by Greg James
“Darkest Mother of All, take me with you on this night, I would see what thou seest and then feel what thou feelest also. I would know Yaddith and the Ghooric Zone, I would see the Gardens of Yin and the ancient things that dwell therein.”
As the last words were spoken, as was promised, as she had long hoped and dreamed, Sarah was taken up, disappearing completely into the churning black belly of the storm-bred colossus. She cried out, not entirely in pain, as she was absorbed into the other-matter of the Great Old One’s amorphous being and saw what the Darkest Mother and her Thousand Young saw and felt as they felt. It was the purest ecstasy. To forever be one with those others who dreamed the worlds into being. Now, she too could see the shores of other realms and esoteric modes of existence; the emerald cities of Shaggai and its chittering insect shamen, the fungoid crustaceans that people the plains of far-off starless Yuggoth, the undimensioned spaces between realities where, kept shapeless, the Great Old Ones wait until the stars are right so they can Be and Become once more.
With them, she would fly, shriek, laugh and cry through Yog-Sothoth, the Animate Gate, to behold places, experiences and sensations never meant for those of us who shuffle on down to this mortal coil’s dismal and depressing end.
We never saw her again after that night, when that sudden storm brought us the most beautiful snow ever seen in Sevengraves' august history; it shone of all colours and hues, some even that we did not know. It came down sparkling from the quieting skies, casting a haze of ethereal rainbows over the mournful face of the moon. And, sometimes, in the years that have come after, when the night air is keen and ragged clouds run over my windowpane like spilt ink, I think I hear her, our Sarah, out there; her laughter frolicking on the sea breeze, lost in some fine nightmare of paradise, and I smile for I know that she is content.
I wish I were so as well.
Ode to a Night-Gaunt
Omnia risus et omnis pulvis et omnia nihil
(All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothing)
There is no greater abomination than innocence. There is no lesser curse than to be afflicted with decency, to suffer from a finely-wrought and sensitive nature. Those who crawl from the warmth of a mother’s womb into this cold world of ours and are affrighted by it walk forever alone. There are few havens for such as these; places of sanctuary are often sought out by the multitude and then burned to the ground, for the dull-headed and witless cannot simply abide and let them be. This is why Sevengraves, that weird coastal town where Time runs slow, came to be. So named after the seven witch-sisters who wove a curving veil over it – an eldritch womb – through which only those who were Outsiders could pass; those with a little of their innocence still breathing. This is not to say that Sevengraves is an idyll by any means. For it is, after all, a place peopled by men and women, and no two human hearts have ever beat the same. For the heart is a darkly-chambered thing, a keeper of secrets aplenty, desires that, once awoken, never wholly lay to rest.
Misia was in love with Byron James though he was both a difficult and strange man. Their courtship began upon the very day that he arrived. Not born to the town, he was one of the Outsiders who crossed through the violet veil of shimmering mist and vapours that kept Time at bay. He was a painter and his work had caused scandal and horror in the cities of the world. Being a sometime student of occult arts and forbidden tomes, he learned of Sevengraves’ existence and made his way there. He appeared well-appointed in his manner and dress to young Misia though by his own reckoning he was near to destitution. He drove the horses that pulled his small coach and his household was but of one frail serving boy, Nathaniel.
She met him in the street as he was taking his possessions, box by box, through the doorway of the terraced house that the town had given to him. I should point out here that the town of Sevengraves is as conscious an entity as you or I. Those houses that stand empty, looking down upon her cobbles with unoccupied windows as sad eyes, are merely waiting for the person appointed by uncertain cosmic laws to arrive and make it their home. Such was the case with Byron James and Misia, a blessed daughter of this heteroclite town, found her attraction to him confirmed as she approached and spoke to him. “Cthulhu fhtagn. My welcome to you.”
“And mine to you.” said Byron, his fidgeting eyes coming to rest on her. They were blue and piercing though obscured by an uneven cut of oaky fringe. A smile made its way into the open, pulling his lips into a pleasing shape. “I’m sorry. I’m a little absent, distracted, in abeyance, you might say. It’s been a long journey into town.”
