SECRET LIBRARY

      Awake with the sense of a pervading presence emanating throughout the choate of my body.  I could only comprehend that this existence, which was also flowing through me, was carrying me forward through a dark space.  No points of reference were there for me to see at what speed I travelled, nor was there any sensation of locomotion from my own body.  After some swift period of travel, a speck of glowing light shown from a great distance. 

      For some time, the speck remained steady and unchanged.  It then began to shimmer and shudder.  Shortly after the glow first moved, I felt a great reverberation through the atmosphere around me.   The reverberation gave way to a thunderous booming; one that I should have been able to feel in my body, like a bass drum pumping through an empty concert hall.  While the pounding of the air around me grew louder, so changed the glowing light in front of me.  The glow became a brilliant white hole against the field of darkness.  The white sun at the center of my attention was a great two-dimensional space of nothing against a universe of black nothing. 

      The deep claps of thunder and the shimmering white disc came into a synchronized and harmonious relationship with each other.  While the explosive blasts chased the emptiness that went on forever around me, they began to develop a simple rhythm.  It was forceful and driving.  The steady, slower than regular, beat aroused a desire within me. I wanted to labor.  I thought that I should take up a pick and begin chopping stone.  The urge was incredible, cutting and stacking one hundred cords of wood would not satiate my want to work.  Death couldn’t keep me from the toil I wished to undertake with the encouragement of these great drums. 

      My guide was greater than death.  I felt my carrier in front of me and behind me.  I felt my carrier to my left and to my right.  I felt my carrier above me and below me.  It was inside me and outside me.  This escort transported me through a universe filled with not but drumming and a shield of light.  It protected me, and satiated my obligation of servitude to the great pounding beats of the distant drums.

      The disc in the distance shifted its position and changed color.  It changed to a dirty pearl color.  Sine and cosine waves of light now passed through the disc.  The waves went in and out of phase and oscillated out of time with each other.  My escort brought me ever closer to the disc.  The display created more and more waves; perhaps more appropriately, they began to grow.  A Lissajous curve developed as a result of the competing waves.  Three times these rotating curves came into sync.  The first was in the form of a sine.  The second took the form of a lemniscate.  The third made a curved plane.   From the point of the curved plane, the waves were pinched on opposite corners and pulled into a tight rope.  The waves became more and more compact across the area of the pearly disc until they disappeared. 

      The waving, undulating, pulsing pearl disc and the eternal darkness around me distorted and transformed.  A metamorphosis took place.  The existence all about me changed into a great and expansive cave.  This enormous cavern led to the point which was once a two dimensional point of light. The once pure, then pearly, white luminescence was now a sharp and sour pitch of red; not dissimilar to ginger skin deeply burned by the sun.

      With this new point of reference I could measure out that the body that encapsulating mine was carrying me forward at implausibly possible speeds.  Not until I was closer to the gigantic opening did I realize the speed at which I was carried was so amazing.  The pencil eraser sized point of red grew larger and larger as fast as an explosion.  By the time we were upon the opening, it seemed less like an opening in a cave and more like the sky over the Earth.

      We breached the divide between infinite darkness and scorching red.  I found us on a great cliff, shielded from the burnt sky by an overhanging darkness of indescribable height.  The conveyor of my body and mind swelled around me, it became my guide and protector.  I knew to allow it to direct me; though I did not know where it would take me.  I knew I was protected so long as I cooperated.  We descended the cliff into a deep and narrow canyon.

      The canyon walls covered every horizon and rose to incredible heights of which I can only guess.  The sheer cliffs rose up for what must have been thousands upon thousands of feet.  The deep crevice nearly blinded me to the sky; all I could see of it was a thin split the size of a distant lighting bolt.  Still, this line of sky was clear; its burning red lit the canyon down to the deepest pit.  Only the most twisting and distant tunnels could remain hidden from the blazing sky.

      Before I could finish orienting myself to the area, my guide directed me away from the inconsequential natural environment around me, and instead revealed the source of the discordant sound.  A great many drums were before me.  The drum had no players, but still sounded.  They were the same drums that before urged me to find agonizing undertakings.  My guide showed me the severe and grinding endeavors led by the rhythm of those drums.

      People worked.

