He had heard of Noble Hiermun’s contract. And he wished to boast of his wisdom in educating me. Again. He still believed I owed him each time I wrote.

On another day I would have made juice, and let him boast, and eaten with him after. But today I was very tired, my eyes stung, and my arms were heavy. I could not give the patience. So I asked him to change the subject.

“What did you say?”

“Could we discuss something else, Father,” I repeated. “I don’t want to talk about this. Noble Hiermun was very gracious. I don’t want to demean his generosity.”

“And how would paying heed to your father ‘demean’ him?” His voice rose at once. My ears began to ring. I had chosen the wrong words. “What disrespect is this? I take time to congratulate my son for his achievement—which he would not have if not for my guidance—and you repay me with insults? Have you no respect for your father?”

I could not think of an answer. My mind clouded as surely as fog poured in my ear. This only made him angrier. “What? Have you no answer? Do you keep something from me, boy? Speak your thoughts!”

I recoiled. He had not called me ‘boy’ in years. Curse my eyes forever, for at that moment they damned us both by flitting to the scrolls and tablets gathered on my writing table.

My father saw. “What’s this?” He reached the table as I stood, and snatched up the Scrolls laid there. ‘Symbols…what is this you write? Where does this come from?”

He glared at me, eyes hard. He pointed one of the Scrolls at me as if to rebuke my life’s career. I opened my hands to placate while I thought with speed.

“It is magic,” I told him. “I received a dream. Lady Ashla said I should write it down to send it away—”

“You practice magic?!” My father’s voice burst at me like cannon. The blood came hot into his face. “So it is true! You have become a sorcerer! My teachings have left you. I must tell my friends of this. They must know not to ask you for writing. You would poison their minds!”

“No, father, wait!” I put out my hands. But he had thrown down the Scroll and raced for the door as though he must guard himself against me. I made a fist as his shadow left. My teeth were locked. He would ruin me now. He would tell all that I was no longer a writer, and make them afraid. Because I was not groveling before him, he would soothe his injured pride by taking away my career.

I grabbed up the Scrolls, my hands white and my chest tight. Red foamed around my sight. One scroll rolled open by my fingers. I put the others down so I could roll it up. I faced the window while doing this. The afternoon sun shone on the paper.

Something moved within it.

I stopped rolling the parchment. Symbols. What I wrote before. Their lines seemed to drift under the sun rays. Like dark branches exposed to wind, they swayed side to side, graceful undulations of ink. I watched in rapture. My anger somehow broken by this dance of signs.

What I did not know then was that my anger was not broken. It had found a way out. While I stared, my mouth betrayed me. From those very symbols, from their mystic sway, came the forgotten speech of their sounds.

I became able to recite the symbols.

And in scorching testament to the naked dangers of such lost knowledge, I did. Scrapings of rock. Predators’ growls. My throat made noise unheard in an age.

=====

The next morning a messenger-boy came to tell me of my father’s death.

I ran with him to my old home, the home of my mother. A neighbor, Good Zechairus the Potter, bent with age, met me at the door. “I have called for the priests,” he said to me, gesturing to soothe. I made past him to get inside.

What I saw, no man should ever see of anyone he loves.

My father lay on his back before the fire-pot. His hands lay beside his head. Each finger bent so cruelly back that bone had broken open the skin. Gouges lined his body, their edges gnawed as though scavengers had their play with him.

But scavengers could not make the deep blood-pooled holes in his stomach. His body was lesser; his killer had feasted on the flesh.

His face held such terror, I could only pray the fright killed him before he was fed upon. Both eyes stuck open, stained red, left for glass facing upward.

It was as though he pushed against a murderous beast atop him.

The priests arrived as I stumbled outside, sick from the sight. They made prayers, and wrapped my father, and took him to the temple. One stopped to look at me while I sat against the wall outside. My thoughts were far louder than Good Zechairus’ comforts.

The priest’s face was as drained as my spirit.

=====

I remember nothing until I returned home that eve and found a woman waiting for me.

