The Artifact II

II. Nightmares


I smile wickedly, admiring my bloody handiwork below me. My hand is warm and wet, dripping and red.
To say that the nightmares ever stopped would be a blatant lie. However, to say that they ceased being nightmares would be far more accurate, as one can only have nightmares when one is asleep and dreaming, locked in the relative safety of one’s own head. So while the nightmares technically ended, it was only because I could no longer view sleep as any form of release from consciousness. No, sleep was something I learned to do without, but regardless the terrors followed me, hounding even my waking mind until the faint light of reason was almost completely extinguished from my being.
I feel the dead man’s tendons slowly give way as I sever his hand from his arm. It’s not like he can use it now.
I began my internship at the Museum of Natural History inconspicuously enough, at the bottom rung on the scientific ladder. I hoped to one day become an archeologist, and the fact that I got to work with the great Dr. Jacob Crane was something I truly viewed as a gift. However, I had always been on the sensitive side, and all my co-workers in the Museum picked up on this. I was sent to work with the researchers instead of going into the field myself; a deal which I was all too happy to accept.
Bodies, rapidly cooling, arranged in a circle around me. There are ten of them. I do not remember killing them but I know I have; I feel a sick, gleeful pride for having done so, for doing something so forbidden.
My timid nature would have been reason enough to be comfortable staying in the labs, but my true motivation was fear. I had been having recurring nightmares of ancient, dark things, foul things that should never have been brought to the light; these dark thoughts were enough to scare me away from field work completely. The things I saw, the horrors I lived through each night; I felt as if actively participating in the field work, searching through dead relics from ancient times, would bring me ever closer to experiencing the haunting dreams that never let me be. I could picture it all, stumbling through ancient ruins to accidentally find that terrible Thing. I thought rigorous scientific testing and subtle, interesting breakthroughs would take my mind off the night terrors and eventually let me leave them behind as I focused on a new path. I was wrong.
Satisfied with my work, I put the knife in the center of the circle. I search through a satchel on the floor and pull out a large, black book.
I was very wrong.
A Book of Hunger.
For nearly a year I worked with the researchers on various finds: a cache of trilobites and ammonites from the Late Devonian, some parchment found in caves along the Dead Sea, and other fascinating studies. I was perfectly satisfied to leave my old goals of exploring temples and ruins behind for this new life, but it wasn’t long before the nightmares started.
I turn the Book of Hunger so that the spine is facing up, revealing a large mouth occupied with the gnashing of its many fangs. I hear a deep growling faintly in my mind, and I suddenly remember why the book would not open.
I had no idea what to make of It at first, but after Dr. Crane came back from that expedition a dark realization came to me. I became acutely aware of my own mortality in a way that is hard to describe. The nightmares were terrible, horrific scenes of ancient and black magic. In my dreams I speak and read words that I do not recognize, and yet I know what they mean. For many a night I watched myself do horrific things in the service of something I could never truly comprehend; a deity of sorts, but to call it a deity would mask the true terror that is the Thing. In my nightmares I was but one worshipper of a black cult hidden from sight in a time that was not our own. Every time I would appear standing in the center of a small, circular room with no windows and stone walls holding a knife, decently covered in blood. I would see ten bodies arranged in a circle all around me, but I wouldn’t feel scared or disgusted. Then, always I proceeded to initiate a foul, ancient ritual and call upon the Thing itself. In the dreams I always took a sick pride in the dark blasphemy I performed, enjoying every twisted step of the path. There was nothing I could do. In the morning I would be filled with nauseating repulsion and more than once had to run to the bathroom to keep my sheets clean.
It needs to feed.
The nightmares continued at a pace of two or three nights a week for about two months. I didn’t want to see a therapist for fear that she’d accuse me of being insane. Once I began having the nightmares every night I began going without sleep for as long as possible. I always had coffee brewing, and I often brought energy drinks to work. I did anything I could to avoid having to relive that horrible, twisted scene.
