Copyright © 2001 Alfred D. Byrd
All characters in this short story are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is coincidental.
It was a sordid need for money that drove Glenn Elliott to his encounter with primeval horror. Had business in his chosen profession of historiographical researcher not been poor, he might have refused the commission of Angus Peabody, Professor of Religion at Miskatonic University, to study "the mad prophet of the Shakers." Certainly what Professor Peabody's introductory e mail told Elliott of this Jedidiah Turner's speeches and activities seemed nothing with which a healthy mind concerned itself. The professor's advance against Elliott's time and expenses, however, was welcome to him; and, as the research would keep him near his beloved home of Lexington, Kentucky, he signed the contract that would be his undoing.
As a lifelong resident of the Bluegrass, Glenn Elliott was not without a superficial knowledge of the Shakers. Members of a sect of celibates who believed in humanity's perfectibility as a means of building the Millennial Kingdom up on the earth, they had, early in the Nineteenth Century, established a community at Pleasant Hill in nearby Mercer County. There they had lived dual lives: one, as pragmatic, diligent artisans whose works of spare beauty were prized to this day; the other, as mystics who achieved communion with the divine through dances producing ecstatic utterances. Elliott had read of such dances, held at first in the Shaker's stark, but elegant meetinghouse, then on a tract of land revealed to them as Holy Zion's field, and it came as no surprise to him that such a man as the Jedidiah Turner of Professor Peabody's description had taken part in the dances. According to Professor Peabody, however, Turner's ecstatic utterances had dealt, not with the benevolent God of the Shakers, but with an evil older and darker than Satan of Christian lore.
Elliott decided to begin his research with a trip to Pleasant Hill. Setting out there in his white '92 Tercel, the sole vehicle that his wretched earnings afforded him, he turned onto Harrodsburg Road and, clearing Lexington's ever-growing urban sprawl, entered the countryside that he loved. This, under a April morning's sky of flawless blue, was a verdant expanse of gentle rises and dips where horses and cattle grazed peaceably behind fences of hand-laid stone or white rails. By trim houses atop the gentle rises, bright yellow trumpets of daffodils, yellow-clad stalks of forsythia, and pale white blossoms of pear and crabapple presaged the showier glories of redbud and dogwood to come. Elliott envied the owners of the houses; it had been his dream to live in one of them, but a scholar's life was conducive only to genteel poverty. Beyond the gentle rises, the road abruptly descended a series of sharp curves to the floor of a deep gorge that the slow rising of the land had forced the Kentucky River to cut through native limestone. The sight of this bare rock, eaten with sinkholes and veined with caves and underground streams that no one had fully explored, never failed to remind Elliott of his beloved Bluegrass as a mere vapor in the winds of geological time. In a sudden fancy that he dismissed with an uneasy laugh, he envisioned the caves as forming a realm where Turner's old, dark evil lurked like a cancer beneath fair skin.
Emerging from the gorge, Elliott reentered the realm of gentle rises and dips, and soon encountered on his right the white fences that bounded the one-time domain of the Shakers. Turning into an elegantly driveway, he parked his car near the domain's rustic gift shop and, spending a few minutes there in thumbing through its collection of books of Shakeriana, not surprisingly found in them no mention of Jedidiah Turner. Strolling through those parts of the domain open to the general public, Elliott tried to get a sense of the mad prophet's presence among open, airy buildings from the Nineteenth Century, but found them odd settings for prophecies of elder evil. The meticulously crafted buildings were equally odd settings, however, for ecstatic utterances on Millennialism, yet these had undoubtedly been made there. Elliott began to ask guides, clad in the somber attire of the Shakers, whether they could direct him to anyone with knowledge of Jedidiah Turner, but most of the guides professed ignorance of the name. Only two of the guides, women so elderly that they seemed holdovers from Pleasant Hill in its heyday, recalled the mad prophet; producing for Elliott antique ledgers, the women showed him records of Turner's entry into the community, of his work and worship within it, and of his expulsion from it. Oddly enough, in view of the thoroughness with which the Shakers had recorded their doings, the final record gave no reason for the expulsion.
