Here now is the last piece of the Riddle of Meln’k, the Spider Prophetess who scaled the walls of El’Shem’Kri. Who will die in the Insect War to build the dead insect god Knk’k-lusz.

The truths she presents are mysteries of time. Contained within the riddle are four secrets. Solve it and gain fore-knowledge.

Here are the previous verses:
Verse 1 of 4
Verse 2 of 4
Verse 3 of 4

Solve it if you can. I await your guesses.

The third verse of four. Meln’k has not yet described what she found inside the peak chamber of El’Shem’Kri…that will come with the final verse.

Who is the ’she’? I confess I never pried this answer from Meln’k herself. I suspect it a reference to The Woman Enwebbed, but cannot be certain until the Woman awakens.

Which she will not do until Meln’k dies.

Did I give too much away there? Perhaps.

Local Boys Discover Walled-Up Room at ‘Razor’ Asylum

April 13, 1952

NEWARK, N.J. – A trio of teenage boys made a gruesome discovery at the site of the former “Razor” asylum last night.

The three boys, after vandalizing one of the long-abandoned Hessh Asylum’s inner walls in what they termed ‘just a bit of fun,’ discovered a sealed-off room in the process.

“We just wanted to see in the Razor,” said Sherman Multin, one of the three teen boys. “We found a couple walls that weren’t torn up like the others. John brought a sledgehammer, so he knocked a hole out of one. That’s when we saw it.”

“It” was the full skeleton of a human male, imprisoned in a windowless room built at some point during the asylum’s operating years. It was slumped against one pitted cement wall, facefirst. On the walls surrounding the skeleton, the no-doubt former patient had painted a large number of weird symbols.

“Frankly, I don’t know what they mean,” said Patrick Wildfire, psychologist and nephew of Dr. Anna Wildfire, responsible for the construction and naming of the Hessh Asylum in 1804. “I never even knew about a room like this. All the symbols look like gobbledygook. Some poor soul’s ravings, I’d call it. That’s all.”

Nicknamed “The Razor” due to its high number of lobotomy patients, the Hessh Asylum operated from 1804 to 1849. It closed in the summer of 1849 due to a sudden, violent collapse of the main building and an alarming number of patients gone missing. Even today, over thirty patients remain unaccounted for.

Its last administrator, Dr. Henry Merriweather, made several bizarre claims about his patients’ behavior before the collapse. As Dr. Merriweather was committed shortly after the Razor’s roof caved in, these claims are likely baseless.

The three boys were released to their parents after they flagged down a police officer and drove with him back to the police station. None of the parents decided to comment for this story.

The symbols found on the room’s walls have been copied and sent to Dr. Stephen Crestfall, a linguistics expert at Stanford University in California, for study. Perhaps they had some meaning to the unnamed patient. Other efforts to determine the patient’s identity have turned up nothing.

In a bizarre final note, police found one word that was written in English on the walls. However the word – “Jurrecz” – has no known meaning.

These circumstances were forced. I don’t know this house. I don’t even know when I am.
I must have done something to get me here.

It’s like some god put seeds in our minds from before. When we will make him mad some time in the future. That makes sense, right? No, how could it?

I thought it was seven, but it’s 4. Seven was the Knives I saw for cutting the gates open.

4 is worse. 4 is faster.

Only 8 Keys left!

It hurts me to think. I shouldn’t try, there’s something inside…

ONLY AEYONS SUN EERIE TWIN MOTE CREST LAIRDS WASTES ARMORS PIERCE MUU HIDDEN GATES BEYOND ONCE MUSED RITE CXL GOD INSECT MEN FORCES IMMIX BURSTER MERGE

What is that? What did I write?

Oh proto-gods, I see it. Every four. Every four!

The mammalian brain changes its thoughts, and reality grates upon that new perception. Clashing truth to belief. Sometimes reality gives way. Or perception adjusts. Only will may decide this, at any given moment.

The question of the parallel then arises. Which is order, and which is chaos?

Most fools would presume that human perception is fundamentally chaotic. Unable to focus, difficult to process. Reality however does not change from blink to blink. This must be true; it always has been. Yes?

Heh.

What if I told you that Order was perception, and reality was Chaos? What would you think if perception was what pulled you back from absolute electrifying madness?

It is true. The universes are insane.

As bracing as such a concept may be, consider its further implications. If perception paints an order upon it in which the human mind may function…what happens when you change your perception?

Can you change the color of songs, of thoughts, of color itself? Yes. There is a power in this. Build what you wish to see. Take turpentine to physics or nature.

But a price must also be paid. And when it is…there will come a moment when perception goes awry. As it finally, inevitably does.

There are incidents where perception shattered in the wake of chaos. A few of these incidents you have recorded in history; I will reveal them at a later date. What is important to learn from them is a truth abominable to human understanding.

Chaos is not bound by time.

Things done now (not perceived) may affect the past. They bend themselves into existence by brittling Time’s arrow.

And the future is influenced by the present. Both can be equally warped, but in different directions. It has happened because it will happen. Reality obeys Chaos, and Chaos does not coincide with the notion of before-now-after.

When the warping of today collides with the implacable whorls of tomorrow…what happens then?

The universal walls of Order – of Perception – begin to fray.

And in between those frays lurk the Arms That Howl.

Does she live? Sleep?
Is her spirit chained?
The skin a garment
What moves between shown in their weaves

When Meln’k is gone
Realms fold
The Woman Enwebbed
Lifts her head at last

Too deep in truth
Realms will cull
You may not like what you find
You may not like what you awaken.