I cleaned my father’s home a little. Good Zechairus said I burned some clothing and smashed some tablets, but I know not why. My parents’ home now stood as a cave, empty, meaningless. It had no purpose. To me or to others. I hung a curtain from its door and trudged away. If any tried to speak with me I did not hear or see them.

For I knew this was my doing. The spells I wrote down, for the shaman’s benefit and Ashla’s grandeur, had come into terrible being. They used my voice to speak them. My will to fuel them. Untold ages, and they had once again found a voice. The spells had trapped me.

As they trapped the Dreamed Shaman.

Now I understood his eagerness. It was not peace he sought – but escape. In my helping, I was ensnared.

These thoughts, and the shackling doom inside them, rattled within my head. The only sound I could hear.

Until I arrived home.

The woman wore servant’s dress, with an unpainted face and cascades of black hair. She knelt as I entered, for she had come inside without my permission. “Forgive me, good sir. I came to speak on behalf of Lady Ashla and found your home open.”

My hand bid her rise while my mind stewed of other things. Those hateful spells, murdering my father…!

Ashla’s servant-girl rose. She did not smile or meet my eyes. Seeming to keep distance as well. “She commands me to say she has heard the news of your father. She sensed a great spellworking last night, but couldn’t tell its purpose. She gives her sympathies.”

A pouch rattled in her hand. She placed it at my feet while I stared across the chasm in my skull. “Gold,” she said, “for your loss. Lady Ashla wishes to see you when you are well again. She hopes this tragedy will not cause you to stop what was discussed.”

Since I made no response, she left. As the sun melted away and darkness crept back in, her words sank into my thoughts. And provoked them.

All that mattered to Ashla were the spells. She must know of their potential now. She would want them all the more. Perhaps she would torture me to finish the rest of them. Perhaps she would trick me by offering herself. She would give me whatever I wanted for such power.

Was that all then? Was I Ashla’s plaything, stuck between her ambition, a dead shaman’s plea for release, and a mutilated corpse I somehow engineered? I felt my fists clench. They felt strong. Eager.

Mighty.

This startled me. I pulled them open and looked down. And on one hand, the palm of my left, I found a symbol. Drawn in black, an exact copy of one of the Dreamed Shaman’s spell-symbols.

They failed to protect us. But they may protect you.

This was not the Charm of Stone. How had it come onto my skin? I scratched, but nothing came of. I tried again and again. My fingers scratched so hard blood appeared. Still the symbol displayed its unbroken black lines.

I half-ran to my writing table. I threw the scrolls open at once and searched. There, on the third, lay an empty place.

I gasped.

The spells had begun to enter me!

My breath left in shudders. Was I doomed? Could I escape? Or was this the curse laid upon the shaman, to wait after death until I could pass on this malice?

No.

In his shimmering nether-body, the Dreamed Shaman appeared. His face bore great sadness.

I would have struck him, had his body any weight.

I am sorry. I had hoped we would finish before the spells could affect you. But they were too eager. It has been too long.

“What has happened?” I hissed at his ghost.

The spells are not of this world, but of another. Jurrecz exacts a price from whoever uses his power. It has always been so. The magic must feed in order to grow. I used it to save us. It took my life in return.

The ghostly old man gestured at himself.

It left me in this empty existence. Until I could ensure the magic would have others on which to feed, I would not rest.

“You’ve condemned me old man!” I shouted so hard at him, my throat tried to force him back. “It has taken my father. It has begun taking me! Damn you!” I shook with rage. My hands reached for his spectral face, needing to attack despite it being futile.

No! There is still a way!

The ghost held up both his hands.

The magic has fed. It sent a creature from its world to your father. It has gone back. There is nothing we can do now about it. But if we finish the last Scroll, and then bury them all before it awakens again, you will be safe.

“Are you mad?!” I roared at this bodiless intruder in my life. “You expect me to finish writing now, after those scrolls caused my father’s death?”

The Dreamed Shaman lowered his hands.

I am sorry. It is the only way. Otherwise, it will consume you as it did me.

I sat down hard enough to make the chair move. Long moments passed. Under dim stars I stared at my polluted hand. The ghostly shaman waited beside me, silent.

