They placed me in a position of honor, and the hunchback translated my words as I spoke to them of the Messiah and his message of peace for humanity. The monstrous tribesmen listened intently, silent as stone. At times their eyes turned to regard one another in unspoken agreement or mutual wonderment. They listened as if they had heard all of this before. I realized then that neither myself nor Father Espinoza was the first missionary to visit these wretches.
I told them the story of Virgin Birth, the miracles of the Christ, his death and resurrection. I invited them to visit the Mission Puerto de Purísima Concepción to discover the glory of my god, which was also their god. They only need accept him into their lives to be transformed, to be filled with the joy of Heaven and the blessings of the One True God.
When I had finished my sermon, I gave a solemn prayer for their village, while they watched in detached curiosity. I raised my head, having finished the benediction, and was shocked by their reaction. They howled and beat at the earthen floor with their malformed hands. It took a moment for me to understand that they were laughing at my sermon and prayer. Some of them rolled on the floor, clutching distended bellies. Others wept as they guffawed and shook.
Apparently I had greatly entertained them with my religious storytelling.
I endured the laughter with a stoic calm, but eventually found myself laughing along with them. Their mirth was an infectious disease to which I had no resistance. The hilarity ended when a hideous crone brought into the lodge a large clay bowl full of steaming meat. She placed the meal at the center of the congregation and departed. The Azothi insisted that I have the first piece. I was ravenously hungry, so I did not refuse. The bones had been removed and the meat was greasy yet tender. Not at all like the bitter, stringy meat of the mules I had eaten during the year of drought. Seeing my enjoyment the Azothi council joined me in the meal. In no time at all we had scraped the big bowl clean. The meat had been seasoned with some unidentifiable spice. Perhaps that was the reason for its succulent flavor, or perhaps it was simply my own state of extreme hunger. Even rancid fare will taste palatable to a starved man.
As my hunchbacked translator chewed a final mouthful, his one eye turned to regard me. I noticed then that the entire council was observing me in the same curious way. Perhaps they wanted another story of Jesus and his miracles. I considered telling a parable.
“Espinoza,” said the hunchback. Drool and grease dripped from his malformed mouth.
“Father Espinoza?” Finally I would get to speak with the man I had come to rescue from this strange place. “Where is he?”
The hunchback gestured to his unpleasant mouth. I failed to understand.
His bony finger extended then toward my own lips.
“Espinoza,” he said again.
A congregation of glimmering eyes stared at me from nightmare faces.
Panic rose in my bloated belly. A sharp pain lanced my gut. I yelped and ran from the sweat lodge into the crooked lanes of the village. Three huts away I saw what I most dreaded to see in that moment: My two scrawny mules, unharmed and tethered to a post.
It was not these beasts the Azothi had roasted.
I fell into the sand howling and vomiting, writhing and cursing, having entirely lost my senses. What a great and terrible sin I had committed without even knowing it. I might have seized a knife from a passing native and ended my own life then, so great was my anguish. But the Azothi council rushed from the sweat lodge and grabbed me by the arms. Their grip was incontestable. They hauled me toward the great, black pit that I had taken for a well, and forced me to stare down into the darkness of it. I could not see the bottom, nor could I smell any scent of water rising from its depths.
Someone forced my head back, and the hunchback came forward with a smaller bowl. He lifted it over my mouth, which the others forced open, and poured a thick black potion down my throat. I tried to spit it back at them, but someone kicked me in the gut, forcing me to swallow the noxious fluid. I fell forward onto my belly, my head hanging over the very lip of the pit, and the Azothi moved away from me.
Whatever drug they had mixed in the bowl took effect immediately. The living world receded from my perception. I stared into the yawning void of the pit, and that abyss swelled to become the cosmos entire. Stars gleamed and swirled in the dark gulf. I floated among them now, my frail body forgotten. I was nothing but a simple mote of awareness suspended in the Great Nothingness that surrounds and encloses our tiny world.
I saw other worlds hanging in the depths of eternity, spinning like minute jewels about flaring alien suns. I understood the pit now. It represented that Great Nothingness that confines and sustains all of creation. The secret mysteries of the cosmos, the blasphemous truths hidden from a humanity that wraps itself in veils of ignorance and illusion. I saw the boiling depths of Eternity and the swirling night of Infinity, the awful immensity of existence itself, the Ultimate Secret of creation.
And there, at the shuddering heart of All That Is, I glimpsed the vast singularity of seething, ever-changing unflesh that churns without end at the nexus of all possible realities. The amorphous, bubbling god-thing that reigns supreme by virtue of its mindless and limitless power. The bloated and monstrous King of All Creation, the core of the rotting universe.
The blind idiot-god, the daemon sultan whose ageless name I heard whispered and echoing in the corridors of supernal night.
Azathoth.
About this centrifugal mass of celestial chaos I witnessed a writhing procession of devils and demons, piping eternally the Song of Creation and Destruction, beating madly on drums that are the husks of shattered worlds, and I knew these terrible beings were the Angels of Azathoth, who was the true and oblivious master of all conceivable worlds and times.
Now I understood the horrid ceremony of the Azothi, who worshipped this One True God, and I knew the significance of the idiot-boy who was their chieftain, a living avatar of their insane deity.
I saw yet another vision as I lay squirming at the edge of the pit: The Azothi themselves studying the patterns of stars in the desert sky, spilling the blood of women and children into the great pit, raising their hideous hands and faces toward the swollen moon. The mindless core of existence writhing and pulsing, squeezing bits of its limitless confusion into the mortal world.
Azathoth, reaching across the threshold of the void, breaking open the Gates of Eternal Night, sending colossal tendrils forth in bottomless, questing hunger to invade and consume mankind, leaving the Azothi to watch over the corruption and decay of their dying world. The daemon sultan would save its faithful ones for last, and while mankind fell to chaos and red ruin, the grotesque children of Azathoth, they who opened the Way for his infernal presence, would rule as senseless tyrants and feast on the flesh of the innocent.
They were the Pipers at the Gates of Eternal Night. They would fling open those gates when the stars were right, and Azathoth would pour forth upon the earth like the ancient Flood.
They would feed the world to their mad god, and help him devour it.
I regained my senses lying next to the pit. The thrashing of my body had turned my face from the deep darkness toward the glittering stars. I looked upon the face of the night and I knew. This was the terrible season the Azothi had long awaited. These now were the patterns of constellations they held necessary to bring their mindless god into the world. First they would drive the Spanish conquerors from the surrounding lands, then their conquest of the world itself would begin.
Someone pulled me to my feet. It was the imbecile child who was chief of the tribe. He smiled at me, blinking, and put a green stone into my palm. It was the very same stone Father Espinoza had carried, the one that had bewitched him, drawn him here to be slaughtered and devoured by the Azothi. And myself.