You must write for me. I beg of you. If you do not you risk the Dreaded coming.

I felt more able to respond this night. As though the gold and good company strengthened me. I tried to form thoughts as the voice did, tried swirling images up from the waves in my mind.

Leave me.

Something heavy leaped into the waves. It stabbed down like a brand-iron, thoughts clouding over with steam. The voice spoke again. It rang out like a bell-sheet.

You would abandon your people to the Dreaded? Send all your neighbors to mangled death, their spirits swallowed, their hands left red and wet? I will show you what comes! Yes! You will see the Dreaded!

And my mind was overtaken by the purest madness ever contained in man’s thought.

It was white. As the white of an eye, stretched hard and frozen from the inside. While slick spidery legs thick as man’s arm stepped hungrily past their pupils.

I saw a land of burning rock. Remains of men, animals and plants lay shattered in between gaseous cracks. A limbless sheep lay atop the body of a woman, both twitching as a nameless abomination, a many-legged monstrosity clawed out nourishment from their flesh.

Then it glanced up – I thank the gods I saw it from behind, and not what its jaws had taken. It vomited out a gruesome cry. It dashed off the corpses behind larger rocks. Above it came a sound. Like scraping, like blades on stone. Many blades. Coming closer, growing louder. More numerous.

I saw the shadows of arms, vast impossible numbers of grasping arms, before a sheet of lightning fear jolted me out of sleep.

You must…you must…

I sat up gasping. My breath came hot in my throat. Flickers of the dream came and left. Horrors even the foulest story had never summoned.

Or had it? Was there such a time, where men fell to monsters so fully we do not remember? How much of a such a terrible history is lost, if no one remained to carry it on?

I rose and walked to the window. The breeze washed my skin. I let it chill me. There was one I could ask, I thought, starlight grinning at me. She might know.

Ashla Kiri’ori was famed for her gaze. Some said it was the source of her magic. Their mythic lights were the reason her spells assured the King of his military victories.

Now I had the gaze drilled into me. She lay on a feather-down seat eyeing up at me from within a pool of copper silk. I looked, trying to avoid the flames of her stare—trying also not to think of the gleaming-skinned body more sensual the finest pleasure-woman.

“Writer,” she said, voice like slow-poured honey wine. “You capture speech. A talent few possess. Some have compared you to me.”

I shook my head. “Such a comparison isn’t right, lady. I could only write a shadow of your magic.”

Ashla gave a snake’s smile. It provided fertile reminder of how dangerous she could be. “How flattering. As if I needed my magic to see your thoughts.” Some silk shuffled; the vaunted sorceress sat up. Revealing more sun-dappled flesh.

“Now. Tell me why you come.”

I glanced up. That spear-like gaze knocked my eyes away again. My hands shook.

I could not lie now, I knew. She would know. So I told her everything about the dreams. About the shaman’s voice, his request, the cruel vision he forced me to see. It ended with the question I had for her.

“Lady Kiri’ori, is it possible another people existed once that no one remembers? Could such an evil work so completely? Or am I going mad?”

During the tale, Ashla’s face had changed. She at first watched me in pliant amusement. Then as I came to the vision, interest grew keen in her features. When I asked my question, deep thought creased her brow.

I waited until she spoke. When she did it was with earnestness in her voice. “You know little of the world. There are places in it no man has seen with his eyes and lived. None can travel to worlds deep in the jungle, beneath the seas, deep within the ices of the north. I have seen them only from afar.”

In all these lands, like ours, there exist evils. The King has fought many. So have I. More surely live beyond.”

She stood. The silk spilled over her arms, slinking her chest, every curve a woman’s. She touched my cheek. It felt as warm wax.

“You are not mad. This dream is real. Do as you were bidden. With such knowledge, we could defend against greater evils. Become greater ourselves. Bring me the scrolls when it is done. I will show them to the King.”

She never did, of course. But even if she had known the result of her command, I doubt she wanted the knowledge for anyone but herself.

That night we began.

At first I wasn’t sure whether to sleep or wait. I waited. After the moon rose, I was rewarded by becoming sudden witness to a ghost!

The old shaman appeared out the moon-shadow in my doorway. Rock-gray, his body never quite there, only a drawing of many lines where nothing was before. I could tell him mostly from the wild excitement on his misty half-present face.

“I cannot appear like this for long,” he said. “We must hurry.”

