My dreams always start out in a massive forest with tall trees. These trees were as tall and red as Sequoia but they weren’t nearly as wide. I was with a group of people, all their faces resembled people I know, but they weren’t. They had different personalities and different voices. We were camping in the forest for some reason, it was kind of post-apocalyptic conditions but we were prepared.
I had my large K-BAR knife and the clothes on my back. However, I used the knife for everything; hunting, cooking, and building. We were cutting down a tree to make shelter and it went terribly wrong and fell the wrong way dropping onto someone’s leg and tearing it open. We scrambled to our feet and carried him back to camp which wasn’t far off.
After we stitched him up and put some braces on his leg we moved to another campsite brightly lit by a bonfire in the center of a clearing. It was near the edge of a hill that was looking over a town. We didn’t know what town it was but it was brightly lit and there was a lot of commotion down there. We thought it might be a safe zone that had survived the catastrophes.
Out of the shadows of the tree line another group appeared slowly walking into the light of the fire. It was a team that we had split off from earlier. The team leader and I had different opinions and couldn’t be swayed to a compromise. I looked into the leader’s eyes but his eyes didn’t give anything away.
The second team made camp and settled around the fire talking with my group of people. They were all glad to see us, except for their team leader who disappeared back into the forest. He always complained that I never talked to him and kept information from him, such as the town down below. It was really because he was never around and I didn’t know about the town myself. Our group had stumbled upon it just like they did.
I knelt next to the fire and began talking with both groups about going down to the town. Some felt that it was too dangerous that there could be anyone or anything down there attracted to the bright lights in the center of the town. I told them that we were nearly out of food and supplies and needed to restock now or never since this might be the only place to, and the only chance. They agreed and I told one of the other team to get their leader and inform him; he couldn’t find him.
We gathered ourselves before the campfire and began to set out to the edge of the meadow to make our way down the hill, through the forest, and into the town from the east. The forest was steep and we had to jump from the tree to tree so we didn’t slide down. The trees were very dense and the hillside steep, maybe this is what kept the town safe. However, it would make escaping even more difficult than I had imagined.
The edge of town and the buildings and streets there were all eerily dark. All the light and electricity was concentrated in the center of what looked like a super store. We made our way carefully through the alleys paralleling the main street. Some of our members were growing fearful and wanted to stay or go back. Either way it wasn’t going to be pleasant and I convinced them to move forward.
Shadows of people would run down the street parallel to us towards the light; a few ran the other way. We heard no screams so we never thought there was any real danger. We were making it to the end of the alley where it met the vast parking lot of the store. The light was so bright from it that we couldn’t see out of the alley.
I grabbed my knife and walked out into the light. This was when everything fell apart and complete confusion set in on my group. There was no sound coming from all the people here running around with grim faces pale with fear. The only hint of any audible source was a mix of high pitched buzzing and low thumping and it was coming from all around us. I turned back around from the terrible noise, clenching my knife.
No one in my group was left, they all had vanished in confusion. I had hoped that a few of them were frightened enough to make it back to the camp through the alley way and never saw the light nor heard the sound. With the people running around I had no idea who was who and if they were people I was familiar with.
I decided that my only chance to survive was to find the source of this sound that was so terrible. It felt like it was coming from inside my mind and from the store at the same time. The sound disrupted my thinking and I had to carefully place each word I was trying to put together in my mind. Someone far in front of me was running towards me and making no signs that they would stop. I gripped my knife and prepared myself, yet I had the urge to start running at it slashing my knife wildly.
I set off from the figure running, making a curved path towards the store. It didn’t follow me, it just kept running in a straight path away from the light. I was still running, the adrenaline of the moment clearing my mind. I ran into a store through a skirmish of people and through a barricade of carts. I ran through the checkout lanes and stopped to assess the vast shopping floor before me.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary; there was no mess, no havoc. The aisles of food and the racks of clothes stood tall and not disrupted by any of the people running about crazed. I stood there gazing upon the scene in awe without considering my immediate surroundings. I took one step forward and was abruptly stopped by a massive force coming from my side. The force pushed me off my feet and I slid across the freshly waxed tile.