I thought of burning the scrolls. Or handing them to Lady Ashla and asking her help. Even hurling them into the sea ten days from here.

But in the end, I did what the shaman asked. If only to rid myself of his violating presence, I told myself. If only to be rid of all of this.

In the hour before dawn two days after, in a silent field far from my city, I buried these scrolls deep in a hole. I laid stones upon them to keep them hidden.

And I have left this warning. You who read this, place the Scrolls back in the hole and cover them anew. Tell no one of their existence. These spells must forever starve. They will bring doom upon you, and all of your peoples, if they are allowed to feed again.

–Unan the Writer

If you have read the warning, then the spells must have been unearthed. So, ponder this…where are the Enoth-Ikul Scrolls now?
~Lord Glanbrin

There are indeed too many humans on this world. In the past nature was able to curtail them, through plagues and famines and their own deep-seated desire for violence. Now however such methods do not go far enough. Nature waits for the inevitable collision, certain she will then be avenged. Even as she herself is ravaged, she will cry out in victory.

With my next post I will begin a new story. You place much truth in written recordings. It happens that I possess one of the very few written records of Xhol magic. Perhaps its telling will convince you.

“Is that it?” Angela whispered.

Her three companions all looked in the direction she pointed. Off to the left of the old weed-tufted road was a gloom-ridden block of a building. Abandoned long ago, complete with empty window-slats and brittle dead ivy creeping through the gaping holes in dull white-painted walls.

“Yep. That’s the old Razor,” said Walker.

The four of them stood watching the long-empty Hessh Asylum for several moments. Sunlight crawled back from them toward the horizon. As if it waited for spooky music, or for some crazed old man to run out at them from the scraggly forest grown over the land.

Garrett grinned at both of the girls accompanying them. “It was built in 1816,” he started. His voice went nasal on the ‘in,’ for which he quickly admonished himself and cleared his throat. “They called it ‘The Razor’ because of all the lobotomies performed while it was open.”

Danielle gave Garrett a solidly-patronizing smirk, face half-hidden by her long blonde hair. “And how long was that, hmm?”

“33 years!” Garrett replied, pointing skyward. His eyes practically glowed behind his glasses.

“Not very long,” Walker said. He snorted. “Guess the residents didn’t like the decor!” He chuckled at his own joke.

Angela shifted in place. “Can we just get the rock you need and go? I don’t want to get stuck out here after dark. I mean, it was hard enough finding our way–”

“Not to worry!” Garrett piped out. “I brought a map that shows the way. And an extra flashlight.” He grinned over at Angela, cheeks mashing upward.

Danielle pulled on Walker’s arm. “Come on, let’s go see the place. Maybe we can have some fun inside.”

Garrett rushed past Walker, his legs much shorter (and more eager) than the basketball player’s. Angela wrung her hands while following them in.

1849
Nurse Sandoval raced up the main hallway, the faint echo of her heels on the tile buried under the yelling all around.

Ahead of her lay an old man, facedown just outside an open cell door. Gray-white hair squashed under him jutted out around his ears.

Sandoval kneeled down, pulled up on his right shoulder, and brushed his beard down. “Mr. Sanderson, are you all right?”

Mr. Sanderson stared at her, panic in his wrinkle-framed eyes. Not the distant kindness he usually showed the staff. “It doesn’t matter,” he mumbled. Lips quivering as though he would cry. “Jurrecz will come. We won’t remember.”

Nurse Sandoval stared blankly for a moment. Normally they ignore patient ramblings. But Sanderson’s sincerity radiated from his eyes.

She touched the cross around her neck.

Why would he be scared of Jesus?

“Come on Mr. Sanderson. Up you go.” She looped an arm around his shoulder. Mr. Sanderson got to his feet, allowing her to direct him back into his cell.

When she closed the door, Mrs. Taylor was waiting in the hall.

“For your own good,” she croaked. Glaring past Nurse Sandoval as if the much younger woman wasn’t there. “Twice a day.”

Nurse Sandoval sighed. Mrs. Taylor never said anything except parroting the nurses & orderlies’ daily phrases. As far as she knew, it was the reason her children had left her here 5 years ago.

