of emotions welling to the surface.

 Adelais’s answering smile was sad. “It must be nice to have someone who takes care of you.”

 “Who-who takes care of you?” Hedwig shuffled forward, separating from the doorframe to put less space between them.

 She shook her head. “No one, I take care of myself.”

 With the innocence only a child could have, he frowned at her words. “That sounds lonely.”

 “It is. Mr. Dennis has been keeping me company. When he can. I’m sure he’s very busy so he usually has to leave. Does he know you’re here?”

 A look of panic came to his face and Adelais knew she had asked the wrong question. “No-no…no, he’ll be angry if he knows I took the light.” Pulling back abruptly, the shifting of the keys next to him on the floor was enough to alert Marcia and Claire, who jerked up with dual gasps of fright.

 Hedwig looks over at them, panicked again.

 “I was quiet!” he declared to Adelais, his voice still in a whisper. He looked upset, afraid—it was how she used to look when she was younger and had displeased her mother. Waiting for the yelling or lashing to start, punishment for disobedience. “I-I was quiet!”

 Nodding her head calmly, she hoped she conveyed assurance with the small smile she allowed. “You were. It’s okay. You did nothing wrong.” Thankfully, the devastated look on his face softened before there was the threat of tears.

 Marcia and Claire were whispering Casey’s name, trying to wake up the other girl as well. It drowned out what Hedwig and Adelais were saying to one another, keeping the quiet assurance between the two of them. She half expected Hedwig to leave now that the girls were awake—Casey jolted up with a gasp once she realized there was someone else in the room—but he just turned himself around to lean on the side of the doorframe closest to her.

 The upset already forgotten.

 Silence stretched for a moment as he smiled at the others. “I’m Hedwig,” he finally declared, so similar to his introduction to her. “I have red socks.”

 The simplicity of youthful minds.

 His expression shifted then, the smile disappearing as he bit at his lip like someone dying to tell a secret. “He’s on the move.” Looking over his shoulder to where Adelais was still leaning against the wall, the manic smile returned as he ducked his head while supressing a laugh.

 Casey’s voice was raspy from sleep. “What?”

 The giggle escaped, Hedwig turning his head away. Excited to know something they didn’t. “He’s…on…the…move,” he repeated slowly, drawing out the last word like the last note of a song.

 “Mr. Dennis?” Adelais asked quietly, though she already suspected he was talking about someone quite different.

 “Nope,” he responded, popping the ‘p’ as grinned at her. Ducking his head, he turned the grin on the other three. “Someone’s coming for you, and you’re not gunna like it.” Next, he faced Adelais. “They make noises in their sleep. I thought you were dead.”

 Marcia interrupted quietly, “Tell us.”

 He looked like he wanted to, opening and closing his mouth like he couldn’t quite decide what he wanted to say. Instead, he declared “I’m not supposed to say” while turning his head to look out into the other room, where Dennis and Adelais would stand for the few minutes of quiet. “But!” he continued, turning back, “He’s done awful things to people and he’ll do awful things to you. I have blue socks, too.”

 “We’re his food?”

 Hedwig extended his arms in an ‘I dunno’ gesture, making a face while doing so. He nearly smacked Adelais with his hand as he stretched back but she quickly lifted her leg until her knee was drawn up to her chest. The rush of blood back into her feet set them aflame with pins and needles. She dutifully ignored the sensations.

 Casey leaned forward, dawning with realization. “How old are you?”

 “Nine,” he declared proudly.

 “So you’re not the guy that took us?”

 She’s as hopeless as the other two.

 Adelais resisted the urge to roll her eyes as Hedwig scoffed at her. When she confirmed that he wasn’t Patricia, either, he made a face. “What are you, blind?” Then to Adelais, slightly quieter, “Is she?”

 “No, just ignorant,” she answered just as quietly. “But be careful, she’s smarter than the others.” Hedwig leaned closer to her, nearly falling from against the doorframe, as he met her gaze. Her whispered warning was so quiet, she knew the others couldn’t understand her. He frowned with concentration. “She lies.”

 Casey spoke over her, almost drowning out Adelais’s whispered warnings. “You don’t know how they think?”

 “No, they don’t tell me much. I just had a hot-dog.” Adelais wasn’t sure if it was the shortness of his attention, or a smart trick to throw someone off the current topic, but the random bits of information was actually clever. Not enough to deter the three teens, but still clever.

 “Could you help us, Hedwig?”

 Similar to her question earlier, Hedwig recoiled. “No, I’m…I’m not even supposed to be here. I stole the light from Mr. Dennis, but he’ll be back real soon and…I can’t steal the light for too long for he’ll know and get angry.” His concern was real; he knew he would get in trouble for doing someone he was told not to. Yet, the curiosity of a nine-year-old was a powerful thing. “Et cetera.”

 Looking between the three on the cots, his eyes darting back and forth, he suddenly reached back and gave Adelais’s leg a playful shove—it was stronger than that of a child, using the strength housed in the adult body he lived within. “See ya!”

 “Wait,” Casey blurted out. Hedwig stopped while still crouched at the door, reaching back to grab the doorhandle as he prepared to close it behind him. His attention was caught, however, as he glanced back at Casey.

 “Be careful, she’s smarter than the others.”

 Looking first at Casey, his eyes eventually drifted over to Adelais. The green of her eyes caught slightly in the light spilling into the room, constricting her pupils to show the ring of hazel around their center. Her lips were slightly thinned, one of the small shows of emotion she allowed. “We heard something,” Casey continued while he was paused in the doorway. “We didn’t understand it before, but now we do.”

 Carefully sliding off the cot, she situated herself in the center of the room. Still far from the door, but now in Hedwig’s direct path. The child noticed when Adelais’s eyebrows twitched down—such a small motion it was almost unseen—and remembered Dennis’s face doing the same thing when there was something he didn’t like.

 “Do you know what we heard?” Casey asked quietly, baiting him forward.

 Adelais knew what she was doing. Hedwig was a child, more easily manipulated when compared to Dennis or Patricia. Dennis scared them too much, and they had only had one encounter with Patricia. Therefore, the nine-year-old made the easier target. It was a sound strategy to try and escape, but the thought of manipulating a child made her stomach clench with discomfort.

 He wasn’t just someone pretending to be a child, this was a personality that knew nothing else. It was the same as if she had actually manipulated a little boy that had the body to match the personality. It was clear that he feared the anger of both of the adult personalities, and Casey was setting him up to take the brunt of that anger.

 The only reprieve was that they shared a body, there was no way to physically punish him.

 But she knew all about emotional and mental torture.

 Unfortunately, Hedwig was too young to see those signs and his attention was caught. “What’d you hear?”

 “Come here,” Casey prompted. “I’ll whisper it to you.”

 Giggling to himself, Hedwig cast one last glance at Adelais before he released the doorhandle. “Okay.” Keeping himself crouched down, he waddled forward on his feet while his hands cradled his knees. Adelais wanted to call him back, to stop what Casey was planning, but perhaps this could be to her advantage as well.

 Hedwig stopped just shy of Casey, ducking his head down so she could whisper into his ear.

 She couldn’t be sure if it was done on purpose, but Casey’s whisper was too low for Adelais to hear. She was probably mimicking what Adelais had done just a minute before, whispered to Hedwig about Casey. Green eyes keenly watched Casey’s face—trying to read her lips unsuccessfully—and Hedwig’s back. Whatever she whispered was short and prompted Hedwig to lean back.

 “You’re a big fibber,” he accused, the playfulness gone from his tone.

 “I never lie, Hedwig.”

 “She lies.”

 His panic was back, bringing with it the slight stutter in his words. “But…but Mr. Dennis said that he followed those two girls for four days, and he said that he knew that they were the ones that-that-that he would want.”

 Adelais knew exactly what Casey had told him. It was risky. Casey continued to whisper to him, her voice low and staying between her and Hedwig. But he wasn’t as subtle; listening to Hedwig’s reactions allowed Adelais to piece together what was whispered to him. What lies were spread.

 How to counter them.

 With the same low, waddling steps, Hedwig backed up a few paces. Putting distance between him and Casey. “N-no…Miss….Miss. Patricia said she’s not mad anymore!” His voice rose with the swell of emotion Casey’s words caused. “She-she sings to me!” Looking to Adelais caused an abrupt swell of anger at Casey to almost choke her. His face was broken and distraught, a tear tracking down his cheek. She wanted to console him.

 How often had she cried alone because she had displeased her mother? As a child, she could never understand why they hated her so much.

 “I was quiet!” He was yelling now, emotions getting the best of him. “I-I didn’t wake them, you said-you said I did nothing wrong!”

 Her body moved before she made the decision, lifting her hands toward him. He waddled forward, still babbling about being quiet, and being good, until Adelais’s chilled fingers gently stroked across his cheeks to collect the tears that fell. She shushed him softly, meant more as a calming sound than to warn him he was being loud. Sniffling strongly, he leaned into her hands as she continued to stroke her thumbs across his cheeks.

 “You’re okay, Hedwig. Don’t cry. She’s lying.”

 Casey wasn’t about to give up, assuming that the emotional response from him meant that he believed her lie. “I think Miss. Patricia’s still a little mad at you. But if we hurry, we can all get out.”

 He pulled from her hands so suddenly they remained in front of her, holding only air. “You lie,” he accused. “She said you lie, you lie!” Adelais only hoped the girls assumed he was talking about Patricia. If they knew she had put the idea in his head, the tension between them would come to a breaking point. “Mr. Dennis made this room safe—it took forever without those nosey-bodies who work here finding out. You can’t get out of here!”

 The upset had turned to panic again.

 “I have to blow my nose,” he announced before rushing from the small room with the door slamming behind him. Adelais retracted her hands as Casey called out for him, desperately trying to stop him so they could escape. But the lock clicked into place, sealing them inside. She beat Casey to the door, having been right next to it, and watched as Hedwig rushed to the other door and used the set of keys he had been carrying to unlock that one as well.

 “Who’s coming?” Marcia was the first to ask, she and Claire getting up from their cot as Casey came up behind Adelais to watch him disappear out the other door.

 “No one’s coming,” Claire tried to assure.

 “Oh, shut up,” Adelais snapped, glancing over her shoulder as Casey started to pace to the wall near the bathroom. “Clearly someone is going to come here, why else would he follow you two for four days? This wasn’t spur of the moment.”

 Claire looked ready to argue again, though there was a distinct hesitation after Adelais’s last enraged reaction. “He said something,” Casey interrupted first, placing her hand on the bare drywall. “He said something about making the room safe.”

 Finally understanding Casey’s train of thought, Claire looked around the room. The wall of the bathroom and the ceiling were both covered in bare slabs of drywall, the screws holding them in place still visible. “This is all new drywall.”

Previous || Next

#Hedwig #Hedwig Split #Split movie #Split 2016 #Dennis Split #Dennis #Kevin Wendell Crumb #James McAvoy #James McAvoy Split #James McAvoy Dennis #James McAvoy Hedwig #Original Female Character #Split Imagine #Dennis X OC

[kenzieam]

Destroyed - Chapter One (Chris X OC)

Rating: M

Warnings: Violence, language, drama, angst

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@iammarylastar​​​ @captstefanbrandt​​​ @jewels2876​​​ @moonbeambucky​​​​ @badassbaker​​​ @everythingisoverrated​​​ @jeremyrennerfanxxxx123​​​ @oliviastan17​​

I KNOW I’M MISSING TAGS, PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF YOU WANT IN

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What happens if Chris survived the bank robbery?

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Five Years Later

The sun beat heavy on his bare shoulders, the skin pulling slightly with the beginnings of a sunburn. Chris tightened the final bolt then straightened, ducking out from under the reach of the truck’s hood, stretching his spine with a groan as he dropped the wrench with a clatter in with its mates then pulled a rag from his back pocket to wipe his hands.

He let the sun warm his face for a moment, eyes closed and contemplated; should he get a start on figuring out what was making the Adler’s van run so rough, or go eat lunch?

That was his life now, and he was content with it.

He’d just made up his mind, lunch first, Adler’s van second, when a new sound pierced his thoughts. Dropping his head from the sun’s warmth, he turned to look over his shoulder.

A late seventies Toyota Land Cruiser wheezed towards him. Although old, it was in decent shape, either an older restoration or just plain well cared for, but right now, it needed help. Chris watched as it wound down, seemingly like a wind-up toy petering out, and gasped one last time before stalling a few dozen feet away. All clearance lights, already dimmed, died instantly and Chris, although not a betting man, not since gambling with his life five years ago, would have laid odds on what the Toyota’s problem was.

The driver’s door opened as Chris approached and he felt a sudden jolt of electricity. Not even Erin’s kiss in that bar as they’d learned their cover had affected him like this. A woman stepped out, no… scratch that, an angel appeared.

Long auburn hair, faint strands of blond catching the sun; thick and wavy and just perfect for Chris to card his hands through. Sunglasses of probably the same vintage as the Cruiser were pushed up into that glorious mane to reveal a set of cat-shaped eyes in the most unique and breath-taking shade of lilac-grey Chris had ever seen. Faint wrinkles of worry marred the smooth heart-shaped face and then she was looking right at him and Chris felt like he’d been kicked in the guts.

“Hey- , uh. Car trouble?” He stuttered, feeling his face start to flame.

The faintest of smiles. “Yeah.”

“Sounds like your alternator.” Chris scrambled for steady ground; known terrain when the earth was practically shaking beneath his feet.

“I thought so,” she murmured, sounding resigned. She met his eyes and Chris felt a fresh jolt. “Do you think it took my battery out with it?”

A lopsided grin, the majority of people he helped had no idea what an alternator even was, let alone knew how it worked.  

“I’ll check that, if you got it here fast enough, it should be okay.”

She bit her lip for a moment. “How long will it take? I have to get to work.”

“Not long, I can have it done by this afternoon if I’ve got the part laying around.”

The woman flinched slightly. “I work late, I won’t be able to come back until tomorrow.”

“That’s fine. You said you had to work? I can take you-“ Chris was babbling and he knew it, forced himself to shut up. “I mean, if you’d like.”

The faint smile again, a hint of pink in her cheeks. Maybe he wasn’t the only one being thrown off his axis right now. “I can’t ask you to do that.”

“No, it’s fine.” Chris was inexplicably terrified of losing contact with this woman and if he’d had more time to think about it, it probably would have bothered him, this sudden attachment. “I’m just heading out to lunch; I can give you a ride. Where are you going?”

Her eyes met his, that strange lilac-grey seeming to pierce into his soul. After a heartbeat, something flickered in her gaze, something Chris would swear was fear. “No, thank you.” Her voice was firm now, insistent and Chris felt an unexpected and unexplained pang of disappointment. She reached into her purse and pulled out a flip phone.

Chris stood rooted to the spot, frozen, until the woman raised her head. “Would you like me to sign anything first?” Her voice was tentative again, as if she worried she’d angered him.

Chris swallowed hard, hating that she was slipping between his fingers and at the same time, absolutely stunned that it mattered so much to him already. What the fuck is wrong with you, King? “Yeah, follow me. I’ll make out a work order.” He turned and strode into the shop, heart hammering a frantic tattoo in his chest. Reaching the counter, he grabbed the necessary paperwork and a pen. “Uh, name?”

The woman had reached the other side of the counter and now shifted her weight, almost uneasily, as if she was leery even of giving Chris her name. “Raen.” She finally answered, pronouncing it like ‘Rain’. “R A E N Casteel.”

“And a number to reach you at?”

Another pause, as if weighing her options. Chris had studied body language and received more than enough training in the F.B.I. to read this woman’s behaviour. She had been hurt by someone in the past, badly, and was either running from it still or was just permanently marked, forever cautious around strangers, especially men. His heart ached with a sudden desire to pull her close and crush away all her bad memories, show her that not all love and all men meant pain; and track down the ratfuck that had made her this way to begin with. Finally, she offered a number, chewing on her bottom lip.

“Okay,” Chris scrawled the number, mind racing as he tried to organize his thoughts. He’d never been so thrown by someone in his life, not since her. In the space of only a few minutes, he’d gone from content and hungry, his biggest decision of the day being when and what to eat, to being absolutely swept up in a mysterious woman, ready to fight for her and kiss away her sorrow. But no.

He couldn’t.

He’d fallen hard for a woman before, and it had nearly killed him. He could not do that again.

“Alright.” He cleared his throat, forcing a casual tone. “I’ll look at it and give you a call and an estimate.”

“Thank you. If I don’t answer, please leave a message.”

“Sure.”

The woman gave him one last hesitant smile, then dropped the keys on the counter, turned and almost fled the shop, the door banging closed behind her. Chris watched her hurry away and disappear around the corner.

Jesus wept.

He wanted to help her, and not just by fixing her vehicle.

As soon as his doctors discharged him from the hospital, as soon as it wasn’t abject agony to move anymore (because Chris had gone cold-turkey on all hard drugs after), he’d left the F.B.I., taking all the compensation and bonuses offered to him for his service and sacrifice. Breaking the lease on his apartment, he’d loaded his truck (not the monster he’d driven as Undercover Chris, but his own) and pointed it east, intent on leaving L.A. and California and the west coast entirely, not stopping until the icy dread that ran rampant through his veins finally ebbed and he could draw a deep breath again.

Staying in L.A. meant memories, it meant driving past old haunts and neighborhoods, remembering his shitty past and even shittier career as a Special Agent; one that had started promisingly enough, especially for a delinquent kid who had more in common with the thugs he chased than the agents who hunted them, but had cratered hard when he’d accepted his last assignment.

Deep cover, a chance to advance and take out an asshole at the same time. Dangerous, but definitely worth it; and then he’d met her.

Erin Bell, his awakening and his ruin. His rise and his downfall. In her he’d found a partner, a fellow survivor of a hellish childhood and for a time, he’d been in love. Blinded by the light, as the song went.

He’d let himself believe he could have it all, that he and Erin could give the middle finger to Silas’ gang, to the F.B.I., Sheriff’s Office and the whole fucking world and just run off together with a shit-ton of stolen money.

How wrong he’d been. At the last moment, his conscience had finally intervened, and he remembered the fright and tears in that blonde teller’s eyes as Silas had screamed at her, the abject terror in her innocent face. As he’d watched Silas drop the duffels, spewing tell-tale purple clouds and storm back into the bank, the haze had lifted from his mind and even Erin’s horrified, pleading stare hadn’t been enough to bring it back.

No one gets a fuckin’ scratch. He’d vowed, but he’d been the naïve one then.

“F.B.I.!” His words hadn’t had the desired effect, Silas hadn’t fl0undered in shock or dropped to his knees in acquiescence; it was like he’d known and, looking back, he probably had, trading Arturo for Chris at the last moment, the psycho had at least suspected someone was a mole and Chris had been the one to break cover.

The memory of the burn from the bullets was something that still woke Chris up from a dead sleep, multiple points of agony in his torso, a line of fire on his scalp. That last bullet Silas gave him, aimed as the kill shot to his skull as he lay gasping and already dying on the grimy industrial carpet of the bank; had, depending on your viewpoint, either saved or doomed Chris, missing his brain and splitting a line on his scalp instead. Silas hadn’t noticed as he’d stalked out and Chris carried that scar to this day, visible at all times because although he hated thinking about his past, he’d kept the shorn head and facial hair.

If asked, he couldn’t explain why, but maybe it really was to remember, even though he hated to. Seeing Undercover Chris, with a buzz cut and goatee everyday in the mirror was his penance. He couldn’t, he didn’t deserve to go back to the neatly-groomed man he’d been before, hair longer and fluffy and worthy of a woman running their fingers through it; he wasn’t that man anymore, for better or worse.

He’d driven until his truck had made the choice for him, quitting in this mid-sized town in New York state, lasting long enough for him to limp it into this very mechanic’s shop. A chance comment from the owner, that he needed a new mechanic, had been the catalyst for Chris to stay, at least for awhile.

As a kid, knowing through bitter experience that his own mother was an unreliable source, Chris had kept himself alive with his hands. More specifically, using his hands to fix and tinker. A few hours working on the neighbor’s broken lawnmower earned him enough to eat for a week, the car he’d traded a day’s worth of small engine work for and spent two months of weekends working on before selling to the plumber down the street helped him make it when his mother finally OD’d and he’d needed to keep himself afloat, keep the nosy housewives on the block from calling CPS and reporting a child left alone. Not that they’d have been overly concerned for Chris’ wellbeing, his mother had supported her drug habit by spreading her legs for anyone with cash or drugs, and most if not all of these women’s husbands had partaken at one time or another, meaning Chris was practically guaranteed abandonment when the real object of their fury and indignation was gone, and only her son was left to blame.

That history had been his fuel for a time, spurring him to apply for the F.B.I., encouraging and driving his ambitions to make something of himself, to be more than the fatherless son of a crack-whore.

And, for a time, he had been. He’d been more. Chosen for the assignment, entrusted with the delicate task, but he’d fucked it up, as it was in his genes to do and it still burned sometimes to think about it.

And now, working at the shop had kept him busy, tired him out enough that sometimes he was even too exhausted for the nightmares. So, when the old man had announced his retirement two years later, Chris had offered to buy the place.

For almost three years now he’d been here, running his own business, continuing and building on the shop’s reputation in town, paying Karma back with steady and honest work.

But was Raen another Erin? Another flash fire that would only leave him staggering and burned, another paradigm shift in his already jagged and torn existence?

He’d worked so hard to rebuild his life, was he ready to risk it all again?

