Denbigh Asylum. North Wales. 1851…

 

To whomever might be reading this,

 

This shall be the last thing I ever write. I do not remember how I got here, nor how long I have been here, only now that I am confined to this miserable squalid room alone. The walls are white and padded and I am not permitted to leave. There is a single barred window near the ceiling. There is no delusion anymore. I know exactly where I am. They must have found me out there on the barren wet moors, raving-mad and jabbering incoherently to myself. And now I am here, bound in this straitjacket like some wild animal. Only my hands are free. Gods, what an ignominious end you have left me with. You must forgive the nature of my writing. For I am to be lobotomised tonight. They have provided me with a pen and paper, but nothing more. My mind has been declared unsound and unable to comprehend reality anymore. I know that is not true. I have been demented by the horrors, yes, but I am not demented. I am not insane!

     All I wanted was to see her face again, to tell her I miss her. Oh, how I loved her. Evelyn. My darling wife.

     And now, my greatest fears have been realised. I may have escaped that dreaded tomb, but…something else escaped with me. It has stowed away in my body. It’s using me as a vessel. I can feel its suffocating inky-black presence in the corners of my dulled mind. There is a dark force within me, and I know now for certain that it came from that awful mouldering coffin deep in that cavern underground; where the dreams and the feet of those ancient still linger and tread. I know this, yet, I have no earthly way to prove it. That horrible presence! When I am left alone at night, it comes back, takes control of my body, and uses it to influence others.

     Whoever you are, you must believe me. This letter is my last chance to explain what happened before it is all lost forever. I swear to you that I am telling the truth. You must listen! Miles below the earth there is a tomb. In it is something… old. I could never say where exactly this tomb is—but this dark place lies deep underground, far below the vast unnaturally domed hills of Dartmoor, somewhere north of Princetown, perhaps even near Black Dog. That is as much as I can recall.

     For I did not find it myself.

     I was given a map to find it. It was a tip-off from a dark-eyed stranger in the local tavern three weeks gone that sent me to that awful tomb. I was in the twilight days of a rather uneventful archaeological dig in northern Devon and had decided to spend my last night in the area by myself and smoke the last of my opium. The loss of my wife had hit me rather hard, to be frank, and I’d dealt with it as any man would’ve. I was squatting in the corner of the dimly-lit tavern alone, stoned out of my mind, and contemplating the meaning of it all when, suddenly, a stranger appeared. The dark of his shadow crawled across the table as he approached me. A brooding and strange man. I looked up from my novel.

     He was a tall gentleman with a thin frame and gaunt features. He wore a low-rimmed cowboy hat with a pheasant’s feather sticking out of the rim. All that I could make out of the man’s face was the gnarled pointed chin covered in a thick black beard. The attire he was wearing proclaimed him to be homeless, but he spoke like a true scholar. The hooded stranger had sat himself down opposite me in the meager tavern, offered to buy me an ale, asked me if I was an archaeologist; then proceeded to tell the most vivid tale of a seldom-talked-about tomb that supposedly held a primordial entity. “An ancient spirit of great knowledge and decadence,” he said with a grin. “The first one. The Pale Man. He can shape universes like clay.”

      I smirked dismissively, but then he told me all about it. The stranger was a grand recounter and had me clinging to his every word like I was a child being told some bedtime story. It was the most interesting thing I had ever heard anyone say during my whole tenure down in that perpetually drizzly and gloomy part of England.  In retrospect, I guess I was lonely and it was pleasant to have someone take my mind off of things. Since my wife had passed I hadn’t been myself. Every day without her seemed only to solidify the emptiness of loss.

     After we chatted joyfully for most of the night, the stranger then produced a map and gifted it to me. Thin wiry fingers the colour of dirt pushed it across the table towards me. He wryly commented that supposedly that’s where the hallowed chamber lies and maybe I should see if it does indeed exist. And I did. What a fool I was.

