The Void of Azathoth

                                             


    The storm clouds hovered directly over the house just as they had for days, immobile, unaffected by the atmosphere. It was as if the sky above the evil domicile had torn open, bleeding out a constant black deluge. I approached the house cautiously, for it was just beyond those oaken walls where, less than a week ago, my friend and mentor Sam Geoffrey had uttered a single name which had never been spoken before by human tongue, and the very sound of that name was enough to render him into a gibbering mass of cold flesh, and to send me fleeing from the house in mortal terror. Somehow, in all of his arcane studies, Sam had stumbled across the true name of the daemon-sultan, Lord of the Ultimate Chaos Himself, known more commonly in strange, obscure texts as Azathoth.

  A gate had been opened, however inadvertantly, and it was now my task to close it, at the risk of my own demise. Fortunately the symbols I had previously administered were still in place. The great Elder Signs I had hastily painted on every window and door of the house were the only things keeping the horrors inside at bay. I had taken it upon myself to effect such precautions, as I had noticed an increasing recklessness in my friend's strange practices, as well as a growing disdain for all things mortal, including himself. It was the only reason I had remained under his tutelage these last few harrowing months, to ensure he did no harm to himself or anyone else, and to keep his crazed rites in check; a function by which l had failed, but that l was now determined to set right.

    The house stood dark and silent. The rain falling from the eaves had a strange calming effect, but it did nothing towards easing the sick pit that grew in my stomach as I reached out to open the door. Inside there was more darkness, more silence. I half expected some terrible fiend to be laying in wait for me just beyond the threshold, but the hallway inside was gracefully empty. I stepped in, and suddenly the darkness engulfed me, wrapped around me like a shroud. It wasn't the darkness of an unlit corrider, but the empty, Stygian blackness of a void that had never known light. Then I felt a great removal take place, a sort of dislodging from my current location, and suddenly I was plummetting through a vast black abyss.

    I screamed then, but the sheer velocity of my fall muted the sound of my terror. Such was the speed of my plunge that I knew I must splash upon the bottom soon, for surely no chasm had ever yawned this deep. Then I began to detect pinpricks of light along the black edges of this pit, like clusters of tiny white eyes that were hungrily viewing my decent. The lights grew in number until they surrounded me, and I soon realised that they were not eyes, but distant stars, and that the deafening winds that roared in my ears were the deathly howling winds of frigid, unknown space.

    It was then that I fully comprehended my situation among these cosmos. This was not space as man in his feeble explorations had come to understand it. This was the Void of Azathoth, which is to come into existence at the end of all things, when Azathoth will awaken from His timeless slumber, and all that He had ever dreamed - time, space, and the other false concepts associated with them - will be reduced to mere after-images in the gulf of His mind, and eventually forgotten by Him as He ventures out into the empty Void to create the true universe.

    I had read of such things in certain guarded texts, but never imagined I would personally see it come to pass. The Book of Eibon hints at the Void, but the ancient wizard who penned that musty old tome knew the dangers in revealing too much. The Hypercosm of the crazed writer-turned-mystic Arthur L. Spence goes into all too vivid detail concerning the "chaos waiting at the edge of space". The Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred himself knew the true name of Azathoth, but was reluctant to write it down even in his frightful Necronomicon, which speaks of the most obscene things. But somehow my friend had come across that damnable name, and because of his blatant disregard I was now an unwilling witness to horrors beyond magnitude.

    I must have fallen through interminable leagues of space before I realised that I was actually being pulled along by something far below, but the depths through which I fell showed no end in sight, only pure blackness. I began to pray for a quick, painless end to my life, though I never believed in any other gods except the ones that slither and lurk in the most unholy places, and who are completely indifferent to men's prayers.

    Then suddenly there came a sound; it began as a deep rumbling which echoed throughout the great expanse of space, as if titanic foundations were somewhere buckling. This was followed by a series of tumultuous thunderclaps which resonated with an awful, hollow deepness that I thought might never leave my ears. And as I gazed out into the ultimate darkness to locate the source of this dreadful commotion I saw what appeared to be space folding in on itself, as a great black wave swept across the wide vista before me, unhinging the stars in it's wake. Hence I knew with mounting disbelief that the awful sounds accompanying this terrible ruin signified the very rending of the cosmos themselves. Cluster by cluster, galaxy by galaxy, the universe fell away before my eyes, and all the while those evil reverberations persisted throughout the gamut, tolling off the falling of stars and the cracking of planets.

    I shut my eyes tightly, wanting to behold no more of these visions of ultra-cataclysm. I continued on in this state for some time, unseeing, oblivious to the havoc all around me, and half mad with the things I had already seen. But eventually I detected a growing source of radiance through my shut eyelids. I opened my eyes again and suddenly the devastated cosmos were adorned with much more light than I cared to see them in. Here and there were great chunks of blasted rubble, the remains of many ancient worlds which had been crushed and thrown into the same torrential winds which continued to propel me onwards. The source of the illumination seemed to be coming from somewhere far above me. I looked up, and screamed another mute scream.

