Corine led the Sueno to Lynn's dorm. They searched for something of hers, but she had taken her brush and the bed was pristine. She was ready to give up when she found a light pink cloth stuck between the bed and wall, covered by the blanket. She pulled it from the spot and completely gave up hope. It was only a pair of panties. She let them drop to the floor. She wanted to scream.
The Sueno walked to the panties and pressed its face into them. Corine was going to force it to stop when it fell upon her suddenly and took her from the world. She was being pulled through a blinding whiteness that was thick like paste, but left her untouched.
"What's happening?" she screamed.
"This is the in-between, foolish woman." The Sueno was able to communicate with her now. Several of the cavities moved in unison, giving it a voice.
"How are you going to find her? There was nothing to connect to her."
"The panties did. It was dry, but it was enough. The substance you call vaginal discharge."
Hearing the words coming from the Sueno was almost absurd. Thinking this demon had networked a way to her niece from such nastiness was extremely frightening. It showed how easily some of these beasts were able to remain in the world, and if they wanted they could remake the world and only the gods could intervene.
The world changed and she was standing with the Sueno in an empty playground. They were standing beside a wall running the circumference of the playground. It was raining outside but not a single drop entered the area. Lynn appeared at the base of the seesaws. Sueno shivered in delight.
"You did not lie." It began to regurgitate dozens of miniatures from its body. Corine turned away from the sight. She might be dead but there were only some things she could stomach in the beyond.
Lynn vanished from sight. She was about a foot tall and was riding a plush toy glowworm, the kind she had as a child. Batteries were needed to brighten its face. The worm moved as if it were biological and pulled her into the sand and sprouted several feet away. Corine could not concentrate on anything except her niece. The dream state was too difficult to comprehend. Like trying to paint a portrait without watercolors and using condiments instead, and the brushes were miniature fly swatters. The world was already affecting her thinking, that was clear.
She raced to the playground sand and hunted for Lynn. Lynn rose on the far side of the swing set. Corine ran but was too late to catch her. Again Lynn rose but right behind her and Corine was too slow to spot her before she burrowed again.
It was getting aggravating. She remained still and watched her niece coming out and then in. When she was near enough, Corine took her chance and launched herself upon Lynn. She managed to knock Lynn off the worm. The worm did not take kindly to that and bit her arm. Corine yelled and slapped the worm off. She was more than corporeal here. It was as if she were still made of flesh.
Lynn stood up and looked at her.
"What the hell! You stupid giant bitch! Why the hell are you messing up my rounds? You're going to get me fired! Graahhh!" Lynn started to chase after the worm. It was an absurd dream.
"Stop!" Corine commanded.
"You, you, you shut up," Lynn ignored her.
Corine reached out and picked her up.
"No! You shut up!" Corine glared at her. "I am your Aunt Corine and you need to listen, now. You need to get rid of the book of mine you found. Do you understand me? It is very dangerous!"
Lynn tried to shake free.
"Listen to me, Lynn Robin Boaz!"
Lynn stopped and looked directly into her eyes.
"This isn't a dream, is it?"
"Yes and no. I am not part of your dream. I am dead. I came back to warn you of the book you found. It is what got me killed. You need to destroy it, or whatever killed me will find you and do the same. It wants to stay hidden."
Lynn started to cry and laid her head against her aunt's fingers. She did her best to give her aunt a hug.
"I understand you. I have began having nightmares about what you wrote. I feel like something is watching me all the time now. Why did you write that book?"
"'Cause I am a stupid bitch, Lynn. I never gave it a second thought. I just dove right in and started to uncover secrets. I did have nightmares now that I remember but I convinced myself that it was just stress."
"I am so sorry, Aunt Corine. I would have loved to meet you."
"Me too, baby. I would have loved to have seen you grow up with my own eyes. Celebrated holidays and birthdays with you. But this is my gift to you, Lynn. Release the need to just follow studying. Find a life away from it and then you will be fulfilled."
"We have to go," the Sueno ordered.
Corine held Lynn before her, not allowing her to get a glimpse of the Sueno, keeping her from having further scares. She set Lynn down on the sand and told her to remember. Then she was pulled from the dream.
She had no idea if her plan would come to fruition and Lynn would destroy the book, but she had done what she could. They returned to Lynn's room and were greeted by Leopold staring at them from underneath the bed.
"You came back. Thank you. I think it worked Leopold," Corine said, a huge smile on her face. Leopold did not acknowledge her. He only stared back at her with his eyes wide and what she thought was a grin, but on closer inspection realized it was a frozen grimace of pain. "Leopold?"
Corine reached down and touched her friend on the side of the head, which just rolled over, disconnected from the rest of his body. She turned and looked at the Sueno and saw it crouched on the bed in the corner, its focus on the open doorway into the hall. Blocking the entrance was a creature that brought pure terror. The room went cold with its presence.
