Guest House by the Sea

Prologue:

It is doubtful that you will believe the tale that I am about to recount to you. I myself still question it's veracity, constantly thinking, hoping, wishing that it were nothing more than some terrible nightmare or mad hallucination, the mere product of a deranged imagination.

No matter how I try to wish it away or rationalize it, I know it must be the truth, for there is no human mind warped and depraved enough to concieve it, and the whole experience is so strongly engraved in my mind with the chisel of primal terror that it remains the most vivid and real encounter I can recall. I can but hope that the eldritch thing has forgotten me and turned to seek another victim, and avoid ever returning to that ghastly sea-side village

Story Begins:

-------------------------------I-----------------------------------------
I was cold, wet, and tired as I walked into that accursed seaside village of Stormdoun. It was half past my 19th birthday and I had recently fallen upon hard times. I had lost both my boyfriend and my employment not a fortnight ago in one terrible cyclone of misfortune.

From then on things had taken a turn for the worst. Unable to find employment and emotionally distraught, my meager resources soon dwindled away. Thus it was that I now found myself walking with the very loose clothes on my back, a few tasteless energy bars, $7.49 in small bills and loose change, a star-shaped five-pointed pendant given to me by my father, and an old bath towel slung over my shoulder as my sole possessions.

I had first heard of the place from a worker in a relatively close soup kitchen. As closing time was near I had asked him if there was any other place where I might find a place to spend the night that didn't require rent. He started to say something but then shook his head and told me that there was nowhere near worth my time or trouble.

When I persisted, he reluctantly told me the location of a seaside fishing village by the name of Stormdoun might have a place although he had rarely been there. He slightly convulsed when he spoke the name, as if he had coughed up something bitter. Most of the regulars refused to talk about the subject but winced and turned when I so much as mentioned it, as if the very word was painful as a slap to the face. The mere thought of the area seemed to arouse great fear and disturbance in them, but I thought it merely some feud-driven enmity or local superstition and paid it no heed.

As I drew near the Stormdoun I felt a mounting sense of foreboding. The buildings were tall and old, leaning in as if huddling together for warmth, many slanted so that their edges met blotting out the sky. Decaying and unkempt, they mostly seemed to be unoccupied, but from a few strange sounds came, noises too primal and warped to be human but too complex and purposeful to be some beast.

There were unpleasant hints of breathing, slow, labored breathing, gurgling half-choked breathing, unnatural wheezing and gasping, all too soft to really be connected to a source or identified but too loud and numerous to ignore. There were also splashings and grotesque moans, but above all there was always the slow insidious trickle of running water.

Every so often I could have sworn I spied an ugly, wide-eyed face staring out at me, some flicker of movement in a window, but when I turned it was gone.

Never did I encounter so much as a stray cat or dog, not even a rat could be found. I was disturbed by the lack of any visible plant life, save stray dune grass or scummy algae in the numerous depressions in the road where water collected. I had as of yet not encountered a single person.

Worst of all was the odor. The whole place had a strong, fish smell, but not merely a wafting odor as one would catch passing by a market. No, this was a bold, aggressive, omnipresent smell. It filled the air and surrounded you like a pack of wolves; it struck you in the face like a lead pipe; it choked you like a pair of vapory claws around your throat. This was a stench to pull you to your knees and make you crawl. This foul reek was like a physical presence on your body.

I began to see why the locals back at the soup kitchen had dreaded this place so.

----------------------------------II------------------------------------------

As I walked the dank and loathsome streets, I noticed the rain clouds gathering as a reminder that I needed to find shelter soon. I felt nauseated at the thought of entering one of those gruesome buildings, and looked around for some more recent installment.

I fortunately happened upon some convenience store branch with a friendly-looking cashier. After talking with him, I found out that he simply came to work here and lived several towns away. He didn't himself have any place I could spend the night, but there was one possibility.

The town had a week-long local festival, during which tradition required them to accept any wandering travelers as guests and provide them food and lodging. He commented that he personally avoided such hospitality due to the frightening appearance and uncanny demeanor of the locals, and the fishy smell that filled the town. Unfortunately I did not have the luxury of choice.

