Dreams of Inner R'lyeh or How I Discovered the Apocalyptic Behemoth that Killed the World

From: Roger Gilmour
Date: Tuesday, 23 December 2014, 2:37 am
To: Peter Peterson
Subject: Official Statement
Well, Pete, this is it. I’ve fucking had it, this has gone on for too long and I’m done. No more. I’m putting a stop to this, and I don’t care what anyone else thinks. If it thinks it can keep fucking with me, this ought to stick it to ‘em.
When I’ve finished writing this, I’m closing my laptop, unplugging it, and throwing it out the 37th goddamn floor of this hotel. I’m taking out my badass Smith & Wesson revolver, giving it a nice polish, checking it for any obstructions in the barrel and loading chamber and delivering my last remaining bullet into my frontal fucking lobe. From the left, of course. I’ve taken down my “DO NOT DISTURB” sign for the cleaning ladies.
If I haven’t complained about the reason to you already, it’s because of these godforsaken dreams. These fucking things are persistent, intense, horrifying, foreboding and, if nothing else, inconvenient. They’re more or less the same every time, albeit a few minor details. They started sometime around mid-July, and up until November, had been happening maybe once a week. Once November came along, it advanced to three or four times a week, and all this month it’s been five or six. So now fuck it, I’ve had it, I’m putting an end to it.
This is also the real reason behind that earthquake that just happened. I know you would have felt at least part of it. Well, it wasn’t an earthquake. I know what caused it. I know, Pete. And it wasn’t the tectonic plates. It was something far worse, something nobody would believe. But I know, and all I can do is tell.
Let’s start with the dreams.
They always start out with me in the middle of what I can only assume is deep space. Pitch black all around, no trace of any land, sea or sky, with the occasional shining speck in the distance. As you’d expect, no hint of sound; as they say, when you’re in space, no one can hear you tripping balls. So I’m just floating around right? It’s like when you’re just hovering underwater, not really making any effort to move, just drifting where the current takes you. Then, without me moving, out from nowhere sprouts this gigantic ellipse-shaped aura of light amongst the nebula, interweaving colours of orange, violet, blue and green. When the dreams first started, the aura took a few minutes to fully grow, but as the months went along, the process got quicker and quicker, to the point where now it pops up in a flash. The centre is a giant black hole, and on the perimeter of the hole is where the lights and colour emit. For a bit, it’s just a solid black circle. But after a minute or so, it starts to collapse from the middle outwards.
You know how when you’re alive you can see? Consider this: when you’re looking – just looking at something, no matter what it is – your vision always stops at some point. No matter how far you can see, there is always something at the end of your sight span. Even when you’re staring into the sky and there are no actual objects in the way, there’s still the blue sky at the end. But looking down this fucking black hole, there is no end to your vision. There’s nothing at the end for your eyes to rest upon. It just keeps going, and going and going… there’s nothing at the end. And it hurts to look down it. Not having something at the end of your sight makes your head hurt because you have nothing to focus on. It makes me feel unbelievably small and insignificant, just being at the forefront of basically infinity.
So then the hole starts dragging me in. I always get pulled in feet-first, I don’t know why that’s the case. It’s really like going down a waterslide backwards, except there’s nothing actually physical to slide down. So I’d be plummeting down into the cosmic abyss, that sinking gut feeling you get making its way in. That’d go on for differing amounts of time per dream, until the dark space fades to sky blue, a blazingly warm yellow light washes in and I hit a solid surface with an impact that would normally be of bone-shattering standards, but my brain is in my favour regarding minor details like that.
So I get up, dust myself off, marvel at how the impact did not shatter a single bone and examine my surroundings. I’ve landed in a desert. The desert doesn’t quite match the ones in our world; this desert’s sand it metallic in colour– a blend of gold, copper and bronze, and even though it’s fully sunny out, there are two gigantic moons on the horizon. These moons are weirdly beautiful in a way; one is a bit closer than the other, and they are only illuminated around the edge. These moons are not part of anything in our solar system – I looked it up, and nothing in the local library nor on the internet matches these two moons even marginally. They are similar to the black hole, in that the awe-inducing scale of them makes you feel so obsolete and insignificant.
