Crimson. The sun in the sky radiated crimson light, and it was a fierce light that was fearsome to behold. The setting sun saturated the sky colors of yellow and pink, but most of all there was the fearsome bloody crimson.

The crimson spilled across the paper as the errant winds blown across the harbor tousled the pages of the manuscript. Sighing and pushing up a small pair of bifocals, the man at the desk put an inkwell upon the corner page and a letter-opener upon the other. Nose almost touching the cool, smooth pages, he took a breath of that fresh wind.

The wind brought scents of fish, brought writhing and screaming in their silence from the chilly embrace of the ocean. The wind brought scents of the sweaty deckhands who loaded and unloaded the cargo, to and from their majestic ships of wood and canvas. The wind brought the scents of perfume from the East, where Ethiopes and the Orientals spoke in their strange voices and brought objects of simple beauty. The wind brought scents of ale, served in the taverns that dotted the docks of moldering wood.

And the wind carried the sounds of drunken cries, the sounds of men, mostly sailors able to spend a brief amount of time on land, fighting over some imagined infraction. The wind carried the foreign cries of the eastern men, lauding their wares that came from lands that barely a white man had seen. The wind carried the sound of the deckhands grunting in exhaustion, pulling and pushing and carrying heavy boxes, some filled with tobacco, others with tea, and more filled with objects stranger or more precious than even those. The wind carried the sound of the fish, brought up and flapping from the cool water, the sound of straining net and great splashes.

The man at the desk took in those sounds and those scents. The noises had been loud for him, at first. He had cursed the sounds of the drunken brawls, and he had cursed the scent of pungent fish, but the man had come to enjoy them. They had come to act as a sort of lullaby, employing some form of cathartic relief.

The sun set and the crimson ebbed away into the ether. The man sighed and slid a matchbox from a drawer on the desk. Fumbling about with the box, he pulled out a red-headed match. A simply flick of his wrist, and the tip caught fire. He placed it against a candle on his desk. And then on to another. His eyes were not what they used to be. To read from the light of one candle put much too much stress on the poor ocular nerves.

Of course, the man was rich enough to afford the electrical lights that the strange Edison had produced. However, he had not spent nearly enough time in the bustling port city to purchase the strange marvels of science.

The man scanned the paper, his milky brown eyes sliding across the sharp black text, arranged in orderly rows upon the sheets of white paper, interrupted every so often by a diagram detailing some aspect of the inner-workings of the human body. The book that the man so poured over was a very thick tome, bound with a thick red cover, though it was a shade of red that was more of a deep burgundy than anything resembling the crimson colors of the setting sun.

He coughed. And he placed a handkerchief to his mouth, to stop the spread of the germs that he had undoubtedly caught on one of the dreadful boats which he took from Europe to the lovely port town off the coast of Maine. The man had traveled to Europe and had gone to its most beautiful cities, France and London and Edinburgh and Prague, though their smells had been mostly of the sewage leaked out onto the streets. The great cities with the sewage-filled streets were the absolute centers of learning, and the man had gone there to gain a greater understanding of medicine. They had told him of new cures and of new diseases, spread by the constant hungers that sailors even found necessary to satisfy in the uncivilized and uncouth lands of the East and the nations of Africa,

Luckily, after he had received what he had found to be a sufficient amount of schooling and learning, he had arranged through a cousin of his to receive a job as one of the doctors of a prosperous hospital in a lovely port city on the coast of Maine. The place had been newly recognized as a nice spot for trade, so, of course, it had been seized by the ships carrying all a manner of wonderful things, and the man had been happy to take the job. However, it had been a hard job so far. The hospital was quite large, and it was so dreadfully understaffed that he had to take more than a dozen patients at once, and he was quite embarrassed to find out that he had mixed a few of them up when he had asked a large fat woman when the baby was due. Luckily, the superiors took in stride, laughing a bit and telling him of their own slip-ups.

The candle-light wavered, and the eyes of the young man felt gradually weaker in the dimly lit room. A sigh, and he stuck a piece of parchment in between the open pages, and he shut the book before extinguishing the flames of both candles. The room fell into darkness, and he took a deep breath of that strange air. It was early, but it was still almost night; the doctor took note of a clock in the corner of the room that showed him it was around four in the A.M., which meant that it was indeed time for a bit of rest.

Casting off the clothes he had worn all day, he took upon himself the bed-clothes he had bought from a fanciful Asian man, saying they were made from silks of the Orient, and indeed, they were quite comfortable. Sliding in between the covers, he set his head upon the pillow, and gradually, his breathing-rate lowered, and he fell into a deep sleep.

The man awoke at the sound of a bustling argument as a ship came into harbor, and it seems as though someone had broken into a fight while arguing with the merchants about the price of something or another. The doctor wondered idly if the argument would come to blows, if the ruffians would strike out at each other for the small matter of a monetary disagreement. He sighed, and the absolute moral decay of the society felt like a heavy creature on his back, which whispered in his ear and hissed, its voice strong and filled with the venoms of rudeness and other such evils.

The doctor was an upstanding, young man who was a true Child of God, if one could go as far to be considered something such as that. He had been raised a Presbyterian, and he stayed true to the teachings of the religion, and sometimes, he had to fight back shock when a papist told him how they worshipped the Virgin Mary and saw a simple man as the voice of the Son of God.

Sometimes, those great misdeeds done in the guise of goodness disturbed him greatly. Sometimes, the doctor was kept awake at night by a pain in his stomach, a pain he attributed to the horrors of the world, to the evil and carnal natures that all men seemed to succumb to in the day and age.