So we did. We started on the first scroll with me sitting, him beside my left. His finger, only clear enough to see the stone-color tip, would trace a symbol on the paper. Which I swiftly copied into ink. Line by line, pictograph by eldritch pictograph. What took shape was a closed-packed series of symbols–”spell-touches,” he called them. All crude, brick-like. No group or line appeared much different than another.

I could see no meaning. No great wisdom.

After the moon passed overhead, the shaman out of time announced an end.

“This is all I can do tonight,” he said. “I will return in two nights. Bring more of this papyrus.” So demanding, he walked into the moonlight at the window, joined with its rays, and ceased appearance.

I must have fallen asleep after that. But I didn’t remember moving to bed. Nor did I understand why the scroll lay rolled up below the window, and not the writing table, when I awoke.

Here I have copied a line from that first scroll. Only one line, so no evil eye should come upon you by seeing more.

I know not what it means. Do not try to learn.

Two nights after the shaman’s ghost appeared again. I managed to buy two more scrolls, but no more. I also bought four clay tablets.

The shaman’s gray-bearded head nodded to me. “This will do,” he declared, his voice like the rustling of dead leaves on a dry field. And we continued.

He spoke of the why behind his magic through the night. I have tried to collect what he said here.

At first they were simple magics – ways to bless the land, anoint warriors, divine the future. But they quickly fell to a darker nature.

The human greed for victory in battle.

The offering of children’s eyes. Or hands, to some ghastly purpose.

The Blade Dance, done to compel demons of madness to emerge.

Even ways to force the future, and to shape the past. Through horrid mutilation of living prisoners – doomed to agony as spiders were poured into their opened chests. Or insects forced into their mouths.

My foolish brothers. They sought to change the very fabric of our world—without even knowing what results they would achieve! They could have done so much damage that blood would pour from the sky, themselves torn to shreds like old cloth…and yet still they performed the magic!

While he spoke and pointed and my hand traced that night, I felt uneasiness grow within my chest. Doubts came. Doubts of whether I should continue these symbols. We finished one scroll and began the next. Ashla said it was powerful to know. But if the shaman’s people knew, and it did not save them…how would the knowledge help us?

Could it hurt us?

Then the shaman began telling stories. He bade me write them in my language. I did not understand why then. And so I foolishly agreed.

His first story involved the meeting of a man with a lizard that walked like a man. I thought it was a silly story to tell children. It was all backwards – the brave walking-lizard warning the man of great danger ahead! And the stupid man walking proudly into the doom of an animal’s den.

Next the ghostly bearded shaman told of how his people’s great creator Jurrecz took of his own body to make the land and forests. I whispered a prayer of forgiveness to Most High Inanna for writing such falsehood.

Finally, when he reached the end of the third tablet, the shaman bade me inscribe six final symbols on its back. Tracing, as before, in his language. At this I could no longer restrain my unease, and I asked the shaman what those last symbols meant.

He said, as his last words that night, “They are the Chant of the Stone Planes. They failed to protect us. But they may protect you.”

To be concluded…

When it was done, I wished I had never learned to write.

I was born in the city of Cren in Sumer, in the fourth age of Enoth, under His Greatness High King Kiresh-Thal. My parents lived just inside the city wall in a strong-walled home facing sunrise. My father made bricks. He did well. So did my mother with her weaving, until the day she pricked herself, became ill and died. This was 7 years before I would reach the age of manhood.

My father traded a year’s labor for the sponsorship of Mec-Sineth, a very old nobleman. His beard was so long it covered his chest. But he was kind, and he provided for my instruction into a new invention. A way to imprint learning in such a way as to make it last. It is called writing.

I was fascinated with this at first. To remake speech, to place it in clay and parchment so that words outlast man? I remember asking Mec-Sineth if it was sorcery. He laughed and said, “Writing is not what makes us kings. What we write does.”

He was correct.

Mec-Sineth died the year before I reached manhood. Even though I was not yet a man, the others allowed me to attend his celebration. His grand-daughter stayed close to me seeking comfort. She was betrothed to Noble Heirmun’s son a month later on her mother’s swift order.

My lessons ended, and I soon was spoken of as a ‘writer.’ Friends treated me differently. A Sorcerer nodded to me on the street. I gained respect from my skill.

My father reveled in the respect paid to me. He told nobles and merchants of my skill. They contacted me to write down matters of business, orations, pledges and other such things.

