《Tongue [Lovecraftian Horror]》


 Mortician

    Long are the hours of a Mortician, filled as they are with the preservation and preparation of a cadaver for viewing and burial ¨C the time consuming chores of embalming, the grooming and dressing of the dead. Many a day, stretching into evening or night, I have spent toiling in my morgue, with little to occupy my mind or senses but the omnipresent stench of formaldehyde and the lingering spectre of death.


    Upon reflection, it was this boredom and a general indifference to the mundanities of everyday existence, driven by an acute understanding of the human condition unique to my trade, that led to my eventual undoing.


    But I am getting ahead of myself: My name is Johnathan Robert Briggs, lifetime resident of Providence, New England, and this is my confessional, for I am a practitioner of that profane and accursed art known as necromancy, and I have spoken with the dead.


    My tale begins in late August, when I was informed of the passing of one of my mentors, Dr. Eliza Hugo, a retired Professor of biology and anthropology who had lectured at my Alma Mater, Miskatonic University, during my tenure as a graduate student.


    Her sudden and unexpected death came as a minor shock to me, for despite her advanced age and lackadaisical attitude towards life, the Professor was famous for her boisterous good health and many of her colleagues had predicted that she would live to become a centenarian.Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators!


    Her death so shook me that when I later attended her interment, I made some discreet inquiries to the funeral director concerning the cause and nature of her passing, but was met with curt dismissal and obtained no definite answers.


    From her family and close relatives I learned she had grown reclusive in her retirement, withdrawing to her studies, and was rumoured to have been in the early stages of writing a grand book or scientific paper. Indeed, my own contact with the Professor had become intermittent, our meetings growing further and further apart, until we had all but stopped meeting in person, our interactions limited to the exchange of the occasional letter or correspondence.


    My last communication from her, a long letter pinned only three weeks prior to her death, contained no mention of ill-health, but rather the excited proposal of a research trip to the Near East, of which she had already begun the initial preparations.


    Thus, when I received word that I had been named as a beneficiary to her estate, I found my thoughts continually returning to the late Professor, and her fascination, bordering on mania, of certain Mesopotamian burial practices, and the curious mummification methods of the ancient Egyptians.


    I recall: my university days would often find me in her office, where we would debate for hours. The Professor was quite convinced that the origins of our modern practices concerning the preparation of the dead could be traced directly back to those Egyptian pharaohs of old, and older still, to those ancients who occupied the river deltas of the Fertile Crescent during the age of prehistory.


    She had once joked, ¡°while our modern gravestones and mausoleums pale to the grandeur of the great pyramids of yore, the average middle-class American receives a decadent embalming on par with that of Tutankhamen.¡±

 New Acquisitions

    One morning in early October a lorry arrived at my estate, and a pair of stout workers began unloading a number of boxes onto my doorstep. This was Dr. Hugo¡¯s vast and sprawling library, to be incorporated into my own prominent collection of textbooks, research papers and scientific documents.


    Upon viewing the sheer amount of material to be unpacked and sorted ¨C the fruits of a lifetime of academia ¨C I began to realize the enormity of the task ahead of me. How well-read was she! And how fortunate was I to be named the inheritor of this grand archive! I found it necessary to convert my guest bedroom into a secondary library, and installed several new bookcases to eventually house the collection.


    One evening, as I shuffled lethargically through the many boxes containing Hugo¡¯s library ¨C rudely packaged with little thought or organization thanks to a disinterested and near illiterate executor who cared not for the Professor or her legacy ¨C I recalled, in one of the Professor¡¯s recent letters, a marked excitement for having procured, by happenstance, a number of ancient texts from a foreign merchant.The author''s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.


    Most had proven fake, or copies of already well known and documented tomes, but one, she was certain after a preliminary examination, was an authentic specimen previously unknown to the community, and of some promise, although she¡¯d deemed further research necessary.