I grin and pat the side of the Book of Hunger reassuringly. It is rough like leather, yet distinctly oily to the touch. The growling I hear in my head is elevated to a grunt for a moment. It is getting impatient. A twinge of fear goes up my spine as I pick up the man’s hand and feed it into the gnashing mouth of the book. The growling slowly becomes replaced with a soft cooing and then nothing. I feel a brief feeling of gratitude to my father for his offering of flesh and flash a wan, taboo grim as the black, oily tentacles locking the covers together slowly unwind from each other and recede into the spine of the book.
I began to get edgy and nervous in the office due to my lack of sleep, but still the dreadful nightmares pervaded my thoughts. I was near the end of my rope and was beginning to think there was nothing I could do, but then Dr. Jacob Crane called the Museum with big news from his expedition.
He said he had stumbled upon something unprecedented and found truly ancient human activity perfectly preserved due to some form of circular, underground room. He briefly described the impressive structural qualities of the stone walls, made an amazing discovery due to their sheer age. I was gripped by fear like I had never known, but I would reach an even greater plateau of terror when he excitedly mentioned how he had found eleven bodies in the room, ten of which were arranged in a circle. His theory was that the one in the middle was a grave robber who had accidentally locked himself in some form of incredibly ancient family burial chamber.
Books of Hunger are full of blasphemous spells of decay and terror. When I open it, I feel a deep gratitude to my brothers in the cult who made this possible. It is a relic of sinister magic, imbued with the entropic energy of The Devourer and his dark hunger for order. To see every page, even only in passing towards the spell that is tonight’s destination, sears dark thoughts into my mind and rattles my very essence.
Everyone was stunned by his find of this monolithic mausoleum. I slipped away from the celebrating group to assure myself it was all a coincidence in an effort to maintain a failing grip on my sanity. I kept telling myself it couldn’t be real, that there was no way it was the same. It was just a terrible coincidence.
My thoughts are suddenly streamlined as I find the right page. There is no title, only a design of a massive black mouth adorned with spikes like a perverse crown on both the top and bottom and a disembodied eye floating in the void of the middle. I take a moment after I read the page to glance quickly around the room to check that the bodies are arranged correctly, and begin chanting the spell.
Roughly a week and a half of travel separated Dr. Crane from the Museum, and in that time I did not need a single drop of caffeine to stay awake. The fear was more than enough to keep me preoccupied, but still I would doze off now and then. When I did, the dreams were all the more vivid and horrific for having been away.
“AA SAH NA, AA SAH NA.”
“NO’AKTU, NO’AKTU.”
As Dr. Crane’s return drew ever closer I tried to do as much research as possible on the mysterious ritual of my nightmares and the bizarre phrase on which it seemed focused, half out of my desperate desire to prove it to be nothing more than a creation of my mind and half out of morbid curiosity.
A thin, hollow scraping noise begins to slowly increase in volume. Space and time begin to rip along a very small tear in the wall in front of me, and soon it grows wider. I immediately feel as if I am being watched.
I found nothing. There were no listings in our records or any of the libraries at our disposal of Books of Hunger, the cultist’s mysterious phrase, or any of the dark titles of that Thing.
It watches. The Black Gaze, the Eye of the Void, the Maw of Darkness.
I couldn’t even really describe what I saw, not completely anyway. It went against so many concepts I had held to be immutable that whenever I saw It in my nightmares It was always the most disconcerting part. The thought that my subconscious could concoct such a terrifying presence alarmed me enough already, but I only grew truly afraid after considering the implications of Crane’s discovery. Every morning I would remember Its piercing stare as if it was seeing through the dream and watching me instead.
The Mouth of the Devourer.
It seemed to me as if It was a faintly glowing eye, suspended somehow inside a large black chasm, however upon further progression into the dream the chasm was revealed to be a gaping mouth lined with fangs. There were protrusions of spikes all above and beneath the mouth, with terrible sickle-like curves to them, and the mouth connected at the end to a long, twirling string of filament-like tentacles cascading back into the oblivion behind the Thing like the optic nerves of some cosmic eyeball torn from its previous owner.
“Great No’Aktu, Watcher in the Shadows, please hear my call.” I cry out to the inconceivable thing on the other side of the cosmic window. I hear a grating hissing noise as I begin to shake, but I suddenly find a moment of clarity. It speaks to me in my own tongue now, but I hear it as a voice in my head.
