The Temple of Dagon

work in progress, open to criticism

Chapter 2

And so continued my proper European education, augmented with drugs and alcohol. When I did do work, and I did, it was only with the greatest reluctance, but to the “best” of my ability. I won’t lie though, seventy per cent of the work was terribly boring busy work. Just the kind I hate.

English Literature in particular was uninteresting when the lecturer droned on about various novels and plays. It’s almost as if they were trying to bore us to death.

‘Austin defies convention in her novel Emma. There is no story because she doesn’t want to distract the reader from the plot. Now I make the distinction between story and plot because…” our lecturer babbled on and on. I took out my doodle notebook and opened it to the first clean page. The Elder Things of H.P. Lovecrafts At The Mountains of Madness immediately came to mind. I began to draw. Terrible, monstrous things they were. More vegetable than animal, like overgrown green carrot but with wings, tentacles and a starfish for a head and pipes or flutes for speaking to each other. But I knew a way to make them chill out, and I drew them passing around a blunt made of the finest White Widow refer straight out of Columbia or Nicaragua, or one of those countries, around the camp fire. Then I added a few Shoggoths playing the fiddle, banjo and tub-bass into the scene for good measure, and to add a little bit of spice.

‘And that is why Elton is casting glances at Emma, because of her wealth. Very well then, have a good day.’ The lecturer concluded the class. Everyone stood, shoved their notebooks in their bags and put on their coats. I did the same, taking a little more care to ensure my masterpiece wasn’t damaged.

‘American literature always was better.’ I mumbled to myself.

Outside the wind was howling like the wolf, and the clouds were weeping a light, snowy rain. I shuttered remembering the weather from At The Mountains of Madness. The only thing missing from the air was that damnable sound of eldritch pipes shrieking across the air.

I screamed and ran when suddenly pipes filled the air and the rain turned to snow for just an instant. People around me stopped and stared, they must have thought I was a crazy, or a druggie. Something like that. I realized it was just bagpipes drifting over from a pub across the street. Damn Scotts, they’ll be the death of me yet, they nearly gave me a heart attack. None-the-less, my next class was an astronomy class of sorts and the current subject was other life throughout the cosmos, and I had no wish to learn of what star system the Elder Things could have crawled out of, so I decided to skip it and go back to my dorm to blaze.

God, it was freezing out. The fiercest, coldest wind I had ever experienced was blowing. The type that cuts you down to the bone in a matter of seconds, you know the type, I’m sure.

Thirty minutes later I was back in my dorm room. If there was on thing you could count on in my dorm was a blistering temperature. Normally I hated it, it was much to hot for my New England blood, today was the exception. My bones were still made of ice however, so I opted to take a nice, long hot shower because the festivities began. There’s no ill a hot shower can’t fix.

Twenty minutes later I was defrosted thoroughly and crash into my bed.
‘Blah.’ I groaned and sat up to crack the window a tad. I took out an empty IRN-BRU bottle, scissors, tape, tinfoil and an empty pen case to make a ghetto bong. Then let it set. I lay back on my bed, laptop on my chest. I pulled up an H.P. Lovecraft forum I frequented. No new posts.

The ghetto had set perfectly, air and water-tight. I filled the bottle with just enough water and proceeded to blaze. It was high quality weed, I think they called it “skunk”. Cheap too, only cost me twenty quid for an eighth.

Some time later, after coughing fits and a long monologue about Aleister Crowley, I picked up one of the hardcover editions of my vast collections of H.P. Lovecraft anthologies and opened it to At The Mountains of Madness, and began to read.

I flew over the Antarctic land, I saw the Mountains of Madness and I heard the wild piping emanating from the bastions of the summit. I saw the murals the Elder Things created, and I saw their statues, supremely crafted thousands of folds more magnificent than any crafted by human hands. Regrettably I saw what chased Professor Dyer and Danforth from the ruins of the Elder Things mountain top necropolis as if it stood right before me, a heaving, slobbish mess of cellulose and fat: the shoggoth.

