DEAR GOODTHINKER,307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡaNbZ9UVvf3
307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡr3Db1WNqX6
307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡHgEG3cXzbH
I am weak, yet I am lucid. I am not sure of the date, yet my almanac assures me by tide and sunset that it must be right. Here I sit at my desk, where I sat when I first wrote you from Wellfall, and look out over the dark sea from which the last remnants of light are fading fast. I shall never see more. This night is my night; I leave it for whatever shadows be.
How it heaves itself at the rocks, this sea! It throws clouds of sea-foam at the darkling sky in banners, making the floor beneath me tremble. In the window-glass I see my reflection, pallid as a ghost’s. I have been without nourishment since the twenty-seventh of October, and should have been without water, had not Edgar left the carafe beside my bed on that day.
O, Ed! He is no more, Goodthinker. He is gone in my place, in the place of this wretch with his pipestem arms and skull face who I see reflected back in the darkened gloom. And yet he may be the more fortunate; for no dreams haunt him as they have haunted me these past days----twisted shapes that lurk in the nightmare corridors of delirium. Even now my hands tremble; I have splotched the page with ink.307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡeNUoNP7tZf
Edgar confronted me on that morning just as I was about to slip away---and I thinking I had been so crafty, I had told him that I ha decided we must leave, and asked him if he would go to Smithtown, some ten miles distant, and hire a trap where where we were less notorious. He agreed to make the hike and I watched him leave by the sea-road. When he was out of sight, I quickly made myself ready, donning both coat and muffler (for the weather had turned frosty; the first touch of coming winter was on that morning’s cutting breeze]. I wished briefly for a gun, then laughed at myself for wishing such a thing. What avails guns when one is confronted with the uncanny?
I let myself out by the pantry-way, pausing for a final look at sea and sky; for the smell of the fresh air against the putrescence I knew I should smell soon enough; for the sight of a foraging gull wheeling below the clouds.
I turned---and there stood Edgar Willard.
“You shall not go alone,” said he; and his face was as grin as ever I have seen it.
“Edgar, please----” I began.
“No, not a word! We go together and do what we must, or I return you bodily to the house. You are not well. You shall not go alone.”
It is impossible to describe the conflicting emotions that swept over me: confusion, pique, gratefulness---yet the greatest of them was love.
We made out way silently past the summer how and the sundial, down the weed-covered verge and into the woods. All was dead still---not a bird sang nor a wood-cricket chirruped. The world seemed cupped in a silent pall. There was only the ever-present smell of salt, and from far away, the faint tang of woodsmoke. The woods were a blazoned riot of colour, but, to my eye, scarlet seemed to predominate all.307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡe08nURVp0M
Soon the scent of salt passed, and another, more sinister odour took its place: the rottenness which I have mentioned. When we came to the leaning bridge which spanned the Sawley, I expected Ed to ask me again to defer, but he did not. He paused, looked at that grim spire which seemed to mock the blue sky above it, and then looked at me. We went on.
We proceeded with quick yet dread footsteps in Jules Beal’s church. The door still hung ajar from our latter exit, and the darkness within seemed to leer at us. As we mounted the steps, brass seemed to fill my heart; my hand trembled as it touched the doorhandle and pulled it. The smell within was greater, more anxious than ever.
We stepped into the shadowy anteroom and, with a pause, into the main chamber.
It was a shambles.
Something vast had been at work in there, and a mighty destruction had taken place. Pews were overturned and heaped like jackstraws. The wicked cross lay against the east wall, and a jagged hole in the plaster above it testified to the force with which it had been hurled. The oil-lamps had been ripped from their high fixtures, and the reek of whale-oil mingled with the terrible stink which pervaded the town. And down the middle aisle, like a ghastly bridal path, was a trail of black ichor, mingled with sinister tendrils of blood. Our eyes followed it to the pulpit---the only untouched thing in view. Atop it, staring at us from across that blasphemous Book with glazed eyes, was the butchered body of a goat.307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡfHzdkLAgzn
“God,” Edgar whispered.307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ7f5wBgSQoO
We approached, keeping clear of the slime on the floor. The room echoed back our footsteps and seemed to transmute them into the sound of gigantic laughter. 307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡs7hDZU733M
We mounted the narthex together. The goat had not been torn or eaten; it appeared, rather, to have been crushed, as if by the tentacles of some massive octopus, squeezed until its blood-vessels had forcibly ruptured. Blood lay in thick and noisome puddles on the lecturn itself, and about the base of it…..yet on the book it was transparent, and the alien hieroglyphics could be read through it, as though through colored glass!307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡT3DFbxHMMo
“Please, don’t touch that heathen thing!” Ed begged, unfaltering.307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡCP8BMBwFtA
“I have no choice. I must take it.” 307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡKaILzPqZRy
"What will you do?”307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡOh7SIMzso8
“What should have been done sixty years ago. I am going to destroy it.”
