A painting of a dying world

Most people who go crazy do so gradually and could not tell you the exact moment they went from sane to completely mad. Not me. I know precisely when it happened. I know to the second when my mind shattered under the pressure of an inhuman intelligence trying to possess me. It failed that day, or this world would no longer be ours. But I will never find rest again, knowing that such beings exist, gaze on our reality with envy, and plan their return.

It was a few weeks past my 14th birthday, a week into the summer holiday. We were sitting around deciding on what to do with the day. There were four of us, always together back then. Besides myself, it was Cal, Muggy, and Susie. Susie—whom I had had a crush on for months.

She was a year older than us boys, and I don’t know why she still hung around with us. She was more mature, as girls are at that age, and if things had gone differently that day, I don’t think she would have stayed part of the group for much longer. She was outgrowing us already.

And Muggy, what can I say about Muggy? He looked exactly like a stereotypical geek: a little chubby, thick glasses, Dungeons and Dragons t-shirts, the kind of nerdy humour that comes with the outfit. Sometimes, appearances can be deceiving. They weren’t with Muggy. If you got him started, he could list all characters in Star Wars, including those that only appear offscreen. He spoke Klingon and those Elvish languages from the Lord of the Rings. He was smart, off the charts smart, and the kindest person you would ever meet. But he didn’t make friends easily, and he was only in our group because we had grown up together, and I had known him since we were both toddlers. The way I see it, though, it was the group that won on that deal.

Cal was the undisputed leader of the gang. Not through any kind of intimidation or coercion—I don’t recall ever hearing him ordering anyone around. He would simply lead by being the most inventive and energetic; he led through initiative; he always had a million plans for fun things we could do, and he sold them well. His project this day was to go and explore Old Man Peaslee’s house, and he’d been going on about it for at least an hour.

“It’s breaking and entering,” Susie objected, not for the first time.

“No one ever comes there. No one will ever know!” Cal countered for the umpteenth time.

Muggy and I were playing Asteroids on my C64 and not really paying attention until I lost my last ship. I threw down the joystick.

“Let’s just go,” I said, “I’m losing this anyway.”

Muggy nodded, “why not?”

That was three against one, so Susie gave in.

“OK, but if there’s anyone around, we leave. Agreed?”

We did.

So, we got our bikes and headed out of town. We rode along the old rail tracks that had been transformed into a bike path years earlier. The trains don’t run there any longer, and the main roads take a different route through the neighbouring towns. It is mostly marshlands around those parts unless the land’s been drained, so there is only the elevated bike path and nothing else around for most of that area. You always felt a sense of both freedom and isolation on that path.

We felt free and joyful that day. The weather was pleasantly sunny, it was not noon yet and not too hot, and besides ourselves joking as we biked along, there were only the buzzing of insects and the occasional call from one of the many rooks always around in these parts. There was a colony of them somewhere around there, but I never learned where. You could see the rooks flying out every morning and returning every evening, and there would always be some around wherever you went.

Old Man Peaslee’s house was about halfway between my hometown and the neighbouring town, a bit off from the bike path. It had been a farmhouse once, I think, more than a century ago. The surrounding swamps had since swallowed the farmland. All that was left was the main building that rose like a monolith above the flat marsh.

Mr Peaslee had lived there on his own all his life, until his death a year earlier. I think he used to be a teacher before he retired, but the rumour among the kids in town was that he was some sort of wizard or warlock.

He wasn’t well-liked in town—I can’t tell you why; I never knew. All that we kids knew was that the grownups would not talk about him, that there was something they didn’t want us to hear. If you were lucky to overhear a conversation where anyone mentioned his name, the conversation would stop as soon as someone noticed you listening. With an old man living alone out in the marshlands that the grownups clearly didn’t want to talk about, it shouldn’t surprise that there were many rumours and stories attached to him.

He wasn’t immortal, notwithstanding some of the rumours. He’d been found in his study by his housekeeper one morning. The official explanation was a heart attack; the rumours were everywhere, from being mauled by a werewolf to being cursed by a witch. At 14, I was too old to believe those stories. Now, I guess I know too much to fully believe in the heart attack either.