Perusing the ledgers, Elliott had noticed, hovering in a doorway, another guide, a middle-aged woman who peered at him with intense eyes. When he reached the ledgers' final, disappointing entry, the woman had vanished; Elliott paid her no more mind until, while he was idly examining the detail of a spiral staircase hand carved from native wood, she reappeared beside him. "What is the reason for your interest in Jedidiah Turner?" she asked Elliott in a tense whisper. When he had explained Professor Peabody's commission, she added, "You have entered a dangerous field of research, but, if you are determined to persist in it, I can direct you to further information. An elder named Othniel Crane, Jedidiah Turner's overseer among the Shakers, wrote a diary in which he described the events surrounding Turner's expulsion. The curators here do not have the diary; they have tried in vain to acquire it. It lies in the possession of an antiquarian of Midway" -- she gave Elliott the man's name and address -- "who, for a consideration, might allow you to copy significant portions of the diary. I urge you, however, and through you I urge Professor Peabody, to make cautious use of what you learn, for it is unsafe for humanity to possess this knowledge."
Elliott thanked the woman gravely, but, returning to his car, he chuckled at her final words of warning. The phrase "There are things that man was never meant to know" seemed absurd to him as a scholar at the dawn of the Twenty-First Century. While he drove, however, westward to the main highway, then northward and eastward to the historic town of Midway, unease arose in him. Once again the fertile, gently rolling landscape through which he was traveling reminded him that it was only a skin over time-eaten rock, and the final guide's intensity and the mad prophet's expulsion from the Shakers reminded Elliott that human behavior often has little to do with what a scholar calls reason.
When he reached Midway, it astonished him to learn that the antiquarian's address lay in one of the rows of Victorian-fronted shops facing each other across railroad tracks. Elliott had thought that he was familiar with all of the shops, but on closer inspection of them he found a hitherto unnoticecd door bearing the inscription RARE BOOKS -- BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. Ringing the doorbell beside this, he waited with growing trepidation until the door was opened by a pale, dark-haired young woman whose facial features, moving from sunlight to shadow, alternated uncannily between unearthly loveliness and indescribable grotesqueness.
Quietly she asked Elliott his business, and, when he explained it to her, she silently led him up a flight of stairs to a dimly lit garret where a man of staggering corpulence, his face shadowed with a shock of iron-gray hair and the stubble of a grizzled beard, squatted amid cases and piles of books. When Elliott asked the man for permission to examine Othniel Crane's diary, the man made an odd, wheezing laugh, then demanded the "consideration" that the final guide at Pleasant Hill had mentioned. The price seemed steep to one of Elliott's limited means, but, as Professor Peabody was footing the bill, Elliott paid it without demur. Soon the young woman had seated him at a flyspecked table; then she brought him, along with a pair of cotton gloves, a legal pad, and a soft-leaded pencil, the book whose bizarre contents would haunt his remaining hours on the earth.
Othniel Crane had written his diary in a crabbed, excessively ornate hand that Elliott at first found difficult to decipher, but, as he grew engrossed in the diary's account, he devoured with eyes burning from dust and strain. Crane recorded the arrival at Pleasant Hill of Jedidiah Turner, a tall, ungainly man who in a booming bass announced to the community that he had the gifts of tongues and interpretations. The diary contained a sketch in ink of a long, narrow face with burning eyes beneath shaggy brows, a sharp nose like the edge of an ax, and a wide, thin mouth curling downward at its corners. Jedidiah Turner was submissive to the community's disciplines and, a skilled wheelwright, useful in its labors, but in its worship he proved a problem. When, in the sacred dance, he cried out in ecstasy, what he spoke seemed to many of the Shakers not "the tongues of men and of angels," but chants of a dark, even demonic, cast.
Worse than Turner's chants, to the minds of the Shakers' elders, was his interpretation of those chants. He spoke in fiery tones of evils predating the present creation: evils teeming in hidden places beneath the earth, evils subject to a master evil that dreamed in a city drowned beneath the waves. The elders of the Shakers, convinced of continuing revelation and open to the possibility of a pre-Adamite world destroyed by God's wrath, were at first reluctant to dismiss Turner's interpretations from the realm of possibility; but, as the prophet began to speak of endless aeons in which Great Old Ones descended from the stars and shaped humanity as a plaything, the attitude of the elders hardened against him. Meanwhile, his chants became progressively more disturbing to the other Shakers as the sounds erupting from his mouth grew less and less human and more and more bestial or demonic. Othniel Crane had recorded some of these sounds; Glenn Elliott puzzled over uncouth words such as Kuththulhu and Rullyeh.