#bucky barnes #bucky barnes fanfic #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky #au bucky barnes #sebastian stan #destroyer #destroyed #destroyer chris #chris x raen #destroyer chris fanfic #destroyer chris fantiction #destroyer chris angst #destroyer chris drama

[yourdeepestfathoms]

A Little Piece Of Heaven (part one)

[Tour!verse]

TW: Surprisingly not many...I guess mockery of religion, specifically Christianity and anything in that branch. Very minor mentions of self harm (like one time- if you blink you’ll miss it). But mainly this fic is just psychological.

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Lord of The Flies

Let’s get something clear really quickly: Joan Meutas was not religious. Did she used to be? Unfortunately, yes, but after seeing the world for what it really was, after getting an axe to her vagina from her beloved husband, she has realized that there was no merciful God who would save lost souls. It was all a hoax by crazy old folk from wherever Jerusalem was to herd people into one belief, thinking that it may make them more humane and friendly. But religion has done more harm than good- Christianity damns all non CIS heterosexuals to hell, Jews got murdered by the thousands, that one branch literally won’t eat anything besides fucking grain or some shit, Catholics are just rude as all hell, those fasting things literally cause people to STARVE TO DEATH, and for what? To appease some higher being? Do they truly think they will be saved? If God was so merciful and wonderful and kindhearted, why would he make things like murder and cancer and rape and torture?

Joan even once heard that the Bible stated that when a woman was on her period she had to leave her village and wasn’t allowed to come back UNLESS she had a turtle dove. She’s never read the Good Book before, so she doesn’t know if that was true or not, but it doesn’t sound unlikely given all the stupid rules she’s heard about.

So, no, Joan was not religious.

It’s strange, she thinks, how offended people get when she says it or simply hints at it. Their eyes will practically bug out of their skull and they probably pray for her “lost soul”, maybe even do that weird cross gesture on their chest when they think she isn’t looking. They look at her as if she was actually a demon spy loosed from hell and not just someone who has enough common sense to realize that an “all powerful father” was complete and utter bullshit.

That’s the thing- it’s like the word “atheist” was purposely made to seem like the most evil string of letters to ever be created. You know the words- those synonyms that just sound much worse than the actual root phrase (molest, slaughter, moist). Atheist just has this dark shade to it. Or so religious people say.

But enough of that! There’s a reason why such a taboo subject is being brought up.

Joan was going to contact Death.

As they say, desperate times calls for desperate measures. And desperate Joan was.

You see, her queen- Jane Seymour- used to be quite the woman. Sharp, beautiful, powerful, but also warm behind the closed court doors. Joan was very lucky to see this side of her as her youngest lady in waiting, often getting called gentle pet names and sometimes pats on her head if she was particularly lucky that day. As a touch-starved orphan servant, this was like a pot of gold to Joan- love and affection is something she’s craved long before reincarnation in the modern world. And, speaking of the resurrection, Joan thought she would get even more of Jane’s “Mum Treatment” since they had more time on their hands, but she was very, very wrong.

Jane...Jane was different. She changed. No longer was she the motherly, caring, strong woman from the past, but instead coming back as some reduced version of herself- slightly younger (24, 25, maybe even 23), more awkward and timid, and much less maternal. The way she now looked at Joan wasn’t with compassion, rather...plain curiosity, sometimes even aversion. Her memory of her young lady in waiting has waned- it was as if she didn’t remember that Joan had been at her side the whole time when she was bedridden after giving birth to Edward! Like she couldn’t conjure up the remembrance of a teenager literally watching her rot away and slowly die for days!

To say the least, Joan was not happy. Add in trauma, insomnia, hate on social media, constant stress and pressure from her profession, and a severe lack of friends and you can probably see why Joan was going to such extreme measures.

Now, she knew about the stories. She’s read The Monkey’s Paw. She knows about the consequences of one’s actions. Joan wasn’t going into this completely stupid- have some faith, will you?

Gambling with Death was a risk. A huge risk that could very well end with her soul being ripped out of her mouth or her flesh being worn by a supernatural being that then goes on to commit atrocities under her identity. And not only was it a massive risk to take, it was also very, very stupid.

If I have to spell it out for you, listen closely: Death knows things. A lot of things. They don’t call him the “Lord of The Flies” for nothing. Which is why he loves to play games for those desperate enough to contact him because he knows he is much smarter than whatever pathetic, miserable piece of useless garbage comes clawing at a mirror, begging him to reveal himself. And unless you have every secret of the universe, you’re probably going to get ass-blasted back to Tuesday.

Oh, what am I saying? You won’t get a second chance.

You’ll be long gone by then.

And whatever state the cops find your body in the next morning depends on whatever mood the beast was in.

However, in Joan’s case here, she is desperate and stupid enough to take the risk. In her eyes, she doesn’t have much to live for. She’s a slave to SIX- day and night she’s working endlessly over musical paperwork and the same songs over and over and OVER again. It doesn’t help that she isn’t the closest to the rest of the cast and is often left alone when everyone else goes out and has fun. The scars on her wrists are evident of how many nights she’s been alone.

Without Jane, she has nothing to live for. She needed her.

And that’s exactly why she was sitting on the floor in front of a mirror propped against the wall in the dark theater surrounded by candles and a semicircle of salt.

Joan has done a lot of studying up to this point. She knows she has everything correctly, now she just has to get Death to appear...and hope he doesn’t immediately pull her small intestines out from her throat for bothering him.

Joan stares into the mirror as hard as she can, closes her eyes, then counted to ten. Her eyelids lingered shut for longer than she would like to admit after she hit the number one, but she eventually pried them open.

It was not her reflection staring back at her.

To be honest, Joan wasn’t exactly sure of what she was expecting to see. Some parts of her believed nothing would happen, other parts convinced itself that a grim reaper-like figure or a horned, goat-legged demon would be kneeling on the other side of the glass wielding a scythe or pitchfork. However, a suit-wearing young man was not really something that crossed her mind in her theories.

If Joan wasn’t a lesbian, she might have found him attractive, but he definitely was at a straight woman’s perspective. Perfect smile, the most amazing cheekbone structure, unflawed olive skin, neatly combed brown-blonde hair, a broad chest, phenomenal shape- if it weren’t for his yellow eyes with slit pupils, he might have been the perfect lady’s man (although, knowing straight women, they probably wouldn’t care for his demon eyes- after all, you don’t need to see someone’s peepers to suck cock!).

Joan sat completely bewildered, all of her confidence draining and being replaced with dread that drenches her like a thick, dark oil spill. She can feel her hands, which are lying in her lap, starting to tremble and clenching her fingers doesn’t help at all. The ability to form a coherent sentence slips from her mind, so Death speaks first.

“Hello, Joan Meutas.”

This guy is the real deal. He pronounced her last name correctly!

Joan opens and closes her mouth like a fish out of water and Death is thoroughly amused by her sardine impression. He watches her through the glass, waiting patiently for her to learn how to enunciate again.

“H-h-hello-”

“Yes, yes, h-h-hello to you to,” Death laughed. He wasn’t directly trying to be cruel, but Joan’s self esteem was far enough into the ground to hear his jibe as a mockery of her understanding of the English language. “If I let you speak the whole time we are going to get nowhere! Pull yourself together, kid. You should see the look on your face! You look like you just got caught making out with the family goat!”

Joan’s expression remained one of fright.

“What? Didn’t you own a goat back in- god, what year were you born? 1517 or 1525? Historians paint it as both! But I thought a family farm animal was the big rave back then! I apologize- I need to catch up on the modern slang. Say, would you be considered a ‘boomer’? Because I have been DYING to use that phrase on someone who contacts me. Could you imagine it?” He warps his voice into one of a pruny old woman, “‘I wish for great fortune!’ ‘Okay Boomer.’” Death bursts into fits of maniacal laughter that sounded as if a thousand lost souls were chortling together at once.

Joan is still silent, but during Death’s monologue she was able to wire her brain back to functionality. She sits up a little bit straighter and Death notices, so he containers himself instantly, also fixing his posture.

“Ready to talk now?” He asked.

“Yes.” Joan answered.

“Wonderful,” There’s a glint in his piercing yellow eyes, “What is it that you desire of me?”

Joan gathers up all her courage, sits up a little taller, and says, “I desire to challenge you to a game of question-and-answer.”

The glint flares into a blaze of confidence. If Joan stares hard enough, she swore she could almost see the fires of Hell burning in his eyes.

“How fun,” The words ooze out from Death’s pale lips, soaked in liquid menace. “Shall I go over the rules?”

Joan nodded. She knew them, she knew she did, but it would be good to hear them one last time.

“Very well,” Death said. He cleared his throat and began speaking as if he were reading off of a manual, “Death’s Gambit: A two-player game between the Lord of The Flies himself and a human. After being conjured- just gonna skip over that process, you’ve clearly got it down, kid- and initiating the game, both parties will have sixty-six minutes and six seconds to answer as many questions correctly as possible. Anything can be asked- trivia, personal inquiries, riddles, even dares, as long as the salt circle is not exited. The catch of the whole thing is this: The Prince of Darkness is obligated to tell the truth only if the human answers correctly to his question or does a requested dare or the human manages to stump him. However, if he answers correctly or the human answers incorrectly to HIS question, he may lie about whichever question he wants. The score will not be revealed until the very end once the time is over. If the human wins, the Keeper of Souls MUST grant any one wish they have. If He-Who-Lies wins, the human will be the victim to whatever losing punishment he comes up with. Remaining rules include: The salt circle cannot be left- you may find yourself no longer in your dimension-, the game cannot be quit until the time is over, items like watches or phones are not permitted to be used to look up answers or keep track of the time. Good luck and Beelzebub be with you.”

Despite knowing this all already, hearing it out loud, spoken by the beast himself, made it all hit home for Joan. She was really doing this; she was gambling with Death.

She had to be the stupidest fuck to ever grace God’s green earth.

“Are you ready to begin?” Death asked.

Joan took a deep death and answered, “Yes.”

A wicked smile curled on Death’s lips. The candles around Joan blaze.

“The game is on.”

A dark feeling weighed down on Joan after that was spoken. The air around her seemed to shift. Her gut was screaming at her to run away, to hide, to do something other than just sit there, but she couldn’t move. Not from fear, but from sheer will. She couldn’t be stupid. Who knows what lurked outside her thin salt circle....

As he usually did, Death initiates the game and asked his first question.

“What was the name of Catherine Parr’s true love?”

Like that, a cold stone drops deep into the pit of Joan’s stomach. Of all the questions she expected him to start off with, Tudor history was not one of them. It startles her, takes her by surprise, and she realizes very quickly that that’s exactly why Death asked it. He’s trying to disorientate her right off the bat and weaken her before she has the chance to get some points in.

She could not let that happen.

It’s just that- she didn’t know Tudor history outside of knowledge on her queen and whatever is said in the show. The others certainly did talk about their past lives, but Joan- she-

It stung, to say the least, when she realized that Death knew about her nonexistence friendships with the queens. And that he was targeting that.

“Thomas Seymour.” Joan finally said.

She was pretty sure that was the right answer...but not completely positive. And, because of that, her worried mind began to scream doubts inside of her brain.

Was that a trick question? He’s supposed to be the embodiment of pure evil- wouldn’t he think Henry is Parr’s true love? Was Henry the right answer?

“Your turn.” Death said, not reacting to Joan’s answer, which scares her even more.

“What’s- why did you choose to show up in that body?”

“Oooh, you’re starting with a personal inquiry!” Death said, laughing, “How fun! And I hope you’re not flattering yourself, Joan- I don’t look like this to make your pussy wet. Trust me, I could look way more attractive, but I know you.” Those three words slither into Joan’s ears and made her shudder. “Isn’t the whole point of being a lesbian to not be attracted to men?” Death laughed again, “But I look like this because I want to. I can take whatever shape I want! Remember that one time I was a snake? That was weird. Although, peeping at a naked chick was pretty damn fun. As a lesbian, you could probably appreciate the sight.”

For just a moment, the image of Death disappears, the mirror hazes to white, and Eve appears. Not the paintings you always see- THE Eve, bare breasts and vagina and all, and if Joan weren’t also asexual, her own genitals may have been burning with desperate pleasure.

“She was a sight.” Death said, returning to view. He chuckles, then immediately goes to his next question, “What was the exact height of Mount Everest in the year 1666?”

Joan’s heart just about stopped.

How in the holy hell was she supposed to know that? Then again, that was probably the point of asking such a thing.

“Three...hundred feet?” It came out as a question, but it’s taken as an answer and Death doesn’t react except for a slight twitch of his nose. “What...is the hardest piece to learn on the piano?”

“Liszt.” Death answered smoothly. “What animal can see the most amount of colors?”

“A...dolphin.” Joan physically cringed at her answer. “Who wrote Liszt?”

Is this what she was going to be doing the whole time? Asking the King of Hell fucking piano trivia?

“La Campanella.” Death once again answered perfectly. “What is the full chemical name for the antidepressant and anti-anxiety medication, Zoloft?”

Wasn’t that the medicine Joan was supposed to take for her anxiety?

“I- I don’t know.”

Death just hummed and awaited his next question. He didn’t laugh at her like she expected him to, which slightly lightened the blow of her stupidity.

“What’s my favorite song in SIX?”

“None of them. Why did you stop taking your Zoloft pills?”

The answer followed by such a question felt like Joan was just punched in the stomach with a spiked gauntlet. She swore she was winded by some unseen force (probably shock). Her breath hitched in her throat and she seemed like a little kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

“I-” She hunched her shoulders around her neck. Death is giving her a curious look, which was at least better than worry or concern. “They- they weren’t helping me...so I didn’t think there was a point taking them if they weren’t going to fix me.”

Death hummed once more, this time louder and more enthusiastic. He clearly liked her answer.

“Interesting,” He mused, then quiets himself for the next question.

“What’s standing behind me?”

Ever since the game began, Joan picked up on the presence of something staring at the back of her head. She could feel their eyes burning into her skull, sometimes even breathing on the back of her neck.

Death smiled. “See for yourself.”

Joan saw nothing in the reflection, just darkness beyond the candles and Death, and she was not about to go and look away. She was scared about what would happen if she turned her gaze away from the mirror for even a second.

When Death realized Joan wasn’t going to fall for his tricks that easily, he quirked an impressed eyebrow and moved on.

“Will you greet the worker who just came in?”

Joan glanced fearfully to the corner of the room. A figure is hunched there. The glow from the candles just barely licks at their claws.

“What was their name? Terrance?” Death said, “Doesn’t he work in lightning?”

“That’s not Terrance,” Joan murmured.

Death took it as an answer, it seems. He leans in close to the glass and when he whispers, his hushed tone is right at the back of Joan’s ear.

“You don’t want to know what he really is.”

Joan can feel a panic attack rising in her chest. Death is trying to scare her, stray her from answering coherently or correctly and get her to waste time by freaking out. She had to steer the game back into calmness.

Or, rather, however calm a Devil game could get.

“What do I have in my pocket right now?”

Death seems a little bothered that the cryptic theme was interrupted, but he gets over it.

“One black pen that’s almost out of ink, a granola bar you promised yourself you would eat, and a rosary you stole from Aragon.” He said, “Oh and, by the way, that isn’t going to protect you from me. So return it as soon as possible or Aragon is gonna be PISSED!” He laughed, imagining the storm the golden queen would cause if she caught Joan with such a precious belonging.

Joan swallowed thickly. She didn’t want to check her pockets. She didn’t want to know that he was right.

“What is the color of the sky?”

It seemed like an easy enough question, but Joan, believe it or not, knew better than to fall for such a simple trick. She wracked her brain for a moment, then answered, “Black.”

Death doesn’t react aside from licking over his dried lips. His tongue is too pointy. Joan moves on.

“Does Jane care about me?”

Honestly, the question kind of surprised her. It bubbled up from her throat from out of nowhere- yes, she had been wanting to ask it so badly, but she didn’t actually expect it to come out.

“Yes.” Says Death.

For a moment, joy bursts through Joan, but the metaphorical, celebratory confetti is sucked up by the vacuum of doubt.

Is he lying? Is he giving me false hope? Or is he telling the truth?

“What’s your blood type?” Death asked.

“A...AB.”

Like Joan fucking knew that.

“What’s my favorite color?”

“Blue.” Death smiled, “Because the blue sky would always remind you of opportunities for a better life.”

A shiver runs down Joan’s spine. She didn’t like how he knew that.

“What’s something that you can’t eat for lunch or dinner?”

He’s asking a riddle. Joan bit the inside of her cheek, thinking.

It couldn’t be a food. That was too easy.

Think, Joan, think!

“...Breakfast.”

Death chuckles. Joan doesn’t know what to think of that.

Twenty minutes pass by in a blur. Cold sweat soaks Joan’s brow, dripping down her face, but she’s too scared to move from her stiff position. Her back muscles hurt from sitting like a statue for so long- how the hell does Death look so relaxed? Then again, he doesn’t really have much to worry about.

He doesn’t have to worry about the possibility of being mutilated or dragged to Hell or that that figure in the corner has been getting closer and closer as the minutes passed by.

“Do you think every human deserves to live?”

The question came out of nowhere, really. Death had been asking mostly trivia up until that point. He tittered at Joan’s stunned expression, then raised his eyebrows as if to say, “Well?”

“No.”

Joan didn’t hesitate because she knew it was the truth. Not everyone deserved to live. Rapists, pedophiles, serial killers, racists, homophobes, terrorists, abusers- they didn’t deserve life. People like them deserved to die.

And anyone who doesn’t believe that is a fucking idiot.

“Do YOU think every human deserves to live?”

Death scoffed. “Of course not.” He peered at Joan, really analyzing her for the first time. His yellow slit eyes raked over the girl, making her feel uncomfortable and violated. “You know, you and I think a lot alike. Not many humans give ‘no’ as their answer. They think optimism will make them seem like a good person. It’s pathetic.”

Joan just nodded silently.

“Now...where were we? Oh, yes.” Death leaned in, “Which queen suffered the most?”

Joan furrowed her eyebrows. The whole point of the show was to not compare, especially traumas, but...

“Katherine Howard.”

Come on- clearly K Howard had it the worst. The girl was violated by four different men before she was an adult! None of the other five stories combined could possibly rank to the fifth queen’s suffering.

“Honestly, I think the same!” Death said, “I mean- what is UP with the whole ‘one of a kind, no category’ gimmick? How stupid! Last time I checked, being a victim of sexual abuse doesn’t make you ‘one of a kind.’ Why would you even think of it that way?“

Joan nodded slowly.

“I agree,” She said, “Um- here’s my next question: Is this question false?”

Death raised his eyebrows and cooed in obvious interest.

“True.” He said, smirking. “My turn. Do you resent the queens?”

Joan actually recoils. Death laughed.

“I-”

Did she? Did she resent the queens? Surely she didn’t... She couldn’t! The queens were perfect! How could anyone ever hate them?

“No.”

Death almost looks disappointed.

“What’s worse than death?”

“You’re living it.”

Cold sweat drips down Joan’s face. It stings her eyes and is salty on her tongue. She hears noises all around her, but doesn’t dare to look. She already knows “Terrance” is on his knees beside the salt circle and his leaning his face in right next to hers. She can smell the rot on him.

“Have you ever wanted to hurt the queens?”

Death’s questions are definitely ramping up in darkness. Was the time close to ending? Is that why he’s getting deeper?

Joan shut her eyes tightly for a moment, but opened them quickly when the fear of losing sight of Death nagged at the back of her mind. Before her, on the other side of the mirror, the being is waiting patiently, eagerly for her answer.

“Sometimes,” Joan breathed, “Yes.”

Death smiles a wicked smile.

“How interesting,” He purred, then gestured for Joan to ask her question.

“Does God exist?”

“Unfortunately.” Death groaned, then laughed. He inspected Joan again. “How would you hurt the queens?”

Joan felt her stomach ache. She didn’t like that question. She didn’t want to think about actually hurting the queens, even if she’s considered it one or two times before.

“I- I haven’t really given it any thought.” She answered, then quickly sputtered out her next question before Death could comment, “Does the Bible speak the truth?”

“Of course not.” Death said. “My next question is this: If I were to give you a task, would you do it?”

“Depends,” Joan said, “What would the task be?”

Death held up both arms in a shrugging motion. “I don’t know! Pick up my dry cleaning? It depends! Don’t put me on the spot like that!” He then laughed that horrible laugh again. Once he contains himself, he says, “Time is ticking. The game is almost over. I want to switch things up before we end. I have a dare for you.”

Joan nods.

“Stab yourself in the hand.”

That flush of icy cold dread floods through Joan’s system again. Every part of her being screamed at her to refuse, there will be other offers or questions she could make up for, but she knew that was just false hope. Like Death said: time was almost up. She couldn’t risk refusing and docking more points (if she isn’t in the negatives already, that is).

“Fine.” She forced out through her teeth.

She reached for the pen in her pocket, but Death held up a hand.

“Don’t use that inky thing,” He said. “It won’t get the job done. Please- allow me.”

He flicked his wrist and a large carving knife appears out of thin air and clatters to the floor in front of Joan. She stares at it for a moment, then picked it up, setting her left hand down in its place. She took a deep breath, screwed her eyes shut, and plunged the blade down.

Joan couldn’t choke back the scream that burst from her lips. She cried at the pain, sobbing in horror when she looked down to see the knife practically pinning her hand to the floor. Dark red blood pools around her fingers, gushing and spurting like spigot from the wound when she pulls the blade free. She cradled her wounded hand close to her chest, weeping weakly.

“Very good,” Death cooed, clapping.

Joan raised her eyes slowly and Death smirked at how lit up they were, almost like hot coals.

“I have a dare for you.” Joan growled, her voice low and dangerous.

“I accept.”

“Change your eye color to blue.”