    It was a giant yellow sun, a great star that had been dislodged from some nearby galaxy, which was now reduced to a cast fireball of megalithic proportions, with enormous flares shooting out from it as if from a hundred wild geysers, and a tail of nebulous gasses trailing behind it. Though it was many millions of miles above me, I could feel the heat radiating from it with a rapidly growing intensity. The thing rolled like a wheel, this massive celestial body from some broken heaven, and any chunks of shattered worlds that fell within it's gleaming radius became balls of smoking detritus before being utterly scorched away. The center of this churning inferno was changing color, from a blinding yellow to a seething orange, and l could tell that the life of the thrown star was slowly dissapating.

    It was within this gloaming blood-tinged hue from a dying sun that l saw the other things which had been pitched into this Void along with me, foul beings whose features were even more terrible to look upon than ever before, now that they had been blasted inside-out by Azathoth's ultra-nuclear awakening. One of these creatures was far below me. It was falling at a higher velocity than mine; the vampiric force that passed for gravity here sucked it down faster due to it's greater size. It looked like some sort of giant sea creature drowning in the filth of it's own inner components, with long, red, pulpy tentacles that flailed in vain at the emptiness around it, while a network of displaced veins hung off of these great appendages, dangling and bulging as they bled away a thick brown ichor. Whatever this thing had once been, whichever strange world it had decended from, it must have commanded great fear and awe. But now, in these final moments of it's life, the creature had apparently lost control of it's own faculties, for beneath a transparent membrane at the creature's mid-section there was a giant, blood-shot orb of an eye which looked out from it's wet hole in obvious terror.

    Another creature, this one far off to my right, appeared to be an invertabrate. It's serpentine body was made of a conglomerance of bubbly segments from which many exposed juices were still escaping. Long sharp horns protruded from both ends of the thing, and it's organs which had originally functioned externally were now smothered beneath the punctured, translucent segments. Although this creature had been dramatically altered from it's original form here, l recognized it from my extensive, diabolical studies into things arcane. It was a neo-shoggoth, one of the many breeds of slave organisms which attend slumbering Cthulhu and His dream-machines in the inner-most chambers of sunken R'lyeh.

    There were many other such horrors surrounding me, but suddenly l could behold them no longer. For almost as if to warn l had already seen too much, the fading light from the dispelled sun high above turned a blistering red before burning out completely, save for the last irregular heat-bursts which lit up the supreme blackness of the Void with a strobe-light effect. And it was within these sporadic lightning bolt flashes that l saw glimpses of the final horror, the absolute dread before which all other horrors bowed, and made awe blossom into madness.

    In my boundless plummet, by which l saw the death of all l thought immortal and the measuring of all l thought incalculable, l had reached the bottom of this cosmic abyss, the very end of a dismantled universe. And there, shaped out of a blackness darker than unlit space, and spanning the entire length of the heavens, was the terrible face of Azathoth Himself. Awake from a timeless slumber, His great chasm of a mouth yawned, wider and wider until the mouth itself filled the empty expanse, and as l passed into that wretched, gaping maw l welcomed oblivion, and the true emptiness that accompanies it...

                                          ******************************

    Suddenly l fell through the doorway and landed hard on the ground outside the house. l remained there for a moment, dazed, as my body seemed to reacquaint itself with the current laws of physics and reality. lt was as if l had awakened from some sort of crazed nightmare, but l knew that what l had just experienced was no mere fantasy. When l looked up at the doorway l saw that the darkness inside the portal was forming into a mass of black tentacles that were reaching for me, and that they were livid and anxious to pull me back into the broken oblivion from which l had just accidentally escaped. ln my blind panic l could barely muster the strength to crawl around to the side of the house, away from that evil threshold.   

    l vaguely recall what l did in those next few moments, only that l had quickly spread the essential minerals l brought with me around the perimeter of the house, and that when l spoke the proper syllables the entire abode erupted into blue flames. The doctors filled me in on the rest. They say that it took three men to pull me away from the burning structure, and that l was screaming something about "chaos" and "burning black eyes". Shortly afterwards l was admitted here at Arkham sanitarium, where the doctors and the police keep hounding me with questions about blue fire and the strange remains found within the house, a body whose DNA matches that of my friend Sam Geoffrey, but whose composition resembles nothing even remotely human.

    I tell them nothing. The less they know the better. Let them think l'm crazy. Maybe l'll find some sort of solace in the drugs they give me. But so far the meds aren't enough to keep me from wishing l had died in those blue flames, and they don't help me sleep deep enough to keep away the strange, far-away piping sounds which haunt me at night, or the gelatinous figures which visit me in my cell, bleating and bouncing in the corners, urging me to repeat that damnable name which still echoes inside my head, that other horrid name of Azathoth.