Of course, the man quickly roused himself from the bed, and he changed into the clothes necessary to perform his duties at the hospital. It had been a busy first week, since it seemed as though a strange epidemic was spreading throughout some of the poorer people in the lovely port town. They complained of flux-like systems, but eventually, great sores, weeping with pus and strange bodily fluids, sprung upon their backs, which eventually spread to their tongues and proved so fearful that they could not eat solid foods and instead had to be given fluids to sustain their hunger.

The sickness was horrible, and it appeared as though it were fatal, since a few of the more advanced cases were slowly slipping away in a quarantined area of the hospital, their cries growing piteous and high in their delirium. The most advanced case had gone blind, for they had found him last morning, screaming that the world had gone dark and convinced that he were in some horrible circle of Hell, one where darkness and the scent of death permeated above all else. The nurses had done their best to calm him, to let his final moments in that dank darkness be as comfortable as possible, but he had died screaming and crying, begging them to take the fearsome beasts away, beasts which he told us he could still see and were all that he could see.

The director of the hospital, a stout man of around forty, chalked it up to the sickness, saying that it may have something to do with the brain, maybe a parasite found in their drinking waters or some strange virus spread by a sailor at some local tavern.

The doctor shook his head, and he threw those thoughts away from him, since they were not the sort of thing a man should think about as soon as he wakes up. His clothes were neatly crisp and clean, and they scarcely creased when he left the apartment, as it were, and stepped down the stairs, foregoing breakfast with the family who owned the house and their other renters. The man kept his briefcase close to his side, and the coat was buttoned to the very top of his neck to keep the cold air, swept in from the bay, away.

He coughed, and it was a hacking cough that sent him momentarily backpedaling, for it was a phlegm-filled cough that always seemed to signify great sickness. He worried that he had caught that horrible flux, but he doubted it, for all of the doctors and nurses had taken the necessary precautions to keep the sickness away from themselves, if it could be spread from air, that is.

The doctor stood in front of the hospital, after walking a good mile to the nicer section of town. Looking from the roof were six leering gargoyles with distorted faces and great and cruel claws, they had been faded by time to a grayish-white shade, but originally, they were said to have been an ebony deeper than the night sky itself. Indeed, it was an impressive building, with its tall towers and strong stone formation. A tall gate surrounded the hospital, which had been built by the original owners who used the building for their home. The director, himself, was the great grandchild of the family, and as a doctor, he had donated the building to the city on the grounds that he could control the construction and the building itself when it became the city’s hospital, which was called, by order of the director, Our Lady of the Most Sacred Heart.

A few windows were open, and he could almost feel a bustle inside. He heard cries of children and the constant shushing of their mothers. It was going to be a tough day, and ruefully, the young doctor grimaced and walked the path to the large front doors, and he stepped into the warm hospital.

The smell of sickness and of dank decay hit him immediately, and it was a nauseating noise that sent him sprawling. Coughing and choking, he doubled over. There was a sense of decay which brought forth an overpowering urge to vomit, and it made him feel chills all along his back. He fell, coughing and sputtering, and he felt a number of people rush forward to him. There was a commanding voice above the rest. It was deep and gentle, but it could also be fearsome and commanding.

“Step away! Let the man breathe!” Doctor Zhernost, the director, pushed them away with his thick, almost stubby arms. The curious patients and worried nurses slipped back and away as the good doctor bent down on his haunches and looked into the face of the young doctor. The doctor’s face was bright red and merry, and his eyes were a piercing blue. His hair was salt and pepper and fading at the top, and like most fat men, he had a light waddling influence to an otherwise confident walk. His meaty hand lay upon the doctor’s forehead, and the other checked his pulse.

“Doctor Beyers, are you alright? Shall we get you a room?” Genuine concern flashed on the roughly hewn face, and he stood up, bringing the young doctor up on his feet, steadying the young man and cleaning off his coat.

“No. No, sir,” Doctor Beyers stammered. “I just felt a bit weak for a moment. I have not been getting enough sleep lately, sir. I think it was just that.”

Doctor Zhernost beamed, the worry dissipating from his face quickly enough that it was quite hard to remember it even being there in the first place. A meaty fist roughly thumped Doctor Beyers’s back, and Doctor Zhernost roared with a strange and fierce laughter that left his cheeks a tad redder than they were to begin with.

“Ah, staying up late, Doctor Beyers? Why, are you out prowling the night with the sailors, looking for women and drink? Why, Doctor Beyers, I did not take you for such a man!”

Doctor Beyers blushed at the director’s strange joke, and he shook his head, a blush affecting his pale skin in a strange way indeed. “No, no. It was nothing like that, doctor. It was… Well, the recent cases. They have been bothering me, sir.”

Doctor Zhernost’s face was serious once again. It was lined at the corners of his mouth and eyes; people tended to call them laugh-lines, but he would often remark that it was a wonder he did not have more, what with his constant laughing and advanced age.

“Yes, yes, it is very serious, but do not worry yourself about it, boy. I wager it’s nothing but a sailor’s disease. It seems to be nothing more than a venereal disease from the high seas.” Responding to the look of relief on Doctor Beyer’s face, he went on. “Yes, a few of our colleagues and I took the liberty of dissecting the body of the patient who had died after we sent you home last night, and there was extensive damage to the testes. It seemed as though they had completely burned away.”

Doctor Beyers’ look of relief faded away to that of terror, and Doctor Zhernost laughed boisterously, hitting the young man on his back enough to almost send him to the floor again. “Don’t worry, my young man. Unless you go out and take a sailor’s woman, I’m sure you would do fine! Now, excuse me, Doctor Beyers, I have a number of patients to attend to. And I am sure that you do as well.”

