longer.blue

It was a dark and stormy night. Actually, it wasn’t. It was a slightly damp and deeply unpleasant evening in the kind of place where the weather always seems to be making a passive-aggressive point. The moon cowered behind a layer of clouds that resembled a soggy dishcloth, and the streets of the otherwise unremarkable town of Dunwich smelled faintly of damp stone and boiled cabbage. Through these streets waddled a man. A man with an expression of vague and perpetual confusion, clad in a tweed jacket that looked as though it had given up on being fashionable sometime in the 1970s and a tie so tight it suggested it had been applied by someone unfamiliar with the concept of breathing. His name was Bean. And he had no idea what he was doing here. This was not unusual. The trouble started, as these things often do, when Bean walked into what he thought was a bookshop. It was a bookshop, in the sense that it had books in it. It was not a bookshop in the sense that customers tended to leave with their sanity intact. The shelves sagged under the weight of dusty tomes with titles like A Beginner’s Guide to Non-Euclidean Geometry and So You’ve Summoned an Eldritch Horror: A Handy Survival Manual. Bean, however, wasn’t looking for anything in particular. He simply liked books. They made good doorstops. A small, hunched man loomed behind the counter, the kind of man who looked like he should be stroking a large, evil cat, except even the cat would probably find him unsettling. He squinted at Bean with the air of someone who had seen many things in his long life and found that he disapproved of all of them. “Yes?” he hissed. Bean, entirely untroubled by this man’s clear affiliation with the Forces of Darkness, picked up the most sinister-looking book he could find. It was bound in something that was either leather or the preserved hide of something best left unidentified. “Oooh!” Bean said brightly. The shopkeeper paled. “That is The Necronomicon. It is a tome of unspeakable horrors, containing knowledge that has driven many men to madness.” Bean flipped through a few pages. The text swam and shifted before his eyes, writhing like a nest of angry eels. He frowned at it. Then he turned the book upside down. This did not improve matters. “Hmm,” he said. He gave the book a shake, as though trying to dislodge the words into a more sensible order. The Necronomicon made a sound like a distant scream. He sighed and tucked it under his arm. “How much?” he asked. The shopkeeper took a careful step back. “You— you actually want it?” Bean nodded. He had once found a book of crossword puzzles at a railway station and had enjoyed the experience immensely, even though he had only managed to complete one answer, and even then, he had to invent a new word to make it fit. This seemed similar. The shopkeeper considered his options. The sensible course of action would have been to refuse, or perhaps to shout something about the balance of the cosmos and forces beyond mortal reckoning. Instead, he said, in a voice hollow with defeat, “…Ten pounds.” Bean triumphantly retrieved a crumpled tenner from his pocket, along with two rubber bands and a single button, and slammed it on the counter. Moments later, he strolled out, clutching a book that had driven scholars to ruin and entire civilizations to despair, whistling a little tune. It was three nights later when the cult gathered on the blasted heath outside of town. Cultists, as a rule, tend to be quite bad at organization. They might be spectacular at chanting ominously and summoning horrors beyond comprehension, but when it comes to things like agreeing on a meeting time, they flounder. This particular gathering had already been delayed twice—once because a member had double-booked it with his child’s school play, and again when they realized they had all forgotten to bring a sacrificial dagger and had to improvise with a bread knife. But now, at last, the stars were right. The air crackled with an almost tangible sense of evil. The kind of evil that made dogs whimper, cows refuse to give milk, and entire town councils spontaneously pass baffling new parking restrictions. The High Priest, a man of truly distressing facial hair and an unsettling number of rings on his fingers, lifted his hands and began the Invocation of Doom. And then Bean walked into the clearing. The cultists froze. Bean looked around, blinking at the gathering of hooded figures like a man who had stumbled into the wrong conference room but was too polite to leave. The High Priest cleared his throat. “…Can we help you?” Bean looked from the ominous sigils carved into the ground to the enormous stone altar, then back to the assembled cultists. He tilted his head, thinking. Then his face brightened with understanding. “Bingo!” he said, nodding knowingly. There was a long, terrible pause. The High Priest massaged his temples. “No. Not bingo. We are summoning Yog-Sothoth, the Key and the Gate, the all-knowing, all-seeing horror beyond mortal comprehension.” Bean gave him a thumbs-up. The Priest squinted at him. “Are— are you with us?” he asked, suddenly uncertain. Bean thought about this. Then he held up The Necronomicon, as if it were a membership card. There was a faint whump sound as one of the cultists fainted. The High Priest opened his mouth. Then he closed it. Then he opened it again. “…Right,” he said finally. “Fine. Just— just stand there.” The cultists resumed chanting, albeit slightly more nervously than before. The sky darkened. The air thickened. Somewhere, in the vastness of the cosmos, an ancient and unholy being stirred. A rift split open in the air, a crack in reality itself, spilling forth an incomprehensible mass of writhing limbs and non-Euclidean angles, an entity that had watched civilizations rise and fall and found them all profoundly disappointing. It beheld the summoning circle. It beheld the shuddering cultists. And then it beheld Bean. It hesitated. Bean stared back. A great and terrible silence filled the void. Yog-Sothoth, the Being Who Knows All, had absolutely no idea what to make of this man. Here was a creature who radiated not cosmic horror, but mild confusion. A man whose thought processes were a mystery even unto himself. A man who had once mistaken a Christmas turkey for a hat. The eldritch horror reeled. Its mind, which had driven a thousand worlds to despair, encountered something far more terrible than insanity: Pure, unfiltered nonsense. “…No,” it said at last. With that, the rift sealed itself, the ancient horror slinking back to its incomprehensible domain, leaving behind a thoroughly broken cult. The High Priest stared, his mouth working soundlessly. “What… what did you just do?” Bean shrugged. “Hmm.” Then, seeing nothing particularly interesting left to do here, he wandered off, humming happily to himself. The cult never met again. No one spoke of the event. And somewhere, in the cold abyss of the outer void, an ancient horror still pondered the question: What, in the name of all things unholy, was that man?