Amber Philips and the Outer Gods, Ch1

The hospital room seemed almost radiant, a red Boston sunset cascading through the window. Light seemed to flow down the numerous tubes snaked through the patient’s face, feeding a body and a mind which had long rotted into uselessness. The doctors had given this patient up a long time ago, saying that the man would never wake up, that terminating his life would be a mercy at this point. It was only by the whims of an old friend that the juices kept flowing, an old friend who had wanted the man around just long enough to deliver a final send-off.

In a small chair across from the bed, the old friend fidgeted restlessly, preoccupied with the way the sunrise glinted off his leather shoes. Watching so many compatriots die over the years had numbed him to the misery of termination, shaped him into someone wholly disaffected by the tragedies of the world. For some inscrutable reason, this final visitation felt different, leaving the visitor with an unsteadiness he assumed had long since forsaken him.

Even after all of his years as a leader, after all his years of studying how people respond and behave, after all his years of deciphering that byzantine code of social interactions and figuring out with great difficulty what a proper conversation should look like, Richard Pickman still struggled to say the right things in a time like this.

“To be honest, I’ve never really understood your thought process, friend” Pickman began. The rest began to flow naturally. “Granted, you made more intuitive sense to me than any other humans, but there was always something inscrutable in how you lived your life, something that even after ninety-six years of knowing you I have yet to comprehend. You’ve travelled to worlds untouched even by modern science, borne witness to miracles and secrets which would break the minds of any other man, consorted with entities which rightfully view the greatest peaks of your civilization as less than cosmic dust. You’ve gazed into the endless abyss of reality and emerged as quite possibly the only one to turn away with your mind intact.”

“And yet, in spite what you could have done with this knowledge, the triumphs and ruins you might have guided this feeble speck of a planet to, you decided to cast it all away, to live out a mundane life in this city of yours and earn a living through your odd little stories. I haven’t read any in a long time, but the details seem to line up with what I’ve seen in my life, the warped geometries and proportions, the horrible sights and sounds which you couldn’t find a way to put down on paper. Somehow, you even managed to capture that feeling of dread which permeates my every engagement with...with whatever those things are. More than a century of study and in no tongue have I yet found a word to summarize them. Maybe you were just as mad as the rest of those fools who plunged in searching for power or knowledge or whatever, and those stories of yours were an outlet for the madness.”

“Of course, if you somehow told me in these final few minutes that you really were mad the whole time, I would have little reason to doubt it. These last fifty years were not kind to you, friend, what with your seeing enemies in every shadow and panicking over how your beloved America was threatened by immigrants or blacks or whatever other threat you and your associates concocted. There were so many times when I wanted to step in and recalibrate your sense of place in the universe, maybe shield one or two innocent people from all the pointless hate you were spewing. Maybe I should have stepped in when things turned violent, when your reactionary agenda started gaining ground. But I respected your wishes up to the end right here. You wanted nothing more to do with abominations like me, way back in 1940, told me that the darker secrets of the universe simply aren’t worth dredging up and that you’d prefer to forget all about the things you’ve seen. I’ve kept my promise up until now, the day I knew would be our last meeting.”

“Don’t worry, Randolph, I won’t eat you tomorrow. I’ve got all the corpses I’ll ever need stored away, and something about you has etched enough respect in my heart not to touch your remains.”

Slowly, Pickman righted himself, signalling to the nurse outside that it was time to pull the plug. Adjusting his hood to conceal his less human features, the old ghoul began for the exit, his keen ears unwelcomely collecting the incessant chatter of the waiting rooms. He tried his hardest to tune them out as he fiddled with his phone to get a ride, but every word inevitably seeped in, continuing to ring on in his brain for minutes, hours, maybe even years if he was unlucky. On most days, this would be only a mild inconvenience, but today just so happened to be a troublesome day, a day where one of those random mutterings of a random individual would put Pickman on edge and send him into a panic.

A day when some random girl spouts out Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn with an articulation too impeccable for it to be an accident.