As I knocked on the door, I cringed with anticipation. Even before I saw my hosts to be I shuddered, and when I actually saw then I could not help but gasp in fear. The person greeting me at the door was as ghoulish sight, to the point where I could have been no more repulsed had I seen a human skeleton. The man was bald, his skin with a slight green tint. There were some wrinkles on the sides of his cheeks, but worst of all was that vacant and inhuman stare. As those cold eyes gazed upon me, I felt the unyielding grip of that stare, felt that those cold horrid eyes never blinked or wept.

The person seemed accustomed to the response or apathetic to it. He mumbled a few words, and showed me to a small guest cottage. I went into the place eagerly, although to my disappointment it was little better than the streets. The house was drafty and unheated, and very damp. Two feeble candles provided the only light in the entire building. The twisted and flickering shadows they made only added to my unease, yet somehow I could not bear the thought of sleeping in total darkness.

I was quickly brought awake from troubled sleep by some sound I could not discern. I lay rigid, my senses heightened by fear and attuned to every noise nearby. There was an odd splash and trickling, as of something breaking the waters surface, and the sloshing of some form trudging through shallow waters. This was followed by a sickening irregular slapping sound of something large and wet lurching or hopping across the sandy shore.

I listened, riveted with horror, until I was sure dread the thing was right outside my window, some nameless visage leering down upon me, yet so petrified with fear was I that I could not bear to turn around. There was a chill wind from the cracks in the house and the candles flickered and went out. A strong taste of salt came into the air, along with a hot metallic odor. I felt my skin prickle, growing uncomfortably warm but shivering convulsively.
My mind shrank and shuddered as I felt a horrible sensation of some greater arcane force reaching into my feeble form and shaping me to better fit its incomprehensible will. Waves of alternating numbness and nauseatingly intense sensation wracked my body.

I found myself nearly falling off the bed, retching violently in dry heaves, not just the ones of standard nausea, but as if my entire digestive track had taken on a rebellious life of its own. After an unknowable amount of gasping and choking, my body slowly relaxed into a more easy state. The candles crackled with sparks and glowed bright purple, then slowly faded down to the familiar weak orange and yellow. Although the experience was over, I felt somehow different, as if all these occult phenomena where but the side effects of some thaumaturgy that had subtly yet irrevocably changed me.
My sleep was not a comfortable or easy one.


----------------------------------III-----------------------------------------
I rose from bed in the morning quickly despite the aches and lingering fatigue. I tried to dismiss the previous night's events as nothing more than troubled dreams. As I crawled from the resting space, I felt the searing jolt of intense hunger pangs. Remembering the register-boy's advice about locals offering both shelter and food, I staggered into the kitchen in hopes of finding something to make a breakfast of.

It appeared that my hosts had prepared a morning meal for me. Not surprisingly, it consisted primarily of fish, and marginally cooked fish at that. Starvation was no stranger to me due to my unfortunate economic status, and I had consumed less wholesome things to sate my hunger, so I eagerly dug in.

I tore through the icthyoid flesh with feral voracity, barely pausing to chew or taste. No morsel was too small to evade my lips, and I feasted on as if in a primal trance. My higher thought seemed subdued, giving leave to the basic instinctual need to devour full rein over my behavior. Only when I stopped, having fully demolished the ample portions before me, did full logic set in, accompanied by the sharp pain of a stomach long-shrunken from lack of food being rapidly and massively distended.

Bloated and weakened by the fruits of my gluttony, I slipped into another uneasy sleep. I dreamt of myself adorned in strange ceremonial gold and vestments. I lay upon the shore without thought or care, bloated and passive as a beached whale. One great and terrible creature rose from the sea, and I knew I must submit to it, allow myself to fulfill its primal yearning as it stared down with hungry eyes, my tender flesh but a means to satisfy its ends...


