He stood there, at the edge of the cliff with his long dark hair whipping against his face from the wind that swept up from the valley below.    He was well dressed in his black pinstriped suit, matching black shirt, tie, and robe that billowed from the same wind.  His hair was dark like the mane of a panther and his skin was pallid from his notorious nocturnal habits.  Incredibly tall and well built, he would have intimidated any man.  He was chanting inhuman couplets from his stolen copy of the odious Necronomicon.  The man was Anton St. Lorraine the notorious public Satanist and I was terrified of him.

He was a well-known organist back in Europe; however, here in America his musical talents were rather diminished by his nefarious and thrill-seeking reputation.  He was a man about town in the New York social circles and often delighted people with his encyclopedic knowledge of many topics.  He could hold an amazing conversation with anybody on any topic that interested them, and this was how I had the extreme misfortune to meet him.  He was talking with some of my “friends” in the musical circle for whom he had thrown this excellent party. 

“But aren’t you a Satanist?”  I heard Jean ask him, as I made my way from the bar.  “Well yes, yes, I am.”  Came St. Lorraine’s reply.  “Did you make a deal with the devil?”  Jean quickly asked in reply.  St. Lorraine peered into her eyes intensely for a moment and replied with a smile, “Well, how do you think that I have achieved the success that I have?”  The group that was gathered around him broke into laughter.

I butted in with a pointed response, “That’s certainly a typical Satanist answer.”  Anton St. Lorraine pierced me with a perceptive and knowing look.  Not taken aback, I stared back at him, nodded, and perceived that he understood what I was trying to tell him.  The conversation continued along the similar and mundane lines of Jean’s previous questions as St. Lorraine continued being intentionally vague in his responses, allowing the group’s imaginations to create vivid fantasies to fill in the finer details.  He was certainly the life of the party that he had thrown and he obviously enjoyed it.

            The party lasted into the early hours of the morning and each one of us was thoroughly intoxicated by the excellent cocktails that our generous host and avowed Satanist had provided.  As I was making my way to the door, I heard his familiar voice ask me from behind, “Have you got it with you?”  I turned to face him and took out my little black I.D. card, which identified me as a fellow Satanist, from my wallet and presented it to him.  He scanned it, returned it, and remarked, “Those sheep, they think they are so clever and so brilliant; getting all of their information from movies on a flashing box.  No wonder they are so easy to control.  I tell you, that I am getting to be very bored with it all.  Nothing excites me anymore.  In my quest for all things esoteric and hidden; I’m afraid that I’ve become quite jaded.”  I nodded in agreement and he continued, “However, I do have some hope.  I wonder if you might be interested in an item that has recently fallen into my possession?”  Saying this, he walked away and disappeared into another room.  He returned with a large book, covered in a red silk cloth, in his arms.

            I followed him over to his cocktail bar and he gently laid the great book on it.  He removed the red silk covering and I noted that it was an enormous all black tome with a large silver clasp locking its contents closed.  As I was looking at this awesome book with awe, St. Lorraine asked me, “Do you recognize it?”  I answered him directly, “No, I don’t think so.”  He was staring at the book as if it was entrancing him and without looking up, he said, “This is the very Necronomicon of the Mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred translated by and written in the very hand of Olaus Wormius.  This edition was largely forgotten as it was kept hidden over all these years by the family von Völlenstein of Heidelberg, Germany.  They did an excellent of job of hiding it too, especially during the days when forbidden books such as this might have met its end in a bonfire.  There are a very few, very few to-be-sure, who even know of this hidden copy.  This family of great antiquity has, unfortunately, dwindled over the years and is represented by its sole survivor Josef Graf von Völlenstein; who is no better than a vegetable these days in his old age.  Needless to say, transferring his copy of the Wormius Necronomicon to my guardianship, without his awareness, was exceptionally easy.  It was almost as easy as walking into his library and simply walking back out with the book in my hand.”

            He looked up at me from the book and said, “Well, allow me to get to the point.  Are you willing to help me in a certain ritual contained in this book that I am particularly interested in?”  I stared at him for a moment, my mind in genuine curiosity and replied, “I will help you.”  “Good!  Very Good!” he answered.  His pallid face betrayed his happiness with a toothy smile.  “You will be staying here in my flat as a guest until we have accomplished this feat.  I will not take, no, as an answer.  We must get to work immediately.  Come, I will fix up a room and get some clothes for you.  You must get some rest; for tomorrow we will begin.”