Sandoval walked around Mrs. Taylor, leaving her standing in the long cold hall. She was fine on her own. The violent episodes only came when she was forced toward someplace.

At the end of the hall was a T-junction; hall to the left, hall to the right, & a door in front of her to the staff offices. Nurse Sandoval had intended to enter the office and take her break. But a shuffling caught her attention, drawing her eyes to the leftside hall.

Patients milling about was common in the Hessh Asylum. But not over there. Not from the walled room hallway. No one went over there. The hallway wasn’t even lit.

Yet she could see the outline of a young man in pants and a strange decorated shirt, without a patient’s gown on. He was hammering his fists on the exterior of the Walled Room. Screaming in a squeaky youthful voice, “Let me out! Let me out, please!”

NOW
“Woah. They weren’t kidding,” Walter said. His eyes drifted over their surroundings.

Inside the long-deserted asylum the four students were surrounded by a ruined skeleton of a building. To their right was a long broad hallway, lit here and there by open patches in the ceiling letting in moonlight. Scraps littered the floor, everything from cracked tiles to small weeds. Jagged holes stood in the walls on all sides, like black-filled sentries.

Angela breathed out, one hand gripping the other elbow. “Is it…did they paint it like this?”

“No,” Garrett said, shaking his head. Eyes on the gaping hole across from them, tracing along the edge. “Guess the story’s true.”

Walker crouched, long legs splaying out like a spider’s to both sides. He picked up the nearest chunk of masonry to him. “Yeah. Look. It’s red. All the way through.”

They stood facing the long central hallway now. Some of what they thought were holes turned out to be doors. Doors opening into cramped patient cells. A warehouse row to store dregs of humanity.

And every wall around them was an ugly, grimy red.

Danielle shifted in place. “It looks like blood. Is it supposed to look like that?”

Garrett nodded. He remembered the flashlight in his hand, and turned it on. “The story is that the walls all turned ‘the color of blood’ after the patients disappeared. Some people thought the staff killed them all. Others said the devil took them. That’s why the walls are all stained.”

A hollow noise came from somewhere down the hallway. Air grating. Wisps of sound.

Walker froze half-standing. The red masonry chunk cradled in one hand. “Dude. You hear that?”

Garrett gave his friend an inquisitive look. Angela bit her lip, saying nothing. Danielle however snorted. “Oh come on. His voice echoed and you’re all scared?”

She grabbed Walker’s right hand with both of hers. “Come on big guy. I want to see the old scary loony bin.” She gave a cutesy pout. “Won’t you protect me?”

“But, he got his frat pledge,” Angela said, pointing toward the masonry chunk in Walker’s hand. “He got what he came for. Let’s go okay?”

“Fascinating!” Garrett suddenly added. He had moved a few steps into the hallway to examine another of the torn-out holes in the walls. He rubbed two fingers along its edge, pushing flecks of red dust off.

“It IS red all the way through.” The scrawny teen wrinkled his nose to adjust his glasses. “Look at this as well–the rubble on the floor.”

Angela looked where he aimed the flashlight down toward his feet. “It’s just a few rocks,” she said, still eager to leave.

“Exactly!” Garrett beamed at her. His face was half-covered by reflected blobs of light, turning the expression into a warped, wicked-looking grin. Angela wasn’t quite as pretty as Danielle. But that was okay. If he could just impress her, maybe she would be nice to him. He could ask her out–just keep trying! “Where’d all the rest of it go? There should be a lot more debris here.”

“Well let’s go find it,” said Danielle. The shadows covered her slight smirk. She pulled on Walker’s arm again. He took a few half-hearted steps forward.

“Great idea!” trumpeted Garrett. Then he took off down the hallway. The flashlight beam bounced over dirt-coated floor patches and holes in walls.

“Hey Garrett, wait up!” Walker called after his friend.

But darkness had closed about the flashlight. Garrett was out of sight.

NEWBETWEEN
Whenisitnow
Weunsure
Onepulled
One?
Weremember
Wallsbrokedown

Garrett coughed. The dim hallway had few cobwebs, but dust jumped up at him with every step.

