Sometimes when you read a book in a bookstore you read parts
of it out-loud. It’s a tic, a sort of
palsy. You pick a book out at random and
a passage just leaps out at you. The
words beg to be made into something physical, a wavelength of sound that can
echo off a surface and collide anew with your ears, making new sensations,
unexpected and pleasant more often than not, joyous even in their most mundane
moments.
Today it’s going to backfire when you pick up a black book bound
in a scaly sort of not-quite-skin, smooth to touch and slightly warmer than the
room in which sits. The book will smell
vaguely of sulfur. Nearly every word on
its pages will call out to you, begging pronunciation. Your ape brain, arguably the smartest part of
your brain, will scream at you No, don’t!
but you, precocious teen in a horror movie of a reader that you are, will pay
it no heed. The feeling of being drawn
to every passage at once will be intoxicating.
You won’t want it to stop. You’ll
flip through the book until a particular passage calls out louder than others
and winds its way through the air into your tongue and takes hold of your brain
and the words echo out through your mouth and get caught by the air, stuck
there, words we dare not write here for fear they’d be spoken again.
This will be the moment of perfect stillness in the world,
the moment before the moment that comes next.
The sharp popping sensation as the air changes pressure dramatically,
tremendously, reverses direction and the world shimmers, shivers and rips open:
a tiny hole, the smallest rift you can imagine.
In that moment cellphones will fail.
Planes will briefly lose their capacity to navigate. Individuals with pacemakers throughout the
Portland metro area will experience cardiac episodes. It will stop raining.
And a small patch of burned concrete will appear in the
middle of Powell’s little known and rarely visited occult books room, hidden
deep within a subbasement of a subbasement.
In the middle of that patch of burned concrete a creature will be
sitting. Horns will emerge from its
skull at odd intervals, its eyes will be irregularly arranged: three on one
side, a constantly shifting number on the other. Its mouth will be the only symmetrical quality
it possesses: a V like slit along its snout which will expose teeth shifting in
size second to second whenever it opens to expose a twisted morass of tongues.
The creature will yip gently and leap up on your legs. You’ll immediately be compelled to lean down
and let him lick your palm, which he’ll do joyfully. His tongue will make your skin feel cool and
numb in a pleasant way, the way an analgesic balm does. His eyes will glimmer up at you. You’ll lean down and open your coat to him
and he’ll hop inside, clinging to the outside of your sweater with wickedly
hooked claws, letting his head just poke out of your P-coat’s opening. His breath will be warm on your skin.
You’ll pat him on the head and mumble at him.
“Randy.”
You won’t be sure if his hellish slit of a mouth can smile,
but it’ll make something close enough to a smile for you. You’ll give Randy one last pat on the head
and begin walking to pay for the collection of Octavio Paz’ poems and the copy
of Life of Pi you found for a total
of fifteen dollars. You’ll feel like
your life has turned around, really turned around with that visit to Powell’s,
but you won’t pay it much heed. You
always feel that way when you visit Powell’s.
But you will know that Randy’s name is really quite false, at best just
close enough.
Congratulations on Unleashing an Unnameable Horror from
Beyond!
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