The Horror of the War

The Sljpnjr Cult

As noted, two... shall we say coincidences? conspired to trap me in a reverie of worry over the true nature of Private Haleman's wartime affairs, long after I had met and left behind the man and his psychiatric case-file. The second took place a mere three months after I spoke with Clarence Pelewski, while I was, admittedly not by happenstance, as it were following up my discourse with her in the course of my own research. It was under these circumstances that I treated a patient whose own filial legacy would reverberate unwholesomely in my subconscious.

Lawrence Faring had been suffering acutely distracting nightmares as a student at Miskatonic University. As per my tenured obligations I did indeed run a free clinic there, for students and even staff; so perhaps I should have expected, given the Arkham school's esoteric reputation for graduating maniacs and intellectual delinquents of all stripes, how such sessions would play out as, they did, in this very case.

But the nightmares Faring would not speak of. Instead he proceeded to unload on my own conscience that which had long harrowed his, a memoir of his brother's.

Born with half-Yiddish names, the Faring twins had separated long before the Nazi war. So it was only Chaim ben Joses who had been taken by the German murderers. He and his kind---the rare clan of black Jews in Germany at the time---were sent not to the death camps in Poland, but shuffled into the German wilderness under quiet guard, by men half of whom displayed no SS or SD or even SA insignia. "Even their swastikas were strange: eight-armed, like some black starfish or octopus," Faring recited.

After a few days of riding---not in vehicles but on horses or perhaps mules in garish, inexplicable robes---the troop reached a castle curiously out of sight from the thin woods on the mountainscape below it. The dozens of black Jews, in chains, had been led to holding cells in which they were fed with vaguely---almost metaphysically rather than aesthetically---noxious food and drink until such time as one or another disappeared.

A week after this, Chaim ben Joses found himself awaking while being chained anew and led with the others of his kind who had not vanished, led that is deep under the castle. Where classical enough German architecture had prevailed, suggestive only of Kantian centuries past, above, as the men and women had gone below, a creeping appearance of not just pre-Renaissance but almost prehuman antiquity had emerged amidst the spandrels and curiously useless windows surrounding the procession. Finally, veritably uncivilized---or somehow alternatively civilized---designs manifested in the stonework.

What light the marchers had garnered from set torches gave way to unwholesome fungi vibrant with eldritch luminescence of their own. Now there were no walls or ceiling or floor but cavernry, dropping off into a sheer hole around which both the fungi and the surface-dwellers gathered.

Abruptly, two of those horses or mules, having been drawn with the men and women into the deep, had their ostentatious raiment pulled from their backs.

What Faring's brother had seen he would only refer to by the word "Sljpnjr." But I, acquainted with all manner of mythologies, knew this to be the name of the ancient Germanic-Scandinavian god Woden's steed. With legs unnatural in number for a horse, this companion to divinity had been in some unusual scriptural variants prophesied to perish in the hideous twilight of deity, along with its master. Now I assumed first that the Germans must have found or invented such a mutation, and in fact nothing Faring said further of the ur-horses indicated a genetic affinity with, say, the flea-anemones.

For the next things that had happened, Faring informed me, had been that each of the horse-things were pushed into the hole, screeching in a horribly equine way as they not only plummeted towards a demise they knew to fear with at least atavistic, animal loathings, but struck outcroppings in the rock of the hole, shattering bones and scraping skin off. And finally all this cacophony faded away, so that Chaim ben Joses and the other poor Jews before the pit were left to notice that no sound ever came of the horse-things hitting the bottom of the hole.

Tittering in German, one of the queerly-marked captors pulled out a book. It was made of black parchment, with obscenely red ink staining it.

I confess that had I jolted or otherwise been shaken with fright at what Faring told me next, our session would have perhaps come to an end, for the thing of it was that this man did not fully or truly believe what his brother had written of some matters. Yet rather than offer him solace in the possibility that the objects of his recent nightmares were merely that, possibilities, for me to have explained my alarm to Faring at that point would rather have served to push him into a realm of more utter horror. The same realm in which I dwell.

As if I could compare graphs of the symbols side by side in front of me, I listened to Chaim ben Joses, through his sibling, describe the largest of those on the cover of the book in the fungi-darkness, and saw that it corresponded one-to-one with the tattoo I had had direct occasion to constantly consider while interrogating Private Haleman.