LJ Idol - Week 28: Salt of the Earth
LJ Idol - Week 28: Salt of the Earth
"But I wou'd have you Observe what was told to us aboute tak'g Care whom to calle upp... I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe;"
-- H.P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The rain is unseasonably cold, which is never a good thing, and I'm trying desperately to keep my cigarette lit. Adjusting my hands, my posture, and the brim of my hat fruitlessly against the blowing rain, I fight an unwinnable battle. The sky lights up, flickering strobes of unnatural day through the trees and in seconds deep crashing thunder shoves the air and the storm closer. The park building nearby would offer some protection from the blowing wind, but the storm is coming from the wrong direction and I won't be able to see the field from the sheltered side of the building. I curse the night and I curse the dark and I keep watch over the spot ten feet off of the pitcher's mound. I'm so goddamn tired.
I can never quite be sure if the glow or the vaguely disturbed earth is real or something I'm imagining, but it's almost certainly the latter. Almost. In the past ten years the baseball diamond had seen countless groomings before games and gougings during games. I don't know, for sure, what the effect of submerging the field and making it into a skating rink in the winter had, but I'm sure that must disturb the earth as well. Just the same, the spot maintains the healthy glow of guilt for me. Guilt and, perhaps, insanity.
We were kids, not even out of High School, we didn't know any better. After my grandfather's funeral, my parents said I could bring some friends with me to go rummaging through all the junk in his cluttered mess of a house. While his collections were grand, what captivated us was an enormous old text we uncovered wrapped in linen under some loose boards in the attic. I don't know if I've invented the memory or not, but when I recall pulling it out into the dim light I remember a flash of lightning and a crackling boom of thunder when the light revealed the word "Necronomicon" emblazoned in the soft leather of the cover.
It was Anthony who knew about it, or pretended he did. He must have heard of it, of course, but the stories he made up were too fantastic to be real. Tales of death and insanity, scholars and wizards, cults and the gods that they followed. We didn't take him seriously at the time, we rarely did, but I secreted the book away just the same and together we investigated it's secrets.
The book was singularly old. In retrospect the magnificently bound manuscript would have been invaluable regardless of it's contents, having purportedly been drafted in the 16th century. It claimed to be an English translation of a much older work, it's subject matter being that of strange philosophies, gods and monsters from outside of time and space, alien magics hiding in mathematics, and ritual not meant for this world. Anthony was clearly frightened and intrigued by it, though we all mocked him for it. Just the same, the book had a clear effect on any who so much as touched it. Reading through the dense manuscript was like allowing electric worms free reign to tunnel in the spaces between your skull and your flesh.
I can't explain how a group of teenagers became so engrossed in a text that didn't come in paperback, but in time we were fighting for it. Things started to happen and it was a little bit like the world we knew was starting to peel away around the edges, revealing vague hints of something we knew without ever being able to comprehend. When Anthony suggested we try one of the incantations, described as a calling of the servants of something unpronounceable, we all pretended we were just humoring him but it was what we were all waiting for someone else to suggest.
What happened that night stayed out of the papers mostly because the only bodies identifiable as such left in it's wake were transients and the rest was too weird to be communicated in print. Mary fell that night, torn apart by the shapeless thing we called, and Eric never really came all the way back from that. If it wasn't for Anthony, it would have been a lot worse, the world owes him that much. We had to tell her parents that she'd been talking about running away from home. I'm not sure that anyone believed us, but there was nothing else and she was gone.
I draw the bottle from a deep pocket in my coat and take a long pull at her memory. My eyes are locked on the spot, unfocused as my mind drifts through rum-stained memory. Lightning flashes again and I flinch, the nervous tic in my eye dancing irrythmically. Rain is pounding down and whipping about in the wind and things are starting to move faster. I put the bottle back because tonight I can't afford to drink too much. Not until the work is done.
Eric demanded access to the book, and there was nothing we could say to dissuade him. He started cutting classes and stopped returning phone calls. His mother said he rarely came out of his bedroom anymore. If we'd known how bad he was, we would have done something sooner, maybe, but when we finally broke through his locked door we found a mad shell of the friend we knew. All of his energies were bent, it seemed, on studying the book in search of a way to bring Mary back. He chased us out with a baseball bat and we had little choice but to tell his parents that there was something wrong with him. They had him placed in a facility and, as far as I know, he's still there. The last time I visited, almost five years ago, he was drugged to the gills and still raving incoherently between bouts of lapsing into near unconsciousness.
