sourly as the dead air of your catacomb; but whereas your sphere was one of utter silence, Innsmouth seemed never at rest—there was constant sound and movement. My eyes were always returning to the sea and its restlessness, to its waves that wrecked themselves on rocks and against rotting piers. My eyes were entranced by an agitation in the black clouds that crawled in the darkened sky, those clouds that shaped themselves suggestively. My ears could hear the sharp cry of gulls that soared above the agitated water, and I thought that I could detect, just below that ordinary noise, an unnatural ululation that might have been but a tissue of entranced hallucination. I stood in that Innsmouth shop, among fossilized memories, and touched the cool pages of an elder volume; and I was allowed to purchase that book, and I wrapped it inside my coat as I stalked the quays beneath the winged gulls and wisps of black clouds.
I sat in the yellow glow of my lantern, in my attic study, and tried to read the book; yet it was difficult to follow the lettering that would not be still beneath my moving hand. It is not easy to read faded dark etchings that subtly creep across a page as if to escape one’s touch, like insects that cannot tolerate the violation of hot human hands. Perversely, I placed my fingers over one section of rapacious ink, that ink that was a hungry blackness that did not move away but rather lifted so as to meet my flesh. Ah, what tricks may be played by the etchings of a potent wizard. How adoringly his quill spilled into wordage the story of your legend. You were a rare dream that he almost fancied was his personal perversion, his delirium of diabolic ecstasy. He saw you as some mystic whore crowned with jeweled stars, and he ached to sip the nectar of your pomegranate mouth, misunderstanding the dye with which your lips were stained. Although much mistaken of your nature, he saw enough of your hidden essence that it beguiled his imagination and debauched his dreaming. He wrote of you as one intoxicated—and that psychic inebriation exists still in his monstrous text, that sentient transcript that frolicked before my eyes and realized my hand. Oh, that wizard ink! It slipped inside my pores and spilled inside my veins, evoking you so absolutely that I beheld the foliage that screened your ancient tomb. I dreamed the slaughter within that tomb with which your ghastliness was celebrated, and I tasted gore upon my teeth. When I awakened from strange reverie I found that I had bit into my tongue and imbibed my blood—and yet it did not taste like something of mine own.
How rare, to have discovered one extraordinary testimony of your legend, recorded by the sorcerer who dreamed you. Although I am no mage, I penned a private grimoire of my own as images were revealed to me in midnight lunacy. I etched your symbols as they were burned into my brain by acidic vision, and I formed the fantastic map that showed me the way to your porphyry tomb. I hacked my way through growth and found your dwelling, and I performed the secret task by which your tomb was opened. I descended the dusty steps that led to where you reclined within your casket as an eikon of ebon stone that had been smoothed by the kisses of your acolytes. I found the ritual dagger, and although its blade was dull I used it with precision; for the sight of your empty bowl was pitiful, and the only gems I owned were my eyes, one of which I dexterously removed so as to place it in your basin. I set it there, inside that sad little space, as an outside wind moaned sorrowfully. But I was happy to hear your whispered sound, the faint vibration that slipped from your firm stone mouth. I felt that sibilant resonance touch my lips, those mortal petals that parted so as to pronounce your name; and, oh, the wonder that I knew, to see the hollow pits that were your eyes begin to smoke, to glow like cinders of some reanimated force.
The cinders in your eyes are gold and
I sat in the yellow glow of my lantern, in my attic study, and tried to read the book; yet it was difficult to follow the lettering that would not be still beneath my moving hand. It is not easy to read faded dark etchings that subtly creep across a page as if to escape one’s touch, like insects that cannot tolerate the violation of hot human hands. Perversely, I placed my fingers over one section of rapacious ink, that ink that was a hungry blackness that did not move away but rather lifted so as to meet my flesh. Ah, what tricks may be played by the etchings of a potent wizard. How adoringly his quill spilled into wordage the story of your legend. You were a rare dream that he almost fancied was his personal perversion, his delirium of diabolic ecstasy. He saw you as some mystic whore crowned with jeweled stars, and he ached to sip the nectar of your pomegranate mouth, misunderstanding the dye with which your lips were stained. Although much mistaken of your nature, he saw enough of your hidden essence that it beguiled his imagination and debauched his dreaming. He wrote of you as one intoxicated—and that psychic inebriation exists still in his monstrous text, that sentient transcript that frolicked before my eyes and realized my hand. Oh, that wizard ink! It slipped inside my pores and spilled inside my veins, evoking you so absolutely that I beheld the foliage that screened your ancient tomb. I dreamed the slaughter within that tomb with which your ghastliness was celebrated, and I tasted gore upon my teeth. When I awakened from strange reverie I found that I had bit into my tongue and imbibed my blood—and yet it did not taste like something of mine own.
How rare, to have discovered one extraordinary testimony of your legend, recorded by the sorcerer who dreamed you. Although I am no mage, I penned a private grimoire of my own as images were revealed to me in midnight lunacy. I etched your symbols as they were burned into my brain by acidic vision, and I formed the fantastic map that showed me the way to your porphyry tomb. I hacked my way through growth and found your dwelling, and I performed the secret task by which your tomb was opened. I descended the dusty steps that led to where you reclined within your casket as an eikon of ebon stone that had been smoothed by the kisses of your acolytes. I found the ritual dagger, and although its blade was dull I used it with precision; for the sight of your empty bowl was pitiful, and the only gems I owned were my eyes, one of which I dexterously removed so as to place it in your basin. I set it there, inside that sad little space, as an outside wind moaned sorrowfully. But I was happy to hear your whispered sound, the faint vibration that slipped from your firm stone mouth. I felt that sibilant resonance touch my lips, those mortal petals that parted so as to pronounce your name; and, oh, the wonder that I knew, to see the hollow pits that were your eyes begin to smoke, to glow like cinders of some reanimated force.
The cinders in your eyes are gold and
Similar Books
