The Vision from the Stars

Written by Julio
Wednesday, 29 August 2007
Having roamed for a long time in the world I decided at long last to settle in Arkham, Massachusetts. In my youth as an archeologist I traveled widely throughout the world and visited places that to any North American mind conjures up visions of Indiana Jones or stark, half-naked savages worshipping god-like stones beneath clear stars. Drumbeats, of course, would be heard in THX sound. As an archeologist I have been to the land of the time-infested pharaohs, whose ancient civilization still speaks to us of mankind’s youth, whose crumbling and eroding monuments whisper to us of man’s vanity and of mysterious epochs now lost to human consciousness. To Africa also I went, and there felt the greatest awe a man of science can feel when I contemplated that it was here that my species first evolved and through its long trek had acquired the capabilities to contemplate its own beginnings, and to build those monuments I so admired in Egypt, and even voyage off its world and reach the moon. I ventured where ancient Sumer once stood, and thoughts of those eons-old priests or poets atop their ziggurats, who had had those intimations of immortality which produced our species oldest epic, Gilgamesh, fascinated me. I was mesmerized by those strange and archaic names of poets which to me seemed as incantations, Enheduanna, and even stranger Sin-liqe-unninni. To distant China and fabled Cambodia also I went and to our own nearby neighbor, South America. Amid the cryptic ruins of Machu Picchu, atop that mystic-laden city surrounded by dense and primal jungle, it was that I had my first and true intimation of what it is that would haunt and so possess me in my golden years. It was here that it came upon me as a great and powerful vision that would awash my body and my mind with its immensity and would seem to me to cover the whole universe with its cosmic significance. This strange epiphany occurred to me in 1988 when I set off towards Peru and those remains of the once mighty Inca Empire on fieldwork in a joint American-Peruvian archeological project. I can still remember the taste of the maca on my tongue that I ate to calm my hunger, given to me by the Quechua guide I hired, and when my excitement to reach the summit caused the lactate in my muscles to become too high, and I became faint of breath, I can still see him reach into his pouch and hand me coca leaves, that would give me, he had said, more strength and would open up the passageways of my lungs. I sat down and tasted the coca but was affected strongly by its bitterness, to which my guide laughed and gave me something he called llipta, saying it would take the bitter taste away. Now the coca leaf and llipta has been used by the Indians of this high plateau for centuries and is not known for causing hallucinations in its takers, at least not in its pure form. I also had this suspicion at first about its properties but now I am grown convinced through my own studies what I saw was no hallucination. How I wished it was so when I finally found out the whole, frightening truth of what it was I saw. Also since then I have taken no further coca leaves, nor have I ever smoked or drank and the visions, no, dare I say the realities I have seen have continued to the present day, in more terrifying aspects. Sitting by the terraced sides leading to the top of Machu Picchu, with the Urubamba river far below me, and the tangent taste of the coca now replaced by the more pleasant savor to me of the llipta, I can remember the native Indian coming and telling me in his haphazard English of a terrible accident he just heard of on his portable radio. A Boeing 727-21 heading from Colombia to Venezuela had crashed at about 1:17 PM into a mountain at an altitude of 6000 feet. I can still recall how amusing his exactness with details was to me, yet once I asked him how many survivors, if there were any, had been rescued, and he replied that all 143 occupants were feared dead, I can more clearly recall the somber and silent frame of mind that then descended suddenly on both of us. Sitting there in silence by that sloped plateau of a once thriving civilization, I was reminded of an enigmatic phrase I once heard quoted to me by an aged fakir in Cairo: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die. And with strange aeons even death may die. I don’t know even now what it was; perhaps the cadence and the hidden meaning in those couplets, at once so mysterious and hearkening to an ancient primal yearning for immortality and permanence unchanging, or the sad news of those lives now lost to time and beyond our powers to call back, gone forever; or the regal splendors of the ruined desolation where men once lived, which nature now fought to reclaim as her own, so suggestive of those ‘strange aeons’ alluded to in the poem; which now took hold of me, and I felt the