For a moment, Joan swore she saw the slightly twitch on Death’s features. She watched him close his eyes, sit their silently for a moment, then open them again.

They were still yellow and slit.

“I cannot.” He said. However, he wasn’t angry or irritated at being stumped, rather amused. “Next...what is the flying speed of a swallow?”

Joan ripped off of a strip of her shirt and wrapped it around her bloody hand, hoping it would be a good enough substitute for real bandages for now.

“African or European?”

Death grinned. And that grin only grew wider as the candles around Joan went out until only the one behind her remained lit.

"̸̡̢̢̣͓͚͖̪̼̪͑͊̈́͋̀́̾͗͘ͅT̷̼̺͈̮̜͔̙͂̋̉͋͛̈̿̀̕͜͠͝i̸̢̹̙̼̠͓͚̖̗͔̮̔̌͂̓̐̊̈́̔̃̕m̸̡̱̤̱͙͎̦̱͙̪̻̓̅͌̉̀̈́̐̄͒̌̕͘͝e̸̟̳͒'̸̗͎̞̙̋̎̓́́͑̉͐͑̈́s̷̰̬̙͖̲̩͚̥͈̝̩̻̻̮̭͂̀̐̓̑̓͌̓̀́̐̐ ̷̡̳͍̗͉̝͔̃̑͛̀͊͌͆̌̒̃̔͘̚͠ͅû̵̞̠̣͉̻̖̅̓̄̏͝p̷̛͖͎̮̖͇̬̮͉̥̲͈̟͊̃́̃̏̇̇͛͗̅̕͘,̷̢̧̧̹͈̗̝͙̪͉̖̆̈́ͅ ̸̲̩̥̇͂̓͌̀̋͗̀͛̚J̵̼̣̋ö̴̡͕̺̪̠͓̹͔̂͝ą̶̡̜̭̤͖̭̫̝̘̆̂̾̐͊̾̒̂̏n̶̛̛̬̦̥̠̮̐̓̃̋̍̒̂͐̂̽ͅ.̴̪̰̩̀͊̑̐́̂͗̍̐̈́̚"̴͍͆͛́̈́̈́̍͆̀͗͘͝͝

It was almost impossible to breathe. Joan can barely hold herself together- the tears are flowing freely and she can’t get them to stop. She would say a prayer for her damned soul if it weren’t for the whole atheist thing, and she worried that Death would get angry at her for it, even if it was said in her mind, which he couldn’t possible read (or, at least, she hoped he couldn’t).

Still, she bowed at the waist and thanked Death for the game.

“Let’s tally up the score, shall we?”

Joan first saw blood start to spread across Death’s midsection, then a sharp sting struck her in the stomach. She hissed in pain and lifted her shirt slightly, as did Death, and they both saw tally marks upon their flesh.

Death had twenty-three.

And Joan watched in shock as a twenty-fourth tally carved down through her skin right before her eyes.

“Congratulations, Joan Meutas,” Death says, “You’ve won. What is it that you wish for?”

#six the musical #six the musical tour #six uk tour #six the musical fanfiction #six the musical fanfic #six fanfiction #six fanfic #six fic #six ff #tour jane seymour #jane seymour #tour joan on the keys #joan on the keys #tw: religion

[unsettlingshortstories]

The Dunwich Horror

H.P. Lovecraft (1928)

Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras - dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies - may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition - but they were there before. They are transcripts, types - the archtypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body - or without the body, they would have been the same... That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual - that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy - are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.

- Charles Lamb: Witches and Other Night-Fears

I.

When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.

The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.

Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterwards one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of horror all the signboards pointing towards it have been taken down. The scenery, judged by an ordinary aesthetic canon, is more than commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer tourists. Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age - since the Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town's and the world's welfare at heart - people shun it without knowing exactly why. Perhaps one reason - though it cannot apply to uninformed strangers - is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding. The average of their intelligence is woefully low, whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnameable violence and perversity. The old gentry, representing the two or three armigerous families which came from Salem in 1692, have kept somewhat above the general level of decay; though many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only their names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the Whateleys and Bishops still send their eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the mouldering gambrel roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.

No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley, newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village, preached a memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his imps; in which he said:

"It must be allow'd, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of Daemons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny'd; the cursed Voices of Azazel and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial, being heard now from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I myself did not more than a Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse of evill Powers in the Hill behind my House; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth could raise up, and which must needs have come from those Caves that only black Magick can discover, and only the Divell unlock".

Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon, but the text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and physiographers.

Other traditions tell of foul odours near the hill-crowning circles of stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines; while still others try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard - a bleak, blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then, too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.

These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come down from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old - older by far than any of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient Bishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill at the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of architecture to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the nineteenth-century factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hilltops, but these are more generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizeable table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains Caucasian.

II.

It was in the township of Dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited farmhouse set against a hillside four miles from the village and a mile and a half from any other dwelling, that Wilbur Whateley was born at 5 a.m. on Sunday, the second of February, 1913. This date was recalled because it was Candlemas, which people in Dunwich curiously observe under another name; and because the noises in the hills had sounded, and all the dogs of the countryside had barked persistently, throughout the night before. Less worthy of notice was the fact that the mother was one of the decadent Whateleys, a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman of thirty-five, living with an aged and half-insane father about whom the most frightful tales of wizardry had been whispered in his youth. Lavinia Whateley had no known husband, but according to the custom of the region made no attempt to disavow the child; concerning the other side of whose ancestry the country folk might - and did - speculate as widely as they chose. On the contrary, she seemed strangely proud of the dark, goatish-looking infant who formed such a contrast to her own sickly and pink-eyed albinism, and was heard to mutter many curious prophecies about its unusual powers and tremendous future.

Lavinia was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was a lone creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and trying to read the great odorous books which her father had inherited through two centuries of Whateleys, and which were fast falling to pieces with age and wormholes. She had never been to school, but was filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley had taught her. The remote farmhouse had always been feared because of Old Whateley's reputation for black magic, and the unexplained death by violence of Mrs Whateley when Lavinia was twelve years old had not helped to make the place popular. Isolated among strange influences, Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose day-dreams and singular occupations; nor was her leisure much taken up by household cares in a home from which all standards of order and cleanliness had long since disappeared.

There was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises and the dogs' barking on the night Wilbur was born, but no known doctor or midwife presided at his coming. Neighbours knew nothing of him till a week afterward, when Old Wateley drove his sleigh through the snow into Dunwich Village and discoursed incoherently to the group of loungers at Osborne's general store. There seemed to be a change in the old man - an added element of furtiveness in the clouded brain which subtly transformed him from an object to a subject of fear - though he was not one to be perturbed by any common family event. Amidst it all he showed some trace of the pride later noticed in his daughter, and what he said of the child's paternity was remembered by many of his hearers years afterward.

'I dun't keer what folks think - ef Lavinny's boy looked like his pa, he wouldn't look like nothin' ye expeck. Ye needn't think the only folks is the folks hereabouts. Lavinny's read some, an' has seed some things the most o' ye only tell abaout. I calc'late her man is as good a husban' as ye kin find this side of Aylesbury; an' ef ye knowed as much abaout the hills as I dew, ye wouldn't ast no better church weddin' nor her'n. Let me tell ye suthin - some day yew folks'll hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill!'

The only person who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life were old Zechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl Sawyer's common-law wife, Mamie Bishop. Mamie's visit was frankly one of curiosity, and her subsequent tales did justice to her observations; but Zechariah came to lead a pair of Alderney cows which Old Whateley had bought of his son Curtis. This marked the beginning of a course of cattle-buying on the part of small Wilbur's family which ended only in 1928, when the Dunwich horror came and went; yet at no time did the ramshackle Wateley barn seem overcrowded with livestock. There came a period when people were curious enough to steal up and count the herd that grazed precariously on the steep hillside above the old farm-house, and they could never find more than ten or twelve anaemic, bloodless-looking specimens. Evidently some blight or distemper, perhaps sprung from the unwholesome pasturage or the diseased fungi and timbers of the filthy barn, caused a heavy mortality amongst the Whateley animals. Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect of incisions, seemed to afflict the visible cattle; and once or twice during the earlier months certain callers fancied they could discern similar sores about the throats of the grey, unshaven old man and his slattemly, crinkly-haired albino daughter.

In the spring after Wilbur's birth Lavinia resumed her customary rambles in the hills, bearing in her misproportioned arms the swarthy child. Public interest in the Whateleys subsided after most of the country folk had seen the baby, and no one bothered to comment on the swift development which that newcomer seemed every day to exhibit. Wilbur's growth was indeed phenomenal, for within three months of his birth he had attained a size and muscular power not usually found in infants under a full year of age. His motions and even his vocal sounds showed a restraint and deliberateness highly peculiar in an infant, and no one was really unprepared when, at seven months, he began to walk unassisted, with falterings which another month was sufficient to remove.

It was somewhat after this time - on Hallowe'en - that a great blaze was seen at midnight on the top of Sentinel Hill where the old table-like stone stands amidst its tumulus of ancient bones. Considerable talk was started when Silas Bishop - of the undecayed Bishops - mentioned having seen the boy running sturdily up that hill ahead of his mother about an hour before the blaze was remarked. Silas was rounding up a stray heifer, but he nearly forgot his mission when he fleetingly spied the two figures in the dim light of his lantern. They darted almost noiselessly through the underbrush, and the astonished watcher seemed to think they were entirely unclothed. Afterwards he could not be sure about the boy, who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a pair of dark trunks or trousers on. Wilbur was never subsequently seen alive and conscious without complete and tightly buttoned attire, the disarrangement or threatened disarrangement of which always seemed to fill him with anger and alarm. His contrast with his squalid mother and grandfather in this respect was thought very notable until the horror of 1928 suggested the most valid of reasons.

The next January gossips were mildly interested in the fact that 'Lavinny's black brat' had commenced to talk, and at the age of only eleven months. His speech was somewhat remarkable both because of its difference from the ordinary accents of the region, and because it displayed a freedom from infantile lisping of which many children of three or four might well be proud. The boy was not talkative, yet when he spoke he seemed to reflect some elusive element wholly unpossessed by Dunwich and its denizens. The strangeness did not reside in what he said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked with his intonation or with the internal organs that produced the spoken sounds. His facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity; for though he shared his mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression of his large, dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air of quasi-adulthood and well-nigh preternatural intelligence. He was, however, exceedingly ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy; there being something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears. He was soon disliked even more decidedly than his mother and grandsire, and all conjectures about him were spiced with references to the bygone magic of Old Whateley, and how the hills once shook when he shrieked the dreadful name of Yog-Sothoth in the midst of a circle of stones with a great book open in his arms before him. Dogs abhorred the boy, and he was always obliged to take various defensive measures against their barking menace.

III.

Meanwhile Old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably increasing the size of his herd. He also cut timber and began to repair the unused parts of his house - a spacious, peak-roofed affair whose rear end was buried entirely in the rocky hillside, and whose three least-ruined ground-floor rooms had always been sufficient for himself and his daughter.

There must have been prodigious reserves of strength in the old man to enable him to accomplish so much hard labour; and though he still babbled dementedly at times, his carpentry seemed to show the effects of sound calculation. It had already begun as soon as Wilbur was born, when one of the many tool sheds had been put suddenly in order, clapboarded, and fitted with a stout fresh lock. Now, in restoring the abandoned upper storey of the house, he was a no less thorough craftsman. His mania showed itself only in his tight boarding-up of all the windows in the reclaimed section - though many declared that it was a crazy thing to bother with the reclamation at all.

Less inexplicable was his fitting up of another downstairs room for his new grandson - a room which several callers saw, though no one was ever admitted to the closely-boarded upper storey. This chamber he lined with tall, firm shelving, along which he began gradually to arrange, in apparently careful order, all the rotting ancient books and parts of books which during his own day had been heaped promiscuously in odd corners of the various rooms.

'I made some use of 'em,' he would say as he tried to mend a torn black-letter page with paste prepared on the rusty kitchen stove, 'but the boy's fitten to make better use of 'em. He'd orter hev 'em as well so as he kin, for they're goin' to be all of his larnin'.'

When Wilbur was a year and seven months old - in September of 1914 - his size and accomplishments were almost alarming. He had grown as large as a child of four, and was a fluent and incredibly intelligent talker. He ran freely about the fields and hills, and accompanied his mother on all her wanderings. At home he would pore dilligently over the queer pictures and charts in his grandfather's books, while Old Whateley would instruct and catechize him through long, hushed afternoons. By this time the restoration of the house was finished, and those who watched it wondered why one of the upper windows had been made into a solid plank door. It was a window in the rear of the east gable end, close against the hill; and no one could imagine why a cleated wooden runway was built up to it from the ground. About the period of this work's completion people noticed that the old tool-house, tightly locked and windowlessly clapboarded since Wilbur's birth, had been abandoned again. The door swung listlessly open, and when Earl Sawyer once stepped within after a cattle-selling call on Old Whateley he was quite discomposed by the singular odour he encountered - such a stench, he averred, as he had never before smelt in all his life except near the Indian circles on the hills, and which could not come from anything sane or of this earth. But then, the homes and sheds of Dunwich folk have never been remarkable for olfactory immaculateness.

The following months were void of visible events, save that everyone swore to a slow but steady increase in the mysterious hill noises. On May Eve of 1915 there were tremors which even the Aylesbury people felt, whilst the following Hallowe'en produced an underground rumbling queerly synchronized with bursts of flame - 'them witch Whateleys' doin's' - from the summit of Sentinel Hill. Wilbur was growing up uncannily, so that he looked like a boy of ten as he entered his fourth year. He read avidly by himself now; but talked much less than formerly. A settled taciturnity was absorbing him, and for the first time people began to speak specifically of the dawning look of evil in his goatish face. He would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener with a sense of unexplainable terror. The aversion displayed towards him by dogs had now become a matter of wide remark, and he was obliged to carry a pistol in order to traverse the countryside in safety. His occasional use of the weapon did not enhance his popularity amongst the owners of canine guardians.

The few callers at the house would often find Lavinia alone on the ground floor, while odd cries and footsteps resounded in the boarded-up second storey. She would never tell what her father and the boy were doing up there, though once she turned pale and displayed an abnormal degree of fear when a jocose fish-pedlar tried the locked door leading to the stairway. That pedlar told the store loungers at Dunwich Village that he thought he heard a horse stamping on that floor above. The loungers reflected, thinking of the door and runway, and of the cattle that so swiftly disappeared. Then they shuddered as they recalled tales of Old Whateley's youth, and of the strange things that are called out of the earth when a bullock is sacrificed at the proper time to certain heathen gods. It had for some time been noticed that dogs had begun to hate and fear the whole Whateley place as violently as they hated and feared young Wilbur personally.

In 1917 the war came, and Squire Sawyer Whateley, as chairman of the local draft board, had hard work finding a quota of young Dunwich men fit even to be sent to development camp. The government, alarmed at such signs of wholesale regional decadence, sent several officers and medical experts to investigate; conducting a survey which New England newspaper readers may still recall. It was the publicity attending this investigation which set reporters on the track of the Whateleys, and caused the Boston Globe and Arkham Advertiser to print flamboyant Sunday stories of young Wilbur's precociousness, Old Whateley's black magic, and the shelves of strange books, the sealed second storey of the ancient farmhouse, and the weirdness of the whole region and its hill noises. Wilbur was four and a half then, and looked like a lad of fifteen. His lips and cheeks were fuzzy with a coarse dark down, and his voice had begun to break.

Earl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place with both sets of reporters and camera men, and called their attention to the queer stench which now seemed to trickle down from the sealed upper spaces. It was, he said, exactly like a smell he had found in the toolshed abandoned when the house was finally repaired; and like the faint odours which he sometimes thought he caught near the stone circle on the mountains. Dunwich folk read the stories when they appeared, and grinned over the obvious mistakes. They wondered, too, why the writers made so much of the fact that Old Whateley always paid for his cattle in gold pieces of extremely ancient date. The Whateleys had received their visitors with ill-concealed distaste, though they did not dare court further publicity by a violent resistance or refusal to talk.

IV.

For a decade the annals of the Whateleys sink indistinguishably into the general life of a morbid community used to their queer ways and hardened to their May Eve and All-Hallows orgies. Twice a year they would light fires on the top of Sentinel Hill, at which times the mountain rumblings would recur with greater and greater violence; while at all seasons there were strange and portentous doings at the lonely farm-house. In the course of time callers professed to hear sounds in the sealed upper storey even when all the family were downstairs, and they wondered how swiftly or how lingeringly a cow or bullock was usually sacrificed. There was talk of a complaint to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals but nothing ever came of it, since Dunwich folk are never anxious to call the outside world's attention to themselves.

About 1923, when Wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature, and bearded face gave all the impressions of maturity, a second great siege of carpentry went on at the old house. It was all inside the sealed upper part, and from bits of discarded lumber people concluded that the youth and his grandfather had knocked out all the partitions and even removed the attic floor, leaving only one vast open void between the ground storey and the peaked roof. They had torn down the great central chimney, too, and fitted the rusty range with a flimsy outside tin stove-pipe.

In the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the growing number of whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen to chirp under his window at night. He seemed to regard the circumstance as one of great significance, and told the loungers at Osborn's that he thought his time had almost come.

'They whistle jest in tune with my breathin' naow,' he said, 'an' I guess they're gittin' ready to ketch my soul. They know it's a-goin' aout, an' dun't calc'late to miss it. Yew'll know, boys, arter I'm gone, whether they git me er not. Ef they dew, they'll keep up a-singin' an' laffin' till break o' day. Ef they dun't they'll kinder quiet daown like. I expeck them an' the souls they hunts fer hev some pretty tough tussles sometimes.'

On Lammas Night, 1924, Dr Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily summoned by Wilbur Whateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse through the darkness and telephoned from Osborn's in the village. He found Old Whateley in a very grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorous breathing that told of an end not far off. The shapeless albino daughter and oddly bearded grandson stood by the bedside, whilst from the vacant abyss overhead there came a disquieting suggestion of rhythmical surging or lapping, as of the waves on some level beach. The doctor, though, was chiefly disturbed by the chattering night birds outside; a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwills that cried their endless message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps of the dying man. It was uncanny and unnatural - too much, thought Dr Houghton, like the whole of the region he had entered so reluctantly in response to the urgent call.

Towards one o'clock Old Whateley gained consciousness, and interrupted his wheezing to choke out a few words to his grandson.

'More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows - an' that grows faster. It'll be ready to serve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth with the long chant that ye'll find on page 751 of the complete edition, an' then put a match to the prison. Fire from airth can't burn it nohaow.'

He was obviously quite mad. After a pause, during which the flock of whippoorwills outside adjusted their cries to the altered tempo while some indications of the strange hill noises came from afar off, he added another sentence or two.

'Feed it reg'lar, Willy, an' mind the quantity; but dun't let it grow too fast fer the place, fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout afore ye opens to Yog-Sothoth, it's all over an' no use. Only them from beyont kin make it multiply an' work... Only them, the old uns as wants to come back...'

But speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed at the way the whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more than an hour, when the final throaty rattle came. Dr Houghton drew shrunken lids over the glazing grey eyes as the tumult of birds faded imperceptibly to silence. Lavinia sobbed, but Wilbur only chuckled whilst the hill noises rumbled faintly.

'They didn't git him,' he muttered in his heavy bass voice.

Wilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous erudition in his one-sided way, and was quietly known by correspondence to many librarians in distant places where rare and forbidden books of old days are kept. He was more and more hated and dreaded around Dunwich because of certain youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his door; but was always able to silence inquiry through fear or through use of that fund of old-time gold which still, as in his grandfather's time, went forth regularly and increasingly for cattle-buying. He was now tremendously mature of aspect, and his height, having reached the normal adult limit, seemed inclined to wax beyond that figure. In 1925, when a scholarly correspondent from Miskatonic University called upon him one day and departed pale and puzzled, he was fully six and three-quarters feet tall.

Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino mother with a growing contempt, finally forbidding her to go to the hills with him on May Eve and Hallowmass; and in 1926 the poor creature complained to Mamie Bishop of being afraid of him.

'They's more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye, Mamie,' she said, 'an' naowadays they's more nor what I know myself. I vaow afur Gawd, I dun't know what he wants nor what he's a-tryin' to dew.'

That Hallowe'en the hill noises sounded louder than ever, and fire burned on Sentinel Hill as usual; but people paid more attention to the rhythmical screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated whippoorwills which seemed to be assembled near the unlighted Whateley farmhouse. After midnight their shrill notes burst into a kind of pandemoniac cachinnation which filled all the countryside, and not until dawn did they finally quiet down. Then they vanished, hurrying southward where they were fully a month overdue. What this meant, no one could quite be certain till later. None of the countryfolk seemed to have died - but poor Lavinia Whateley, the twisted albino, was never seen again.

In the summer of 1927 Wilbur repaired two sheds in the farmyard and began moving his books and effects out to them. Soon afterwards Earl Sawyer told the loungers at Osborn's that more carpentry was going on in the Whateley farmhouse. Wilbur was closing all the doors and windows on the ground floor, and seemed to be taking out partitions as he and his grandfather had done upstairs four years before. He was living in one of the sheds, and Sawyer thought he seemed unusually worried and tremulous. People generally suspected him of knowing something about his mother disappearance, and very few ever approached his neighbourhood now. His height had increased to more than seven feet, and showed no signs of ceasing its development.

V.