I was still holding my knife firmly in hand and quickly recovered my stance. It seemed to be the biggest and bulkiest man I have ever seen. I stepped forward and he didn’t move. I took another step and he grunted. He wasn’t even staring at me. There was something he seemed to be staring at but his eyes were small and didn’t appear to be focused on anything. He might smell something in the air but his nostrils were still. I stepped closer and he didn’t move at all or make a sound. The small eyes under his prominent brow slowly rotated down to meet my gaze in the most distasteful motion.
The sound came rushing back just as soon as it had when I first stepped into the light. This time it was louder and felt like it was coming from my own mind, even more than before. The enormous man took off towards the back of the store screaming and growling. He was running so fast that the wind stirred the clothing racks around him yet he never touched a single one, even as huge as he was. I noticed that he was flailing his arms like he was trying to catch something that was just out of his reach. It must be terrible, what’s going on in his mind that I haven’t had the privilege to experience yet.
I had the urge to run again, but I didn’t fight it as much this time. I knew I had to get somewhere and following the crazed thoughts might lead me. I ran towards the food aisles where I fought off two individuals with my knife. I stabbed one in the stomach and kept on running. The second one I forced my knife through its neck and slashed it out. My right side was covered in blood spatter but I hadn’t stopped for a moment. The sound kept pushing me forward to run faster and not let anything in my way. Mostly killing those things that did get in my way was the plan.
I ran up through the main aisle between the food and clothing. Nothing over here was disturbed either, everything was perfectly in place where it should be. It would seem normal if it wasn’t in the middle of mass delusion. Something did stop me though, I noticed two that were in my group before. They were huddled near the corner of a frozen food aisle. I ran up to them and they screamed so terribly loud that I had to cover their mouths. They didn’t seem to recognize me but listened when I told them that they needed to run back to camp and pointed towards the direction. They both got up running, the man holding the woman’s hand. They only made it a few feet before my enormous friend from earlier drove into them from the side and kicking them so hard that blood spattered. He kicked them in the ground before I could get up.
I continued running and figured out that I was heading towards the back of the store into the warehouse. The bright light seemed to dim and return to normal. Also, the sound seemed to die down but remained a constant in my mind. There was a crowd of people here, no one I recognized. They were standing in front of this door dazed. They didn’t notice me walking through them even when they bumped into me because they were swaying from side to side. I made it to the door and tried to open it. The door seemed extremely cold and hot at the same time. I let go of the handle fast enough that my skin wasn’t too badly burned. It resembled frostbite but had an odd color and smelled strange, like it wasn’t from anywhere around, maybe the coast miles away.
I took my knife and broke the lock by shimmying it through the two doors and pushing in the bolt. When the doors opened the crowd began screaming hysterically and ran off into the madness just as the large man had. I opened the door and it was darker than outside but it had a strange twilight. It smelled terrible in here, worse than my hand but it was the same strangeness that resembled the coast. I stopped when I came upon bodies on the floor. They were all wearing purple cloaks and were laid out around a circle marked with salt. The blood from the bodies had soaked the salt red. In the middle of the circle was a crack in the floor. It wasn’t big but it was surrounded by symbols drawn in blood. It looked as if the figure that had done this was gone and had smudged the salt circle where he had left.
I stepped over the salt line and into the circle where the crack in the floor was. I reached out and smudged one of the symbols surrounding the crack with my finger. A terrible roar broke out when I did that and it was so loud it broke my eardrums. The roar continued for a long time as if it was wind coming through the crack but there was no wind. It started to die down and became a whistling sound that was oddly similar to the first sound I had heard upon entering the light. There was also that low thumping noise behind it hidden in the middle of the more prominent high pitched noise.