--------------------------------IV------------------------------
The next few days in my stay there were more or less repeats of the first. I rose and fed throughout the day with ravenous hunger. After eating my fill I went into a gluttony induced sleep, where I cycled through the same strange and discomforting dream.

Over time I noticed I had begun to gain weight. My thighs were thicker, my chest larger, my rear was soft enough to allow for comfortable sitting and my stomach was more soft than its usual emaciated flatness. For a long time I had been thin from necessity, barely obtaining enough food to live much least to store away in my bodily tissues. I had come to appreciate some of the intrinsic values of caloric storage, and the idea of an internal emergency ration combined with the general sense of anatomical completeness gave me some comfort.

As it continued however, contentment changed to alarm. I was growing far more rapidly than was normal and eating more than I thought was humanly possibly. The week was barely half-finished and already I had nearly doubled in weight, my fat potbelly protruding out of the once-baggy shirt to rest on my plump thighs, ample breast becoming more of a bother, butt spreading out to fill in the chair as I sat and arms rounded and thickened to the point where my sleeves were torn.

For some inexplicable reason all these changes always drew my unwilling mind back to the strange events that occurred during the first night, as if these metabolic abnormalities were somehow tied to the disturbing and unnatural occurrences in that ghastly night.

My feelings were not at all put at ease by my host, who was always looking over my growing figure with a calculating and practiced eye, like a judge at a county fair or butcher examining livestock.

I did what I could to amuse myself during the intervening time. At first I made some attempt to read the volumes resting in the shelves. To my displeasure, most of them were in some foreign language. Of the few that were in English, they tended to be cryptic, arcane, and disturbing. One particular volume had me struggling between horror and morbid fascination, what seemed to be a religious text called "The Secret Lore of Dagon".

This text had strange preaching and hymns seemingly focused on some sea-creature named Dagon, and to a lesser extent his mate, Hydra, all the while hinting at some greater, dormant power to which both paid homage beneath the waves. There was also a large amount of idolization of beings called the Deep Ones, apparently Dagon's servitors and kin.

The lore had various incantations for improving the catch of a fisherman, summoning forth and even controlling these dark creatures and others. It held promises of freedom from pursuit of death by age and of bountiful catches. As it got into the details of sacrificial rites and the ways to pay thanks and homage to the deep ones, I could bear to read no longer, and closed and tossed away the book in disgust as if it were some horrid stinging and shapeless oceanic monstrosity.

As I turned over that last section, I felt a shudder run through me. Some gruesome sense of premonitory foreboding permeated through my body, as I tried to keep my imagination from conjuring up terrifying scenarios in which my situation and the ritualistic offerings described could intersect.


-------------------------------------V----------------------------------
I rapidly exhausted the contents of the few sources of literature I could find that were both in a familiar language and provoked no horror in my mind. I eventually abandoned such sources of entertainment and settled into a gluttonous, cow-like bliss, content to merely lounge about stuffing my fat, ever-expanding stomach to its limits. With each passing hour I became more sedentary and less mobile, until this vicious cycle was interrupted by my host.

It seemed that being accepted as a guest during this local celebration was not all binging and sleeping. In exchange for the food and lodging, I was to perform a role in the ceremony that culminated this festival. I listened passively as I was told how to approach the dock, how to perform the dance, and other such details. I was so dazed and groggy that I barely resisted as he all but ripped off my current garb so I could be adorned with the ceremonial robes and ornaments, only making a slight contrary tug and shielding my vast bosom with my arms in a reflexive attempt to protect my decency.

As he led my out to the shore my primary feelings were mild annoyance at this unaccustomed amount of activity, with only the slightest and remote corner of my mind worrying about what these events might lead to and thinking of the grisly rituals I head learned of in that accursed book.
There were many other townspeople there, most possessing the same repulsive countenance, unevenly balding heads, gill-like neck folds, greenish skin discoloration, wide mouths with a tendency to gape, and those fish-like, unblinking eyes. Some of the younger ones showed little sign of it, but there was some hint of that shared appearance in all of them.

