I’ve made mistakes but the one in front of me that looks out of the glass might be my most impressive work for he is quite a disgrace but definitely attractive but definitely the ugliest person in the whole world and I hate him so much but he always gets through it all though I am trying to make it stop and all the cuts and the crying and the failures and this idiot he stands up again and again and now it is night and I have lost my job and drunk too much but he wants to change.

(A small Lovecraftian piece I Wrote some time ago, definitely flawed but I thought someone here might enjoy it)

“I am not a lunatic!

The closet is!”

And as I utter those words I realise my strategic mistake, underlined by my opponent’s surprised and bewildered laughter. He, that most horrible of angels, most fierce of cowards and most smart of idiots. That humanisation of the damnation.

My supervisor.

Who stands in the kitchen of the disgusting cliché of wood that is my temporary home.

“William, come on. Please.

We sent you here for a report about naval exercises happening near this boring, foggy coastal town. And yet, all you sent us are letters of imaginary things I partly don’t even understand.”

“How limited is your intellect please? In my two weeks here, I swear that I saw all of these things and more!” My fine vest restrains my movement but I remain on the fly, pointing at the ugly truth and at his even uglier face, filled up by a nose and a moustache so powerful, all the hair on his head had decided to evacuate.

His face becomes increasingly amused as his right hand withdraws to the pocket of his coat, drawing out both his and my evidence. I find myself wandering around the kitchen, looking outside of the flat, onto the city that somehow manages to give an individual like me the feeling that we do not find ourselves in the 1920s but in the 1870s.

“Oh well you started off with what you get paid for: Interviews with sailors, descriptions of ships and the city but then, well, you confuse a U-boat with a whale but that’s okay.”

“Neither U-boats nor whales randomly split in two and reunite during swimming, Sir.”

“Neither does something like that exist.”

Of course there is a heavy fog that drowns the city in pity and turns silent streets into the hubs of silent watchers.

There they stand and wait. Unseen. Shall they! Shall they!

“So you wrote you are being watched every time you leave your home and that they even stalk you back to your flat here?”

“Exactly.”

“But why would they?”

“Because they are them, but I agree with you on one thing, I do not know yet why they are them.”

I am losing him or he already is but the bickering unfortunately tells me the second is more likely but maybe, bickering is not a trustworthy source, maybe it is corrupt or has its own agenda.

“William, don’t you want to go back to your girlfriend?”

Lisa.

If I look into her eyes I smile like a pathetic puppy, if I cower in her arms I cry like a joke of a man. I love that demon so much and she makes me so weak. So naive, so loving, she would only hinder me while I write the piece that could make me rich enough to buy her a thousand houses and a million dresses. We change rotation as I walk to the back of the room and my supervisor to the window, unsurprisingly he doesn’t see what I don’t see either.

“Sir, let me show you the reason for my delays and my letters and maybe you can understand.”

He nods and we walk to my bedroom where you can find table, typewriter, bed and that closet out of hell.

A great bundle of papers emerges as his eyes widen and I realise that I have lost this battle already.

“What in God’s name is that?”

“Put simply, these are my observations, theories and recordings of what is going on here. All the villagers here are more or less polite, more or less busy and more or less ugly but they truly feel like a herd, whose brains were molten into a collective of boringness. And I can feel it as well, this place is killing off my brain cells.”

“At least we can agree somewhere.”

My desperation serves his satisfaction.

“It’s something even the sailors and officers acknowledge, I’ve got the interviews on page 28. But here are my own observations.”

The paper travels and after vivid reading also is the target of mockery and disapproval, he calls it fiction and absurd but in a more polite way and then he politely orders me to pack my things to go back to London but a phone call impolitely disrupts his politeness.

My feet find the phone, my arm the handset and my ear the voice of my girlfriend, incidentally also begging me to return to London.

I get weak and soft and feel longing and thereby pathetic.

A portal is near this city and it unleashes horrors of the physical and mental variety and I want to return to my love instead of finishing the piece that could change the world?

And so the handpiece finds its way back like I do to my room.

I could also finish it from London and not lose my job.

My step halters as my thought continues.

It would naturally be weaker and I could not conduct my research properly anymore as well as my ability to describe the power of the gate firsthand but it would be a price worth paying.

Oh Lisa.

But as I enter my bedroom again I find a most curious sight.

My supervisor leans into my hated closet and I can hear a quite clear dialogue emerge.

“We will get him to leave soon. You did well, we know all of his thoughts, his girlfriend will be enough for him to return.”

While I struggle to enter the room calmly, he struggles to lean out of my closet calmly.

We look at each other in mutual horrifiedness, neither daring to state the most obvious, most ridiculous truth and while I feel a great terror rising in me, I also feel comfort in being proven right. A comfort that is quickly ended as he slowly stumbles into my direction wordlessly and the wooden floor creaks while my supposed death nears my planless, foolish self.

He, both un- and surprisingly draws a knife which declares a queer arms race which he instantly wins. Even though I possess a firearm, it waits in one of the drawers of my table, a revolver with only one bullet.

A great array of options all go on to bewilder me. I could sprint to the kitchen, take a knife and hope for reflexes to take over.

Running outside was a bad idea as I integrated the idea of him being part of that collective unintelligence.

To surrender now was the same as dashing into his blade, even though the latter would probably mean a faster death.

