The second year of His Rule. The year is known as 689 in the heathen calendar. It is the thirteenth month and the second week.

Today my liege was visited by a traveler. A man of white skin and red cloak, who claimed lordship over small lands in the northwest. He gave to my liege a beautiful ring with a green stone, which he called a “stone of Nat-ruul.”

My liege did not share the full discussion he had with this man. They spoke of some topic in quiet words for many moments in private. Then the traveler gestured in such a way toward the throne, and my liege leaped up as though struck. He ordered the traveler to leave in a booming voice. And to never again enter our lands under pain of lifelong imprisonment.

The traveler laughed rudely in response. He is a fool to displease my liege. Men have died for such actions before my eyes. Yet this traveler was not approached by the royal guards. He departed untouched, allowed to leave his insult in the royal presence. I have never seen this occur.

He called himself a lord, and yet spat in the face of grand Kutran? Either my liege was in generous spirits this day, or there is another reason why he chose not to respond to mockery. Perhaps he is of great influence elsewhere, or he has an army.

This concludes my recording of the day’s events.

==============

Yatoslan, Scribe of the Court for the Grand Kutran, Ruler of Volga Bulgaria

The seventh year of His Rule. The year is known as 694 in the heathen calendar. It is the first month and the first week.

He returned! The red-cloaked traveler, the foreign lord! I remember him well. His sneer insulted our grand ruler; he lived only by the generosity of my liege.

I must write this down quickly. My liege did not give me leave to do so. They have gone into the royal chambers. I can hear my liege shouting something at him. The guards are coming up the hallway. Wait, I can hear. This ‘lord’ is cal

Here the transcript ends. The remainder was burned away in some distant night.

They all looked as white as their uniforms. Each stood limp, staring at him. Directionless. Caught like flies in a web.

Dr. Merriweather pointed past them all. “I want all the doors checked, all the windows checked, and all the storage rooms searched. Right now!” He bellowed the words out, voice echoing back down from the ceiling. “Nurses, windows. Orderlies, doors. And don’t forget the treatment room. I’ll check the storage myself. You find even one patient, you sound off. Go!”

The staff took off like he’d fired a gun. The nurses split to both sides of the main hallway, checking the first pairs of cells there. Not all of them had their doors open. The sound of keys rattling echoed out.

The orderlies bounded down toward the main hall’s far end, heading for the doors on either side of it. Dr. Merriweather went that way too, angling right toward the narrow hall extending down past the main hall on the right side. Producing his keyring, he moved toward the only door on the right of that dim gray hallway, a lonely green metal door marked ‘STORAGE’ in white letters.

Unlocking it with a heavy frown, he slipped through.

Inside was the Hessh Asylum’s sole storage room. From records boxes to foodstuffs to emergency supplies, all were neatly arranged on open steel shelves eight feet tall. The lighting came down in harsh swathes, not strong enough to chase away the pools of shadow surrounding many boxes & some patches of floor.

Dr. Merriweather took a slow breath. The door had been locked. It was unlikely anyone else was in here.

So why had his neck begun to tingle as soon as he entered? Why did it feel like someone was watching?

Uncertainty, he told himself. And the room. The room was cold. It was always cold.

He walked between the shelves. The shadows drew his eye more often than boxes. Did that one move?

Nothing lay on the floor. No hiding patients, no spilled boxes. Yet each moment Dr. Merriweather felt more compelled to look over his shoulder. Some invisible presence, growing, weighing down on him.

Who was THERE?

Finally, finding nothing amiss in the storage room save the growing invisible weight, he scurried out & re-locked the door. Seth Hamish, one of his orderlies, lumbered up to him at the mouth of the main cell hallway.

“Nothing, Doctor Merriweather sir,” he drawled in his Georgia accent. “Doors in the back were locked. No sign of anybody outside neither. No sign of anybody at all.”

The hair on the back of Merriweather’s neck bristled up. He looked up the long main hallway. Finding three nurses approaching them, all with the same nervous confusion on their faces. He knew what they’d say.

Gone. 16 patients. All vanished.