      People were the tools with which work was done.  Humans just like me; I saw them do all manner of drudgery.  The first thing I saw was a chain of people. Not like you would think. This was no row of inmates bound together digging trenches.  The people were the binding.  Dozens, maybe hundreds, of people were twisted into a great hoisting chain.  One person’s arms were braided into the next person’s legs.  Their limbs were twisted and broken, haphazardly tied into a ragged series of links. I saw bits and fragments of body pulled and torn from the strain of their load, dangling from the plait of people like frayed threads of hemp rope.

      The worker of this rope was a bipedal creature of the likes I’ve never seen, before or sense.  I feel like I remember him looking like a shaved wart hog on its hind legs, but it what more convoluted than that.  His legs did resemble the hind legs of a pig, as its knees didn’t seem to bend in the proper direction.  I could not make out the finer detail of its feet, but they looked mostly like the feet of a man.  Its torso also resembled that of a man’s.  The body and arms of the worker were large hulking masses.  The upper arms, shoulders, and chest looked chilsled and formed; they flexed and gleamed as the animal pulled the rope of men.  It had a large pot belly, covered in a ragged cloth which hung down to just above the backwards knees of the animal.  The creature had hands that looked to work in a way impossible for human hands.  There was no apparent wrist or palm.  I could see that there were four oversized fingers coming directly from the forearm.  The fingers looked to be in line with each other and work like normal fingers would, but they also seemed to be able to bend backward just as well as they could bend forward. This large, powerful looking animal had a face that looked like deformed boar; one that would take generations of inbreeding to achieve.   The snout was pressed back into its head.  It had two misshapen holes that I assumed were its nostrils.  The monster’s mouth had irregular tusks, each different in length, jutting up and down from the lower and upper jaw.  Its eyes were small and round; the skin above them looked like someone had stretched it upward from the center of each eye, making it look difficult to blink.

      This fearsome thing did not seem to enjoy its task anymore than the people in the rope it was yanking on enjoyed theirs.

      My eyes followed the mangled bodies to their point of termination.  At the end of the living rope was a very large, rough cut, squarish block of what looked like basalt.  From where I stood, it seemed to me that the chunk of stone was six or eight feet on all its faces. 

      A wall was being built around and enormous tower. This tower shot into the heavens themselves.  So tall was this tower, that I believe my eyesight failed to see the top before it disappeared into the burning sky over the canyon walls.  It was thinner than I thought could support the height.  The tower only looked to be about twenty feet or so from one wall to the next.  There was nothing else truly peculiar about it design, though it was very plain.  The stone material of the tower looked like the same basalt the wall was being built from.  The stones seemed to be about half the size of those used on the wall, and much more accurately cut to size. There were no windows that I could see, and the entrance, I assumed, was blocked from my view by the segment of wall being built. 

      Again, my attention was then brought to something other than what it was on. 

      The mortar used to secure these stones to one another was people.  The builders applied no other method of sealing the wall.  Between each enormous brick the pig-men were heaving living people onto the wall where the next brick would fall.  Naked, emotionless, living people were dutifully allowing themselves to be crushed between stones of volcanic rock to build a courtyard for a tower with no windows.  And, the people continued to live.  Just as the broken bodies of the chain lived, the mortar lived.  Smashed and squashed beyond recognition, the limbs that sprouted from between stones continued to move.  The entire wall was covered with moving flicking tongues and reaching hands.  I thought then that my guide, somehow immune to the driving percussion, protected from the drums that drove the monsters and men to build this arena of the living who wished they could be the dead.

      I turned away from the wall of living mortar and the chain of living bodies.  I searched for some redeeming quality of this construction, some greater purpose, perhaps, than what I first saw.  My eyes settled on what I could only describe as me.

      I did not redeem this building.

       I saw myself as a tool, stirring pool of terror and transgression.  I saw out of the corner of my eye one of the pig-men retrieving bucket of the slurry, but I could not pull my eyes away from me.  I began to have strange questions come to mind.

      All I could think was there I was, in that bath of shit, sin, and sorrow.  The other me was walking in circles around and around in the filth pit, stirring it like a mixing spoon.  I couldn’t even see my entire face, I only saw enough to know it was me.   The viscous gluey liquid he stirred settled in the space between my nose and my mouth, at the horizontal center of his philtrum.  For as long as I waded through the cesspool, I had to breathe in the stink and the foul particles of the content there in.  I still felt lucky in comparison to the mortar and the rope.