I was sitting on the floor staring at the crack with fear in my eyes. A hand touched my shoulder and I startled back when I saw that it was bloody, scaly, and webbed together. Long thin nails protruded out of the finger like tips; they had such a strange color, like the color on my hand. I realized that it was one of the cloaked bodies on the floor and that the rest of them had also risen from the dead. They moved forward into the circle and surrounded the crack. There was chanting coming from under their hoods. It was too low to understand but I don’t think it was a familiar language to this planet.
The chanting grew louder and I began to hear it in my head. I couldn’t understand it but I felt like I needed to say it. I tried to resist but the words were so strange that I didn’t know what I was resisting from doing. I began stuttering and blurting out parts of the chant. It seemed grotesque and alien to speak it; I knew it wasn’t meant for our vocal chords.
The chanting grew louder from the cloaked figures and I began to speak it louder and louder. The roar from the crack started to pick up again and we started chanting louder until I was yelling it as loud as I could.
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”
I began to understand what I was chanting, the words started to make sense but I could not express them in any of our lower dimensional languages on this planet. A terrible light shown through the crack and silhouetted the cloaked beings. They kept on chanting but each one began to take down their hoods. The ones on the far side of the light were obscured by its immense brightness. However, when the last cloaked being pulled down his hood I screamed against my will.
The head of the nearest being was mutated and distorted from anything that resembled human. It was partly translucent and the light shown through its skull. I could see its eye on the other side and it seemed like it was staring back through itself at me. The rest of the head was a terrible and strange color and it seemed like it did not connect with the shoulders or torso. The neck kind of faded before it reached the edge of the cloak around its shoulders. I could see what appeared to be a spinal column or at least a throat like structure through its neck. It glowed a sort of purple and light pink color through it’s opaque skin. I could see it moving and flexing as it chanted those terrible words.
A roar exploded through the air from the crack and it felt like a pressure both pulling and pushing away. The wall behind me crumbled and I was grabbed by the enormous creature-man from earlier. He pulled my body through the wall and flung me into the ceiling. Now the store looked like the chaos that was going through my mind. Things were burning and the lights were blown out, but it still kept a luminosity that was so strange to my eyes and didn’t belong here. People were running around tearing each other apart with any tools and weapons they could find. A person would try to destroy another as much as they could only to be manually dismantled by another that was waiting.
The last few seconds I witnessed were beyond what I thought the human race was capable of. This evil that was emanating from a different plane was showing me and everyone else exactly what we are capable of. Then my enormous friend rediscovered me where he had left me. He was wielding a washing machine and air conditioner in both hands to obliterate the creatures scrambling around his feet. He tried once and threw the washing machine, but his aim was off and only crushed my lower body deeper in the wall. Screaming didn’t help at all with the pain but I had long given up the will to scream. I kept screaming and muttering at the same time not knowing what I was saying which drove me further into true insanity. The second time my friend threw the air conditioner. It flew true to his aim and I regret that the last thing I saw in that existence was complete madness and the sight of a grey generic air conditioning unit hurtling towards my head.
The air conditioner demolished what was left of my body and I don’t think neither it nor the washing machine will fall down anytime soon and release my gory bits. I’m not saying that there is an afterlife. After what I’ve seen I don’t believe in any such thing and the mention of it is truly laughable, especially in my current situation. The recording of this event is possible because my essence, or my spirit, maybe just a part of my conscious, was pulled into that dire abyss. The crack was small, and it felt smaller when being pulled through it in agonizing pain and focused despair at what was happening in two different worlds at the same time.
Now eventually this record would be written in a story somewhere, maybe back on earth. Because everything is possible and everything is infinite somehow it will be put down into a form of communication. Being stuck in this dimension as a bodiless being has the terrible consequence of being completely permeable to all thoughts and feelings from all the consciousnesses in this and my past dimensions. I feel all pain, all torture, and all feelings of regrets; these feelings seem to be the most abundant type here. This is probably the reason why such horrible and terrible creatures are spawned here with the insatiable appetite to destroy and devour lesser beings in more simple dimensions.
This is worse than hell, for any being in the multiverse, and our human God could not even begin to imagine it.
Madness. Madness. Madness.
-Samuel Woods