He fought to keep stiff-lipped composure while his mind raced. He had to assume they’d gotten out somehow. If they did, they’d wander into the forest or up the solitary road back to Crenim. Even in their addled states, some would surely find their way the four miles south to town. There would be panic, commotion for the papers, people clamoring for his job…

A thunderous crack sounded up the hall. The nurses shrieked, their voices adding to the pounding noises that came next. Chunks of concrete exploded out of a cell doorway. Like volcanic eruptions, terrific screams of rending stone came at them.

Dr. Merriweather went cold. The walls. The walls were collapsing!

“Get out!” he roared, shoving Seth’s arm. He pointed to the door down the hall to their right. A wrenching crack surged into the ceiling above them. “Get out now!”

They ran. Crashing sounds chased the asylum staff up the narrow side hall. Concrete tore free of itself so violently they felt the floor shudder. The ceiling-crack followed them up. It threw down gray clumps at their heels. Merriweather’s chest heaved, exhausted in seconds. Seth was ahead of him, knocking the door open with his shoulder. A sea of stone screams harried the other six out into the chill night air.

They all tumbled onto the ground, either tripping or dropping to knees, lungs burning. Gray dust stung their eyes. Nurse Sandoval burst into tears. Dr. Merriweather, wheezing against exertion and concrete dust, turned back to look at the Hessh Asylum.

The collapsing noises had stopped. Sooty smoke billowed up out of gaping holes in the walls. He could see at least four of them on this side. He blinked. More along back, probably.

First the patients disappear. Now this? His jaw tightened.

His job was over.

NOW
Walker grabbed onto the pockmarked empty door frame. His mind needed something solid to touch, to hold. He heard one of the girls scream. But right now he had to keep from screaming himself.

He was looking at outer space. As though the doorway to this one tiny cell was some portal out into the vastness of the cosmos beyond Earth. He saw stars twinkling among a tremendous emptiness. He saw large green and yellow orbs that he guessed were planets. The scale, the sheer impossibility of it all being right before him took his breath away and strained his senses.

But it was the creature that made panic force its way up his spine.

At first he couldn’t see it. So covered over by black, so blended into the star-streaked tapestry was it that it wasn’t visible.

Then it moved.

A tremendous pair of hooked claws rose up, stretched forward and struck down. Walked pulled pack despite the claws coming no closer by his perception. The arm that held them was as night. Long and wiry in shape. With a twisted, cruel nature that echoed of pains and bizarre truths hidden among the wastes beyond their puny world.

The claws seemed to sink into space itself. Walker saw another pair of the ugly barbarous claws raise slowly up. Then another. They too stamped onto the soundless aether. And a fourth pair rose.

Pulling itself, Walker thought, terror curdling in him. The thing was pulling itself through outer space! Like some nameless insectoid dragging its body toward prey!

One pair of arms wrapped around his waist, startling him so much he jerked. He looked down to see Danielle. Crying. “Don’t let it in!” she shrieked. “It wants in, don’t let it!”

The star-insectoid clamped down with its final patch of claws. A noisome shuffling occurred, blackness rippling like uneven smoke as its gigantic body moved closer. An orange-yellow globe with many rings lost part of its bulk, blocked from view by the thing.

How BIG was it?!

Danielle pulled on Walker. “Don’t let it in!”

Three baleful eyes, red creases in the fabric of its eager body, fixed upon Danielle. Her eyes remained on Walker, but a grasping fear glazed over them. She tried to speak. But then a pulpy gurgling came from her throat. As though sounds never meant to pass now forced their way up.

Weshouldgo
Nomustremainthecall
We are one in many
Whenheisnotmanyinone
The plane-burner is seen
Lightsoutatten
Must to go now

“Stop it, stop it!” Angela yelled. Her fists pressed to her forehead, she dropped to her knees, jagged masonry edges poking her flesh. Tears spattered onto her wrists. “Stop yelling, it’s crazy, go away!”

Walker had begun doing the only thing he could – moving away from the terrifying vision of outer space and a sickening invader dragging itself nearer. Concrete chips scraped as he staggered back over them. He hauled the gibbering Danielle with him, her arms fastened to his waist tight enough to hurt.

