Personal notes, Dr. Stephen Lansing, Professor History/Literature
It saddens me to write this, as I meant no harm in instigating this project. Now, the Cthulhu Mythos study has been discontinued, and all materials destroyed. This was actually done under the strict, watchful eye of the Cedar Vale Police Dept. Just prior to this action, a representative from the Department of Education and the Dean paid me a visit to question me about the project, before ordering its halt.
It was only supposed to be a type of experiment surrounding H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, however, it somehow turned deadly. I shall not divulge the names of the students, only that there were ten involved. Each student was to work on his or her own, not sharing notes or even conversation about the fictitious Lovecraft work, at the end writing a paper revealing the impact the study had on each student.
Of course, by now you know that student #9 had suffered some kind of delusions, hallucinations, and had ended up at Stormy Haven – after a month of confinement, he had somehow murdered a nurse and then vanished. Police are still trying to figure out how someone in his position, having only a pencil and paper, had decapitated the woman. The coroner insists to this day that her head had been bitten off, and if #9 had chewed it right from her body. His notes, or “chronicle” as he had called it had been found, and that had been a mistake from the beginning, to allow him anything with which to write.
And now, it has only recently come to light that #9 had shared some of his notes with several other students, and students 3 and 6 are now residents of the third and fourth floors at Stormy Haven.
Even stranger, student #9 visited me the other night at my home. He simply walked right into the house. I live alone, and he knew there would be no interference. He looked different somehow, as if he was the same person from a different mold. He implored me to let him show me proof that everything he had claimed to have seen had been real.
All he did was place his hands on the sides of my head, and he showed me. By God, my eyes saw through the thin veil between dimensions – I saw them, the Great Old Ones. I saw Cthulhu, and when I saw, it stretched out a tentacle and gently touched my forehead.
Real. It had all been real. #9 left me standing in a daze, and when I awoke from the almost hypnotic trance, he was gone. There was a rotten stench in the air, and I remember opening the front door to air it out. And when I stepped outside, I saw them. The spiders that #9 had been so adamant about – they, too, had been real.
He had left me with one piece of information that I am still waiting to come to fruition - an entrance to the other universe, another dimension where their chaos and horrors were our insanity. They would return. It was only a matter of time before I, too, saw a great opening to a cavern leading to the other side. I shall wait and see. I am still teaching, only we are now working on different, so-called harmless studies, and no one has grown wise to me.
I see the large spider things when I arrive home after work, I see them sometimes early in the morning when I go down the driveway to fetch my paper, and I have seen them scurrying around the back yard just by peeking out my bedroom window.
I know now, I know what #9 saw, and I refuse to let it take my mind. That’s right, it’s not going to drive me insane. The experiment had worked! I cannot remove the grin from my face. I cannot believe my good fortune. And I shall not share with the other professors, lest they try to steal my secret away…
“The most merciful thing in the whole world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents… Someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.”
- H.P. Lovecraft
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