            I was led, still in a semi-drunken state, to my room where I retired and slept soundly that night.  I awakened the next day around four in the afternoon.  Having showered, I dressed and made my way to the living room.  I reclined in his large sofa and took out my cigarette holder.  Placing a cigarette between my lips, I took out my lighter.  “Oh, put that disgusting, paper cylinder away!”  I looked and beside me stood the imposing and cowling figure of Anton St. Lorraine.  “I’m sorry.  Did I frighten you?  I abhor cigarettes and will not allow their use while we are working on this project.”  He said as he sat in the chair across from me.  “If you don’t mind, we should eat a little and begin with our work.”  Putting the cigarette back in its case, I more than a little, begrudged him this as I knew it would cause me more than a little discomfort over the coming weeks.

            After having had our breakfast (or dinner) of coffee and toast with jam, we went into the study and began our work.  Or rather, he began his work of translation from the antiquated German of the Wormius Necronomicon and I took his dictation.  What I wrote, I had only the slightest idea of what it all meant.  There were names that I’d never heard before; Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, and Phr-Ashmodath.  There were also formulas and incantations that I could not repeat as they, seemingly, were not intended for a human tongue.  As we cross-referenced the Necronomicon with other books of great antiquity and of an esoteric nature such as; Unaussprechlichen Kulten by Von Junzt, Cultes des Goules by the Comte d’Erlette, and the abhorred Testament of Israhim the Sadducee Heretic:  I learned of sites located all over the world, that were once strongholds of cults devoted to the worship of forgotten Gods.  His collection of exceptionally rare books was astounding even to me.  A person with even a superficial knowledge of the occult, such as my self, could not venture to even guess as to how St. Lorraine managed to get his hands on these exceedingly rare tomes.  Knowing the story of how he obtained the Necronomicon; I could hazard a guess.

            Our work progressed along these lines for two weeks.  Each night I went to bed thoroughly exhausted and had even begun to dread having to wake up the next morning to continue the work.  His enthusiasm, however, kept me going even under the extreme duress of exhaustion and having to do without my cigarettes.

            One night during the second week, I had a horrid dream, which made me waver and almost decide to just go home.  If it was produced by weeks of single-minded concentration, or it was produced by some other means, I couldn’t say at the time.  It terrified me and I can say that I hope that I never have it again.  I wouldn’t have even called it a dream as much as I would call it some sort of lucid vision.  From the darkness of unconsciousness, I emerged into a nightmare realm of complete darkness.  There was nothing visible at all, at any direction.  It was a darkness of complete pitch that could only be experienced in dreams such as this one.  I began to hear a voice as if in chanting.  The voice was chanting those same incantations that I had recorded on paper for St. Lorraine.  “Brth Ythl truhg gthll mnptrul kgtrng, krgtrng jgklu Phr-Ashmodath.”  This same monotonous, organic, yet somehow mechanical voice continued its incantations and was steadily becoming louder.

            Then it happened.  I saw a faint glow approaching me from somewhere below in the darkness.  Its light illuminated grotesque tentacled shadows that writhed in the darkness.  I felt the chill of primal fear stir from within me.  The hairs on the back of my neck stood bolt-upright as the chill found its center there.  As the glow grew nearer, I could begin to distinguish that it was produced by one of the very denizens of this infernal realm.  Still at what I thought was at least a hundred yards away, I could clearly determine that the possessor of the light was an incredibly immense being.  It had no body as it was a semi-spherical mass of extending and retracting feelers.  There were two places for eyes at the center of the thing but none existed, it was like the blind cavefish whose ancestors had lost the need for sight in the darkness of the cavern.  The thing issued a pale-grey glow from its mass and it seemed to be without any kind of feeding orifice or mouth.