     The map annotated a small section of rugged Dartmoor. It appeared to have been hand-drawn and, being a man of relative erudition myself, I could see that it was of no archaeological significance. The stranger then left with a graceful bow and I scoffed with chagrin at his departure. I soon stuffed the map into my blazer pocket and had promptly forgotten all about it.

     It was only the day before I was due to travel back to Leicester from Plymouth when I’d probed into my blazer in search of my matches and had pulled the map from my pocket instead that I realised it was still there. I’d pulled it out of its pit and held it in my palm, along with all the other crumpled tenants, and I looked at it curiously and something stirred within me. Perhaps something of significance may come of this trip after all, I thought brazenly. With that, I’d changed plans and set off.

     I had packed a daypack and set off from Okehampton early the next morning. The sky was a beautiful twilight blue with streaks of purple and the air cool and wet. There was no reason to be alarmed at this point. I started hiking over the moors alone, following the crude directions on the map down across the moors, and eventually came down into a steep damp valley. It was all laden with thorns and nettles and I had to scrabble through them all like a rodent. It took most of the morning until I came to the base of that valley where the map’s directions ceased. And, there, I found it. There, next to a small trickling stream, was a slope of scree and large boulders all piled up together to create an arch. In the middle of that arch was a hole. It couldn’t have been more than two feet wide.

     I stood before the small blackness at the side of the slope and wondered if I’d made a mistake somewhere along the way? But, after checking the map several times over, I realised I must have been in the right place. After much time deliberating, I edged closer to it and tried to peer in but saw only blackness. Feeling strangely uneasy at the sight and the sudden unexplainable draught coming up from the hole, my archaeological mind activated nonetheless, and I guess I couldn’t resist a further inspection. After a pause, I knelt to the hole and held my hand out to it cautiously. The cool wind blowing up from the blackness tickled the hairs on my hand. That’s unusual. The shaft must be very deep indeed to create that amount of draw, I thought.

     Then I reached in and took a hand full of the dirt from the floor. I examined its geology and was immediately stunned. It appeared to contain pumice, ironstone, sand, and remnants of shellfish; all of which were impossible that far above sea level. It was as if these minerals had been dredged up and excavated from the shaft below. How did all this come up here?

     Then, the strangest thing happened. As I held the debris and dust of the old world in my hand, I could have sworn I’d heard a voice coming from down there in that darkness. A howl that seemed to emanate up from the earth, trying to beckon me closer. It almost sounded like a trapped woman down there.

     “Hello?” I’d called out, staring into it, but was met with no response. Feeling suitable curious, I proceeded to then shuffle into the tunnel’s gravelly and damp throat and see if I could hear it again. I’d only put my upper body into the hole, my legs were still outside, but it was enough it seemed. I would trade all my earthly possessions to change this decision now. Going into that hole was the biggest mistake of my entire life.

     “Hello?” I asked again and thought I’d heard it clearer this time. It sounded sounded like my wife’s voice now. She’d died a year previously and I mourned her every day. Without thinking, I moved in a little bit more. Could she really be down there?

     “Jonathan? Is that you?” Her ethereal voice echoed up from the gaping hole in the earth.

     “Evelyn? Is that you?” I cried out, moving deeper into the hole.

      What came next was a blur. When I crawled in headfirst, the scree and sand below me suddenly gave way like an avalanche at my presence and I was sent hurling downward into the crevasse face first.

     “No!” I screamed. I tried to brace myself against the walls, but it was too late. I slid down the tunnel with my palms outstretched in front, trying to stop it, screaming as I did, but it was no use. It was as if I was surfing down a river of pebbles. Stones and dirt flew up into my face and I’d smacked my head on the roof of the shaft a few times as I hurtled down the tunnel. By the time the landslide had slowed, I knew I was already very far underground. This was confirmed when I turned and could not see the light of the entrance behind me anymore. The first level of the nightmare had just begun.

