|
|
From Sorcerie de Demonologie by Count de Hammais
The water moved sluggishly under the pressure of the dark depths, slowly stirring the oceanic vegetation that adhered to the outside walls of the city. The vegetation had originated at various lesser depths, which attested to the non-permanence of the city's foundations. The angles of the city, which were acute and obtuse at the same time, also attested to the fact that the city had not been built to the mathematics of this universe.
The sound of the water moving against the outside walls of the city filtered through the walls and through the water inside the walls and entered His dreams as a faint echo of the present reality. He moved restlessly in His infinite sleep, sending slow waves through the inside waters of His city. His dreams became telepathic waves emanating away from His mind, His alien bulk, upward and outward from His prison, flooding the minds of the sensitive ones among the surface dwellers. Those that did not go insane, went into spasms of mindless creativeness in which they tried to make substance of their dreams in various media forms.
Dreams...
...of His passion, His desire for procreation, His misgivings of having offspring.
...of His eternal striving to conquer, His dark magic covering the universe like a plague.
...of His triumph, reigning supreme over this, if not other universes.
...of His omnipotentness, but...then...
After eons of dreamless sleep, His dreams were disturbed by His memories. His memories flitted in and out of His dreams, which caused some of the sensitive surface dwellers to lose their sanity and take their own lives. Other sensitive surface dwellers, who did not lose enough of their sanity to take their own lives, sought out others of the same ilk and they formed cults to worship Him in His alieness and His dream-sendings that they could not even hope to begin to understand. And sometimes during their ritual worships of Him they thought an occasional sacrifice of a virginal nonsensitive would be helpful, whether it was or not, who is to say?
Memories continued to flit in and out of His dreams, sometimes being caught in His dreamweb so that they could be examined.
Memories...
...of His mating with Idh-yaa on or near the dim green star called Xoth, and Their three offspring, Ghatanathoa, Ythogtha and Zoth-Ommog.
...of His life among the stars and His seeping down from those stars to the backwater planet, blue and green in color, on the outskirts of the spiral galaxy. The surface dwellers of the planet called it Earth; a hard name to pronounce without distorting the vocal cords.
...of His building and occupying the mighty city of R'lyeh, greatest and grandest city upon this planet.
...of His and the Others rebellion against Their brothers from the star Betelgeuse in the Hyades, those brethren who had been misnamed the Elder Gods.
...of His confinement in the city of R'lyeh as punishment for His rebellious nature and its sinking beneath the primordial waves for all time. As if time had any meaning to Them; just about as much as space had meaning.
...of His half-brother, Hastur, who was allowed to walk upon the winds of the planet, but never allowed to stray elsewhere.
...that reminded Him that at some time, measured in millennia, the chains of force binding Them to Their confinement would dissolve and They, the rebellious ones, would once again know Their freedom.
...that cities are hard to build in any dimension, thus Their plans to drag this backwater planet through the gateway to the dimension of the red supergiant star known only as The Primal Star. And in the new dimension the surface dwellers, those who survived the transfer between the dimensions, would become eternal to serve Them for an eternity, for whatever purpose.
...of His occasional waking when R'lyeh arose once again to the surface of the deep waters. The sentient door to the city opened automatically in hope that now was the time of the true and final awakening. He would have a short period of freedom before R'lyeh would once again sink beneath the waves, the chains of force dragging Him back through the door before it closed and the waves washed over the mighty city.
...of the surface dweller who had written down an enigmatic couplet composed while under the influence of one of His dream-sendings:
That is not dead
which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons, even death may die.
Some time in the far distant future, the stars will begin to quake and shudder in their hoary paths through the universe. Their speeds will slow to a crawl, their paths crossing one upon another. The time will draw nigh when the dimensional boundaries shall come asunder and all of the many dimensions shall also overlay one upon another. The new Space will become the new Universe before starting backward once again. The more change there will be, the more everything will remain the same, eternally, from beginning to end to beginning.
He became motionless once again and slipped into a deeper slumber. A dreamless sleep came over Him and all was calm. Further aeons of sleep, undisturbed by memories or even dreams, caused to come about the time when the rituals had been forgotten by the surface dwellers. Even the remembrance of Their names, but this could change at any time for:
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
"Dream-Sendings" : Reprinted from The World of H. P. Lovecraft, Summer-Fall 1995 (#3) with kind permission of the author.
Copyright © 1997 Peter A. Worthy
"Dream-Sendings" © 1995 E. P. Berglund