Dr. Jacob Crane came back to the Museum of Natural History, and all interns were called in to help catalogue and analyze his huge find of artifacts.
‘What is it that you seek, simple one?’ It speaks in all voices as one. I can barely handle the mental strain. My knees buckle, but I fight to keep my composure lest I be overcome.
I came into work, hoping with all my heart that I could put my fears to rest. I sorted through a few hours’ worth of artifacts with my colleagues and had no problems, so I began to feel a bit more at ease.
“I seek the truth!” I proclaim strongly into the void. The eye in the darkness seems to rise a little at the edges, or maybe this is merely what I perceive It to do. It seems to relish my request for a moment.
With a more level head on my shoulders I began to appreciate how impressive of a find it really was. There was a large amount of decorative pieces and tools and each item proved to be consistently older than we expected. This was groundbreaking information. ‘Rewrite-some-history-books’ groundbreaking.
The room begins to spin and I fall to the ground. I black out for an undetermined amount of time. When I wake up the cosmic window is closed, the Thing and the Book of Hunger are gone, and my head is pounding. I see a small circular stone charm on the floor. It has two prominent spikes on either side, and has designs of fangs and hook-like tentacles, and in the center is the symbol of an eye within an eye. “It worked.” I mutter.
We were getting near the end. I began to feel uneasy again, figuring that that cursed stone object must be waiting at the bottom of a box somewhere.
The Thing that we can only call No’Aktu, the Eye of the Void, Mouth of the Devourer, has gifted me a portion of the Devourer’s great power that I may see the truth! I pick up the charm.
It was almost five o’clock, and we had just finished cataloging the last item and scheduling a few tests for the coming weeks. We were almost completely done for the day and had only a few tasks remaining. I felt immensely grateful to whatever divine mercy had spared me from having to face my nightmare as a reality, and thought on the uncanny nature of coincidences. Dr. Jacob Crane came into the back rooms after leaving earlier to check on our progress.
At that moment my mind becomes opened to the truth of the existence my family, my brothers, and humanity had come to know in the vault chambers, of what came before, of the darkness and the fire and the grand cosmic need for entropy, the divine orchestrator of destruction.
His face turned serious for a moment as he mentioned an artifact not intended for public display. He pulled a sterile baggie out of his chest pocket containing a small circular stone artifact roughly the size of a golf ball of a unique appearance due to a design of hook-like tentacles and clusters of fangs surrounding an eye within an eye.
I see the cataclysm that brought us here. I see the threat that caused it.
I remember wanting to scream out for all that was left of my now rapidly eroding mind but not being able to. There is no word to describe the fear I felt, and yet I did not care anymore. Only one thought filled my mind and that was a call to meet the gaze of the eye within an eye.
I see the inevitability of that same threat returning, too far removed in the eons for any of us to do anything about it.
I remember not being able to look away. I remember wanting to. I remember feeling the same as when the Eye of the Void was watching me in my nightmares. Here is where, technically speaking, the nightmares stopped for my world had become the nightmare.
I see that which was the Devourer and the mere thought of his terrible hunger scourges my mind of order and reason.
We started to work on it, all of us taking every precaution to protect the fragile, ancient artifact. I tried to leave it and focus on the remaining work I had, but I kept getting distracted staring into it and many times the researchers had to get my attention and bring me back to working. By the end of the day I couldn’t pull myself from its gaze anymore.
Crane had left immediately after he dropped off the artifact, so I could not ask him any further questions about it. All we learned was about it was that it was a historical anomaly, a rare work of intricately detailed art in a time when man was barely man. We placed it in a little glass case and deemed it indeed too off-putting for public display. My colleagues often simultaneously experienced feelings of being watched after working around the artifact for too long. I could never be near it, because I always ended up trying to meet Its gaze.
I slowly return to awareness of my own reality and realize I am slumped in the corner of the room. I get up wearily and cast a brief look around the room.
We clocked out for the day and began to leave, but I lied to my colleagues and said I forgot my hoodie jacket in the back room. They didn’t give it a second thought. I could feel It calling again. The nightwatchman wouldn’t have given me any trouble, but I took special care to avoid him. The Thing was saying that no one else should know.