“I’m sure. We have Outsiders come here from every corner of the seven continents. All of them are tired by the world in some way.”
“Well, yes, tired is one way of putting it. Unwanted, another.”
“Perhaps,” she said, feeling bold, “you could tell me about it, being unwanted, sometime.”
Byron paused, those unsteady eyes of his suddenly finding their centre, she could feel them, closing in around her. It made her feel good. “Yes.” he said, warmly, “perhaps, sometime.”
So, their romance began, unfolding its petals, seeming to synchronise with the seasons in Sevengraves. Being irregular and often overlong in their nature, said seasons granted the couple an exquisite spring and a sumptuously overlong summer.
Arm in arm, Byron was walking Misia back home one evening when there was a cry from above. Starting, he drew her close to him, backing into the shadows of a terrace. Overhead, a lithesome, loathful shape went flying across the face of the rising moon; some poor soul, the source of the heard cry, dangling, wailing and writhing, from its long, thin arms.
“The Night Gaunts are out early tonight.” Misia whispered, shivering but feeling safe as she leant against Byron’s breast. He enjoyed the feeling of her pressing into him like this. Smiling, he watched the Night Gaunt circle overhead, seemingly displaying its prey in warning and mockery to those below.
“Yes, an unlucky happenstance for the wanderer that one is bearing off,” he said, “you know, they say the cries we hear during the night here are not gulls of the sea but come from the insane mouths of the victims Night Gaunts carry back to their caves.”
“Don’t be horrid, Byron. Not after this afternoon and not about that poor man. You’re just saying this to scare me. I won’t sleep tonight if you go on.”
Byron wasn’t listening. He went on, feeling strong, his eyes following the winged demon-angel and its whimpering cargo as they swept away over the rooftops towards the ebony cliffs that rose to the north of Sevengraves, disappearing into the gathering haze of dusk. “They also say that when a Night Gaunt is tickling you with its infernal claws and its wicked tail barb that your bones sing and your throat is soon dried out from a kind of paralysis. Tears run and run. Some go into seizures. Others stop breathing altogether. Your eyes, well, they simply gape at the Night Gaunt, feeding it the terrible ecstasy that comes from when its fingers are playing upon your skin.”
Misia moved away from him. “I said stop it, Byron. It’s not funny what they do to people. I can see why your imagination got you into trouble before you came here to us.”
“My imagination?”
“Yes, your imagination. You couldn’t possibly know all those things about them. How it feels to be tortured by one. I was born here and I know of no-one alive who possesses such knowledge.”
“Oh no? Would you like to see my Night Gaunt then?”
*
The creature hung in the air, enclosed by the treated tube of glass that went from the ceiling to the floor of Byron’s attic studio. Every inch of the angle-less prison’s surface was inscribed with runes and sigils made only of curves, no corners or sharpness interfering with the Arabian flow of the strange design. All of designs had been painted on using an expensive gold-black tincture. It was a bizarre sight to see among the covered canvases and unglamorous spattered surfaces that make up a painter’s domain.
Misia’s heart missed a beat when the narrow featureless face of t
he Night Gaunt, a mask of midnight velvet, turned slowly in her direction. She felt eyes upon her that she could not see. The absence of said organs coupled with the acute internal sense of their definite presence made her hold very still; prey in the predator’s gaze. She felt as the man carried away must have felt before being swept up by long obsidian arms. A curious trembling began deep inside her; a stirring unfamiliar, from being in the presence of such a horror. Though the citizens of Sevengraves were witchy folk, they were not arrogantly so. Being born blessed by the Dark Design that underlies Creation leaves its mark. An intuitive understanding of how perilous it is to bind that which should never be bound.
“How did you do it? Catch one and live? Mother told me, grandmother too, that the Night Gaunts can no more be bound than a dream or nightmare.”
