As they departed, the pain subsided and I rose to my feet and looked out at what now was leaving to explore the cosmos. What were these things that I had had a part in bringing to life? Were they forces of good or evil, or did those concepts even apply? Did they even have names?
And with that simple questioning thought, the two titans both turned and casually screamed, not at each other, but at me and all the other observers who remained. What the others did, I cannot say, for I did not wait to see. I fled. I fled through space as fast as I could and did not cease until I stopped screaming. It took me days to recover from what I saw and heard, and from what I understood it to mean. Days for me to come to terms with what I had done, and what abominations I had unleashed upon the universe.
Even now, I seek an explanation, a reasoning, and a sense of absolution for what I have done. That what happened, was going to happen, no matter what. I have come to believe that my presence was some sort of cosmic joke perpetrated on me, and the entire universe, by a cosmic trickster who cast me back into time in the first place. I wondered what had happened to Charles Meyer. Did his consciousness still exist? Was he part of one of those things or the other, or perhaps both? Perhaps this was why I was sent back. Perhaps the cosmic intelligence that had punished me so was trying to teach me something, about life, about the universe, about everything. Perhaps someday I might understand and then I could finally rest.
But those things, those two creatures that now roamed the cosmos, they would be out there forever, for eternity, and I and every delver in the darkness, every explorer of the eldritch, every seeker of the unknown, would know their names: Names that would echo through time and space and generate immeasurable horrors, two halves of something so perfect that the universe itself rejected its existence. Two things that had a mutual enmity of the likes this reality had never seen before, and had chosen names to reflect what they once were, and what they sought to be. The names they had chosen and that had reverberated through the empty void of space, would do so for unfathomable depths of time. May the universe find a way to forgive me for what I have unleashed within it. Those names were Kth’Hlu and Hst’Tru, or as men would know them in eons yet unseen, Cthulhu and Hastur!
As it so often is with the things that impact your life the most, I knew nothing about the Sleepers and their cults of followers, nor would I have cared. Spirituality, let alone religion, had never been priorities in my house growing up. An only son in a small Irish-American family subsisting on averted gazes and unspoken words, I was born Catholic but my family never brought me to church, nor was any sense of the spiritual instilled in me during everyday life. My mom was a worrier and a list-maker, my father a construction worker and a drinker, and they tackled these jobs with the whole of their hearts and souls. To them, that left no time for gods or ghosts in the day, and nothing but exhaustion and uninspired sleep to pass the night. At nineteen, I already had mounting debts, so I had little time to sleep at all, and less to dream.
That's another thing – the Sleepers spoke to people in dreams. In fact, that's how they found Natalia.
Natalia – my sole reason for wanting to keep this dirty, twisted, illogical world going, simply because she was in it, and she made my little piece of it brighter. Now that I sleep, I see her in the vines, her soundlessly screaming mouth pulling her face out of shape. Those are my bad dreams. In my worse dreams, we are together and happy, and we never close our eyes, not even to blink.
Many things fascinated me about Natalia back then, not the least of which was that she was the only actual princess I had ever met. Her family was directly descended from royalty and she was, in fact, in direct line of rule, though neither the poverty of her small Eastern European country nor its governmental unrest lent her family financial or political security. Quite the opposite, in fact – it was closely whispered that Natalia was sent with caretakers (her "aunts") to seek political asylum in America.
While in her homeland, her being a princess meant certain death, here in the wild woods of upstate New York, it meant nothing much, really – a conversation-starter at parties, and an awkward one at that. She would never talk about it if she could help it. She wanted to forget. No glass slippers or golden balls here.
The first time I saw her, she was napping on a friend's couch, and she took my breath away. I wanted to kiss her, crazy as it sounds. She looked so peaceful, so soft, almost glowing in the slant of afternoon sun streaming in from a window across from her. It was a crazy compulsion, wanting to kiss a strange and sleeping girl like that, and I stifled the urge. But if you've ever met someone like that, someone whose presence sort of stupefies you and somehow changes the hues of the world with every moment you are near her, you probably understand what it felt like to first encounter Natalia.
I loved her. Her beauty was inarguable but severe and aloof, as if ice and not muscle defined the angles and contours beneath her skin. I loved her accent, and the way that when she was amused, the corner of her mouth would turn up just a little while she looked at you with dark eyes from beneath thick, dark lashes. I loved the smell of her skin and her short black hair, scents like blackberries and heady brilliant-hued flowers.
She loved me, she said, because I was smart and quiet, and kind of cute in that clueless sort of way. I'm not sure what she meant by that, but I was glad to give her any reason at all to love me back.
___
At the end of the Hundred Years' Sleep, it is said that there will be deep and impenetrable night swallowing the stars. There will be a cacophony of screams. There will be fire that will raze the cities of men and shreds of flesh carried by rivers of blood. There will be blazing symbols of power. And there will be the return of the Sleepers. More people believe in this than Scientology. More copies of the Doctrine of the Sleepers are sold on Amazon than any of the occult texts, which have gained, through misdirection and movie inaccuracies, and kind of pop culture fame.
