The Marvelous Misadventures of Walter Guilman: The Witch House

Drums & Flutes

Walter emerged from the door onto the boat deck, after returning to his mother's cabin to retrieve his book. One might consider this to be an irrational choice, being he was on a ship that was slowly slipping below the Atlantic, but the priorities of ten year-olds tend to defy explanation. "Walter!" he heard a voice call. "Hurry!" He turned and saw his mother some distance away. She was standing next to one of the last lifeboats, and it was just about to launch. Walter began moving as quickly as he could toward them, but stopped when he felt something in his arms. He looked and saw he was carrying a massive tome, with silver hinges as binding and a clasp on the front cover keeping it closed. The covers were made if wood, and wrapped in a strange black, leather like material, with a large, oval-shaped violet crystal in the very center of the front cover surrounded by a silver motif. "Walter, please!" he heard his mother call. "We don't have time for this!" No. This was all wrong. The book he had taken from their cabin was small enough to fit in one hand, not so large Walter had to carry it under his arm. He ran his fingers carefully over the cover. "I'm not on the Titanic." he thought to himself. "This is a dream..." He carefully began to undo the lock. "WALTER!" his mother yelled. Her voice was filled with a mixture of anger and terror. Walter opened the clasp just as the maddening screams of the other passengers grew suddenly louder, and the sound of snapping cables and bending iron filled his ears. As the first of the ship's great funnels began to fall, Walter opened the book's front cover. When he did so the ship, its's screaming passengers, and his mother all disappeared, and the ocean was replaced with a strange violet abyss. The sound of snapping cables morphed into the muffled beating of vile drums, and the stretching iron was replaced with the monotonous whine of accursed flutes. And Walter wasn't ten anymore, he was twenty-one. As he floated through the violet abyss, he saw things that no human could ever hope to accurately describe. He saw objects fly about at random, who's shape defied definition. He saw masses of shapes that resembled cyclopian cities, and others that looked like amorphous masses of tentacles or bubbles. He even saw a true Tesseract, with all its sides at right angles to each other as it flew into and out of view. Then suddenly, he was out of the violet abyss, and found himself flying high above the Earth. Floating near him was a massive pentagonal shaft that was divided into five sections. The object had five spokes emerging from the gaps between the sections that were angled so they extended beyond the front of the object, and pointed toward the Earth. On the side of the object, was what seemed to be a banner of sorts,  representing a pentacle with a large, beady red eye in the very center. To Guilman, the object seemed dead. But suddenly, the segments began to glow a dark red in sequence, going from back to front. When the light reached the front of the object,  the tips of the spokes flashed a brilliant scarlet, and a massive beam of red light shot out toward some point in the middle of the ocean. When he saw this, a word came into Guilman's head from nowhere. "Tekele'li..." Guilman thought to himself. Then he was back in the violet abyss. He saw the tesseracts dance in front of him as he flew through the void, and the cities and blobs floated slowly about him. Suddenly he was back out again, but this time he saw the sun as nothing more than a bright star, and in front of him floated an object that could only be described as a mechanical planet. It was surrounded by clouds of strange ships flying in and out of orifices all over the surface, and three massive black towers protruded from the planet's equator, and loomed thousands of miles above the surface, along with millions of other smaller protrusions all over the metal world, making it appear to be hairy. Another word came into Guilman's mind at that point. "Yuggoth..." he thought. Then he was back in the violet abyss, but it had changed. No shapes danced around the void, and there were no large masses anywhere around him. He was simply flying toward a yawning blackess that was almost maddening to look at. As he grew closer so it, words he had never heard before butted their awful heads in his memory. R'lyeh, Deep Ones, Mi-Go, Cthulhu, Shub-Niggurath, Yog-Sothoth, Yith, all these completely alien words flooded his mind. Soon, he seemed to begin speaking a language in his head that he had never heard of before. "S'uhn n'ghft ep k'yarnak Shub-Niggurath vulgtlagln nnn'fhalma ee vulgtm, athgnyth ron h'nw ilyaa h'li'hee ch' wgah'n, geb h'llll orr'e nafluaaah Tsathoggua shogg y-nw. Nagotha sgn'wahl uh'e nog gof'nn lloigog lw'nafh f'shagg mg cwgah'n, wgah'n lw'nafh nogoth uaaah!" he shouted in his mind. But as he got closer to the darkness, one word... No... One name rose above the rest, and it was a name that almost drove Guilman mad to think about. And as he drew closer to the center of chaos, and the drums and flutes grew deafening, it became the only thing he could concentrate on. The only thing his mind could bring him. The only thing he knew.

AZATHOTH