Byron, looking at ease, though his eyes, damp and nervous, were trained upon his supernatural captive, came up behind her and started stroking her rigid shoulders. He told her how it was done. “As you know, the Great Old Ones and their brethren come to us through the angles of Space and Time. To imprison them, all angles must be absent, only curvatures may be used. You see, a curve is a curve and may be moulded around so as to form itself into a circle complete. It is One and so can hold that which is of the Angles, which are Many. The sigils on the glass create a further magical barrier, all of them being drawn from the Book of Eibon.”
“Having this thing here though, it’s too dangerous, Byron.”
He smiled, drawing his arms down to firmly embrace her waist. This was good, she was scared, he felt his body warm and stir at the shaking in her voice. To cow a daughter of Sevengraves so; this was a sign of how much he had achieved by trapping a Night Gaunt. “It is only dangerous if the prison is disturbed, if angles are introduced, then yes, it would be loosed upon us. There is no telling what terrible things it might do.” He whispered these last words into her ear.
“How long have you had it prisoner, Byron?”
“Since just before I became established. You, my dear, are looking upon the muse of Byron James.”
“You mean that has been in there for ten years?” There was a catch in her voice.
“It has indeed. That creature feeds me the most elegant of nightmares, which I then execute to the best of my ability upon the canvases standing about us.”
At these words, Misia was sure she saw a subtle movement. A rippling, as of oil disturbed, passing across the face of the Night Gaunt. Then, it was still once more.
Byron moved away from her, busily pulling free the sheets that had previously been shielding his work. He dramatically threw out his arms as he cast the last covering aside. “See, my dear Misia, these are what so horrified the stuffed shirt critics of the modern world.”
A revel of vampires, drinking from dusty wine bottles, the crimson contents having been siphoned out of a headless and dismembered corpse, which was the centrepiece of their crypt’s banqueting table. A ghoulish seductress slithering into the bedchamber of a sleeping suitor, her eyes shining silver, her hair writhing with the life of the grave; spiders, worms, maggots and white lice. A tentacle-headed toad-thing squatting, enthroned in an oozing chamber of knobbly stone; the walls awash with aqueous ichor, decorated with angular glyphs whose shining emerald depths were cut into the low ceiling depicted. It bore no eyes, this thing, rather a number of glistening fleshy buds that hung loosely from squamous, suppurating hollows, entangled in a fleshy beard that was strung through with seaweed.
Misia felt strange surging sensations of attraction and repulsion as she stood before her lover’s abyssal works. Though, as much as they drew her attention, she found it difficult to avert her eyes completely from the fascinating visage of the Night Gaunt. For a thing she had feared all her young life, there was something bewitching about it, its velvet wings, the oddly smooth nothing-face, the singular substance of which it was made; she wondered how it would feel under her fingers, to stroke and caress. She felt sure it was watching her as intently as she was watching it. Was it wondering how it would feel for it to touch her?
As you might guess, this revelatory event occurred when autumn was first in the air, letting down her hair as leaves turned to maple, orange, gold and then brown. Twilights were becoming heady seas of churning burgundy fed by rich rivers of wine, sometimes shewing frostier sorbet shades, hinting at the coming cold of a Fimbulwinter. Misia’s fascination with the living source of her lover’s inspiration did not lessen over time. She would often peer into his studio when he was out, simply to behold the thing as it hung there, its black wings working the air, seemingly at peace.
One evening, Byron returned home early, catching her there, startling her out of the trance she had not known she was in. He wiped away a few unwelcome beads of sweat from his brow; seeing her standing like that, her eyes fixated, her pupils dilated, reminded him of the opium-eaters he used to share rooms with in the worst ends of London. “Misia, what are you doing in here alone?”
She stuttered, mumbled, her eyes casting about for a reason. She saw one, a covered painting, set away in a corner, isolated from its fellows by shadow. “I wondered about this painting, my love. You are always so secretive about it. Keeping it closeted away and always covered over with this drape. It is a shame to hide it and it does look odd when the others all stand proudly on show now.”
“You think so? Have you seen it? Looked upon it?”
“No, not yet.”
“Once you do, perhaps you will understand why I keep it secreted away.”