I joined in mindlessly with all the others, singing along in the deep droning chants and songs that rumbled with the flow of the tide, a paean to dark things that dwelt in depths which no human being has ever probed. As we spoke and sang, some of the leaders began to chant, and hurled golden relics into the ocean. When they did, some change seemed to pass over the waters. The color shifted and darkened, the waves became more jagged and frothy, and the sea itself seemed ready to give a shout of anger or pain. Slowly, several greenish specks began to present themselves.

At first they could have been mistaken for fish, or even stray pieces of weed-covered-driftwood. Gradually as they advanced inland, they began to rise out of the water. They now seemed more frog-like and gaping, some unholy union of fish, amphibian, and reptile. They eyes gazed straight through vestment and flesh to the very naked mind within. The gaping jaws appeared to greedily suck in both air and water, exchanging fresh vapors and fluid for the unwholesomeness it exhaled. The shoulders were finned arcs of power, they arms dreadful sickles terminating in claws made for rending and tearing still-struggling flesh.

The things were vaguely humanoid in shape, yet it seems too mundane a word for them. While the shape matched, it was more like some dreadful shark or malformed coelacanth had been chiseled or molded into a streamlined shape which just happened to bear the bipedal gait and limbs that allowed one to confuse it with a man in poor lighting and great distance. Normally I would have been terrified, but some strange mind fog calmed me. I had spent so much time in uneasy half-sleep and dozing waking hours that sleep and consciousness, dream and reality had become mixed and confused.

As they one by one ascended from the waters, they each took to a side, making way for some greater being. The one that appeared to be the leader rose, truly a figure of monstrous proportions. It had to be at the very least 12 feet in height, for its lesser brethren at their full heights did not even reach the hunched horror's hips. It turned and looked at me. It stared with a horrible predatory glare in those cold, unblinking eyes.

That stare communicated all I needed to know. It showed the unrelenting, cruel, hunger, the singular desire for my soft, tender, unprotected flesh. Even in the dream-like euphoria I shuddered, reflexively clutching at the five-pointed star nestled in my bosom.

The moment I grasped it, all thought returned. The dreamy haze left like morning mists dispelled by a gale. Once I was fully aware of my situation, all the vestiges of obedience and confused submission were shredded, and my only thought was to flee this accursed place.

As I turned to escape, I struggled, tearing off the layers of heavy ornaments and ceremonial decorations that weighed me down, violently shaking and feeling as if my flabby flesh was about to fly off my rapidly moving but clumsily impaired body. Even if I had been still small and sleek, there was no chance of escape. The things had me cornered. The moment I had screamed and turned away they formed a pair of concentric circles of sea-borne monsters and demented townsfolk to block my path.


--------------------------------VI----------------------------------
To this day I know not what primal urge or otherworldly force motivated me to act as I did, I can only thank all things in heavens or hells that I listened to it. Reaching into my vestments, I drew forth the star pendant which I counted as one of my few possessions and held it up to them. I spoke words in a tongue I did not know, shouting them in a powerful and commanding voice, mind reeling in and out of phase as some other part of my being took over.

I literally poured heart and soul into those words, feeling as the very ethereal essence siphoned out of me and worked into whatever power this talisman held over the horrors confronting me. They cringed and gave inhuman shrieks of anger and pain, withdrawing from its presence. This brief break in their line gave me a slim chance, and I took it without hesitation.

I ran. I ran long and far. I ran till my lungs where heaving, my skin drenched in sweat, my trunk-like legs rubbed raw and bloody by the constant friction and my feet all but numb with the constant gallop. When I could not run, I walked. When I could not walk, I staggered. When I could not stagger, I crawled. I know not how long it was that I fled in panic and fear, maybe hours, maybe days, and maybe years.

I only know I was grateful when I returned to less dark lands; the violent urban areas and xenophobic small towns seemed tame and friendly by comparison. I wished above all, more than for life itself, that I would never again return to those ghastly docks and horror-haunted streets, that I would never again reside in the guest house by the sea. No more would I serve the bestial desires of that dreadful abomination, that thing that longed for me, not as its meal, but its mate.


THE END