The patient was gasping for breath, desperately clinging to life as we rushed the only remaining ventilator to his bedside. As we struggled to flip her over and intubate them, they began hallucinating, babbling on about the monster hovering above them, eating their soul. “Can’t you see it! Don’t you see it?!” she screamed. Once the tube was inserted, and we stabilized her breathing, she stopped struggling as much. The lack of oxygen to her brain had to have caused a terrifying hallucination. Strange that the last five patients who died claimed to have seen something similar before they died. The nurse held her hand, and told her she’d be alright now. We all knew that her chances were slim, 1 in 3 at best..
These strange creatures roam the places between dimensions, invisible and incorporeal to beings grounding in a single reality most of the time. They are parasites, feeding on the vapors emitted by slowly dying beings and their radiating pulses of fear and dread. Some say they are a servitor race of the Great Old One Aboth, Source of Uncleanliness, but what their true relationship is to that entity, if anything, remains a mystery.
There was this funny legend that Old Lady Margaret still lives in Margaret Mansion. Silly, isn’t it? Margaret Mansion is called so because it was built by a Lady Margaret two centuries ago! But we were bored so we went to check it out.
What we met there might have been Old Lady Margaret. A skeleton laying on the dining room floor. It might have been dead for two centuries—but it was alive! As we argued what to do about it, lots of women—Ladies Margaret?—appeared around the corpse. Some were quite young, some terribly old, some probably dead. I screamed and ran. The others…I don’t know, I was too frightened to look back. Will you help me find them?
When you look at time from a higher dimension, human life really is a line. Creating a Time-Frozen loops a tiny part of that line into a never-ending circle, but from the point of view of Yog-Sothoth and other forces invoked to create this being, the potential remaining part of the line already exists. Sometimes those forces make a separate entity out of this loose thread—a Time-Tangled.
If ever I should to that moment say – “So beautiful thou art, a little longer stay!” Then I’ll care not who me with chains may bind; Nor if I and my little all to ruin be consign’d; Then let the church-bell toll my funeral knell!
J. W. Goethe, Faust, English by John Wynniatt Grant
Human life goes in a line from birth to death but changing this trajectory is no problem for cosmic powers. Spells invoking the power of Yog-Sothoth to change the course of one’s life were known throughout history and used for many purposes.
One of the most radical effects such spells can cause is the creation of a Time-Frozen. They’re a person trapped in a personal time loop, never aging and constantly reliving one brief moment while the rest of the world moves forward. Some people use this spell on themselves to preserve a moment of perfect fulfilment; others, to escape a terminal disease or some other looming misfortune. Others yet are cursed by someone else.
Master adapters, not every shoggoth attacks to kill. Very rarely, a shoggoth incapacitates a victim, then enters its new host through the mouth, nose, and other orifices. Why the shoggoth does this is unknown. Perhaps it is to explore beyond its accustomed haunts with a degree of anonymity. Whatever the reason, the shoggoth enters the body, seeping into the interstices between the host’s own internal matter, down to the cellular level. Upon coming back to its senses, the host retains its general health, going about its normal business, often unaware that its body has become home to a new tenant. For its part, the shoggoth acclimates to its new environs, absorbing awareness of its host’s bodily and cognitive functions, studying everything the host sees, hears, senses, and does. With its impressive imitative abilities, the shoggoth can soon recreate with near perfection just about any sound that has been heard by the host body.
It was late on Christmas Eve, and I was staying in the town of Cowbridge, when the strange knock came to the quaint rented house. When I answered it a chill wind filled the air around me, colder than the December night air. There it was, a phantom in a white shroud with a horse skull head, glowing eyes, and a crown of holly on its head. Before I could scream or shut the door it started singing. My Welsh was terrible, after so many years living in New York, but I could just make out the lyrics…it wanted something to eat? It wanted to come in? Then I remembered tales my grandmother told me…this could be only one thing…a Mari Lwyd! When it was finished singing, I licked my lips, cleared my throat, and started to sing an answer….
In the ancient days procuring sacrifices for the Old Gods was a fairly simple matter. One need only capture them from the neighboring tribe, or perhaps purchase them from a slave trader.
With the dawning of the Victorian era the world became infested with ridiculous notions such as the rights of man, watched over by police forces, and filled up with busybodies who care about the “downtrodden”. Things became much more difficult.
Enter Elliot Montgomery, Esquire, doss house owner, entrepreneur, and procurer of sacrificial victims for any number of diabolical conspiracies.
She was beautiful, unbelievable, dark brown skin and long, long, flowing back hair. Her every move wafted the sweetness of jasmine flowers. She wore long, flowing, silk skirts and blouse, all hand-dyed in brilliant colors. They swirled at her slightest turn, dancing with her hair. Her eyes were a deep brown, and when she fixed them onto you, she called you, silently, into some ancient and wondrous place.