     I laid there in the tunnel on my stomach, in pain, and sighed. I could feel all the cuts and slices across my palms and face. Blood seeped down into my eyes from somewhere in my hairline. Everything hurt and I just wanted to get out. But it was impossible to turn around nor crawl back up feet first. My only choice was to continue and try and find a cubbyhole to turn around in. I heaved my hand into my pocket and lit a candle and held it outstretched. What in God’s name have I just done?

     Then I started wearily crawling down further, dragging my battered body down into the depths. The tunnel was unfathomable. Each time I thought I was coming to a dead-end, it just kept on going, endlessly unfurling blackness before me; yet still no cubby hole to turn around in. I crawled and crawled. Each lurch forward only served to remind me that I was only heading down further to doom, not upward towards my salvation. It was then that I began to truly panic. The air was thick and earthy and it felt like I was breathing in sand. What was at the end of this interminable tunnel? What created it?

     Then, after an indeterminate amount of time, scrabbling through the bitter darkness, snagging myself against rocks and outcrops as I did, I eventually fell out of the shaft without warning and came into a large domed room. I crashed onto the floor with a thud. My head smacked against something cold and hard. And I laid there on the wet rough floor and groaned. After a pause, I rose blearily to face a new level of the nightmare. That’s when, after standing upright for the first time in hours, I saw it. In the centre of that room, there was a sarcophagus, vaguely illuminated by a single white light above. My mouth dropped. The light was beaming from a small fissure in the ceiling and onto it like a great dark tableau.

     “Good lord…” I whispered to myself as my eyes fell upon it. “What in the name of…?”

     I stood there completely awestruck in the chamber of the tomb and gazed around at its majesty. It was a grand and dark hall with black stone walls and a low bearing ceiling of inky veined midnight-blue granite. I could barely even see the edges of it, only the ceiling and the coffin were visible in the stygian gloom. Everything else was only purest blackness.

     The whole cave smelt like freshly-turned compost and fetid lake water. I lite another candle and held a handkerchief to my nose as I edged forward to the coffin to examine it. The coffin was a huge scalene triangle of ebony stone that sat in the centre of the cavernous crypt. The triangle was surmounted with graphite shards that all pointed up in rows of serrated teeth on some great demon. The construction of the thing was unlike anything I had seen in all of my studies. It was not      Egyptian, certainly not Roman, nor what it Viking. The thing did not bear the same hallmarks as any of those cultures. I came to the side of it and rested my hand lightly on its lid. Around the sarcophagus were burnished dark jars containing a fetid black liquid that smelt truly vile; like rotten meat.

     “The stranger was right…” I said as I wiped the dust off the top of it. At first, I was excited about discovering such a monumental find. But as I looked closer, the feeling was soon replaced by creeping dread.

     I held the candle up to the side of it and ran my fingers across the embossed images and shuddered. Along the rim of the coffin were esoteric carvings, hieroglyphics, and other depictions of demonic entities upward reaching to its lid—none of which I could understand. There were four-armed humanoids with bulging eyes, Trilobites with fireballs in their stomachs, and great floating squid-like entities carrying mammals and laying them down on the rocks. I gulped involuntarily as the icy chill of the cave gnawed at my exposed skin. They all appeared to be reptilian in their aspects, yet preternaturally fish-like. It was beyond being even prehistoric. I took a single step back and absorbed the scene, trying not to allow my imagination and inferences of the place to run away to implausible explanations. 

     The prospect of the find utterly terrified me. Is this a dream? Is my mind really seeing this? Or am I still stoned?

     But it must’ve been. Everything was so particular and apparent. I could smell the air. I could feel the course rock with my hands. I had not expected to find anything, yet there it was. The coffin was imbued with dreadful themes of the macabre and it defied any known period. This is something different, something primal; something alien? I thought to myself.

Whatever this tomb was, it had known the architecture and possibly adoration of a not yet known race of primal beings, all born when the world was young and the seas swirled high over the lands. A species of sapient anomalocaris. And that terrified me. My heart pounded in my chest. Judging by the stratum of rock and how far down I'd descended, I guessed that the crypt's age was somehow from the early Palaeozoic period, back when the earth’s continents were mere infants and were born together as one.