I had scheduled a meeting with a navy officer at my flat for later in the day and that annoyance suddenly turned into my revenge. If I killed myself, my former supervisor would never be finished quickly enough with cleaning to not be noticed by the officer.

And so I dash forward, eagerly awaiting a sharp pain in my chest but to my surprise, my killer may is part of something greater but certainly not a fighter.

He steps beside me and only tries a stab after I have already passed him and now suddenly finds me sprinting to my table as his mass walks to his doom.

I pull out this theatrical method of killing and aim at his head, an action that is rewarded with his body dropping to the floor.

A great silence creeps out of his corpse and into the air. I did it. I ruined my future but I found out the truth.

My head filling with plans of corpse removal and a new motivation to finish my piece, the telephone rings once again and the door knocks.

With a hasty step I see the police through the door agent and chose not to open just yet and instead answer the phone.

“A few seconds slower and we would have to do a lot less cleaning today.”

The gas mask is uncomfortable at best and outright insulting at worst.

I think about every single edge of this mask as we walk through the abandoned and yet so lively streets of Abarathia.

They call it a plant but it is more of an algae or yes, a tumour.

It’s skin is brown-yellowish and constantly seems to pump something through its

“veins”.

It can be seen entangling every house and it slithers through the streets.

Fire combats it well enough but it grows back so fast we could do nothing to help the locals but kill almost all of them.

The rest was made to leave the city under the now greenish sky.

This is the end of their world.

Although tight, I feel safe and warm in my suit. It’s thin barrier is the only thing stopping me from being warped and changed by the tumour.

It corrupts the waters and the seas.

The city itself seems to be what we would call early medieval. I have no idea how old their kind is, we burned too much.

The slaves carry the last hope of this world.

When their gods called us, they should have expected us to be pragmatic.

We walk further down the city, all in all we are 20-50 fools. I do not know the precise number as we are prone to losing people.

Everyone is tense but we are almost at the core of the city. We will never come closer to the tumour, everything beyond is grown too dense.

Someone further behind screams and is dragged off into the shadows.

We throw some fire behind but we do not care about the loss.

I am informed, it was Pierre.

Shame. I thought he was better than that.

We reach the golden square of the city, the paved floor is made out of their equivalent to gold.

In the middle, a gigantic statue stands, we expected it to be in a cocoon of tumour but no.

The statue is clean, this world trembles before it’s beauty.

The slaves put the cores down.

1-2-3-4-5. All of them are there.

Our surviving technicians prepare the purification.

I get handed the remote, my hands start to shiver.

All 5 of them work and start to glow in a blinding blue light.

Everything but the statue is illuminated.

For my destiny ends here. Not one of us is worth saving, for the risk is too great.

We all salute to each other, I turn around again and find new determination.

These bombs will burn the continent and dry the seas around it.

Hundreds of millions will die, but potentially, enough will survive.

They should have expected us to be pragmatic.

Click

The army was on the lookout as justice hid itself among the routing masses.

Equality and brotherhood layed dead as the republic burnt under the oh so glorious light of the Emperor.

One could not contain thoughts but one could massacre every place where they were thought.

Peter and Maxwell charged through tight, dirty corridors of the conquered city, where after 53 days of bravery and sacrifice, the only unshelled place in the city was the theatre that had burnt down before the war, the two men had fought and died for their right to vote and yet as the banner of the three headed eagle had stepped through the third circle of defence, they prioritised their right to breathe and ran deep into the screaming city.

Both still had their rifles gripped tight. Both had spent their entire lives in the city. Both knew there was only one way to see another sunrise. The port. There were Ships that hadn’t taken off yet or were just leaving. On these, Peter knew, mother freedom still loved her sons and caressed her daughters.

Good thing the honourful of the invader was far too busy raping its way through every district: Women, children, art or architecture, whatever could be exploited, abused or simply destroyed for a quick laugh.

400 years of prideful build-up, only to be pissed on by drunken soldiers.

Neither spoke, both muttered, neither cried, both moaned. Sprinting through the city was an exhausting pleasure after visiting a fresh love or to catch the early hours of a favourite club - dashing to not be tortured to death was not even exhausting, just taxing, the deterioration of Peter’s physical condition was not a hindrance but an added fact upon the list of things that predicted his end - and he had never even published his masterpiece, the only, truly important thing in his life before the laughter in the city’s air was replaced by lead.

The green sky cried into the green sea that swept against the grey stone of the huge port. A laughing Maxwell dragged a coughing Peter into his arms - there were still ships and they still took people. Pushing through mothers and fathers and daughters and sons and beggars and soldiers like them, the staying ships became taller and taller and Peter knew that he would fall in love with someone on that ship. Whether it was a man or a woman he did not know, but his heart had already jumped into the refreshing, free sea, where it would kiss and hug whoever he pleased to hug and kiss.

He saw a rifle and a tattered uniform carrying a tattered man and his screams broke through the panic.

“Men of the Republic! The enemy is breaking through and our mother carries us to the sea! But we cannot all go, whoever is strong and capable enough to shoot shall stay behind to defend the leaving ships against the brutish hordes! For a new generation must be raised in the spirit of freedom!”

Peter knew that someone would fall in love on that ship, whether it was a man or a woman he did not know but they were already on the refreshing, free sea, where they would learn to kiss and hug whoever they pleased to hug and kiss, where mother freedom loved her sons and caressed her daughters.

And he held that happy thought with a smile as he aimed upon the hateful soldiers that marched towards the port.