We smuggled the book out of his house and I declared that I would keep it safe. Countless promises were made that I would leave it in the closet until we could figure out what to do with it. Weeks went by before anyone noticed that I wasn't eating or sleeping anymore. When Anthony and Miranda broke into my bedroom, I didn't have a baseball bat handy to chase them out with. They found the manuscript I'd been working on, copying the monstrous tome page by page, adding insights and revelations in the margins. Anthony went ape-shit, something about copying the book being one of the hidden rituals of binding, or some shit. I hate thinking about it now.
I grabbed what I could before I ran out into the night. I rarely left the house at the time, especially at night, because of the things I'd seen in the shadows. Monstrous shapes that slithered through the dark spaces of the night, always in my peripheral vision, always slipping away just before I caught one. I'd found a passage in the book that I thought would banish them.
It didn't work and things went bad again. It was like fighting some sort of secret war that no one else seemed to be able to see or understand. At least not the right way. Everyone thought we were mad and sometimes I wondered myself. The scars were real enough, so we kept at it. In the end, my friends pulled me through and we somehow got things mostly under control. Pretty much.
Thunder booms and crackles like god's laughter immediately in time with the lightning forking through the night. It's hard to see through the canopy of trees in this part of the park so I move out into the open where I can see the sky as well as the spot in the field. I move out where the storm can see me, my coat whipping about me in the wind. The storm is right here, right now, and my cigarette is a forgotten waste in the rain. If something's going to happen tonight, it's going to happen soon. I'm so goddamn tired.
We went back to my house after everything was done and we sat in my bedroom in the basement for most of the night. We talked, we cried, we screamed, and we made a plan. We were kids, we didn't know what the fuck we were doing. We found what appeared to be a purging ritual, a ritual of fire. Having no cars, we had to make do with walking to a park near my house. We carved our circle in the dirt near the pitcher's mound, we said the words. We placed the ancient text within the circle and we laid my own manuscript on top of it.
We said the words and we lit the stack of papers on fire. It burned hatefully in a weird turbulence of hissing wind that was somehow confined to the circle. I'd never seen anything quite like it, as though a part of myself was burning in those flames. I screamed aloud when I realized that the words were being burned into me, somewhere deep and dark and frightful. They stopped me when I tried to rescue the manuscript. They thought I was trying to preserve it, but I was only trying to preserve myself. Trying to put a stop to something hideous and unknown that was escaping in the smoke. Escaping into me.
When it was done, there was nothing anyone could do or say, so we parted company and went our separate ways. We stayed in touch for a while but it was never the same, we were broken. Lost. At least it was done.
It was months later when the storm broke out. I was away at college at the time, but I still remember the nightmares I had of something monstrous birthing itself in the field where we burned those books. The memory of the dream stuck with me, clouding my day. The storm was bad enough to make the news, there was a great deal of destruction and several deaths associated with it. I didn't know, at the time, how close to my parent's house, and the nearby park, those deaths occurred. When I got back to my dorm at the end of the day, there was a message from Anthony waiting for me. His voice flat, he told me that something came out of the park and took Miranda before he could stop it.
When I got out of the car it was late, but I found him sitting alone in the park, looking at the field from the very bench where I'd spent most of the night for every storm since. Without speaking, I joined him in watching the battered earth where we'd burned the Necronomicon, where something clawed it's way into our world and wrought destruction that somehow to everyone else appeared as storm damage.
I did this.
"The Lament of Azathoth," he said finally.
Without turning to look at him, I nodded. "The Settlement of Yog-Sothoth might have turned it back before it even made it through, don't you think?"
He thought for a moment and slowly he nodded. "If someone were here, yeah." In the end we shook hands, we both tried to speak but failed. I heard later that he left town, went south. No one really knows what's come of him since but I like to think that things somehow returned to normal for him. I stayed in school for as long as I could before dropping out due to "nervous exhaustion." I took a shitty job, I rented a shitty apartment above a shitty bar in a shitty part of town. I stayed close. I stayed ready.
For nights like this. The storm twists in familiar patterns and my flesh begins to awaken. It's only happened five times in almost ten years, but I'm here for every storm, just in case. My skin tingles and, despite how wet it is, my hair tries to stand on end. I dive to the ground by instinct, knowing that the lightning isn't going to strike me regardless. I could climb the flagpole and hold an antenna to the storm and the lightning wouldn't find me. It's come for the spot.
Thunder finds a new crescendo, crackling as though the sky is splitting, as though reality itself is tearing. Unsteadily I rise, the wind and the rain doing it's best to stop me. I draw the Elder Sign pendant from my pocket and hold it to the scorched and trembling earth of the spot by the pitcher's mound and for the sixth time, the Settlement of Yog-Sothoth rips a part of my essence away with it as the words and the strange energies blast out of me in an effort to contain the thing in the mound.