Mr Peaslee didn’t have any relatives, and he hadn’t written a will, so the house and lands belonged to the state now. No one knew what to do with it, and so the place was simply boarded up and left as it was.

But Cal had heard—don’t ask me from where—that the house would be torn down soon, so if we wanted to have a look inside, it might be our last chance. That was why he had been so keen on this expedition and why the rest of us had been so easily persuaded.

There was a small gravel road from the bike path to the house. I imagine it was a leftover from the time there were trains here, and the Peaslee place had been a farm. When we got there, we jumped off our bikes and dragged them beside us. It is hell to bike on loose gravel, and I think all of us appreciated taking the last few hundred metres slow to fully savour the experience.

We had all biked past the gravel road a million times before but never turned down this way. The main reason, I suppose, was fear. But at 14 and 15, we were too old to fear the boogieman—and in any case, Mr Peaslee was dead and gone now. So, here we were, braving the forbidden road, preparing to explore the old wizard’s lair.

“It’s bigger than I thought,” said Muggy as we got closer.

And it was.

Farmhouses weren’t big around my hometown. You don’t make a great living farming in what is practically reclaimed marshland, so most farmers are poor, and the farms reflect that.

Mr Peaslee’s house wasn’t like those other farms. I suppose we knew that at some level since we had seen it many times from a distance, but the contrast didn’t strike us so much until we saw it up close.

The house was more of a mansion than the typical farmhouses: a two-floor red-brick main building with two smaller side buildings. It had not one but three chimneys, and it looked old. Centuries old. If it was truly that old, it had been around longer than my hometown.

We didn’t test the doors; we assumed they would be locked. The plan was to get in through a window. All the windows on the ground floor were boarded up, as we had expected them to be, but Cal had brought a crowbar for this eventuality.

Cal picked a window on the other side of the house, so we wouldn’t be seen from the bike path. There was never a lot of traffic on the path, but there was some, and we saw no point in risking anything.

I was feeling anxious when Cal started breaking off the boards. I could see on their faces that Muggy and Susie felt the same. It is one thing to plan a break-in and quite another to do it. Heading to the house, it hadn’t felt as real as it now did. We were breaking the law, and at this moment, that felt scarier than any rumoured warlock.

Cal didn’t hesitate, though. Nail by nail, he pulled them out, and board by board, they fell to the ground until the window was cleared.

He paused for a second—maybe he was feeling the gravity of the situation after all—but then he shattered the glass with the crowbar. Through the hole he made, he could reach in and open the clasps. He opened the window and turned around with a big smile on his face.

“Welcome to Old Man Peaslee’s Place.”

He crawled in first. I think he was enjoying the thrill of the situation. I don’t know about Susie or Muggy, but I was not comfortable with it at all. I didn’t want to look a coward in front of Susie, though, so I went second through the window. Then came Susie, and last came Muggy.

The window led into a dining room. A long table filled the middle of the room, with five chairs on either side and one at each end. Someone had put a sheet over the table and chairs before they had boarded up the house. A peek under the sheet didn’t reveal anything exhilarating.

There were two other windows in the room, besides the one we came through, both still boarded up, of course. On the wall opposite the windows hung a row of paintings, all portraits. Could be relatives of Mr Peaslee, previous owners of the house, or just paintings bought at a yard sale for all we knew. They were old and not that exciting when you are 14.

There were three doors—one in the wall with the paintings and one at either end of the room. Cal first checked the door closest to the window where we had entered. It led to a large kitchen, which we quickly explored. We didn’t expect to find anything sensational in a kitchen, and we didn’t. There was a door to a pantry, one leading out to the main hallway, and nothing of interest in the kitchen itself.

The door opposite the kitchen in the dining room took us to a smaller room. There were more paintings on the walls, again all portraits, and along the walls stood comfy chairs with small tables between them. Muggy said it was a “smoking room”. That means something else today than it did back then. Today it is what they call the boxes in airports and restaurants where you are allowed to smoke. Back then, you could smoke anywhere, and everyone did. We didn’t have designated rooms set aside for smoking. But apparently, Muggy explained, posh old places would have a separate room to smoke in after dinner, and this room looked like such a place.