This became my life. I left my father’s home and built my own, a small house at the edge of the city of Cren. My days became solitary. I would carefully inscribe pottery, or tablets, or parchment when I could acquire it. On many days I did not leave my home at all, nor receive guests. I sometimes became lonely. No mate. Few friends. I did what I could.

Then the dreams came.

That first night I struggled to sleep. My bed mat was at first too cold, then too hot. I tossed side to side as if rolling between ice and fire. My body refused rest, pinpricks and sweating on every limb. The moon rose over me in vigil. My thoughts vaguely registered her behind the fog crawling in the window.

Just when sleep began to drown me, just when my body spent its last and succumbed, he came. It was as though a crooked cavern reigned within my mind. At first it was far away, below a gasp, like a faraway voice in a chasm.

You who hear, listen!

My sleepy mind didn’t know what to do. As though my body, it shrank back. Is this a dream? How could this be otherwise? Who speaks?

Then the voice came as close a stalking wolf. My mind, as though my body, shrank.

You who hear, listen. You must help me. I have waited too long past my death. I cannot go forth without passing on my knowledge. You must use your skill, your ‘writing’ for me.

My writing? In this deep fog, my thoughts drifted. I could not remember myself, not what this chasmic voice sought. Sleep coiled about me.

I will come again before next moon. We will speak again. I was Kaala once…

I slept.

The next day I rose with a terrible sense of difference. The window appeared differently placed. The ground had a tilt. I lack words even now to describe the seeming strangeness.

A vivid dream following a restless night. Surely that was all.

I set to work for the day. The writing went quickly. My hand glided true across the fresh tablets. Its sureness pleased me, as did the clear pictographs I created. I fired the tablets, set them to cool under the window, and decided to visit one of the pleasure-women before last meal.

On my way through town I saw Noble Heirmun come towards me through the mill of buyers. He raised a ringed hand to me. I smiled, thinking how much more beautiful his golden robes were than my white tunic.

“Unan!” he said, his beard splitting with a grin. “It is good to see you! How fare you?”

He offered his hand. I took it. My skills afforded me a certain respect, but Noble Hiermun was of good nature to almost everyone. He had well earned his nobility through trade of metals.

“I fare well, Noble Hiermun. How is your family?”

“Oh, very good!” Hiermun laughed. “My eldest daughter is soon to wed! It is a good time. In fact, I was coming to see you. I have need of your ability.”

“Of course, good sir. What do you need written?” Much as I wanted to go on to the pleasure-den, a noble offering work was not to be refused.

Noble Hiermun gestured high to his left. He pointed toward the High King’s stone palace. “I must make a speech to the King’s advisors in five suns. I would like to leave the speech with them on parchment. Can you do this for me?”

I blinked. My skin became warm. To my knowledge, my writing had never been brought to the palace. Noble Hiermun offered me not just work—but a great honor!

I heard myself accepting a breath after I’d decided. Noble Hiermun’s face brightened anew. “Wonderful!” he declared. “Come to see me tomorrow after morning meal. I will have parchment for you.” He clapped me on the shoulder and made his way past.

I stood there a moment, savoring the good fortune. If my skills were noticed, the King could ask me to become a royal scribe! The highest honor a writer could gain.

If I had known what awaited me in response to these events, I would have felt hand-quivering terror in place of lurid excitement.

That night the voice came again. It stirred a dreamless sleep, like a boat’s prow does still waters.

You who hear, listen. You must write my knowledge. It must survive the scourge which killed us.

My thoughts lapped about in my head, myself a breath of air amid the lazy waves. I wished for peace, for quiet.

Many suns ago my people lived north of these lands. We were not many. Winters were harsh. My rituals protected us from the winds. But they failed against the Dreaded. It came from beyond the veil of night, sending drought ahead of it. We sought to drive it back by numbers. It seized us all and crushed us. Nothing remains of us now.

My murky awareness wafted in ways not bound by direction. The boat continued through.

You must write. I cannot find another. You must…

I arrived at Noble Hiermun’s estate early, finding the streets open to my feet. A servant younger than me brought me to a stately room with tall windows and azure silk hangings. I sat in a chair softer than my mother’s embrace. Noble Hiermun came in a few moments later, followed by another servant bringing tea. I began to think, is this how a royal scribe is treated?