I'm so goddamn tired.
"But I wou'd have you Observe what was told to us aboute tak'g Care whom to calle upp... I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe;"
-- H.P. Lovecraft, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The rain is unseasonably cold, which is never a good thing, and I'm trying desperately to keep my cigarette lit. Adjusting my hands, my posture, and the brim of my hat fruitlessly against the blowing rain, I fight an unwinnable battle. The sky lights up, flickering strobes of unnatural day through the trees and in seconds deep crashing thunder shoves the air and the storm closer. The park building nearby would offer some protection from the blowing wind, but the storm is coming from the wrong direction and I won't be able to see the field from the sheltered side of the building. I curse the night and I curse the dark and I keep watch over the spot ten feet off of the pitcher's mound. I'm so goddamn tired.
I can never quite be sure if the glow or the vaguely disturbed earth is real or something I'm imagining, but it's almost certainly the latter. Almost. In the past ten years the baseball diamond had seen countless groomings before games and gougings during games. I don't know, for sure, what the effect of submerging the field and making it into a skating rink in the winter had, but I'm sure that must disturb the earth as well. Just the same, the spot maintains the healthy glow of guilt for me. Guilt and, perhaps, insanity.
We were kids, not even out of High School, we didn't know any better. After my grandfather's funeral, my parents said I could bring some friends with me to go rummaging through all the junk in his cluttered mess of a house. While his collections were grand, what captivated us was an enormous old text we uncovered wrapped in linen under some loose boards in the attic. I don't know if I've invented the memory or not, but when I recall pulling it out into the dim light I remember a flash of lightning and a crackling boom of thunder when the light revealed the word "Necronomicon" emblazoned in the soft leather of the cover.
It was Anthony who knew about it, or pretended he did. He must have heard of it, of course, but the stories he made up were too fantastic to be real. Tales of death and insanity, scholars and wizards, cults and the gods that they followed. We didn't take him seriously at the time, we rarely did, but I secreted the book away just the same and together we investigated it's secrets.
The book was singularly old. In retrospect the magnificently bound manuscript would have been invaluable regardless of it's contents, having purportedly been drafted in the 16th century. It claimed to be an English translation of a much older work, it's subject matter being that of strange philosophies, gods and monsters from outside of time and space, alien magics hiding in mathematics, and ritual not meant for this world. Anthony was clearly frightened and intrigued by it, though we all mocked him for it. Just the same, the book had a clear effect on any who so much as touched it. Reading through the dense manuscript was like allowing electric worms free reign to tunnel in the spaces between your skull and your flesh.
I can't explain how a group of teenagers became so engrossed in a text that didn't come in paperback, but in time we were fighting for it. Things started to happen and it was a little bit like the world we knew was starting to peel away around the edges, revealing vague hints of something we knew without ever being able to comprehend. When Anthony suggested we try one of the incantations, described as a calling of the servants of something unpronounceable, we all pretended we were just humoring him but it was what we were all waiting for someone else to suggest.
What happened that night stayed out of the papers mostly because the only bodies identifiable as such left in it's wake were transients and the rest was too weird to be communicated in print. Mary fell that night, torn apart by the shapeless thing we called, and Eric never really came all the way back from that. If it wasn't for Anthony, it would have been a lot worse, the world owes him that much. We had to tell her parents that she'd been talking about running away from home. I'm not sure that anyone believed us, but there was nothing else and she was gone.
I draw the bottle from a deep pocket in my coat and take a long pull at her memory. My eyes are locked on the spot, unfocused as my mind drifts through rum-stained memory. Lightning flashes again and I flinch, the nervous tic in my eye dancing irrythmically. Rain is pounding down and whipping about in the wind and things are starting to move faster. I put the bottle back because tonight I can't afford to drink too much. Not until the work is done.
Eric demanded access to the book, and there was nothing we could say to dissuade him. He started cutting classes and stopped returning phone calls. His mother said he rarely came out of his bedroom anymore. If we'd known how bad he was, we would have done something sooner, maybe, but when we finally broke through his locked door we found a mad shell of the friend we knew. All of his energies were bent, it seemed, on studying the book in search of a way to bring Mary back. He chased us out with a baseball bat and we had little choice but to tell his parents that there was something wrong with him. They had him placed in a facility and, as far as I know, he's still there. The last time I visited, almost five years ago, he was drugged to the gills and still raving incoherently between bouts of lapsing into near unconsciousness.
