“A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low.”
Nyarlathotep, H. P. Lovecraft [1]
Occasionally Hannah North worked late, just her and the archives – a poorly lit hallway with ruminations bled onto parchment, where the dead speak of themselves presently and the shelves accumulate artifacts in the haze of time; doctors of decay, presidents of perdition, all awaiting their turn of absorption by delicate hazel eyes. Indelicately, her eyes deceived her many times as she perused the archival holdings. There are several different areas in the archives, some which Hannah North had never actually been to before, and it was precisely when she went into the most ancient of the archives, in the bottom basement storage room – a place that had never been renovated before, and only remained as a ruin does: for outrageous tales of dark whispers and ghostly walks – that she had an encounter, a brushing up against something. This place was built in colonial times of soft pine and tough maple. For some reason it was dug deep by the builders. Hannah North had heard one tale that it was this deep because it was once used to store dead bodies in the winter before they could be given a good Christian burial. She could not tell what she felt. There was nothing peculiar around her, nothing unorthodox about the stone walls or the shelves’ organization, which were shaped to fit cadavers, if the tales were true. In fact, the peculiarity was not so much a visual affront. The colonial rusticity was something normally appealing to her. It was one of the reasons she came to the east coast. She felt something, some visceral perplexity placed quite near, as if just around the corner of some dark shelf lay something whispering.
She decided it was nothing. Maybe – if anything at all – just a draft affecting her. Yes, that must be it, she thought, as she went back to her office on the ground level, two stories above.
She sat and did her work, sorting some documents from 19th century Hanover for an exhibit. Her desk was solid white and she used a Mac out of personal preference. Her foot heater glowed under the desk as the sun’s light died slowly. Her only light was a small desk lamp and the dim glimmer of her screensaver. She spent two hours filling out notes for the exhibit. Her boss said it was imperative that it be perfect. Hannah North continued her work diligently, but she could not shake the feeling of that implacable whispering, the murmur from that ancient archive. Feeling suddenly disturbed, she pried herself away from her work and picked up her iPhone. Her tinnitus rang in her ears as she unlocked her phone – but the screen remained dormant and black. Right at that moment a howl of wind swept through the open window by her desk. Her tinnitus ceased and her senses heightened, much like a frightened rabbit’s eyes grow impossibly wide before it dies. The archives’ lights flickered and dimmed as an image of her in what was unmistakably the old colonial part of the archives appeared on her phone. But that would be impossible; she was the only person working in the archives this evening. She put the phone down for a minute and then, taking a deep breath, checked it a second time. The photo stared back at her with hazel eyes. It was her, but it couldn’t be her. How could a photo like this be taken without her knowing? In the photo she is looking right at the camera – and grinning.
She could feel that eldritch itch again, as if something were murmuring right behind her, at the base of her neck and curling toward her ear like a nip of frost in autumn. And against her better instincts she felt not so much scared of the photo as intrigued. Not many people would go back to that place after such an odd moment, but she wanted to know where this feeling came from. She did not believe in oddities. The fantastical is the guise of the stupid, she thought. She would march to that colonial archive and see if someone was playing a joke on her. This must be a joke, of course.
Certainly.
There was no light in the colonial archive – a result of the power surge, she presumed – and Hannah North used her flashlight app to look around. Nothing burst forth or seemed altered to her. She smirked to herself, thinking it pointless to investigate some stupid joke. It was probably Grant from the Dartmouth library pranking her. She always thought he was that type.
But then she heard it – the whisper in the darkness, from a shelf to her right.
She heard it whisper something soft and surreal. She felt it writhe into her ear, into her mind – don’t ask how – and then… and then unfurl. It spoke but without speaking. It was completely nonsensical, unreasonable – impossible. But it spoke without speaking. It told Hannah North to go toward the shelf to the right, an old shelf that hadn’t been touched in at least several years. A thick layer of dust had settled upon it; two quill pens in a frame from the signing of the document that made Hanover a town lay forgotten upon it. It urged her in a tongue colder than a polar vortex to push hard on the back of the shelving. At first the stone did not give, but then it fell into a tunnel, probably only two feet deep. Instantly she felt she had struck the source.