Doctor Zhernost walked away, with that light waddle affecting his step, and Doctor Beyers walked to his small office, where he changed himself out of his coat and slipped the white coat that all doctors wore. It was going to be a tough day indeed, and he took a breath of the sterile air around him, a deep breath.

But, there was something behind that sterile air, and it was that which caused him to collapse upon the floor, and it was that which frightened him as he stood in his office, the pressed white coat about his tall, thin frame.

It smelled like rot, and it smelled dank. It smelled like some great shaggy beast had been murdered and left to stink, maggots crawling through its flesh and burrowing into its muscles. It smelled like that and much, much worse.

“It burns! Oh Christ save me, it burns!” The patient screamed and cried with such alarming volume and tone, that the nurses had rushed to him and drugged him, hoping to send him into a deep sleep. “I see it! Oh God it’s coming to take me!”

The patient had gone blind an hour before, making it the eleventh whose optic nerve had deteriorated beyond operable use. The man screamed and cried, thrashing at things that were not there, knocking out the intravenous needles and occasionally hitting a poor nurse. The drugs had not yet taken effect, and the poor women, with their mouths covered for fear of catching the horrible malady, tried to calm the poor man’s spirits.

His face was unshaven and unclean. There was a layer of grime still on his face and hands, due to the fact that he had just admitted, and yet he already showed signs of an advanced case. His eyes were sightless and milky, and they were wide with an unseeing fear, a rapidly spreading horror at the grotesque and unseeable thing that stood before him.

The room was small and cramped, and it had that odd smell of death, of rotting, only it was masked with the scent of pine and lemon, and it combined to form something grotesque, something that was quite hard to get used to. The curtains were drawn tightly, and the room contained little light, for there was no need for the room to be too brightly lit, considering the patients preferred darkness in their state, and this one was blind anyway. There was only enough light for the nurses to see what they were doing, and that was all that was needed, all that was required, since money had been getting tight in the darling port city.

“Drunk, I’d say if I hadn’t seen another case such as this. It could be a specific brand of delirium caused by the disease?” Doctor Avery said. Doctor Avery was a tall man, whose age was almost as great as Doctor Zhernost, though he looked far older, considering his hair had turned to a shade of snow-white and his eyes had gone yellow and bile-colored from complications with his liver.

Doctor Beyers nodded his affirmation, eyes wide with his own breed of fright at the strange specter before him, that screaming and crying man who thrashed against the crisp and cleanly white bed sheets.

“It is a demon! A demon! Its eyes! It has so many eyes!”

Doctor Zhernost sighed through the mouth-covering and turned to leave the room, his first true action upon bringing them to the room. The man squeezed his rotund bulk through the doorway and walked down the hallway, stopping in front of the door that led out of the quarantined section of the hospital. The two doctors followed him as though they were obedient children and stared at him, willing him to make the decision or observation that would lead to a cure.

The director only sighed, and he shook his head, his face glowing red from his growing frustration. Large, plump hands gestured in vain back at the room where the man was yelling at unseen specters, crying out as a little child would, left alone without his treasured blanket or teddy bear to protect him from what lurked beneath the bed.

“We don’t know what it is yet, do we?” Doctor Avery asked at last. The silence shattered by his words lie on the ground, and it quivered with the dank smell of the deaths that had been springing throughout the hospital. Around twelve had died from the strange disease, and it looked as though it were getting worse. The trade in the city had slowed down to something below a trickle, and it seemed as though it was going to stay that way unless the epidemic was stamped out quickly.

“No. We know nothing of this disease. I think it may be some bug from the Orient, brought by those… strange yellow men that live there. It seems to be mutating rapidly, because, depending on the case or sometimes even the day, different drugs have entirely different results.” He started to spit as he spoke, and his face was growing red, growing a shade of crimson not unlike the sun. “I, for once in my entire career, have no idea what to do next.”

Doctor Beyers stared down at the floor, and then he looked upwards with a child’s innocence and simplicity, and his voice even quavered a bit. “I think we should continue testing upon them as much as we can, to find the cure, if there is one. I am sure that there is something that we can do, and I think we are taking as many precautions as we can to stop it from spreading.” His voice sounded muffled, coming from the sheet that covered his mouth.

Doctor Avery nodded, as did Doctor Zhernost, and Doctor Beyers beamed with an even more childish sense of happiness. The young doctor nodded, happy to see that, despite his age, he was one of the more respected doctors, as evidenced by the fact that the two listened to his input and invited him to witness the strange new disease in action and partake in discussion of what exactly to do about it.

“Well, I am certain that we should tell the others, though I think that is what they expected to anyway,” Doctor Zhernost said at last. “You two can go about your rounds. Do not alarm your patients by acting any different than usual. Keep them comfortable and help them through whatever sickness they have. If they seem as though they have the disease, alert the nurses and that patient will be quarantined.”

Doctor Beyers and Doctor Avery nodded, and they remained solemn as Doctor Zhernost took his leave; the two looked at each other for a moment in silent confusion, in silent terror at the disease that was spreading throughout the town with such alarming celerity. Then the two nodded, wordlessly, and they both walked through the strong doors of iron, doors which were to keep the contaminated air from going to the rest of the hospital.

Doctor Beyers rounded a corner of the sparkling white hallways, and he entered the room of the patient that he usually visited first. It was a young man with an extremely innocuous broken arm and two broken legs after being nearly crushed underneath a load of strange spices from Orient. Luckily, he had escaped only with the broken limbs, and they would heal quickly, seeing as how they were extremely minor.