      I was captivated by the sight. 

      My guide walked me through an opening in the incomplete wall towards the sky probing tower.  I saw that the entrance was a small offshoot at the base of the tower.  We crossed the threshold and I no longer heard the drumming.  My guide lifted off me and condensed into an uneven apparition; it took the general form of a person, only more pyramid like.  The room was small.  It was only about five paces from each wall to the opposite side.  It was plain, the low ceiling, the walls, and the floor were all made a small black bricks.  The guide signaled to the only furnishing in the room, a long wood like shelf against the wall across from the entranceway. 

      I had nothing to put on the shelf.  There was nothing to take from the shelf.  There was nowhere to go but back outside, to the drums.  I felt like I was at the end of a dream.  I stood there, not doing anything, not knowing what to do. 

      I walked up to the long plank on the wall and ran my hands over it. It was unfinished, but still very smooth.  It was worn down to a slick surface that only years of use could produce.  I couldn’t force a splinter from the board.  It didn’t look like it came from any familiar tree.  It had a wavy grain, almost as though the tree grew in a twist.  The shelf didn’t seem to have any binding to the wall, it just sort of jutted out.

      After examining the shelf, I turned to see if my guide had any further instructions for me.  In its hands it held out a book. 

      I took the book away from my guide to put it in its place.  It felt heavier than it should have.  The book was probably five or six pounds but only had a few hundred pages.  It felt familiar.  I looked at the cover and it had a list of four languages, four titles; I had recognized this book that so long ago I had left in a pit in the ground.  My guide read out the titles to me. 

      “Hjlax uht thal-ctwag faowlhjo’kgo”

      “Mekhloqat tabood al'aaleeha”

      “Bestiae deorum”

      “Vleote theokei tak tanee”

      I recognized the Latin name.

      My guide stated the title, “The Bestiary and Their Gods, in Hierarchy.”

      That was my language.  That was the name of the book to me. “The Bestiary and Their Gods, in Hierarchy.”  The Bestiary, that’s why it was full of lists of creatures, and people.  It was listing, and in some cases illustrating, the beasts of the world – no, some greater world, or galaxy, or universe.  These were existing living things. 

      This book could be powerful.  Just knowing these things were real could drive you crazy.  If you brought other people to believe they were real, there is no telling what could happen.  I wanted to protect this book, and now it seems as though I had.  I can’t imagine a safer place for it to be. I took the book and laid it flat on the shelf. 

      Just then, the shelf smoothly lowered itself along some invisible rail.  There was now a gap in the wall tall enough to draw the book back into the tower.  It reminded me of an after hours book deposit at a library, only quite a bit stranger.  Once the book and the shelf disappeared into the slot in the wall, a small handle, it looked like a coat hook, sprung down from inside the slot.  I looked over to my guide and it made a sort of nodding motion. 

      As I pulled down on handle, my guide spoke in my mind, “The attendants will help you.”

      With the handle pulled, the wall dropped down the rest of the way to the floor.  I had to stoop to get through the opening.  It took a long time for me to accept what I was seeing.  I had to choke down my brain.  The contents of the tower, at first, made me think I had gone mad.  Then I thought I would go mad.  I had to exercise all my will power, and all my resistance, and all my imagination to accept what I was seeing and keep from going mad.  I had to focus on one thing at a time, sometimes only parts of things, and come to comprehend what it was before me.  I remained motionless, with the exception of my eyes roaming and focusing, roaming and focusing.  Trying to deal with what it was I thought my senses were telling me.

      Here even the simple things were perplexing.  There was a bookcase, for instance.  I studied the spine of each book, but couldn’t remember one once I moved on to the next.  The casing began at about waist high and ran a slow incline around the wall of the tower, up and on into the high reaches of the great silo.  After slowly examining the books I found at eye level, I noticed that I had been running my hand along the shelving.  Keeping my back to the center of the room, pressing my chest against the tomes and manuscripts as I went along, I traced my hand along the shelf feeling neither ridge nor separation.  The shelf was one continuous plank drifting upward to what I could only imagine was the top of the tower. 