The sights from El’Shem’Kri Spire haunted Meln’k. Even a spider can have nightmares.

Meln’k went to the Inevitable Call for peace. For a chance to rid herself of the truth, escaping into the bliss that is blackness between existences.

Unfortunately for her, her tale is not yet over. That day is for me to decide.

Thus far you have seen half of her great riddle. I decreed that when it was solved, she would have her escape. But none have solved it yet…for its solution is not merely one phrase or idea. Four secrets are tangled within its quatrains. Only when all four are unraveled shall the Spider Prophetess know peace.

There is a spider in here. It watches me.

I called for Father to make it go away. Without lighting even a single candle, he said there was no spider.

He left me alone.

I keep my diary by my bed. But I’m afraid to leave the bed to get away from the spider. I can see it in the shadows there. Black ugly thing. I want it to leave me alone.

I don’t know how it got in. I didn’t let it in. Somehow it crawled into my room when the window and door were shut. Now it squats there watching. It must have found a way. I can see its many eyes glaring.

Why do they act this way? Am I food to it? Or does it simply hate me?

It came closer.

I looked away for just a second, and it moved closer. I’m sure of it.

It must hate. Those eyes glisten with nothing less. But what hate? What did I do to it–

It moved again. I saw it. If the thing had a tongue I know I’d see it lick those wicked fangs.

What does it wait for?

I should call Father again. He has a gun and a great knife I’m not supposed to know about. He could kill it before it reaches me.

Oh Almighty God it’s so close now. I don’t want to die. It scraped its legs against the floor. I can almost hear it. Or is that coming from outside? Are there more?

Take this foul beast away! Father won’t answer me, he thinks I’m telling stories. I told the spider to go away. I threatened it.

It only creeps closer!

I cannot reach my shoes without taking my eyes off it now. Please God, make it go away. I will never harm a spider again, I didn’t know they could grow as large as dogs, please spare me
those eyes

If you search through local county records in the early 1800s, you’ll find a newspaper article about the body of a young girl discovered in her own side yard. Mutilated so badly they would not describe her condition in the article. Only that she had ‘great holes’ and her face was ‘unrecognizable.’

“Assumed work of a maniac believed to prowl about.” How wrong they were.
I know what that ’spider’ truly was. Do you?

I know I don’t understand what happened. This won’t even make sense. But I have to tell it to you. It won’t leave me unless I tell it.

Forty years ago tonight Vinuk, my old village, was attacked. By what things, I still don’t know. I think I’ve found the answer in the years since then, but there’s no way to be absolutely sure. Even the answer I found seems like a pathetic imitation of what my people experienced in their final moments.

They were wild, shaggy beasts. Something like man, but far larger, possessed of demon-spirits, terrible enough to make old men scream. They came upon us as the night began. Bursting out of the dim edges of the forest. Perhaps they were some evil spirits loosed by our actions. Or maybe just an uncaring world that wanted playthings.

They broke down every door and entered our homes. I can still hear the wood cracking under their gnarled fists, big as a man’s head! The doorframe cracked too as they pushed their ugly bodies inside. I was sitting in my room that night, carving some wood-blocks. I heard the loud crack. And my sister screaming. Then this horrible sound…like someone tearing fruit…

I heard my father yell then, and his sword unsheathe. Part of me wanted to go out and fight whatever attacked us with him. But I could not move. Screaming flooded in all around, freezing my body, as though air were water meant to carry the pain into me.

Then my mother called out something in the old tongue. I think it was, “Bes! Odist Bes!” I heard footsteps, great hulking footsteps that rattled the wood and spoke of nightmare places, and an animal’s cry that shook all the windows. Then I heard it again from somewhere outside. And again. There were many.

By some Providence I was spared the monster’s intrusion. Of the memory, however, I was not spared. Between the window and me was my bed. Hunched while sitting as I was the bed obscured me to the outside. But I saw it walk past. Something more monkey than man, huge and coated with matted yellow fur, with terrible eyes of blood. From it wafted a terrifying air of savagery, a hatred of life, an abandon of anything good or worthwhile.

It didn’t look at me. To this day I’m grateful. For I’m sure whatever insane truths it knew, whatever foul purpose guided it and its brethren…
To see them in its eyes would have left me as broken, as mad-dead as it left the bodies of my family.

–Piotr Yvenshich, aged 48

His life in Smolensk was fraught with poverty; he spent almost half of it in asylums. He died shortly after recounting this story to a state authority. This authority is unnamed in the account. At this point, all records die out.

“Bes” is the name of a demon in old Slavic mythology. This is incorrect; the old woman mislabeled their visitor. Though a demon it could be judged, by its actions.

This is only half the story. No one ever found out about the symbols scratched into the rocks a mile north of Vinuk. They never found the blasphemous priestess who painted her body and danced that night. They never saw the remains left when her body exploded to complete the realm-piercing spell.

All of this is still there.

The piercing still yawns open.

“There are pale stenches and gaunt superstitions and mere shadows and lively malices: whims and amiabilities. The naïve and the pedantic and the bizarre and the grotesque and the sincere and the insincere, the profound and the puerile.”
–Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned

He also wrote a quotation which I find skillfully observant.

“If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?”

No, Mr. Fort. There is no such commandment. And even if there was, the universal mind has already defied it.