immensity of time surround me and pervade my body. It was as if for the first time I comprehended what time and infinity meant, and those vistas of long passage from which primeval things had breathed and died a million times over, until time had found me and my Indian friend sitting on this slope, that in a months time would find us here no more; as the Dinosaurs had gone, as Egypt, Sumer, Babylon, and some day not far off, all those of my generation, and our music, triumphs and our loves, gone; which future civilizations will not even remember. In my paralyzed and awe-inspired state my mind wandered into contemplating time beyond our stars and the great gulfs of that massive infinity we call space and all the weight of the thing and the sky fell on me like a massive hand. I had the illusion that the solid hill on which I lay was now up and I was held onto the earth like a man pinned to a roof, and I looked down into the sky below me and the clouds, and I had the dread that I would fall into the sky. How horrible, horrible it was that demonic sensation of looking into the sky, and feeling helpless that if nature and gravity were for a moment stopped, by some greater power that had no love for me, I would fall into that abyss we call the sky and be lost in its eternal expanse of space and uncaring time forever. And then the final horror of blasphemous terrors I witnessed on this little rock of earth took hold of me as I looked down into the void of blue, for the sky looked up at me (or so I sensed it did) and opened up, and I saw the blackness of space and myriads upon myriads of worlds and different shapes of vaporous gasses and colors float by me in different directions, and I felt our world on which I was pinned was falling fast past stars and galaxies at tremendous speed, until there were no more stars or galaxies, and one lone shape was in the distance, which kept getting larger and larger until I could see it clearly. Oh God, if you are indeed there, let me not grow insane as I write of this dream-like and nightmarish experience. This thing, it was no god, nor was it devil, but some ultra-dimensional being so repulsive I can hardly hold my pen steady as I think of it. The grotesquery of the thing was that it seemed to hold within it the sum total of every creature that had ever lived. It had a million eyes or more totally surround it, all in stages from complete and utter idiocy to the sublimest wisdom, and out of it protruded every head and limb that time had produced of living thing on a thousand worlds. All it did was wail with uncountable mouths and moved and flailed chaotically as if in the grips of some unthinkable madness. Every limb of head or leg, claw, slime or torso appeared and disappeared, thrashing within and around it in mindless fashion throughout its formless and gelatinous body, and then (of all horrors) it took on something resembling anthropoid shape and started walking towards me. I could feel the earth heading headlong into it and also the whole of space and time shake at its every step, and so it grew in scope until this now humanoid thing held the whole sky prisoner, and still it grew until it surrounded the whole of the cosmos, and all of the cosmos shook, and then I screamed as I realized I and the earth and every living thing in it was falling straight into it, and nothing would stop us. The last I can remember as I fainted into nothingness was seeing one of its monstrous, idiotic eyes grown into the size of a mind-shattering planet and then I realized the size and power of the whole creature, and went numb to think that when we crashed into it we would be as a microscopic speck hitting a human eye, and this one of its million eyes would not even blink as we were annihilated into it. When I awoke I found myself in a demented, delirious state and from thereon in floated in and out of consciousness. In my more lucid periods, which lasted no more to my thinking now than merely seconds, I glimpsed and realized I was in some hospital. Yet my mind was not eased by this realization, for the memory of what I had experienced filled me with a wild and feral terror, which made my waking moments a hell I care not to describe. My sleeping moments were no better, for then I dreamt weird and malignant dreams, and impressions of mountain high beings that walked just beyond my sight, out of space, out of time, haunted my dreams and were a dread to me. After a few weeks when I was finally well enough to leave I decided not to return to work on the archeological project at Machu Picchu, but to concentrate all my powers into finding out what horror it was that had so violently intruded into my life and soul without pity or care, but with inhuman malice and torment. It has become my obsession, and this obsession has led me to the vilest knowledge of mankind and the universe, that any sane mind would recoil from the hint of it. The knowledge