At length Jedidiah Turner passed into a state in which he twitched, prostrate, continuously, alternating between hideous outcries and even more hideous interpretations of them. The elders, fearing demonic possession in their community, led the Shakers in disfellowshipping Turner from it, but, open to the possibility of his madness being an organic condition amenable to medical treatment, assigned Othniel Crane to head a group of brothers in transporting Turner to a private asylum on Leestown Pike just outside Lexington. There, Crane sat by Turner's side while the alienist who ran the asylum applied to him the medical lore of the day and at last confessed ignorance of an effective course of treatment for the mad prophet. Eventually, to spare other inmates of the asylum from Turner's ravings, the alienist moved him to an outbuilding on the asylum's grounds and chained him to an iron bedframe. There, on a night of unseasonably warm weather when Aldebaran burned high overhead, and clouds on the horizon flared and rumbled, Turner made a chant of incredible complexity and horror; then lightning struck the outbuilding, and it was consumed in flames. Othniel Crane, helping fight the flames under lowering clouds that never spilled their rain, recorded that he had glimpsed something of hideous aspect slithering away from the flames; no trace of Turner's body was found. Crane closed his record of the mad prophet by writing, "The alienist made a transcription of Brother Turner's final words, but, as for me, I regard them as the names of blasphemy of the scarlet coloured beast having seven heads and ten horns, and I want no part of them or him again.
When Glenn Elliott raised his eyes from the diary, it amazed him that he was still in a world in which sunlight streamed through a garret's window. He muttered thanks to the antiquarian and the pale young woman for her help; then he stumbled down a staircase and drove blindly back to his modest quarters in Lexington. There, rallying slightly, he e mailed his findings to Professor Peabody; then Elliott began to search on-line databases for information on the alienist who had failed to cure Jedidiah Turner. Elliott soon found that the Special Collections Section of the King Library at the University of Kentucky contained the alienist's casebooks. While Elliott was printing out entries on these, his computer announced to him that he had mail. This was a note from Professor Peabody expressing delight at Elliott's swift progress, but ending with a warning: If you find the transcription of Turner's last chant, be careful not to speak it aloud, as the consequences of reciting it could be devastating."
Elliott, although skeptical of spells in an age of software, was less inclined to laugh at the warning than he would have been earlier that day. Eventually, his eyes burning from the glare of his monitor, he collapsed into bed. There, he fell into a fitful sleep broken by dreams in which he was wandering the byways of an underwater city of titanic blocks of slimy, greenish, phosphorescent stone, the geometry of which was wrong, inverting itself at a glance from relief to intaglio and tilting at odd angles that vaguely terrified him. When, in his first dream, he heard frenzied drumming and deep chants of Cthulhu fhtagn, he awoke; in further dreams, he wandered farther into the underwater city until he glimpsed, looming through greenish murk, a figure that squatted on a pedestal of basalt -- a monstrosity with the head of an octopus and the wings of a dragon mounted on a human form of obscene bulk! The monstrosity, with malevolent intelligence, began to turn towards him vast eyes that glared with hellish redness . . .
Elliott's screams roused his neighbors, who pounded on his front door and demanded to know what was wrong. Guiltily he explained to them that, because of overwork and worry about his finances, he had had a nightmare, and he apologized to his visitors for his lack of consideration for them. Muttering in angry tones about Elliott's "craziness," they returned to their quarters. He determined to sleep no more that night and sat down at his computer; there, hours later, he awoke, his face pressed against the computer's keyboard while sunlight filtered through curtains. His recollection of the titanic figure at the heart of the underwater city was no less terrifying by daylight than it had been by darkness.
Quickly showering and changing clothes, Elliott drove as close to the university's campus as he could find a parking space; then he walked the rest of the way to the King Library. This old structure of red brick at the heart of the campus brought back to him fond memories of climbing amid the stacks of it general collection of books before these were moved to a colossal new repository at the edge of campus. As Elliott always did, thinking of the new repository, he smiled, recalling that it had been built above a sinkhole.
At the desk of the Special Collections Section, the librarian, a dowdy elderly woman who was always helpful to Elliott, quickly brought him the antiquarian's casebooks along with a superfluous warning to handle them carefully. Taking the dog-eared casebooks to a nearby desk, Elliott eagerly scanned their contents until, with a leap of his heart, he came upon a section entitled THE CASEBOOK OF JEDIDIAH TURNER. What the alienist had written of the mad prophet accorded in striking detail with the diary of Othniel Crane, although the alienist interlarded his observations of Turner's condition with speculations on its cause based on Nineteenth-Century medical theory: deficiencies of physiognomy, poor posture, atrophy of the pineal body, or lack of citrus fruits in the diet! Elliott's spirits fell as, reaching Turner's death, the alienist merely recorded that it had occurred in an unfortunate fire; Elliott's spirits rose as, fulfilling Othniel Crane's indications, the alienist's wrote a sentence gravid with promise: "On the following pages I shall make, to the best of my ability, a transcription of patient Turner's final words, which, because of atavistic fears that I must examine, I dare not speak aloud." Eagerly turning the page, Elliott made a bitter cry that drew sharp stares from other researchers in the library; the casebook's next three pages had been carefully, but thoroughly ripped from its spine.
