textfiles/magazines/DDE/dde04.txt

                                :::.                     
                                :: :istorted                     
                                :::'          
     Text File #4               :::.               Az A. Thoth
   <20><><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD> :: :igital <20><><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD><EFBFBD>
    14 February 1994            :::'               Mongoloid Telecom
                                ::::
                                ::. rection
                                ::::                                
   :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
        


                      'The Scratching'

                     Elbow: A Prologue

        It entered through my right elbow; I'm quite sure of that.  There
was a tingling, a slight numbness, and then it was as though nothing had 
happened there at all.  But then the scar on my left hand started to throb, 
and slowly bleed before my eyes.  The old wound reopened and the blood that 
came was old and dried.  It wasn't like blood should be.
        It was feeling around me, I guess, making sure it wouldn't leak out
accidently, or maybe making sure that there was an easy escape hatch 
available.  Anyway, there was no pain, just that same numbness that began 
shooting through my whole body.  It wasn't long after this exploration that 
the scratching began, and I started having fits of unconsciousness, from 
which I would awaken in places not knowing where I was, where I'd been, 
how I'd gotten there.  
        The scratching.  It was inside, somewhere in my head, a little 
above and behind my right eye.  I guess the energy had found a comfortable 
place there, or maybe there was some more significant reason, I don't know.  
        Gradually, I came to accept the ever growing periods that were
complete blanks.  There were days where I never woke at all, but just lay 
low, deep, and let the scratching run its course.  I began to be grateful 
for the few moments of self-awareness 
I still came across, but I found that they tired me rapidly, fighting to 
hold on to them an extra moment, retain myself for just a second longer.  
I always would sink back into the dark after a little while.  It was strong, 
and when it did need to rest, it was never for very long.
        Perhaps it seems strange that I accepted my unusual fate so 
casually, but this was simply because such things were not unknown to me.  
In fact, I had been expecting something soon.
        Listen closely, and I will tell you if I can.


                       I. Uncle Howard

        I had this weird old uncle, and his name was Howard Kinston. Even
though most of the family ridiculed him, I adored him.  Anyway, Uncle Howard 
would always tell me stories about some of the strange, and as I grew older, 
disturbing, things he had seen and heard and read in his days as a field 
archaeologist of some reputation.
        His most frightening stories were the ones about the things he 
called the Low Ones, which he said lived in secret places under the earth 
and in shadowy dankness.  
        According to Uncle Howard, there was a place not more than half an 
hour or so drive away, down over in Mansfield, a neighboring town to my 
native Getzenberg, where strange things happened in the night-time and 
where sounds of inhuman gatherings could be heard carried in the winds.  
There were Low Ones there, my Uncle said, or something like them. 
        The Low Ones were old things, older than mankind.  The thing 
they worshipped was somewhere around the age of time itself, and its 
existence went against every logic and sense of order that had ever 
been given status as law.  It was a thing akin to c
haos itself, devourer of all things wholesome or likened to normalcy.It was 
an Old thing indeed, from the times before the ages of man, when the earth 
did not spin in its current cycle but hung suspended and blank in other 
places where dimension had 
less meaning and concepts of spacial occupation were rudimentary and 
unnecessary.  It was a thing long relegated to the outside, but which 
never failed to search for the way back in, if only for the sake of 
reclaiming what once had been in part its own.  
        It, and the other Old Ones had thrived then, in a  
discordant world of clashing reality and angular misshapenness.  
They were still around somewhere, in the places between the spaces of 
untold numbers of realities, always scratching at the doorways 
they could find but never open.
        It would be the end of man, should they ever gain re-entry. 
Then would return the times of screaming insanity and abominous intent, 
when laughing things of spiteful wonder would walk the Earth's regions 
again, terrible in their indifference.
        The last vestiges of their ancient and innumerable blasphemies
remained in the Low Ones, and other foul things akin to them in the various 
regions of the Earth and in dreams.  They had not been cast away, but had 
fled to the dark places with the coming of new ages.
        I always thought that the stories were just fairy tales, a game my 
Uncle liked to play with me, making up frightening tales to keep me wake 
at night.  Then, when I was twenty-three, my uncle came to me, and 
told me that he had found proof that the Low 
 Ones were real.  The possibilities of such a hideous thing were far too 
much.  I had to go with him.  That was 1978 and my uncle was forty-seven.  
Today it is January 10, 1986.  My uncle is still forty-seven, and I know 
that he is somehow still alive, or at least existing in some insane 
facsimile of life, somewhere across unthinkable gulfs of space.
        

