From The Journals of Tanya Westing, April 2016 to January 2017
A lovecraftian short story.
“Man Fires God”
I
I’ve had a lot of time on my hands since Mike left me, since I left him. It had to be done. He was toxic to me; a cancer to my happiness and future. I was always asking him to go out but instead he played Minecraft. I would say, “Mike, let’s go to a party,” or, “Let’s go shopping,” or, “Let’s do something adventurous, like making out in the cemetery behind St. Sebastian’s.” and he would always keep playing. He would look at me and say, “Sorry dear, but my system can’t run these patches.” I would scoff, and he would say, “One day, Tanya, I’ll make something of myself.” but I had no faith in that. Then he’d keep playing that infernal game, without talking to me, in my own room. I loved him, once, but he was a bastard, so I fired him.
We all do crazy things after a breakup, but what I’ve done isn’t so crazy. I’ve simply fallen back on the habits and studies of my ancestors, wise women of old Salem who wanted more from life. I want to feel the wind in my hair. I want to dance naked in the moonlight. I want to wield powers beyond imagination. I want to clasp the putrid and unholy tendrils of the Ancient Ones, and invite them to dance along with me.
II
At eighteen and a half I really don’t have time to waste playing video games or doing homework. I need to be living it up and and feeling the wind in my hair. I need to feel the wind that whispers dark and ancient secrets in my hair.
I thought about turning base-metals to gold, but that requires a lot more scientific knowledge than I would like. I took a test in Career Class that told me I was more right brained, more artistic, poetic, and empathic. So, I thought about raising the dead, nothing is more poetic than Orpheus, or Hamlet babbling to Yorik. Death is the great ancient enemy.
But then, I couldn’t really think of anyone I really wanted to raise, also, I’ve never seen a depiction of a necromancy that turned out well in popular media.
So, I went with some of my great-great grandmother’s dusty tomes to Starbucks, and began writing down names of people who I might want to bring back. Elvis jumped into my head at first, but I never really cared much for his work. A conversation with Elvis would be awkward, having raised him I would have to admit I knew none of his songs and had nothing for him to do.
I considered David Bowie, whose passage was fairly recent, but I’m not entirely sure he isn’t going to resurrect on his own, considering all of the dark magic vibes I got from some of his final videos. I would hate to gum-up the works of a perfectly crafted self-resurrection plan.
There was also the matter of finding and digging up the bodies, which seemed a tiresome affair. I had no car, and I didn’t like taking the bus. I had no idea where these famous rock-stars where buried, and I didn’t want to get in trouble for grave-robbery. All in all, it felt like a bit too much work.
I thought about this while I sipped my white-chocolate mocha, and I contemplated dark-deeds, and then, a miracle, an unholy miracle occured! My elbow slipped. In one motion I dropped my tome, and my coffee slipped from my fingers.
The journal fell open to chapter nine: Forbidden Beasts, and onto a page depicting most exquisite and most terrible fiends of the Outer Realms, and my coffee spilled. In one instant I was upset that such a valuable piece of antiquity had been damaged, but in the next I was marvelling, as the coffee spill had drawn a straight arrow and stopped on one particular fiendish name.
Qot’uqoloth
He Whose Shadow Grasps
III
Qot’Uqoloth is all over my wall now, like a rock-star. I’m such a weird girl. I kiss his picture every morning. I want to meet him.
My one true idol. Existing in a time outside of time, beyond death; a space outside of space, which he constantly filled and was absent from. His hand was on all the activities of the swarming masses of the mortal rank, and yet he touched nothing, and thought of nothing, and was beyond thought. I shook his non-present hand every morning in salute, but I yearned to meet him materially, to feel him . . .
Aunt Christie asked me if I have a crush, and I do, and I probably blushed. She keeps talking about college.
I am fixated on learning to turn his immaterial form to material, and to have him here, with us, to usher in his Age of Lightlessness, but Stacy keeps pestering me about going to the mall to get new shoes. How weary am I of mortal affairs, but how much do I also need new shoes.
IV
There was no substantial occult section at the Books-A-Million in the mall. All they had there were a lot of self-help books and a set of tarot cards with Family-Guy characters on them. The gods are mocked. I have gone deep into forbidden research over the past two weeks (While binging the new season of Orange is the New Black) I have sought out things that mortals ought not seek out. I have googled many scary words. I have found, “The One True Tome of the Crawling Things” on ebay. I have asked Aunt Christie to lend me money. I have told her it was for school books.
She stormed into my room today, hooting and hollering and raving about my grades. I was ready to defend myself, but it turned out my grades are really good, and she wants to set me up with a literature major at some top ranking school. I can’t remember the name. God, I care so little.
I have begun bidding on the forbidden book.
V
I lost the bid. I’m looking for another way to acquire what I need. Since it is still too early in the game to start getting all of the necessary ritual objects (Dove’s blood, sacrificial knife, dust of a thousand horrors, etc) all I can do is sit on my hands.
I went on a walk to calm my rushing mind. The sky was gray and gloomy and I liked it. It was chilly, and I wasn’t dressed properly for the weather, but a little bit of agony was just what I needed to keep my momentum.
Freshly falling leaves crack beneath my sandals. Their tiny, torn flakes get caught between my toes. I wince and try to shake them out. A raven lands on a dying tree before me and crows a melancholy note. I think it is an omen, neither good nor bad, but of him.