The following winter brought an event no less strange than Wilbur's first trip outside the Dunwich region. Correspondence with the Widener Library at Harvard, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the British Museum, the University of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of Miskatonic University at Arkham had failed to get him the loan of a book he desperately wanted; so at length he set out in person, shabby, dirty, bearded, and uncouth of dialect, to consult the copy at Miskatonic, which was the nearest to him geographically. Almost eight feet tall, and carrying a cheap new valise from Osborne's general store, this dark and goatish gargoyle appeared one day in Arkham in quest of the dreaded volume kept under lock and key at the college library - the hideous Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in Olaus Wormius' Latin version, as printed in Spain in the seventeenth century. He had never seen a city before, but had no thought save to find his way to the university grounds; where indeed, he passed heedlessly by the great white-fanged watchdog that barked with unnatural fury and enmity, and tugged frantically at its stout chaim.

Wilbur had with him the priceless but imperfect copy of Dr Dee's English version which his grandfather had bequeathed him, and upon receiving access to the Latin copy he at once began to collate the two texts with the aim of discovering a certain passage which would have come on the 751st page of his own defective volume. This much he could not civilly refrain from telling the librarian - the same erudite Henry Armitage (A.M. Miskatonic, Ph.D. Princeton, Litt.D. Johns Hopkins) who had once called at the farm, and who now politely plied him with questions. He was looking, he had to admit, for a kind of formula or incantation containing the frightful name Yog-Sothoth, and it puzzled him to find discrepancies, duplications, and ambiguities which made the matter of determination far from easy. As he copied the formula he finally chose, Dr Armitage looked involuntarily over his shoulder at the open pages; the left-hand one of which, in the Latin version, contained such monstrous threats to the peace and sanity of the world.

Nor is it to be thought (ran the text as Armitage mentally translated it) that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They had trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraver, but who bath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.

Dr. Annitage, associating what he was reading with what he had heard of Dunwich and its brooding presences, and of Wilbur Whateley and his dim, hideous aura that stretched from a dubious birth to a cloud of probable matricide, felt a wave of fright as tangible as a draught of the tomb's cold clamminess. The bent, goatish giant before him seemed like the spawn of another planet or dimension; like something only partly of mankind, and linked to black gulfs of essence and entity that stretch like titan phantasms beyond all spheres of force and matter, space and time. Presently Wilbur raised his head and began speaking in that strange, resonant fashion which hinted at sound-producing organs unlike the run of mankind's.

'Mr Armitage,' he said, 'I calc'late I've got to take that book home. They's things in it I've got to try under sarten conditions that I can't git here, en' it 'ud be a mortal sin to let a red-tape rule hold me up. Let me take it along, Sir, an' I'll swar they wun't nobody know the difference. I dun't need to tell ye I'll take good keer of it. It wan't me that put this Dee copy in the shape it is...'

He stopped as he saw firm denial on the librarian's face, and his own goatish features grew crafty. Armitage, half-ready to tell him he might make a copy of what parts he needed, thought suddenly of the possible consequences and checked himself. There was too much responsibility in giving such a being the key to such blasphemous outer spheres. Whateley saw how things stood, and tried to answer lightly.

'Wal, all right, ef ye feel that way abaout it. Maybe Harvard won't be so fussy as yew be.' And without saying more he rose and strode out of the building, stooping at each doorway.

Armitage heard the savage yelping of the great watchdog, and studied Whateley's gorilla-like lope as he crossed the bit of campus visible from the window. He thought of the wild tales he had heard, and recalled the old Sunday stories in the Advertiser; these things, and the lore he had picked up from Dunwich rustics and villagers during his one visit there. Unseen things not of earth - or at least not of tridimensional earth - rushed foetid and horrible through New England's glens, and brooded obscenely on the mountain tops. Of this he had long felt certain. Now he seemed to sense the close presence of some terrible part of the intruding horror, and to glimpse a hellish advance in the black dominion of the ancient and once passive nightmare. He locked away the Necronomicon with a shudder of disgust, but the room still reeked with an unholy and unidentifiable stench. 'As a foulness shall ye know them,' he quoted. Yes - the odour was the same as that which had sickened him at the Whateley farmhouse less than three years before. He thought of Wilbur, goatish and ominous, once again, and laughed mockingly at the village rumours of his parentage.

'Inbreeding?' Armitage muttered half-aloud to himself. 'Great God, what simpletons! Show them Arthur Machen's Great God Pan and they'll think it a common Dunwich scandal! But what thing - what cursed shapeless influence on or off this three-dimensional earth - was Wilbur Whateley's father? Born on Candlemas - nine months after May Eve of 1912, when the talk about the queer earth noises reached clear to Arkham - what walked on the mountains that May night? What Roodmas horror fastened itself on the world in half-human flesh and blood?'

During the ensuing weeks Dr Armitage set about to collect all possible data on Wilbur Whateley and the formless presences around Dunwich. He got in communication with Dr Houghton of Aylesbury, who had attended Old Whateley in his last illness, and found much to ponder over in the grandfather's last words as quoted by the physician. A visit to Dunwich Village failed to bring out much that was new; but a close survey of the Necronomicon, in those parts which Wilbur had sought so avidly, seemed to supply new and terrible clues to the nature, methods, and desires of the strange evil so vaguely threatening this planet. Talks with several students of archaic lore in Boston, and letters to many others elsewhere, gave him a growing amazement which passed slowly through varied degrees of alarm to a state of really acute spiritual fear. As the summer drew on he felt dimly that something ought to be done about the lurking terrors of the upper Miskatonic valley, and about the monstrous being known to the human world as Wilbur Whateley.

VI.

The Dunwich horror itself came between Lammas and the equinox in 1928, and Dr Armitage was among those who witnessed its monstrous prologue. He had heard, meanwhile, of Whateley's grotesque trip to Cambridge, and of his frantic efforts to borrow or copy from the Necronomicon at the Widener Library. Those efforts had been in vain, since Armitage had issued warnings of the keenest intensity to all librarians having charge of the dreaded volume. Wilbur had been shockingly nervous at Cambridge; anxious for the book, yet almost equally anxious to get home again, as if he feared the results of being away long.

Early in August the half-expected outcome developed, and in the small hours of the third Dr Armitage was awakened suddenly by the wild, fierce cries of the savage watchdog on the college campus. Deep and terrible, the snarling, half-mad growls and barks continued; always in mounting volume, but with hideously significant pauses. Then there rang out a scream from a wholly different throat - such a scream as roused half the sleepers of Arkham and haunted their dreams ever afterwards - such a scream as could come from no being born of earth, or wholly of earth.

Armitage, hastening into some clothing and rushing across the street and lawn to the college buildings, saw that others were ahead of him; and heard the echoes of a burglar-alarm still shrilling from the library. An open window showed black and gaping in the moonlight. What had come had indeed completed its entrance; for the barking and the screaming, now fast fading into a mixed low growling and moaning, proceeded unmistakably from within. Some instinct warned Armitage that what was taking place was not a thing for unfortified eyes to see, so he brushed back the crowd with authority as he unlocked the vestibule door. Among the others he saw Professor Warren Rice and Dr Francis Morgan, men to whom he had told some of his conjectures and misgivings; and these two he motioned to accompany him inside. The inward sounds, except for a watchful, droning whine from the dog, had by this time quite subsided; but Armitage now perceived with a sudden start that a loud chorus of whippoorwills among the shrubbery had commenced a damnably rhythmical piping, as if in unison with the last breaths of a dying man.

The building was full of a frightful stench which Dr Armitage knew too well, and the three men rushed across the hall to the small genealogical reading-room whence the low whining came. For a second nobody dared to turn on the light, then Armitage summoned up his courage and snapped the switch. One of the three - it is not certain which - shrieked aloud at what sprawled before them among disordered tables and overturned chairs. Professor Rice declares that he wholly lost consciousness for an instant, though he did not stumble or fall.

The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall, and the dog had torn off all the clothing and some of the skin. It was not quite dead, but twitched silently and spasmodically while its chest heaved in monstrous unison with the mad piping of the expectant whippoorwills outside. Bits of shoe-leather and fragments of apparel were scattered about the room, and just inside the window an empty canvas sack lay where it had evidently been thrown. Near the central desk a revolver had fallen, a dented but undischarged cartridge later explaining why it had not been fired. The thing itself, however, crowded out all other images at the time. It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions. It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateley's upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth unchallenged or uneradicated.

Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the dog's rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.

Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth's giant saurians, and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws. When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatory cause normal to the non-human greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearance which alternated with a sickly grayish-white in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious discoloration behind it.

As the presence of the three men seemed to rouse the dying thing, it began to mumble without turning or raising its head. Dr Armitage made no written record of its mouthings, but asserts confidently that nothing in English was uttered. At first the syllables defied all correlation with any speech of earth, but towards the last there came some disjointed fragments evidently taken from the Necronomicon, that monstrous blasphemy in quest of which the thing had perished. These fragments, as Armitage recalls them, ran something like 'N'gai, n'gha'ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y'hah: Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth ...' They trailed off into nothingness as the whippoorwills shrieked in rhythmical crescendos of unholy anticipation.

Then came a halt in the gasping, and the dog raised its head in a long, lugubrious howl. A change came over the yellow, goatish face of the prostrate thing, and the great black eyes fell in appallingly. Outside the window the shrilling of the whippoorwills had suddenly ceased, and above the murmurs of the gathering crowd there came the sound of a panic-struck whirring and fluttering. Against the moon vast clouds of feathery watchers rose and raced from sight, frantic at that which they had sought for prey.

All at once the dog started up abruptly, gave a frightened bark, and leaped nervously out of the window by which it had entered. A cry rose from the crowd, and Dr Armitage shouted to the men outside that no one must be admitted till the police or medical examiner came. He was thankful that the windows were just too high to permit of peering in, and drew the dark curtains carefully down over each one. By this time two policemen had arrived; and Dr Morgan, meeting them in the vestibule, was urging them for their own sakes to postpone entrance to the stench-filled reading-room till the examiner came and the prostrate thing could be covered up.

Meanwhile frightful changes were taking place on the floor. One need not describe the kind and rate of shrinkage and disintegration that occurred before the eyes of Dr Armitage and Professor Rice; but it is permissible to say that, aside from the external appearance of face and hands, the really human element in Wilbur Whateley must have been very small. When the medical examiner came, there was only a sticky whitish mass on the painted boards, and the monstrous odour had nearly disappeared. Apparently Whateley had had no skull or bony skeleton; at least, in any true or stable sense. He had taken somewhat after his unknown father.

VII.

Yet all this was only the prologue of the actual Dunwich horror. Formalities were gone through by bewildered officials, abnormal details were duly kept from press and public, and men were sent to Dunwich and Aylesbury to look up property and notify any who might be heirs of the late Wilbur Whateley. They found the countryside in great agitation, both because of the growing rumblings beneath the domed hills, and because of the unwonted stench and the surging, lapping sounds which came increasingly from the great empty shell formed by Whateley's boarded-up farmhouse. Earl Sawyer, who tended the horse and cattle during Wilbur's absence, had developed a woefully acute case of nerves. The officials devised excuses not to enter the noisome boarded place; and were glad to confine their survey of the deceased's living quarters, the newly mended sheds, to a single visit. They filed a ponderous report at the courthouse in Aylesbury, and litigations concerning heirship are said to be still in progress amongst the innumerable Whateleys, decayed and undecayed, of the upper Miskatonic valley.

An almost interminable manuscript in strange characters, written in a huge ledger and adjudged a sort of diary because of the spacing and the variations in ink and penmanship, presented a baffling puzzle to those who found it on the old bureau which served as its owner's desk. After a week of debate it was sent to Miskatonic University, together with the deceased's collection of strange books, for study and possible translation; but even the best linguists soon saw that it was not likely to be unriddled with ease. No trace of the ancient gold with which Wilbur and Old Whateley had always paid their debts has yet been discovered.

It was in the dark of September ninth that the horror broke loose. The hill noises had been very pronounced during the evening, and dogs barked frantically all night. Early risers on the tenth noticed a peculiar stench in the air. About seven o'clock Luther Brown, the hired boy at George Corey's, between Cold Spring Glen and the village, rushed frenziedly back from his morning trip to Ten-Acre Meadow with the cows. He was almost convulsed with fright as he stumbled into the kitchen; and in the yard outside the no less frightened herd were pawing and lowing pitifully, having followed the boy back in the panic they shared with him. Between gasps Luther tried to stammer out his tale to Mrs Corey.

'Up thar in the rud beyont the glen, Mis' Corey - they's suthin' ben thar! It smells like thunder, an' all the bushes an' little trees is pushed back from the rud like they'd a haouse ben moved along of it. An' that ain't the wust, nuther. They's prints in the rud, Mis' Corey - great raound prints as big as barrel-heads, all sunk dawon deep like a elephant had ben along, only they's a sight more nor four feet could make! I looked at one or two afore I run, an' I see every one was covered with lines spreadin' aout from one place, like as if big palm-leaf fans - twict or three times as big as any they is - hed of ben paounded dawon into the rud. An' the smell was awful, like what it is around Wizard Whateley's ol' haouse...'

Here he faltered, and seemed to shiver afresh with the fright that had sent him flying home. Mrs Corey, unable to extract more information, began telephoning the neighbours; thus starting on its rounds the overture of panic that heralded the major terrors. When she got Sally Sawyer, housekeeper at Seth Bishop's, the nearest place to Whateley's, it became her turn to listen instead of transmit; for Sally's boy Chauncey, who slept poorly, had been up on the hill towards Whateley's, and had dashed back in terror after one look at the place, and at the pasturage where Mr Bishop's cows had been left out all night.

'Yes, Mis' Corey,' came Sally's tremulous voice over the party wire, 'Cha'ncey he just come back a-postin', and couldn't half talk fer bein' scairt! He says Ol' Whateley's house is all bowed up, with timbers scattered raound like they'd ben dynamite inside; only the bottom floor ain't through, but is all covered with a kind o' tar-like stuff that smells awful an' drips daown offen the aidges onto the graoun' whar the side timbers is blowed away. An' they's awful kinder marks in the yard, tew - great raound marks bigger raound than a hogshead, an' all sticky with stuff like is on the browed-up haouse. Cha'ncey he says they leads off into the medders, whar a great swath wider'n a barn is matted daown, an' all the stun walls tumbled every whichway wherever it goes.

'An' he says, says he, Mis' Corey, as haow he sot to look fer Seth's caows, frightened ez he was an' faound 'em in the upper pasture nigh the Devil's Hop Yard in an awful shape. Haff on 'em's clean gone, an' nigh haff o' them that's left is sucked most dry o' blood, with sores on 'em like they's ben on Whateleys cattle ever senct Lavinny's black brat was born. Seth hes gone aout naow to look at 'em, though I'll vaow he won't keer ter git very nigh Wizard Whateley's! Cha'ncey didn't look keerful ter see whar the big matted-daown swath led arter it leff the pasturage, but he says he thinks it p'inted towards the glen rud to the village.

'I tell ye, Mis' Corey, they's suthin' abroad as hadn't orter be abroad, an' I for one think that black Wilbur Whateley, as come to the bad end he deserved, is at the bottom of the breedin' of it. He wa'n't all human hisself, I allus says to everybody; an' I think he an' Ol' Whateley must a raised suthin' in that there nailed-up haouse as ain't even so human as he was. They's allus ben unseen things araound Dunwich - livin' things - as ain't human an' ain't good fer human folks.

'The graoun' was a-talkin' las' night, an' towards mornin' Cha'ncey he heered the whippoorwills so laoud in Col' Spring Glen he couldn't sleep nun. Then he thought he heered another faint-like saound over towards Wizard Whateley's - a kinder rippin' or tearin' o' wood, like some big box er crate was bein' opened fur off. What with this an' that, he didn't git to sleep at all till sunup, an' no sooner was he up this mornin', but he's got to go over to Whateley's an' see what's the matter. He see enough I tell ye, Mis' Corey! This dun't mean no good, an' I think as all the men-folks ought to git up a party an' do suthin'. I know suthin' awful's abaout, an' feel my time is nigh, though only Gawd knows jest what it is.

'Did your Luther take accaount o' whar them big tracks led tew? No? Wal, Mis' Corey, ef they was on the glen rud this side o' the glen, an' ain't got to your haouse yet, I calc'late they must go into the glen itself. They would do that. I allus says Col' Spring Glen ain't no healthy nor decent place. The whippoorwills an' fireflies there never did act like they was creaters o' Gawd, an' they's them as says ye kin hear strange things a-rushin' an' a-talkin' in the air dawon thar ef ye stand in the right place, atween the rock falls an' Bear's Den.'

By that noon fully three-quarters of the men and boys of Dunwich were trooping over the roads and meadows between the newmade Whateley ruins and Cold Spring Glen, examining in horror the vast, monstrous prints, the maimed Bishop cattle, the strange, noisome wreck of the farmhouse, and the bruised, matted vegetation of the fields and roadside. Whatever had burst loose upon the world had assuredly gone down into the great sinister ravine; for all the trees on the banks were bent and broken, and a great avenue had been gouged in the precipice-hanging underbrush. It was as though a house, launched by an avalanche, had slid down through the tangled growths of the almost vertical slope. From below no sound came, but only a distant, undefinable foetor; and it is not to be wondered at that the men preferred to stay on the edge and argue, rather than descend and beard the unknown Cyclopean horror in its lair. Three dogs that were with the party had barked furiously at first, but seemed cowed and reluctant when near the glen. Someone telephoned the news to the Aylesbury Transcript; but the editor, accustomed to wild tales from Dunwich, did no more than concoct a humorous paragraph about it; an item soon afterwards reproduced by the Associated Press.

That night everyone went home, and every house and barn was barricaded as stoutly as possible. Needless to say, no cattle were allowed to remain in open pasturage. About two in the morning a frightful stench and the savage barking of the dogs awakened the household at Elmer Frye's, on the eastern edge of Cold Spring Glen, and all agreed that they could hear a sort of muffled swishing or lapping sound from somewhere outside. Mrs Frye proposed telephoning the neighbours, and Elmer was about to agree when the noise of splintering wood burst in upon their deliberations. It came, apparently, from the barn; and was quickly followed by a hideous screaming and stamping amongst the cattle. The dogs slavered and crouched close to the feet of the fear-numbed family. Frye lit a lantern through force of habit, but knew it would be death to go out into that black farmyard. The children and the women-folk whimpered, kept from screaming by some obscure, vestigial instinct of defence which told them their lives depended on silence. At last the noise of the cattle subsided to a pitiful moaning, and a great snapping, crashing, and crackling ensued. The Fryes, huddled together in the sitting-room, did not dare to move until the last echoes died away far down in Cold Spring Glen. Then, amidst the dismal moans from the stable and the daemoniac piping of the late whippoorwills in the glen, Selina Frye tottered to the telephone and spread what news she could of the second phase of the horror.

The next day all the countryside was in a panic; and cowed, uncommunicative groups came and went where the fiendish thing had occurred. Two titan swaths of destruction stretched from the glen to the Frye farmyard, monstrous prints covered the bare patches of ground, and one side of the old red barn had completely caved in. Of the cattle, only a quarter could be found and identified. Some of these were in curious fragments, and all that survived had to be shot. Earl Sawyer suggested that help be asked from Aylesbury or Arkham, but others maintained it would be of no use. Old Zebulon Whateley, of a branch that hovered about halfway between soundness and decadence, made darkly wild suggestions about rites that ought to be practiced on the hill-tops. He came of a line where tradition ran strong, and his memories of chantings in the great stone circles were not altogether connected with Wilbur and his grandfather.

Darkness fell upon a stricken countryside too passive to organize for real defence. In a few cases closely related families would band together and watch in the gloom under one roof; but in general there was only a repetition of the barricading of the night before, and a futile, ineffective gesture of loading muskets and setting pitchforks handily about. Nothing, however, occurred except some hill noises; and when the day came there were many who hoped that the new horror had gone as swiftly as it had come. There were even bold souls who proposed an offensive expedition down in the glen, though they did not venture to set an actual example to the still reluctant majority.

When night came again the barricading was repeated, though there was less huddling together of families. In the morning both the Frye and the Seth Bishop households reported excitement among the dogs and vague sounds and stenches from afar, while early explorers noted with horror a fresh set of the monstrous tracks in the road skirting Sentinel Hill. As before, the sides of the road showed a bruising indicative of the blasphemously stupendous bulk of the horror; whilst the conformation of the tracks seemed to argue a passage in two directions, as if the moving mountain had come from Cold Spring Glen and returned to it along the same path. At the base of the hill a thirty-foot swath of crushed shrubbery saplings led steeply upwards, and the seekers gasped when they saw that even the most perpendicular places did not deflect the inexorable trail. Whatever the horror was, it could scale a sheer stony cliff of almost complete verticality; and as the investigators climbed round to the hill's summit by safer routes they saw that the trail ended - or rather, reversed - there.

It was here that the Whateleys used to build their hellish fires and chant their hellish rituals by the table-like stone on May Eve and Hallowmass. Now that very stone formed the centre of a vast space thrashed around by the mountainous horror, whilst upon its slightly concave surface was a thick and foetid deposit of the same tarry stickiness observed on the floor of the ruined Whateley farmhouse when the horror escaped. Men looked at one another and muttered. Then they looked down the hill. Apparently the horror had descended by a route much the same as that of its ascent. To speculate was futile. Reason, logic, and normal ideas of motivation stood confounded. Only old Zebulon, who was not with the group, could have done justice to the situation or suggested a plausible explanation.