                     II. Mansfield, 1978

        We headed over towards the town.  Uncle Howard said we
wouldn't have to go really that near the city itself, as the places 
we were looking for weren't to be found so near that large a normal 
human population.  There were some old Indian burial mounds between 
Getzenberg and Mansfield that my Uncle knew of, and there were those 
that said something still moved far below.
        It was cloudy that night when we arrived at the state park 
that had been built up around the old mounds, and so neither the 
moon nor the stars cast much light.  Somewhere, I could feel a  
drumming, and horribly, inescapably, I knew it was coming from below. 
        Not only from below the mounds, but from below the grounds all around 
the park.  The sound was muffled by the tons of rock that must have 
surely separated us from its origin, and in fact the rhythms 
could not be heard at all, but only felt.  That was enough.
        My Uncle had a pair of flashlights, and he tossed one to me.  
He knew a place in the side of the old stone hill that led down.
        We descended through an old cave in the side of a tiny stone mounta
in that stood on the far side of the park from the mounds, but the slope 
gradually changed degree and direction so that we came to be travelling 
towards the mounds, eventually at a nearly horizontal direction.  
        The drumming did not seem any stronger here, though occasionally 
we could hear a singular groaning in the earth as something shifted 
from the reverberations of the drums.  
        The little cave we had descended through had become a magnificent 
grotto, and as we made our way, rather slowly, towards the place that 
would be beneath the mounds, the ceiling of the cavern became increasingly 
higher, and the walls became ever more smooth.  
        It was unnatural, that polished, soap-smooth rock, which should have b
een jagged, gradual limestone and granite.  How could we have known?  
It was just one more mystery, and it diverted little of our attention from 
the now rumbling drums emanating from the cavern ahead.
        When we came to the gigantic shelf and the hideous lake 
therein, we prayed diligently that we had managed to shut our 
flashlights off in time.
        The hideous spectacle of deformities and grotesques below seemed to
have paid us no mind.  They were dancing in a frenzy before a huge stone 
idol of a monstrous worm, its head-end adorned with four vicious sets of 
mandiblous jaws working the air in screaming disunion, its tail-end 
seemingly streaming forth with obscenities represented in the stone.
        There were no drums.  The rumbling came from further
 ahead, from below and behind the hideous black lake of tar that lay 
beyond the dancing abominations that writhed before their idol in 
flickering shadows of blackly radiant torches.
        The light cast from those impossible things was a radiation of sorts, 
causing everything within the hideous grotto to shine darkly with 
colors unassociated with any earthly spectrum.  They cast no light but 
instead seeped into things, giving the rocks an inconsistent glow remindful 
of bio-luminescent fungi and the hideous Low things an innate light 
not unlike that found in many fishes native to the deepest of waters.
        The rumbling was getting louder, and the things below were 
quickening the tempo from its already feverish pulse to an insane 
set of impossible contortions and writhings upon the ground.  
When the thing burst from the lake, all of the mutants 
fell prostrate and motionless upon the ground.  
        We saw the tip of a thing of impossible proportions.
If this were only its head peeking out at us from the lake, then the 
rest of that gargantuan worm would have filled the earth with its 
wrapped form.  
        The lake was not a lake, and I saw now for the 
first time how different the reflections in the tarrish 
substancelessness really were.  All the angles were inverted 
there, and everything folded wrong.  
        My Uncle began to mumble softly to himself, and then he did 
something I could never have expected or prepared for.  
He stepped off our ledge and dropped the eighteen feet 
to the surface of the opaque black "lake" below.  He strode in 
a daze onwards towards the rumbling worm-like monstrosity.
        I tried to scream to him, to stop him, to go after him; 
it was futile.  My lungs were as frozen as any of the other 
apparatus of my body, as I stood there and stared.  
        When the thing suddenly retreated back through its hole, at 
last I did scream and take flight.
        Back through the smoothened grotto, the wide walls of 
which might have precisely accommodated the massive tongue which, 
in the worm's moment of retreat, had slipped instantly out to envelop 
my uncle.  
        But it was its offspring that I ran from now.  The worm-thing, that I
would come to finally know as Os'Gthua, the eater, had gone, back 
through its impossible and insufficient gateway.  The Low Ones, 
which I have found are properly known as Deep Ones amongst the small 
circle who know of such things, have gone from the cavern, my Uncle 
having ruined their gate there. 


                         III. Spawn

        I was able to run for a long time, once I found some of my uncle'
s old books.  I was able to hide myself from it, and throw it off my trail.
I think it might even have feared me for a moment, some of those books 
were so insidious.  They toyed with 
my will, but I overcame the temptations, shut them and finally left 
them behind me.  I ran and I hid and it never found me for 
eight years.  Until about nine days ago, when it found me here 
in Maine.  I couldn't run any more, without the books and the insane 
verses within them.
        Now it's in my arm, in my head, scratching on my brain and 
taking my body.  I've been fighting a long time now to write this 
down, nearly an hour, and I don't think I can hold it off anymore.  
        I've got a twelve gauge in my hands, so I have to finish this.  I hate 
to think what it has done with my hands already, without such things 
as a gun.  I read the papers when I still can, and I know who or 
what it is that's been decimating the populati-
on of late-night travellers, prostitutes and watchmen.  I hate to think 
what the thing in me would do with a weapon.  It has very limited 
intelligence, it seems, if any at all; its actions are random.  I 
can't let things go on this way, I just can't.
  Not while there's still some piece of me left, anyway.  
        They'll say I was insane, and that's fine.  At least I'll have done
what I could to stop the spreading.  I only hope they notice quickly that 
some of the recently dead, the ones that made the front page with me, 
won't seem to want to stay down below.  They'll be coming back.  
The spawning has begun.  I only hope I haven't taken it too far 
to be stopped.  I won't let myself turn into one of those things 
below the mounds.  
        The scratching has started again now.  I've said all I've got time to. 
If only that were the only place they could cross over to our here and now, 
I'd feel so much better about everything.  But I'm afraid.  
        Need more time...too much to explain...don't have it.  This may be the 
last chance I get to stop it...the scratching...been harder 
lately...hard now...think it knows...I think it knows...wants out again...
my God it can hear my brain!  The rumbling's back...eight years!  
It came WITH ME...THE GATE!  
  

  `'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'
       Distorted Digital Erection   February 1994   Text File #4
            DDE is fully supported on the Necropolis BBS
          216.966.8970  - subterranean telecom - All TEXT!
          vaginal yeast infections are worse, much worse..
   Submissions are accepted. Send your t-file submission to Sorc, on
    the Necropolis. If using a new account, (I)nclude the file with
                     the New User Application.
     CHECK for MORE Distorted Digital Erection in the NEAR future!
      TCC in CHECK! ... and assorted tales of erect rodentia!...      
  `'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'

-eof-