The demon stood higher than the door itself. It was leaning in on its makeshift body. Its anatomy made no sense. Arms and legs shifted along its body at strange angles, as if were born crippled, yet its head was elongated, its mouth opened wide, the lower jaw crescent shaped and stretched out to the sides. Rows of every type of teeth crookedly lined the inside, with two tongues dancing around as it screeched at her.
Corine had nowhere to run. Looking at it, she remembered it killing her all those years ago. Dropping from the sky and slamming her into the tree, her back splitting open from the force. The demon had marked her, two nails dragged through her flesh to form the Roman number five, but had no real significance. It was playing with her body. It had ordered gremlins to bind her wrists with wire to make the murder seem as if it were a homicide.
"You motherfucker!" Corine felt no fear now. She lunged at the demon and used her anger to anchor into her energy and slammed her clasped hands into its body. The force was enough to drive it back. It was not enough to stop it, though. The demon took hold of her and pulled her apart as easily as parting a cobweb. The woman was no longer there, every ounce of Corine had been stripped from the world.
The demon looked at the Sueno, but satisfied with finally destroying Corine, faded back into its realm. The only thing left of Corine was a conversation in a dream, and Lynn remembered it very clearly when she woke up.
The Accursed Lineage
Aaron Vlek
December 21st
The last of the insufferable students have finally vanished from these darkening marble hallways. Silent now are the harsh and obnoxious howlings they call laughter. Gone are their priggish musings and presumptions of grace and grandeur that trumpet and echo between stacks of books and curiosities best left to molder into antiquity in peace. Mercifully absent are the noxious fumes of their half-rotted feastings that linger long after they have ceased to feed and which cause the bile to rise within the clear strong gullets of good wholesome folk.
If I can tolerate but another two days, their professors will be gone. These are no better than the young among them. The august airs they cloak themselves within like virulent cocoons in order to maintain the illusion of superiority over the pitiful whelps they would instruct in their abominable ways are at times too much to bear.
Soon these
baneful beings will all have evaporated into the chilling mists to salute one another and welcome their fellows to holiday hearth and home far away from these sanctified halls. This festive occasion is known among these odious creatures as Christmas and apparently includes a whole compendium of distasteful rituals and, needless to say, more and more feasting.
Then, ah sweet holiday of mine own! Peace and quiet I shall don as a noble shroud to continue my study of things arcane and of lasting import. For it is matters old beyond time, when man was but a myth among us, that bear upon the truths I seek. Such pointed and precarious wisdom might only be found here at Miskatonic University, in the library where ancient volumes and timeworn journals of obscure authority are housed in abundance upon its shelves and stored beyond memory in the catacombs below.
You might wonder at the unapologetic distaste with which I write of these others, these human creatures with whom I am forced to enter into a highly disagreeable sort of cohabitation. But it is necessary in order to complete certain critical tasks. It is with great pride however—and I bristle that one might presume otherwise—that I banish all conjecture that I might myself be human.
I shudder as I ponder the curse of such an affliction and the very great blessing by which that terrible fate has passed me by. I am what these lesser mortals of Miskatonic University and beyond call, for some inexplicable reason, a Deep One. I resemble their insipid features and garrulous ways but slightly. True, like them, I descend from a bipedal species. But I am of far, far older and nobler stock than they and am at home equally on dry land and among the fathomless black wastes of my precious primeval sea.
My maternal line has at times shared blood, in so many ways, with the descendants of no less a being than Pickman himself, while notable and accomplished ghouls of numerous royal and military lines have married into our family to mutual and lasting benefit.
Physically, the human creature possesses but a modest flapping aperture with which to issue their insipid and off key chitterings and to feed on their bilious comestibles. My handsome mouth, a proud batrachian portal, is remarkably equipped both to issue a broad and lively array of complex and pleasing tones and sweet locution, and may emit such sendings across vast expanses not only of space but time as well.
So you see, it is we who are the superior ones, even as we must hide from our inferiors and scurry from their invasive scrutinies. Such is the ignoble truth.
More later. That portly balding creature known as Juf’riz (or some such blather) has just appeared to mop the floors in the library and empty it of waste in the form of wadded husks of paper carelessly covered with inarticulate scribblings. I must scuttle away now to the confines of my subterranean refuge until the loathsome one departs and I may safely return to my work.
December 25th
At last I am utterly alone! The silence is complete and the snow drifts deep upon the little town. No cars, no bustling noisiness wafting from the streets, just an absence of anything which might intrude upon my all-important work. But I must confess, it is not only the pasty human things and their gibbering larvae that I must wholly avoid at my peril. I must also evade the prying impatience of my own fellows looking too closely over my shoulder at the discoveries I have so far unearthed in this disturbingly fecund tableau.
There had long been stories, nothing more than hideous rumors at first, then sadly verified by the irrefutable proof of material artifacts, on occasion living material artifacts. How it first came to pass is unknown. There is, of course, no reliable report among either of our peoples, and conjecture is far too varied and frankly preposterous, to set down any clear historical record.
Let it be said that at some point in time, certain rather degenerate and sickly branches of both the human species and our own had cause to–found themselves inclined to–saw fit without rhyme or reason, without benefit of sound counsel, without sense or sensibility to mate among themselves and to promote their progeny to free ranging adulthood.
