Granted.
April 13, 1907. None will believe this story, and all evidence has been lost to time. Nevertheless, I write because I must. I must put the dissident and clattering chaos of the unfamiliar that churns my mind to an Earthly Abaddon to paper, that the world might at least know the truth of the phantasmal doom that shall one day find me.
I was with my old Harvard colleague, an American of good stock and a philosopher by trade. His name was Victor Standish, and I hope that when his family receives this message that they will know that I merely wish them closure and the knowledge that Standish sold his life bravely. They should not read on.
We were in Normandy, visiting the ruins and mounds of citadels once inhabited by our ancestors that fought alongside William the Conqueror. One could almost feel the ancient blood that had been spilled in this land. The bones of the ones who had been slain to build the thrones of history's arbiters would never be truly excised from the triumphs born from their suffering. We wondered in later discussion, why is it that one side triumphs over another? We did not yet realize that we should find a final answer on our journey.
The locals had been supportive of our quest for identity and were gracious towards our poor understanding of their tongue. There was only one place they tried to warn us of, the Castle Poulpe. The educated Frenchmen simply said that no good had come of those who ventured to the ruin, while the more superstitious called it haunted.
Of course, this only fueled the fire of our curiosity. We told ourselves that we were braver than other men, and that the locals simply lacked the will to see that no mere ruin should be a thing of dread. We wished to be part of a legend. This was our doom.
We took a cab to Poulpe on the morning of the next day. We found the castle to be largely a mound, near indistinguishable from the normal slopes of the French countryside to the untrained eye. However, upon closer inspection we discovered a yawning maw carved in the side, concealed by imported Judean date palm trees. We took samples of the anomalous plants and entered the tunnel by torchlight. We made rubbings of ancient artwork we quickly found painted on the walls. They depicted the Jinn of Arabic myth, surrounded by men making sacrifices of their fellow men in exchange for the creature bringing disease to the cities and camps of their foes.
This was clearly disturbing, and we should have given up our quest immediately. Still we pressed on to a new and wondrous sight. The stone and earthen walls began to fade to primitive wooden supports, and the advanced artwork was usurped by crude graven images made from bone and wood by some degenerate worshipers of its half-human subject. Still further, and the deplorable constructions were replaced by smooth metal. The art was now no longer recognizable images of creatures, but raw splatters and symbols by barely sentient minds screaming for some last taste of expression.
We found the last chamber. It was a rounded room and in the center of this room, surrounded by mummified corpses, was a large brass lamp of the shape made a permanent fixture in the minds of ambitious men by Scheherazade's tales. Standish and I went to inspect the thing. Knowing well the old legends, I took up the lamp and disturbed its surface in a sort of jest while suggesting a few wishes for wine and women that I should like to have granted.
Immediately, a horrid boneless thing emerged from the lamp. The abomination was a mass of nerves, tendrils and sensory organs, lifted into the air by a propulsive gas expelled from a hundred nozzles underneath. It looked at me and I was frozen in fright. It immediately latched on and tried to force open my mouth. Standish fired his gun at the thing. The smell of powder and the echoing blast snapped me out of my trance.
However, the creature was almost entirely unhurt. It hurled me to the floor and pounced upon Standish. I rose and tried to grasp the creature, but its strength was immense. Even as we both grappled with it, the creature broke open Standish's jaw and crawled into the mouth. Once inside, it's tendrils filled out his body, leaving only his eyes to twitch wildly in terror. He used his last words to command me to run. I am ashamed to admit I was already fleeing in terror. The last I saw of him, the creature used his own hands to bisect him with daemonic might. The creature's gaseous cloud then emerged from the wound, and I saw the legend made real as Standish's corpse raised into the air.
I fled the tunnels and fainted as soon as I was well away from the terrible mound. When I awoke, I went to the authorities. They knew I had traveled with a companion, so they accompanied me in spite of their skepticism toward the fantastic features of my tale. When we got to the rubble, the caverns in which my companion and I had traveled were no longer accessible. Only the expected ruins remained. I was nearly blamed for Standish's murder, but I was eventually able to secure release after a stay in an asylum.
Once I had returned to England, I hunted for any scrap of information I could find on the monster. Everything was useless, besides the pages of the dread Necronomicon. There I found a terrible truth. The creature would require a new host soon, once the meat had fully rotted away from its current vessel. Further, it was a creature that knew humanity all too well, owing to its inhabitation of human hosts. In particular, it knew the curse we call spite. Once a man had escaped it, it would never forget him until it had gained his shell for its own. Even after its vengance, it would return every 111 years to possess one of his descendants.
This is Professor Old Puppyguard, and I must tell this story.
I wish for a pony.
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Topic: Corrupt a wish! (Read 1276588 times)