So I start walking. The direction I go is different in each dream. I could be walking for minutes or hours. I mean, what else was I going to do? Sometimes I’d just go straight, other times I’d take a turn or two, trudging through this otherworldly metallic sand. Gravity in this place was more or less the same as on Earth. But always, when I’m walking, twin pillars would emerge from the sand as I went on. I’d be walking, and every few metres there’d be a pillar on either side of me, each pair a little taller than the last. They’d be on either side of me wherever I’d walk, no matter how many times I changed direction. They were already there, everywhere I went, like my path had already been determined. But they were always there.
A couple of times I’d stop and examine one. They’d be pure white and cylindrical, without a grain of sand on them, and they’d have a pattern protruding from the surface that resembled human veins, also white. I examined these things a few times; there appears no sign of any crack or seam, and they looked to be porcelain or marble or something. What’s really weird is what would happen if I tried to touch them.
You know how, sometimes, if you’re watching a 3-D movie you reach out with your hand and try to touch the stuff coming out at you? When you go to touch it and it looks like the thing on screen is close enough to touch but your hand just kind of moves through it and in front of it at the same time? And while you’re doing that, nothing happens to the picture, it just stays there taunting you because you can’t touch it? That’s what trying to touch these pillars was like. I could never make any physical contact with them - even though I was so close to them, they would always just be out of my reach. But what’s even stranger: I’d stumbled forward the first few times trying to touch them, and I smacked straight into them, hard as a brick wall. So I could never deliberately touch these pillars, but if I accidentally touch one it’s just as dense and tangible as anything on Earth. These pillars were assholes.
So after continuously walking I’d reach the point where the pairs of pillars would be protruding from the sand into the sky, the tops extending out of sight. Once they hit that point, I’d come to a gigantic set of stairs, which were only visible once I had passed the two final pillars. These stairs were made out of the same white ceramic as the pillars previous. Also like the pillars, the stairs stretched up and out of sight into the sky. So now I had to climb these sons of bitches. Thankfully the stairs stopped at the point of the first clouds.
At the top of the stairs was a short, flat bridge – white ceramic, of course – that led into an enormous gaping doorway. Like the stairs and pillars, the doorway loomed into the unseeable sky above. Oddly enough, there was no wall for the doorway to be embedded in; it was just a huge rectangular black hole in the middle of the sky, not unlike the black hole that lead me there. So, as per continuity, I made my way through the massively intimidating doorway in the sky. The floor continued before me into the darkness, greatly contrasting the pale blue sky surrounding the doorway. There was light shining in a few metres from the doorway, but before long it became very dark. As the remaining glare from the bright sky faded out from my eyes, my vision returned a little, but it was still dark as hell. The interior was composed of irregular stone bricks, which, at least in the extremely dim light, appeared a dull green-grey. So I’m walking down this hallway – it’s humid as hell – and there isn’t much there. Until I get to a ledge.
This is where things get interesting.
I come to a ledge in the ground, and at the ledge the sides of the hallway expand dramatically. It’s essentially leading into a gigantic room with no floor. Instead of a floor at the base of the room, it’s water. It’s like one of those mansions with entire rooms dedicated to a pool. Except there’s no ledges surrounding the water; it’s just a gigantic chamber filled with dark water just up to the ledge. With regards to size, I’m talking at least the size of a small suburban block. There was just enough light for me to work that out. But here’s the scary bit:
As dark as the pit of water was, I could make out an even darker mass under the water. This shape was fairly round, it looked to be a hell of a far distance down under water from the surface and it took up about 90% of the chamber perimeter. And I could tell, I don’t know how but I could, that this mass was a living thing. I could feel small vibrations in the floor, pulsing in a regular pattern. As each pulse came though, small sets of ripples would appear in the otherwise statue-still water surface. Every few seconds another vibration would ring through the complex.
