[The following are excerpts from handwritten notes discovered secreted in a hidden alcove in the west wing of the Phillips-Ervin
Museum, London England.
Sealed in a leather canister, the aged script was accompanied by an ornate bronze key of unknown origin.
The
author of the journal remains unidentified, and the artifact was only chanced upon following the museum's partial destruction during the
spring of 1941...]
[Fragmentary entry I:]
I have come into possession of a certain ancient book, a collection of arcane
scrawlings reputed to have been derived from an even earlier transcription, allegedly lost during the great fire of 1666.
The Chthonic
Chronicles!
I cannot disclose here the precise and rather unsavory means by which I acquired this weather-worn tome, but I immediately
recognized the veracity of the fevered inscriptions contained within.
Apparently derived from an incomplete Latin translation of the
original source material, the text sporadically lapses into an indecipherable tongue which the translation cryptically notes as being Old
High Atlantean.
Glyphs, sigils, occult pictograms, six score and ten oblations to some malign entity of colossal evil... some
diabolical avatar of the Z'xulth.
Khthon!
I must delve further into the foreboding depths of this great black
book...
[Fragmentary Entry II:]
Caught in the maleficent whorls and verticals of this dark tome... but what lies at the heart of
it?
A vespertine viper's nest of sublime wickedness!
What I discovered within this shadow-haunted volume was a terrifying axiom so
inestimably terrible in its magnitude that it would shatter all man's carefully orchestrated views of the cosmos and render utterly
redundant previous theories on the origin of humankind.
Lore dating from time immemorial; lore surviving in the records of long extinct
civilizations, be it inscribed upon parchment now crumbled to dust, etched into the sand-whipped, glyph-scored stone of hoary temples, or
committed to verbal traditions long since ingrained into some collective tribal memory.
This is no globally common myth cycle, no
collection of universally allegorical folk tales; it is all cold, pitiless truth!
And yet, such enlightenment has not been a prize
easily won...
I have communed with native shamans, consulted with misanthropic diabolists.
I have confronted the martial agents,
acolytes and cultists of clandestine sects who would see their knowledge safeguarded at all costs.
Hildebrandt and Quorum have
treacherously attempted to have me committed to the baleful confines of Grimm's Hold Sanitarium, yet I have circumvented their insidious
plot to put an end to my vaunted research.
Damn their traitorous eyes!
I must confer with Blackthorne upon his return from the
Peruvian expedition... or mayhap Stone if ever the poor wretch regains his sanity...
Stygian gramarye, etched with blasphemy,
Whorls
and verticals, black with baleful spells,
Vespertine conjurings, doomsayer's prophecy,
Pellucid lotus-dreams, spawn of the elder
fiends,
Cryptic halls, squamous mass, malevolent diabolist,
Black desire, knighted woe, shunned and forbidden tome,
Brooding
dark, deepest night, ritual, abhorrent sight,
Whispering, malignity, hearken to the summoning!
[Fragmentary Entry III:]
What
titanic demi-gods once strode the boiling surface of the young earth, treading the shattered surface of mighty Pangaea beneath their
ersatz feet?
What fearsome entities were already inestimably ancient when mankind himself was naught but a collection of mindless
random atoms, a viscous puddle of gelid protoplasm teeming with the raw materials of life, transient cells of primordial slime, all naught
but malleable and tractable clay to be worked at by unimaginable sculptors, immortal star-spanning fiends!
What inhuman eyes even now
watch the inconsequential toilings of man from afar?
The answers to these questions of denied primacy and direful cosmogony were too
repulsively horrific to contemplate, and yet...
I knew the truth!
And more terrifying still...
The Z'xulth and their villainous
agents of depravity even now walk among us!
But what price these revelations?
What dire agents of malignity safeguard such cryptic
axioms against the prying intellect of man?
I must confess, oftimes in the brooding darkness of the night, I have sensed their malefic
gaze upon me, lurking, inexorably dogging my every step, their existence perceived only as some unnamable sense of fearful unease, and the
occasional glimpse of black shimmering against black in the depths of the teeming shadows...
I hear them whispering when the mantle of
darkness silences the world, and the sibilant words they utter are not for the minds of men to know.
O' how I wish I had left those
vile and fathomless depths of cryptical lore wholly and mercifully unplumbed!
O', how I long for the assuaging balm of ignorance to
once again soothe my ravaged mind!
But such pleadings are, of course, ultimately in vain.
I must keep my wits about me.
Even now
the stars align, the celestial spheres moving into the prophesied positions of the great astral conjunction.
Am I to be ground to dust
between the grand gears of this pitiless cosmic engine of destruction?
The die is cast, the endgame nears.
Wait... they come, they
come for me!
Is it Hildebrandt, or something far, far worse which stalks me this night?
The key...
I must hide the
key!