I carry is of the type found in a lunatic’s asylum, and I am convinced the universe is more irrational and chaotic than anyone has heretofore believed. If what I know is true, the universe is the product of a mad thing’s unholy dream and we are merely the dead-spawns of an eldritch terror. I became convinced those days in the hospital that the mystery I sought to unravel had something to do with an elder secret, whose hints as an archeologist I had seen or intimated glimpses at. Knowing that Miskatonic University in Arkham is famed for housing scientific and arcane anomalies, I decided to begin my studies there. Believing then, and I was right, that my search would take years and all my efforts, I quickly hastened to call off an engagement of marriage to a fellow associate, with much regret yet with the conviction that it was in the best interest for the both of us. Having built a worthy reputation in the archeological field through my previous work, it was in no time that I was accepted to a post in Miskatonic University, and my wanderings, in a sense, then came to an end. My days were spent in teaching at the University and my nights in research of my uncouth subject. I rarely slept more than four hours but in my manic state, which has lasted for years, I barely noticed any tiredness. It would be unnecessary to give a detailed account of all the steps I took to arrive at my final conclusion, so I will relate three incidents of importance to my project, which god willing will elucidate to your mind the supreme significance of what I have uncovered. This thing I saw, no, not thing, for no thing or word can describe or approximate in shape this sprawling madness of loathsomeness from beyond dimensional space. The most abhorrent statues elder races made when they mixed human and animal forms to make their hybrid and repellant obscene gods; snake-headed deities with human bodies or men with tails of fishes or goats with faces of men, cannot describe this ultimate monstrosity. I grow nauseous to think of it. Abhoth, the quobling thing of obscene offal and abomination, and Ubbo-Sathla, the sloughing formless mass which begot the archetypal life of earth, are perhaps the children or the avatars of it. It is that which the occult book, whose secret teachings drive men mad, and which few men dare read, the Necronomicon, describes in cryptic and clouded words as, “Y’ai’ng’ngah is That from beyond the outer-worlds. The Forgotten One that dwelleth in darkness where all gates meet. There That was before time and there the mindless gods still rule. Unwittingly That first spewed life from the unnamed gulfs at the heart of chaos. No man knoweth whether It first created Azazoth or whether Azazoth created It in the dim past before the worlds were made. Dark sorcerers and witches speak of seeing It amidst soundless, piping flutes, a seething pool, and mindless Azazoth, the highest god, drinks from Y’ai’ng’ngah amidst vile beatings of blasphemous drums. All those who would raise the dead or prolong their lives take heed of Y’ai’ng’ngah and fear Him, oh man, for dark prophets say not long will It abide the coarse gnawing in the dark, but in the end will turn to Azazoth in disgust and shall arise, and take to It the life vomited forth, and all that was, is, or shall ever be, shall once again join with Y’ai’ng’ngah, and That which was torn to pieces shall once more be whole again. Betelgeuse shall not survive, nor shall Yuggoth escape at It’s great coming. Behold, the sleeper soon awakens, which is Y’ai’ng’ngah, that means in the Falion language, The Seeder from beyond the Stars. It was before man, and man too shall go into that oblivion termed death, and no one knoweth whether man shall awaken again. If this is our beginning, then in what that cannot be imagined, is our end, oh man?” This riddled knowledge and the realization of its truth did not come to me through merely books. In my feverish studies I discovered the secret, angled stone and carved artifact, whose eyes see through all space and time, and is servant of veiled Nyarlathotep. Its curious dimensions at first startled me and I did not believe in its powers. Powers which I now know to be all true. I fished it out of Narragansett Bay, where it was thrown for reasons I will not mention. The Shining Trapezohedron it was called by those who used it before me, and through it they could see the secrets of other worlds. This also I wanted to do. On those other worlds and in times past, perhaps, were the answers that I sought. The finding of this object was the fruition of all my studies, and I told no one I had found it, lest I be thought a madman and be hunted to my death. Do not think me some crazed Necromancer in his tower, peering into his crystal ball at night, in awe of magic and of arcane doings, for I was as far from this as can be imagined. I am still a man of science and agree with Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum which states that any advanced technology would be construed by any primitive race as akin to magic. The Shining Trapezohedron is an object so far advanced of our punitive understanding of physics and our entire universe, that our shiniest achievements are as a slingshot in comparison to it. It was made by an elder race, but they are gone now, and they were not it’s only keepers, for it has been passed down to beings even more alien to us than its original makers, and finally, to me. Through it I learned what I had sought to know for so long. These then are the three incidents that I have promised to tell and will help prove, I pray and fear, my fiendish conclusions. One night I was transported, through the use of The Trapezohedron, into the primal past of mankind, and there met the Sumerian, Enheduanna; she whose name had so fascinated me so long ago. The veils of time and space were broken and for a while our two epochs blended into each other. The four millennia that separated us did not exist in any sense, and so I walked beside her, as lover, consort, friend. She was priestess of the moon god but her heart was tied more strangely to the goddess, Inanna. She told me that in the temple she had met Inanna and that this goddess had told her secrets of the beginning and cycle of things. Her large, oval eyes, dark with mystery, were exultant and beautiful as she explained to me how in the distant past, the goddess had said, life had fallen to earth from beyond the disk of the moon. She told her life was finite and that someday even the gods of earth would die. Their temples would be forsaken and their laughter in the sky would cease. So it would be if The Great Old Ones wished it. Who were these Great Old Ones I had asked. She replied that they were beings even the powerful gods of earth feared and whose worship even some of the gods themselves now found repulsive. They were the rulers of all things below and above the firmament of the sky and one of them first seeded life from the heavens, but they were hidden and men were only allowed to see the lesser gods of the earth. Their true forms, she had said, would drive any one insane who saw them. So far this confirmed everything I had learned in my own studies, but I needed, no, I desired to know more. I next turned the eyes of The Shining Trapezohedron out into the voids of space. There I conversed with many intelligences and found some with which I could not communicate. We were so foreign to each other that no conversation was possible. One night in May of 2005 I had a conversation with a member of a race of aliens which finally for me brought all to light, and crystallized in exact words, all I have come to know of life, time and space. This being lived on a planet whose distance from ours was of a vastness no mind could comprehend and through it I learned my final horror. Its form I can only describe as resembling a jelly-fish and on its world were towers which reached far into the darkness of the space around it. The vast being I had seen, it said, was one of The Great Old Ones. They were a race of beings that existed before our universe and came from a universe now dead or dying. Some cataclysm had occurred or was occurring and these Great Old Ones broke through into our universe at one time, perhaps hoping to escape theirs, in the distant past. This doorway was somewhere at the centre of the universe and for some reason they reside their still, between the two existences, and cause havoc on our plane of reality. Their original dwellings, it is believed, consisted of a place of utter and complete chaos and malignancy and this chaos was seethed into our own and helped build our cosmos. Their presence encompasses all space and time, yet for some reason only known to them they have not yet chosen to encompass our reality with utter imbecility and chaos. They come from dimensional realities beyond our scope to know and some believe they exist beyond dimensionality itself. Our notions of good and evil, space and time, energy and mass, love or hatred, are meaningless to them. Indeed, higher beings are convinced, he explained, that our universe was an accidental creation perpetrated by the Great Old Ones as they warred and delighted in their havoc before our space and time began. They are beyond our notions of anything and what we know is only what they have wished to be let known, through intermediaries, images and avatars of themselves from the higher planes and descending. They are the creators of our universe and the lords of chaos, and if ultra-powerful beings should be deemed gods, then they are the highest gods and pantheon of life in and outside our cosmos. We can only comprehend them through fractional and contradictory understanding, for our minds cannot grasp the whole, and beings of our sphere cannot see them as they are in truth, for then our notions and our minds