Walker called to Angela, but she remained on her knees beside the star-gaping doorway.

The first pair of ghastly claws raised once more.

A voice intruded then, deep and singular and droned with power.

Inevitable of Between…
Enah-k’k, Enah-k’k…

Danielle screamed a piercing scream once. Then she crumpled against Walker’s leg and went still. The deep droning voice spoke again.

Return whence cast…
Claim the new followers…

The droning voice fell silent. The star-insectoid heaved its vastness forward.

Then Angela moved, crawling after Walker’s fleeing feet like a bug. Her tears left dark wet circles on the dirty floor. “I have to go, have to leave, please!”

An horrendous shriek came over all three of them. It was a one voice churning in on itself, cacophonies of different pitches and unmatchable tones. Like a dozen human beings or more all speaking the same thing at the same time in different states of agony.

“LEEEEAAAAVVVVEEEE?”

“The asylum gained the nickname ‘The Razor’ in 1847,” mumbled Garrett. “Due to its continually-high percentage of lobotomy patients.”

Reciting from books came naturally to him. He often read aloud when he wanted to memorize facts. It was calming.

Calming was what he needed.

He stood in front of a wall, cracked open like the others, somewhere near the asylum’s far end. Blackness lingered close about him. His flashlight shone through the hole into a cell.

A cell with no door. This hole was the only entry or exit. It had come too late for its former occupant.

A human skeleton lay sprawled against the opposite wall from Garrett. Its skull leaned against the masonry, sockets pressed against it. The arm-bones had crumpled down alongside the ribcage.

Above them, long scratches raked the red-stained surface. Brown dried blood-streaks mingled with the pale scratch lines.

Garrett was sure his face was white. His stomach groaned a protest of his thoughts. Someone HAD died here. Who? No one was mentioned in the records as being confined like this. From the look of it, he (or she) had been walled into this cell. Never to leave. Left to rot.

He let the flashlight drift. Its ghostly beam traveled over the walls. Garrett caught his breath.

Symbols. Scratched into the walls, every wall, were all manner of wrenched alien symbols. They twisted about themselves, like suicidal dancers trying to snuff their lives once the music ended. They were completely unfamiliar to Garrett. And the more he saw them, the more he wanted never to remember their rippling madness, their archaic whisperings.

Then he felt eyes upon him. From far away, a deep voice droned words he could not fathom.

1849
Nurse Sandoval heard someone else crying. She blinked at the tears in her eyes, grit fast replacing them from the soot and dust choking up the air. Was someone still in there? She got up off her knees and peered back.

More crying echoed from the dust-shrouded remains of the Hessh Asylum. A single voice, far away, sobbing like an abandoned child.

“Someone’s still inside!”

Dr. Merriweather and Seth saw Sandoval straighten up. Both men glanced at each other.

They got to her before she could charge back inside. Each took hold of one arm, firmly holding on. Sandoval was a kind soul; she really would charge into a burning building to save someone.

Or in this case, a partially-collapsed one.

The wailing came again, shooting out from behind the shrouded concrete skeleton that was their workplace. This time it spoke. A man wailed out, the sound pitiful and soaked in despondence.

“They left me! They found him and left me behind!”

Dr. Merriweather snorted. It figures. All the other patients suddenly vanish, the whole building spontaneously crumbles…and Josias Kegal weathers it.

Kegal was deemed so dangerous that they walled him permanently into the last cell. His ravings had led to many severe injuries among neighborhood pets and children in Pennsylvania. His file stated that he’d lost his sanity after his father died under mysterious circumstances at sea. Evidently some discovery in his father’s effects – a dark family secret, or proof of some unspeakable event – shattered the man so thoroughly he became no more than a screeching animal.

Screeching like he was now. Half-buried under a collapsed roof, thought Dr. Merriweather. The bitter edge of a smile stole across his wrinkled face. Good. It’s all he deserves.