Byron drew away the drape with a characteristic flourish, revealing the vision beneath. Misia cried out.
It was as beautifully realised as all of his other creations but it was truly awful to look upon. There was no element of dark fantasy or imagined horror in it. As monstrosity goes, what was there was all too real; a drab rendering of a dirty, windowless cell though the cell itself was not the subject. By the light of a guttering oil lamp, one could make out a face, a man gone mad. There was nothing romantic, melancholic or fantastic in that haunted visage. The eyes were lolling orbs, distending slowly from their sockets, wetly easing their way free from restricting orifices. One could almost see the sickening motion taking place. The mouth in the face was a cavern of disintegrating yellow teeth projecting from mottled gums as brown as old dog turds. The despair lined into the flesh of the man’s grey face was indecipherable in its intricacy. It was a black labyrinth indescribable that made the face seem a mere mask; a flaccid, punctured membrane stretching over emptiness, an echoing space, endlessly sad.
“Who was he?” Misia whispered, not daring to raise her voice because of the effect left upon her by the harrowing portrait.
“Samuel Brown. He was the bait for the thing over there. Poor sad fool. His gift was for poetry whereas mine was for painting. In my heart, I had hoped he would pen sonnet sequences and odes to accompany my art as it toured the galleries of England, Europe and the rest of the world. We all have our ridiculous hopes and dreams. It was not to be as you can see. We are the puppets of many-fingered Azathoth; we hang, blind and kicking, in His resplendent Void. Our ever-fraying strings dancing to a tune that, all our lives long, we rarely ever hear. I think Samuel heard his tune after the Night Gaunt had done its work on his skin. I think he hears it still, a wordless song sounding between the screams that echo in the place wherein his spoiled body now rests.”
“He does still live then?”
“If you can call being kept in Bedlam a life, yes.”
“How can you keep the Night Gaunt after it did that to him?”
“How can I? I’ll tell you, I keep it because of what it did.” He said, turning, voice darkening as he strode over to the glass prison, “You will stay here until I die. Giving me every last drop of the inspiration I need. You took my friend’s mind and you wish to take mine too but you never ever will, understand?”
The mouthless Night Gaunt hung there, doing nothing, making no gesture of comprehension.
Byron wen
t on, “You know it’s actually an erroneous statement that Night Gaunts tickle their victims to death, though the sensation is undoubtedly similar, to begin with. No, there is a purpose to such seemingly playful evil. They are creatures born of the Angles and on the exterior of the human body, there are some intricate sets of natural angles. Such as those worn upon the soles of the feet and the palms of the hands. What a Night Gaunt does is use those angles, manipulating them, opening us up as a locksmith might open a door.”
“And what constitutes a door is merely a matter of perception.” Misia said, “it’s from one of the old books we used in school.”
Byron nodded, “Exactly right, every Angle is a doorway. An aspect of Yog-Sothoth, the Animate Gate. These things are simply doing as all servitors of the Great Old Ones do. Using us as a means of bringing closer the time when Yog-Sothoth opens wide and the cosmos is consumed by chaos. These vile things unpick the seams of your being and then leave you mad and changed forever. Lost inside yourself. That’s what you did to Samuel, didn’t you?” he was screaming now, “Bastard beast!”
Byron stormed out, leaving Misia, even though she reached out for his sleeve. She could see the tears pouring from his eyes as he went. A hole opened up inside her, empty, wintery with cold and whistling. She hung her head. Her eyes flickered over to the thing behind the glass. She saw its tapering black fingertips were pressing against the inner wall of its prison. She went to it. Matching her fingertips to its own. Noticing they were placed in the small spaces where the glass was not inscribed with the gold-black tincture. She felt her heart miss a beat, then another. Sudden ecstatic shivers, exquisite with morbid sensations, swept through her, bringing her to her knees. The shivers left a rotten electricity to hang, pungent, in the air. Her fair skin was sore, aching profoundly. Her soul, it was hungry for more. Misia gasped out loud. There was a sound in her head, a velveteen voice composed of a thousand ancient layered tones.