ELDRITCH HORRORS: DARK TALES

The Dying God

by Dan Clore

(Excerpt pp. 204-206, Eldritch Horrors: Dark Tales)

When the oceans had shifted and that continent lay under the waves, the seeds of culture had taken plant in the human brain. The Elder Race found it easy enough to create a place for itself, for they invented a number of cults devoted to their worship and preservation. They must remain secret, for the number of men greatly outnumbered the Elder Ones, and they knew (from bitter experience) that such a half-formed civilization easily turns against a fully sentient species, which it inevitably perceives as unknown and threatening. So the Elder Ones had each founded a cult, composed solely of the members of humanity which had received some portion of its psyche as an agent of apotheosis—for they were to men as gods—and those who could, with suitable rationalizations, be convinced to act in their interest.

Each individual of the Elder Race found itself, as at multitudinous times in the past, obliged to divide the various portions of its psyche among a group of individual bodies, composed of twelve women, who would continually recreate their living community, and a single man, who must be renewed on a regular basis, lest that portion of the Elder One die and so destroy the whole. So had they formed in prehistoric times cults composed of these members alone, and these groups had survived to the present day in a secrecy broken only infrequently.

Just such a group, it appears from notes in diary format left in the possession of the Asshton-Urquharts, had the young Linwood stumbled upon. If one can trust the surmises of the Anti-Cult Lucidity Organization, then the thirteen members of that order consider themselves but a single entity, known as Nigguratl-Yig; a name further divisible into Yig, the Father of Serpents, a symbolic conception of the solarphallic principle, and Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, representing the female principle incarnated in a multi-bodied, self-reproducing and chthonic form.

Such a cult they find unrepresented in any of their voluminous files on those groups which they have succeeded in infiltrating. But they point to disturbing similarities between this sect and several guarded descriptions in the questionable Bridewall edition (1845) of Fvindvuf von Junzt’s Die Unaussprechlichen Kulten, which differs greatly from the Düsseldorf edition (1839) which is known as The Black Book, and which gives the author’s christian name as Friedrich Wilhelm; they report thinly veiled hints in the essay on Gilles de Retz in Guy-Ernest Clouët’s Les Abîmes; while they find oblique references in that forbidden fountain of uncleanliness, Lord Weÿrdgliffe’s Gothick Romance, The Unspeakable. The latter finding particularly disturbs Linwood’s parents, for they know that he had thoroughly studied the work of his obscure ancestor, however unpleasant others might find its perusal, and that those elements which most shocked others he often found appealing. Nonetheless, the Anti-Cult Lucidity Organization maintains that all of these sources, however much the analogies may seem to illuminate the case, have been thoroughly discredited; and in this they compare them with the philosophy of a Theosophical splinter group known as the Chaosophists, who worship the blind, idiot creator-god Demogorgon, and who claim to have made telepathic contact with a reptilian conclave of immortal Lemurian hierophants, who remain entombed in the innermost sanctums of their temples at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Their speculations about cosmic cycles and grotesque, unheard-of races display great similarity indeed to those of the unnamed sect which Lin had joined; but they have received thorough debunkings in the Skeptical Inquisitor, and no one can now take them seriously.

From a few letters addressed to scientific periodicals, posed in the hypothetical mode, one may infer that the Elder Ones have maintained a close connection with each other, forming in essence a worldwide network of cults, and that they have made great strides in their goal of creating bodies which can reproduce their minds. Indeed, it seems that certain recent discoveries—among them the third form of life, the Archaea—when connected in quite novel ways, render the effect virtually inevitable. Toward such a goal has the Elder Race directed human science.

(...)

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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