True to his claim, Hiermun has purchased papyrus. Many scrolls of it! Much more than needed, even for many copies. He insisted I take it all, and coin in payment. Such opulence baffled me. Noble Hiermun was a great man.

We set to work following tea. Hiermun would speak, then wait, and then continue. He talked about a proposal to build a new method of bringing water from the river. He called it an “aqueduct.” He even offered some of his own borderland to build on.

Twice he changed his mind, returning to a point and restating himself. His excess papyrus was a boon; we lost many sheets this way. I thanked the gods he spoke slowly.

The sun had come to the end of day by the time we were finished. Noble Hiermun smiled as he gazed down each of the final three scrolls. Even though he could not read. “Very good!” he exclaimed, as servants arrived to light candles. He rolled up the scrolls and tucked them into a pouch. Then he brought out a gold coin.

“Sir!” I breathed, before manners could halt my tongue. A gold coin was five times what such work would normally earn. “That is generous of you. But I could not accept it—”

Hiermun laughed. “Yes you can. Am I not allowed to pay what I believe your work is worth? Worry not, my friend. If the King is as pleased as I am, soon you will command this and more. Now, I insist you join us for dinner.”

I left that night with a month’s earnings in my pouch and belly full of roast boar. I met Hiermun’s eldest daughter and her soon-mate. He shook my hand with the strength of a soldier, and invited me to their wedding. I accepted. I hope in the time since I wrote this, Cehu and I have become friends.

For you see, I carried away the dreaded beginning. A tool with which the dream-haunting shaman ruined my life. Hiermun gave me the four remaining sheets of papyrus. The left-over from his speech.

That which was to become the first of the Enoth-Ikul Scrolls.

He stood in the mangled remains of the head doctor’s office, leafing through a jumbled collection of files he’d pulled from the wreckage and dumped on the desk. ‘Jumbled’ was a kind phrasing though. Dr. Merriweather had been running a terrible shop out here if the records were any indication.

Missing treatment records. Mean-spirited documents about patients AND staff. The only part that seemed consistent were the admittance records.

Nurse Sandoval stood across from him. Hands clasped in front of her, anxiety and eagerness mingled on her dust-streaked face. Rezavich tried not to pay her too much attention. If he did, she’d ask that they make another search of the building and grounds. Another fruitless and very dangerous search, since the forest was not tended. And if it held a slew of crazies, well…

“Lot of Irish patients in here,” he murmured, mostly to himself. Papers flapped past one another as he turned admittance records over. “I’m not seeing a why though. Miss? You know why?”

He looked up. Sandoval was already shaking her head. “No sir. Most of our latest patients did arrive in one group, and they were Irish. But I don’t know anything else. Can’t we–”

Sergeant Rezavich returned his attention downwards. He shuffled his crisp leather notepad out from under the latest stack. It was a new device to him, this portable note-taking tool and its pencil. Still, it had been valuable thus far. He wrote down a note about this group of Irish crazies.

Then he wrote down his theory about where the patients had gone.

“Now then.” The hefty sergeant stood, collecting a pile of records under one arm and his notepad into his trench coat pocket. “Miss Sandoval, if you’ll join me, I’d like to search the surrounding forest treeline.”

“The forest?” Nurse Sandoval unclasped her hands. “But why? They vanished like ghosts, I know it…” Her eyes trailed up and around.

Sergeant Rezavich put up a hand. “They had to get out somewhere. I think they headed to the forest for cover. That means they’re going in the wrong direction for town, so there’s no immediate danger to people. If I find where they went in, I’ll know where to send my men. Come on.”

He turned about and walked through the gaping crack in the wall behind him. Nurse Sandoval followed him dumbly. Outside, Rezavich hissed at the cold while his eyes scanned a clump of evergreens north of the building.

They must be crazy to escape in this weather, he thought. But with the treatment they apparently had at the Razor – and those were just the documented accounts – he couldn’t blame them for trying.

He thought there was movement past the treeline to the north. His eyes narrowed, trying to pierce Night’s veil.

Then a tremendous visage appeared in the night over them. Larger than the Razor itself and filled with atrocities upon sanity, it sneered down as a god to displeasing followers.

The face was gnarled and chitinous. Four terrible mandibles sprouted from it at top and bottom, grinding like they crushed the very space between them. Hundreds upon hundreds of voices burst from the visage, whispers and wrenching cries and things only heard when angry insects mass.

