That overpowering, unnamable stench hit me first, then the chilled stone wet with slick moss beneath me. The intense cold told me I was far beneath the earth. Iron bars several feet above my head trapped me inside a dingy pit within the underground crypt. My left wrist throbbed where a hand had been, and I cradled the stump to my bloodied shirt. That multi-eyed creature Curwen had summoned flashed through my mind and I screamed. The ungodly barking I had heard down here before rose around me, much nearer than I preferred. Within the darkness of the pit, shapes shuffled around with slippery thumping.
“Walton?” I dared to call. “Walton, are you here?”
Slippery clopping struck up as a silhouette both not human and too human lunged at me on all fours. I scrambled up against the wall but there was nowhere to run. Something slimy brushed my leg and I lurched away as an equally appalling fiend reared up beside me with a demonic howl and slashed its paw-like appendage at the other creature. The latter backed away with a sour whine and shuffled further into the dark.
I stumbled away from the creature beside me and collapsed in the small beam of light on the floor. The creature fixed its eyes that were not eyes on me. I held my breath. It turned away and lowered itself to the floor, resting that head-like organ against its paws. Was this what Curwen meant by his attempts at resurrection being warped and inhuman? Walton would never stand a chance against those twisting nails. He was gone, and I would soon follow.
I reached inside my pocket and grasped air where Victor’s journal had been. My fist punched the floor as I howled. Curwen had all of Victor’s knowledge now, whether I had prevented him from resurrecting my brother or not. I had failed. Failed poor Walton, my brother, and possibly the world. How feeble Victor playing god felt compared to these cosmic abominations! A few feet away lay a trampled sheet of paper. I snatched up the relic of familiarity and saw the shredded edges where it had been torn from a book. The letters were written in Victor’s large, looping cursive:
I beg of you Curwen, do not call up Any that you cannot put down; by which I mean, Any that can in turn call up something against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall command more than you.
I hardly processed the words, for beneath the faint light lay more pages from Victor’s journal. Curwen had not found it after all! With my single hand, I frantically grabbed the scattered remnants of my brother’s legacy. I would destroy them so no one could use Victor’s work to inflict further harm! The journal itself was on the edge of the light, badly chewed but still containing a few pages. Halfway through ripping the first one apart, my eyes settled on an entry:
Wretched fool I am! I find myself subjected to a hell of intense tortures such as no language can describe. Curwen has taken me to the depths of Ingolstadt, those catacombs unused since the days of Weishaupt and his accursed New World order. He revealed his wicked work in full to me, which if left unchecked, shall jeopardize all civilization, all natural law and perhaps even the fate of the universe! I only wished to pour a torrent of light into our dark world, and for the sake of all life and Nature, I must thrust Curwen’s monstrous inclinations back into the dark. Forgive me, Mother, for delving into such unhallowed arts! Happier is the man who believes his native town the world than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.
Curwen claimed he had only recently removed the stonework and gained access to the crypt. He had also spoken of using mathematics to traverse the fourth dimension and vanish from his prison cell. If he could disappear from enclosed spaces, surely materializing in others would be no issue for him. My hand trembled as I read further.
Curwen threatens to reveal my grave robbing if I expose his wicked deeds, yet my life and reputation are the very least of things that hang in the balance. M. Krempe and his ever-present disdain for the alchemists laughed off my warning, though it struck the soul of kind M. Waldman. He has offered his assistance.
The next page was barely legible, and I had to speak the words out loud to understand them at all.
It is done. We have set everything in that blasted lab ablaze, God willing Curwen too, though they have yet to locate his remains. The contents found within that lab have left me much changed. I am oppressed by a slow fever and in my agitation even the fall of a leaf startles me. Many have grown alarmed at the wreck I have become, but I might not be mad if Curwen’s accursed tomb-legions had not been so heinous!
If men like Curwen, bent on death and destruction, exist in this world, then my research may be our only defense against such insanity! I must discover the spark of life and use that power to protect the few that remain to me. My work, grizzly as it is, is nothing like Curwens! I shall create a man, not some cosmic daemon, and he will be benevolent and good! Surpassing any mortal man and immoral fiend fixated on tearing the world apart!
The next entry was a nearly identical description of that infamous creature found within Walton’s biography on Victor. The lustrous black hair, white teeth and overall beauty of his creation. Victor’s excitement showed through the sloppy handwriting in a way Walton’s printed report never could. Mankind’s salvation. With the key to life in his reach, he would never lose another person he loved again.
I skimmed the mechanisms used to infuse life into the creature, why linger on the process when I knew the result? To my surprise, the narration differed from Walton’s account when Victor recounted the creature’s watery yellow eyes- the very detail that had sent him fleeing in disgust and sealed the fate of us all:
What horror! Curwen’s influence lingers closer than a familiar. It stains my hands to make my good work an abomination! Those eyes are watery, pulsing with yellow. It is not the candlelight playing tricks, it cannot be! I hoped to perfect man, but I have only raised up one of Curwen’s horrors in the body of my fellow creatures! There is no soul inside those yellow eyes, there cannot be! Oh, it is the same! The same! I chant the incantation to disperse the monster, but it is not enough! I shall inscribe them here and recite again, surely there is more power in the written word?
“OGTHROD AI’F
GEB’L—EE’H
YOG-SOTHOTH
‘NGAH’NG AI’Y
ZHRO!”
It has not vanished! I dreamt of Mother’s corpse rotting in my arms. Oh, I have called up something greater which I cannot put down! I have brought a curse upon my head that cannot be cured. Yet who can I tell? M. Waldman would never forgive me if he knew I continued this wicked research and the rest would call me mad. Both would lock me up, and then who could save humanity from the vengeance of this daemon? I must stay silent and find a way to undo this. I must. I must!