I stumble to the center of the room and look around for the book, to see if hopefully it had not been taken through the gate. I find nothing, but I hear a quick stirring and pick up the ceremonial dagger, still dripping with the blood of my friends and family, and look around nervously. I cannot find the culprit of the noise. I should be alone. Fear begins to grip me, and I squeeze the artifact.
I got to the back rooms and slowly approached the little glass case that the repulsive, ancient artifact had been placed in. I don’t know how long I stared into it; it could have been weeks as soon as minutes for all I could tell. Eventually I knew nothing but desire for the Charm, so I smashed the glass with my fist and grabbed it.
My little sister’s leg begins to twitch, slightly. I watch with wide eyes and my back against a wall, clutching tightly at both the knife and the Charm.
I fled, but I could not remember what happened on that night after that. I still do not. The next thing I knew, I was in my bed the next morning and waking up, as if from another nightmare. I was confused and did not know what was going on, until I saw the artifact on my desk. I stared at it for a while and it stared back, and we stayed that way for a while.
Slowly her body begins to move, and the others join her. They softly cry as they slowly regain control of their limbs, flailing weakly like babies still learning to use their arms and legs.
Eventually I had to break the gaze, however, because I heard a soft crying from somewhere in my house. I stepped into the hallway; it seemed to me that everyone else must have still been asleep. I crept through the house searching for the source of the noise and before long I realized it was coming from the basement. Without thinking I opened the door and ran down, fearing that something had happened to my younger brother, perhaps he had fallen down the stairs.
As soon as they can lift their heads they stare at me with white, dead eyes. There is nowhere I can run.
I saw my father and mother at the end of the room, leaning over my younger brother. He was asleep, but crying out as if plagued by bad dreams. I saw that they each were laying a hand on his forehead. I looked at them, confused and scared, but saw that something was not right. They were not my parents, but they were hollow husks of my parents. Their eyes were sunken and white, and their faces bore a look of emptiness. I do not remember which damaged my psyche more, the hurt for my family or the fear for my life, but I called out to them, at which point my younger brother sat up abruptly and opened his eyes. In a matter of seconds they too became sunken and white, and his demeanor became as theirs as he stood up.
They stand up now, gathering close together. They are all staring at me, and I cannot handle the dead, white stare of their eyes. I stare into the Charm of No’Aktu as my grip on the knife tightens.
I slowly backed towards the stairs muttering hopelessly to myself when they all turned at once to face me with those empty, dead eyes. They began to walk towards me. I screamed and sprinted up the stairs, running galvanized by fear all the way up to my room, at which point I locked the door. Eventually they found their way up and shuffled around at the door, trying to get in. I knew it was only a matter of time until they broke the door down or simply got the house master key from my parents’ room. I was faced with the fear that whatever foul affliction had come to them that they had given to my brother was about to come to me. I stifled the horror and emotions, and in desperation I looked around the room for a way to barricade my door from the hollow ones on the other side. I found nothing substantial.
They start walking towards me. I am surrounded as they close in on me. I don’t want to die like this, I don’t want to become one of them with that horrible hollow stare.
I heard a sound, then perked up and looked at the door. My eye twitched in terror as I recognized the sound of someone fumbling with a key. They were using the master key.
I watch as I stab the knife into my chest and stomach several times. I’m not going to be one of them. The pain is too much. I fall to the ground.
They opened the door and pushed aside the meager barricade I managed to arrange. I tried to push them away from me but they kept coming. Eventually I fell down and they converged on me, smothering me, placing their hands on my forehead. Everything started to become white.
Everything fades to darkness as I bleed out. I fall in and out of consciousness.
I summoned one last burst of strength and pushed them off of me. I was not going to die like that, not going to become one of those things. I grabbed the artifact and made a run for the window. I jumped through it, pain washing over me for one brief, glorious instant; a last beautifully visceral moment of the sensations of life. Time slowed down as I squeezed the artifact in my hand, yet still I saw in full detail the ground approaching at its own pace with no intention of stopping.
This is how the nightmares end.
That is how the nightmare ended.