would burst with the knowledge. We know them only as visions or in forms we can comprehend, as symbols or myths, dreams, ideas or intuitions, essences, personifications of elemental machineries of our universe, and even these are idiotic and half-understood by logic. When, it said, the Great Old Ones first broke through, their was a mighty disturbance or explosion, and as some form of creation occurred, life, or the essence or idea of life, or the machinery by which life might occur, was seeded into our universe from beyond the cloak or gulf which is now the centre of our universe. The Great Old One I had seen was the author or is the life itself which burst into the universe during its infancy. However, and this is the terror that all living things must know, it was an accident. And this powerful being which resides outside space and time, and indeed, encompasses all space and time, wants this life back to itself again. It wants and waits in the void, and someday, good and evil, the lion and his prey, the dreamer and realist, the feeling of the wind, and the sight of the stars; all that sentient beings feel or project onto the universe, will return to it again, and without the light of mind to illuminate the cosmos, all will be dark again, for there will be no one to see it. It explained to me that its world had already been targeted for this destruction and that they would do nothing, since against this horror of a thousand names, against the author of life itself, there could be no winning when it came to reclaim that which belonged to it. Who, it explained, could resist such a tremendous foe of such incomprehensible magnitude and power? The next night when I wished to speak with it again I saw its world, now a frozen wasteland and all its occupants frozen in their places. I saw my alien friend and in its eyes I glimpsed a horror which even now fills me with dread and nausea. It was still alive beneath its cold, dead exterior. Immobile yet alive perhaps forever, if this demented being so wished it. What manner of creature was this, I thought? What malignancy and evil could do such a thing? I looked around that waste and frozen world and saw all its billions of inhabitants in the same predicament. This evil reached in scale to the size of the universe itself, and as incomprehensible. What had they done to deserve this? And would we be next? I now came to realize the hopeless situation of earth and our species, if the Thing in its demented mind, had chosen us to be next. Who could stop it? I will now relate the last occurrence. When I went to bed that night my thoughts were wild and confused and sometime in the night I found solace, at last, in blessed sleep. I awoke barely able to breathe in the middle of the night, and noticed through my window the sky was darker than usual. A strong wind had picked up as I slept, and I distinctly noticed in its howling a strange noise as if I heard a piping of flutes. As I lay there, paralyzed with dread, I heard the piping grow louder and then mix with a mad beating of drums. In my panic I rushed for the door of my bedroom and as I opened it I saw a horror which sent me into the highest deliriums of madness. A shape stood there, and I realized immediately it was Sin-liqe-unninni. This was a Babylonian sage who had died and disappeared off the face of the earth three millennia ago, and now he stood in my doorway and blocked my escape. I often conversed with him in his own time and now he stood in my own, resurrected by some mind I was fathomless to comprehend and powerless to stop. Peering into his eyes I felt an even greater dread when I realized his gaping mouth showed such signs of horror that I almost choked with fright. I then knew this once dead man, with still pulpy and just built, scabrous flesh, was as ignorant of what was occurring as I was. He had been dead and now he lived, and knew to no purpose for what cause. I shuddered to think that even death was no escape from this malignant thing that now had control of both of us. He moved from my way with a great jolt, as if he were a puppet, and then fell to the ground, lifeless. As I ran to one of the adjacent rooms I noticed the wild look in the dead mans eyes and more hurriedly burst into one of the rooms and tried to wake one of my fellow scholars. It was to no avail. From room to room that I went no one would wake up. At last I threw myself on an empty bed and thrashed upon it in fear such as no man I believed had experienced until then. Soon I began to laugh like a madman and noticed, as the beating of drums and piping of flutes raged uncontrollably in the wind, that a strange shape began to take form through the boards of the floor. It seeped up and soon was a glob of loathsome matter, I knew, alien to this world. I sat on the bed, and my unblinking eyes now were stuck in awe and terror, for I knew, I knew, what it was that now appeared to me. It took on