We smuggled the book out of his house and I declared that I would keep it safe. Countless promises were made that I would leave it in the closet until we could figure out what to do with it. Weeks went by before anyone noticed that I wasn't eating or sleeping anymore. When Anthony and Miranda broke into my bedroom, I didn't have a baseball bat handy to chase them out with. They found the manuscript I'd been working on, copying the monstrous tome page by page, adding insights and revelations in the margins. Anthony went ape-shit, something about copying the book being one of the hidden rituals of binding, or some shit. I hate thinking about it now.
I grabbed what I could before I ran out into the night. I rarely left the house at the time, especially at night, because of the things I'd seen in the shadows. Monstrous shapes that slithered through the dark spaces of the night, always in my peripheral vision, always slipping away just before I caught one. I'd found a passage in the book that I thought would banish them.
It didn't work and things went bad again. It was like fighting some sort of secret war that no one else seemed to be able to see or understand. At least not the right way. Everyone thought we were mad and sometimes I wondered myself. The scars were real enough, so we kept at it. In the end, my friends pulled me through and we somehow got things mostly under control. Pretty much.
Thunder booms and crackles like god's laughter immediately in time with the lightning forking through the night. It's hard to see through the canopy of trees in this part of the park so I move out into the open where I can see the sky as well as the spot in the field. I move out where the storm can see me, my coat whipping about me in the wind. The storm is right here, right now, and my cigarette is a forgotten waste in the rain. If something's going to happen tonight, it's going to happen soon. I'm so goddamn tired.
We went back to my house after everything was done and we sat in my bedroom in the basement for most of the night. We talked, we cried, we screamed, and we made a plan. We were kids, we didn't know what the fuck we were doing. We found what appeared to be a purging ritual, a ritual of fire. Having no cars, we had to make do with walking to a park near my house. We carved our circle in the dirt near the pitcher's mound, we said the words. We placed the ancient text within the circle and we laid my own manuscript on top of it.
We said the words and we lit the stack of papers on fire. It burned hatefully in a weird turbulence of hissing wind that was somehow confined to the circle. I'd never seen anything quite like it, as though a part of myself was burning in those flames. I screamed aloud when I realized that the words were being burned into me, somewhere deep and dark and frightful. They stopped me when I tried to rescue the manuscript. They thought I was trying to preserve it, but I was only trying to preserve myself. Trying to put a stop to something hideous and unknown that was escaping in the smoke. Escaping into me.
When it was done, there was nothing anyone could do or say, so we parted company and went our separate ways. We stayed in touch for a while but it was never the same, we were broken. Lost. At least it was done.
It was months later when the storm broke out. I was away at college at the time, but I still remember the nightmares I had of something monstrous birthing itself in the field where we burned those books. The memory of the dream stuck with me, clouding my day. The storm was bad enough to make the news, there was a great deal of destruction and several deaths associated with it. I didn't know, at the time, how close to my parent's house, and the nearby park, those deaths occurred. When I got back to my dorm at the end of the day, there was a message from Anthony waiting for me. His voice flat, he told me that something came out of the park and took Miranda before he could stop it.
When I got out of the car it was late, but I found him sitting alone in the park, looking at the field from the very bench where I'd spent most of the night for every storm since. Without speaking, I joined him in watching the battered earth where we'd burned the Necronomicon, where something clawed it's way into our world and wrought destruction that somehow to everyone else appeared as storm damage.
I did this.
"The Lament of Azathoth," he said finally.
Without turning to look at him, I nodded. "The Settlement of Yog-Sothoth might have turned it back before it even made it through, don't you think?"
He thought for a moment and slowly he nodded. "If someone were here, yeah." In the end we shook hands, we both tried to speak but failed. I heard later that he left town, went south. No one really knows what's come of him since but I like to think that things somehow returned to normal for him. I stayed in school for as long as I could before dropping out due to "nervous exhaustion." I took a shitty job, I rented a shitty apartment above a shitty bar in a shitty part of town. I stayed close. I stayed ready.
For nights like this. The storm twists in familiar patterns and my flesh begins to awaken. It's only happened five times in almost ten years, but I'm here for every storm, just in case. My skin tingles and, despite how wet it is, my hair tries to stand on end. I dive to the ground by instinct, knowing that the lightning isn't going to strike me regardless. I could climb the flagpole and hold an antenna to the storm and the lightning wouldn't find me. It's come for the spot.
Thunder finds a new crescendo, crackling as though the sky is splitting, as though reality itself is tearing. Unsteadily I rise, the wind and the rain doing it's best to stop me. I draw the Elder Sign pendant from my pocket and hold it to the scorched and trembling earth of the spot by the pitcher's mound and for the sixth time, the Settlement of Yog-Sothoth rips a part of my essence away with it as the words and the strange energies blast out of me in an effort to contain the thing in the mound.
I'm so goddamn tired.