Sergeant Rezavich seized his head. His screams could not drown out the sounds drilling into his mind. In seconds he collapsed to the ground unmoving. Dead from fright. He would never find the truth.

Nurse Sandoval, shrieking as though the devil himself was behind her, fled down the road.

NOW
Walker was the first to claw his way out of the dreamscape.

He wasn’t sure how it happened. His eyes at first showed shiny yellow gym floor. Then dimness, polish fading at the edges. Then a gritty texture, and finally the shrouded glistening of moonlit concrete.

He lay facedown in the Razor’s main hall. Dust caked his cheeks. He forced himself to hands and knees, coughing.

Walker shook like a dog, sloughing off rocks and gray. It felt like the floor, the very building trying to suck him in. He got to his feet, casting about. Danielle lay on her side facing him, eyes unblinking. Dust had collected so thickly on her hair & clothes that she appeared petrified.

Angela crawled up the hallway on his right. Jaw locked, eyes fierce. One hand reached ahead and pulled her forward. Then the other.

“Angela,” Walker said. Voice coming out gritty. “Where you headed?”

“Garrett…find…” she hissed.

“Oh god,” Walker responded. Garrett. Where was he? Walker lurched forward. His legs stumbled him up into a loping run. He ran past Angela, reaching the end of the main hall in seconds. To the right was a short hallway with a collapsed roof. To the left was a badly-damaged room, gaping holes in both walls facing him.

Inside it lay Garrett. He was slumped forward on his belly, bent almost straight up with his hips still on the floor. His face cruelly pressed into a shadowy wall, arms dangling limp at his sides.

Beside him lay a brittle human skeleton. Bones brown with age.
In exactly the same position.

Walker picked his way over rubble to get through one hole. “Garrett! Hey Garrett, you okay?”

Garrett made a muffled unintelligible sound.

Did he fall? Hit his head? Walker braced himself with one hand above Garrett’s head on the strange-painted wall. Then grabbed his shoulder. Garrett didn’t move.

“Garrett? Hey man, if you can hear me, I’m gonna pick you up. Say something if it hurts.”

No response came. Walker hunched down and worked his hands under Garrett’s shoulders. He moved his feet for good positioning.

Someone screamed.

Walker started so suddenly he yanked up on Garrett. The boy made no sound. Even when his lip scraped up the wall, leaving blood in a diagonal line.

Another scream echoed out. Walker jerked his head up and around. Different voice. Where? Who? Walker breathed harder.

Screams. Female, far away. No. Getting closer. More frequent now.

A woman crying. One called his name. The girls. “Garrett, man, get up.” Walker’s voice sounded hollow to his own ears. The screams washed over it, still more. Where were they coming from?

Then Walker knew. He saw one of the warped symbols beside Garrett’s lolled head. It glistened a sickly red as though inscribed with fresh paint.
Or fresh blood.

They came from the walls. From INSIDE the walls!

All at once he heard Angela yell out, voice shot through with terror.

“What are you?!”

Walker heaved, managing Garrett up alongside him. They had to get out right now. He would carry Garrett out through the nearest damaged wall, then do the same for the girls.

When he got out of the formerly walled-up room, there was an old woman in a ratty smock with wild hair and hawk’s eyes standing in the hallway.

Old Mrs. Taylor rubbed her wrinkled hands together. “One voice,” she whispered. “Free to one voice.”

Walker stared, dumbfounded. “Where’d you come from?” he asked. Then he realized he’d shouted it. His lips were trembling.

“The wall,” said Angela, kneeling in the hall past old Mrs. Taylor. Fear tightening her voice, she pointed a shaking hand at the crumbled concrete.

“From the wall.”

“One voice! We saw beyond!”

Old Mrs. Taylor raised up her hands like a preacher stirring their flock.

Or a witch summoning some demon.

Down the main hallway, past them all, something began to emerge from another wall. Concrete pushed outward, flexing like gray rubber. Handprints – two, then four. The shapes of bodies grew forth, defiant of all reason. Splendid madness showing in lively shapes out of unliving surface.

More people began to step free of the walls. Stone spilled like slime around them, pouring as liquid around their wizened legs, castoffs of a torn chrysalis.

Walker and Angela watched the spectacle, mute, gaping. All the people emerging were aged, unkempt, and wearing ragged medical smocks. Some looked about eagerly. Others wailed in wild despair on their knees. Their voices clashed, words piled over each other, one person finishing another’s sentence.

