Small Words
15 Feb 2021Today’s prompt: “Rewrite a piece of your own writing in one-syllable words.” [I’ll be rewriting my post Fear Itself, with the exception that I’ll keep the multi-syllabic names of the Old Ones and Outer Gods.]
You like to think you have good taste in things that scare you. You find jump scares dull, like where a cat jumps out at you and then all at once it’s not a cat, it’s Cyäegha. Gore does not do it for you these days; pails of blood, and guts and ropes of meat that spill out from the dead, and folks with their lips sewn tight with strands of their own hair, they all just get kind of stale in time. You thought the one way you could taste true fear, that white hot fear that gnaws its way in you and ties your guts in knots, is to stare in the eyes of the Great Old Ones.
So you went on a big trip. You thought you would start out with some of the Old Ones that you thought, based on the tales, might not make you lose your mind as much. You thought that way you could get in lots of scares while you were still sane. So you kicked things off with some of the gods that sound like they could make you laugh. First, Basatan, who, yes, is a big crab. You asked to get in close, but the man in charge of your ship said no. Basatan’s huge claws, each the size of ships with big sails, went clack-clack-clack, and he seemed like a big old goof, but then you looked in his eyes on their big stalks. In them, you could see, the whole was more than the sum of its big crab parts. Those deep black eyes held whorls of – of a thing that made your guts try to stand on their heads. It was like your heart and lungs and spleen did not want to be in you and would fight to get out. The crew that had not left let out screams and jumped off the ship. But you just stared, your jaw slack, in the face of that great scare.
From that point on, you were hooked. Next stop was Chaugnar Faugn, who was like a man and like a beast with a trunk and tusks and big ears, and that drank blood, and there was a mouth on the end of its trunk. Ha ha! But then you saw those eyes. You looked in those dull gold eyes, and it felt like you had walked through all the halls, all the halls, and the halls were full of screams.
Then you went to see Glaaki. Glaaki is a big slug with three eyes and spines that shine like steel. You don’t know how he walks since his small, small feet are this shape that has four points and each face of the shape has three sides. How do you walk on that? It made you want to laugh, but then you looked in his three eyes, each of which spelled out to you in real smart words what it feels like to die with no one next to you and no one that loves you.
Golgoroth can look like two things and you weren’t sure which one you would get, the big black toad or the thing with scales and bat wings and squid arms. You lucked out. It was the toad. Some say the toad has a glare that is so mean it can’t be real. Its eyes said they hate you and your mom and dad and their moms and dads and their moms and dads, all of them back to the great apes. Its eyes said they hate all the bits of you, from the nails on your weird toes to the way you think you can make good jokes but they’re not that good. It has so much hate for you, the hate could roll over you and crush you. You’d seen so much, and yet your skin crawled and you shook.
You of course checked out a few of the Gods that Live in the Out, and all the big names, your Cthulhus, your Nyarlathoteps, your Shubs-Niggurath. But to tell the truth, you found that the more the god sounds like a big goof, the more deep scares it hides. One of the best was when you went on a hunt to see Baoht Z’uqqa-Mogg. Baoht has an ant head on top of a big bug that flies and has a tail that can flick forward and sting you to death. When you looked in its eyes, it felt like a dream where you fall and then you wake up and then you go back to sleep and then you fall, on and on. It felt like your skin was full of bugs that would crawl and make you itch. Fear made your whole self shake like when you put clothes with dirt on them in the wash, but you put all your clothes on one side, and the wash shakes since the load is all weird.
Of course a god ate you. The one that ate you was Ctoggha, a god that likes things best when no one is near it. Your book that told you what the Old Ones are like did not tell you what Ctoggha looks like since no one knew, so you thought you would take a real good look. It had a chain of beaks that moved like waves on the sea. You did not think a beak could move that way. It had eyes that grew out of its neck and hands that grew out of its guts. It did things with space and math that would have made the guys that made the math rules want to crawl in a box at the top of the stairs and roll down the stairs for so long that the box would not be shaped like a cube. But those eyes … those eyes on those necks…. First they made you feel like the wing of a moth had left dust on your cheek. But this built and built, up and up – nails that scratch on a board you write on with chalk, then a cold breath on your neck, and then you were sure you left the stove on, each thing built up like a piece of a song by Bach. At the end it felt like all at the same time, you had to wade through blood, you had lost your best friend, you could be seen by lots of eyes, you were now just like your mom and dad, and you had cut slits in your arms and now had to sew them shut.
Sure, you died, but the things you’ve seen … no one can say you did not live.