He felt slightly ridiculous at running on ahead like that. The others hadn’t followed him. And he’d readily admit it; most of his reason for being here was impressing the girls. He learned all he could about the Hessh “Razor” Asylum to show how smart a guy he was. Girls said they liked smart guys—don’t they?

Swatting at another cloud of dust, he blinked as he found himself facing a wall. What? He flicked the flashlight up, another crack-riddled red concrete face showing in the beam.

Did he get turned around?

He looked over his shoulder. Grim darkness greeted him on all sides. Only the wall was distinct.

Where was he?

“Okay, don’t worry Garrett,” he said to himself. His voice emulated a quivering reed. “You can’t get lost in here. There’s a dozen ways to get out through the walls. Just find your way back, or get out through a hole. And then ask Angela out on the way home. Yeah.”

Then an airy sound breathed out of the blackness on all sides. Like a dozen disparate noises circling him.
“Oooouuuutttt….?”

1849
Doctor Gunther Merriweather sat in the meeting room at the far end of the main hallway. A thick tuna sandwich hung between his beefy hands, its innards trying hard to slide back out onto the table before he could take another bite.

Nurse Sandoval walked in the door, nudging the head doctor’s eyes up toward her. Lovely woman, to his sentiments. Pity he’d been married to a nagging shrew for…what, has it been 35 years now? And the staff wondered why he preferred being here, among crazies, over his own home?

Nurse Sandoval came right up to him. He saw a paleness on her face that wasn’t a frequent visitor to the ordinarily-vibrant woman. “Doctor,” she said. “I just saw something.”

Dr. Merriweather licked some tuna off his finger. “What something?”

Sandoval rubbed her left arm. “Well, it was…there was a young man in the hall. The Walled Room hallway. I’m sure he wasn’t a patient either. He had strange clothes on, not a gown or anything.”

Dr. Merriweather chewed on his next bite. He grimaced as the last of the sun’s rays intruded on his eyesight from the window off to his left. “Strange clothes. Is that all?”

The nurse shook her head, dark blonde hair wagging back and forth over her cheeks. “No sir. He was pounding his fists on the Walled Room. And he kept yelling, ‘Let me out!’ I tried talking to him, but he didn’t seem to hear me.”

Merriweather made a small noise in his throat and put down his sandwich. A little tuna finally crept out the side. He grunted at it. “Sounds like a patient to me. Get Mr. Hunt to help you bring him to a cell. I think #32 is still open if you can’t find his. He can spend the night there; I’ll look him up in the morning.”

Nurse Sandoval frowned. The idea struck her as unlikely to work. The yelling boy didn’t belong here. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she felt it was true. All the same, she wouldn’t get any more out of Dr. Merriweather once he’d made a pronouncement. So she nodded and turned on her heel to leave.

Then Nurse Winfield burst into the meeting room, hands up, face white. “They’re gone!” she shouted out, panting furiously. “The patients, they’ve all vanished!”

NOW
Danielle giggled at the decrepit remains of one of the asylum’s patient cells.

Walker shot her a funny look. Standing on the other side of what was left of a metal-backed cot, he watched her face. “What’s funny Danielle?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head, then gave the basketball star a playful look. “Just thought it was a pity the beds are broken like this.”

Walker blinked, and looked down. The cot was only a rust-coated frame now, with scraggles of old mattress springs and flecks of brittle cloth atop it like some nightmare forest.

“Girl, what’s going through your head?”

Danielle simply smiled at him.

Angela, pressed to the yawning doorway with Garrett’s extra flashlight in her hand, rolled her eyes.

Danielle suddenly changed the subject. “Why’d you bring the nerd along, Walker? He’s funny, but really.”

Walker pointed at her. Long and lanky, his arm almost reached across the cell entirely. “Don’t you go calling him that again, y’hear? Garrett’s my friend. Has been since 6th grade. He’s got more the right to be out here with me than you.” Walker snorted and went for the cell door.

Danielle followed him out into the hall – breezing past Angela as if she wasn’t there – and stuck herself in front of Walker. “He doesn’t have these, though,” she said, pushing her breasts together with her hands.