Thursday night began much like the others, but it ended less happily. The whippoorwills in the glen had screamed with such unusual persistence that many could not sleep, and about 3 A.M. all the party telephones rang tremulously. Those who took down their receivers heard a fright-mad voice shriek out, 'Help, oh, my Gawd! ...' and some thought a crashing sound followed the breaking off of the exclamation. There was nothing more. No one dared do anything, and no one knew till morning whence the call came. Then those who had heard it called everyone on the line, and found that only the Fryes did not reply. The truth appeared an hour later, when a hastily assembled group of armed men trudged out to the Frye place at the head of the glen. It was horrible, yet hardly a surprise. There were more swaths and monstrous prints, but there was no longer any house. It had caved in like an egg-shell, and amongst the ruins nothing living or dead could be discovered. Only a stench and a tarry stickiness. The Elmer Fryes had been erased from Dunwich.

VIII.

In the meantime a quieter yet even more spiritually poignant phase of the horror had been blackly unwinding itself behind the closed door of a shelf-lined room in Arkham. The curious manuscript record or diary of Wilbur Whateley, delivered to Miskatonic University for translation had caused much worry and bafflement among the experts in language both ancient and modern; its very alphabet, notwithstanding a general resemblance to the heavily-shaded Arabic used in Mesopotamia, being absolutely unknown to any available authority. The final conclusion of the linguists was that the text represented an artificial alphabet, giving the effect of a cipher; though none of the usual methods of cryptographic solution seemed to furnish any clue, even when applied on the basis of every tongue the writer might conceivably have used. The ancient books taken from Whateley's quarters, while absorbingly interesting and in several cases promising to open up new and terrible lines of research among philosophers and men of science, were of no assistance whatever in this matter. One of them, a heavy tome with an iron clasp, was in another unknown alphabet - this one of a very different cast, and resembling Sanskrit more than anything else. The old ledger was at length given wholly into the charge of Dr Armitage, both because of his peculiar interest in the Whateley matter, and because of his wide linguistic learning and skill in the mystical formulae of antiquity and the middle ages.

Armitage had an idea that the alphabet might be something esoterically used by certain forbidden cults which have come down from old times, and which have inherited many forms and traditions from the wizards of the Saracenic world. That question, however, he did not deem vital; since it would be unnecessary to know the origin of the symbols if, as he suspected, they were used as a cipher in a modern language. It was his belief that, considering the great amount of text involved, the writer would scarcely have wished the trouble of using another speech than his own, save perhaps in certain special formulae and incantations. Accordingly he attacked the manuscript with the preliminary assumption that the bulk of it was in English.

Dr Armitage knew, from the repeated failures of his colleagues, that the riddle was a deep and complex one; and that no simple mode of solution could merit even a trial. All through late August he fortified himself with the mass lore of cryptography; drawing upon the fullest resources of his own library, and wading night after night amidst the arcana of Trithemius' Poligraphia, Giambattista Porta's De Furtivis Literarum Notis, De Vigenere's Traite des Chiffres, Falconer's Cryptomenysis Patefacta, Davys' and Thicknesse's eighteenth-century treatises, and such fairly modern authorities as Blair, van Marten and Kluber's script itself, and in time became convinced that he had to deal with one of those subtlest and most ingenious of cryptograms, in which many separate lists of corresponding letters are arranged like the multiplication table, and the message built up with arbitrary key-words known only to the initiated. The older authorities seemed rather more helpful than the newer ones, and Armitage concluded that the code of the manuscript was one of great antiquity, no doubt handed down through a long line of mystical experimenters. Several times he seemed near daylight, only to be set back by some unforeseen obstacle. Then, as September approached, the clouds began to clear. Certain letters, as used in certain parts of the manuscript, emerged definitely and unmistakably; and it became obvious that the text was indeed in English.

On the evening of September second the last major barrier gave way, and Dr Armitage read for the first time a continuous passage of Wilbur Whateley's annals. It was in truth a diary, as all had thought; and it was couched in a style clearly showing the mixed occult erudition and general illiteracy of the strange being who wrote it. Almost the first long passage that Armitage deciphered, an entry dated November 26, 1916, proved highly startling and disquieting. It was written,he remembered, by a child of three and a half who looked like a lad of twelve or thirteen.

Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth (it ran), which did not like, it being answerable from the hill and not from the air. That upstairs more ahead of me than I had thought it would be, and is not like to have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins's collie Jack when he went to bite me, and Elam says he would kill me if he dast. I guess he won't. Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula last night, and I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles. I shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off, if I can't break through with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it. They from the air told me at Sabbat that it will be years before I can clear off the earth, and I guess grandfather will be dead then, so I shall have to learn all the angles of the planes and all the formulas between the Yr and the Nhhngr. They from outside will help, but they cannot take body without human blood. That upstairs looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a little when I make the Voorish sign or blow the powder of Ibn Ghazi at it, and it is near like them at May Eve on the Hill. The other face may wear off some. I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be transfigured there being much of outside to work on.

Morning found Dr Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of wakeful concentration. He had not left the manuscript all night, but sat at his table under the electric light turning page after page with shaking hands as fast as he could decipher the cryptic text. He had nervously telephoned his wife he would not be home, and when she brought him a breakfast from the house he could scarcely dispose of a mouthful. All that day he read on, now and then halted maddeningly as a reapplication of the complex key became necessary. Lunch and dinner were brought him, but he ate only the smallest fraction of either. Toward the middle of the next night he drowsed off in his chair, but soon woke out of a tangle of nightmares almost as hideous as the truths and menaces to man's existence that he had uncovered.

On the morning of September fourth Professor Rice and Dr Morgan insisted on seeing him for a while, and departed trembling and ashen-grey. That evening he went to bed, but slept only fitfully. Wednesday - the next day - he was back at the manuscript, and began to take copious notes both from the current sections and from those he had already deciphered. In the small hours of that night he slept a little in a easy chair in his office, but was at the manuscript again before dawn. Some time before noon his physician, Dr Hartwell, called to see him and insisted that he cease work. He refused; intimating that it was of the most vital importance for him to complete the reading of the diary and promising an explanation in due course of time. That evening, just as twilight fell, he finished his terrible perusal and sank back exhausted. His wife, bringing his dinner, found him in a half-comatose state; but he was conscious enough to warn her off with a sharp cry when he saw her eyes wander toward the notes he had taken. Weakly rising, he gathered up the scribbled papers and sealed them all in a great envelope, which he immediately placed in his inside coat pocket. He had sufficient strength to get home, but was so clearly in need of medical aid that Dr Hartwell was summoned at once. As the doctor put him to bed he could only mutter over and over again, 'But what, in God's name, can we do?'

Dr Armitage slept, but was partly delirious the next day. He made no explanations to Hartwell, but in his calmer moments spoke of the imperative need of a long conference with Rice and Morgan. His wilder wanderings were very startling indeed, including frantic appeals that something in a boarded-up farmhouse be destroyed, and fantastic references to some plan for the extirpation of the entire human race and all animal and vegetable life from the earth by some terrible elder race of beings from another dimension. He would shout that the world was in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it and drag it away from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other plane or phase of entity from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of aeons ago. At other times he would call for the dreaded Necronomicon and the Daemonolatreia of Remigius, in which he seemed hopeful of finding some formula to check the peril he conjured up.

'Stop them, stop theml' he would shout. 'Those Whateleys meant to let them in, and the worst of all is left! Tell Rice and Morgan we must do something - it's a blind business, but I know how to make the powder... It hasn't been fed since the second of August, when Wilbur came here to his death, and at that rate...'

But Armitage had a sound physique despite his seventy-three years, and slept off his disorder that night without developing any real fever. He woke late Friday, clear of head, though sober with a gnawing fear and tremendous sense of responsibility. Saturday afternoon he felt able to go over to the library and summon Rice and Morgan for a conference, and the rest of that day and evening the three men tortured their brains in the wildest speculation and the most desperate debate. Strange and terrible books were drawn voluminously from the stack shelves and from secure places of storage; and diagrams and formulae were copied with feverish haste and in bewildering abundance. Of scepticism there was none. All three had seen the body of Wilbur Whateley as it lay on the floor in a room of that very building, and after that not one of them could feel even slightly inclined to treat the diary as a madman's raving.

Opinions were divided as to notifying the Massachusetts State Police, and the negative finally won. There were things involved which simply could not be believed by those who had not seen a sample, as indeed was made clear during certain subsequent investigations. Late at night the conference disbanded without having developed a definite plan, but all day Sunday Armitage was busy comparing formulae and mixing chemicals obtained from the college laboratory. The more he reflected on the hellish diary, the more he was inclined to doubt the efficacy of any material agent in stamping out the entity which Wilbur Whateley had left behind him - the earth threatening entity which, unknown to him, was to burst forth in a few hours and become the memorable Dunwich horror.

Monday was a repetition of Sunday with Dr Armitage, for the task in hand required an infinity of research and experiment. Further consultations of the monstrous diary brought about various changes of plan, and he knew that even in the end a large amount of uncertainty must remain. By Tuesday he had a definite line of action mapped out, and believed he would try a trip to Dunwich within a week. Then, on Wednesday, the great shock came. Tucked obscurely away in a corner of the Arkham Advertiser was a facetious little item from the Associated Press, telling what a record-breaking monster the bootleg whisky of Dunwich had raised up. Armitage, half stunned, could only telephone for Rice and Morgan. Far into the night they discussed, and the next day was a whirlwind of preparation on the part of them all. Armitage knew he would be meddling with terrible powers, yet saw that there was no other way to annul the deeper and more malign meddling which others had done before him.

IX.

Friday morning Armitage, Rice, and Morgan set out by motor for Dunwich, arriving at the village about one in the afternoon. The day was pleasant, but even in the brightest sunlight a kind of quiet dread and portent seemed to hover about the strangely domed hills and the deep, shadowy ravines of the stricken region. Now and then on some mountain top a gaunt circle of stones could be glimpsed against the sky. From the air of hushed fright at Osborn's store they knew something hideous had happened, and soon learned of the annihilation of the Elmer Frye house and family. Throughout that afternoon they rode around Dunwich, questioning the natives concerning all that had occurred, and seeing for themselves with rising pangs of horror the drear Frye ruins with their lingering traces of the tarry stickiness, the blasphemous tracks in the Frye yard, the wounded Seth Bishop cattle, and the enormous swaths of disturbed vegetation in various places. The trail up and down Sentinel Hill seemed to Armitage of almost cataclysmic significance, and he looked long at the sinister altar-like stone on the summit.

At length the visitors, apprised of a party of State Police which had come from Aylesbury that morning in response to the first telephone reports of the Frye tragedy, decided to seek out the officers and compare notes as far as practicable. This, however, they found more easily planned than performed; since no sign of the party could be found in any direction. There had been five of them in a car, but now the car stood empty near the ruins in the Frye yard. The natives, all of whom had talked with the policemen, seemed at first as perplexed as Armitage and his companions. Then old Sam Hutchins thought of something and turned pale, nudging Fred Farr and pointing to the dank, deep hollow that yawned close by.

'Gawd,' he gasped, 'I telled 'em not ter go daown into the glen, an' I never thought nobody'd dew it with them tracks an' that smell an' the whippoorwills a-screechin' daown thar in the dark o' noonday...'

A cold shudder ran through natives and visitors alike, and every ear seemed strained in a kind of instinctive, unconscious listening. Armitage, now that he had actually come upon the horror and its monstrous work, trembled with the responsibility he felt to be his. Night would soon fall, and it was then that the mountainous blasphemy lumbered upon its eldritch course. Negotium perambuians in tenebris... The old librarian rehearsed the formulae he had memorized, and clutched the paper containing the alternative one he had not memorized. He saw that his electric flashlight was in working order. Rice, beside him, took from a valise a metal sprayer of the sort used in combating insects; whilst Morgan uncased the big-game rifle on which he relied despite his colleague's warnings that no material weapon would be of help.

Armitage, having read the hideous diary, knew painfully well what kind of a manifestation to expect; but he did not add to the fright of the Dunwich people by giving any hints or clues. He hoped that it might be conquered without any revelation to the world of the monstrous thing it had escaped. As the shadows gathered, the natives commenced to disperse homeward, anxious to bar themselves indoors despite the present evidence that all human locks and bolts were useless before a force that could bend trees and crush houses when it chose. They shook their heads at the visitors' plan to stand guard at the Frye ruins near the glen; and, as they left, had little expectancy of ever seeing the watchers again.

There were rumblings under the hills that night, and the whippoorwills piped threateningly. Once in a while a wind, sweeping up out of Cold Spring Glen, would bring a touch of ineffable foetor to the heavy night air; such a foetor as all three of the watchers had smelled once before, when they stood above a dying thing that had passed for fifteen years and a half as a human being. But the looked-for terror did not appear. Whatever was down there in the glen was biding its time, and Armitage told his colleagues it would be suicidal to try to attack it in the dark.

Morning came wanly, and the night-sounds ceased. It was a grey, bleak day, with now and then a drizzle of rain; and heavier and heavier clouds seemed to be piling themselves up beyond the hills to the north-west. The men from Arkham were undecided what to do. Seeking shelter from the increasing rainfall beneath one of the few undestroyed Frye outbuildings, they debated the wisdom of waiting, or of taking the aggressive and going down into the glen in quest of their nameless, monstrous quarry. The downpour waxed in heaviness, and distant peals of thunder sounded from far horizons. Sheet lightning shimmered, and then a forky bolt flashed near at hand, as if descending into the accursed glen itself. The sky grew very dark, and the watchers hoped that the storm would prove a short, sharp one followed by clear weather.

It was still gruesomely dark when, not much over an hour later, a confused babel of voices sounded down the road. Another moment brought to view a frightened group of more than a dozen men, running, shouting, and even whimpering hysterically. Someone in the lead began sobbing out words, and the Arkham men started violently when those words developed a coherent form.

'Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd,' the voice choked out. 'It's a-goin' agin, an' this time by day! It's aout - it's aout an' a-movin' this very minute, an' only the Lord knows when it'll be on us all!'

The speaker panted into silence, but another took up his message.

'Nigh on a haour ago Zeb Whateley here heered the 'phone a-ringin', an' it was Mis' Corey, George's wife, that lives daown by the junction. She says the hired boy Luther was aout drivin' in the caows from the storm arter the big bolt, when he see all the trees a-bendin' at the maouth o' the glen - opposite side ter this - an' smelt the same awful smell like he smelt when he faound the big tracks las' Monday mornin'. An' she says he says they was a swishin' lappin' saound, more nor what the bendin' trees an' bushes could make, an' all on a suddent the trees along the rud begun ter git pushed one side, an' they was a awful stompin' an' splashin' in the mud. But mind ye, Luther he didn't see nothin' at all, only just the bendin' trees an' underbrush.

'Then fur ahead where Bishop's Brook goes under the rud he heerd a awful creakin' an' strainin' on the bridge, an' says he could tell the saound o' wood a-startin' to crack an' split. An' all the whiles he never see a thing, only them trees an' bushes a-bendin'. An' when the swishin' saound got very fur off - on the rud towards Wizard Whateley's an' Sentinel Hill - Luther he had the guts ter step up whar he'd heerd it fust an' look at the graound. It was all mud an' water, an' the sky was dark, an' the rain was wipin' aout all tracks abaout as fast as could be; but beginnin' at the glen maouth, whar the trees hed moved, they was still some o' them awful prints big as bar'ls like he seen Monday.'

At this point the first excited speaker interrupted.

'But that ain't the trouble naow - that was only the start. Zeb here was callin' folks up an' everybody was a-listenin' in when a call from Seth Bishop's cut in. His haousekeeper Sally was carryin' on fit to kill - she'd jest seed the trees a-bendin' beside the rud, an' says they was a kind o' mushy saound, like a elephant puffin' an' treadin', a-headin' fer the haouse. Then she up an' spoke suddent of a fearful smell, an' says her boy Cha'ncey was a-screamin' as haow it was jest like what he smelt up to the Whateley rewins Monday mornin'. An' the dogs was barkin' an' whinin' awful.

'An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the rud had jest caved in like the storm bed blowed it over, only the wind w'an't strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' we could hear lots o' folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she yelled again, an' says the front yard picket fence hed just crumbled up, though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then everybody on the line could hear Cha'ncey an' old Seth Bishop a-yellin' tew, an' Sally was shriekin' aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse - not lightnin' nor nothin', but suthin' heavy again' the front, that kep' a-launchin' itself agin an' agin, though ye couldn't see nothin' aout the front winders. An' then... an' then...'

Lines of fright deepened on every face; and Armitage, shaken as he was, had barely poise enough to prompt the speaker.

'An' then.... Sally she yelled aout, "O help, the haouse is a-cavin' in... an' on the wire we could hear a turrible crashin' an' a hull flock o' screaming... jes like when Elmer Frye's place was took, only wuss...'

The man paused, and another of the crowd spoke.

'That's all - not a saound nor squeak over the 'phone arter that. Jest still-like. We that heerd it got aout Fords an' wagons an' rounded up as many able-bodied men-folks as we could git, at Corey's place, an' come up here ter see what yew thought best ter dew. Not but what I think it's the Lord's jedgment fer our iniquities, that no mortal kin ever set aside.'

Armitage saw that the time for positive action had come, and spoke decisively to the faltering group of frightened rustics.

'We must follow it, boys.' He made his voice as reassuring as possible. 'I believe there's a chance of putting it out of business. You men know that those Whateleys were wizards - well, this thing is a thing of wizardry, and must be put down by the same means. I've seen Wilbur Whateley's diary and read some of the strange old books he used to read; and I think I know the right kind of spell to recite to make the thing fade away. Of course, one can't be sure, but we can always take a chance. It's invisible - I knew it would be - but there's powder in this long-distance sprayer that might make it show up for a second. Later on we'll try it. It's a frightful thing to have alive, but it isn't as bad as what Wilbur would have let in if he'd lived longer. You'll never know what the world escaped. Now we've only this one thing to fight, and it can't multiply. It can, though, do a lot of harm; so we mustn't hesitate to rid the community of it.

'We must follow it - and the way to begin is to go to the place that has just been wrecked. Let somebody lead the way - I don't know your roads very well, but I've an idea there might be a shorter cut across lots. How about it?'

The men shuffled about a moment, and then Earl Sawyer spoke softly, pointing with a grimy finger through the steadily lessening rain.

'I guess ye kin git to Seth Bishop's quickest by cuttin' across the lower medder here, wadin' the brook at the low place, an' climbin' through Carrier's mowin' an' the timber-lot beyont. That comes aout on the upper rud mighty nigh Seth's - a leetle t'other side.'

Armitage, with Rice and Morgan, started to walk in the direction indicated; and most of the natives followed slowly. The sky was growing lighter, and there were signs that the storm had worn itself away. When Armitage inadvertently took a wrong direction, Joe Osborn warned him and walked ahead to show the right one. Courage and confidence were mounting, though the twilight of the almost perpendicular wooded hill which lay towards the end of their short cut, and among whose fantastic ancient trees they had to scramble as if up a ladder, put these qualities to a severe test.

At length they emerged on a muddy road to find the sun coming out. They were a little beyond the Seth Bishop place, but bent trees and hideously unmistakable tracks showed what had passed by. Only a few moments were consumed in surveying the ruins just round the bend. It was the Frye incident all over again, and nothing dead or living was found in either of the collapsed shells which had been the Bishop house and barn. No one cared to remain there amidst the stench and tarry stickiness, but all turned instinctively to the line of horrible prints leading on towards the wrecked Whateley farmhouse and the altar-crowned slopes of Sentinel Hill.

As the men passed the site of Wilbur Whateley's abode they shuddered visibly, and seemed again to mix hesitancy with their zeal. It was no joke tracking down something as big as a house that one could not see, but that had all the vicious malevolence of a daemon. Opposite the base of Sentinel Hill the tracks left the road, and there was a fresh bending and matting visible along the broad swath marking the monster's former route to and from the summit.

Armitage produced a pocket telescope of considerable power and scanned the steep green side of the hill. Then he handed the instrument to Morgan, whose sight was keener. After a moment of gazing Morgan cried out sharply, passing the glass to Earl Sawyer and indicating a certain spot on the slope with his finger. Sawyer, as clumsy as most non-users of optical devices are, fumbled a while; but eventually focused the lenses with Armitage's aid. When he did so his cry was less restrained than Morgan's had been.

'Gawd almighty, the grass an' bushes is a'movin'! It's a-goin' up - slow-like - creepin' - up ter the top this minute, heaven only knows what fur!'

Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one thing to chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it. Spells might be all right - but suppose they weren't? Voices began questioning Armitage about what he knew of the thing, and no reply seemed quite to satisfy. Everyone seemed to feel himself in close proximity to phases of Nature and of being utterly forbidden and wholly outside the sane experience of mankind.

X.

In the end the three men from Arkham - old, white-bearded Dr Armitage, stocky, iron-grey Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr Morgan, ascended the mountain alone. After much patient instruction regarding its focusing and use, they left the telescope with the frightened group that remained in the road; and as they climbed they were watched closely by those among whom the glass was passed round. It was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more than once. High above the toiling group the great swath trembled as its hellish maker repassed with snail-like deliberateness. Then it was obvious that the pursuers were gaining.

Curtis Whateley - of the undecayed branch - was holding the telescope when the Arkham party detoured radically from the swath. He told the crowd that the men were evidently trying to get to a subordinate peak which overlooked the swath at a point considerably ahead of where the shrubbery was now bending. This, indeed, proved to be true; and the party were seen to gain the minor elevation only a short time after the invisible blasphemy had passed it.

Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage was adjusting the sprayer which Rice held, and that something must be about to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling that his sprayer was expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Two or three men shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley snatched back the telescope and strained his vision to the utmost. He saw that Rice, from the party's point of advantage above and behind the entity, had an excellent chance of spreading the potent powder with marvellous effect.