All across the world, there are groups of people who believe this, who devote their lives to making this happen. These people keep to the shadows, the night places, the off-the-grid and out-of-the-way places where their secret meetings and arcane rites herd fear and ugliness through the world. In these places, blood soaks carpets so that it sponges up wet around their footfalls. In these places, the dead lie still but find no peace. In these places, doors and windows look out on vistas of terrifying magnitude and alien strangeness, and the rabid laughter of inhuman voices drives the unstable to madness.
It was here, in these places all over the world, where it was discovered that the Hundred Years' Sleep was reaching its end, and the rarest, most sacred, and powerful opportunity was at hand. The era of the Ancient Ones, the elder gods of myth, was to begin, and deaths would make it happen.
It was Natalia that told me about the Hundred Years' Sleep and the Sleepers themselves. We had gotten very close, inspecting and experiencing and sharing the world and each other as if no one else existed. It felt good when she confided her secrets in me, when she fantasized about a future with me in it. I'd never had that kind of closeness before, certainly not with my parents, never with my limited circle of friends, and never with girls. It made me feel like more than just an echo of a person. I liked that. Hell, I thrived on it.
A few days before the sirens, she gave me a book from her library to read. She had hundreds. That's where I first read about the Hundred Years' Sleep, in a book on the occult called Unaussprechliche Kulten. One of the original German editions which she helped me translate, bound in leather with iron clasps, it told of a cult ritual that would bring about an end to everything human. It was fascinating, even thrilling to me, the way campfire stories and urban legends are thrilling. But it was just a story.
Actually, when I think about it, it was much earlier when I first read about it, in an old book of Grimm's fairy tales – an English translation of the German, that time. A princess pricked her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and fell asleep. It wasn't until a prince came along
a century later and, moved by her beauty, kissed the sleeping princess and woke her up. Also just a story.
When I asked her why she was giving me fairy tales to read, Natalia told me about her dreams – about ancient and impossibly slanted buildings forming huge cities, of creatures only visible in glowing outlines of irregular shapes. She told me about the messages of death and change and resurrection they whispered to her-- those things I just spoke of, or at least parts of those things. She claimed she didn't know enough English to verbalize it all in a way I would understand. I think she just didn't have the words in her heart, in her soul, to get past the horror.
They weren't just dreams, see. Not to her. It was crucial to understanding Natalia to accept that she saw patterns in the universe, and those patterns, deliberate as they were, contained signs and messages. I thought it was all just a part of her eastern European folklore, a charming quirk of her foreign upbringing, but I'd never dare dismiss it. When the sirens began, I can almost say I expected it. At least, I didn't doubt Natalia's belief in what those sirens were signaling.
See, Natalia had a way of believing something so strongly, so perfectly, that you found yourself believing it, too.
___
When the first of the sirens went off, Natalia and I were asleep. We often fell asleep, just holding each other, in the silent and tucked away places of our hometown: my basement rec room, her library sofa, the abandoned cemetery's office or tranquility gardens, the side street behind Krausers, and a dozen or so places in the nearby woods where we would watch stars between the speckled canopy of leaves and branches. This time, we were camped out in one of those wooded clearings, having nodded off on the hood of my car where we had been reclining against the windshield, talking about outer space. It seems funny to me now that we had been talking about life from other worlds just hours before we saw it. She had even been telling me about the Sleepers.
"My people believe the Sleepers, they come from another planet in another dimension," she said. "There are many mens who think it wise to offer them...what is the word? Appeasements? Twice a year they do this – May and October. To keep the Sleepers from waking."
"Oh yeah? What kind of things do they do?"
Natalia's face darkened. "I do not know. They do not tell me this thing. But...they fail this last May. It is why I am here."
I glanced at her to see if she was being serious. The look in her eye told me she was.
"Really? I thought you were here on political asylum."
"I am."
"Oh," I replied, not quite understanding. "I guess I always assumed there were factions looking to take over the country, maybe hurt you or your family, and they sent you away to avoid, like, terrorists or radicals or something." I held my breath, listening for her feelings in her ensuing silence. Was she upset that I had brought it up? It was the one thing we never talked about, not in any kind of detail.
Finally she smiled, but it was a tiny thing, twisted by bitterness. "In a sense, that is true. There are radicals in my country, but they are more...religious than political. Sleeper cults, determined that now is the time to bring their gods back to earth. They require...different kind of appeasement. Sacrifice, that is the word. A farmer, a priest, a sage, a whole list of people they need to kill to awaken the sleepers. Then they need to kill a princess to keep the Sleepers awake for good. And when they kill me, the end of everything will begin."
"Baby, I'm sorry. I had no idea. These people sound crazy."
"My parents are strongly opposed to the ideals and agendas of these cults. They sent me to live with.... "
"With your aunts," I finished quietly.