    The mystery of this unknown specimen dangled before me as one might bait a fish or deep sea creature, and my curiosity was vigorously roused, as a leviathan rising from some colourless, unfathomable depth. I hoped the book might prove an antidote to the boredom and indifference that had thus far plagued my banal and pallid existence.


    Thus, with little hesitation, I decided to prioritize this text over all others, and set about at once to excavate the rumoured tome from the collection that now threatened to subsume my house.

 Tome

    Many a night I spent in my study, searching for Dr. Hugo¡¯s mysterious tome, the stagnant air heavy with that unmistakable scent of aged leather and hoary paper, mixed with the thick smoke of my customary evening cigar.


    I searched for weeks, through books both academic and fantastical. Evidently, as the Professor had delved deeper into her research, she had been led down ever increasingly distasteful and shadowy avenues. Amongst others, I found copies of the dread Black Book of Babylon, the discredited Dollhouse Manifesto, and the supposed autobiography of the Whitechapel Killer.


    These were queer nights: my oil-lamp flung strange shadows over the pallid busts and sculptures that adorned my study, twisting the marble figures into cruel and otherworldly shapes.


    At other times a log or errant coal would shift in the fireplace, and the flames would flutter sinisterly, giving rise to fantastic visions of dancing demons and tormented souls.


    Even the soft rustling of my curtains began to fill me with dread, moved as they were by the chill air of the New England autumn seeping softly through the cracks in my window-frame.


    More than once I rushed to my window, certain that someone was leering in from the darkness outside ¨C only to discover it was only a trick of the waning light, or the wind shaking the branches of the oak that grew crooked outside my study¡¯s solitary window.


    It was around this time I began to be haunted by strange and unpleasant dreams, visions that found me as I lay drowsing at my desk, pushing me from the precipice of consciousness to the dark underworld of sleep. These dreams were often jumbled, or confused, filled with vague and unsettling imagery, but I still recall the first in vivid detail:This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.


    I found myself underground, evidently an ancient cave used for burials, for the cavern was populated by countless rows of mummified figures, arms folded in death, all resting upon cold, stone plinths. The cavernous rock walls of that subterranean crypt were slimy to the touch, and dripping with an ominous phosphorescence, and the air was thick with the smell of decay.


    Nothing moved save I in that Stygian tomb, yet more disturbing than the dead was the horrid sensation of being perceived by some unseen but malicious spectre ¨C a sensation that persisted for some time even after I woke.


    Such was my unease that, upon waking, I performed a thorough investigation of my estate, thinking perhaps some burglar or intruder had snuck inside during the night, and this, subconsciously, was the source of my ill feeling.


    Of course, I found nothing.


    Then, one day, after setting aside a soiled collection of Antikytheran funeral verse, I unwrapped a worn muslin cloth from around a strange book, and knew at once I held in my hand the very tome the late Professor had alluded to in her letters:


    A singular book of strange origin, bound in curiously taut leather, a curt examination of the tome¡¯s yellowing, crumbling pages revealing blasphemous rituals in a curious script I later discovered to be derived from an ancient Sumerian cuneiform.


    At once I was struck by an overwhelming sense of dread. Horror clawed darkly at my trembling psyche, warning me of untold and nameless truths that human minds ¨C in their banal placidity ¨C were not meant to comprehend.


    My first shameful impulse was to destroy the book, to throw the tome into a fire and do service to mankind with its destruction. I started towards the fireplace, but hesitated at the brink. I was a man of science; books were my domain. To reject the knowledge within would be to reject all that I valued and loved of the world.


    Trembling, I returned to my desk and continued to peruse the tome, which now seemed thick with an almost tangible malice and maligned portent.


    The scenes depicted within were gruesome beyond belief, and I grew faint as I poured over illustration after illustration of ritualistic sacrifice, necromancy, cannibalism, and the offering up of condemned souls to nameless dead gods, who lay writhing in the dark hidden places beyond time and space.


    Was this the Professor¡¯s discovery? Her legacy?