The patient in question was lying upon his bed as the doctor stepped in, and his pale face matched the sheets and pillow almost perfectly. There were three other men in the room. The two to the patient’s right were asleep, and the one to the left was an extremely far-gone case of a disease that may have been a severe case of the arteries hardening. He was being let to wither away, and he was currently mumbling to himself about a horse which his relatives had informed Doctor Beyers that he had never owned.

The patient’s face was extremely pale, and his freckles showed starkly, pinpricks of red blood upon a startling white sail, flecks of blood shot up by a wave of red, a red sea that stretched from horizon to horizon, an infinite sea that never ended; his eyes were faded and a tad yellow, and the more that the doctor looked at his skin, the more he realized there was even a light yellow tint. The poor boy was an Irishman, so it stood to reason that he drank alcohol, and it stood to reason that it was damaging his liver. Upon letting the poor boy leave, they would tell him to stay away from the drink, how he was showing signs of liver damage, but of course, like all Irishmen, he would not take it seriously.

The doctor sighed, and he shook his head from the right to the left. The room stank lightly of urine and of sweat; it stank of defeat, and it stank of abject sickness. And, strangely enough, that dank smell was coming from his patient. Doctor Beyers tilted his head, leaning forward to the half-asleep male. The eyes registered nothing.

He felt a rustle, and he felt a change about the room. There was no color for a moment, and the smells went away, only to be replaced by something horrid beyond conception. It was a smell of death, a smell of disease, a smell of something that slept and lived in its own wastes that had accumulated since time began. The patient’s face, it changed.

It shifted, as thought it were made of a pliable material such as putty. The expression changed to something like a grimace, and the eyes opened to reveal two gaping black holes, rimmed with blood. The black holes looked endless and bottomless and horrible. No light could penetrate it, and it did not confuse the doctor as to why he would know that. The face remained, and the entire room fell away, fell out of his view and out of his mind. There was only a pulsing shade of purple around him. A shade that was not a color but some part of a strange living creature. He tried to look at it, but it evaded him, it bent away and faded and it became background. To look at the strange shade was to look at something that the mind could not comprehend. It was the very sight of infinity.

Doctor Beyers felt himself tremble. Larvae began to crawl from the patient’s eyes. They were sticky white worms, eyeless and mouthless, and they slithered from those dark recesses and they left dark purple streaks along the pale face. The freckles erupted with blood, and it fell down that face. The mouth opened wide, and the patient’s teeth were sharpened and white and horrible. The patient stared at the doctor with those sightless eyes, and the worms crawled out and into that mouth and it seemed to be feeding on them.

But it stopped eating, and it spoke to him.

It did not speak to him, no. It spoke at him in a voice that was otherworldly and beyond anything. It was a voice that spoke of dank halls away from all sense of reality, a voice that spoke of chalk-white dust that settled upon books that should never be read, books written by insane men who lived in deserts, feasting on locusts and wild honey.

Do zla boga. Dos zhernots ka khef cthulha terantima. Tyerkarostep, c’that c’talth.

And Doctor Beyers stared, and the voice filled him with dread. The purple shade pulsed, and it almost came into view, and Doctor Beyers could feel countless eyes looking upon him, seeing through him, and feeding upon him. But it was asleep. They were asleep. The shade was asleep, but it still was awake. It slept, but it knew what went on around it, and it was ready to awaken.

And it felt hungry, so very hungry, and the young doctor fell upon his knees. The ground rushed up to him, and he felt the coldness, and he felt his bladder empty, and the purple shade met him.

As soon as the purple seemed to be reaching out to him, Doctor Beyers blacked out, and he knew no more of that moment.

Doctor Beyers awoke to the feeling of a burning liquid sliding down his throat, scorching its course to the pit of his empty stomach, and the strange liquid made him cough, and he sputtered. The doctor fought to release himself from the grip of whatever that purple shade had been, but he became awake enough to notice that he was naked and in a bed. His eyes opened, and he could clearly see a nurse hovering around him, but more importantly, he saw Doctor Zhernost’s face, beet-red and bloated as a corpse.

“Doctor, are you okay? Why, Nurse Summers here found you collapsed in Ward Five, and we rushed you here as quickly as we could. You even had wet yourself, my boy, and after we changed your clothes, you even vomited all over the new ones!” He leaned forward, and one eyebrow rising to the ceiling, he sniffed the air around the rapidly awakening young man. “You’re not drunk are you? I will not abide with a doctor who cannot handle the drink!”

Doctor Beyers coughed, and he shook his head to and fro. “No, of course not, Doctor. You see, I was tending the patient… And I…” He could not continue. A hot red blush tinged the flesh high on his cheekbones enough that he looked as though Doctor Zhernost had a much thinner son.

The director tilted his head, and he did look genuinely concerned. It was obvious that he did not believe that the boy was drinking, but it seemed as though he had come to his own conclusion about why he had collapsed, and it was genuinely concerning him.

“Why, my boy, it is not your fault that the patient died. No one could have known that he had caught the disease. It was not your fault at all.” Doctor Zhernost paused to shake his head, to show the poor, sick doctor that, indeed, it was not at all his fault. “However, you have to learn to not take such an emotional investment in your patients. Some may die, and some may live. Hopefully, the majority will live, but you must never cry for the ones that die that much. You must never allow yourself to be taken away by the grief.”

Doctor Beyers remembered the voice that sounded as though it came from beyond the veil, and he remembered the worms, the larvae that crawled from the eyes, and he remembered all of the blood. His face went pale, but he nodded in silent agreement.

It was just a simple case of overwork. That was it. Nothing more.

Doctor Zhernost smiled and patted the clear forehead, standing up unsteadily on his ham-like thighs, and he trundled to the door, before turning to point a sausage-like finger in the direction of the bedded doctor.

