All I had left was my life, and they would take that too in good time.
The stars were ripe for the great bloodletting.
For three grueling days the deformed ones led us through the waste, allowing us barely enough water to stay alive. The cries of hungry children filled the hours. When the sun went down we were allowed to rest, after marching all day beneath the burning sun. Every one of the captives, including myself, fell immediately to sleep. Yet often one of us would awaken from terrible nightmares, only to fall unconscious once again. I remember waking several times to the low chanting of the Azothi, who stood about us in a circle with their bulging eyes turned to the stars. Even this cruel trek of deprivation and misery was part of the coming sacrifice. The greatest of their ceremonies had already begun.
On the fourth day we reached their village, where the great pit yawned open to receive us. They fed us well then on dried strips of meat. I chose to continue my starvation, yet I did not have the heart to tell the ravenous women or their little ones the nature of the flesh upon which they were fed. I kept the dreadful truth to myself, and emptied my mind of what was to come.
The Azothi arranged their captives about the lip of the pit, forming a circle. They waited for sundown. When the first shadows of night crawled from the desert, they would begin the torture and slaughter of their victims, one by one until the great circle of blood was complete, and all our bodies had been cast into the void of the pit.
I watched the sun sinking behind the dunes, glad that I would not live to see the shape of the world that was to come. A world where the Children of Azathoth would reign supreme over seas of blood and empires of bleached bone. The women and children, their bellies stuffed full of unwholesome meat, fell to sleep about the pit, while the Azothi sharpened the stone blades of their knives. I saw the hunchback mark me with his evil eye. He would take my life himself, but not before he had squeezed enough pain and anguish from me to satisfy the great ritual.
As the last rays of sunlight died between the dunes, and the first stars of evening awoke in the sky, the Azothi began their chanting. The most hideous and blood-eager among them stalked toward the captives with naked knives displayed.
A black-feathered shaft appeared in the throat of the hunchback. A second arrow fell out of the twilight and caught him full in the breast. The knife fell from his gnarled fingers. A rain of arrows fell now among the Azothi, raising cries of pain and alarm. The chanting was broken by howling war cries. Shadowy forms darted from behind the huts to pounce on the grotesque worshippers. Axes bit deep into malformed flesh, shattering brittle bones.
The sounds of battle aroused the women and children about the pit. A great band of painted Quechan braves descended upon the village. I heard the thunder of a Spanish musket, followed by several more. Bare-breasted warriors came running toward the pit, cutting through the Azothi with knife, spear, and hatchet. They offered no mercy to their deformed foes.
I watched with little excitement as the Quechan slaughtered the lost tribe. The moon rose full and red as blood above the horizon. Several Azothi corpses were tossed into the pit, and the Quechan began to free the captives of their bonds.
A plumed and painted warrior crept to my side and sliced the thongs that bound my wrists. Only when I looked into his pigment-smeared face did I recognize Walking Ghost. The naked stars glimmered in his black eyes.
“You are free, Father,” he said. I must have grunted, or said nothing at all. He picked me up and tossed me over his broad shoulder. In this way Walking Ghost carried me away from the black pit and out of the burning village, while his war-brothers set fire to every last teepee.
We fled the heat of rising flames into the cool embrace of the desert night. The joyous cries of families reunited came to my ears, but beneath them I heard still the sonorous chanting of the Azothi. I feared that I would hear that chant forever after in the low sighing of the winds, in the babble of rushing waters, in the voices of men and women and children who had never seen beyond the Gates of Eternal Night.
I recall very little of what followed. I must have slept for the entire journey out of the dunes. Yet when I awoke, I lay in the camp of Walking Ghost, who had returned with the rescued captives to the river valley. He sat next to me, along with several of his loyal braves. They had not yet removed the war paint from their bodies, and their faces looked strange and monstrous.
“Here, Father,” said Walking Ghost. “Drink this.”
“No!” I knocked the bowl of river water from his hands as if it were poison. “No! Get away from me! Stay away!”
“Father!” Walking Ghost came after me as I shuffled away from his campfire. “I broke my vow of peace to save these people. To save you. What should I do now? Will the Christ forgive me?”
I had no answer for him. I ran from Walking Ghost as if he were the Devil himself. Perhaps my dead brother-priests were right all along — I had been driven mad and would never be sane again. I ran into the land of the brush and cactus, where my only company was the mute serpents and quiet lizards. There I found a shallow cave to shield me from the bite of the sun. I lay there for days, rising only to seek a stream for water and to break open a cactus with a piece flint. I pulled the spines out and ate the vegetable flesh. Never again would I suffer the touch of meat on my tongue. I have no idea what became of the green stone and its disturbing sigils.
Several years I have lived alone in this cave. My nightmares have all but faded, yet my memory remains. Sometimes the peaceful Quechan bring me corn and beans to eat. They consider me a holy man, but I never give them blessings. I have come to understand that, to them, simply being in my presence is blessing enough.
They cannot know that I am cursed.
Doomed to know the truth of the horror that lies at the Center of Creation.
Now comes the time that I must leave my little cave. I will carry this testament to the nearest mission, where the truth has some small chance of being acknowledged, and perhaps preserved. In this way I hope for some small measure of redemption before I cast aside the burden of mortality.
I can only hope that my eternal spirit, set free of its confining flesh, does not plummet into that great void where the ultimate chaos waits to devour all that exists.
I pray to the god whom I no longer serve that death is, after all, an escape.
Yet I fear that it is only a doorway, a passage to some new and more hideous realm.
The Thing in the Pond
They say Old Man Carter started digging the pond back in 1931. His wife and two little boys had died from tuberculosis. Folks said he’d lost his mind. He never even shed a tear at the funeral, but as soon as his family was laid to rest he went on home and started digging. Most folks thought he was digging a well at first. Others claimed he was digging the pond that his poor wife had always wanted. I remember my granddaddy’s take on it:
“Jeb Carter is plum crazy.”
Some men deal with grief in unexpected ways. Old Man Carter turned his grief into a sadness that would mar the earth itself. He dug, and he dug, and he dug. Folks brought him sandwiches from the General Store and farmers’ wives brought him chicken dinners. After a week the hole was forty feet deep, and they lowered his meals into the hole with a bucket-and-rope. Carter had rigged up a pulley system to haul up buckets of dislocated earth all day long, and a few local boys helped moved the dirt piles aside to make room for more. Everybody figured he’d give it up eventually.