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Whoozit
Based on the Whoozit Goodnight Book
(text deleted from book by photoshopping).
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We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not
meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have
hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up
such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either
go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
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The Great Old Ones lived ages before there were any men.
Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams.
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The dreams occasionally approached the fantastical in character, though falling somewhat short of coherence.
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Their voices were a sort of musical piping over a
wide range, more from spoken commands than from hypnotic
suggestions as in earlier times.
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The things come from another planet, being able to live in interstellar space and fly through it
on clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of resisting the aether but which are too poor at steering
to be of much use in helping them about on earth.
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Yuggoth was the nearest world fully peopled by the beings. It is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system.
The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses,
and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them, for
it does not exist at all in the black cosmos outside time and space where they came from originally. To visit
Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad.
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When the stars were right, they could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, they could not live.
But although they no longer lived, they would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in their great city of
R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious surrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for them.
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Past all these gorgeous lands are the gates of a monstrous cataract wherein the oceans of earth's dreamland drop
wholly to abysmal nothingness and shoot through the empty spaces toward other worlds and other stars and the
awful voids outside the ordered universe where the daemon sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in chaos
amid pounding and piping and the hellish dancing of the Other Gods, blind, voiceless, tenebrous,
and mindless, with their soul and messenger Nyarlathotep.
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They have come down through the gloaming from the stars. Now all is over.
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One of the child's first memories was of the great westward sea of hazy roofs and domes and steeples and far
hills which he saw one winter afternoon from that great railed embankment, and violet and mystic against a
fevered, apocalyptic sunset of reds and golds and purples and curious greens.
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After a time the shadows began to gather,
and the sunset cheer gave place to a vague growing terror which flew shadow-like
before the night.
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Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman
did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town,
and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and
formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed.
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He would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the centuried room.
All at once he felt a new equilibrium. The cold of interstellar gulfs gnawed
at the outside of his envelope, and he could see that he floated free in space.
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Gilman's dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight
and baffingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation
to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle;
yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary.
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And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and the dream haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watcher's window
to merge with the close air of his room and to make him a part of their fabulous wonder.
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References
Frame 1: The Call of Cthulhu, 1926, H. P. Lovecraft (We live...)
Frame 2: The Call of Cthulhu, 1926, H. P. Lovecraft (The Great Old...)
Frame 3: The Thing in the Moonlight, 1927, H. P. Lovecraft (The dreams...)
Frame 4: At the Mountains of Madness, 1936, H. P. Lovecraft (The newly bred...)
Frame 5: The Whisperer in Darkness, 1930, H. P. Lovecraft (The things...)
Frame 6: The Whisperer in Darkness, 1930, H. P. Lovecraft (Yuggoth...)
Frame 7: The Call of Cthulhu, 1926, H. P. Lovecraft (When the stars were right...)
Frame 8: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, 1927, H. P. Lovecraft (Past all these...)
Frame 9: The Crawling Chaos, 1921, H. P. Lovecraft (They have come...)
Frame 10: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, 1927, H. P. Lovecraft (One of the child's...)
Frame 11: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, 1927, H. P. Lovecraft (After a time...)
Frame 12: Dreams in the Witch-House, 1932, H. P. Lovecraft (Whether the dreams...)
Frame 13: Through the Gates of the Silver Key, 1933, H. P. Lovecraft (All at once...)
Frame 14: Dreams in the Witch-House, 1932, H. P. Lovecraft (Gilman's dreams...)
Frame 15: Azathoth, 1922, H. P. Lovecraft (And one night...)
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