Great Old Ones

There was only one rule: don’t open the door.

We’d read the words a thousand times. Did the mad Arab trust us to obey? His abhorrent mind should never have set forth inking into eternity those ancient primal rites of preternatural origin. The arcane was simply a foretaste of oblivion—had he known what cosmic terror stirred? Or was he simply its first acolyte, and this Necronomicon his holy homage to a primal horror of immeasurable and undefinable magnitude?

My soul shuddered without permission.

These unholy pages, penned by one long dead but no less obsessed, have led our company hither and yon, wandering across great barrens, wastes, and sands to find that nameless city, and there off to the north, where we galloped fields unworn in the Severn Valley, traipsing through the disquiet haunting of that Blackest of Forests. All this to encounter that which was beyond and bygone, those ones who presaged man’s first breath and trod that astral firth where the first inkling of starlight adorned the void.

All of it led us here.

We stood before that unholy mantel in the cavernous deeps of New England’s wilderness, drawn forth by yearnings of unknown provenance. It mattered not that eight of us had become two, nor how grievous to us was their end. There was only the obsession, only the door.

I read from the Necronomicon, sounds so horrifyingly unlike any words spoken by man. Upon finishing the undulating sounds the stone door groaned. That is all that I remember.

“Tell me, sir,” the officer said with unbelief, “how’d you come to be walking main street naked as a jaybird and holding a severed head?”

A voice from beyond the grave spoke words that slithered over my lips, “Why tell you officer when I can show you?”