None of us smoked, but we examined the portraits and tried out the chairs. If it wasn’t for the thrill of being in a place where we were not allowed, I think we would have got bored and left by now. But we had more to explore.

The last door in the dining room went to the same hallway as we got to from the kitchen. Opposite it was the house’s front door, and next to that, a staircase led to the second floor. You could unlock the front door from the inside, which Susie did “in case we need to get out fast if someone comes”. We decided to explore this floor fully before we went upstairs.

I won’t bore you with the rest of the ground floor, though. There were lots of rooms, several that Muggy asserted where for servants, which Susie didn’t buy because no-one had live-in servants that she had ever heard of. I think there was some truth to both points. Where we grew up, no one had ever been rich enough to have servants, beyond maybe cleaning help once a week or so. But then, Mr Peaslee’s house was not like any other around here, and to me, it looked like a place that ought to have a butler and maid and all that.

After at least peeking at every room on the ground floor, we stood at the foot of the staircase. It was wide with white-painted stairs and a blue carpet running along the middle of the stairs. We went up.

At the top of the stairs was another hallway, and to the immediate left and right were two doors. Arbitrarily, we went through the door on the right first. Through that, we found what I can only describe as a library.

Private libraries were not something we had experienced before, but it was every bit as impressive as the town library. Bookshelves, stretching from floor to ceiling, lined all four walls, and there was one of those ladders on wheels you otherwise only see in films or fancy bookshops.

I had spent a fair bit of time in the public library, mainly with Muggy, but that was to read comic books. There were no comics in this library. Every book we examined was thick and leather-bound, and none of us recognised a single title.

The most impressive books—tomes would be a better description, but I didn’t know the word back then—were on shelves sheltered behind a glass casement. These were huge and old. Not just old in the way that most things are when you are 14, but ancient. Cracked leatherbacks and pages that you knew would crumble to dust if you didn’t handle them carefully. Some titles were in English, The King in Yellow or The Book of Eibon, but most were foreign, like Unaussprechliche Kulte, Cultes des Goules, or De Vermis Mysteriis. Half of our town’s population were of German descent, so I knew enough of the language to recognise the first title—Unpronounceable Cults. None of us knew which language the other books were in.

It would have been impossible to pry Muggy away from the books if it weren’t for the excitement of the next discovery. On one of the walls hung a huge painting with a sheet thrown over it. Cal, not that interested in the books, went over and pulled off the sheet, revealing the artwork in all its glory. And it was glorious. And disturbing.

It depicted a barren alien landscape. Hard dirt, dried to cracks under aeons of a relentless sun’s radiation. A desert where no life could form and no life endure. No plants, no insects, no higher forms of life could survive here. And yet, four humanoid shapes, dressed as monks in long flowing robes, stood in the distance, facing us.

On the horizon, not one but two suns were setting. A monstrous red giant of a sun halfway set beyond the horizon, and above it, a brilliant bluish orb still illuminated the landscape. Painted suns do not glow, and they carry no heat, but I will swear till this day that these suns did. When Cal removed the sheet, the room grew both brighter and hotter, and while the painting didn’t quite warm your skin the way sitting near an oven would, you did feel the radiated heat.

It wasn’t just the heat I felt, though. I sensed something evil; something malevolent, emanated from that painting. I felt observed, as if those painted monk-creatures were watching me.

It wasn’t just me. Muggy had turned from the books and was staring at the painting like mesmerised. He obviously felt something too.

Cal seemed unaffected.

“Wow, look at this.”

He ran a hand across the painting. To me, it felt like sacrilege, and Muggy groaned audibly. Cal didn’t notice.

“This is so cool. Shame we can’t take it with us, eh?”

I would not have taken that painting anywhere with me to save my life, but Susie smiled at Cal’s comment, so I forced myself to smile as well.

There was a small, raised platform in front of the painting, also covered with a sheet. Susie grabbed the sheet and pulled it off. Underneath was a wooden lectern, with figures carved on the sides. Some of the figures looked like the monks in the painting, others less humanoid.