Now, some of these material artifacts, some of these individuals of commingled and accursed lineage were remarkably handsome of feature and comely of face and grace and altogether a wonder to behold. There can be no denying the facts, plain and unrepentant for all to witness. It was rather the possibility of cohabiting each strain with the other that many on both sides found particularly distasteful.
Deep Ones have long been shunned by humankind and we were happy to live off among ourselves. For our part, we find humans weak. They suffer certain insurmountable limitations of constitution and biology that would severely curtail any useful or agreeable camaraderie that might otherwise arise from living openly in close proximity.
As such, we shunned and avoided contact with their species. Most of us did, at any rate. I tire now and must leave in search of sustenance. It is past midnight and the luminescent algaes and floral fungi of which I am so fond this time of year are now fully abloom in the moonlight among the shallows. More tomorrow when I am again rested and replenished.
December 26th
Through a close perusal of certain documents found in the library, as well as digging through mounds of ancient journals and personal letters, many of which crumbled and disintegrated in my hands as I read them, I pieced together the identities of the families on both sides in question. It seemed, unfathomably, that this had not been merely a few ill-considered dalliances and regrettable pairings but had endured through certain families as a sort of jealously guarded and desirable practice for hundreds of years!
I gasped in utter horror when I took full measure of the hideous implications! The habitants of both land and sea along the whole of the New England seaboard were now almost certainly indistinguishable one from the other except in the basest of appearances. Not a family was spared this commingling and none of our amphibious lines remained untainted from these questionable alliances. In fact, individuals in both our lines had conspired to keep this great spreading of the genes concealed from the rest of us.
The fact that we lived apart as distinct peoples at this juncture seemed utterly ludicrous and without meaning. And yet, how would this knowledge be brought to bear upon the general and collective public attention of our conjoined peoples? And to what end? A strange new beginning? Or a tragic and violent end for us all?
My own superiors who had set me to this task were closing in. They demanded answers, they wanted assurances that the few isolated cases that we already knew about had died out long ago. They planned to undertake certain measures to ensure that if such mixed lines endured contemporaneously that they be allowed, indeed be strongly encouraged, to die out naturally. Whatever that might have meant, I shuddered at the thought and prayed I did not discover my own noble family among those telling annals of private record. How could I possibly convey to them the broader meaning of my current discoveries?
So far I had kept my fellows at bay, stalling where I could and taking full advantage of the empty halls of the festive season to pursue my work at a highly elevated pace. So far, they had accepted my unrelenting insistence upon waiting until my findings were complete so I could make my recommendations based upon a thoughtful consideration of all the available materials and not pick piecemeal through incomplete terrains now wholly obscured by the impenetrable mists of time.
December 27th
I have thoroughly exhausted the last of the available documents. In the last days, I have penetrated far beyond the walls of the subbasement into long unused halls and locked forgotten rooms thick with dust and mold. Certain abandoned laboratories filled with archaic equipment and heaps of wrecked and mangled gurneys caught my eye but promised no assistance in my current campaign, so I passed them by.
The work had progressed at a slow pace because of the condition of the papers and journals germane to my inquiries, many of them mere stacks of dust held together with cobwebs and the casings of long dead larvae of numerous types. Despite these challenges and limitations, I have prevailed and come to a clear comprehension of the extent of the
intermingling of our peoples as iterated and outlined above.
On the hardened clay floor of the final room, however, at the end of the last long boarded up hallway, there was a large threadbare rug of what they call the Persian design, itself thick with dust and the droppings of wool moths and their dried carcasses.
Why, I wondered, had they placed a rug down here? Particularly when such rugs as this seem so highly valued and jealously displayed among humankind of a certain crust and class? The mystery continued to plague me as I rummaged about the mostly worthless contents of what seemed nothing more than a storeroom of the last or even earlier century. Something piqued at the corners of my mind and caused a warm sweat to ooze from the dorsal gills I generally keep hidden beneath my collar when venturing out in my great coat and fedora among the last men wandering the fog-laced evening streets.
When I had finished with the decayed and musty room, I glanced once more at the rug. Then I ripped it back and dragged it into a corner causing a huge cloud of dust and other detritus to fill the room. When all had settled, I saw my foreshadowing had been correct. I was rewarded for my efforts with the sight of a ponderous iron grate three-foot square set with a massive ring and the grime of centuries.
I will investigate thoroughly and at leisure on the morrow. For now, the sweet moon calls to me with her warning impatience. I am possessed of a ravenous hunger and the tides are right for a swim, for I am now feeling, for some reason, unclean.
December 28th
This morning I proceeded directly and without delay to the room at the end of the hall in the subbasement. All was as I had left it and the massive iron grate remained securely in place as if patiently awaiting my return. I stared at it for a few moments, marveling at the possible purpose of the grate and its obvious obscuration. I was strangely hesitant, in awe even, of the extreme age of the thing.
Miskatonic Dreams Page 19