“Rest here until you get better. This will be the only time I allow you time off like this without being docked pay, so consider this a present of sorts. A vacation, if you would prefer it to be so.”

The door closed after him, and Doctor Beyers looked around the clean, sterile room. The window was closed, so it was stuffy, and he smelled that terrible scent, the scent of masked death and rot. The nurse busied herself with cleaning the invisible dust from the room.

Doctor Beyers stared at the ceiling, and he willed himself back to sleep. His dreams were troubled: they were off horrible demons that menaced him, and they were of nurses with long, cruel needles, jabbing them into his arms and injecting viscous green fluids that hissed and bubbled and blinded him to the horrors of the torture devices. Most of all, however, he dreamt of the eyeless face, speaking that incomprehensible and alien tongue.

There was something looking down upon him, and its face was cruel and twisted, melting tallow-wax and a bright shade of purple where the eyes should have been. The horrible face had thousands of eyes within the two sockets, and they blinked on and off with many colors that somehow looked to be purple on the whole. The face of melting tallow-wax leaned down to him, and the scorching flesh dripped on his face, and the doctor’s mouth opened to scream, but the sound was caught in his throat would not come out. The thing held a needle to his throat, and he felt the thin tip slide into his skin, almost without any force, the thin needle injected its poison into him, and the sounds of his pain and distress would not come out from his mouth.

His teeth clacked together, and the beast above him made a series of rapid choking sounds, a wet noise like a drain being unclogged of an excessive amount of sewage. It was laughing at him, and the laughter descended from an unseeable throne, high above mortal comprehension; the throne rose above anything and everything, in a world undefined by Euclidean geometry, a world where nothing was comprehensible in our mortal three dimensions, and the beings there were stars and planets and meteorites. They were everything and anything.

The specter’s tongue slid from his mouth, and it was forked with a small mouth at the very tip, a mouth filled with rows of whirring teeth. The small mouth began to speak to him in that otherworldly voice, a voice that sounded as though it came from beyond the veil, as though it knew nothing of the veil that separated the worlds of the living and the dead.

Do zla boga, c’tanta kin? Ka khef dinh dan? Teranigma, te yornis’tirrith. Aut zle boshkt’ka.

The fear overrode all possible emotions, and his eyesight grew dim, despite the fact that his eyes were open wide with unattainable fear, a fear that grew out of true encounters with the Unknown, what lay outside of a human’s comprehension. The eyesight was leaving him, but the horrible specter stayed, emblazoned upon his eyes, though the angles were distorting, and the beast’s outline seemed to be leaving, seemed to be fading into some ether.

Doctor Beyers fainted.

When his senses came back to him, as beaten dogs to a cruel master, he found that the room was extraordinarily dark. That led him to two realizations: the first being that it was night, and the second that he had regained his eyesight, if he had even lost it in the first place. The room was dark, and the curtains were drawn, but there was little light that seeped through the small slits. His arms were not tied down to the bed, and there seemed to be no nurses in the room, nor did there seem to be any life in his room besides his presence. Doctor Beyers felt hungry, and he wondered how long he had been asleep in that hospital bed, how long time had ceased to be something material and sensical.

One leg slid over the side off the bed, and the other followed, the soft pads of his foot coming into contact with the somewhat cold ground. The legs that hit the ground propelled him upwards, and the sheets clung to his body for a moment before falling away. He stood there, dumbly, as the cold air wrapped around his body, a draft from an unseen window. It took him quite a long time to figure out that he was, indeed, naked. A sigh expelled from between his thin lips, and he searched around the room, under the bed and the closet, before finding a robe in a small cabinet to the left of his bed. The doctor put the robe on and sashed it tightly to make sure that his modesty would not be put into question. It was a cotton robe, and it was a simple white color, and he knew that many patients before him had worn it; there was a lingering thought of how many had died while wearing it, of how many had lost their lives while wearing the garment.

Holding the robe closed, despite the tightly tied sash, he walked down the halls of the strangely quiet hospital. The lights were off, and there was no one around, no one that seemed to be awake. His eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness, and he routinely based his shin against various door handles and other such necessities of life. Doctor Beyers stopped in front of Doctor Avery’s office, and he heard the coughing and the tinkling of a glass filled with ice. He smiled, and the smile cut across his skin like a scythe. He could remember the old doctor telling him of his early days when the young man first joined the practice, of his foibles and great victories concerning the art of saving a man or woman’s life, using science to the very last degree.

He opened the door and stepped inside. It was a small, warm office, the kind with walls lined with books; the desk was messy and covered with many sheathes of paper, all of which Doctor Avery somehow knew how to locate within a moment’s notice. The good doctor lifted his rheumy old eyes to the young man in the robe, and he smiled.

“Why, it’s good to see you awake, Anthony! You’ve been out for a few days now. We were worrying quite a bit about you.” And Doctor Avery coughed, his face growing red and the coughs growing more and more ragged. They tore at his throat, and a good chunk of mucous slid into his opened handkerchief, and there were small flecks of blood stained onto the white handkerchief. Noticing Doctor Beyers’ surprise and terror at the sight of his sickness, the old doctor merely shook his head and made a dismissive gesture with his right hand. “It’s more than a cold. My old body has been through a lot, and I like to think it would be immune to things such as this, the innocuous flux. No, there are strange things spreading through this hospital, my dear Anthony.”

There was another cough, and a large amount of blood seeped through the white handkerchief.

“Doctor Avery… You’re coughing blood in large amounts. You may be internally bleeding. You should go get yourself under observation.”