A book lay on the lectern. Leather-bound like all the other books in the library. Ancient and cracked like the tomes on the glass-protected shelves. Susie opened it and flipped through the pages.

“This must be Mr Peaslee’s spellbook.”

“Grimoire”, Muggy corrected her, “it is called a grimoire.”

“Grimoire, then, do you think there are any spells?”

“What does it say?” asked Cal, now more interested in the spellbook or grimoire than the painting.

“Just a lot of nonsense, really…”

“Read something,” said Muggy, “or do you want me to do it?”

“Nah, I’ll read…”

The gate is Jog-Sottott and Jog-Sottott is the gate, key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future…

“It’s Yog-Sothoth,” said Muggy, looking over her shoulder.

Muggy was probably right, but I would have defended Susie’s pronunciation any day if it came to that. It didn’t, though.

“OK, you read Muggy.”

“Alright.”

He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth’s fields, and where…

“Boring,” interrupted Cal. “Does it say anything about the painting?”

Muggy thumbed through the pages, scanning each page along the way. He stopped flipping pages about halfway through the book.

“He’s underlined this passage,” Muggy said and started reading.

They exist at the end of time and have seen all. Their world is dead, burned to ashes by dying suns, and time itself is ebbing. Nothing there lives now, except the monks of Yi’thle, the keepers of all knowledge.

“Do you think it describes the painting?” I asked. “A world burned to ashes and all?”

“Might be. There is more…”

Muggy continued.

From a dying world, they cometh, with wisdom and knowledge of history run its course they cometh, they offer you secrets. They seek to escape their dying realm; they burn in the embers of their deeds; they hunger for escape, for the youth of other worlds. Take their wisdom, take their ken, do not give them your world, for they shall make it as their own.

“What does that mean?” asked Cal, “is it about these monks?” he pointed at the painting, “They don’t look that smart.”

I looked at the painting again. There were five monks standing in the desert. I could have sworn there were only four earlier.

Do not take the star-stone

Muggy continued,

The star-stone opens the gate, the star-stone lets them in, the star-stone tears down the barrier.

“What’s the star-stone?” asked Susie.

“Doesn’t say,” said Muggy. He continued.

Give them not the star-stone, do not touch the star-stone, the star-stone is the undoing, the star-stone is the end. Seek their knowledge; do not let them in.

As he read, I felt more and more ill at ease. I wasn’t precisely relaxed, to begin with, with the whole breaking and entering going on, but this was different. I was afraid of getting caught in the house, of course, but as Muggy read of monks and dying worlds, I felt a dread I had never experienced before. The painting felt evil, the monks in it wrong, and if I had been there alone, I would have run away already.

But peer pressure is a strong motivator, so I stayed and tried to act as if I wasn’t affected.

“The next bit isn’t in English,” Muggy said. “I don’t recognise the language.”

Susie looked over his shoulder at the book.

“‘Ayi, Ayi, fhtagn,’… yeah, that is impossible.”

“Do you think it is a spell?” Cal asked. “Like a proper magical spell?”

“I don’t think I want to know,” Muggy answered. I seconded that.

“Let me try,” Cal insisted.

“‘fhtagn, ph’nglui mglw’nafh’?”

I don’t know how mere words can strike you with terror, but they did. I almost fled when he spoke them. I could see a similar reaction on both Susie’s and Muggy’s faces. The room turned darker, the heat from the painting stronger, and the evil emanating from it was palatable. I might have imagined that, although thinking back, I do not think so.

“Stop reading!” Susie said and slammed the book close.

The fright I felt subsided slightly. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the painting any more. When I saw it at the edge of my vision, I sensed movement, but I was too afraid to look. I just wanted to leave the house, to get as far away from the painting as I could.

“I’m keeping that”, said Cal and grabbed the book.

He took it under his arm.

“Let’s see what else is in the house.”

I didn’t want to explore further. I really didn’t want to stay a second longer in this place. But when Cal went for the door, so did Susie, and where Susie went, I went.