            It continued to move towards me as I fought in pitiful vane to try and escape.  My movements seemed to attract the other horrible things hiding in the darkness.  The sounds of moist suckers and tentacles reached ever closer to me as they sensed and tried to find me in the darkness.  Realizing my helplessness, I released one last gasp from my lungs as the things reached out……”Wake up! Wake up! What’s wrong with you?”  St. Lorraine was towering above me as I lay in the bed that was now sweat drenched.  “Has our work gotten to you?”  “No, no, I just get nightmares when I’m overstressed and without my nicotine.”  I replied as I climbed out of the bed.  “Well, that’s all well and good because we are almost finished.” He said with a slight grin, obviously ignoring my nicotine comment.  “I do not see our work taking up more than half a day at best.  Then, you may relax to your heart’s content for the rest of the day.  After that, however, we will have to make ready to travel.

            “Travel?”  I exclaimed.  “Where will we be going?”  St. Lorraine looked at me with that same slight grin.  “West-Viriginia, I’ll tell you more later.  We must make haste and finish our work, come.”  I followed him into the study and we began our laborious task until its completion.  Before us, we had hundreds of pages of incantations and notes that were carefully organized and categorized.  I asked him once, during our work, why he didn’t want us to use a computer to type our notes.  The way that he answered me was this, “Computers are devoid of any characteristic of the arcane and are also at once singularly devoid of any emotion.  Hand written documents wield an emotional power that is essential to any magical working!  The Necronomicon, along with every other book that we have used, are indeed inked with the very hands of their authors and transcribers; this is part of the reason that they are so powerful.”

            The work was finished and we retired to the living room and enjoyed some fine cocktails.  He broke the silence that I had momentarily enjoyed, “We are going to a spot just outside of a small town in West-Virginia called Mourning; because it is the closest and most powerful of the ancient focus sites of the ancient Native Americans.  There is, indeed, a small circle of stones and monuments that the Indians used to dance around and conjure their ancient gods.  These monuments I hear, miraculously, are still standing despite the religious compulsion of the local inhabits who would normally destroy such places.   The very gods that we are planning to invoke in a couple days time are the gods that those ancient natives used to call upon.  We have one thing over the Indians, though, and that is the writings of the mad Arab who was able to see far beyond any crude cult that the Natives could devise.  Yes, we are indeed wielding a great power and we will be able to cause great change in this world. 

Our pathetic Satanic organization is content to merely engage their carnal desires and play at magic; but you and I will witness and experience things beyond enacting our sexual fantasies.  We will truly engage the fulcrum of change in this world.  We will stand out as great men with real power aided by the Gods.  Now, get a good night’s sleep and we will depart at once in the morning.”

            I was astonished and at once thrilled by what this man said in his emotionally charged speech.  I went to bed wondering just what the next couple of days might hold for us.  Lying in the bed I tried to correlate the contents of my now disheveled mind.  I looked over at the alarm clock and seeing that it was midnight, I cleared my mind and settled into sleep.  That night, I didn’t dream at all.  After the dream of the previous night, it was a great and fleeting comfort.

            After waking up and dragging myself from the bed early at five A.M., I dressed and packed for the long trip that awaited us.  We got into St. Lorraine’s luxurious car and drove all the way to West-Virginia with very few stops.  The old mountains and long-forgotten valleys of that state did seem to hold some kind of hypnotic quality.  This was a land of great antiquity far beyond the first European settlers who claimed it as their own.  It was a land often neglected and passed over when anyone speaks of mysterious places which is just as well.  It is the forgotten realms that often hold the most power as I was soon to find out.

            We arrived in the town of Mourning and its gambrel shacks and run down mill houses.  Apparently, the mill was no longer in operation as the dilapidated shacks and their degraded occupants had a look of desperation about them.  We pulled up to a motel that looked as though it had longed passed its 1950’s heyday.  Checking in we deposited our baggage in the immensely stuffy room that probably hadn’t seen any guests in quite along time.  We took along our notes, Necronomicon, and day provisions in day packs.  As Anton St. Lorraine, had told me earlier in the day, this leg of the trip could only be made on foot.

            We started up the mountain along a long disused trail.  We hiked for miles along hill crests and down into valleys until we hiked up the last peak; until we came upon a clearing which oddly enough, was completely devoid of any life.  It was a sterile patch of barren soil and rock upon which stood a miniature version of Stonehenge.  The rocks stood about four feet tall and were an unnatural black color that seemed to throb and pulsate.  Indeed upon touching them, they were cold almost to the point of freezing.  As I looked up and around this bare heath, the sky seemed to be a reddish-violet color as if indicating the intrinsically sick nature of this area.  No small wonder that the inhabitants of this area never came up here.