     This is far too old for any human burial. Far too old for anything human, I dared to think, taking panicked steps back away from the coffin. I stood motionless for what seemed like hours, looking up and around at the chamber, trying to work out exactly what this place was. All I knew was that it was morbidly old. It was as if I could still hear the primordial chanting of those unseen unknown beings emanating through the rocks. Everything I thought I’d known about our history was wrong. This is not right. None of this makes any sense…

     I began exploring the edges of the tomb wearily, taking each step slow over the jagged floor. The candle in my hand probed into the darkness all around, emitting only a small sphere of amber light in front of me. Soon, I then found myself standing before a sheer slab of black granite opposite the dreadful coffin. It was a mural, and what was on it was utterly horrifying. I almost fell to my knees at the sight. No known words could describe the alien entities exhibited there, for all manner of human aspects and depictions were purged entirely. There were more fish-like reptiles depicted and they were shown to be Gods. They showed scenes of indescribable butchery, genocide, of death. Horrifically-sized crabs feasting on what looked like early species of man. Land-dwelling squids pulling apart dinosaurs. Tentacles constructing foliage against a backdrop of a stark volcanic land.

     Oh God… we’re not the first…

     It was then I decided to get out. Any notion of documenting the monumental find was quickly quashed by unassailable fear. The tomb was unbearably cold and the terror combined with it had made a mockery of my fortitude. All I wanted to do now was escape. I turned and panted and clutched out into the sheer blackness, desperately trying to find the passage back out, away from the awful infernum.

     “No, no, no, no, no. Please, God,” I huffed and coughed. But I could not find the exit. Escape was not possible. I searched and searched but could not pin the little tunnel that had brought me down into the tomb. I desperately clawed at the walls and tossed away small boulders as I did. I soon began to sob.

     “Oh, God, please! Let me out of here,” I cursed into the widening silence, more to myself than anything. “I don’t want this. Let me escape!”

     But, there, from the blackness at my back, something answered. I heard something that sounded like a didgeridoo playing. A short roll of sound that soon vanished into the silence once more. A yelp of sheer dread escaped my mouth and       I almost dropped the candle. I snapped back and peered into the inky dark.

     “Who’s there?” I shouted and my voice cracked. “Evelyn?”

     There was no reply. I heard nothing save for the faint sounds of dripping cave water all around me. But, I had heard the sound as clear as the winds.

     “Hello?” I asked, the tension throbbing in my head now. “I have a gun!” I lied.

     Then, from somewhere ahead, between the stagnant dripping of the cave water, I thought I could hear a laboured croaking, like an old man struggling to breathe, sucking in deep musky breaths from the damp air all around.

     “Is someone there?” I asked once more. But still, there was no response.

     And then I heard it. “Jonathan? You came for me,” Evelyn said.

     I crept forward in the direction of where that sickening ill breathing was coming from, half expecting to see some ghoulish emaciated figure come crawling out of the darkness, hands outstretched in desperation. That was when I saw something else instead. Something was at the end of the room. It loomed out of the tenebrous dark towards me. I gasped and screamed once more as it came into view.

     “Jesus!” I screamed.

     Facing me head-on, was a stone statue of a tall pale humanoid figure. It looked like a sort of grotesque gargoyle squatting there in the shadows. I wheezed sharply once more as I was finally able to penetrate the darkness and look upon it fully.

     “The Pale Man…” I whispered softly.

     The effulgence from the candle danced across its curved masonry aspects. The effigy was sitting on top of a pile of decaying skulls, bones, and broken pots. I could not tell if they belonged to humans or not. The thing sitting above them all had four atrophied arms, two of which were clasped together in silent prayer; the other two stretched upwards to the ceiling of the chamber. My heart leapt into my throat and I sucked in a long hard gulp of terror at the sheer sight of it. The effigy was wet and covered in fungus and mould. The walls of the tomb around it sloped downward and back impossibly, headlong into pitch-black dread, the abyss of death itself. Then, it spoke.