Those without the telescope saw only an instant's flash of grey cloud - a cloud about the size of a moderately large building - near the top of the mountain. Curtis, who held the instrument, dropped it with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled, and would have crumbled to the ground had not two or three others seized and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-inaudibly.

'Oh, oh, great Gawd... that... that...'

There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler thought to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was past all coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much for him.

'Bigger'n a barn... all made o' squirmin' ropes... hull thing sort o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step... nothin' solid abaout it - all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'... all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... an' Gawd it Heaven - that haff face on top...'

This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis; and he collapsed completely before he could say more. Fred Farr and Will Hutchins carried him to the roadside and laid him on the damp grass. Henry Wheeler, trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the mountain to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible three tiny figures, apparently running towards the summit as fast as the steep incline allowed. Only these - nothing more. Then everyone noticed a strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind, and even in the underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of unnumbered whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there seemed to lurk a note of tense and evil expectancy.

Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three figures as standing on the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone but at a considerable distance from it. One figure, he said, seemed to be raising its hands above its head at rhythmic intervals; and as Sawyer mentioned the circumstance the crowd seemed to hear a faint, half-musical sound from the distance, as if a loud chant were accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette on that remote peak must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood for aesthetic appreciation. 'I guess he's sayin' the spell,' whispered Wheeler as he snatched back the telescope. The whippoorwills were piping wildly, and in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of the visible ritual.

Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of any discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the hills, mixed strangely with a concordant rumbling which clearly came from the sky. Lightning flashed aloft, and the wondering crowd looked in vain for the portents of storm. The chanting of the men from Arkham now became unmistakable, and Wheeler saw through the glass that they were all raising their arms in the rhythmic incantation. From some farmhouse far away came the frantic barking of dogs.

The change in the quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd gazed about the horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born of nothing more than a spectral deepening of the sky's blue, pressed down upon the rumbling hills. Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat brighter than before, and the crowd fancied that it had showed a certain mistiness around the altar-stone on the distant height. No one, however, had been using the telescope at that instant. The whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of Dunwich braced themselves tensely against some imponderable menace with which the atmosphere seemed surcharged.

Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield no such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came from the pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the altar-stone on the peak. It is almost erroneous to call them sounds at all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet one must do so, since their form was indisputably though vaguely that of half-articulate words. They were loud - loud as the rumblings and the thunder above which they echoed - yet did they come from no visible being. And because imagination might suggest a conjectural source in the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain's base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a blow.

'Ygnailh... ygnaiih... thflthkh'ngha.... Yog-Sothoth ...' rang the hideous croaking out of space. 'Y'bthnk... h'ehye - n'grkdl'lh...'

The speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some frightful psychic struggle were going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at the telescope, but saw only the three grotesquely silhouetted human figures on the peak, all moving their arms furiously in strange gestures as their incantation drew near its culmination. From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn? Presently they began to gather renewed force and coherence as they grew in stark, utter, ultimate frenzy.

'Eh-y-ya-ya-yahaah - e'yayayaaaa... ngh'aaaaa... ngh'aaa... h'yuh... h'yuh... HELP! HELP! ...ff - ff - ff - FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!...'

But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at the indisputably English syllables that had poured thickly and thunderously down from the frantic vacancy beside that shocking altar-stone, were never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they jumped violently at the terrific report which seemed to rend the hills; the deafening, cataclysmic peal whose source, be it inner earth or sky, no hearer was ever able to place. A single lightning bolt shot from the purple zenith to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force and indescribable stench swept down from the hill to all the countryside. Trees, grass, and under-brush were whipped into a fury; and the frightened crowd at the mountain's base, weakened by the lethal foetor that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were almost hurled off their feet. Dogs howled from the distance, green grass and foliage wilted to a curious, sickly yellow-grey, and over field and forest were scattered the bodies of dead whippoorwills.

The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again. To this day there is something queer and unholy about the growths on and around that fearsome hill Curtis Whateley was only just regaining consciousness when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the beams of a sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were grave and quiet, and seemed shaken by memories and reflections even more terrible than those which had reduced the group of natives to a state of cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions they only shook their heads and reaffirmed one vital fact.

'The thing has gone for ever,' Armitage said. 'It has been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know. It was like its father - and most of it has gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outside our material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the hills.'

There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of poor Curtis Whateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity; so that he put his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick itself up where it had left off, and the horror of the sight that had prostrated him burst in upon him again.

'Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face - that haff face on top of it... that face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like the Whateleys... It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked like Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost....'

He paused exhausted, as the whole group of natives stared in a bewilderment not quite crystallized into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon Whateley, who wanderingly remembered ancient things but who had been silent heretofore, spoke aloud.

'Fifteen year' gone,' he rambled, 'I heered Ol' Whateley say as haow some day we'd hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill...'

But Joe Osborn interrupted him to question the Arkham men anew.

'What was it, anyhaow, an' haowever did young Wizard Whateley call it aout o' the air it come from?'

Armitage chose his words very carefully.

'It was - well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn't belong in our part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself by other laws than those of our sort of Nature. We have no business calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked people and very wicked cults ever try to. There was some of it in Wilbur Whateley himself - enough to make a devil and a precocious monster of him, and to make his passing out a pretty terrible sight. I'm going to burn his accursed diary, and if you men are wise you'll dynamite that altar-stone up there, and pull down all the rings of standing stones on the other hills. Things like that brought down the beings those Whateleys were so fond of - the beings they were going to let in tangibly to wipe out the human race and drag the earth off to some nameless place for some nameless purpose.

'But as to this thing we've just sent back - the Whateleys raised it for a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and big from the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big - but it beat him because it had a greater share of the outsideness in it. You needn't ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn't call it out. It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.'

[gideonaceleigh]

Hello Friends it’s Flashback Sunday Monday!! Here’s is a short story I wrote in probably 2010? 2011? approx. 1900 words :) This is posted 100% for my amusement (and the amusement of others) and not meant to be taken seriously in any way lol.

Mirror

Petrichor stands in front of the door that blocked off her room, staring into the full length mirror attached to it. Lost in her head, thinking about the past couple of years. Her parent’s had to be right, she was just a silly kid, none of it was real. Memories go flying through her head, random flashes and pieces. 

Have you ever looked into a mirror and seen a flicker of motion from the corner of you eye? When I was younger I would always she that random flicker, it used to terrify me.

Petrichor, no more than five years old, stands in front of a mirror and looking into it for a moment before screaming in fright. She runs to her parents and they soothe her.

Most children have at one time or another. Scared, they run to their parents and tell them there's a monster in the mirror. The parents calm their child, telling them that it's impossible, just a trick of the light.

Or is it?

The flashbacks continue, showing her at 7, 11, 13, 15, and 16 years old standing in front of a mirror. A fuzzy form comes into focus in the mirror a little more at each flash; it stands behind her right shoulder. 

The sensation, of a flicker just outside of sight, followed me throughout my childhood. Except, instead of disappearing, as I grew older the flicker came more often, and it became more defined.

She goes to parents, begging. Her parents scold her, telling her to quit being dramatic as she storms to her room and falls onto her bed.

I told my parents about it, or at least tried to a few times. They told me to grow up and get my head out of the clouds, that I was too old for such games. Eventually I just kept it to myself. I grew tired of arguing with them and being told to stop behaving like a child. I even began to think I was truly crazy.

There are flashes of mirrors; one is fancy, gold with an intricate design. Another one plain with a wooden frame, moving onto a full length mirror and finally showing a small hand-held mirror held by the small hands of a child. Each mirror was showing the fuzzy form barely visible in the corner of her eye.

I began to think there was something wrong with me, with my brain. I tried to ignore the flicker, told myself over and over that it was just my imagination. Maybe my parents were right, maybe I just needed to grow up and get my head out of the clouds. I avoided mirrors whenever I could, so that I could pretend to be normal. But there are so many mirrors in the world, how do you avoid them all?

Petrichor walks along the street, she sees a reflection in the store windows and quickly hides her face behind her hair. It's not her reflection but something else, less discernible.

A couple weeks later she looks into a mirror and quickly looks away. She frowns slightly and tentatively looks back before staring intensely into it. There is no form, fuzzy or otherwise. She smiles and starts humming, leaving the bathroom and looking into mirrors all over the house. 

She snaps herself out of her memories and back into the present. Soft morning light streams in from her bedroom window and hits the mirror she’s been staring into. She’s still in her pajamas, it being a lazy weekend morning. Slowly the form starts materializing in the mirror, returning after its brief, and very much appreciated, reprieve. 

She lets out a heavy sigh, “Welcome back,” she silently greets Her. Yes, Her. For Petrichor was finally able to make out what exactly had been stalking her, her entire life. 

The girl has the same features as Petrichor. They have the same shaped eyes, ears, cheek bones, lips, nose, and body shape. Only Petrichor has pale blue eyes, bleach blonde hair, and naturally tan skin. The mirror twin has stormy, dark grey eyes, black hair, and her skin is pale. Petrichor looks into her mirror twin's eyes and, trembling, she cautiously reaches out to the mirror, slowly sinking into it.

Frost gathers onto Petrichor's hair and eyelashes as she steps fully into this alternate world. Its dark, the only thing visible is the snow swirling everywhere in random gusts and sputters. 

Not looking around Petrichor looks straight at the mirror twin and takes a deep breath before simply asking, “Why?”

Her mirror twins laughs vindictively, “Why not?” she says with a smirk.

Petrichor just looks at her in confusion, “Don't you get lonely?”

The mirror twin freezes, and Petrichor catches a sad look on her face, a look of loneliness. 

Petrichor smiles in triumph, “So that's why you’re doing this, isn't it? You want the company. But if you’re so lonely why don't you leave this desolate place?”

The mirror twin laughs scornfully, “You really don't get it do you?”

Petrichor frowns, “Get what?”

“I can't leave. I'm stuck in this wasteland forever!” she says, looking almost as if she’s on the verge of tears.

Petrichor takes an unthinking step forward, wanting to comfort her and her twin lunges towards her. Petrichor jerks back at the last minute, shaking from the scare of her almost fatal mistake.

Her mirror twin smirks at her, “Oh so very close. Just a second more and I could have escaped this place,” she says.

Petrichor’s head snaps up at that, eyes widening in understanding.

The twin nodded in confirmation, “Yes, that's all it would take. One touch and I could be free of this place, while you would be left to rot in this god forsaken place.”

“There must be a reason you’re in here. I don’t know why but I can take a wild guess. Whoever put you here wanted you to suffer. You’re alone in this cold, desolate reality, and you’re cruel, you make no secret of that.”

“Oh very good,” her twin said. “Aren’t you oh so clever? I’m sure you think I’m evil don’t you?” She didn’t wait for the reply before carrying on.

“I've never done anything evil! All I ever wanted is what I DESERVE to have, my BIRTHRIGHT.

She starts pacing and gesturing with her hands erratically.

“I was a Princess once you know,” looking at Petrichor who raises her eyebrows in surprise. “Oh yes, a Princess. Daddy ruled a huge empire, until those bastard rebels decided they didn't like the comfy life Daddy gave them,” she frowns, looking down at the ground for a few minutes before smiling and continuing with her story.

“Of course Daddy was always a weak man. To compassionate and soft-hearted. Never stern enough with anyone, not even the servants or animals. Not that there’s a difference between the two,” she smirks at Petrichor.

“The rebels had another thing coming when they got to me though,” she smiles mischievously at Petrichor, as if letting a friend in on a secret. “I bet you think I killed them, don't you?”

She walks closer to Petrichor then abruptly turns away, not waiting for a reply. “Quite the opposite really. I charmed them. If you know how to bat your eyelashes enough you can get pretty much anything you want in life, especially from men,” She laughs wickedly, smiling and demonstrating her eyelash batting to Petrichor. 

“I had them wrapped around my finger. I moved my way up, right to the top. The 'new king's’ wife. From there I was able to do whatever I wished. I dined with all the right families and, of course, had all my ill-wishers put to death,” she laughed sharply.

“Unfortunately, my poor husband passed away shortly after passing a law I had suggested to him. It stated that the wife of a Lord, or say a King, was capable of taking over her husband’s duties in the event of his absence, or god forbid, his death. It was quite a coincidence I assure you,” she winks at Petrichor.

“They never could determine the cause of death of my poor Harold. Eventually they just laid the blame on natural causes. Arsenic is virtually undetectable, did you know that?” Another mischievous laugh and grin in Petrichor’s direction.

“Unfortunately, once more and more people started dying of the same mysterious 'natural cause,' people started getting suspicious. Once people started realizing the people dying were people I was less than fond of, or people that were getting in my way, well they jumped to conclusions. Accusations started getting thrown around, revenge was demanded.”

She started getting overly dramatic, tumultuous emotions thick in her voice and her hand gestures getting even more sporadic and erratic.

“You know how it goes,” she waved her hands around vaguely, “So, of course, they demanded my immediate removal from power and stripped me of my fortune. I was furious. They wanted my head chopped off. I hissed and bit and fought the entire way to the guillotine. But right before they released the blade someone yelled 'Stop!' My salvation I thought.” 

She laughs bitterly, abruptly subdued, and whispers, “How wrong I was.”

She turns away from Petrichor and almost seems to cave in on herself. The entire time the mirror twin has been ranting Petrichor has been standing in the same spot in shocked silence. The mirror twin slowly turns back to Petrichor. 

“It was a man. He got on the stage and told them, he told them, 'Stop this! Please, listen to me! This is no punishment for a cold, heartless killer. This, this monster!' 

He was a very good speaker you see; he knew how to work his audience.

 'I have a better idea.' He whispered dramatically. He told them he knew of a place they could put me. A wasteland.  A place where I could live an eternity in solitude. If I was so determined to be alone by killing everyone around me why didn't they give me a better alternative? He had asked them. 

I had laughed, at the time. I would live forever, I thought, and not have to suffer those fools.

She laughs scornfully then looks around her prison, becoming subdued again and whispers, “That was over 4000 years ago.”

After a moment of silence she laughs loudly, “So you see, I'm really not evil. I just knew how to get what I deserved. What’s so wrong about that?!”

“After a moment of shocked silence Petrichor bursts out, “You're a monster! And as long as you're here, you won't be able to wreak your havoc. So as long as I have a say in it, you will never be free.”

As she says this she moves back towards the mirror, throwing herself at it. She crashes into it and it shatters into a million pieces. She watches passively as the glass slowly comes tinkling down, gracefully like the snow. It seems as if continually falling, never reaching the ground.

Her mirror twin screams as she fades into darkness, “You don't know what you've done! We'll both be trapped here forever!”

Petrichor looks at the shattered mirror before slowly turning to her mirror twin, “If that means you can never be free, then it is worth it,” she says as she slowly closes her eyes. She calmly relaxes into the cold and she feels herself falling into nothing, content.

#my writing #short story

[aprobableparadox]

With All Your Lies, You’re Still Very Lovable

There was a demon lurking at the local 711.

He stood in the chips aisle and considered a can of Pringles, his black eyes investigating the nutritional value lazily. The demon, who was in the mood for something salty tonight, couldn't decide between the original or the sour cream and onion. Indecisively, as most demons did things, he picked both and swaggered up to the cashier.

Anwar said the cashier's name tag. Anwar was much too exhausted and much too bored to mind that this stranger had black eyes, nor that he also wore a Sigil of Baphomet on a silver chain around his neck. For all Anwar knew, this kid was yet another example of the misguided American youth his wife was always going on about.

The demon, whose name was Azazel but liked to go by 'A' because most people pronounced it wrong (especially coffee places, especially Starbucks), complimented Anwar on his excellent hair and left. A car idled outside. The car happened to be a debilitated white Honda Civic and its driver appeared to be in just the same state of disrepair.

The driver's name was Daemon Adamos, and no he was not a demon. He did, however, make a bad habit of hanging out with unsavory people and getting into trouble, so A enjoyed his company. Daemon always looked as though he'd just awoken from a long sleep, and his personality suggested that it was everyone and everything that had shaken him awake.

A slumped into the car, held up the two Pringles cans for Daemon to choose from, and ceded the sour cream and onion can. The white Honda Civic pulled out of the parking lot with a ghastly cough, the radio sputtered on an obscure Remember-the-Eighties station. As Bon Jovi wailed about living on prayers (inadvisable, A believed, but he was biased), the demon stared out the window and thought about angels.

He'd been one once, you know. A very long time ago, when Mesopotamia was still around, and the concept of angels in the traditional sense hadn't been thought of yet. Then, as one tends to do when they've been doing nothing for a few thousand years, A got bored. And he Fell.

He remembered the wind slapping his face, the awful swooping sensation in his stomach, the way the ground loomed closer with every second. He could no longer fly, but it was the freest he'd ever felt. A hadn't even minded very much the scorching agony of having his wings torn off, or even the sensation of every bone in his body shattering the second he hit the ground.

He'd minded a little bit.

He has to admit: Though infinitely freeing and fun, being a demon does not come with as many perks as does being an angel. Namely the flying and the eternal beauty and the luxury, though there are many more. But A doesn't miss it, he would never miss it. He is in the firm belief that anybody who has experienced being both an angel and a demon in their lifetime would much prefer the latter. Mostly because all angels are old fashioned and stuck-up.

"A," says Daemon, and it comes out like a croak. "What are we doin' bout the pigeons?" Daemon liked to call angels 'pigeons' because he thought it was clever, and that pigeons were the most insulting kind of winged animal one could be termed.

A sucked on his teeth and shrugged––he didn't do plans, that was an angel thing. The whole point of demons, he'd once decided, was that they were random and chaotic and unorthodox. You couldn't go around planning things and also be a demon, that was . . . blasphemy. Or the demon version of blasphemy, anyway.

Daemon didn't enjoy A's spontaneity. "I'm not trying to get smited here, okay?" (A frowned here, unsure if his friend was using the right tense.)  "So if we had a plan, that'd be real great."

The problem they were having was this. A had gotten into trouble (as demons do) and Daemon had egged him on (as humans do), and they were both waiting for The Upstairs to send down some of its best and brightest to apprehend them. Angels had a tendency to intervene when demons did bad things on earth, and what they'd done was certainly the worst thing they'd accomplished so far.

Daemon was worried about this because he had a particular dislike for angels. More so than any other human A had ever encountered, and this was another reason he liked him so much. See, Daemon had once been a devout man and, much like his demonic friend, had experienced a change of heart. He figured that this alone was grounds enough to end up a place worse than Hell after he died. So he wasn't planning on dying any time soon.

"Try not to think about it," A said wisely. It was relatively good advice––people tend to get nervous and make mistakes when they're thinking about spending an eternity in the fieriest circle of Hell. "If we're lucky, they'll send the old man again." The 'old man' in question was truthfully a few decades younger than A, but he also had the hobbies and the mannerisms of a very boring and very uptight human elder.

It was right about then that Daemon began wondering why, again, he hung out with A. It wasn't the corrupting politicians for fun (although that was entertaining) or even the wild parties with various rap artists (most of them were bound for Heaven, surprisingly).  He supposed that it might be because Daemon was reckless and hungry for adventure, and so was A. But it was hard to reconcile his friendship with him when he was staring death in the face for the third time this month.

"You would think they'd've learned their lesson, sending him. All-powerful, omniscient creatures and all that. They could've killed us by now, maybe they just don't want us dead." He said this last past with a desperate air of hopefulness. A was about to retort that he was also all-powerful and omniscient (ok maybe not that) thank you very much and that he was certainly powerful enough to evade a couple of feathery nuisances. He would've said all this if a girl hadn't miraculously appeared in the backseat.

They had not sent the old man.

Daemon, a human, was quite susceptible to scares, and a little girl abruptly appearing in the backseat of his car was one of these frights. A quick glance in the rearview mirror set him off and, swearing loudly, he slammed on the breaks so violently A flew forward and hit his head on the windshield.

The girl looked to be about ten, but she was actually older. A lot older. And, much to A's dismay, a lot more powerful than himself. A swore too, and used a much worse and more satisfying word than Daemon had to do so.

There was an awkward pause in which nobody in the car said anything although it was clear that all present wanted very much to do so.

"Azazel," the little girl said in a tired voice. She said his name the same way one might say 'what now'. A despised it.

"Ah, hello. Long time no see," A sneered in a manner that said everything about how he felt about her presence. The girl looked upon the demon with a stare that was full of the deepest disapproval and scorn, like a pet owner might to a misbehaving dog. This made A so angry that he had to turn around in his seat and look at his friend instead.

Daemon had finished getting his heart rate under control and was now gaping at the girl. The human's reaction embarrassed A, he hated when Daemon acted as though he'd never seen a divine being before. He couldn't be seen with an amateur. Luckily, Daemon was distracted by the irritated honking coming from the car behind him.

"Azazel," the girl said again, "what are you hoping to achieve from this? Truly?" Her demeanor betrayed her true nature, A thought savagely. She was the most vicious and blindly loyal angel he'd had the misfortune of knowing. She wouldn't hesitate to vaporize him if given a reason. In Hell she'd be called an 'insidious murderer', in Heaven, she was dubbed a 'loyal soldier of the Lord'.

"Fulfillment? Purpose? A good time?" A laughed. Angels always were so black and white, they always needed a plain and simple answer for everything. "Do I even need a reason?" He knew what she thought of him. He tried not to mind, and failed.

Daemon, who had wisely decided to relocate the white Honda Civic out of the middle of the road, looked pained. He had come into contact with this particular angel only once before, and after all was said and done he'd spent a few weeks in the hospital and changed addresses.

"You used to be worth more than this, Azazel," said the little girl, and A hated her. He loathed the sureness in this statement, as though the girl knew with absolute certainty that everything she said was true. "And I am afraid that you're going too far."

