Warren is Dead!

Harley Warren and Randolph Carter were spotted by reliable witnesses walking the Gainesville Pike under the fat, spectral face of a waxing moon. We must assume they carried spade, shovel, and pick in hand. Warren, at the very least, carried with him a telephone apparatus of a strange and inscrutable nature. He may have had the long, long cord wrapped about his person.

Why, specifically, they did not accommodate themselves, easing their mutual burdens by simply taking an automobile—perhaps a rickety old panel truck—is anyone’s guess. The preceding may very well have escaped, like the noxious whiff from a fetid crypt, from the rancorous, puzzling belly of a sly, nocturnal reverie.

Or some such.

To the ancient, weed-choked burial ground, a noisome place of scrubby vegetation and crumbling headstones leaning crazily at morbid angles, rearing up their stone cadavers in the moon’s light, encrusted with the nitric drip of time.

This is the pale moonlight cradle of death, rocking cold, crepitating corpses in its loveless, freezing embrace. The two men, Warren and Carter, share between them a secret—it is here, this dismal gate of mockery, this guardian and testament to the inexorable march of relentless TIME, that is the portal to another, stranger world, a world buried beneath, with the ravenous worms and that which slithers and creeps in the stiff and noxious forms of the blissfully, eternally lost.

The two men make short work of the growth over moss-covered marble slabs, revealing three. They lift the crumbling stone lid of one such slab and, shining their electric torches into the yawning aperture below, reveal a set of stone steps going down, down into the black recesses of the brain that is the living, and dying, earth.

Mr. H.P. Lovecraft tells us (affecting the voice of Carter):

“The weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to me, and to some extent shared by me. Of his vast collection of strange, rare books on forbidden subjects I have read all that are written in the languages of which I am master; but these are few as compared with those in languages I cannot understand. Most, I believe, are in Arabic; and the fiend-inspired book which brought on the end—the book which he carried in his pocket out of the world—was written in characters whose like I never saw elsewhere.”

Somewhere in all that musty library must have been the key; somewhere the sacred text that revealed the doorway down, far, far below, where the nightmares that the world represses, that men hide in the bestial, darkened breast where beats their blackened hearts, lurk on stiff and cadaverous feet. “Curse these black things,” Warren exclaims. But we get ahead of ourselves.***

Big Cypress Swamp, where, we might imagine, the will-o’-the-wisps and the corpse candles burn in the black, hid within its grasp this burial ground. Warren had learned the secret of this place, had punched a hole in the surface of “reality,” and here they sat, at the head of the dark dream of the staircase winding its way eternally down into the sea of shadow below.***

And Warren said:

“I can’t tell you, Carter! It’s too utterly beyond thought—I dare not tell you—no man could know it and live—Great God! I never dreamed of THIS!”

And then he entreated me to put back the slab, to, as he put it, “beat it.” And I knew that, quickly, the things lurking in the dark—these “hellish things”—would consume him, would consume him. Would eat his whole soul, devour his beingness in the dark, abysmal lurking depths, where no light dwells.***

And I sit here before you and offer testimony to the last, final communication from that yawning, infernal abyss below, which might as well be the lurking bottom of my own brain, the subconscious stairway to primal horrors that lurk, bestial in the dark, where mankind is devoured, where civilization disappears, where learning and civilized man are evaporated, coming again unto his own bestial savagery, the anthropophagous monster that still waits, and always waits, lurking in the dark.

And that silvery corded phone apparatus. What do you think it said to me? What message did it convey to my own fractured mind, my own human and fallible ego, beneath which such monstrousness lies buried?

One watery, choked and gargling, sepulchral emanation of its vocalizations. Heard as a disembodied voice, the gurgling speech of a watery revenant. And it said, quite simply:

“You Fool! WARREN IS DEAD.”

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My book: Theater of the Worm: Essays on poe, Lovecraft, Bierce, and the Machinery of Dread

My book: Silent Scream! Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and Edison's Frankenstein by C. Augustine

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