The Ancient and Unspeakable Ones

> you know from my previous writ­ings, I am an asthmatic, and I have L been all my life. But I have never V considered this a curse. • For one, it excused me from

countless gym classes, thus instilling in me a love of observing life from the

LITERAL SIDELINES and A LIFELONG FEAR OF THE HUMAN TOUCH.

And for two, it gave me the opportunity to experiment with many lung-altering drugs that opened not only my bronchial tubes1 but also my mind.

Many a night I have spent sleepless, my mind and heart quickened by heavy doses of albuterol, various inhaled ste­roids, my cache of long-off-the-market antihistamines, two humidifiers and a medicinal tumbler of a special smooth-muscle relaxant called gin. This potent cocktail attuned me to the old ways and ancient rituals that our modern soci­ety has largely forsaken in the name of "progress" and "not sacrificing humans." And at times, I have even become intoxicated with visions of a world that remains unseen to you, the normally breathing person.

1 THE LITTLE SNAKES THAT LIVE IN YOUR LUNGS AND BREATHE FOR YOU.

Indeed, it was under the influence of a massive dose of prednisone that my inner eye first opened to many invisible truths, such as:

-dogs cannot speak, no matter what the Nazis claimed. -wai.i.papkr is fooling you into thinking that it does not change its pattern.

-WATER DOES NOT BOH. BECAUSE OF "SCIENCE"; it boils because

the fire puts a bubble curse on it. -if you stare at trees i.ong enough, you can get the wind

to blow through them with your MIND. -all of us share A group consciousness and also the same

exact memory of eating in the Heath School cafeteria

in Brookline, Massachusetts while the kid who got to

see R-rated movies gave a scene-by-scene description

of the fog. -frogs have hallucinogenic skin, but you can't activate it

unless you first tear them apart with your hands.

-YOU HAVE TO GROW A MUSTACHE. YOU HAVE TO GROW A MUSTACHE. YOU HAVE TO GROW A MUSTACHE.

And of course I became aware of the ancient and unspeak­able ones.

Perhaps you have heard whispers of them or read of them in ancient Babylonian texts in the forbidden rooms of the univer­sity library. There are some old fairy tales where you may still see reference to their dreadful names—the unedited European fairy tales that are not afraid to deal candidly with child muti­lation. Or perhaps you heard them invoked in the whispers of the adult dinner party conversations that you snuck down the staircase to hear as a child. Perhaps your parents were planning to sacrifice you to one of them. This happened a fair amount at dinner parties in the 1970s.

I will explain as best I can.

THE ancient and unspeakable ones are not gods precisely, nor are they precisely demons. But they are creatures so old, fierce, uncaring and powerful that many called them those names. They are avatars of our deepest fears, monstrous intelligences from the far-flung outer dimensions of the many-verse or per­haps dimensions that exist within our very own minds.

Whatever the case, they were the First Ones in this universe, and they will be the last, their deathless lives a pair of slimy parentheses around the pathetically brief cosmic aside that is humanity. And they once ruled this world.

A number of them built great cities that some called Atlantis and some called R'lyeh and some called Detroit, and they were worshipped there by fanatics and madmen and art students. And then they killed those worshippers and cursed those cities or hid them beneath the crashing waves, because THE ancient AND unspeakable ones crave destruction as much as they crave cre­ation. Or sometimes they just messed up and built the cities too heavy for the pontoons. Their hideous, hideous pontoons.

Others of their kin dwelled alone, secretly, not just in the deep places of the earth, as chose the Century Toad2, but also in the banal, forgotten places that are all around us: in your half-memories, in the crisper drawer in the refrigerator, in that space just beyond your vision, attached with its little teeth to the part of your back that you cannot reach, there

IS PROBABLY ONE SLEEPING IN YOUR CAR RIGHT NOW. THE HIGH DOSES OF PRFDNISONE ARE TELLING ME SO.

And there, in time, they were forgotten. And over eons, for­getting even themselves, they fell asleep, to wait until the signs emerged, the omens and portents aligned and the conditions were right for their return.

The Americanomicon tells us that this will happen on June 3, 2012.

What will happen when they come?

Some will be destroyers, full of a fathomless rage that you cannot quell, even with money.

Some will be tricksters, who will come to you kindly with offers of power and gifts' before they enslave you.

Others are just snobs, full of bitterness at a world that refuses to worship them and their self-consciously esoteric preferences in music, film, technology and other dimensions.4

All of them will be pretty hungry, unfortunately.

What do they look like? They are almost indescribable to the sane.

What can I tell you of Ath-Masticath, the Mouth Cloud? You will not see him until his 10 million mouths are eating

YOUR EYES!

(Also, his 10 million mouths have no lips, gross.)

What can I tell you of Juggoth, God of Atheists Who Is

Himself an Atheist? What good will it be to explain that he

does not believe that even he is a god but simply a flesh-and-

blood creature from another time-space? You cannot reason

with him. YOU CANNOT EVEN TELL WHICH IS THE FLESH AND WHICH IS THE BLOOD.

What can I tell you about Solomon Deadfist, the Corpse-Handed? I TIIINK THAT HIS NAME PRETTY MUCH SUMS IT UP.

I mean, if you were to force me, I guess I'd say they more or less look like crazy snakes or giant squids wearing graduation robes, hut i dare say no more, lest you go mad.

All that you need to know is that it will be terrifying to behold them, and not merely because they are disgusting.

What is terrifying is to contemplate a life in which there are things that do not care about you and that will last long past all forgetting of you and everything you have done.

In this way, they are as unsettling as human children, only with tentacles.

But once you have accepted their reality, things get easier somehow. You will embrace darkness. Or perhaps be put into a cocoon of dread silk and human scabs and saved for later consumption. Either way, you tend to get a lot calmer about the little things.

FROM THAT IS ALL BY JOHN HODGMAN, AVAILABLE FROM DUTTON IN NOVEMBER.

2 PLEASE SEE PAGE S69 OF MORE INFORMATION THAN YOU REQUIRE UNDER THE HEADING "ANSWERS TO YOUR QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MOLE-MEN."

3 ONE WAY TO SPOT AN ANCIENT AND UNSPEAKABLE ONE, ASIDE FROM THE FANGS AND THE DOZENS OF EYES THAT FILL YOU WITH NAUSEATING DREAD, IS THAT THEIR "GIFTS" ARE

TERRIBLE. USUALLY IT'S SOMETHING LIKE AN ORANGE OR A GIFT CARD OR A CARD WITH "IOU ONE BACK RUB" WRITTEN IN BLOOD.

' EVERYONE KNOWS THAT DIMENSION 29 IS PLAYED OUT.