Not unlike a heartbeat.
So I’d be standing there at the ledge of this pit for a certain amount of time depending on the dream. Just staring at this water chamber. Then the shit breaks out. A huge rumbling, earthquake-y sensation occurs in the chamber. Most times huge cracks would appear in the walls, sometimes even chunks of stone come tumbling out of place and into the water. But it’s not the rumbling, the water or the debris that has me paralysed with fear similarly to how I assume a person stuck in their car on a set of train tracks feels.
The dark mass is making its way upwards to the surface of the water.
Now this might just be me, but I don’t reckon that anything that spends its time underwater in a dark chamber in the sky is likely to be friendly. As the mass gets closer to the surface, the trembling of the chamber intensifies, to the point where the falling chunks of stone from the ceiling hitting the ground exactly half a metre to my left awaken me from my stupor. So, I do what any rational horror movie expendable would not do: I turn and run for my fucking life. I’d always get around halfway back to the doorway when I hear the surface of the water in the chamber break behind me. The force was heart-shattering. The water would burst up and send relentless waves crashing down the hallway, with me running like an ant attempting to escape a cat on angel dust. I’d feel a tremendous impact on the entire back of my body as the waves would sweep me up in the dark, foul flood, dragging me closer and closer to the end of the hallway. My vision is flooded, literally, and I can’t get a breath in to save my life. All I can do is let it take me. Eventually the waves would drag me to the end of the hall and out the heightless doorway from whence I entered. I’d be shot out from inside with and by the water, past the bridge and staircase and sent soaring through the air. Tumbling through the sky, I’d get a glimpse at the doorway in the sky, getting further and further away as I fell, and I’d see a horrible sight.
Perched on the edge of the doorway was the entity from the chamber. Never had I seen such an incredible, otherworldly sight as this monstrosity. This colossal nightmare was like nothing I’d ever seen, even in the most depraved, imaginative fiction. It had general human features, two arms, two legs and a head. The dark grey-green skin glistened like oil in the blazing sun, its head an opaque bulbous mass not unlike a cephalopod. I’d become so engrossed in observing this behemoth that I’d get startled when it lunges from the doorway. It leaps with a force that contradicts its mass and plummets down a path similar to mine. It’s diving faster than I’m falling, which is a cause for concern. The impounding fear that correlates this thing’s getting closer to me is immeasurable and unbearable, because I can see the creature clearly now, in increasingly horrid detail. No person on this Earth can comprehend the horror that this thing exhibited, because even as I type this to you now, the close-up appearance of this is something short of a blur. I remember black eyes. More than two. I don’t think there was a mouth, not that I could see. But up closer, I did see that this thing was not one single mass. Rather, it was an entangled mass composed of possibly hundreds of individual appendages. Like, imagine a bunch of squids and octopi tied together in the shape of a creature. Somehow this thing looked like a shit ton of little, like, biological parts combined into one.
Anyway, this thing is diving in the direction I’m falling – which, as you may have deduced, is a significantly longer fall than the stairs I ascended upon earlier – and it’s gaining on me. Eventually it would get close enough to touch me, and I would avert my eyes, an action not usually permitted by the world of dreams. At this point, I’d hit the ground. But, unlike my arrival, I wouldn’t land on the ground; I’d crash through it. I’d be submerged in the sand for about a millisecond before landing back on my bed and waking up with a jolt.
But the most recent incident had a different ending, which is why I will shortly be redecorating my apartment a lovely shade of red. Now, in all the other instances, the behemoth never acknowledged me. Whether it actually noticed me or not, I don’t know. But in tonight’s dream, it fucking saw me. In tonight’s dream, I was a little more to the left of the colossus during the fall. Its eyes flickered over to me. Even though there was no pupil in this particular eye, it moved, facing me during the fall. You know that feeling where you’re trying to sneak past someone you’re trying to avoid because they’re after you and then they catch you? Fifty times that is what exploded within me when that eye shifted in my direction. All the other times it’s just been like I’ve been observing what’s going on in this godforsaken place, rolling along with it, going wherever events took me. But this time, my presence had an effect; the thing noticed me.
