Falling Idols

Blind Idiot Lovecraft

It is true that our conjurings have wreaked much havoc upon the autumnal hills surrounding Arkham, yet I hope to show by this testimony that fault lies not with us alone, but with malefactors who hungered for profit at the expense of learning.

Through my student years I had lived quite peaceably in my tiny garret, under the rafters of a Georgian house that squatted atop the hummock of Howard’s Hill like a troglodyte upon a chamber pot. My northern window commanded a view so splendid that during those hours I was not immersing myself in dog-eared sheafs teeming with the unsettling lore of the region’s hillfolk, whose family trees did so scarcely deviate beyond their mouldering trunks that both their eyes often made homes within the same socket, I would find myself brooding for hours over a cityscape bristling with eldritch spires and cruel gambrels, and cramped with slouching hovels and streets whose spectral denizens scurried from shadow to shadow … until I had utterly lost track of whatever thoughts filled my head when I’d first sat down for a quick breath of fresh air.

In time I realized that my reveries were not unnoticed, and I, the watcher in the window, had become the watched. The man who was to lead me to insanity’s brink made frequent trips through the street below, pushing his wheeled cart like a raw-boned, ill-suited Sisyphus, a peddler of crustaceans of decidedly peculiar anatomies. His passing stares grew more bold, lingering day by day until I called down to him, demanding to know that which he found so fascinating. Imagine, then, my vexation to hear him call back that he thought I would make a fine apprentice crab-monger, as I appeared to have ample time on my hands and, as I’d yet to tumble from my window, sufficient dexterity to suit the demands of the cart. My hasty refusal was as swiftly regretted, when examination of my wallet reminded me that I had never worked a day in my scholarly life and, more mysteriously, could not account for the origins of those few meager dollars I did possess.

When finally I caught up to him, he, with a temper as crusty as the shells of his wares, docked me a day’s wages for insolence.

How much better for me — for Arkham itself — had I given in to my umbrage, taking my solipsistic leave then and there. How much better for him — o damnable geezer! — had talk of my australopithic studies not awakened within him the curiosities of his ancestral hills, whose netherbowers sang of mysteries beyond space and time. How much better for you, my reader, if I just cut to the chase.

Knowledge of Arkham’s variegated streets was written deep within my mentor’s pickled brain, taking us along skewed lanes rarely traversed by those free of portentous motive. How I now wish that we had never disturbed the dust of the curio shop where we uncovered our prize whose cost has proved beyond reckoning: a lone — and curiously slim — volume of the dreaded Necronomicon, penned by that mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, at great personal peril and many a rumored grumpy night.

I console myself that our experiments might not have been performed with such urgency had the shopkeeper been more nimble of finger, but his delays returned us outside only after our cart had somehow overturned, sending our renegade crustaceans scuttling through the streets and back to the inky waters of Innsmouth they called home.

Lest the ravages of our imminent destitution overtake us, we fled to the hills outside of Arkham, where yodeled those cyclopean families beneath a gibbous moon, and where the inhuman ears of things ancient even by saurian standards listened with a gnashing of antediluvian teeth. By the baleful light of our fire, we called on the Great Old Ones, our barbarous words the keys to dimensional doors better left unjiggled.

Hideous to behold, their vast, terrible majesties inspired in me a polysyllabic glossolalia. They capered beyond our protective circle, their stertorous ruckus sufficient to shake every rafter within miles, until we could no longer bear the din of all the adjectives they demanded.

“The banishings!” I screamed. “Send them back!”

He shook his hoary head. “In a paowerful pickle now, we be! Thar’s no banishments t’be fount, nowhere! I calc’late they was never here, whatall!”

He blew the dust from the leather binding, and like chilled penguins did we shudder at the words revealed:

Reader’s Digest Condensed Edition.