When Elliott displayed the mutilated volume to the librarian, she shook her head with an expression of sorrow. "It would depress you to learn how common defacement of rare books is. A researcher eager to keep a thrilling discovery to himself, a dilettante too lazy to copy out an interesting passage by hand, a zealot wishing to suppress data inimical to his pet hypothesis -- such persons cause more harm to our accessions than time or mildew do. At least the alienist's casebooks have not been stolen or lost. If you go through our database, you will find that with dismaying frequency we have had to write after our holdings the phrase, 'Not on shelf.'"
Thanking the librarian for her help, a disappointed Elliott turned from her desk. As he approached the library's outer doors, he noticed in one corner of the room the pale young woman from the antiquarian's shop, her mutable features bent low over the spread leaves of a large volume. He debated within himself whether to approach her; then, bitterly recognizing that the isolation of his researches had prepared him poorly for interactions with women of his own age, he proceeded through the doors.
Back at his computer he sent Professor Peabody an account of the alienist's casebooks; then Elliott stared blankly into the blue depths of his monitor. He brooded first on missing pages, then on his life's missing aspects: wealth, a house of his own, and feminine companionship with which he could share it. For profitless knowledge he had traded all of these blessings! If the mad prophet's rantings were true, what could a human being's life be but a transient quest for pleasure against the backdrop of infinite vistas of time and space in which transdimensional intelligences regarded humanity with scorn?
As he decided on its being folly not to make the quest, the computer startled him with the announcement that he had mail. Speculating that it might contain further instructions from Professor Peabody, Elliott opened his computer's in box and gaped at an e mail address with the byline Jedidiah Turner. Elliott relaxed somewhat on recognizing the name of the server following the byline as that of a provider of anonymous remailings for its subscribers. He regarded the e mail as a prank, although it occurred to him to wonder who might be pulling it on him. His unease returned, however, when he read the e mail's subject line: My Final Words.
Opening the e mail, he found its text to consist of italicized clusters of letters and apostrophes that at first seemed to him to form unpronounceable gibberish. As he scanned the clusters, however, he found among them familiar terms, Cthulhu and R'lyeh, from Othniel Crane's diary, and began to wonder whether with further study he could wrest sense from the text. He recalled Professor Peabody's warning not to speak the transliteration aloud, but Elliott's native skepticism reasserted itself to maintain that nowadays spells were as ludicrous as was the ancient cautionary text about a woman and a tree: "she took the fruit thereof, and did eat."
At first Elliott found it difficult to speak the clusters of letters and apostrophes in any coherent way. As he proceeded further into the text, however, he found his vocal apparatus reshaping itself around uncouth syllables with a growing confidence that first delighted, then alarmed him. Although at first it had been he who willed to speak the clusters aloud, now something alien to his experience compelled him to pronounce them. He struggled to silence himself, but the clusters, like mad, imprisoned creatures, tore themselves with wild shireks and shrill chitterings from his throat.
When echoes of the last cluster dwindled into silence, Elliott gazed around him in fear and wonder at a transformed world. The familiar angles of his room now seemed wrong to him, and a greenish phosphorescence, oddly both abhorrent and pleasing to him, clung to the surfaces of everyday objects. To Elliott's horror, he glimpsed the same disturbing phosphorescence on his hands; and, running through shadows that had been light and light that had been shadows to a mirror, he learned from it that the phosphorescence and the new geometry had transformed his facial features into those of an angel with leprosy.
Knocking sounded at his front door. Fearing that he had again disturbed his neighbors, and cudgeling his brains for an excuse for the bizarre sounds that his visitors might have heard, he opened the door, only to find on its far side the pale young woman from the antiquarian's shop.
She, too, had been transformed by the greenish phosphorescence and the new geometry into something that his stunned brain struggled to comprehend; she seemed to him both a creature of transcendent beauty alien to humanity and a manifestation of its instinctive dreads. Smiling at him a smile both lovely and ghastly, she said in her quiet voice, earnest and insistent, "We have heard your speaking of the words that we sent you. They have set you apart from the world of wretched humanity to the planes through which the Dreamer, imprisoned for now in the sunken city of R'lyeh, will walk when the stars are right. You do not fully belong to these planes; to complete your transformation into a creature of them, you must come to us to a place where knowledge and power will be manifested within you."