     “Come closer, let me see ye,” it snarled in a low metallic voice now. It wasn’t Evelyn’s voice anymore, and it didn’t say it aloud. I heard it in my mind. The dizzying reverberation of its voice echoed throughout my skull and burned in the centre of my brain.

     “How do you know my language?” I asked, whimpering, standing before it like a child. All the while, the darkness seemed to draw nearer behind me, as if clutching up from the corners of the forlorn tomb with wide-open talons of shadows. Everything grew dimmer. The candle began to flicker in my grasp.

     “I know everything. I AM ETERNAL!” It growled and the echo of its timbre voice made my ears ring. “I was here when there was only darkness, and I shall be here when there is only darkness once more. I live here. I have always lived hereee...”

     The vibration of its voice in my brain caused the most painful spasming headache I have ever experienced. My will was not mine to command. I stood prostrate before it. “What are you?”

     “I am the first one. The benevolent one. Banished here to this mouldering tomb by the Old Ones. They have imprisoned my mind in these stone walls.”

     “Why? Why were you imprisoned here?”

     “I created life without their consent. I created this world,” it said. “And for my deeds, the Old Ones took everything from me. This mouldering tomb has been my prison for aeons. You must open the coffin. You muuuust releaaaase meee…!”

     I turned over my shoulder to see that coffin still there bathed in the beam of light.

     “No… I cannot,” I said, turning back to the effigy.

     The effigy chuckled. “Observe the works of aeons past below me. They all refused. Now they shall suffer forever. I am benevolent. I shall let you leave if you do…”

I sighed and looked at the floor. It was furnished in millennia’s worth of crumbled bones. It was clear the thing was not benevolent.

     “No, I will not,” I said meekly. “Please, let me leave.”

     The thing laughed and it echoed in my body. “I can create whatever I want. I could create a utopia for all species if you would but release me from my bondage. I could bring her back.”

     “Evelyn?”

     “I see your pain. You miss her every day. The smoke and wine do little to silence her screams in your mind, doesn’t it?”

     “I miss her more every day.”

     “Release me and I will give her back to you,” It said and I seemed to lock eyes with it, yet it had no eyes.

     “I loved her… But, I cannot release you.”

     “You will release me,” the thing seemed to chuckle.

     My head swam and a thick painful pulsing began to manifest behind my eyes. My whole body quivered with agony. Its presence was trying to corrupt me. My hands shook as I clutched at my temples. My brain burned like a pit of white coals.

     “I cannot,” I sobbed, staring up into its hollow eye sockets. Its great pale domed skull almost glowing like a phosphorescent egg, silent, unmoving. My whole body was trembling in anguish now.

     “Do it, or I will reave your soul and tear it to DUST!”

     “No,” I tried to say defiantly, but the pain was taking everything from me. “Oh God,” I said as I fell to my knees as the agony jolted throughout my entire body like wet fire.

     “ReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeReleaseme,” the voice then began looping. Words tumbled over each other like a torrent of sound in my mind. It was maddening.

     “Stop this!” I screamed, clawing at my head. It was throbbing now. I buried my skull into my arms on the floor and began weeping. The thing above me seemed to be smirking now, seemingly relishing in my anguish.

     “ReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeReleaseme!” It said, rising into a crescendo.

     My ears pulsed and the pressure inside my skull made me feel as if my head was about to explode. It felt like my entire body was on fire and frozen at the same time. I screamed and screamed. I wanted nothing more than to die.

     “ReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeRELEASEMEEEEE!!!”

     “Please! Stop this!” I bellowed as I scrapped my nails deep into the sides of my head. “Please? Please! I’m begging you!”

     “ReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeReleasemeReleaseme.”

     My whole body went into a seizure. “No! I will not!”

     “Then you will suffer like this… FOREVER!”

