Cold: Chapter Nineteen
In which you read a book. Which is fine, really. Nothing bad could happen from reading a book, right?
Chapter 19
I picked up Nameless Cults, feeling the heft of it, the leather crackling in my hand.
It’s a book. Relax.
I opened it to the beginning, because I wasn’t in a movie where someone opens a book to a random page in the middle and finds exactly the passage they need.
But as I opened the book, I felt my mind open. I couldn’t really describe the feeling if I wanted to. My mind just…accepted the words on the page as truth, as real, as important. Descriptions of the indescribable. Instructions for spells to summon entities I wanted nothing to do with. Stories of mad cults who worshipped impossible deities that lived infinities away, in the deepest depths of space, far beyond what any human could ever possibly know about. Cults that manipulated time and space and matter to accomplish arcane goals. I fell into the book, almost literally, even as the words on the page burned themselves into my mind. My head seared, reality warped around me, darkness filled my vision everywhere other than the book.
I found a spell, and I read it, and I read it again. It claimed to be able to banish the Black Pharaoh, and as I read further, I figured out that that name referred to Nyarlathotep, or at least an avatar thereof. A pretty gnarly spell, and not without risks. It first required the caster to summon the entity using a different spell, and then, a series of incantations, a binding circle, quite a lot of blood, and sacrificing the caster’s own sanity, banishing the Crawling Chaos to a different plane of existence. The spells had to be done in sequence, and they could only be completed when “the stars were wrong.” The book showed a star map, but it wasn’t at all clear where the stars would be visible in that configuration, or how they might be “wrong.”
“Ken?”
A hand on my shoulder.
“Ken?”
I screamed and nearly leapt ten feet out of my chair, blinking away thick tears that turned my vision red.
“Ken? You’re crying blood, man.”
“Fuck,” I gasped. “That book…”
I stood, shaky, wobbling, my vision blurring into static, and caught my breath. Insane visions clouded my mind, their tendrils visible now in the bookstore as shadows that morphed and grew and watched me with black eyes.
I stumbled to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror.
My eyes bled thick crimson into the sink. Gore covered the front of my shirt in long stains that glistened in the fluorescent bathroom light.
And behind me, in the mirror, the black figure from the bar, covered in eyes, eyes that bled with mine now, the eye-mouth laughing, glutinous viscera pouring from it and splattering the floor.
I retched, feeling a clawing at the back of my throat. Choking, I fell to my knees and reached my hand into my mouth, where something grabbed it, pulling it down, down, into me.
“Ken? You ok in there?”
Clyve’s voice felt far away as I struggled and choked, dark fireworks in my vision now, pulling and fighting the hand dragging my own deep into my throat, into my very lungs, my whole arm twisting into me. I doubled over, writhing on the floor, fighting, pulling at myself, my fingers brushing the soft, delicate alveoli, the bronchioles, wet and surging with effort.
A voice behind me, muffled, and hands on mine, one of them metal, clamping down on me, pulling, as my own effort faded, as the world blurred into nothing.
Gasping. Breathing. My arm free, slick with fluids. The stench of everything that had come out of me, that covered me. The fluorescent light blinding my now clear eyes.
Tea. Hot, soothing. My hand trembled as I grabbed the cup.
“Easy now.” Clyve’s flesh hand on my own, comforting me.
I sipped, and my bruised and lacerated throat stung.
“I’m gonna need something stronger than tea,” I rasped.
Clyve nodded, and a moment later I heard him rummaging in the kitchen.
“Nothing, sorry,” he said, returning. “Guess Lovecraft didn’t drink.”
“Shit.”
At that moment, everything crashed down on me. Everything. It all hit my mind with an audible crunch.
And all I could do was laugh.
Hysterical sobs racked from me, twisted, broken, blubbering, uncontrollable. I screamed, a primal scream that tore at my wounded throat, fresh blood spraying from my mouth. I stared at my arm, the arm that had so recently been inside my own lungs. I laughed at it. I pounded it on the table. I clawed at my face, and Clyve stopped me.
“We need to get you to a hospital,” I heard him say.
And then I heard nothing. Saw nothing.
Time passed in blurred moments of consciousness, visions of hospital corridors, muffled conversations, feeling myself rolled onto a bed. Something sharp in my arm.
Sleep.
I woke in darkness, my mind clear. I coughed, hard, shooting pain from my lungs to my throat.
“You ready to give up yet?”
The figure from the bathroom, perched at my feet on the hospital bed, eyes glittering with starlight.
I started to say no, but the word caught in my lacerated throat.
“Shh…you don’t have to speak,” the figure said, his eye-mouth glinting. “Just nod.”
I stared at the creature, felt its weight on my legs.
“No,” I managed, finally, forcing the word out.
“That…is a shame.”
The creature began to crawl, slowly, up the bed towards me. And now I saw the teeth in that eye-mouth, a spiral of them, swirling, and I heard the buzz of a drill. The eye-mouth opened wider, wider. I swatted at the creature, dislodging my IV, sharp pain in my arm, but it kept coming.
Then, in a second, something yanked it away, threw it back against the wall, where it burst into a wet black stain.
“We need you back in the Dreamlands, Ken.”
The First Priest of Inquanok, in all his glory, stared down at my hospital bed.
Next Chapter→
Image from here. Not AI.
Note: I’m using some sources for research in this story, and I’ll cite them occasionally throughout. For this section, I’ve been reading The Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic:
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/206774/the-grand-grimoire-of-cthulhu-mythos-magic
I’ve also been consulting the Call of Cthulhu Investigator’s Handbook and Keeper Rulebook.
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/167631/call-of-cthulhu-investigator-handbook-7th-edition
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/150997/call-of-cthulhu-7th-edition-keeper-s-rulebook
Finally, for the Dreamlands portion, the story is heavily inspired by the Call of Cthulhu scenario The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man, available here:
And of course, none of this story would exist without the writing of a troubled old racist from New England who helped invent cosmic horror and weird fiction.