Would gossip never tire and would burly brutes never be silenced? Would they continue to skulk through the streets outside her door? She lay down on the mildewed floor inside the stairs. She huddled into the corner amidst fungi and rot. She clutched herself. In a few moments, she felt something change. It wasn’t anything which she could readily identify. She breathed long, gasping breaths and felt something in her suspire that was alien in its comfort. She breathed deeply and, in her mind, she felt an azure rapture. Pale blue. Electric. The fleas stopped biting her. The tears would not come. She breathed again and felt it bubble in her blood, again. It was unlike anything she’d ever felt before. Suddenly, she could envision the horrid church hags forgetting who she was. Not only forgetting who she was, but having their gossiping tongues ripped off by some invisible spectre, if they ever dared to speak of her or her family again. She could envision the plutonian trash she’d worked for many years ago, now having to take back everything they’d forced her to cover for them. She could envision the tormentors of yesteryears gone, by melting away into a new light from which their evil was bound. If mortal she must remain, then mortality would not be her enslaver. It would be her liberator. She breathed in the rot and, instead of being repelled, she was delighted. Gossip may be a measure of power in some circles, but it was nothing compared to this: great, fabulous, azure light beaming inside her thoughts.
The seeds had been implanted inside her mind. Now began the countdown.
Day One
I have had the most incredible experience. I have no words for it except: azure rapture. I can’t define it as anything else. It is the most wonderful feeling I’ve ever known. It comes over me like a wave of light and sea. It washes away all my fears, all my anger, all my hatred. This morning, a punk kid plunged a rock through my window. I didn’t even get angry. I didn’t even feel abused. I felt as I do now. I felt incredible.
Day Two
Many in my life have indicated to me that a woman’s only real power is that of procreation. That, if she cannot conceive, she is nothing but a slab. I can’t conceive because I have no interest in doing so. Not a mortal child, anyway. But something has happened. There were strange growths on the inside of that staircase. I breathed them in. I felt something change in me. I am pregnant now with something I cannot define. Not in my belly but in my mind.
Day Three
The change is growing more voluminous. It scares my haggard mom half to death. When she saw me this morning, she screamed herself into unconsciousness. You see, journal, the wires are growing.
Day Four
Space is no longer of the sky. It is of me. 5510 A.D.? Ha! Try 15,510 A.D. and you may have the more accurate year. But the year is of no consequence. Not without my blood to guide it, anyway. Give me all the centuries untold and I’ll give you the gluons of a million universes, ten million years in the future. Innsmouth is quaking under the overcast rain of a sneaking, summer deluge. It’s uncommon for Innsmouth to have this much rain this time of year, but then again, there is no time, anymore.
Day Five
I went to the waterfront. They were waiting for me. They know what’s happened and are proud to say they knew it would. They assured me that they would not forsake me. Cthulhu knows how valuable I can be to his dreams. They would not let me remain a skulking mortal, to rot to dust. The change is still happening. My flesh is starting to slake off in scaled fragments. The town of Innsmouth is truly now one belonging to the Deep Ones. The human fraction that has caused me discontent for so long is beginning to quake with fear, because now they are seeing, as if for the first time in their whole, benighted history, that there really are beings that stalk their shadows that are far more powerful than they. And I am now one of them. The fungi growing in my head are sprouting exponentially. Soon, like Athena bursting forth from Zeus’s head, my dreams will give birth to the Kadath Angle: the angle of dream that will engulf the future with my azure rapture.
Day Six
Genesis is always painful. Parthenogenesis, in particular, because we virgins have no one to give a hoot about us in the waiting room. That’s not really true, though. At least, not anymore. The Deep Ones are ecstatic. All night long, I hear their yelps and cries echo over frightened Innsmouth. They know what is coming. When the Kadath Angle bursts forth from my head, it will be the birth canal for all star spawn upon the Earth.
Day Seven
God forgive me.
The Kadath Angle burst forth over Amy’s prostrate form on the floor. Her mother had starved to death in the upper room, thus she was not disturbed. Like a great serpent, it burst from the Gilman House, shattering the roof. Star spawn rained down over Innsmouth, over the world. The atrocities in Asia whimpered and paled before the spawn of Kadath. The Earth tilted under them as they littered the sky with the protoplasmic slush of universes born many eons before. 5510, 7510, 125,510, 750,500, 5,000,000,000.
My name is Amy Gilman and I am a monster. I didn’t think about the ramifications of what was happening to me when I first experienced what I can still only call ‘azure rapture’. I have allowed myself to become Mankind’s exterminator, simply because I did not believe my own humanity was fair. I had Deep One ilk in my background. I believed I deserved to live with the Deep Ones. I would have done anything to make them accept me, as no one else ever had. They accepted me, all right. Strictly for their purposes, as these things always go. There is not one trace of humanity left, for they have been undone. My mortal blood touched that which should never be touched and now, not only has Mankind been exterminated, but it has never existed at all. The Earth is what the accursed Necronomicon always hinted it would be if star spawn ever regained control of it. Now their cities are laced upon the barren world. There is no water, save for the terrariums that the Deep Ones constructed to meet their occasional, water-frolicking needs. The Fungi from Yuggoth, which I now know to have been the fungi I suspired from under my staircase, though how they grew there, I am still at a loss to define. Now, I am the fungus that grows under the stately staircase of a Deep One. Winged visitors from Vermont, or what used to be Vermont, are staying over tonight and I have been instructed not to say a word, which is why I’m recording my thoughts on a beam of light in a distant part of the universe. It is my sincerest hope that some passing explorer may find this haphazard message in a bottle and learn from it. Learn that the only way to save mankind is to kill me before I have a chance to become impregnated with the Kadath Angle. This will be most difficult and I can’t think who, or what, lifeform that may even have the technology to decode this message would even bother to do so. Even if they do, who can reach that far into the past and rewrite what I have done?