The old doctor sighed, and he took a drink of the brandy placed upon his desk. He filled it up with the bottle at his right, and he shook his head again. “No, no. It’s getting worse. But…” And the old doctor sighed, trying to find the words to say. Doctor Avery was a quiet man, and this was obviously a stretch for him to speak so much at once. “There is something odd with this hospital. At night, none of the nurses work at all. Patients are dropping like flies; patients who come in for routine childbirths are catching the disease. All of them loser their eyesight, and they die screaming that they see horrific demons.”

He coughed again, and the hacking cough deposited another chunk of blood and phlegm into the white cloth. His voice was losing strength, but he went on, for it was important. And Doctor Beyers felt that Doctor Avery felt it was so.

“Anthony, they are all dying, and Doctor Zhernost seems to be ignoring it. He sits in his office, never coming out after six, and he tells us it’s a simple venereal disease from the east. But what venereal disease is spread through the air? What venereal disease kills so rapidly?!”

Another wad loosened itself from the flesh of the old man’s throat, but this one seemed to contain a bit of flesh; Doctor Avery’s rheumy eyes were losing their strength. He was getting visibly weaker, and Doctor Beyers rushed to aid him, but the old man pushed him away with an anemic strength.

“No, no. You may catch it. Stay away, Anthony. It would be stupid of you.” Doctor Avery shook his head, and he downed the rest of his brandy. The hot liquid seemed to calm him, and he shook his head. The old man almost seemed to have recovered, before he sputtered and once again coughed into that rapidly pinkening handkerchief. “My eyesight is failing,” he said simply.

Doctor Beyer rushed forward and caught the old man as he slid out of his chair. He coughed again, and a glob of phlegm, blood, and flesh erupted onto the breast of Doctor Beyers’ robe.

“Doctor Avery, are you alright?”

“For God’s sake, boy,” Doctor Avery scolded. “Call me Jonathon. You don’t always have to be so bloody formal. I’m not some bloody dooh-” and his voice was cut off by a torrent of coughing. The eyes went blank, and Jonathon Avery stared upwards at the wall, his mouth and eyes widening with terror.

“By God. I see it. Oh God, they were right. Those bloody bastards. I see it. Oh god…”

Doctor Beyers looked to the ceiling, and he saw nothing.

Jonathon Avery began to scream and thrash about, and Doctor Beyers held him close, to calm the man who seemed to have caught the strange disease. His pulse quickened, and it spiraled to an irregular beat, as his breathing grew stranger and stranger.

“It has so many eyes!” And his cries quieted, but the look of sheer fright did not end; no, it was emblazoned across the wrinkled face of that old man.

Jonathon Avery slid into the world of the dead, as Anthony Beyers held his head to his breast and cried hot tears of sorrow; his tears did not end until he collapsed, fainted, into another comatose state.

Anthony Beyers awoke what could have been minutes or weeks later, and his eyes felt heavy and red. His head throbbed, and it felt as though his brain was fighting to exit his skull, to break it apart and slide out onto the ground, a mass of pink brain matter slimy and slickened with the grease of pumping blood. Jonathon Avery’s body had not yet decomposed, and it still felt frightfully warm, almost hot. The eyes were covered in blood, as though a vein had burst before he had died, and his hands were curled up into arthritic claws; the look of sheer terror had stayed upon his face.

He stood up, on shaky feet, and the young doctor found that he could stand after some concentration. It took him a bit to stumble over to the door, and he leaned against it until it opened outwards. The hospital was still dark, but there were pinpricks of light through the curtains, here and there. An hour had passed, an hour and nothing more. Doctor Avery’s body was still warm, and the sun was just about to rise, like a newly born phoenix, like the great Egyptian god Ra resurrecting himself from his great death, an ephemeral life of sheer glowing gold.

Doctor Beyers stumbled through the hospital, the lifeless building that had no working nurses, no doctors that he could see. The hospital was so very cold, and the earth felt so very cold. The young man walked without thinking, and his feet fell heavily upon the floor; there was no reason for anything that had happened, and Doctor Zhernost… Why did he not do more? Where could he have been?

Without understand his own movements, the young doctor found himself at the door to Doctor Zhernost’s chambers, and normally, the door was locked. However, it was opened for some strange reason, and it did not even squeak as he turned the knob and stepped into the dark room.

The first thing that hit him was an overwhelming sense of dread, of dank air that had never been breathed by a human, and it was a foreboding sense of dread. Standing behind the desk of a room that was orderly and seemed barely used was a tall figure in yellow. The robe reached the ground, and he wore a hood that covered his face, with a strange sigil of black emblazoned across it. He tried to look at it, but it shifted out of his view, and it burnt itself into his corneas, a strange unfocused shape that was a shade not unlike the purple of the cognizant flesh that bound him in the hospital.

The figure raised a yellow-gloved hand and pointed to him, and the cloak changed to a deep shade of purple before the creature disappeared in that puff of smoke that smelled quite a bit like death, if death indeed could have a smell. The figure in yellow turned and pointed to a bookcase, tapping at a book in the stack before disappearing in a puff of purple and yellow smoke.

Doctor Beyers stepped forward to the bookcase, and the binding of one of the books had a purple smudge upon its surface. Doctor Beyers’ right hand moved forward, and he pulled the book from the case, and as though it were some mystery novel, the bookcase swiveled on an unseen axis, and it revealed an extremely dank and dripping subterranean passageway. He looked at the cover of the book, and it was called “The King in Yellow,” a short play, and the cover held a simple image of that yellow-robed figure; the author’s name was smudged to the point of illegibility, but the young doctor cared not to read it, cared not at all.