Merriweather would lose his job for this. An entire patient population (save one) somehow escaped? The entire building tearing itself apart as if by some divine retribution? No rational explanation fit. So the state would dismiss it all by dismissing him. And Seth. And Nurse Sandoval, who now stood crying into her hands. And all the others too.

Dr. Merriweather gestured with a dismissive hand to the cobbly dirt road behind them. “Seth. Head back up to town and bring the police. Tell them we’ve got escaped patients.”

Seth nodded mutely and lumbered for the roadway. Merriweather listened to his shoes crunching dirt, slowly receding south. He wondered how the patients had gotten out. Maybe they broke a hole in one wall, causing the collapse? He shrugged.

Possible.

But he found he didn’t care.

It meant retirement. It meant being home with his nagging wife all day. But it also meant no more screaming patients. It meant a slight bit of relaxation.

The Hessh ‘Razor’ Asylum staff waited for the police to arrive. Each staring at the jagged rubble to which their workplace had violently reduced itself.

NOW
160 years later, four young people fought to keep sanity in a place for the insane.

Walker lurched forward, then back. His eyes flew every which way. Trying to find where the voices came from. There were more now. They spoke up and down and near and far. Different words, male and female, all shouting and whimpers and shrieked babbles.
I REMEMBER!
THE DEMON CRAWLS
TWICE A DAY, DON’T FIGHT NOW

The air seemed to whip around him, the voices banshees that struck at his lean body time and again.

Danielle had collapsed at Walker’s feet. Her eyes were wide, vacant. Her body gone fetal. Tiny burbled sounds dripped from her lips. Across from her Angela was a blaze of frenzy. She scratched at the air, flailing arms glistening with sweat and streaked with dust. Her tear-streaked face knotted in panic from the bodiless howls.

Walker put his hands over his ears. It didn’t dim the tide of howling. He wanted to run. To get past that abyssal window into some nether-space. Get to a broken-out wall and run for it. Save himself.

But his feet wouldn’t take any steps for him.

Couldn’t leave his friend? Chivalry for the women? Too scared of the pounding voices to move at all? Any or all, it didn’t matter. He hated whatever was responsible for this torment.

Then he heard the tone change.

The voices began to soften. To turn away from them, as though their many unseen speakers all faced another direction.

Even the words changed.

ANOTHER JOINS
WE REMEMBER FEELING
ONE FROM NOW TO SEE THROUGH THEN

Walker felt his breath catch. He did not like those words.

Garrett stood with one leg over the broken closed-off cell wall’s lower foundation. This way he could lean in and examine the strange symbols more closely. Unlike his companions only thirty yards away, he heard not a sound. The only noise that came to him was a thready whisper, so quiet it seemed to Garrett the voice of his own mind.

“These aren’t runes,” he mumbled.
-stories of plane burner- came the whisper.
“Must be some kind of ritual thing,” Garrett continued. The scrawny young academic reached forward, trailing his fingertips over the ragged lines.

Another tenor joined the whisper. Warm, flowing like honey, its barely-felt presence so enticing Garrett found himself shivering. It spoke so low he couldn’t determine the words. Only their sensations, so warm, soothing, comforting. He felt his mind stir, images slowly bubbling into being there.

Images of bliss, comfort. Lying on a bed. Soft cloth over him. Women all around, half-naked, glowing with desire. Was that Angela? He couldn’t tell. It wasn’t important. When your dream comes true, you don’t ask questions.

-welcome- was the whisper. -come-

Garrett’s body slowly eased forward. His forehead came to rest against the wall. His eyes closed. Breath left him.

All at once, the other three visitors came face-to-face with fantasies of their own.

The voices changed again into a musical cant, chiming spoken bell-sounds that bounced in scattershot. Walker, Angela and Danielle gasped in unison.

Walker saw himself driving the lane at the national championships. Up went the ball. Camera flashes went off. Through the net.
No cheering.
No one watching.

Angela gasped at finding herself on a cliff overlooking the sea. Crisp air caressed her face. Forest noises fluttered behind her. A sense of peace flooded through her mind, suffusing into her body as well.

She cried. Both from feeling so calm, and from having no one with whom to share it.