Worst of all I saw what Danforth saw before his sanity was plucked from his very soul whilist fleeing from those Mountains of Madness via airplane over the Antarctic wastes, of which he couldn’t speak of to Professor Dyer, or anyone, except in disjointed, faltering hints. I felt his heartbeat escalate in terror from what he saw, and I knew what it was, the unspeakable. It was He Who Knows the Gate, He Who is the Gate, He Who is The Key and Guardian of the Gate, “the original, the eternal, the undying.” The extra dimensional Lord of Time in Past, Present and Future, Yog-Sothoth.

I put the book down and caught my breath. I had spent three hours reading that story – it was only one hundred and four pages long. The story was such an intense ride I was sweating and panting. Some music would help relax me. I sat up and went to my laptop on my desk and opened iTunes. Scrolling through to try and choose a song I clicked on Danny Boy as sung by Johnny Cash. I lay back down but couldn’t concentrate on the music, At The Mountains of Madness kept coming back into my head. Slowly I started to unconsciously improvise the lyrics, of course with a theme of At The Mountains of Madness.

“Oh Danforth boy
The pipes, the pipes are calling
From summit to summit and down the mountain side
Your sanities gone and your expeditions fallen
It’s you, it’s you, who must go and not hide
But come you back to the Mountains of Madness
To those mountains forlorn, and white with snow
I’ll be here in freezing shadow
Oh Danforth boy, oh Danforth boy, I own you so
But if you come and all the Elder Things are sleeping
And I am sleeping as sleeping I will may be
You come and find the place where I am resting
And you’ll then see your soul belongs to me
And I’ll know your soft tread near me
And then my home will richer, sweeter be
And you’ll draw close and whisper that you fear me
And I’ll rest in peace knowing your sanity belongs to me.”

I drifted off into sleep whispering this. My last thoughts that I remember being that I need a life, that I needed to eat some pussy, that I needed to get laid. I remember I used to love doing that.

I needed to stop living in a bizarre fantasy world soon or I’d be stuck in it forever.

You just had to throw the Danforth boy in there

I wrote Danforth Boy for this.

Enkil wrote:I wrote Danforth Boy for this.

Ya thats what I figured

this really sounds like something written by a college student with new-found freedom.. i'd kinda like to see chapter 1, just to get a sense of who this narrator is

You hit the nail on the round thing, JJ. Here's the first chapter.

Chapter 1

It was my first year of University and I was already starting to wish I went into the Marine Corps. Instead, I was in Scotland, getting a proper European education during the day and as high as Willie Nelson during the evening. I had always fancied myself an intellectual, or at least a pseudo-intellectual. Why? High school had been tremendously boring, I was taught nothing that I needed to know or would ever need to know in the future, and thus I engaged myself in private study ranging from archeology to cryptozooology.

And here I was, in University where I thought everything would be different, more stimulating, and for the most part it was, to an extent, but I found myself doing a lot of research on extraneous matter which truly interested me, and later at night smoking pot because I found myself without anything better to do.

If I had joined the Marines at least I wouldn’t have been bored. I’d have been off killing insurgents and terrorists and some God forsaken stretch of desert somewhere in Iraq or Afghanistan. There wouldn’t have been time for discontentment, only time for surviving, and killing, and sleeping and shitting.

‘That’s not the way things are though’ I muttered and sparked up another spliff. Inhaling, a wave of fresh attitude coursed through me. Sighing, I closed my eyes and realized that if I was in Iraq I’d probably be dead by now anyways, then again, I might also have been a hero – having saved my disabled squad from a battalion of Evil Soul stealing Arabs.

The bastards steal your soul through your eyes, so it was an easy fix to get rid of them. I launched two-dozen tear gas grenades into their battalion, strapped on a gas mask and plunged into their ranks without doubt or hesitation, using my K-Bar to chop out every last eye in the bunch. Poor bastards.