      I ran my hip into a reading desk when I reached the opposite side of the tower from where I entered.  The desk and its companion side table and chair, where nice; and out of place.  The furniture spatially stuck out, avoiding the twisting bookshelf behind it.  The furniture stylistically stuck out, as it had a design reminiscent of 17th century furniture.  The chair and side table had bowed out legs that curved inward near the bottom and terminated at a ball shaped foot.  The table and chair each had bracings just above the inward curve, going from leg to leg. The simple side table had a smooth surface and plain finish with a slightly beveled edge. The chair, with its high armrests and low back, had a seat a seat packed full with what felt like goose feathers. 

      The reading desk was simple also.  It had slightly more ornate edge carvings, which reminded me of grains of wheat wrapped around the outside of the reading top’s tilted surface.  The desk had a lip on which a reader could to rest their book without it sliding down the steep incline and into their lap.  There was no storage in the desk, only the reading surface and long straight legs, with spiral etchings down their length.

      I felt like this would be my best place to stop and rest.  Even at the crawling pace I walked around the interior of this immense and towering library, examining every detail on the spines of every book and analyzing the shelf on which they sat, it only took a few minutes to reach this side of the now too narrow room.  I sat down and rested my mind.  I knew, clearly, that I wasn’t alone, but I did not first realize how much company I had. 

      On the opposite side, from where I had approached the desk, where two misty figures.  They had no solid looking form.  Instead, the figures seemed to be constructed of dense fog in a series of string shaped jars.  They floated silently to my right, as I seated myself facing the reading desk.  The figures held a roughly humanoid shape, only with no discernable head and there structure reminded me of deep breaths. 

      I took deep breaths. 

      I sat and waited. 

      I waited until I was at least comfortable enough to speak to the less than threatening apparitions nearest to me.

      “Can you understand me?”, I asked.

      “I understand any thing.”, the watery ghosts replied.

      I couldn’t think of what to say next.  I reported as such to the things, “I don’t know what to say next.”

      “Perhaps I can introduce myself”, said the two clouds of haze.

      “Okay.”

      The fog went on and explained itself to me. “I am the attendant.”

      Since the attendant kept referring to its two parts in a singular fashion, I came up with a question, “If you are one attendant, then why do you have two distinct, bodies?”

      The Attendant explained, “I have two parts because I must attend to you and Angdelagog at the same time.  In one body I can only attend to one.  This way I can hear what you say and tell Angdelagog what you are saying simultaneously and without interrupting either.”

      “What are you made of?”, I asked.

      “Nothing.”

      “How do you attend to me?”

      “I can communicate with Angdelagog for you.  I can also bring you food and drink.  I can handle the memories, manuscripts, writings, visions, and knowledge for which you will inevitably ask.”

      “What do you mean memories, visions, and knowledge?”

       More and more questions began to come to mind as I became more comfortable with The Attendant.

      “You are in the library of everything ever known.  You may spend eternity here. Until Azathoth awakens and takens us.”

      “This is a library of everything ever known. And, that behind me is the librarian?”

      “Yes.” Said the attendant.

      I still couldn’t bring myself to address The Librarian. 

      “I’m hungry.” I claimed, trying to buy time. “And thirsty.”

      Seemingly from nowhere, The Attendant presented me with a colorless lump of flesh.  It was an oblong shape, roughly the size of a football, and resting on a plain tin platter.  When The Attendant drew its diaphanous fingers across the body, white hocks of meat fell from the shape and landed heavily only the platter below.  The food had the texture of cotton candy, only, without the gritty sugary dissolve.  It tasted like the sweet heart of ripe watermelon lightly dusted with fine salt.  The meat made me thirsty.  It reminded me of trying to eat dried and ground coffee.

      I asked The Attendant, “What is this you’ve fed me?”

      “It is the flesh of God.”

      “Which God?”

      “This is a God you’ve known but have never called.  It is a god of rain and growth and flowing water.”

      “What name did its worshippers give this God?”

      “Tlaloc”

      I didn’t recognize this name. 

      “Is this God dead?”

      “Yes.”

      “How do you serve this God's flesh as food?”

      “It is by the authority and in the service of the dead and mindless God we long for and fear, that I serve you this.  By Its unconscious desire to serve you your own Gods, you are nourished.”

      With this meat, The Attendant also brought a vessel of dark wine.  I drank from the container, and even though the wine smelled like peaches it tasted like vinegar. 