Danielle jerked so violently she came to a sitting position. What she saw was a dream–but not hers. The music-voices pierced down into a piece of her mind no one else knew. Primal urges. Unchecked instinct.

She saw herself stabbing basketball players while Walker ran past them on the court.

She saw her naked self climbing on top of a grinning Garrett.

She saw herself racing up a cliff at Angela’s back. A rope held between her hands.

Her twitching face drew a smile. A shallow reflection of the twisted glee pumping through her in each dream.

1849
Officer Patrick O’Brien simply did not believe what he was hearing.

“You’re saying all the patients got caught in the building when it collapsed, aye?”

Dr. Merriweather looked at the much younger man with tiresome distaste. “No, you idiot. I said all the patients were gone before the building collapsed.” He waved a wrinkled hand dismissively in front of him. “They must have gotten out the back.”

Officer O’Brien frowned. Again he looked about for his sergeant. This ‘doctor’ had been nothing but disrespectful since he & his staff had entered the Crenim Police Station.

But his sergeant had gone up the told Razor with one of the nurses. Given how crabby this old man was, he couldn’t blame him.

Even if it was all a bunch of crazies.

“Patrick,” a dry voice said beside him. O’Brien looked over to find Officer Murdoch there. A troubled look on his colleague’s face.

“Excuse us,” O’Brien said to Dr. Merriweather. Then he got up and moved over to the briefing room’s far corner, beckoning to Murdoch before the old doctor could protest much. Murdoch followed.

“What is it?”

“It’s their stories, Patrick.” George Murdoch rubbed his forehead, eyes searching the floor. “Their stories aren’t matching up. A couple said all the patients got out. But the others…they’re saying the patients all DISAPPEARED. Like poof! Magic.” He made a puffing gesture with one hand.

Nervousness writ large on his face.

“The doctor’s not telling me whatever happened to them either.” Patrick O’Brien rubbed at the bristly red chunk of beard on his chin. “You sure they’re not joshing you, the other ones?”

Murdoch quickly shook his head. “No sir. The big guy, Seth?” He pointed in the direction of a broad-shouldered man in a white orderly’s uniform, sitting hunched over rubbing his face with both hands. “I grew up two houses down from him. His father and mine both came over on the same ship. He’s no liar. He swears to me that all those patients up and vanished. Like something took ‘em all away.”

Patrick’s frown deepened into his face. Murdoch wasn’t the brightest sort—but he wasn’t a liar either. And with the doctor’s abrasive account, they had two stories here. One explainable.

One not.

“Guess we should wait until Sarge comes back. See what he finds.”

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.

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?

“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.

“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
–H.P. Lovecraft

Ahh, Howard. What is mankind meant to do, if not come to understand its own limits?

And yet they so often refuse to venture out that far.

I often wonder why most humans choose to remain afraid. Yes, I said choose, because you do.

Why else would you leave such places as the black murk of the ocean deep unexplored? The vast wastes of space? The scalding strangeness of other dimensions?

It is my theory that your willful timidity stems from egotism. These are all places where man is stripped to his core. Ideas that pull focus away from the central position man takes in his own make-believe world.

The rawness of real nature is simple. Kill, eat, sleep. So visceral is this nature – so far have you stepped from it – that you bury its echoes down inside.

That is why man fears. There is no true ‘unknown’ to you. There is only what you will not accept. Those places where you are an abandoned child.

It is all perception. A self-delusion planting space between yourself and those things which bedevil your mind.

Concepts that jar others. Cracking the edges of sanity, opening thoughts to the nether-expanse between thought and possibility.

It is in these realms that dwell such things as The Arms That Howl. Fragments of Jurrecz the Shattered God. And the imagined unrealities spawned at the protest of consciousness.

I now remind you of that scraping you heard from the closet.

I remind you of the shape you could not have seen on the drive home.

I remind you of that horrible doll you remember from some half-exhausted vision, its eyes fixed upon you.

Howard P. Lovecraft wrote so eloquently of them.

They can’t be real…can they?

Oh yes. They can.

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.

For I have seen the arms that howl.