“We didn’t ” “Reach him! Weren’t many ” “Enough! But was the space-creature” “No! Jurrecz’s punishment! We have to app ” “-pease instead! Different, one voice many ” “Thoughts now!” “When? Is it too late?”

Walker’s feet finally obeyed his panicking senses. He leaped for a doorway on his left into one of the former cells, behind the old woman with raised arms. Kicking aside remnants of old furniture, he raced up to the gaping hole in the cell’s far wall. Outside stood a calm forest, a hushed night-breeze, and the old roadway. Way home. Safe.

Garrett sagged against him, feet dragging. His legs bashed against the ruined bed. Walker didn’t slow. He couldn’t now.

He dumped Garrett on the grass outside the Razor Asylum. Jumping back up, he spun about, intending to go back for the girls.

He couldn’t move again.

His legs locked on him. They refused to approach. Walker stretched his arms out, hoping they could somehow reach the girls from there. Shouts and cackles wafted out at him. Mocking his immobility. Celebrating the two remaining people left inside.

People began to come out through the holes in the walls. Walker froze completely. Their eyes were clouded. Their hands grasped at vapor out in front of them.

Stuttered laughter flowed from the stream of people. It reached Walker before they themselves did. His breath came hot as it dawned on him. These were the patients from many years ago.

The patients who disappeared.

They had come back.

Every patient muttered as they trudged past Walker and Garrett. Like a statue in a park at night, he bore unwilling witness to their mad ramblings.

They spoke of creatures in great damned hordes. Of living swamps and apathetic beast-gods. Of inevitable forces in space and Earth. And of their failed “attempt to join.”

Through the walls.

He and Garrett were witness to secrets undreamt by mankind since well before history was recorded. The weavings between place and its opposite dribbled out of thoughtless words. They were forced to hear of the El’Shem’Kri Tower and the closeness of Lu’kk-Enoth’s bubbling flourishes where Chaos runs wild.

They never again knew sanity as whole people. Ever again.

TOMORROW
Ever since then, a lingering fester has dwelt around the town of Crenim. Visitors tell of a frightful clicking or grinding that emanates from the surrounding woods when the night is grim. Its meeting-places forbid any mention of the crumbled dwelling once called the Razor. Even children dare not venture there now.

Friends discovered the four at the ruins of the Hessh Asylum the next day. Garrett was committed, and caught several times emerging from his catatonia to scrawl grotesque symbols with unknown meanings on his cell walls. Using his own torn fingers.

Walker bought a pistol four days later and put it in his mouth.

Danielle moved to California and became involved with a sociopathic woman there. They found her beaten and stabbed in a cliffside crevasse two months later.

Angela roams North America in pursuit of the Razor’s patients. They didn’t believe her when she told them. They even tried to commit her alongside Garrett. But she escaped and ran. She had to find them. They were missing the walls society pushed upon her. The unity they shared, she felt, it was all one. She had to seek it out again.

They would give it back to her.
They would take down the missing walls again.

For those patients who once dwelled within the Razor are still free. Where did they go? Could they seek what they found in another place upon Earth’s crust? Why, when people hear the many croakings, were they always seen on ocean shores?

And out a thousand leagues from Saturn, advancing with the certainty of venom, the star-insectoid Enah-k’k continues to drag itself across the black ocean of space.

–THE END–
–…for now–

“A ship carrying a group of Irish immigrants passed by the submerged Atlantic isle of Nat-ruul in 1847. Consider that magnetism may not always involve metal.”
–Lord Glanbrin

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.”

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 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.

“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.

Those humans who heard the name call it the Pit of the Seven Knives. But it has another, older name. The insects called it Kl`kknnn. As we often ascribe meaning to things in order to elevate our own importance, one could translate this word as “Between.”

Have you thought of insects? The buzzing hordes whose members cause revulsion merely by appearing? No, you simply killed them. Crushed them underfoot, as callous as a brutish giant. Wiped their bodies away and forgot them.

They remember. Though their minds are small, they are made as groups. Tiny sparks animate their thoughts, flowing through the world to reach one another. Kill one, ten thousand feel the loss. Slaughter a hive and earn the enmity of millions more. The insects of this world had only the notion of survival upon which to count. These deaths over centuries became a collective pain so great that their ephemeral cores shuddered.

They had only one final recourse. The Inevitable could be called. When the Seventh Knife fell, crashing deep into the realm-plunged Pit, they could at last have their long-waited revenge.