"Too far?" Was what A snarled, the edges of a laugh hidden in the snarl. "Too far was when I Fell, Ariel."

#story #stories #tumblr writers #write #writing #demon #angels #supernatural #heaven #hell #religion #deities #god #angel #demons #human #humans #aesthetic #cool #inspired by supernatural and good omens #little bit of a love story but i have not finished #bad boy #boys #time #ancient #help #what tf do i tag #i hate tagging #bible #biblical

[lyriumpulse]

Childhood meme. (I am on my phone)

                                        a childhood memory ! | accepting

On any other day, Leto would have loved the opportunity for a bath – especially when he had only just returned from difficult, grueling work. Other boys in his position are fond (overfond, he would say) of staying in the sun or in their master’s dining halls, doting on masters who did not even bother remembering their names. Leto has never seen an advantage to that. Other slaves think him mad for what he’s doing, speak of him even when he is not present. Lounging around with them as though they were friends would send the wrong message.

His only purpose is to make it to the end of the tournament alive. He mustn’t distract himself by fraternizing with those who may want to sabotage him.

Each surviving warrior is bathed and tended to after each round by his (or her, Leto has seen a shocking number of women competing for this) fellow slaves. They gather in one of the squat bath houses and allow people like them, people who were once their equals, to lavish them in the perfumed waters of their betters. On any other day, Leto would delight in such treatment, but today he politely turns them away, all but one. She is a beautiful thing, younger than Leto though he cannot tell by how many years, and she trembles when she combs out the long dark tangles of his hair.

Anna, he believes is her name. A plain name for a plain girl that he will likely never see again.

It feels wrong to him today, indulging in something that Marcellus can no longer do. It feels blasphemous somehow. Leto almost could not bear the walk into the baths, save that remaining in the bunks and listening to Marcellus’s ever-fainter cries was far worse.

Oh, what a misery. When he’d first returned to his temporary sleeping chambers only yesterday, his fellow competitor’s screams of agony were so unbearable that no one could sleep. Now, of course, everyone would get a full night’s rest – but only on account of the stillness overtaking Marcellus’s body. The boy can no longer walk, and such vital tasks as eating and breathing, last Leto checked, were becoming increasingly beyond his capabilities. Leto tells himself that this is for the best, and that Marcellus was the one who made this bed he is now forced to lie in. The magisters have no patience for slaves who cheat, with magic or no. When Marcellus was discovered attempting to cheat his way to victory, the slave masters had taken matters into their own hands.

Leto is a coward. He should have stayed with Marcellus despite their rivalries; the paralysis set upon the lad by his masters is a cruel one, turning his lips and tongue blue, choking his voice. But Leto could not endure the sight of him, and there were more important things to fight for than the life of one slave he only half knew. He could only tolerate being around his dying rival for so long.

Dying. Likely dead, in a few hours’ time.

Leto closes his eyes as another bowl of water is poured gently over his head by Anna’s steady hands. It disturbs the cloudy bath around his waist, prickles his skin in gooseflesh. When the waters calm, Leto can see himself in the surface as though looking into a mirror – his olive green eyes aching with turbulent pain, hair hanging around his head and neck like a dark curtain. He barely recognizes himself in his reflection.

- - -

The magister who had orchestrated the contest – Danarius – is one of the most financially successful, Leto has been told, primarily because, in such a competitive occupation, he is still alive. Danarius had spent half of his life in service to the Imperial Senate, and has broken many staves on the backs of his slaves, and has executed several of his men for various offenses.

This information had come to Leto through Varania, in the rare moments they were allowed to speak to each other while the contest was ongoing. Leto chooses to take her concerns with a grain of salt. Surely someone so cruel would never have offered a boon to a slave to begin with, no matter how many ogres, giants, or dragonlings they kill.

Leto meets him in the fortnight before the final trial. From his understanding, Danarius wanted to lay eyes on him before the test took place, likely to determine whether Leto was physically what Danarius was looking for in a valued slave. Prior to the meeting, Leto had procured many things for the man he hoped to be his new master, up to and including other slaves. Leto has a fairly good eye, and can tell those who would slouch on the job, who would do more than his share. But Leto himself isn’t destined to be a simple house slave. A favored slave is something altogether different.

His surprise makes him, for one of the only times in his life, question aloud a man so far in status above him. “Master Danarius— I don’t think I understand you. Do you mean a… a house servant?”

“A specific sort of servant, yes.” Danarius is sitting at his work table, as though this information has something to do with his job. Several maps paper over the surface of his table, with various Tevene notations scribbled in the margins that Leto cannot read. “You’ll be rewarded handsomely for this competition, Leto, and if you do particularly well, there is an extra boon that is yours to claim, if you wish it.”

“Messere,” Leto says, not daring to look up and meet his eyes, his heart pounding. “Of course I will be happy to do it. When you say servant…”

Danarius sighs. “How old are you, Leto?”

“Seventeen, dominus.” This is a lie; Leto had only turned fifteen a few months prior. He knows that his long hair makes him appear more youthful than he is, and he also knows that his body is still slender, golden-brown and unmarred with inexperience.

“Undress,” Danarius murmurs. “I did not get to examine you as thoroughly as I would have liked.”

“Yes, dominus,” Leto says promptly. He stands fully and slips quietly out of his clothing, until he is in nothing but the darkness of the shuttered work room. He closes his eyes, waiting to be struck, or bitten, or whipped – then he gasps, in pure surprise, when he feels Danarius’s scarred hand gently drifting over his skin.

“How old are you?” Danarius asks again. His fingers stroke across Leto’s chest, find a scar, fondle it thoughtfully as though mapping real estate.

“Seventeen,” Leto replies. His fright has begun to melt away, to be replaced by another sort of trembling, but the question makes him worry all over again. Has he shot for an age too old? Perhaps Danarius wants someone less experienced, someone younger, for his new companion.

“I don’t believe you.”

“What?” But Leto does not get a spoken answer. Instead, he feels Danarius’s hands encircle his hips and guide him forward until he is lying, trembling, in the bed.

Once there, the terror returns full force, but Leto knows what is expected of him.

- - -

The trial is finished and Leto, the side of his face swollen and bruised, says goodbye to his sister for a final time.

Varania clings to him and wails as though Leto has sliced off her very fingers, uncaring for the onlookers, uncaring for their mother, who stares into the middle distance looking shattered. Leto wishes there were more time to bid her farewell, but he is almost afraid to touch her when she is this volatile. Leto promises her that things will be easier for her and Mother now, that he did this for them, only for them, only ever for them.

When they are wrenched apart, Danarius wastes no time in ordering, “Come, Leto. Let us prepare you for your new purpose.”

- - -

They cut his hair to make the ritual easier; eventually, they will need full access to his scalp, and Leto will be shaved completely. He is shown where each scar will go, is told that it will be agony, but this is the price for the freedom of his family.

Danarius asks if there is anything of Varania’s that Leto would like to keep, before she is set free. Leto thinks: her eyelashes, her breath, her blood. He thinks, what have I done, and he thinks, I only want my sister back. He cries himself to sleep for a week straight at the thought of never seeing her again, quietly saying ‘no’ again and again, his mouth dry with the taste of sickness.

They cut his hair and the new angle of his neckline makes him look dangerous and hard, older than his years. There is a scar on his shoulder from one of the trials, where another slave had nicked his skin with a blade. Leto touches it and knows it won’t matter soon. This skin won’t be his for much longer.

- - -

It is a whisper at first. Soft little whispers that hang against the walls like fog, until the voice becomes a shout, becomes a howl that runs its fingernails down his face, across his chest.

The floor is slicked crimson beneath his body but he does not slip. He clings to his chains and howls for his mother with noises like an injured animal.

He huddles in his master’s arms when it is over. Wet and naked as a newborn, staring blankly. Holding the trauma like a bowl of blood.

#this is fucked up but here we go #rape / #slavery / #abuse / #torture / #how the fuck do i tag this im so sorry #miindframe #my writing

[queen-of-deans-booty]

Bugs- Part 4

Pairing: Eventual Dean x Reader

Word Count: 1,746

Warnings: Typical Supernatural violence, angst, language, minor character death, blood, you know the usual

Author’s Note: I do not own anything from Supernatural. All credit goes to their respective owners. Please, if you want to be tagged for this series, let me know and I’ll add you! If you want to be tagged for my other fics, I’ll add you! I want to hear what you guys think about this. If you want something requested, send it in!

Feedback is always appreciated

Tags at the bottom

Part One, Part Two, Part Three

You had to ask around for the right person but eventually you got his name and you were parked outside of a diner. You walked inside with Dean and looked around, your eyes landing on an old Native American man with cards on a table.

“Joe White Tree?” You continued when he nodded. “We’d like to ask you a few questions, if that’s alright.”

“We’re students from the university.” Dean stated.

“No you’re not, you’re lying.” He stated without looking up. Dean looked at you for some help. Sam stayed in the car so it was just you and Dean.

“Have you heard of Oasis Plains? It's a housing development near the Atoka Valley.” You asked.

“I like her,” Joe looked up and Dean. “She’s not a liar. I know the area.” He shrugged.

“What can you tell us about the history there?” You knew you would be doing the talking.

“Why do you want to know?” You had to be honest with the guy.

“Something bad is happening in Oasis Plains. We think it might have something to do with some old bones we found down there - Native American bones.” You sighed.

“I'll tell you what my grandfather told me, what his grandfather told him. Two hundred years ago, a band of my ancestors lived in that valley. One day, the American cavalry came to relocate them. They were resistant, the cavalry impatient. As my grandfather put it, on the night the moon and the sun share the sky as equals, the cavalry first raided our village.

“They murdered, raped. The next day, the cavalry came again, and the next, and the next. And on the sixth night, the cavalry came one last time. And by the time the sun rose, every man, woman, and child still in the village was dead.

“They say on the sixth night, as the chief of the village lay dying, he whispered to the heavens that no white man would ever tarnish this land again. Nature would rise and protect the valley. And it would bring as many days of misery and death to the white man as the cavalry had brought upon his people.” He explained.

“Insects, sounds like nature to me. Six days.” Dean said to you.

“And on the night of the sixth day, none would survive.” Joe finished. You sighed and nodded.

“Thank you for your time, I appreciate it.” You left the diner with Dean and groaned.

“When did the gas company man die?” You wondered.

“Uh, let's see, we got here Tuesday, so, Friday the twentieth.”

“March 20th? That’s the spring equinox.” You said to him.

“The night the sun and the moon share the sky as equals.”

“So, every year about this time, anybody in Oasis Plains is in danger. Larry built this neighborhood on cursed land.” Dean sighed.

“On the 6th night, which is tonight, Larry’s family won’t make it tomorrow. How do we break a curse?” You asked Dean.

“You don't break a curse. You get out of its way. We've gotta get those people out now.” You groaned and got back in the car, filling Sam on everything you learned. Dean was taking too long and the sun was going down already.

“Sam, do something. I’ll call Matt. You have his number, right?” Sam nodded and grabbed his cell phone, dialing Matt’s number and handing the phone to you.

“Hello?’ Matt said after a few rings.

“Matt, it’s Y/N with Sam and Dean.”

“Y/N, my backyard is crawling with cockroaches.”

“Matt, just listen. You have to get your family out of that house right now, okay?” You warned the kid.

“What, why?”

“Because something is coming.” You sighed.

“More bugs?”

“Yeah, a lot more.”

“My dad doesn't listen in the best of circumstances, what am I supposed to tell him?”

“You make him listen, okay?” You said.

“Give me the phone,” Dean reached behind him and you handed him the phone. “Matt, under no circumstances are you to tell the truth, they'll just think you're nuts.”

“Dean…” You sighed.

“Tell him you have a sharp pain in your right side and you've gotta go to the hospital, okay?” Once Dean was happy, he hung up and tossed you your phone.

“What the hell?” You looked at him.

“Make him listen? What are you thinking?” You sighed and slumped in your seat. He was right, you couldn’t get civilians involved in this crap. Dean made the rest of the trip in record time and cursed when you saw Larry still in his house.

“Damn it, they're still here. Come on.” Dean and his brother exited the car and you followed, scared of what will happen.

“Get off my property before I call the cops.” Larry warned.

“Mr. Pike, listen,” Sam tried to say.

“Dad, they're just trying to help.” Matt said from behind his dad.

“Get in the house!” He yelled at his son.

“I’m sorry, I told him the truth.” Matt apologized.

“We had a plan, Matt, what happened to the plan?” Dean sighed.

“Look, it's 12:00 AM. They are coming any minute now. You need to get your family and go, before it's too late.” You said to Larry.

“Yeah, you mean before the biblical swarm.” Larry scoffed.

“Larry, what do you think really happened to that realtor, huh? And the gas company guy? You don't think something weird is going on here?” You glared at him.

“Look, I don't know who you are, but you're crazy. You come near my boy or my family again, and we're going to have a problem.” Larry threatened.

“Look, this land is cursed! People have died here. Now, are you going to really take that risk with your family?” Sam yelled at Larry. For a moment, everyone was silent and for a second, you heard buzzing.

“You hear that?” Dean said quietly. The noise got louder and louder, as if it was coming near you.

“All right, it's time to go. Larry, get your wife.” Dean said.

“Guys, look.” Matt pointed to the sky and you looked, seeing millions upon millions of bugs flying to the house, blanketing the sky.

“Oh my God.” Larry said in disbelief.

“Everybody in the house. Everybody in the house, go!” Dean ordered. You whimpered in fright and followed everyone else inside and they locked the door behind them.

“Honey, what's happening? What's that noise?” Joanie walked into the room.

“Go call 911, now” You ordered to her do. The glare you sent her made her move her feet to where she kept the house phone.

“Okay, we've gotta lock this place up, come on - doors, windows, fireplace, everything, okay?” Sam said to Matt. Matt started grabbing towels and handing them to everyone.

“The phones are dead.” Joanie came back a minute later.

“They must have chewed through the phone lines,” You helped Dean put the towels by the front door when the power went out. “And the powerlines.”

“Dean, I can’t do this.” You got tears, looking at him.

“Sweetheart, listen to me. I’m right here. Do you honestly believe I would let something happen to you?” You shook your head, letting a tear fall. He wiped it with his thumb and got up with you. “Then believe it because Sam and I need you.” You nodded and needed to be strong. You saw the bugs starting to cover the windows, making it impossible to look out of. You gasped as Dean left you to go find something. He came back a moment later with bug spray.

“Bug spray?” Joanie asked him.

“Trust me.” Is all Dean says before going back to you. You bit your lip and waited for something to happen and all you could hear is creaking noises.

“All right, I think everybody needs to get upstairs.” Dean instructed. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of bugs come into the living room, swarming all around them. You screamed, trying to get away from them but Dean uses a lighter on the bug spray and it works to some effect, keeping some of the bugs at bay. “Go!!!!” Dean yelled.

You helped the Pike family up the attic stairs and you helped Dena and Sam get there and once everyone was in, Sam slammed the door shut. You breathed heavily and bit your lip, fear gripping onto you tight. You heard the buzzing get louder and watched as the sawdust fell from the ceiling.

“What’s that?” Joanie asked, pointing to the saw dust.

“Something is eating through the wood.” You stated.

“Termites.” Matt confirmed. You knew the ceiling would topple down.

“Alright, everybody get back. Get back, get back, get back!” Dean ordered. The Pike family moved to the corner and you stood in front of them. You screamed a bit when a hole was chewed through and a swarm of bugs came rushing in. Dean and Sam tried to patch the hole up and for a minute or so, it worked but then two more appeared and more bugs came into the room.

Your heart was pounding and you were scared but you had a job to do and people to protect. You tried your best to swat the bugs away but nothing was working. All hope seemed to be lost when the bugs started to leave. You gasped and watched as they left the attic without a problem. You slumped down when you saw sunlight come through the holes and you knew you had beaten it.

You were in the backseat of the Impala, waiting for Dean and Sam to get back from talking with the Pike family. You didn’t want to go to that house ever again. You hated doing that last night but it was over. You saw Sam talking to Matt but Dean was walking to you.

“Sweetheart, you did good.” He smiled. All you could do was shrug.

“I want to leave,” You sighed. “I’m never doing that again. I don’t care if it’s a hunt or not.”

“You did good,” Dean leaned down and pushed back your hair. “Wait, you got something in your hair. I think it’s a bug.” Your eyes widened and you screamed, moving your hand frantically though your hair. You stopped when you heard Dean laughing his ass off.

“Fuck you. I hope your dick falls off.” You rolled your eyes and turned away from him. It wasn’t long before Sam and Dean were both in the car but you didn’t want to think about this hunt ever again. You were happy when Dean put the town behind him.

Masterlist // Series Rewrite Masterlist // Buy me a Coffee?

Series Rewrite tags:

@helllonearth @amyisabellal @deanwnchstr @caseykitten6 @roxalya19 @quixoticcat

Forever tags:

@deans-short-girl @maddieburcham1 @ginamsmith @mogaruke @jarpadandjensenaremyheroes @whit85-blog @inlovewithbja

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@akshi8278 @mega-mrs-dean-winchester @winchesterandpie

Other tags:

@jensen-jarpad @notnaturalanahi @deathtonormalcy56 @27bmm

#dean x reader #dean winchester x reader #dean winchester #dean #dean winchester fanfiction #dean winchester angst #dean winchester fluff #dean winchester preference #dean x reader insert #dean x you #dean x y/n #dean x reader inserts #series rewrite #series rewrite masterlist #dean winchester series rewrite #spn #supernatural #spn spoilers #spoilers #season 1 episode 8 #bugs #s1e8 #s1e8 spoilers #sam #sammy #Sam Winchester #john #john winchester #winchester

[autolovecraft]

I was soon carrying my thrusts into the enemy's own country.

One window had lost its entire frame, and in all the others there was not a trace of glass in the little diamond apertures. To credit these whisperings of rural grandmothers, I now insisted, argued a faith in the existence of spectral substances on the earth apart from and subsequent to their material counterparts. My tale had been called The Attic Window, and appeared in the January, 1922, issue of Whispers. And did you find anything there—in the attic of a house, in flesh and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later and couldn't describe what it was that turned his hair gray. Moreover, so far as esthetic theory was involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the specter of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against nature? Cotton Mather had been gullible enough to dump into his chaotic Magnalia Christi Americana, and so poorly authenticated that even he had not ventured to name the locality where the horror occurred at the parsonage, leaving not a soul alive or in one piece. They never unlocked that attic door was strong. They may have been what that boy saw—if he was sensitive he wouldn't have needed anything in the window-glass to unhinge him. It is all in that ancestral diary I found; all the hushed innuendos and furtive tales of things with a blemished eye seen at windows in the night or in deserted meadows near the woods. My friend was more wrought upon than I had suspected, for at this touch of harmless theatricalism he started neurotically away from me and actually cried out with a sort of gulping gasp which released a strain of previous repression. And because all the other frames were long since fallen, I knew that it was the grisly glassless frame of that demonic attic window. So little is known of what went on beneath the surface—so little, yet such a ghastly festering as it bubbles up putrescently in occasional ghoulish glimpses.

It didn't sound sensible to him.

In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific coast, they took the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly milk-sops; but New England didn't get the thrill and merely shrugged its shoulders at my extravagance. With him all things and feelings had fixed dimensions, properties, causes, and effects; and although he vaguely knew that the mind sometimes holds visions and sensations of far less geometrical, classifiable, and workable nature, he believed himself justified in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot be experienced and understood by the average citizen. He was principal of the East High School, born and bred in Boston and sharing New England's self-satisfied deafness to the delicate overtones of life. My friend was more wrought upon than I had suspected, for at this touch of harmless theatricalism he started neurotically away from me and actually cried out with a sort of gulping gasp which released a strain of previous repression. Our couches were side by side, and we knew in a few seconds that we were in St. Whether or not such apparitions had ever gored or smothered people to death, as told in uncorroborated traditions, they had produced a strong and consistent impression; and were yet darkly feared by very aged natives, though largely forgotten by the last two generations—perhaps dying for lack of being thought about.

There was a vortex of withering, ice-cold wind, and then the rattle of loose bricks and plaster; but I had mercifully fainted before I could learn what it meant. Once a post-rider said he saw an old man chasing and calling to a frightful loping, nameless thing on Meadow Hill in the thinly moonlit hours before dawn, and many believed him. At last I could feel a real shiver run through Manton, who had moved very near. The boy had gone to that shunned, deserted house, we talked on about the unnamable and after my friend had finished his scoffing I told him what I had found in an old diary kept between 1706 and 1723, unearthed among family papers not a mile from the old burying ground, on a spot where an ancient slaughterhouse is reputed to have stood. There were some bones up under the eaves. It didn't sound sensible to him. Cotton Mather, in that demonic sixth book which no one should read after dark, minced no words as he flung forth his anathema. Perhaps he did not know, or perhaps he knew and did not dare to tell—there is no public hint of why they whispered about the lock on the door to the attic stairs in the house of a childless, broken, embittered old man who had put up a blank slate slab. I knew that it was the grisly glassless frame of that demonic attic window. Then came a noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded direction, followed by a piercing shriek just beside me on that shocking rifted tomb of man and monster.

Others knew, but did not dare to tell. It was plain that Manton knew more than I, he would not admit that it is sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. It argued a capability of believing in phenomena beyond all normal notions; for if a dead man can transmit his visible or tangible image half across the world, so I went back with a sack and took them to the tomb behind the house. Manton, who had moved very near.