The young doctor let the book slip from his fingers, and he turned to walk down the winding passageway, which dripped dead water from high stalactites.

The stairs had been roughly hewn into the solid black rock, and it must have taken ages from them to carve through the stone, since it took what seemed like an hour for him to even reach the bottom of the stairs. As he walked down the stairs, the smell of rot and of strange incense burnt itself into the surface of the inside of his nostrils. It was dark enough that he had forgotten entirely about his ability to see. Doctor Beyers could make out the outlines of stalactites, so he was never in danger of hitting his head upon a jagged rock.

Occasionally, something slithery and wet would run over his foot and brush against his leg. Anthony Beyers was much too tired, too drained, too deadened to take notice of what may have been something quite poisonous or deadly.

At the bottom of the stairs, there was flat rock, rock which seemed stamped by hundreds of people walking the same path for so very long. The path had born its way into the rock, and it was so smooth, smooth like the finest marble. The smell was getting stronger, and his head was swimming with it, swimming with the ideas of an eternity of life, of eons lived that were alien to man and anything else that could have possibly existed.

He walked, and he walked what could have been miles, what could have merely been a few hundred feet; the darkness had blinded him, had retarded his sense of time and space to purest nothingness. He stopped as the cavern opened up, and he saw that there was a pool of water and a fire at its shore. The fire was tall, and it was being constantly fed by sweet-smelling wood. There were a ring of people around it, yelling and screaming strange words that registered with something primal in the doctor’s mind.

There was someone above the flame, held on sticks, and the person being held above the fire was screaming in pain. But a short, fat figure hobbled up to him and produced a long, cruel knife from beneath the robes, and the knife slid into what looked like the person’s stomach, and the cries became louder before dying down, copious amounts of blood dripping into the fire. When the crying fully stopped, the carriers of the body dropped it into the fire, and the flames licked the body, burning it to a crisp almost instantly.

Doctor Beyers stumbled forward, and he began shouting, his foot getting cut on a few loose and jagged rocks.

“You! What are you people doing! I’m going to call the police! This is not allowed! You, you monsters!”

There was a bit of confusion and bustle. The purple-robed figures around the fire turned, and they stopped the chanting and wailing. The short fat one in a yellow robe turned and stared at the interloping doctor. There was a sound like a chuckle, and something began to churn below the surface of the water. Those who stood around the fire seemed to have forgotten of the man crying to call the police, and there seemed to be a silent reverence concerning what came out of the water.

The bubbling at the surface of the water stopped, and a hideous shape erupted from it. It was purple, and it was glistening with a strange slime. The beast roared a strange sound that trembled beyond the edge of reason, beyond the edge of what is observable with the simple auditory senses men are equipped with. Its face was a large tentacle, and the tip had a suction cup whirring with sharp teeth around the inside. The body was hulking and dripping with bits of purple flesh, loosened by years of sleeping at the bottom of the oceans, sleeping its nigh eternal sleep.

Except, Doctor Beyers somehow knew that it was still sleeping. It was a quadruped, and its strong forelegs were scaled, but its back legs seemed to be comprised of conjoined tentacles, wrapping around each other to form limbs. But even beyond that hulking mass, there was another shape just beyond it, and it was a shape of a small robed figure, wearing a yellow and purple robe, a robe that was at once purple and at once yellow. It was a grinning, hooded man, a man whose power had begun to exceed the elder gods that had birthed it, a figure that had indeed began to usurp them.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn? Ia Ia? The yellow robed one laughed.

The beast roared in its incomprehensible tongue, perhaps in a sort of affirmation, and those around it laughed, as though their yellow-robed master had played the straight man to the horrible beast. Its worshippers laughed, and it was a hideous laugh that dripped with a crushing knowledge, a crushing sort of fear mixed with awe, and it was a fear and awe that led to a madness that superseded every other emotion.

It slept on, but the worshippers seemed quite happy, and there was indeed a reason for that, since the great beast seemed to have unearthed itself.

Doctor Beyers stared directly at the beast, and he began to feel faint, as though the veil had been obliterated, as though it had finally gone away. His eyes widened, and it was horrifying to see that evil, to see that purest destruction, to see that which was unthinkable in a true mind.

“It has awakened, my boy. Well, not yet. But it will awaken. It has usurped the throne of R’yleh, and it has seen the wisdom of Yog-Sothoth, surpassing him in every respect. Indeed, it has become the King in Yellow, whether or not it had been that in the first place. He Whose Name Must Not Be Uttered is no more, nor are the any of the Great Old Ones, of the Elder Gods, regardless of how terrible they had been before. There is no one left to devour what is all, but our god. My boy, our nameless god, our Noah, floating in the sea of ether for far more than forty days and forty nights, has scraped himself from the bottom to the top, and he has become what is all. Our Noah does not bring two of every animal in his ark, but he has floated for so long, and he has waited and schemed until everything fell into place.”

Doctor Beyers wondered if the cultist was truly mad, and found that he did not care, that it did not matter.

“The Great Old Ones have been destroyed. The Elder Gods are no more.”

Doctor Beyers shielded himself from the monster, and it looked at the man in yellow. Slowly, he took off his hood, and the face was read and sweating, almost the color purple, almost the color red, and almost the color yellow. The fat face shook with laughter, and his eyes were the color green, and it was a glowing green the color of bile and of snot and of phlegm and of dead things rotting in some unattended corner of some unattended hospital.

“Doctor Zhernost?” he asked with a cracking voice, his eyes unable to leave the sleeping giant.

“It took you that long to figure it out?” The other robed figures turned to him, and they were the doctors, the nurses, and they were grinning with rosy cheeks, drunk on the blood of their heathen god, drunk on their horrible, endless rites.