      “What is this?!” I shouted.

      The attendant calmly explained, “It is the fermented liqueur pulled from the body of Tlaloc.  The food is the flesh and the drink is the essence.  You must be nourished only by the Gods when in the library, and no part of the God shall go to waste.”

      “What if I don’t eat it?” I asked.

      “Then you will starve”

      The Attendant shaved another slug of god’s flesh from the body of Tlaloc.  The Attendants razor feather fingers simply floated through the air, neither hesitating nor slowing as it breezed through this dead God, cutting apart the physical nature of an ethereal being.

      I decided I should probably not stay in the library very long, lest I kill my own God for sustenance. 

      I breached the topic of the horror behind me.  The bizarre and misshapen wad  I had been avoiding. “That behind me, is the librarian?”

      The Attendant replied, “Yes.”

      “What is its name?”

      “Angdelagog.”

      Now that I knew what that name was in reference to, I liked the monster even less.

      “Besides being a librarian, what is it?”  I had to get an idea of what I was looking at before I brought my eyes to meet it again.

      “Angdelagog is the mindless god of knowledge.  Everything that can be known is kept by Angdelagog.  Angdelagog is an unconscious extension of Azathoth that is present here in your plain of perception.”

      “So,” I tried to understand, “This is like a big tentacle of a sleeping God.”

      “In a way.” said The Attendant, clearly trying to help me understand more than simply being accurate in its description of The Librarian.  

      “What does It do?”

      “For the Mindless One, Angdelagog has recorded everything that ever was and will ever be. For you, Angdelagog can retrieve a recording of anything that ever was and will ever be.”

      “Can you stop saying its name?”  The name of The Librarian made me sick.

      “What should I call it?” asked The Attendant.

      “Just call it The Librarian.”

      “Very well.”

      "How do I use the Librarian."

      “You must simply ask The Librarian for what it is you want.  However, The Librarian cannot comprehend your questions.  The Librarian will only retrieve what you ask for.  I will attempt to explain to The Librarian what it is you want if you are unclear.”

      I sat, eating and drinking Tlaloc, deciding what to do next. 

      I turned to face the queer creature that is The Librarian.

      The Librarian was a tubular barrel like monster.  It was stout and hard edged.  It looked to be about fifteen feet tall and maybe nineteen feet around.  It had scrawny arms that were only as long as the space between the fleshy trunk of The Librarian and the wall of texts It maintained.  There were delicate tendrils reaching out from the creature, but none were as long as any of the arms.  The tendrils had no apparent purpose.  They reminded me of the thick meaty leaves of underwater sea plants; only they were more physically similar to long dangling skin tags that moved like the shadows of long, matted, and locked hair.  The thick beige skin of the beast was apparently more liquid, or gaseous, than solid.  It flowed freely around the tank of a monster that was The Librarian.  The skin stretched and wrinkled and moved about the body without clear cause.

      I asked It, “What is the first memory of humans, like me, and what was the outcome of that memory?”

      The library tower spun downward like a giant hollow screw into the planet below.  It began moving so suddenly and unobtrusively that it felt like it had already been in motion.  The ground did not shake.  The air did not stir.  The tower made no sound.  Silently it twisted into the earth with damage done to neither the ground beneath me nor the books before me.  The tower stopped twisting and digging with a sudden joltless cessation of motion, as though it hadn’t been moving in the first place.

      The tower of records moved with such a blur that there was no way for me to gauge how far downward it traveled.  I looked up to find a ceiling; I still could not.  Even after its descent, the tower came to a point out of my eyes’ view.  It went on forever.

      The Librarian reached and withdrew from the shelf a single page of text.  With a crippled and twisted arm The Librarian set the page down onto the reading desk. The Librarian almost touched me as its hand passed to the desk.  I was frozen with panic and a sharp sense of overmastering fear until The Librarian withdrew the appendage of horror back to its ugly trunk.

      I want to say that The Librarian placed a scroll on the reading desk.  But, it wasn’t a scroll at all.  It wasn’t rolled.  As far as I could tell, it wasn’t a natural fabric. It didn’t have anything written on it. While I looked at it, trying to figure out how I could get anything from this document.  I thought maybe there was something great and profound to what was in front of me.  I thought maybe there was no first human memory.  I thought maybe we never existed to have a memory. 