I must write down what has come for me, before my hands can no longer hold the pen. Before the paper flutters away. Before any last thought escapes my head and I’m left a husk on the floor, jaw agape, waiting for the entrance of insects.

I was a scholar, until I learned. I studied history as we know it, content with boxed explanations, smiling at discussions I could quickly label stupid or fantasy. We rose from the primitives. History was a rising spiral.

But one day I realized there was more history to study. Out beyond the ridges of our book spines and slide rules. It came from a small, crippled volume in the old library. I don’t remember why I was there, or what compelled me to take it. But the research it held…

It told me of a way to see what was once, long ago, far away. A place, or a sheet as one might speculate, upon which the memories of people long gone were recorded. The very universe painted on, with man’s own thoughts as dye!

What could this hold? Anything we have seen, or done, or felt or lost. The possibility was enormous. I could herald an entire era of history! I could look back into the dim past, observe those primitives, and hold them up to measure our greatness by.

After all, we had no knowledge of such infinite tapestry from the ancients. Only generalized pictographs, or whispered rumors put to paper by explorers centuries later. They knew this knowledge, and didn’t think to tell us? Fools! I called them. There is proof of your squalor!

But now it is I who lies squalid in a barricaded shack.

I studied the book. I checked it out so many times the old librarian threw it at me the final time and told me to never return. I spent hours, days in meditation, only a candle flame and a loaf of bread my company.

Until finally one day I broke the barrier. Like an iceberg only reveals itself below the waves, I plunged through the realms of spirit and wonder. I passed sheets of color behind my eyes, shivered as the body became meaningless, and with a twisting of the mind like the most powerful drug in all of Nature…

I saw ancient history as my ancestors did. As it happened. Through their eyes.

And this is what I saw.

Long back, when mankind found the caves they would make their homes, when itchy skins were the height of fashion, when they huddled together amidst cold rock, they did as we do today. They tried to understand. What were these forces coiling ’round them? What makes these invisible bursts animals fear, and hide from?

Is it merely a part of the land? Perhaps the after-effect of those floating creatures, leaving a wake that knocks them over? Or is it some armed creature flailing in the sky, a furious god who looks upon them with hate.

Yes, a god of a thousand arms. They cannot see it, for it is beyond them. It dwelled before and seeks dominion again.

It’s not of us, they whispered. It must be bad. Let us fight it! Let us drive it away, so we may not hear these terrible noises from arms that should not be.

So they went out. They made tools, and painted themselves. They gathered in a great line before the edges of rock, and resolved to cry back at the unseen god until it departed.

And that night when they went – I saw it as though standing on the plain beside them, shaking my spear, baying out – the god revealed itself.

It was not what they knew. They could see it. The arms, like blades of grass, stained and swinging and hammering. They carried smoke, and teeth, and loathsome cries no animal ever made. The god shattered the night, defiant, mocking. They saw their fellows picked up, into the arms of the seen god with a thousand scaled arms.

Some were pulled apart, howling from the worst agonies the body may surrender as it tears. Some were squeezed, turned so red they burst like thrown fruits. The parts fell, dripping through the soil, soiling the people who had cried out.

Until all that remained in the sky with the god were their arms. And the howls. They were joined together, more for the god, who grew louder and fiercer.

They ran. I ran.

I awoke here, just at the spot by the door, the candles guttered. My clothes stuck to me, cold, no reassurance. I had not escaped. It waited still. The cries, they could come again.

They are there in the memories that remain. Waiting where bodies fell, in the tapestry of our infinite world. In the place of seeing, where the old gods dwell.

I have seen the arms that howl.

I burned the book. It lights my pages now, so I may give the warning our ancestors gave. Do not look too far down the path of history. What you will find is madness sprung from the mind of man. There is knowledge there, waiting.

But other things wait as well. They know what lures us. They wait for more, in their unseen sky. More arms. More howls. They wait for us to see and die.

I dare not give my name. Remember me as The One Who Warned.

The firewood is ready. All I must do is take the embers of the book, toss it down where I stand. I pray fire will cleanse me. Take me away from those horrible howls. I pray the arms cannot reach me there.