Then, something strange happened. I was passing by Saint Sebastian’s Church, and a man with haggard, red eyes and a long, grey beard appeared before me. He dashed down the stone steps, almost falling and probably nearly spattering his brains across the Holy Threshold. He coughed at me. I picked up my pace but he didn’t stop chasing, so, considering that I was receptive to omens and the spiritual realms at this time, I stopped for him.
“My dear! My dear!” he screeched between wheezes. He put his hand on my arm to hoist himself up and I recoiled slightly. “Do not call that name.” he barked, looking at me with a certainty and bizarre clarity, “Do not call that dreadful name.”
I shook him from me entirely, “You are drunk and high, old man.”
VI
Qot’uqoloth Qot’uqoloth Qot’uqoloth Qot’uqoloth Qot’uqoloth Qot’uqoloth.
Bite me.
VII
It took me weeks, but I found a coven in the area that claimed to focus on the physical summoning of forbidden, spiritual beings. They had a table reserved at Starbucks, but it wasn’t the Starbucks near my house, it was the one near the Dallowood Mall.
I came in a black robe with a hood and everything, but they were all dressed in T-shirts and jeans. I was also the only girl. We held hands and muttered some words together (I don’t know what language it was, and the hands I held did not feel like they knew moisturizer). The leader of the coven asked for my name. I told him it was Tanya. He laughed and asked what my real name was. Perturbed, I said “Tanya” He laughed again. After that he went on some long boring rant about how his phone rang one night after three and when he got it, all he heard was silence. He claimed that this was according to the will of Yog-Sothoth. I crossed my arms and said, “Qot’uqoloth, would eat Yog for breakfast.”
He scoffed and said, “No, Qot’uqoloth is a pussy.”
I bowed my head and said, “Forgive them, Qot’. They know not what they do.” but deep down I did not, in fact, hope that Qot’ would forgive them. I hoped from deep in my heart that they would be destroyed most terribly when the Age of Lightlessness came. I left in a huff, and as I ran to catch the bus, it began to rain on me, and the sky spat thunder. I was thankful.
VIII
I don’t think there is anything to this recent incident, but I have written it down to put my mind at ease. I no longer fear the fires of hell. The Christian god, Jehovah, or YHVW, is a poorly aged Zoroastrian myth used by people in seats of political power to scare innocents into submission, a frightful opiate of the masses. It is nothing I fear. HE is nothing I fear.
I shall recount: this morning when I rose from my bed and went down to get breakfast (it is a Saturday, so it was after nine, I should add) every Bible in the house was open, all seven of them, every one forming a circle on the living room floor. All of them were open to Proverbs 14, and, to my faithless shame I say my eye was drawn, as if by a hand not my own, to a singular verse.
There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end, it leads to death.
I shook, like a girl who had seen a ghost, then I closed all of Aunt Christie’s Bibles and put them back on the shelf, muttering, “I am not a man.”
The path I have chosen is the path I have chosen, and if there is a YHVH, I will not let him strongarm me. I will make my choices and I will hold to them. I have chosen to love Qot’ above all else.
Christie betrayed no knowledge of the incident. If it was her, she hid it well. She is bothering me again about college. I have told her I have other plans. She doesn’t seem pleased, especially since I will not tell her my plans. The Lightless Age will come soon, and one cannot study without eyes.
PS: I am writing this before bed, and I am filled to the bones with thrill. I have finally won a copy of that dread volume The Tome of Crawling Things on ebay. Praise him. I shall soon see the dark with my own eyes.
IX
Qot’uqoloth was before all beasts, before all men. He is unliving and he was before life. He sits in the space outside space, waiting, bored, ravenous, with nothing to do but wait for the dawning of the Lightless Age. He hungers and he thirsts. He screams in a voice that we can all hear in the rapid undetectable reverberations of our mortal skulls, and should he speak they would all shatter.
It has been a month since I last wrote you, dear diary. I have been so immersed in my work. I have had none of school, none of homework, none of Christie or Stacy or covens, only study, and I have acquired every ritual implement required of me. I am ready to bring about the endless end, which is the beginningless beginning. I am ready to feel his arms upon me. Tonight, at midnight, I summon him into this world.
X
I see at least thirty eyes, but they float across the surface of his amphibious flesh like paper boats in a pond. All are yellow and winking at different intervals, none at me. At the top of his squidlike form is a dark chasm, like an open plastic bag full of black ink, rowed with jagged teeth, razor sharp. Tiny tendrils gyrate on his flesh, feeling the air and pulling in particles of the light; his sustenance.
He reeks of a thousand dead, a thousand ancient civilizations, a thousand worlds melted like sacks of old potatoes.
One arm is upon me, upon my left shoulder. Another is twisting the cap off a bottle of mountain dew. Another is buried in a bag of flamin’ hot cheetos. He dwells in my room, unbreathing, like something dead, but still moving, twisting a joystick nimbly with his fingerless, slimy appendage, and he plays Minecraft.
One of his eyes notices my disappointment, and he says, speaking through screeching ripples in my mind and not with his monstrous mouth, “O n e of these d a y s, I w i l l bring a b o u t the A g e of L lllllightlessness.”
But I have no faith in that.
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