ELDRITCH HORRORS: DARK TALES

The Bibliophile

by Henrik Sandbeck Harksen

(Excerpt pp. 121-123, Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales)

And so it happened that not long after I was back in the small, book-embedded chamber, poring over the tome, the lamp light still on—hence I didn’t notice when the night entered the world again, and everything outside the light’s protective circle faded from the normal vision of a human’s eye.

I think my mind has deliberately left out most of the details of what the dreams, or nightmares, or visions, whatever, showed me. For that, if nothing else, I am grateful. Suffice it to say that in the course of the next weeks my craving for unlocking the key to the secrets I unquestioningly believed and knew to be in the book grew stronger and stronger, and less and less time was spent outside the sacred room; it was only interrupted by the most necessary and stimulating lectures at the University. Food I ate nothing of, and, when milk and the sole bottle of whisky was gone, soon water was my only, irregular means of physical sustenance.

Turning the pages of the book, my brows together in a frustrated frown, trying to find out just the tiniest hint at a way to decipher any meaning, and even doing a Google search on the Internet a few times—to no avail, the shimmering sheets extended my vision and mind. Pushing through the obscurity of my drowsiness, a vast landscape emerged, drifting past my mind and opening vistas into unnumbered worlds throughout the universe and beyond. I found myself seeping into incorporeality again. Amazed, I looked at all the colours around my being—some of them entering me; passing through me. Some of them even took on a semi-solid form, but before I could perceive what the forms looked like, they expanded and merged with the surrounding world. Crossing barriers of time and space and reality and unreality they were gone. As was I, I suddenly noticed. A sinking feeling, a twisting of perception and senses, and I was somewhere else entirely.

Strangely, I found myself floating in a haze of weird colours; colours I couldn’t comprehend. I was in a small room with wooden panels, and a man stood before me. Behind him were shadows of a strange apparatus, as if taken out of a mad alchemist’s laboratory.

“Do you know what that is?” the oddly shaped man whispered, his face a grotesque mask of intense insanity, pointing at the mystical shimmering, “that is ultra-violet.” He chuckled oddly at my disbelieving surprise. “You thought ultra-violet was invisible, and so it is—but you can see that and many other invisible things now.”

I then saw that before his feet lay a book, and it was as if some foul energy was intermingling with him, absorbing him! I recognised all too well the book . . .

Seeing where I was looking, he laughed out loud. “Oh, don’t you worry. Everything has a price, you know—”

Before he could continue his face contorted in mounting pain, and I saw that he was beginning to burn; literally beginning to burn! He began gurgling incomprehensible words, his searing eyes never leaving me. As I understood the meaning of some of the words, they filled me with terror.

(...)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Paul S. Kemp:
One Thousand and One Words

W. H. Pugmire
Recompense of Sorrow (brand-new Sesqua Valley!)

Ron Shiflet
Out of the Frying Pan

Don Webb
The Jest of Yig

Gary Hill
Rest in Peace, Jeremy Randall

Simon Bleaken
Ashanna's Whispers

Leigh Blackmore
The Return of Zoth-Ommog

Thomas Strømsholt
Devouring Darkness Hovers

Benjamin Szumskyj
A Haunting From Beyond

Linda Navroth
The Specimen

Dan Clore
The Dying God

Blake Wilson
The Door to Nowhere

Paul Mackintosh
The People of the Island

Henrik Sandbeck Harksen
The Bibliophile