We rolled the goat’s corpse away from the book; it struck the floor with a hideous, lolling thud. The blood-stained pages now seemed alive with a scarlet glow of their own.
My ears began to ring and hum; a low chant seemed filled with specters and litten with the hell-glow of eternal cold fire. It seemed that I saw Jules Beal, hideous and misshapen, cavorting around the supine body of a woman, and my Grand-uncle Jayson behind him, an acolyte in a black, hooded cassock, who held a knife and bowl.
“Nullam Ave! Ave fortis Nullam eu odio vitae….”
The words shuddered and writhed on the page before me, soaked in the blood of pagan sacrifice, prize of a creature that shambles beyond the stars….
A three-eyed, interbred congregation swaying in mindless daemoniac praise; deformed faces filled with hungering, nameless anticipation.
And the Latin was replace by an older tongue, ancient when Egypt was young and the Pyramids unbuilt, ancient when this Earth still hung in a shapeless, boiling firment of empty gas:307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡOv4ORtSOil
“P'atugans Ba'athk Oftana! Ftaru'a ranuftx! Kanxa-ftu'n haftr-ft'usha' Ma'k! Oftana! Ngatangshu! Naghtnagn!”307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡwHpRa5mlYz
The pulpit began to rend and split, pushing upwards----
Edgar screamed and lifted an arm to shield his face. The narthex trembled with a huge, tenebrous motion like a ship wracked in a hurricane. I snatched up the book and held it away from me; it seemed filled with the heat of the sun and I felt that I should be cindered, blinded.
“Run!” Edgar screamed. “Run!”
But I stood frozen and the alien presence filled me like an ancient vessel that had waited for years---for generations!
“P'atugans Ba'athk Oftana!” I screamed.
And that was not all:
“In the beginning, there once existed the S'raphh people, who dwelt millennia ago, upon the surface of the moon in the sky……P'atugans Ba'athk Oftana!...... To space they soared on their fine wings, in search of that which gives life meaning……P'atugans Ba'athk Oftana!........They failed!...... P'atugans Ba'athk Oftana!.......And having failed they collectively took their lives by diving into the rocky, foetid wasteland upon which they once made their home……P'atugans Ba'athk Oftana!....... But their immortal souls, desiring vengeance upon all creation for their failure to find that which they sought, birthed our royal master! Null! The Living Darkness! Null! He from beyond space! Null! The Star-Eater! Null! He who blinds time! I conjure thee, Null! ‘Tis your Hour of filling, your time of Rending! ….. Ngatangshu! Naghtnagn!” 307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡMHbNSHyM4Q
Edgar pushed me and I tottered, the church whirling before me, and fell to the floor. My head crashed against the edge of an upturned pew, and red fire filled my head---yet seemed to clear it.307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡiw5mlgcl56
I groped for the Sulphur matches I had brought.307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡVUGi61qNtI
Subterranean thunder filled the place. Plaster fell. The rusted bell in the steeple pealed a choked out a devil’s glockenspiel in sympathetic vibration.
My match flared. I touched it to the book just as the pulpit exploded upward in a rending explosion of wood. A huge black maw was discovered beneath: Ed tottered on the edge his hands held out, his face distanced in a wordless scream that I shall hear forevermore.
And then there was a huge surge of a purple substance, ectoplasmic in nature. The smell of it became a nightmarish tide. It was a huge flow of noxious, repulsive substance, neither solid nor liquid, a huge and awful form that seemed to rise like a gathering thunderstorm from the very bowels of the ground. Furthermore, most horrible still, multiple eyes, white with terrible black pupils, began to open and looked at me balefully. Oh, Goodthinker, the thing’s repulsive looks were topped off with slimy tentacles, hundreds of powerful tentacles, just like the Kraken of seafaring legend. A mouth opened, showing rows of razor-sharp teeth, then closed again.