It beckoned her to reach inside and pull it out. She was hesitant, yet it planted in her mind a curiosity insatiable and lengthless. She could not stop herself as she reached in and grabbed hold of a smooth, almost leathery box. It was not a box. It was an off-color, leather-bound book.
Hannah North, a simple archivist, had already gone too far, though she could not fathom her error. As soon as she touched that devilish book her fate began to be tainted by the amorality of a cosmogony infinitely indifferent to her deference for good, no matter how nondescript such respect may be. This book was a plague and its perversion struck her mind so deep with intrigue that hope buried itself in the frosted turf of northern New Hampshire; the story already condemned her to an alternate fate.
But it was when she opened the book and partook of its legacy that ruinous visions appeared to her, visions of such galactic proportions that astrophysicists dream idly at night of discovering them and their secrets. She knew somehow these visions were not visions. They were Truth, such that her heart froze and her blood stopped in her arteries and veins; such that her synapses snapped and connected into malevolent patterns; such that her soul – and oh! did she hope beyond all hope that she had one pure as Christmas snow – shriveled into a sable husk, hollow and frigid and unhallowed. She saw immense cyclopean monuments to creatures in the sky, and large shadows with diaphanous wings that stretched beyond sight, where a darkness more vast than anything she had ever seen before writhed and beckoned while consuming whole galaxies. And she could not tolerate to watch as the visions came more and more. A glimpse behind the strings of the universe severed her from the vision.
The text of that black book does not get read – it invades and conquers the mind. Hannah North was gone. But one could say she never truly was there. Her corpse moved, but in secret the book’s nefarious soul infected it, moving it, dragging her as it pleased. The die was cast the moment she obeyed and opened that odious lexicon. Even Caesar could not conquer with such efficacy and alacrity – nor Napoleon, Attila, or Alexander. Hannah North did still exist, but her essence was extinct within.
Perhaps only because the sadistic apathy of the leather-bound tome let it be so, Hannah North’s soul was not eviscerated. It was left for the book to talk with torturously, to taunt and prod with the promise of the greatest joke.
It took her to her home and made her read sleeplessly through the night. As the gibbous moon illuminated the lexicon, it repeated a simple question: How feel I? How feel I?
She softly touched the leather tome, felt the smoothness of the cover, the rough stitching of the binding. She touched and touched, all while the tome asked, How feel I? How Feel I?
Hannah North’s hollow soul screamed for release as the book dominated her. It turned her against herself, into a sycophantic and servile slave. “You feel smooth! Smooth!” she shouted awkwardly as she stood sweating by her kitchen window. “You feel smooth!”
It was silent.
For a moment she thought she had dispelled it, as if she had been crazy one moment and had corrected her own insanity. She felt her control again and… lost it as that terrible whisper crept back into her ear and unfurled in her mind, forcing her to bring her face close to its surface, to hold it close and press it against her soft cheek. In a tender moment it pled for a kiss. She hesitated for a moment but her new obeisance ran fathomlessly deep, and as a drop of sweat dripped down her forehead and nose to her upper lip she pressed a docile kiss upon the leather cover.
I am the remainder of the Ancient, it whispered to her. I am the Revelation, made of the faithful – made of cabal skin, theirs… and now yours.
A putrid flavor of pestilential skin invaded her senses as her lips rubbed the smooth yet tough book-binding. When she tried to pull away from the putrid leather, her fragile lips tore off into the skin of that noxious lexicon – horribly human skin! She screamed, but it was contained and suppressed into her hollow soul as the tome laughed with hubris utterly repugnant. She thought to commit suicide and it reveled in her misery, in her hopelessness and agony. It made her take a bandana from atop her bureau and cover her lips, and though her body was feeble and febrile, it forced her to march out her door and north, promising her visions such that her disbelief would demise, such that her words would perish, and the death of that which is the unspeakable hope and wish of the universal humanity would at last consume itself in horror – north, ever north into the frozen edges of Quebec and toward her demise.
The Ancient Revealer, the No Thing, the Silence that slowly sings with the ecumenical resonance, lying recumbent in the inscrutable – you shall witness the inhalation of the cosmos. All shall perish.
[1] Lovecraft, H. P. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S. T. Joshi. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. 33. Print.
The Hanover Horror | Copyright 2016
AARON RECORDS 