the same shape as the thing I saw so long ago on Machu Picchu. All manner of flesh and head, leg and fin bubbled within it, this pool of writhing madness, and then it began to take on a monstrously distorted humanoid shape. It grew sky-ward, and soon the top of its head, if head it was, almost touched the roof of the room. My fears, my tremors, are indescribable. My every muscle tensed and soon I was paralyzed and yet I could not look away. I was in the presence of that Thing that is the cause of why beings live and die, empires rise and fall; the uncaring principal of creation and its destruction, now before me come bodily to life. I cringed at its cosmic potency. I knew that at this moment it was here and yet also on stars a trillion light years away. It had seen the beginning of my universe and would see the end and delighted on planes and realities, dimensions of existence I could not even fathom lived I a hundred lives of Methuselah. What had I in common with such a mind? Could there ever be a mutual understanding between us? Can a man have intellectual intercourse with an amoeba or a dust-mite? So small I felt and powerless. Its head I discerned in the darkness was in the shape of a fleshy, fabulously angled bivalve, from whose aperture I thought I saw two lidless and pitch, black eyes. Of mouth I could discern nothing. It stood now on two slimy legs and possessed two arms which ended on extended and frightening claws. Every eye upon it was closed as if asleep and I noticed coarse hairs had now grown around it, such as is seen on tarantulas. An impression of regions beyond my sight surrounded it and also of great and mighty beings that live for purposes that make ours dwindle by comparison. It just stood there and I can tell you there is a time when immobility and paralysis of action is more horrible and frightening than the wildest frenzy. After what seemed like hours, or was it minutes, a shape in the form of an orb appeared before it and I could tell by its look it represented our earth. The earth floated towards the Thing and hovered before it. Then I saw the facsimile of the earth covered by strange oceans and the shape of the land had changed and at the last, the earth burst into flames and disintegrated from sight. I then felt a dread and terror more profound than anything I ever imagined. I wept and writhed in agony and shouted in delirium that I did not want to die. Death, death, haunted my imagination in a great disturbance. I did not want to die, I screamed, I did not want to die. Then in my delirium I contemplated that perhaps I was insane and the thought, in my derangement, was as a blessing to me. The loathsome creature moved as if reading my thoughts, and I became immediately aware that whatever its intentions were, they would forebode no good to me. I ran feverishly towards the nearest door but the Thing followed and hurled me to the floor. The sinister presence hovered above me and I could feel its dark and monstrous eyes leer down towards me and then it began to slash me with its claws, for no reason my mind could fathom. I struggled in vain against pain and its powerful assault until my body and mind could take no more, and I fell helplessly into a dreamless sleep I imagined would be death. That was seven months ago and I write this with what is left of my wrecked body and mind. I was in a coma until recently and I awoke to find that the Arkham police are still searching for my unknown assailant. I told them my assailant was a man. Would they believe me if I told them otherwise? The doctors and forensic scientists, I also learned, are troubled by my heinous contusions and lacerations. Some are still visibly shaken by one of the most brutal assaults they had ever seen. I write this with my two mangled remaining fingers as a warning and an exhortation to whomever may read this. I am convinced in some way I summoned the Thing and the beings can read our minds. Its attack was a way of proving to me that all my experiences were not delusion but in fact frightening reality. As for myself now I know what my end will be. I can only hope all that I was shown was a lie. If not, expect in the near future the coming of the Thing. In its warped mind I have guessed at its next intention. I believe since my last thoughts were of never dying it will grant me this wish. By intuition I know it will take me to that frozen planet whose vast distance from our own is incomprehensible and there set me beside my alien friend. There I will stay, deathless and unmoving, perhaps for all eternity. A fitting end for its herald of doom. These are my last words and I begin to hear a piping in the wind and a beating of unholy drums in the air. The Great Old Ones are stirring and in my imagination I see a monstrous, demonic and malevolent being coming towards me, whose treadings are upon the stars. Farewell.

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