            The sun was low at that point and St. Lorraine suggested that we begin with the ritual.  We built a fire in the ring at the center of the circle of stones and we donned black robes for dramatic effect.  St. Lorraine took the great black Necronomicon along with some notes and stood at the highpoint just at the edge of the cliff where his long mane began to whip about with the wind.  I took my place alongside the monument with the pages of responses that accompanied his invocations.  Thus we began the odious ritual with great pomp and show that was soon to end in great tragedy and even greater destruction.

            St. Lorraine began chanting, saying each line in the inhuman language and I followed with its translation in English.  “Khtln sfrn tyklmnh ugrgh bmkyt Phr-Ashmodath!”  “We call upon you, great Phr-Ashmodath!”  “Ughtn lkyn qthat ofrnqat dhmrt sfgth ghtop!”  “Lord of Destruction and change, come forth!”  After I had shouted that refrain, the fire in the circle began to darken.  Continuing to burn, its flame turned into pure pitch.  Within it I could see, illuminated by the still remaining twilight, the same foul shapes that had haunted my dream.  Noticing the light and our activities, they began to move their bloated and eerily pulsating bodies in an agitated manner.  Then, I saw that faint glow from deep within the bowels of the fire.  I was terrified by this scene beyond all rationality.  Anton St. Lorraine noticed it too.  His eyes darted about in the fire and he became noticeably terrified as well.  He shouted to me, “I think we have made a mistake!”

            He took up the great book and peered at it with great malice and walked closer to the void.  He called out at me, “This will end this nightmare!”  He raised the vile tome with both hands high above his head and threw it into the great black fire.  The book fell into the void where a great tendril shot out and grabbing the Necronomicon, shot back toward its owner’s gaping maul.  The things, apparently, had no use for the work of man.  Peering astonished and dismayed, I saw from within the void the great, pale-grey glow grow much closer and reveal its eyeless owner from within the fire.  As I was petrified from extreme horror; another long black tendril shot out from within the void and wrapped around St. Lorraine’s body.  With the crushing sound of bones being snapped and wrenched from their frame; the tendril withdrew St. Lorraine silently into the void and toward the gaping maw of another one of the black beings

            He was gone.  The great Anton St. Lorraine had been destroyed by the very destruction that he had tried to wreak upon our planet.  The things, which in the whole, are Phr-Ashmodath had only disdain for the ones who tried to help them cross the void into our plane of existence.  Human life was nothing to them.       

            After witnessing the ignoble end of a person that I had come to call a friend, I stood very still.  The things seemed to be attracted to movement, so I remained frozen.  As the great blasphemous fire died down; the void closed with it.  Even the embers that remained burned with the infinite darkness of that insane dimension.  I just stood there for hours upon hours until the morning had begun to creep across the horizon.  When I had perceived that no embers remained, I moved very carefully, with my eyes frozen upon the ring of ashen wood.  I gathered all evidence of our having been there and returned to the degraded village.  I checked out of the hotel and having St. Lorraine’s keys in my possession as he, fortunately left them in the hotel; I got into his car, lit a cigarette, and drove the long and winding way back to Manhattan in complete silence.

            An investigation followed in the wake of St. Lorraine’s disappearance.  It took several weeks for anyone else to notice that he was missing.  This was, I suppose, due to his often solitary lifestyle, except on the rare occasion when he would throw a party.  I was questioned by the police, of course, as was everyone else who had been at that last party.  We were all exonerated because no one had noticed that I had stayed behind that night.  Doubting my own sanity; I only write this down to find a psychological outlet for myself.  No one will ever see this journal entry; because I will destroy it soon after finishing it to keep the wrong hands, police or otherwise.

            I had hoped that the night at the mountain would not have any dire or dramatic consequences.  I am troubled, however, because of the recurrence of the same dream that I experienced that night so long ago before we embarked on that mad quest.  In it, each time, the snaking tendrils of Phr-Ashmodath come closer and closer to finding me in that terrible black void.