Lovecraftian Thing a Day No.364: Yog-Sothoth Is The Key And The Gate

Last night I was taken again - on this occasion to a new (and frankly unexpected) destination. However, as we came toward the end of our flight, I was surprised to discern a number of features amongst the landscape below with which I was familiar: at one point, we coasted across the night sky above the fine city of Providence; later we followed for a period what I believe to be the Pawtuxet River, before setting down next to an abandoned and dilapidated farmhouse in a remote, rustic area.  Thence I was carried through a trap door in the floor of that building down a series of stone steps into a complex maze of basements and sub-basements of antique construction - many of which were filled with items and equipment which I readily identified as typically requisite to the alchemical arts. Eventually we came to a roughly-hewn tunnel that led further downward into the darkness.

After a period of traversing this tunnel, we finally happened upon a wide, cavernous room, in the centre of which sat a squat altar. Upon the altar rested a small bronze effigy of grotesque and disturbing design. Surrounding the altar were a number of large ceramic jars, grimy with age. On the wall behind the alter was inscribed the following formula:

Y'AI 'NG'NGAH

YOG-SOTHOTH

H'EE-L'GEB

F'AI THRODOG

UAAAH

This I recognised of old: an incantation notorious amongst alchemists and cabalists, and which supposedly calls upon the power of dread Yog-Sothoth, Who is both Key and Gate to the Outside, and Who possesses the power to bend time and space to Its will. It is rumoured that this formula has been used by certain necromancers to abjure the remains of the dead, so that they might once more be forced to take on the semblance of the living; but who, it is said, may take on other, less fathomable forms should their remains be incomplete.

Then that monstrous emissary - who over the past nights had been responsible for exposing me to these abject zones of horror - raised its horribly buzzing, droning voice, and began chanting the formula.

Grayish-blue smoke billowed from out those ceramic jars arranged around the central altar. Through that smoke I witnessed that which should not have been witnessed, as those who had once been clothed in solid flesh were given shape yet again. But the remains from which they had been called up must have been incomplete, so that rather than observing the natural, sane contours of the human form I instead discerned a blasphemous coterie of unwholesome abominations. Yet before the madness of this scene drove me to a state of oblivious insensibility, that impossible sodality of half-finished things - which were even something less than a bizarre charicature of twisted human morphology - began chanting in unison: 'Yog-Sothoth Neblod Zin! Yog-Sothoth Neblod Zin!'

On awakening fully-clothed upon my bed this morning, the shutters of my open window clattering in the chill breeze, I discovered that once again a momento of the previous night's frightful sojourn had been left for my deliberation: the shockingly incongruous bronze effigy which had sat, incomprehending, on the altar beneath Pawtuxet - that graven image wherein a vague approximation of the bulbous and misshapen semblance of that Outer Monstrousity which is veiled beneath the name of 'Yog-Sothoth' has been made incarnate.