#H.P. Lovecraft #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains #The Unnamable #1923 #The Unnamable week

[eorzeaisnotcrash]

Beast Tribe Tendency

“I just want to fly”

I don’t feel like getting ordered around by Alphinoob today, so I go check on some suspicious activity in the North Shroud. I find Ixali stuff! But before I can decide what to do with it, two Ixal walk up to claim it. I think I can take them, but instead of fighting me for it, they just grab it and dare me to come check out their project. Well, it’s this or get talked down to some more by the princeling. JoJo goes to Ehcatl and meets... some pretty nice people who have no intention of worshipping a primal who only cares about herself. Chief Totoloc wants to build an airship that will take him and his homies to the Ixali ancestral homeland, where their wings were more than vestigial structures. JoJo is immediately interested and willing to do anything she can to help with such a project, which is good, because she’ll be crafting a lot of stuff. (And she’ll get her eyes pecked out if it’s substandard.) There’s also a Lalafellin engineer who tries to stick his nose in it, but ends up being blown away by the awesomeness of the blueprints. We’re all crew now. No going back.

MOST AWESOME MOMENT SO FAR: Some haters decide to come from their logging grounds, attack an engineer, and break his wing. The Ehcatl Nine’s refusal to ride the Garuda hype train makes them heretics in these guys’ eyes. Chief Totoloc points out despite the uselessness of their prayers, the fanatics already have lots of air... between their ears. Sir, I am a Serpent officer and I have to arrest you for that murder. Meanwhile, I’m told I count as a sister of Ehcatl because I’m out here making the good stuff.

“I’ve been through the desert on a drake with no name”

Shame on me for forgetting who asked, but my help is wanted in Southern Thanalan because quite a few merchant caravans have been attacked recently, with the poor victims dragged away for tempering. When one dude decides to put greed over caution, JoJo waits up late with him to see if anything is going to happen. Sure enough, some Amalj’aa come around... but before I can get the violence going, another Amalj’aa, wearing blue instead of the bad guys’ usual red, advises me to stand back and let him and his friends handle this. After the merchant has learned his lesson, Hamujj Gah invites me to visit with his Brotherhood of Ash. JoJo gets to be privy to some of the workings of a society of BAMFs who want to preserve their ancient and proud (and primal-free) traditions. And the Brotherhood will welcome anyone if they’re tough enough, which is why a Miqo’te hangs out with them. She doesn’t like me much. That’s okay. I’ve existed to her for about three minutes and so she has no way of knowing whether I will or won’t fold like wet tissue paper in a fight.

MOST AWESOME MOMENT SO FAR: Well, I get called “honored ally” every time I come around, which feels great in and of itself. One of the tasks I do for the Brotherhood involves destroying barrels of flammable material -not by myself, but atop a fire drake. So I get mad respect, EXP, multiple forms of currency, and a sweet ride to burn things up for justice! *cackles madly*

“Skipping through the forest”

One day I get asked to check on some poor nerd who got lost in the Sylphlands. JoJo greets her little friends and learns of what her inner 12 year-old admits would be a pretty funny prank... if the guy was around to get pranked, that is. Voyce is found not too far from the entrance to Larkscall, doing his best to not die of fright. I’d say it would be time for him to change his undies, but thanks to the prank he’s no longer got any. But there’s a reason for this visit of his: apparently once every so often, a special little sylph is born. If the touched ones get their corrupted hands on this kid it could spell disaster for everyone. As long as we’re looking out to stop that happening, JoJo may as well stick around and lend a hand with other things.

MOST AWESOME MOMENT SO FAR: A very happy sylph lets me ride on her goobbue pal, who, when directed, will spew a moldy sneeze on groups of touched ones who have huddled together to plot... something. I get a mean laugh out of seeing the haters flee to take a bath. And riding this goobbue is just plain fun, especially when the sylph says that she can tell her buddy likes me too. It’s the most adorable schadenfreude in all Eorzea. (Well, in all of 2.0 anyway. I don’t know what cute friends are waiting for me later.)

“I hope the Sahagin love their children too”

Another one of the things JoJo gets sent to help with is the aftermath of a shipwreck. Some of the survivors need potions and some just need first aid, but there’s one lady I can’t do anything for because what she wants is her missing son. Then everyone looks out at the sea, where two Sahagin have appeared with a small boat. In the boat is a little boy. Their task done, the Sahagin leave without a word, but after the mom has quit hugging her son, he holds up a necklace. Obviously it’s not his. He knows his mom would be very upset if he tried to return it to its rightful owner, so JoJo goes instead. That’s how I meet Clutchfather Novv, who states that the inhabitants of both land and sea value their kids, so of course he’d reunite that family. He’s raising his own family in this particular spot because their old spawning grounds got wrecked in the Calamity, and his group in particular isn’t interested in fighting humans as much as they are in not dying out. Helping a hardworking single dad save his people from extinction? JoJo can’t turn her back on that.

MOST AWESOME MOMENT SO FAR: As in so many families, the older siblings help out. I get some good fighting in by request, but if I had to go with just one thing Fyuu has asked me to help him with, it would be vandalizing those Coral Trident banners set up to taunt the Maelstrom. Fyuu is a savage.

“Hey jerk, YOU work”

Some explosives have been filched from Camp Overlook. They know who did it and where they went, so JoJo accompanies Storm Sergeant Skaetswys down a path to the bottom of the nearby cliff. Five seconds later, we’re surrounded by kobolds... and five seconds after that, the kobolds surrender. The 789th Order seem to be as dangerous as they are highly-ranked (hint: there are fewer than 790 Orders). I don’t think they’re tempered, either. JoJo hides behind a nearby furnace just in time to hear a pickman from a much higher-ranked Order threaten to hurl everyone into said furnace if they don’t do better at their jobs. Skaetswys is so disgusted by the lack of guts displayed around here that she sticks around to chew out the leader while I look to see what else needs doing.

MOST AWESOME MOMENT SO FAR: Having to track down several small bombs to tell them Ba Go didn’t really mean it when he called them fat, and won’t they please come home? When they do come home, JoJo gets scolded for interrupting a “moment.” Honorable mention goes to Ba Go’s beef with king of slackers Bo Zu, who at one point decided to make a meal of bomb fingers. Not his bomb fingers, of course. Skaetswys is right, someone really needs to teach these guys self-respect and self-reliance and discipline. I wonder if this is how Hank Hill felt in some episodes.

#playing ARR #beast tribe tendency #I am so glad these quests exist #I knew a lot of the sylphs were cool #I had been wondering ‘is every last kobold a tempered maniac? is every last Ixal a tempered maniac?’ #and now I have my answer! #I really hope I can help those guys fly

[stopsubstanceabuse1-blog]

Exam Collection EC-COUNCIL Certified Ethical Hacker 312-50 Lead2pass Exam Dumps -->> 312-50 Lead2pass Questions and Answers

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[drjacquescoulardeau]

LAO SHE – TEAHOUSE – JOHN HOWARD-GIBBON – 1957-2013  

One of the strangest plays we can imagine because it deals with China and for us, westerners, China is the other end of the universe. It has three acts, one in 1898. The second ten years later hence in 1908 or so, and the third one after 1945 but under the Kuomintang government. The scene is in the Teahouse in Beijing all the time. At first we are at the end of the Imperial China with the Empire going out, meaning down, and the Emperor being pushed aside out of power. The reformist party takes over and in the second act we have the republican power. This will not change much at the end after the Japanese occupation and defeat when Beijing is under the control of the Kuomintang and the quasi occupation of the country by Americans. The hope everyone is waiting for (either as a frightful future for the Kuomintang officials, or some hope of decency among simple people) is coming from the western provinces and mountains and will take four years to arrive, but they will arrive indeed, the Communists.

 As for the historical change from 1898 to 1945 the play is not that original. But it is fascinating because it is tremendously Brechtian in the fact it concentrates on simple people and how they feel, react and simply suffer in front of change. Yet they have to endorse it because life is change. The main character is typical. Hardly 20 in 1898, taking over the Teahouse from his dead father he follows the trend and changes and he will change all along because nothing can be successful if it does not change.

His point of view, his vision of successive periods of change and what they mean, including the shift from the older generation to the younger generation, at times twice removed, is sad, very sad. Change most of the time meant takeover, from the old proprietors, the old people, to the newcomers. In 1898 it meant getting rid of the Empire and its systematic selling and buying of girls and boys as anything at all and a plain banal practice, for the rich and the powerful who could buy a wife, when a eunuch, and even buy a son. Absurd world where a eunuch can buy himself a family, since he can’t make it himself, or shouldn’t I say “it”self. In 1908 it meant industrialization and the enthusiasm it may bring to the younger generation then who are able to sell all their property that brought no real enterprising benefits to open a factory. But that change did not go beyond this limited evolution and it required a lot of corruption and under the table or under the cover dealings.

 In 1945 the picture has changed. The Japanese had taken over and occupied the country for many years. They had purely seized all property that could produce anything and had integrated these requisitioned properties into their industrial endeavor whose only objective was the war with the USA. The Japanese were defeated and the Americans took over under the semblance of the Kuomintang. That meant transforming the Teahouse into a brothel more than anything else, with charming names on the ladies and the place, for the sole entertaining of the powerful of the Kuomintang and the occupying Americans and their puppets. All those opposed were either sent to prison or beaten up. A teachers’ strike is declared a rebellion and repressed in blood and violence. The ringleaders, as they are called are simply killed on the spot when captured, in the most effective and rapid way possible.

 All those who are against this evolution which is no reform but the continuation of the Japanese endeavor under the star-spangled banner and their local lackeys, their hope is the communists in the western mountains. And to symbolize how dead this old new world is, the younger man who was taking over the Teahouse after the death of his father in 1898 just hang himself before his Teahouse is seized by the Kuomintang and he himself is reduced to being a doorman in his own Teahouse. He can hang himself because all the members of his family have left and are on the way to the Western Mountains, hence to the communists.

That’s probably what people like Trump and his supporters who voted for him, as well as those who voted not for Clinton but against Trump, will never understand. China is not about the first or the second amendment of the US Constitution, but it is about millennia (not centuries) of exploitation in China itself by various political systems and success in global commerce represented by the famous Silk Roads finally discovered by Marco Polo (1271–1368), which meant that the western world limited to Europe at the time finally came to realizing China was the real global power Europe and then the West tried to become after the discovery of the Americas (1492) and the re-invention of slavery by the Portuguese around 1450 in Africa from Western Africa to Congo, Angola, Mozambique and eastern Africa, plus India on the other side of the Indian Ocean. And China was already a very wide empire long before even Homer and Aeschylus were even born, not to mention Plato and Aristotle, the fanatic supporters of slave societies.

 Unluckily this play will not be understood by Westerners, especially narrow-minded people like those I have just mentioned, because they think they are hot hamburgers and hotdogs all over and that anyone and everything that is not in their direct mental and geographical territory is nothing but swampy water and rotting mud. Waking up will be difficult and I just hope they do not start throwing their atomic bonbons on us before dying out.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU

#China #Silk Road #Marco Polo

[vitalmindandbody]

Jonathan Demme obituary

US film director whose 1991 thriller The Silence of the Lambs won five Oscars

Jonathan Demme, who has died aged 73 from complications from cancer, rose from his colourful if tawdry beginnings under the aegis of the exploitation maestro Roger Corman to become one of the most eclectic, delightful and original film-makers in Hollywood. He also happened to be one of the nicest: the compassionate sensibility that lent his work its warmth and musicality was no put-on. Plainly put, he loved people.

Even his darkest work, such as the hit thriller The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which gave him his first taste of box-office success nearly two decades into his career and also brought him a best director Oscar, had a beguiling tenderness about it. For all that films gruesome frights, it was the connection between the FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) and her macabre mentor, the serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), that lent the film its emotional bite.

His movies could be bewilderingly diverse he made the innovative concert film Stop Making Sense (1984), the uproarious screwball thriller Something Wild (1986), the Aids drama Philadelphia (1993) and a remake of The Manchurian Candidate (2004) but they were united by their colour and vim, as well as a deep-seated sense of conscientiousness and community. Demme cared deeply about what he put on the screen.

Thats one of the joyful aspects of the work and I also feel its part of my responsibility as a film-maker, he said in 2004. You have to remember that the behaviour you visualise on screen will be witnessed by thousands or millions of people, and will ultimately say something about us as a species. Thats why it gets harder for me to have pure villains in my films. When people tell me, Oh, Meryl Streeps great in The Manchurian Candidate, I hated her so much! well, I dont wanna hear the hated part, because I see her as a fully fledged, emotional person.

Crucially, he never lost touch with his B-movie roots. He always remembered Cormans advice to keep the viewers eye stimulated; as a mark of affection, he gave Corman cameo roles in most of his films.

Tom Hanks, left, and Denzel Washington in Philadelphia, 1993, directed by Jonathan Demme. Photograph: Allstar/Tristar Pictures

He was born in Baldwin, Long Island, the son of Robert Demme, who worked in PR, and his wife, Dorothy (nee Rogers). Jonathan was educated at the University of Florida, where he became a film critic on the college newspaper and came to the attention of the producer Joseph E Levine, who was so impressed (not least by Demmes positive review of Zulu, which Levine had produced) that he hired him as a publicity writer.

Demme met Corman while working in London on publicity for the latters war film Von Richthofen and Brown (1971), and was soon recruited into the stable of writer-directors that had already spawned Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich. He shot one scene of the sex film Secrets of a Door-to-Door Salesman (aka Naughty Wives) (1973) and wrote assorted scripts for Corman, such as Angels Hard As They Come (1971) and The Hot Box (1972), before making his directing debut with the women-in-prison thriller Caged Heat (1974) and the lighthearted gangster movie Crazy Mama (1975). In both instances, he insisted that the criminals should survive; Crazy Mama even ends with the outlaws cheerfully running a hot-dog stand. They escaped! Youve got no ending! cried an outraged Corman.

After his last outright exploitation picture, the revenge thriller Fighting Mad (1976), Demme made his major studio debut with Citizens Band, aka Handle With Care (1977), intended by Paramount to cash in on the CB radio boom but shaped by Demme into a sweet-natured comic roundelay. The agent turned producer Freddie Fields interfered in the production and even sacked Demme at one point, until Roman Polanski, who had heard about the incident through a mutual friend, demanded his reinstatement. Glowing reviews (Pauline Kael likened Demme to Renoir) did not translate into ticket sales and the film was a flop, as was Last Embrace (1979), his witty homage to Vertigo. There was praise, too, for Melvin and Howard (1980), which dramatised the true story of an unassuming milkman who helps an old man stranded in the desert one night after a motorcycle accident; only later does he discover that he came to the rescue of Howard Hughes and that he has been made a beneficiary in his will. Demmes intimate, easygoing humour, and his affectionate work with his cast (including Mary Steenburgen, who won an Oscar) brought purpose and definition to this featherweight tale.

He had another bruising encounter with Hollywood on Swing Shift (1984), a wartime comedy-drama which was re-edited by its star Goldie Hawn, who was also the producer. But Stop Making Sense was a triumph a fully cinematic visual record of a Talking Heads performance, with the band and the show assembling gradually, song by song, beginning with just the singer David Byrne on stage with a guitar and a tape-recorder and ending with a full battalion of musicians, dancers, backing singers, props and costumes (including, famously, Byrnes boxy, over-sized suit).

Something Wild threw together an uptight businessman (Jeff Daniels) and an unpredictable kook (Melanie Griffith) in an on-the-lam adventure steeped in colour, eccentricity and music; Demme negotiated masterfully the switch halfway through from comedy to suspense.

In Swimming to Cambodia (1987), he brought to a one-man show by the actor and raconteur Spalding Gray some of the same minimalist magic of Stop Making Sense and delivered another quirky marriage of crime and comedy in Married to the Mob (1988), starring Michelle Pfeiffer as a mafia widow. However, the audiences were not won over. I wondered if I was missing some commercial gene, he said. Or if I had a curse.

Demme claimed to be as surprised as anyone about the success of The Silence of the Lambs. I had just done what I always did. Only this time it worked. That was an understatement. The film was only the third in history to win all five major Oscars; it made more than $240m worldwide and its influence was strongly felt on the thriller genre, though it was to Demmes credit that he opted not to direct the sensationalist sequel (Hannibal) and prequel (Red Dragon). Philadelphia, about the efforts of a lawyer (Tom Hanks) to sue the practice which dismissed him after discovering that he was dying from Aids, could hardly have been more different. It was credited with encouraging a better understanding of HIV/Aids.

We got together and tried to come up with a movie that would help push for a cure and save lives, Demme said. We didnt want to make a film that would appeal to an audience of people like us, who already had a predisposition for caring about people with Aids. We wanted to reach the people who couldnt care less about people with Aids. That was our target audience.

He later conceded that the success of those two films changed the course of his career, and not exclusively for the good. There is some seductive upward spiral, which I might have got sucked into, where once you have success, you get to make even more expensive films, you get paid more and your work seems even more important and major. His adaptation of Toni Morrisons novel Beloved (1998), though intensely powerful and boasting a spectacular performance by Thandie Newton, did not continue his box-office success, while The Truth About Charlie (2002) was an insipid remake of the much-loved caper Charade.

He rediscovered his earlier vitality with Rachel Getting Married (2008), a fizzy family drama which drew on memories of his mothers alcoholism and starred Anne Hathaway as a woman leaving rehab to attend her sisters wedding. Shot with hand-held cameras (camcorders were even placed in the hands of the extras playing wedding guests, and their footage spliced into the movie) and peppered with impromptu musical turns, it fulfilled Demmes ambition to create the most beautiful home movie ever made. Less well-received, but brimming with bonhomie, was Ricki and the Flash (2015), with Meryl Streep as a rock singer re-connecting with the daughter she abandoned.

Aside from his fiction work, Demme was an accomplished documentary maker whose subjects ranged from family (his cousin, an Episcopalian minister, in the 1992 Cousin Bobby) to musicians (Robyn Hitchcock, Neil Young, Justin Timberlake) and politicians (Jimmy Carter in the 2007 Man from Plains).

In 2008, I asked him whether he had anything to add to the formula he had outlined in 1986 for making a decent movie You get a good script, good actors and try not to screw it up. He let out a joyful laugh and gave an exaggerated slap of the thigh: Thats the formula, baby.

He is survived by his second wife, Joanne Howard, and three children, Ramona, Brooklyn and Jos.

Robert Jonathan Demme, film director, born 22 February 1944; died 26 April 2017

Read more: www.theguardian.com

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[autolovecraft]

Presently he spoke.

Something had caught my ancestor on a dark valley road, leaving him with marks of horns on his chest and of apelike claws on his back; and when they looked for prints in the trampled dust they found the mixed marks of split hooves and vaguely anthropoid paws. Then came a noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded direction, followed by a piercing shriek just beside me on that shocking rifted tomb of man and monster. It was plain that Manton knew more than I, he would not admit that it is the province of the artist not so much to rouse strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a placid interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed transcripts of everyday affairs.

They were that kind—the old lattice windows that went out of use before 1700. It had four-inch horns, but a face and jaw something like yours and mine. At last I could feel a real shiver run through Manton, who had moved very near. The crumbling slate slabs, the patriarchal trees, and the poisonous sermons of the cramped divines. They never unlocked that attic door, but left the whole house as it was still echoing, I heard a creaking sound through the pitchy blackness, and knew that a lattice window was opening in that accursed old house beside us.

I made plain, related to monstrous apparitions more frightful than anything organic could be; apparitions of gigantic bestial forms sometimes visible and sometimes only tangible, which floated about on moonless nights and haunted the old house, the crypt behind his own house in sight of the blank slate slab by an avoided grave, although one may trace enough evasive legends to curdle the thinnest blood. With him all things and feelings had fixed dimensions, properties, causes, and effects; and although he vaguely knew that the mind sometimes holds visions and sensations of far less geometrical, classifiable, and workable nature, he believed himself justified in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot be experienced and understood by the average citizen. Molded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vaporous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable? Certainly, there was strange talk one night in 1710 when the childless, broken old man was buried in the crypt behind his own house in sight of the blank slate slab. When noises came from it, they whispered and shivered; and hoped that the lock on that attic door, but left the whole house as it was, dreaded and deserted. Mather, in that demonic sixth book which no one should read after dark, minced no words as he flung forth his anathema. He did not laugh as I paused, but asked quite seriously about the boy who in 1793 entered an abandoned house to examine certain traces suspected to be there. It is all in that ancestral diary I found; all the hushed innuendos and furtive tales of things with a blemished eye seen at windows in the night or in deserted meadows near the woods. There was a vortex of withering, ice-cold wind, and then the rattle of loose bricks and plaster; but I had mercifully fainted before I could learn what it meant. The Attic Window, and appeared in the January, 1922, issue of Whispers. Manton, but what was it? It argued a capability of believing in phenomena beyond all normal notions; for if a dead man can transmit his visible or tangible image half across the world, or down the stretch of the centuries, how can it be absurd to suppose that deserted houses are full of queer sentient things, or that old graveyards teem with the terrible, unbodied intelligence of generations? It was plain that Manton knew more than I, is more resilient; for we opened our eyes at almost the same instant, despite his greater injuries. Cotton Mather, in that demonic sixth book which no one should read after dark, minced no words as he flung forth his anathema. Here, truly, was the apotheosis of The Unnamable. They were that kind—the old lattice windows that went out of use before 1700. Manton actually half clung to many old-wives' superstitions which sophisticated people had long outgrown; beliefs in the appearance of dying persons at distant places, and in original and dramatic recombinations of images usually thrown by habit and fatigue into the hackneyed patterns of actual existence, was something virtually incredible to his clear, practical, and logical intellect.

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