Angela snorted air out of her mouth. “Danielle, honestly. Let’s just find Garrett and go already.” The darker-haired girl looked up along the rotted ceiling, its surface riddled with gloomy pockmarks and dangling bits of aged white tile.

Walker, despite being honestly tempted by the display in front of him, mustered the resolve to walk around Danielle. It wasn’t the first time a girl offered herself, eager to take advantage of his image around campus. Walker may be the school’s best chance for a new league title. Danielle would love to brag to girlfriends about him.

Okay, he’d love to brag at the frat house about Danielle too. But dissing Garrett wasn’t—

Up ahead he heard a whisper.

Walker’s pace slowed on its own. “Hey Garrett? It’s me. Don’t do nothing stupid man, you’ll scare the girls.”

Danielle scoffed, a few steps behind him. Angela, half-hidden behind their flashlight’s weak halo, said nothing.

As they went further up the long broad hallway, the whispers continued. The sound grew close enough to shape a pitch. That of an old woman.

Walker became aware of pebbles scuffing under his shoes. It was an old woman’s voice, yes – croaking syllables, huffs between words. He could hear words now. It sounded like his grandma.

What would she be doing here?

“For your own good.”

An old woman’s muttering. Coming from…the next cell on the right.

“Administered daily.”

The part of him that gripped the chunk of masonry wanted to turn around. Or throw it. But the part that didn’t know better kept moving his feet.

“For your own good,” the voice croaked.

Walker reached the cell, its open doorway welcoming him as a spider would a fly. Danielle behind him, pressed to his side. Angela still hung back in the hall. He gulped, and looked inside the cell.

What he saw made no sense at all.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Charming, is it not? To think it was composed by a spider.

Nevertheless, a spider who walked the whole of the El’Shem’Kri Tower.

This is the first part of her great riddle. Written in webs strung from the Pit Kl`kknnn. They preach the truth she discovered in four verses. You will read the other three in due course.

On your amusingly-named “Black Friday” I shall post a story involving Meln’k.
Death is where you will meet her. Her life will be revealed in time.

I include myself in this assessment because even I cannot escape what comes. I am, however, one of the few who desires it.

There are those who oppose me in this. Perhaps I will tell you of their conclave someday.

By now you must be wondering, why does this man speak of doom? With names and monsters I do not know, let alone understand? Where do these stories he mentions come from?

I will answer the last question first. While I do say only four have been to the Other Realm, many have glimpsed it. Some recorded their experiences. Others went blindingly mad and their stories were written down by others between seizures. Some had the integrity to write what they had seen, but then tried to destroy those writings.

Fortunately for you, I quickly become aware of these gibbered scrawls. And I possess them.

I took a handful of pages from an ornate tomb in a black pit off the frozen shores of Norway. A complete, if short manuscript I dug up in what you now call northern Iraq (once Sumer, the nation you foolishly believe the oldest in human history).

A few were given to me by their authors. Now long dead, either from age or self-inflicted release.

Why so much fear surrounding their stories? Horror writing brings fear, yes. But prophecy brings terror. Cold, implacable terror that nestles in your chest like an ice tumor.

That is why they all surrendered their words to the winds of chance. They wrote down their terror and tried to cast it away from them. Escape in some final effort of divorcing truth from their minds.

It does not work that way, my friends. Truth stays. No matter what it means for you, for your city, for every city on the Earth today. Truth will sweep them all away in the end. And watch the new Realm-life ooze into shape on the warped, raw-edged landscape.

Oh, and as for the names and monsters and doom you do not yet understand? Patience, friends. You will.

How amusing.

I see the yearning for knowledge still remains in my once-brethren.
Be warned though. Your curiosity may prove your greatest mistake.

What? You want more still? You read on, so sure that what comes is within your capacity to weather, despite the braver men who threw themselves in rivers to escape its sting? How…enjoyable.

For that will you have to wait, my young friend. Wait and grow accustomed to this. The surety that one day all of you…the living, the dead, and those who dwell otherwise…must bear witness to the One Realm Coming.

Follow this “website” as you call it. When it is time, you will know more.