"No," she finally said, although the hesitancy still clung to her words. "They are...I don't know the word. Mages? Very learned. Very knowledgeable in occult, and knowing spells and sigils and incantations to protect me from the cults. They are part of my father's counsel. I am safest with them than anybody. Except maybe you." She smiled at me and I felt an overwhelming surge of love for her. I wanted to keep her safe, and would spend the rest of my life, if that's what it took, protecting her. I told her so.
"That is noble, and a reason why I love you. I think you'd brave even the Sleepers and their legion of unholy things to protect me."
"You really believe the Sleepers exist, don't you?" I asked gently.
"I used to think I just couldn't afford to discount the possibility," she said, and turned her head to look me in the eye. "But they've spoken to me, in dreams, like I told you. Things are different since. The smell of the air, the taste of food and water, the skittishness of the animals. Even the trees shudder in a strange way. I believe, yes. I feel it in every part of me. Which means the cults have been successful in killing many good people and will come for me soon. If I die and the Sleepers awaken, we will become memories, Declan. Mere stories. We will become the fairy tales."
I pulled her closer, but didn't answer. I didn't know what I believed, if anything at all. I supposed that scientifically, there had to be life on other planets, even sentient life, and probably on millions or even billions of them. I could even entertain the possibility that there might be other dimensions containing other universes and possibly billions of planets with yet even stranger alien life. But that any of it could be here, on this single little rock floating on one little part of one arm of a single galaxy among countless others in a nearly infinite universe? The odds seemed against us in that regard, and frankly, I was glad for it. This world, and all the life on it that so often seemed incomprehensible to me, was enough to contend with.
I didn't get the chance to express any of that to her, though. By the time I found some inadequate words to try, she was already asleep on my chest, breathing softly. And I remember thinking that everything I needed in this world, this universe or any other, was right here with me, right then.
Then I must have drifted off, too, because I had one of Natalia's nightmares about the Sleepers. She would have said, I guess, that they were finally speaking to me, as well, and maybe trying to use me to get to her, but I can't say for sure. It certainly seemed like a dream, although it was incredibly vivid. In it, the history of the Hundred Years' Sleep played out in graphic detail.
I saw a great battle from back when the earth was just jungle. I saw what I knew to be the Ancient Ones from the starless edge of a different universe. I'm not sure any description would do them justice, but there were masses of shining blue-black flesh peppered with eyes and mouths and tentacles, there were mile-long, miasmic swaths of black cloud in the sky and acidic ichors that burned paths through the new life on the ground.
I also saw those other-dimensional formless things who would come to be the Sleepers, just as Natalia had described them, iridescent and irregular outlines. These shapes were also colossal in scale, so much so that the invisible swipes of their appendages felled trees.
I saw meteorites rain fire and tumultuous waves of ocean water tossed into the sky. I saw flashes of light in colors I'm pretty sure we don't have names for, and they lit up the night sky of the dream. There was what I could only guess might have been blood, sprayed across foliage and sand and rock, and there were utterances I assumed might be prayers and battle cries, but in the end, the Sleepers were nearly wiped out.
The Ancient Ones cursed their remaining enemies with a restless death. It was powerful magic, so powerful that the curse could not be completely lifted even by the most skillful wielders of ancient and cosmic arts. However, it could be lessened, and so the priests of that old and alien race transmuted death to sleep, a sleep that would last eons, until all could be set right. Every 10,000 years, there would come a single century in which the stars would be positioned just so and the land and sea of this world fertile and brimming with life energy, and at the end of this century, the Sleepers would have a chance to awaken and reclaim their domain, feeding off the life energy of the lesser creatures who were, I guess, just simply in the way. I saw the Sleepers' perception of what Natalia had called appeas
ements. These were sigils carved in rocks by the sea and in the walls of deep canyons and at the entrances to caves, followed by a series of ritualistic practices I didn't fully understand. And I saw the Sleeper cults' sacrifices. I will never be able to unsee the atrocities of that part of the dream.
I had just been forced to witness the evisceration of an elderly woman when it occurred to me that I could hear her screaming even in my ears. It took a moment, but I realized it was a real sound from outside my head – an air raid siren, the kind of canopy of wailing that filled all the air around and above you. It reminded me of old war movies, or those storm warnings towns in the Midwest used to send people scrabbling to their storm cellars. I'd spent my whole life in upstate New York and had never actually heard one in our town before. It took another moment for me to sit up, aware all at once that the sound meant some enormous and immediate danger.
Natalia was already awake and standing by the passenger door of my car. Her head was cocked and her eyes were fixed on the sky, and she looked as if she were listening for something beneath the siren.
"Babe?"
She shook her head and looked at me. "We need to go. They're here. The other mages couldn't stop it...."
I hopped off the hood of the car, keys already dangling in my shaking hand. "Where?"
"To my aunts.”
A Mythos Grimmly Page 24