Excerpts taken from Marcus P. Kellum’s personal journal.
Cover dated March 23rd, 1978
there was a soft movement. not really a sound, but rather the feeling of a sound. a wave of discomfort sped towards me.
i hadn't’t realized it, but in my shock, i had upset the ink well. a pool, shiny and black, slowly formed above the cracks and etches of my desk. the page i had been hastily scrawling on was now ruined, but that was the least of my worries. whatever it was that had caused the silent explosion was moving towards me. i had a good idea who the creator of my discomfort was, but my mind could not grasp the implications. this toying had not been real when i had started it, and up until now, i had always played with the idea that such mumbo jumbo was as fake as a cigar store indian.
with some small flourish, i swept out my pocket handkerchief and began to sop at the running ink. rivulets of it had reached the ends of my table and were now dripping on the floor.
silently, i wondered to myself why i was wasting time on such a trivial chore as cleaning up the mess. i let the handkerchief fall to the floor, a bluish-black wad. a whoosh of air entered the room. things were closer now, their soft footsteps, so full of alien hatred, had caused the flame on my desk candle to flicker. with a trembling hand, i groped towards the bottom right desk drawer and the pistol that rested there. this is silly, i thought to myself again. if i were to believe the ancient texts this small firearm would be of no avail. there was no weapon that the earth now possessed that would save me from my foes. still, the weight of the pistol felt good in my hand. someplace in the instinct of man, far back in the mists of time, a weight in the hand must have been a comfort. a rock to throw, so ingrained in our psyche, had evolved into a comfort of all things heavy in times of need. i gripped the pistol tighter as i felt a presence in the hallway that led to my rooms.
someplace in the house, there was an electrical charge of great power. i could feel it in the hairs on my arms and taste the ozone on my tongue. a brief flicker of that power shone forth as a sickly greenish light that i could see from the crack under my door. soft hissing voices could be heard in the hall, but i could not tell you what sort of creature could articulate a tone like the one i was hearing. amid the words being spoken, i caught the unmistakable sound of gurgling, as if the owner of such a voice were under hundreds of feet of water.
the floorboards nearest to my door began to bend downward. it seemed a great weight had been placed on them just outside my door. i clutched the pistol tighter and as silently as i could, i eased my chair back away from my desk. “s’hy em Hasture.” came a voice, and the door trembled as if it were being pushed inwards. the words seemed to be demanding something - telling the door to open. only the small glyph i had carved into the wood of the door had kept the door shut. i felt a prickle as sweat broke out on my forehead. stupidly, i reached for my handkerchief, only to remember that it was wadded and ruined on the floor.
“L’lugutha vea urul!” came the voice again. this time the door didn't tremble, but rather, it faded out of existence as if it had never been there.
the hinges poked out from the doorway just exactly as they had been when the door was there. now that the door was gone, a wave of fetid air rushed into the room. i felt my stomach drop in my abdomen.
there was nothing in the doorway. i crept around the edge of my desk, moving to a spot in the room where i could get a better shot at whatever would be coming in. i peered at the wall of the hallway across from my rooms and waited to see a shadow or to hear something that might reveal my foe, but no noise came. the otherworldly voice was silent. i drew several breaths as i tried to understand what had happened. i reached out with my mind and could not find any trace of the being that had so recently been at the threshold of my study. whatever it had been, it was gone. i moved back to my desk with the purpose of filling a glass with the brandy when another soft explosion occurred. this time, my room was the epicenter of this explosion. it felt as if the world had suddenly dropped from under me. then the sickly light was back. a ball of energy moved towards me. it floated up, drifting across my desk and aimed itself at my chest, hovering. thin tendrils of black energy snaked out from the ball and licked at the papers and tomes on the top of my desk. tiny arms shot flames into my files, months worth of investigative work now destroyed in an instant. as quickly as the papers disappeared, the ball was on the move again. it drifted up to me and hovered again at eye level, a mere foot from my face. again, a terrible finger of black fire shot out of the ball and stopped short of my face by the width of a hair. the ball stopped hovering and stood perfectly still in the air, then the voice came again. “urgoth uhm liekke...R’lyeh fom kkurduth.” it uttered and the lick of destroying flame snaked back inside the ball. i collapsed in utter horror, the warning had been given. the accursed ball slowly faded and i scrabbled forward trying to salvage some of my papers and texts. to my alarm, not one page or book was left. only a small swatch of ancient papyrus had survived the fiery blasts. i picked it up and saw that text could still be read from the ruined scroll. i gasped as i read what the piece said:
That is not dead which can eternal lie
And with strange eons even death may die.
And with strange eons even death may die.