      The first human memory was not so profound.  It was both miserable and joyous.

      While I sat looking at the page on the reading desk and trying to create some powerful meaning from nothing, I felt a sense of recollection.  A memory came over me like the first memory of a child.

      I remember being huddled in a mass of people.  I remember being cold and bundled together against a rock wall.  I remember wanting to be able to create heat that could be called on at any time.  I didn’t want to be cold anymore.  I wanted to make a source of warmth like a summer sun, and to be able to control it. 

      After sleeping, in the memory, I awoke to the next day.  A large group of men went out to hunt.  Another group of women went out at the same time, also to hunt.  Many other men and women stayed back at a loosely organized patch of houses and lean-to’s.  I don’t remember what I was supposed to be doing.  The memory owner rubbed my hands together in an attempt to create warmth. 

      (I still have trouble remembering if I was the maker of the memory or if I was just watching the memory being created through the eyes of some ancestor.)

      Even though the memory owner could create heat by rubbing his hands together, it was fleeting and uncontrollable. He remembered that when the sun heated stones, they stayed warm well into the night.  So he rubbed his hands against rocks.  After rubbing his hands raw trying to heat the rocks, he began rubbing the rocks together.  Eventually sparks came off one of the rocks.   After a while, he was ready for the sparks to come when he would bash certain rocks together.

      He caught a spark; it scorched his hand. 

      He came up with a way to catch the sparks with a pile of grass.  The memory owner initially wanted to examine the spark, but when he caught it in his glove of dry grass, it began to burn in a consuming flame.  The memory owner found that he could set other things on fire as well.  He dug pits to fill with grass and wood to burn.

      I remember joy at discovering a way to create warmth and to be able to make a fire before the night and sleep in its soft heat and golden glow. 

      This was the first memory of man.

      Looking over to The Attendant I asked, “Was that the first memory of humans?”

      “Yes.  Would you like to put the memory away and retrieve another?”, it asked.

      “Yes.” I said.  “I would like to know the first memory of The Librarian.”

      The Librarian reached passed me to retrieve the first human memory.  After placing the memory back on the shelf, The Librarian did nothing.

      “Why doesn’t It bring me Its first memory?” I asked.

      The Attendant explained, “The Librarian has no first memory.  As only an extension of Azethoth, The Librarian has no mind, no memory, and no consciousness.  The Librarian is only the recorder and keeper of knowledge.  The Librarian does not create any new information.  The Librarian cannot perceive itself, nor does The Librarian perceive any of what is around us. The Librarian keeps this information to supply the dying god Azathoth with the means to become The Destroyer.”

      “Then give me Azathoth’s last memory, before He destroys himself.”

      “Azathoth has always been and always will be in deep sleep.  Since creating the first gods, Azathoth has been resting. This will continue until he becomes The Destroyer of His creations and their creations.  Once Azathoth awakes he will be The Destroyer, and will then not have a last memory as Azathoth.  Once the Destoyer comes to be, all will be destroyed; including The Destroyer.  The Destroyer will have no first memory and no last memory.”

      I couldn’t take much more of this.  I demanded “Give me the last memory of man.”

      Angdelagog took a document from what seemed very much like the same place from where He pulled the first memory.  It may have been ever so slightly off more to one side.

      Again, the artificial material The Librarian had placed on the reading desk was blank. I looked at the page, and remembered clearly the last thing a human will ever remember. 

      I remember feeling cold and in a sort of wasteland.  I remember being knotted up with the bodies of other people.  I remember seeing the algid gray light of the sun through the thick and eternally overcast shroud of dense choking atmosphere.  I could see it, but could not feel the heat of the sun.  I wished I could find kindling to burn, but there is nothing but crusty gray and white ice.  The only variance I could find was dusty snow floating above the ground with every stiff shuffling movement I made.  I felt the bitter and still cold.  No smell was in the air.  What was left of the moisture in my mouth had frozen it shut.  I felt my dead exposed flesh break and further expose the inside of my face and hands to the murderous weather.  I heard silence, and I heard the blood slow down in my veins.  I became a frigid and still mass, and ceased to exist.  That          last             bit             of awareness evaporated into an unidentifiable gel, freezing and dying with me. My last memory was wanting to be able to create heat.