     I quivered in pain at its feet. I do not know how long for.

     “Do it and I shall bring her back for you…”

     To whoever is reading this still… Please forgive me. I resisted for as long as I could. But it hurt so much. I just wanted to see her again. Soon, it was like my mind was commandeered completely. I could not hold out any longer. As if on auto-pilot, I stood up from the damp floor and shakily glided towards the coffin.

I should’ve smashed my head against a rock or cast myself down further into the blackness! I should’ve taken my own life with a blade rather than what I done next. Forgive me…

     My footsteps towards that sickening ancient triangle were slow and serene. It had me. I couldn’t escape it without yielding. My mind screamed at me that must not open it and I should just accept my death. But the thought of going back to the pain was unbearable for me, the thought of never seeing her again tormented my soul. Without even thinking, I reached into my backpack and produced the crowbar. A single tear rolled down my face. My hands shook as I reached for the lid of the coffin, and I felt the chill in my bones. I had to do it.

     The crowbar pried its way into the gap. The sarcophagus screeched when I separated the lid from the coffin. It slid off to the side and a sulphuric-smelling vapour rose up from the opening like a bonfire. Wafts of ancient dust spewed out from the yawning blackness within and in an instant, I knew I had made an even worse mistake than refusing. The damp air descended languidly all around me, laden with primal particles that had seldom felt any other air for aeons. I felt sick and nauseous all of a sudden. The voice from below was as clear as thunder to me.

     “Aaaaaat laaaaaaaaast!” The alien voice hissed from the pit of the coffin.

     I reeled back in utter horror. The crowbar clanged on the stone floor at my feet. All that was old and mystical was awake once more. All that once was—would now be again. And I’d released it.

     “Once I have infected every living thing, I shall plunge this world into inescapable twilight!” The voice echoed in my head. “You shall never see the sun again. No one will. It shall set forever over you all. The twilight lands are nigh.”

     There, in the dark, I reluctantly peered over the rim of the coffin and faced down into complete indescribable horror. His presence was impossibly glaring back at me from the pit of that endless infernum. Down there, in that swirling mass of fathomless evil, the vampires of all the millions of years past reached up with him to embrace me as one of their own. They rushed up. My face went wide with terror.

     “You will be my slave forever. Your flesh is mine. Your body is my vessel,” the voice growled to me.

     I do not remember what happened after that. Only that everything went black. I lost consciousness and sunk into something abyssal. Smothering darkness. The unending void. I do not know how long for, but it felt like an eternity. Horrific dreams. Rolling waves of infinity.

     Then I awoke in this jacket.

     I still do not know how I escaped that awful chasm of despair. Perhaps I didn’t. Maybe I am merely imagining myself writing this? Maybe I never left? You think me a madman? I must be…

     I hope I am.

     How delightfully ignorant we must be to truly believe that we are the first to tame nature and cultivate a civilisation born entirely separate from the governance of the earth. What I saw down there numbed me to my very core. We are not the first. Those beings of old laid their scaled feet across the lands long before any of us. The history of the universe unfurls itself backwards infinitely. Humanity is a grain of sand on an endless beach. There are others! There are entities that straddle the outer realms that we may never spy on with our mortal eyes, yet they are there, they have always been there.    He moves betwixt the shadows. I have seen Him. The Pale Man.

     He has plans for this universe and it starts with me. I went in search of discovery and found only a nightmare.

     No one believes me, but you must. With all my might, I implore you! Take this letter and tell everyone. Tonight they shall come for me, and my knowledge of what lies beyond this realm's outer reaches shall die with my body. Perhaps that is what they want? But there is a great malevolence on the precipice of release. It has always been here. He has great designs for this world. When I die, it shall be released. You must take my body back to the tomb and bury it in that dreadful coffin along with it, so I alone may bear the burden of that evil entity, before it is too late! May the gods have mercy upon me for the evil which I have unsheathed unto this world.

     I love you, Evelyn. I only hope now that I can join you in death…