We went across the hallway to the door across from the library. There was a large bedroom there, probably the master bedroom as Cal called it, so where Old Mr Peaslee would sleep.

It was a large room. Gigantic for a bedroom. The size of the living room in my own house. We explored it for a few minutes, but our hearts weren’t in it. Not even Cal’s. He seemed more interested in the book he was carrying.

I could still feel the maliciousness radiating from the library and the painting across the hall. It was a visceral feeling. The sinister glow of the dying suns and the hateful greed I had sensed from the monks may only have been my imagination, but the terror I felt was real.

The bedroom was getting dark. The windows on the second floor were not boarded up, it was the middle of a cloudless summer’s day, and the room by all rights should be bathed in sunlight. But it wasn’t. I looked through the window. It was nighttime but darker than it ought to be. I should still be able to see the lights from town on the horizon, but all I could see were a few hundred metres; after that was a wall of absolute blackness.

I shivered and turned to tell my friends, but before I had the chance, Susie spoke. “Hey, where’s Muggy?”

He wasn’t in the master bedroom with us.

“Oh for…” Cal sighed and headed back to the library. Susie and I followed.

In the library, Muggy was standing in front of the painting. There were definitely more monks in it now, and what is worse, they were closer to the front. When we had left, the monks were standing halfway across the landscape towards the horizon, but now, I swear they had all moved nearer. There were seven of them, not five, not four.

One of the moved. Not the natural fluid motion of living things, but like the miserable stop-motion special effects of old films. Jerking movements, one second in one position and the next in another, without any apparent transition between the two.

The monk was moving fast, closing in on Muggy, who didn’t seem to react to this at all. Susie and I both screamed warnings to him, but he didn’t respond. Cal threw the book aside and sprinted towards Muggy.

The monk was right at the edge of the painting frame. The next split-second, it was holding out its hand, and in it was a glowing crystal.

Muggy reached for it, in through the painting, as if it wasn’t canvas but mere air, and picked the crystal from the monk’s hand.

As Muggy’s hand closed on the crystal, the painting changed; it became truly alive. You could no longer doubt the heat from the two suns and the scorched ground; you could feel the wind from that alien world on your skin and smell the fetid odour of the foreign atmosphere.

Cal slammed into Muggy, tackling him to the floor, away from the monk now climbing through the frame. The other monks were rushing towards us from inside the painting.

Muggy howled, an inhuman sound of rage and frustration. Cal tried to drag him away from the painting, but Muggy fought back, kicking, punching, biting.

Cal grabbed the hand holding the crystal, twisting it, smashing it against the floor, trying to make Muggy drop the cursed thing.

Susie ran over to join the fight while I, to my shame, stood frozen at the door. She stepped down hard on Muggy’s wrist. He screamed but opened his hand. She snatched the crystal and jumped back as the monk leapt from the painting down on Cal’s back, pinning Muggy and Cal to the floor.

Muggy blinked and screamed again, this time a more human scream, a scream of alarm and terror, not of anger, but the weight of both Cal and the monk soon squashed the air out of his lungs, killing the sound.

Susie stood with a puzzled look on her face as if inner voices were yelling conflicting orders in her head. Cal fought to get out from under the monk, and Muggy struggled not to get crushed under him.

Cal managed to push the monk to the side and crawled away on his hands and knees. “Throw the damned stone back in the painting”, he yelled, “get rid of it!”

Susie blinked, looked at Cal, then the painting. But the frame was now filled by the other monks, crawling through it, into our reality. If she tossed the crystal, the monks would catch it. ’Give them not the star-stone…the star-stone is the undoing’.

She shook her head. “I can’t!” she yelled back.

“Then get it away!” Cal shouted as he got to his feet, “they can’t have it!”

The first monk grabbed him from behind and pulled him down to the floor. Two of the other monks stood over Muggy, lying on his back on the floor, frozen in terror. One of them bent down over him. I heard a quiet whimper; then, they fell on him.

Susie hesitated for a second, maybe considering her chances of saving our friends, but then turned and ran for the door. That unfroze me as well. I fled with her, followed her through the door and down the stairs.