One moon-shining night the first insects arrived. Darting moths and gnats, dancing in clouds around the trees standing a hundred feet back from the Pit (lest they too become swallowed and torn into the next dimension below). Over the next four days the crawling, wriggling swarms came. Entire plagues migrated from all Earth-corners within a thousand miles. Countless millions from the thinnest worm to the mightiest arachnids. They flooded the sky, dark clouds in blotted waves. And the land, blankets of twitching and mottled color. All surrounding the angry stone gape named the Pit of the Seven Knives, drowning the air for a hundred miles in torrential throat-cries.

And there they fought.

Spiders bit scorpions, who stung their killers. Flies collided with one another and dropped in grotesque fusion. Entire colonies of ants made war with other populations before turning on themselves. Thousands of feet stepping through yellow slime to spill more. Venom melting into soft bodies. Millions of tiny metallic screams. It was the most numerous, most savage war Earth has ever known.

In each insect there was both rage and regret. They killed until they died, their core of survival mutated into one of murder. And yet none bore ill will toward one another; none wished for the death of yet more brethren. They only knew it was all necessary.

The bodies collected. Piled upon the slick stone surrounding the Pit, staining it a glittering black-green with ichors and torn carapaces. The mystic spider called Meln’k, the size of a man’s head, she who knew the first song-line of the Wild Tribes and wrote the garbled riddle-secret, lasted the longest. Her fangs oozed with brethren-blood, which she stabbed over and over into beetles and locusts. Until two legs stuck fast in the entrails of a scorpion called Hkort, and a hail of wasps stung her down.

Generations died. Laying down to join the land-crust.

For this was how they must summon and become their god. Only he, only the one whose name was buzzed at windows and lamps for millennia could make the roar that would call to their giant otherworldly cousins. Only he could sound the Inevitable Call.

In hours it was over. The Insect War ended as the last gnat fell. The barren patch around Kl`kknnn returned to harrowing silence, now drenched in the corpses of Earth’s insects. A day they rested, juices congealing, clenched limbs relaxing. Their painful sacrifice, their last defiance against the giants called Man.

Then within the carpet, something shuddered. And twisted together. And heaved. The winds stilled, then retreated from the spectacle.

Exoskeletons jammed up against one another. Like misshapen blocks they built up something larger. Something a thousand thousand times larger than any of their dead members. Something huge, and heavy, an emblem of their long-suffered rage.

Until at last in the red-swathed twilight, the long-dead insect god Knk’k-lusz splayed its cobbled legs upon the landscape once more. Taller than the tallest man, its body constantly grinding against itself, the fleetingness of insect life given titan shape. At every step carcasses sloughed off its chitinous body, shells clattering like the soft parts did in life, a hollow chorus. More were slurped up from the dense collection baked upon the gray stone as it dragged toward the rim of Kl`kknnn.

Knk’k-lusz came to the rim of the moss-dampened gorge of Kl`kknnn. Its mind roiled, hot with fury over the collected memories of its fallen worshippers. It was them all, and the more. For its task was clear. A god formed of its people served both its purpose and theirs.

It was at last time.

And so all the dogs, the birds and the humans within a thousand miles heard the roar that night. Heard the grotesque howl of the Inevitable Called. Felt it in the ground-rattlings, saw it in the tree-limbs’ panicked vibrations. A tearing of the skies, viscous shatterings. Bird flocks flew any direction that led them away. Children ran to their parents’ beds.

Deep in the Pit of the Seven Knives, the passage to Lu’kk-Enoth the martyred insects called Kl`kknnn, the creatures of the other realm heard the insect god.

He had made the call. It was time.

“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.

He smirked as he asked the jesting question, “So how do we save ourselves?”

I incinerated him at once. For his disrespect.

And because he asked the wrong question.

It is not a question of “salvation” with the One Realm Coming. This implies a notion that what you are, what humanity now sees itself as, could be preserved through & following such a discordant change.

How do you preserve communication when continents shatter? How do you keep morality when beasts consume your flesh? How could you maintain “civilization” when cities are gone from the Earth?

How any of this, when even Earth is no longer Earth?

No. There will come no salvation. Only mutation will occur. It may be that some humans will survive. But new beings they will become. Something more? Less? Elsewise entirely? Even I could not say.

Though I look forward to seeing it.

I may be the only one who does.