I opened my eyes, flipped open my laptop and played Carl Orff’s “O’ Fortuna,” closed my eyes again and relived the battle in slow motion.

I came up to the first Soul Sucker, who was doubled over and cough like a baby, grabbed him by the neck and quickly stabbed out his eyes. He cried in surprise, and then in my very hand melted into a gelatinous blob of black goop. It streamed through my hand like a viscous mix of sand and oil.

‘How fitting,’ I thought the Arab Soul Suckers would be made of sand and oil.’ I turned to go to work on the rest of the lot but was petrified in place.
‘What sort of witchcraft is this!’ This hadn’t happened before; it wasn’t supposed to be this way! I struggled to gain repossession of my limbs but to no avail. They closed in on me, hacking, coughing, wheezing and crying.

No! The biggest man of the battalion, a wholly mammoth of a man, pushed through the crowd, unphased by the tear gas now. Standing in front of me he threw his head back and howled in laughter, then spit in my eye. I returned the favor, hawking a massive lugie into his laughing, gapping mouth. He froze and anger boiled behind his cheeks. My legs still wouldn’t budge! Great time to stop working, jackasses. His hands moved to his hip, where a giant scimitar was fastened.

‘No!’ I screamed at him. He just laughed again and turned to his comrades.
‘Dirka dirka Muhammad jihad!’ He cried, receiving a cheer of the same chant from the throng. He turned to me and withdrew the scimitar. My God! It was the blade of Allah! A turning, convulsing blade of Allah’s ethereal spirit, with an ever-evolving surface displaying verses from the Quran, written in Arabic, and small hurricanes moving slowly across it.

‘You are a worthy soldier to die by the Hurricane Blade of Jihad.’ He said to me in English, ‘This is the blade forged by the Prophet Muhammad to slay the infidels who oppose the Mighty Allah. It has not been used in over thirteen centuries, consider it a privilege to die by it.’

‘Fuck Allah, fuck Muhammad and fuck the dirty camel he rode in on! It’s no privilege to die by a false God!’ I hissed. And with my last words my limbs regained partial control. An idea suddenly dawned on me, I bent down and quickly took off my right boot. As I stood up the mammoth was drawing the Hurricane Blade of Jihad over his head ready to strike my head in twain. He struck forward, the blade creating a small crescendo of visible sound waves about it. I ducked and rolled, stood up and struck him in the nose with the sole of my boot, the ultimate offense to Muslims everywhere. It rang out as if the boot hit a metal door. He reeked back in pain and dropped to his knees, it must have broken his nose. I took his momentary lapse of action as an opportunity to finish the battle and lunged towards the blade and smashed the soul of my boot into it, creating an even more thunderous ring of metal. It dissolved up to the hilt, and with it the rest of the Soul Suckers.

I knelt on the sand and put my boot back on, taking care to tie the laces back up to military regulations. I stood and another large metallic bang rang out across the sky, and a voice spoke to me.

‘Marius… Marius are you ok?’

‘Yes, God!’ I whispered, falling to my knees and bowing my head in respect.

‘Hah! God, that’s the first time I’ve been called that. Come on, get up, we’re going out to the pub.’

‘God… I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean, is the pub Heaven?’

God laughed, ‘Yea Marius, the bar is Heaven, now lets go…What the fuck are you listening to?’ My music snapped off suddenly. A breeze struck up around me in the desert and I was consumed by the sand.

‘God! What are you doing?’ I cried

‘Wake the fuck up Marius. We’re going to be late!’ I suddenly felt a harsh slap on the back of my head and my eyes snapped open. I was in my dorm room.

‘There you are.’ It was my friend Mark. ‘You coming?’ What a trip. I wiped my forehead with my sleeve, leaving a sweat stain.

‘Ehh, yea, let me just throw on my shoes.’

And out to the pub we went.