Then it touched me. The motherfucker reached out and touched me with one of its disgusting appendages. One of its countless segments unraveled from the rest of it, came over to me, mid-fall, and brushed across my chest, as if to confirm that what it was seeing was there. You know, I think the fact that I was there, visually and physically, came as a surprise to it, that an outsider had somehow come to its realm and interacted with the environment. It might have even been amused. But as bad as that was, the following occurrence is still unimaginable to me, and it happened half a fucking hour ago. This is the reason I’m offing myself momentarily.
The dream didn’t end when I hit the ground. Before making it to the ground, the appendage took a hold of me, tightening across my chest, dragging me down with it. We’d crash through the sand and end up back in the open space I started in. So now this monstrosity is speeding through space, dragging me with it. Then, from out of the plethora of stars, one small dot appears, and it’s getting bigger, i.e. we’re getting closer. The green patches that start becoming apparent on the blue dot make my stomach drop. This ungodly thing was hurtling towards Earth. The now-doomed Earth is getting closer and closer, faster and faster. As we pass through the outer atmosphere, the surface of Earth is coming up to meet us, and just as we collide with the planet, there is a thunderous crash, everything is black and I woke up to an earthquake.
Pete, I woke up from that dream at 2:02am, about 35 minutes ago. That’s the exact same time as the “earthquake” that just struck. I don’t know exactly whereabouts on Earth the thing and I crashed, but we just felt an impact in reality, at the same time we crashed into the ground in my dream.
That thing is here.
If you turn onto Channel 7 right now, you’ll see the news people gathered around the source of the “earthquake.” I guarantee that before long you’ll see something emerging from the ground. By then there’ll be nothing anyone can do to stop it. Something like that really cannot be stopped, but I guess it’s too late now anyway. No army in the world can take it on, no government official can attempt to communicate with it, and none of our scientists could possibly hope to understand it.
The dreams tried to warn me. That’s why I was having the same dream all the time. Something was trying to show me what was coming, some kind of higher intelligence was sending me to that realm to warn me, to warn us all. It wasn’t the first time this monstrosity had done this to a world, and they knew it was coming for us next. And I wasn’t getting the message; that’s why I kept having the same dream. I wasn’t clicking, and by tonight it was too late. I was too late. I had spent so much time in that realm every night that by tonight the thing was able to see me, to touch me – tonight, I had crossed over, and the thing knew that I knew it was coming. But why would it care? It’s here now. It’s too late.
I don’t know why I was chosen for the warning. What’s so special about me that I’ve been shown the impending doom of the human race? I don’t have the amazing ability to convince the entire world it’s in danger. That kind of thing is usually left to people like Oprah. Why me? I’m just some guy, a nobody. Who’s going to listen to me?
Anyway it’s too late now. That thing’s here. We’re all fucked, and that’s why I’m about to cap myself. Pete, you have to pass this on to EVERYONE you know. Obviously don’t bother with the dream sequence.
Heh, on  Channel 7 you can see a huge black mass uprooting itself from the crash site. They’re filming this live, you know. There’s fire and debris and shit everywhere.
You know, Pete? I’m glad it was you I decided to write to about this. Mum and Dad pretty much alienated themselves from me the first time I told them about the dreams. It’s almost like they had some kind of idea about what was going on. I never really had any friends to chat with; all the more reason to off myself, huh? Maybe I’ll set fire to the apartment too. Just for the fun of it.
You’re all I had Pete, and if you’d pass on my message to as many people as possible, I’d sure appreciate it. Thanks, Pete; I’ll be seeing you.
Your mate, Roger.
Category:Lovecraftian
Category:Dreams/Sleep
Category:Gods
Category:Space