The rest was illegible from ink smeared in a manic fit of agitation. There were no pages after it. I shut the journal, thinking of that accursed mass of tentacles and twitching yellow eyes.
Tears blurred my vision. I could see the horror on Victor’s face that dreary November night as he mistook his innocent creation for one of Curwen’s awful fiends. If I really wanted to, I could also see the shreds of paper caught in the monster’s claws squatting before me. My eyes closed involuntarily at the wretch. It was like a human, but painfully unfinished. The deficiencies were uncanny, and the abnormalities of proportion hinted at obscure cosmic relationships to horrible to behold. Yet I thought of Victor’s creature, the monster who had murdered my family out of spite because of his neglect. His appearance had denied him companionship and turned his heart black. Forcing my eyes open, I beheld the thing before me. Misshapen though it was, there were glimpses of familiarity. The shape of those uneven shoulders, the outline of what had once been a jaw. The blue tint in the eyes that were not eyes.
“You wanted me to read these pages, did you not, Victor?”
The creature released a moan outside the range of human vocal cords. He had slashed at the previous monster to defend me. He was safe. I crept over and touched his jutting shoulder blade. The skin felt like wet leaves mixed with gravel.
“I understand why you did it. I should have believed you before,” I whimpered. “Even if I doubted your claims, I should have taken your fear seriously.”
That which was not Victor sighed.
“I have never been capable of seeing what is right in front of me. Curwen is right, I am a feeble mind, the background character to the grand narratives of you greater men.”
The creature whined and rested his disfigured paw on my hand. I tried to ignore the wetness of the skin. He shook his head with a soft croak. My eyes looked into his. Past the cosmic abnormalities, I sought my brother. I found deep pain, regret, and words unspoken that would never be. I forced myself to smile.
“At least we are together in the end.”
The creature reared back with a hiss. A claw jammed beside my knee and etched C-U-R-W-E-N into the moss before slashing the word with a vicious intensity.
“Yes, yes, I hate him too,” I sighed.
The creature growled and gave me the begging look our old dog had perfected at the dinner table. Again, he slashed the remnants of Curwen’s name.
“You wish to stop him?”
The creature yipped excitedly and pointed to my chest.
“Me?” I broke off in a cough. “Victor, you are the genius! I led him straight to your remains and started this mess!”
The creature grabbed one of the torn pages and shoved the paper into my hand. I reread the familiar lines:
I beg of you Curwen, do not call up Any that you cannot put down; by which I mean, Any that can in turn call up something against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall command more than you.
“Victor, this makes no sense.”
The claw scribbled a new name- Marie Antoinette, into the moss.
“The ex-queen of France? She was executed years ago!” I paused. “By her own people. Commoners. Lesser men.” I traced the name in the moss with an idle finger. Victor’s intent was reaching me. “Some people are born for greatness, and some are not. I am inferior to you two, an insignificant ant. Yet how great is a queen, be it of ants or men, without their subjects? It is the expendables who enable great men to be great, and can tear them down just as easily. Maybe I cannot stop Curwen, but together we may yet win!”
Victor nodded and half-hopped, half crawled to the stone wall and stood on what I assumed were his hind legs. He angled his head to the grate several feet above us. Picking up on the gesture, I climbed onto his shoulders with great difficultly. Leaning my stump of a hand against the rough wall, I stood on Victor’s shoulders and strained up toward the grate. Yipping came from below me as the other creatures emerged to investigate. Growls and barks echoed off the walls as they fought one another with animalistic savagery. My fingers grasped the grate and lifted it easily. Curwen had clearly planned on me being dinner to his failed experiments instead of working with them to escape.
Victor boosted me upward and I scrambled from the pit onto the stone floor. I was in one of the corridors connected to the haunted room of chiseled stone Curwen had shown me before. I had to wonder what pentagrams were original to Weishaupt’ s Illuminati, and what grizzly additions Curwen had added himself? I snatched up a dusty pole and stuck the end into the pit where Victor growled at the circle of monsters closing in on him. I regretted the second look, for horrid as Victor’s appearance was, his fellow creatures boasted far greater abnormalities.
Curwen is improving, I thought with a shudder as Victor clutched the flimsy pole and scrambled up the wall as the others snapped at his heels. He collapsed beside me in a panting heap as those left behind howled and scratched at the walls. It seemed Curwen had not perfected bringing back the minds of his genius men either, and I pressed against Victor’s flank with a shudder as he stared into the pit. Despite his deformities, the drawn eyebrows and puzzled scowl were distinctly Victors, and I thanked whatever governed the laws Curwen rivaled that I had my brother’s mind in full. Victor’s yip interrupted my thoughts as he angled his head toward the pit.
“You want to free them too?” I asked, the only explanation. “Victor, they tried to eat me and I am sure they devoured Walton!”
Victor pawed at the pit impatiently, and I knew arguing was pointless. Then again, if these creatures were Curwen’s failed attempts at resurrecting the dead, surely they retained some form of humanity? Victor nudged me behind him as he lowered the pole into the pit and the remaining creatures pulled themselves up one by one, ten in total. Each one thanked us by lunging at me with snapping jaws, but Victor was more complete than they, and a few swats sent them rushing down the nearest corridor howling with demonic bloodlust. The sound of shattering pottery reached me as they wrecked Curwen’s little stock in the furnace room. As the final one disappeared down the dark hallway, I could only hope Victor knew what he was doing. Victor pointed a claw to the opposite doorway. Nodding, I snatched up the pole and rushed with him back into the light.
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