“Why… Doctor Avery has died, Doctor Zhernost.”

Doctor Zhernost chuckled, and he shook his head. The nurses and doctors behind him laughed and agreed. Their god, Noah, remained silent, remained impassible, still slumbering.

“Why, I know that, my boy. And you? You gave it to him!”

Doctor Beyers found himself fading, found himself on the edge of a gibbering madness, a madness that would swallow him up and leave him dying in the abyss. “What? How?”

And Doctor Zhernost laughed again, shaking his head to and fro. The others behind him joined in,

“My boy, my family has been sacrificing to Noah since before civilization began. Our sacrifices were isolated, and they were nothing to the great hunger of the god. So, I took it upon myself to become a doctor, to allow our mansion into become a hospital. My boy, every death is a sacrifice to our God. It just so happened that I sensed it growing closer, so I began to… make things go a bit quicker, to make the offerings more direct. I injected the patients with the blood of my God, and they died tearing themselves to get him out of them, and he fed upon their fear, upon their very souls. Why, they are still inside of him, and I don’t think that they will ever leave, my boy.”

He paused, and he drew a hand over his sweating brows, and his face was a shade that was not unlike purple, that was a mottled color that nearly mirrored that of the terrible god behind him, that thankfully still seemed to be in its alien slumber.

The great god behind them began to rumble, began to move, and its great tentacled head shifted, and it seemed to be staring without eyes, without anything but that wide mouth with whirring teeth.

“I gave you a watered down phial of his blood, and it only served to pass it on to others. Doctor Avery, he was getting a bit nosey, and I knew that you would immediately go to him. Of course, I did not take into account that Noah would awaken tonight! But, that just seems to be my luck, and my God’s luck. We will no longer have to wait, and we will be rewarded for our years of service to him.”

He shook his great head.

“My boy, Noah awakens. And he will be hungry. There are many things for him to devour, and he will exalt us above everything. It was so much easier to awaken him with more followers, yes, and they… well, they, too, will see paradise. Paradise that our God can give.”

“You, you terrible man. Why have you done that? You have gone against the law of Yahweh!”

And Doctor Zhernost laughed, and he shook his head. “You great fool. The god that sent his son to save us is anemic, and he has no real power. He is a culmination of humanity’s wishes. What we worship, what we have helped bring to power, is a being that exists beyond the flow of reality, beyond the flow of logic and reason.”

“What you worship is the devil!” And he felt himself fading, Doctor Beyers felt himself dying, and the robe may have opened, but he did not know it. It was cotton and white, but it was stained by the minerals that the rocks were made out of.

“My boy, the devil is such a small figure. The devil is meaningless to us, as it is to most Christians in our world. You see, gods are born, and they sometimes can die. Gods need belief, and they need sacrifice, and they need their belief to proliferate throughout the known world. Yahweh receives nothing, and the people have turned to science. All those that believe in him give only a little, and they do not give all that they can give. Noah is given all that we can possibly ever give, and that seems to be all that is needed.”

He turned to face the slumbering creature, and he stretched his arms out wide, as though he were trying to embrace from far away. The creature stank of a thousand deaths, of countless lives spent toiling away in the darkness of the human, of things that should never be felt by man or by anything else.

“Ah. He awakes. Witness, my boy and my followers, the fruition of my family’s deeds, and of yours, too, my followers. Noah, awakens, and he hungers.”

“For what?” Doctor Beyers asked with rising terror, a dumb blank terror that blazed itself into the center of his mind, that lighted every synapse on white fire.

“For reality, my boy. For the simple world that we live in.”

The god awoke.

Its cry was unearthly, and it was great and terrible. Its image began to quake, and it roared, beginning to crawl out from the water like some great purple slug, bits of its flesh sopping and falling off its sides. Its outline blurred, and it gained facets that were not of a Euclidean world, and it was infinite and glowing, a mass of purple flesh and whirring yellow light. Doctor Beyers stepped forward, and it filled his vision.

“Look at it, my followers. See what you have brought upon this world. See that which will devour all existence, see that which will exalt you above our human concepts of time and space.”

Overcome with dread, the young doctor reached his hands to his eyes and tore them out of their sockets. The pain caused him to fall to the floor, and he coughed, blood spewing from the opened wounds. Knowledge filled him upon the very sight of the awakened beast, and it was knowledge that no man was meant to know, no man was meant to comprehend in our limited view.

“The weak will perish, and the weak will always perish. But, my followers, even the strong will perish at the hands of our god.”

They stared at it, and their eyes glowed with true madness, with true religious zealotry, and true religious epiphany. The nurses stared, and the doctors stared. Their eyes bled bright crimson, and it dripped down their sallow cheeks; Doctor Zhernost began to tremble, but he stared steadfast at his God, and he felt the true power.

Doctor Beyers could still see the god.

And it had so many eyes, and he saw so much more when he had no eyes. He saw all of it, all that it was an all that it could ever be. He saw more than the followers did, but maybe, he saw exactly what they saw, maybe he saw with his blindness what they saw with their true belief.

“You will be his first meal, my boy.” And Doctor Zhernost began to laugh. He saw the trembling, and he saw the coughing pain and the look of terror upon the young man’s face. “Oh, you thought that meaningless gesture would save you? My boy, you do not need eyes to see the infinite.”

A tentacle picked up Doctor Beyers, and screaming and crying with madness, the doctor slid down the Noah’s great gullet, to be torn and tortured for strange eons by the probing of sharp teeth and to be burned by bile the color of a setting sun. Eons where even immortals may die, where even entire existences could be born forth from nothing.

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