Nevertheless, with a sudden bone-chilling comprehension which no man can have known. I perceived that I was looking upon the nauseating form of the demonic intelligence, the living void of darkness and dreadfulness that called itself Null, who had existed for years in the chambered darkness beneath that abominated church! 307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡnsDKDuvof8
The book flared alight in my hands, and Null seemed to scream soundlessly above me. Edgar was struck glancingly and flung the length of the church like a doll with a broken neck.307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡbifLFE7RQ7
It evaporated----Null evaporated, leaving only a huge and shattered hole surrounded with black slime, and a great screaming, mewling sound that seemed to fade through colossal distances and was gone.307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmxnVwJRf7x
I looked down. The book was ashes.
I began to laugh, then to howl like a beast struck by a hunter’s bullet.
All sanity left me, and I sat on the floor with blood streaming from my temple, screaming and gibbering into
those unhallowed shadows while Edgar sprawled in the far corner, staring at me with glazing, horror-struck eyes.
I have no idea how long I existed in that state. It is beyond all telling. But when I came again to my faculties, shadows had drawn long paths around me and I sat in twilight. Movement had caught my eye, movement from the shattered hole in the narthex floor.307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡnncR4E84LQ
A skeletal hand groped its way over the riven floorboards.307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡzUaecJzNIf
My mad laughter choked in my throat. All hysteria melted into numb bloodlessness.
With terrible, vengeful slowness, a wracked figure pulled itself up from darkness, and a half-skull peered at me. Cockroaches crawled all over the fleshless forehead. A rotted cassock clung to the askew hollows of moldered collarbones. Only the eyes lived---red, insane pits, just like Null’s, that glared at me with more than madness; they glared with the empty life of the trackless wastes beyond the edges of the Universe.307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡpcTwfCdXRM
It came to take me down to darkness. It wanted to sacrifice me to Null!
That was when I fled, screeching, leaving the body of my lifelong friend unattended in that place of dread. I ran until the air seemed to burst like magma in my lungs and brain. I ran until I had gained this possessed and tainted house again, and my room, where I collapsed and have lain like a dead man until to-day. I ran because even in my crazed state, and even in the shattered ruin of that dead-yet-animated shape, I had seen the family resemblance. Yet not of Jayson or of Anthony, whose likenesses hang in the upstairs gallery. That rotted visage belong to Jules Beal, High Priest and Caretaker of Null, the Living Darkness!
He still lives somewhere in the twisted, lightless wanderings beneath wanderings beneath Christian’s Lot and Wellfall----and Null still lives. The burning of the book thwarted Null, but there are other copies.
Yet I am the gateway, and I am the last of the Beal blood. For the good of humanity, I must die----and break the chain forever.
I go to the sea now, Goodthinker. My journey, like my story, is at an end. May God rest you and grant you all peace.
CHARLES307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡoB2L4hE7sp
307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmcdQQDcVak
The odd series of papers above was eventually received by Mr. Eric Hartman, to whom they had been addressed. It is assumed that a recurrence of the unfortunate brain fever which struck him originally following the death of his wife in 1848 caused Charles Beal to lose his sanity and murder his companion and longtime friend, Mr. Edgar Willard.
The entries in Mr. Willard’s pocket journal are a fascinating exercise in forgery, undoubtedly perpetrated by Charles Beal in an effort to reinforce his own paranoid delusions.307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡjlcHuwKGg3
In at least two particular, however, Charles Beal is proved wrong. First, when the town of Christian’s Lot was “rediscovered” (I use the term historically of course), the floor of the narthex, although rotted, showed no signs of explosion or huge damage. Although the ancient pews were overturned and several windows broken, we can safely assume this to be the work of vandals by neighboring towns over the years. Among the other residents of Ministers’ Corners and Wellfall there is still some idle rumor about Christian’s Lot (perhaps, in his day, it was this kind of harmless folk legend which started Charles Beal’s mind on its fatal course, but this seems hardly relevant.)
Second, Charles Beal was not the last of his line. His grandfather, Anthony Beal, sired at least two bastards. One died in infancy. The second took the Beal name and located in the town of King George, Rhode Island. I am the final descendant of this offshoot of the Beal line; Charles Beal’s second cousin, removed by three generations. These papers have been in my committal for ten years. I offer them for publication on the occasion of my residence in the Beal ancestral home, Wellfall, in the hope that the reader will find sympathy in his heart for Charles Beal’s poor, misguided soul. So far as I can tell, he was right about only one thing: this place badly needs the services of an exterminator.
There are some huge rats in the walls , by the sound.307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡUpY5zUxfvv
Signed,307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡekAG5WLbCJ
Jonathan Anthony Beal
October 2, 1986.307Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡXdJMkJmVQz
