by Shining in the Dark- Celebrating 20 Years of Lilja's Library (retail) (epub)
Wille, Tore and Linus were on their way out, but Oswald didn’t move. His self-confidence had grown over the course of the evening, but now his inner lapdog reappeared as he quietly asked: “Does that include me?” Before Albert had time to respond, Wille said: “What are you talking about? That fucking book’s in Latin—we need you.”
Albert wasn’t pleased to see Wille usurping his authority. He was the game master, this was his house and his adventure; it wasn’t Wille’s place to invite people along. Fortunately for Oswald, he realized this. He smiled wanly at Wille, then turned his pleading doggy eyes to Albert, who nodded and said: “Of course, Oswald. See you tomorrow”.
Oswald’s expression suggested that he would have liked to jump on Albert and give his face a good licking.
* * *
When Albert woke up in the afternoon, he shoveled down a bowl of muesli with yogurt before preparing the evening’s activities. His mother and father were on a weekend break in Paris, so the group had the house to themselves. The others were supplying pizza; there had to be some privileges when you were the game master.
If the players followed the dramatic curve that Albert had planned, a climax should be reached when they entered the underground chamber in the library where De Vermis Mysteriis was kept. Unfortunately Gunnar Asplund himself was in there too, protected by a Barrier of Naach-Tith, from which he would read a spell that summoned a star vampire.
The problem lay in finding the right details so that something magnificent and horrific didn’t become inane. Albert began by rereading Robert Bloch’s short story The Shambler from the Stars, where the star vampire is mentioned for the first time. The eerie giggling emanating from the invisible creature, its appearance when it has drunk the blood of its victim and its contours begin to emerge. The formless, pulsating
mass. The tentacles.
One sticking point was the spell, the one the characters would hear as they stood listening outside the closed door. Albert had started with the one in the story: “Signa stellarum nigrarum et bufaniformis…” and had added a number of invocations from The Keeper’s Companion: “Ia Shub-Niggurath, y’ai’ng’ngah, yog-sothoth”, along with odd fragments along the lines of: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!” He repeated his invocation in order to make the words flow, and to ensure that he sounded as sinister as possible.
He had one specific goal: to make Oswald cry. He had come close a couple of times the previous evening; Oswald’s eyes had been suspiciously shiny. But tonight those tears were definitely going to fall.
* * *
The evening came, the pizzas were eaten and the game began. As an extra touch, Albert had brought down a pair of candelabras so that they could play by the glow of candlelight. The dice rattled across the table and the tension grew in direct proportion to the number of cans of Celsius the boys consumed. By midnight the characters were finally standing outside the closed door at the bottom of the long staircase.
Albert had carefully built up the atmosphere, describing the vibrations in the stone walls, the smell of the prehistoric bog rising from the underworld, the beam of the flashlight which seemed to be swallowed up by the compact darkness, the sound of the blasphemous invocation. He lowered his voice, making the pitch as deep as possible, and began to intone: “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn ny’ar rot hotep…”
He could feel the quivering energy spreading through the room as the players realized they were facing something that could possibly kill them all. Albert glanced at Oswald, whose gaze was fixed on Albert’s lips while he subconsciously moved his own lips. There were tears in his eyes.
Go on, cry, you pathetic worm.
Albert raised his voice a fraction and intensified the spell. He had abandoned his written text and started to improvise. The words just seemed to come to him, and he spat them out with a malicious potency he hadn’t known he was capable of. And there it was, a tear trickling down Oswald’s cheek as his lips continued to move in time with Albert’s. It felt good to have another person’s emotions in the palm of his hand; Albert could do whatever he wanted with them. He flung his arms wide and was about to declaim a final “Ia! Ia’y!” when something happened to the room.
Albert felt dizzy as the planes and angles altered. Corners became sharp edges, and the sides of the table folded in on themselves, causing Albert to lose his balance. He fell forward, his field of vision contracting until he could see only the six candle flames flickering at the end of a tunnel. In a way that was impossible to describe he knew that the flames were holding up the sticks of wax and not vice versa.
A second, and then it was over. By the time his forehead hit the table it was once again a solid surface made of birch, and behind a red curtain he heard his friends calling out: “Albie, what the fuck?” “What happened?” “What are you doing?” He got to his feet, staggered slightly and rubbed his head.
What was that?
In spite of his perception of the collapsing room, it was the sight of the candles that had etched itself into his brain as an indisputable realization. Those white wax objects were an adjunct to and a consequence of the slender yellow flames rising from the wicks. Cause and effect had changed places in a way that made his head spin, and he covered his eyes with his hands as he heard Wille say: “For fuck’s sake, Albie, this is creepy enough as it is—there’s no need to go over the top”.
Albert lowered his hands and opened his eyes. The room looked perfectly normal, and the four boys were sitting around the table staring at him. Faint traces of tears shimmered on Oswald’s cheeks in the yellow glow of the candlelight.
The flame produces the wick, the light creates the fire.