Why he followed the pale young woman from his house to her promised place he could not have said, unless it were that the enticement of knowledge and power, coupled with the hope of belonging to something above the tawdry world of his previous life, was too seductive for reason to resist. She led him through his neighbors' yards beneath the viaduct of a railroad into a park that he had previously visited in the days of his humanity. With his newly opened eyes he saw the park's ancient oaks and sycamores altered by phosphorescence and the twisting of space into a dark basilica reminiscent of the sunken city of his dreams.
Evidently catching his wonder at his surroundings, the pale young woman made laughter that his ears found both beautiful and abhorrent in its unearthly tones. "Has it occurred to you to wonder," she said, "how this park has survived the spread of subdivisions and factories? We who have been touched by the Great Old Ones, through the powers that they have bestowed upon us, have preserved it as a place dedicated to the Dreamer. Here, since times long before the advent of the white man to western shores, we have served the one the least of whose names is Cthulhu. Today, we promise you, you will learn as much of him as your mind can hold."
With a thrill mingled with unease, Elliott followed the pale young woman to the park's central feature, a disappearing river rising from blue-tinted springs. These, to Elliott's astonishment, now displayed, like the sheen of a snail's passage, infinite hues, many of which were previously unknown to him. The pale young woman laughed again. "The university's scientists proclaim the blue color to be due to a salt of copper. For all of their observation and logic, these wretched pedants have glimpsed only a tiny segment of the scale of possibility. Even the Professor Peabody whom you have served, although he is an adept of Miskatonic University, has grasped but little of what the Dreamer can reveal to you."
She led him forward into the bowl of the springs and through an opening that only the new geometry revealed to his view. As he reached the opening there wafted from it to his nostrils a charnel stench that struck his befuddled senses as being less unpleasant than it would once have been. Beyond the opening's threshold lay the narrow passage of a cave, along the floor of which an underground stream trickled towards the springs. A flickering of yellow, orange, and red, mixed with unearthly colors, came from the direction in which the pale young woman was guiding Elliott.
The cave opened into a round, vaulted chamber in the center of which flames, the source of the unearthly colors, leaped from a circular pit. To the right of this there crouched four or five men whose impassive bronze features recalled to Elliott those of the Shawnee, or perhaps of members of the pre-Columbian Adena Culture who once frequented the Bluegrass. Without looking at him, the men, as he entered the room, began to slap the palms of their hands against the cavern's floor in a rhythm reminiscent of the drumming of Elliott's dreams, and to chant in deep voices the loathesome phrase Cthulhu fhtagn.
The charnel stench, which had diminished as Elliott approached the chamber, reintensified. Beside him the pale young woman spread her hands towards the shadows on the far side of the flames and called out, "One who has spoken the words comes to complete his transformation."
The shadows began to stir as if something massive within them was beginning to uncoil itself. Dimly, Elliott descried a blunt head, like that of a giant worm, rising from the cavern's floor. The head swayed from side to side as the worm's body slithered across damp limestone around the left of the flames towards Elliott. The sickly sweetness of corruption overwhelmed him. In his breast a scream formed and died a-borning as he glimpsed on the front of the approaching head a human face, a long, narrow face with burning eyes beneath shaggy brows, a sharp nose like the edge of an ax, and a wide, thin mouth curling downwards at its corners -- the face of Jedidiah Turner!
In a booming voice the mad prophet called out, "The fire shall purge thy dross and leave the Dreamer what is his"; then he caught in slime-besmeared coils the fear-paralyzed body of Elliott and swept it into the flames.
Agony engulfed Elliott as these played across his flesh. He was unable to escape them, for the loathesome coils of Jedidiah Turner, seemingly unaffected by searing heat, held him relentlessly in its midst. To his horror, as he choked on the reek of his burning, he learned that not all of his mortal substance was being consumed; rather, what remained of it changed before his eyes into, and proliferated as, the stuff of the planes through which the Dreamer would someday walk. To Elliott's greater horror, as the mad prophet thrust him deeper into the flames, he saw these reform themselves into a portal into the sunken city of R'lyeh. There, in greenish murk atop a column of basalt, there crouched the winged horror, hybrid of octopus and human, whom Elliott had glimpsed in his final dream. Well-remembered vast eyes of hellish red turned towards him, and, in the mad prophet's clutch, Elliott was helpless to avoid them.
Only for an instant did he meet their gaze; then that which was Glenn Elliott fled, shrieking, into oblivion, and that which now looked through his body's eyes belonged entirely to the Dreamer.
END
If you enjoyed this story, you may also want to read The Shadows on the Screen, an Egyptian horror story in the style of H. P. Lovecraft, or The Calming of Cthulhu, a story of the Mythos in a lighter vein.