Halloween Story, Part 4
IV.
Sentinels
Yes. You’ve seen it. In fact, you’ve invoked it:
The knife cuts into the soft orange rind. Pulp and seeds are scooped out like so much convoluted gray mattter. Eyes, nose and mouth are excised. A candle is placed and lit within. You gaze into the brazen glow of this gourd lamp, your eyes shining with the wonder of it. And through these perfect, pure eyes pour hopes, dreams, excitement, and almost unspeakable happiness. Or, if you have wrinkled skin, grey hair and more cynicism than you ought… out pour fond recollections of same. All caught, held… and magnified… within this orange bowl.
The tiny flames beckon from each porch, a multitude of crooking yellow fingers. “Come closer… closer…” And through the dusky streets comes the parade of phantoms and faeries, villains and champions, dragons and dinosaurs… paper sacks and pillowcases heavy with sugary swag, little voices piping. This you percieve with your senses, as do I with some of mine.
But within my sheath of flame, through my numberless eyes and grins, I also see what you -mercifully- cannot: a shambling, masterless Shoggoth, respiring heavily with the effort at having pushed through tonight’s thin membrane between this sane world and that terrible place where all sanity is flayed to shreds, where time itself is pulverized in a self-propogating wavefront of collapsing loopspace.
Still only partially formed, the abomination catches sight of my flame and homes in, its reeking eye-pustules blinking.
I urge it forward… “Closer…come closer…” and on it comes in a mindless rush. I let it get within lunging distance and I dispose of it. I do not ‘send it back’ to the dark region from whence it came. I subtract it from the order of things.
Then the deadwalkers come. Then the gakis. Then the Sons of Dust. Then a towering, skeletal Wendigo. Then a Vucub-Caquix. Then a Rusalka. On and on they come. I take each into myself, and we combust together.
By the overcast dawn I am a shriveled, gummy shadow of myself. But the watch has been stood for another year, and the line has been held.
Sentinels
Yes. You’ve seen it. In fact, you’ve invoked it:
The knife cuts into the soft orange rind. Pulp and seeds are scooped out like so much convoluted gray mattter. Eyes, nose and mouth are excised. A candle is placed and lit within. You gaze into the brazen glow of this gourd lamp, your eyes shining with the wonder of it. And through these perfect, pure eyes pour hopes, dreams, excitement, and almost unspeakable happiness. Or, if you have wrinkled skin, grey hair and more cynicism than you ought… out pour fond recollections of same. All caught, held… and magnified… within this orange bowl.
The tiny flames beckon from each porch, a multitude of crooking yellow fingers. “Come closer… closer…” And through the dusky streets comes the parade of phantoms and faeries, villains and champions, dragons and dinosaurs… paper sacks and pillowcases heavy with sugary swag, little voices piping. This you percieve with your senses, as do I with some of mine.
But within my sheath of flame, through my numberless eyes and grins, I also see what you -mercifully- cannot: a shambling, masterless Shoggoth, respiring heavily with the effort at having pushed through tonight’s thin membrane between this sane world and that terrible place where all sanity is flayed to shreds, where time itself is pulverized in a self-propogating wavefront of collapsing loopspace.
Still only partially formed, the abomination catches sight of my flame and homes in, its reeking eye-pustules blinking.
I urge it forward… “Closer…come closer…” and on it comes in a mindless rush. I let it get within lunging distance and I dispose of it. I do not ‘send it back’ to the dark region from whence it came. I subtract it from the order of things.
Then the deadwalkers come. Then the gakis. Then the Sons of Dust. Then a towering, skeletal Wendigo. Then a Vucub-Caquix. Then a Rusalka. On and on they come. I take each into myself, and we combust together.
By the overcast dawn I am a shriveled, gummy shadow of myself. But the watch has been stood for another year, and the line has been held.