The pain in Albert’s skull subsided and he was himself once more. He opened his mouth to say something, smooth things over, but not a sound emerged. A shiver ran down his spine as he realized that something was sitting behind him, looking at him. He slowly turned around and peered into the dark corner where the workbench stood.
The thing that was looking at him was sitting right in front of the bench. Was it sitting? He didn’t know, because it was invisible, but he could feel its presence, its attention totally focused on him.
“What are you doing? Pack it in, Albie.” Tore was standing next to him, shaking his shoulder. “Albie!”
Albert would have liked to respond, shrug his shoulders or smile, but he was paralyzed by fear. He could feel the power and the hunger emanating from the thing in front of the workbench, and knew that he could be dead in a second. Tore shook him again. Nothing happened. Albert managed to force his jaws apart just enough to whisper: “Can you see anything? Over there in the corner?”
He pointed with a shaking finger, but was rewarded with a guffaw. “Seriously, Albie, pack it in! Come on, let’s get back to the game.”
Continuing to play was impossible. Even if he couldn’t see the thing keeping watch in the corner, there was no way he was going to turn his back on it. He said he wasn’t well and they’d have to carry on some other time; he claimed he didn’t feel too good after banging his head.
* * *
As the others got ready to leave, muttering discontentedly, Albert glanced over at the corner where the nameless thing still sat, then turned to Wille. “Listen, can I come and stay at yours?”
“You said you didn’t feel well.”
“No, but… can I?”
Albert thought he ran the same risk of going mad as the characters in the game if he was forced to spend the night alone in the house with… that. To his relief, Wille shrugged and said: “Okay, as long as you don’t throw up all over me.”
Wille lived three doors down, and he and Albert had been friends for as long as they could remember. If there was one person Albert could confide in, it was Wille. They had said goodbye to the others and set off when Wille suddenly stopped and said: “So what really happened back there?”
Albert glanced down the street where the others were heading
for the subway station. No awareness of indifferent evil, no thirst for blood in the air. He would have liked to persuade himself that the whole thing had been some kind of auto-suggestion, but the insight into the nature of the candles was burnt into his brain. Nothing was as he had thought, the most basic truths were wrong.
“What if…” he began. “What if this whole Cthulhu thing… What if it’s actually possible to summon up something? If you say the right words?”
Wille tilted his head on one side. “Mmm?”
“What if I… accidentally did that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When I said those words. When we were in the library. It was as if something… happened. And something came.”
Wille didn’t laugh, didn’t tell Albert that he was pushing things too far. In fact he seemed to regard it as a theoretical problem, because he said: “Well yes, but… it’s all made up, isn’t it?
I mean it’s not as if it’s based on authentic sources or anything.”
“No, but…”
“But what?”
“What if it is?”
* * *
They carried on talking, but Albert didn’t mention the creature sitting in the corner because he was becoming more and more convinced that it had been a figment of his overheated imagination. Something had happened, but perhaps it was just a vision, like when people saw the Virgin Mary or Elvis. A temporary short circuit, a momentary blackout where reality is distorted.
They each grabbed a beer from Wille’s father’s stash, then sat chatting on the balcony for an hour or so. Towards the end of the conversation they had turned their attention to books and movies and girls, and Albert was beginning to feel quite mellow. They said goodnight, and Albert went into the guest room and closed the door. He was about to unzip his jeans when he froze on the spot and stopped breathing.
The guest room was also used as a home office, and at the far end there was a bookcase crammed with files and folders of different colors. In front of the bookcase sat the creature. Was the creature. It had no perceptible body, except perhaps the colors were slightly paler behind it, but that could be his imagination. Essentially it was invisible. And it was looking at Albert.
He slowly let the air out of his lungs, pushed down the door handle and backed out of the room without taking his eyes off the area where the creature was located. His breathing was rapid and shallow as he closed the door and stood there on the landing.
I’m going mad.
How many times had he pretended to be sympathetic as he threw the dice to determine what kind of insanity or phobia a character should suffer after being confronted with something that the human mind was incapable of dealing with?
Now he was in exactly the same position, and found that incipient madness did not take the form of hallucinatory images or a panic-stricken desire to flee; instead it was like a glutinous grey mass into which his consciousness was slowly sinking. His arms hanging limply by his side, he went downstairs, fighting the urge to stick out his tongue and let it dangle there.
He went into the living room and slumped down on the big sofa with its plumped up cushions a few feet away from the fifty-five-inch flat screen TV. He felt nothing, his thoughts were incapable of moving through the jelly-like fog that filled his head as he sat there staring at the black rectangle. He didn’t even know when it happened, but at some point the creature materialized on the floor in front of the TV. It was looking at him. Waiting.
Terror had a stranglehold on Albert’s throat, reducing it to what felt like the diameter of a straw, and the words came out as a broken whisper when he said: “What… do you want?”
No response. No change in the creature’s focus, but in the silence of the room Albert thought he could hear something that sounded as if it came from far, far away, brushing against his eardrums through the ether. A joyless giggling.