The monk pursued us. They were incredibly fast, their strange stop-motion movements propelling them forward with inhuman speed.

One caught Susie’s hair, she screamed, and I looked back to see the monk yank her head backwards. It must have snapped her neck. Her body hung limply from the monk’s hand; then, it tossed it aside.

The crystal fell from her hand and bounced a few steps down the stairs to where I stood in shock. I didn’t have time to process what had happened; if I had, I would never have acted and would have died there and then with Susie. I snatched the crystal, felt instant nausea, but ran.

I reached the bottom of the stairs and the main door as my pursuers stepped over Susie’s body. I yanked the door open, praising Susie’s foresight for unlocking it earlier. I got out and slammed the door behind me, leaning hard against it to prevent the monks from opening it and following me outside.

It wouldn’t hold them long. They could easily smash through the boarded-up windows and get at me that way. But I wasn’t in a state to make long-term plans. Blocking the door was the best I could think of.

It was dark as night outside the house, but not natural darkness. It was as if a wall of absolute blackness surrounded the place—tangible darkness, not merely the absence of light.

The crystal in my hand, the star-stone, felt oily, slimy, not truly solid. I felt a malicious presence in it, greed for my sanity and my world, a will to subdue me, enslave me, posses me, destroy me.

I hurled the crystal against the wall. It bounced off. I threw myself after it, skidding across the ground; the hard dirt tore up the exposed skin on my arms, sharp rocks pierced through my clothes and mangled my right shoulder and back. I caught it, just barely.

The darkness was moving closer. I felt it as much as I saw it. I knew that there were things in the dark, horrible twisting squirming things. I slammed the crystal into the wall with all my strength. It achieved nothing.

There were voices in the darkness now, but not human voices. “Ïa, ïa, fhtagn, ph’nglui mglw’nafh”. I did not know the language—I still don’t—although I’ve heard it whispered in the back of my mind for decades since. The sounds were not made by human throats.

Although it ought to be the middle of the day, the sky above me was dark, but not like the total blackness closing in on me. There were stars in that alien sky above me, but not any I had seen before or ever seen since. Not merely different constellations, although that also; the stars felt wrong, evil, hateful.

My mind was shutting down. I could not think, only panic, only act with animal instinct against the visceral threat emanating from the crystal. I held it against the wall, picked up a rock with my other hand and smashed it against the crystal. I could feel my finger-bones breaking, crushed between wall and rock, but the crystal broke as well. It shattered into shards that exploded in all directions. One pierced through my hand.

That is when the being from the crystal entered my mind. I instantly felt its evil presence, pushing against my sanity, testing my will, trying to possess me. It was weak, only a shard of the star-stone, but in my panicked and confused state, it was enough. I passed out.

I came to several hours later, lying on the bike path halfway to town. I don’t know how I got there. Someone had found me and was shaking me awake. There was no sign of the encroaching darkness, no sound of that ominous chanting. With the crystal destroyed, maybe those creatures had returned to their own dimension. Perhaps they are still here. I do not know.

I was practically catatonic and was taken to the hospital. I was in no state to talk to the doctors or my parents. The police tried to interview me. My friends were missing, but I couldn’t help. Cal, Susie, and Muggy’s parents begged me to tell them what happened to their children. I couldn’t speak. Whether it was a psychological defence mechanism that prevented me from speaking or a lingering influence from the star-stone, I do not know, but that hardly matters—I was no help.

They put me in an institution for a couple of years but then let me out again. I wasn’t doing anything that justified keeping me. I never recovered entirely, though. I still occasionally feel the malevolent intelligence that had entered my mind from the crystal. I perceive it observing me, observing our world, and I sense its hunger.

A smarter person would seek professional help. I wasn’t that smart and didn’t want to return to an institution. I would self-medicate. Alcohol, drugs—anything to make the memories go away.

It is more than thirty years since now, but it will never get better. I have to stop it. I know this. So many times, I have thought of ending it, ending my life. I will not get rid of the terror and nightmares in any other way. But I’m afraid of that also. I don’t want to die, but I cannot continue living like this.