–Jonathon Oliver: weary, desperate, and half-mad defender of Humanity.
As an avatar of the Elder god Isis, Jasmine occasionally appears to investigators of the Cthulhu Mythos and provides them a small degree of support and comfort.
“Bring on the multitudes….to nourish the Artist, stretch their skin upon an easel to give him canvas, crush their bones into a paste that he might mold them. Let them die, and by their miserable deaths become the clay within his hands that he might form…”
– Maxwell Brock, Beat poet
Creating a piece of artwork can be like a particularly difficult birth; more so if the act of creation has resulted in the birth of an iconodule, a foul and hateful entity that lives within a piece of artwork. Iconodules are born of frustration, despair, and envy, fused with human creativity, imagination, and desire to create: a tempestuously fertile ground. Iconodules have been found in sculpture, in paintings, even in the written word, corrupting first the work they hide within, then their creator, and finally others within their sphere of influence.
I wasn’t sure what I expected when we got the proximity alarm, best not to, anyway. Guy was human in appearance, though, so that was promising. Ticking through my scope options, he showed a normal heat signature. Wearing a suit, damned expensive and tailored at that–not what I’ve seen before on someone trying to break into an Above Top Secret facility–one of our places that don’t exist. It wasn’t Abe, but his was the card the gate had declined. He’d been dark 24 hours, so all his protocols were suspended. Not sure how this asshole got in. Then I noticed the glint of glass in the light. He was holding some kind of big glass jug. What the hell? He moved like Abe, kind of, walked a little the same. He passed right around the spot on the asphalt that would trip you if you weren’t careful, had that weird little OCD thing Abe did with his left hand. Then he deviated course, just a bit, toward the supervisory area. Abe wouldn’t go that way, none of us grunts ever would. He knelt, set down the glass jug, took off the lid, and removed a pair of sunglasses I hadn’t noticed before. The fucking jar was full of eyeballs–over a dozen–floating in a liquid. The guy in the fancy suit tilted back his head, reached up, and plucked out one of his eyes, just like a god-damned contact lens. He dropped it in the jug, and started fishing out another. No more of that shit. I fed the eyeball soup two, quick, whisper kisses from my weapon, I think at least one went through the bastard’s hand. The jar exploded and the guy froze. Then I dropped him with a round through the head. Just for good measure, I put another six in him, just ‘cause. Damn, this job is fucked up.
–Cpl. Grant Rice, Facility Security, Location CC-Z-29.
We finally got to what we assumed was the mi-go lab. We were all half nuts by now, just seeing the damn things. Frickin’ wasp, lobster, crab, whatever the hell. Getting electrocuted and half frozen to death by their weaponry didn’t help much either. We’d already lost the Professor, and our team Wizard. The rest of us were pretty beat up too. Getting in was easy enough. A door just slid open, silently, as we walked up. The thing didn’t look like much at first: a big, black, metal cylinder with some sort of rollers, supported by braces attached to the sides. They had varying amounts of some sort of fabric on them, like rolled carpet. The place smelled bad, like chemicals and ham. On top of the thing was a brain in a glass jar, typical. The cylinder had metal beds attached all around, covered with glass domes. They looked kind of like escape pods, or cryo-crypts. Then I got close to one. Inside, there was a woman, nude, floating in some sort of pink-tinged solution. She had a mask over her face, like a scuba mask. It had a tube, and a bunch of wires running into the cylinder. But that wasn’t the bad part. Extending from the cylinder into the tank, was a little mechanical arm, with a tiny tip that could rotate in any direction. The arm was running that tip all over her body, damn fast, pulling off her skin in strands, like yarn, which was being drawn into the cylinder. Most of her muscle tissue was exposed, and completely intact. She didn’t react at all, and I think that was the worst part of it. I snapped, I know what that feels like. I leveled Suzy up and started firing. One already under the hammer, five more in the chamber. The stuff sure wasn’t glass, at first I didn’t even scratch it. Twelve gauge at point blank range. Then, I got some chips, then little cracks. On my last round the thing blew open. The fluid was slick, I fell when it got under my feet. She started convulsing, the mask pulled off, the breathing tube drew out of her throat, a bunch of wires jerked out of her skull, and she landed right on me. She was screaming, screaming like I never heard anyone do before, and still thrashing around like hell. I tried to get hold of her, keep her from hurting herself, but the damn pink stuff was so slick, and it got all over me as well. It tasted salty. She finally calmed down. Her head drooped onto my shoulder, and my gaze fixed on her dead eyes.
—Charles McPherson, Captain, United States Marine Corps (Ret.), Security and Combat Specialist for the Manchester Foundation.