* * *
Any attempt to get away would be futile. Albert stayed where he was on the sofa, staring at the thing that could not be seen, listening to the giggling that could not be heard. After about an hour he pulled a blanket over himself and curled up. There was a star vampire on the floor ten feet away from him.
De Vermis Mysteriis and Ludwig Prinn were creations of Robert Bloch, just like the creature itself. The incantations Albert had recited were a hotchpotch of Latin nonsense and Lovecraft’s made-up language, which was based on Arabic.
And yet.
There were only two possibilities. The first was that he, Albert Egelsjö, a fifteen-year-old with a high IQ, no childhood trauma and a good relationship with his mother and father, had lost his mind. Started imagining things with such authenticity that they seemed real to him. He would end up in a child psych unit, with a diagnosis involving a whole series of capital letters, followed by a course of medication.
The other possibility was that a chain of coincidences had led him to cast a real spell, just as an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters will eventually produce a Shakespeare play. That there was a real basis for Lovecraft’s universe, and that he had somehow made contact with it.
If he accepted that possibility, why didn’t the creature attack him? It would be the work of a moment for the vampire to suck him dry before returning to the stars, giggling and sated with blood. Why was it just sitting there waiting?
Because…
The realization that flooded Albert’s body made him sit bolt upright. It was obvious! It was only fear of the impossible that had prevented him from understanding; after all, he had been the game master in similar situations so many times.
In his adventure, Gunnar Asplund was in the secret library gabbling his spells. Not with the intention of summoning something that would suck the life out of him and cast him aside like an empty shell, oh no. His aim was to call up the creature because he needed its services. If the reality worked the same way as in the game, the creature was now bound to Albert until he gave it a command, a task that it must carry out, then it would be free to return to the place from which it had come.
A smile crept over Albert’s lips as he stood up and pointed at the invisible presence. “You’re mine, aren’t you?” he whispered. “You will do whatever I tell you to do.”
No response. But for a moment Albert thought the soulless giggling grew a little louder.
2
DAWN HAD BROKEN by the time Albert fell asleep, only to be woken two hours later by Wille’s parents asking if he would like some breakfast. The creature appeared in the corner between the sink and the stove, its muted giggling drowned out by the sounds of everyday life.
Albert was in a world of his own as he chewed on a slice of bread with cheese and jam. From time to time he glanced over at the corner. A command. Theoretically, Albert could instruct the creature to remove Wille’s family from the surface of the earth right now. Theoretically. In a second the lazy Sunday breakfast would be transformed into a bloody massacre, if Albert uttered just a few words. Or would the power of the mind be enough?
The creature was connected to his thoughts on the same wavelength as he himself was aware of its existence, a secret flow that linked the two of them. It was with some difficulty that Albert managed to swallow the lumps of masticated bread.
Wille’s mother Veronica got to her feet, picked up her plate and walked over to the relevant area. Albert stiffened. What if someone touched the creature? Veronica stood by the sink, one leg within the presence.
Was Albert imagining the whole thing after all? Veronica was standing there rinsing her plate under the faucet and humming “Strangers in the Night” with one leg enveloped in a star vampire’s shapeless mass. Did that seem like something that could actually happen?
Wille coughed loudly, and Albert turned away from the non-drama. Wille gave him a filthy look, and Albert stared uncomprehendingly back at him. Then he got it. He and Wille had once talked about older girls, well, women really, and Albert had mentioned that he thought Wille’s m
om was really hot. He might not have used that particular word, and he definitely hadn’t gone as far as MILF, but Wille had reacted badly. His face had clouded over and he had changed the subject immediately.
And now Albert had spent quite some time sitting at the kitchen table staring at the lower half of Veronica’s body; no doubt Wille thought he knew exactly what was going through Albert’s mind. Fortunately, Wille’s father Thomas was preoccupied with the morning paper, and didn’t notice a thing.
Albert said thank you for breakfast, then got up from the table without taking his plate over to the sink as he usually did. He went into the hallway to put on his shoes; Wille followed him, his hands pushed deep into his pockets.
“What the fuck was that all about? You can’t just fucking sit there eyeing up my mother like some kind of…”
“That wasn’t what I was doing. Sorry, but it really wasn’t.”
“Okay… So what was it, then?”
“Can’t you feel a… presence?”
“Not as far as you’re concerned. Anything but, in fact.”
Albert sighed. He wasn’t going to get confirmation from Wille, yet he felt he had to carry on. “In the kitchen. Just now. It was exactly where your mom was standing. That’s what I was looking at.”
Wille nodded, his expression serious. “I get it. And now it’s told you to go home and jerk off, right?”
“Fuck off.”
‘No, you fuck off.”
* * *
Albert left Wille’s house and strode down the garden path. He simply had to accept the facts. No one but him could see or perceive the extra-terrestrial visitor, and he was just going to have to deal with that.
It was a beautiful August morning, and the sun was already pleasantly warm as it shone down on the little gardens and fruit trees of Södra Ängby, with the sound of lawnmowers all around. It was as far from Lovecraft’s fetid, gloomy world as it was possible to get.