THE TRANSVERSAL

II

At this moment Shepard's laughter broke out into sobs of despair and he rushed at me, clasping my neck in his hands which I observed were wrinkled with unnatural age yet paradoxically blessed with youthful strength. My cries must have awoken Bryson, if he was not already awake, and he ran over to us, pistol in hand, and yanked the being that was Shepard off of me and threw him to the moonlit ground. Bryson cocked the revolver and after a single second emptied the entire chamber into Shepard's body, whom I observed seemed to laugh and sob throughout his death. I could never be sure, but I thought I heard Bryson mutter a soft sob of apology to Shepard after executing him.

Bryson and I left early the next morning, not before burying poor Shepard. We left his infernal telescope as it stood, a strange artificial tripod in a forest of decaying nature. Neither of his dared look through that lens all night lest we see what Shepard saw and lose our minds as well.

That afternoon we found what we supposed was Shepard's cabin, which seemed to have both aged and solidified. We could never be sure if the cabin was indeed Shepard's, but its outward appearance was certainly that which he described, and regardless we did not care now, nor did anyone we supposed. Most importantly it was here, in this paradoxical bungalow betwixt Sutter's Mill and Cassidy Hill that we discovered that hellish doorway into the cosmos in the attic, and that I must implore you, being whoever finds this testimony, to NOT ENTER.

I will tell you now why you should not.

After Bryson kicked the door into the cabin we settled in and distributed our equipment and food about the house. We figured this was, for all intents and purposes, our home now and for however long we were doomed to inhabit this dying planet. After having settled in, we immediately went upstairs and found two glorious bedrooms where we could once again get a good night's rest, the first we had since that damned April morning in San Francisco. Yet before we turned in we both detected a low humming noise, one that while quiet, was ever maddening due to the pure alien nature of it. We attempted to ignore it at first, but found that nigh impossible. At last, in the black of the night, Bryson and I ventured throughout the house, lanterns in hand, to discover the source of that insane hum.

We checked every room of the ground floor, top floor, and cellar. We even searched the moonlit grounds immediately outside the cabin, which were lit by that queer crimson light. Eventually we pinpointed the source of the hum to be in the attic, and Bryson and I ventured up there together, rightfully fearful of what we would find.

The source of the hum was in there, and it would prove to be the source of all the pain and misery humanly imaginable, for inside the attic we discovered that eldritch, ephemeral portal that I am sure you have by now witnessed. A shimmering gate that more resembled a tear in the very fabric of reality than anything else, which bore an indescribable convex shape that glittered in sour light. It was something that seemed neither natural or artificial, but cosmic. Universal. It was beyond the realms of human imagination or natural order, and undoubtedly another aspect of that bizarre universal decay of which poor Shepard spoke before his untimely death.

If Bryson or I had any wisdom, we would have left the attic then and there and cursed it and the entire house to oblivion, leaving for some other refuge in the Sierra Nevada foothills. But in our merciful ignorance we were intellectually aroused by that strange convex doorway which hummed maddeningly. Bryson and I studied it for sometime in the attic which was grotesquely illuminated by our dimming lanterns.

Eventually our black curiosity waned enough for us to return to our slumber, which was unbroken now that we had come to terms with the source of the low humming.

And it is here, reader, that everything changed.

I awoke the next morning to the dim light of the wavering sun and the most horrific sound I have ever heard in my entire earthly existence. The sound plunged me deplorably from my unconsciousness and into cruel reality. The sound was subhuman and indescribably painful to me, and I could only imagine the agony of the creature that was emitting it. The sound was Bryson, screaming the most soul-shattering shriek you could imagine.

I raced out of my bedroom and into the upper floor hallway, detecting along the way the screams were emanating from the attic which held the insane convex portal. I ran to the middle of the hallway and pulled down the trapdoor which led into that forbidden room, letting its wooden steps fall to my feet. I began to climb, but not before glancing back at the windows through which the dim, dying light of our star came directly through from its cosmic source. It was then that I realized, having studied the cabin top to bottom the day before during our settling in, that the windows faced northwestward, not eastward.

I shook this terrible realization off and scrambled hastily up the stairs. In the attic, I found poor Bryson, stripped to his bare skin, crumpled into the fetal position of small child or dying animal on the floor immediately in front of that accursed convex portal. His shrieks continued nonstop, I felt as if those screams penetrated in the deepest corners of my soul and shut off all sensations of hope or happiness. His hands were clasped tightly on his head, as if some great force was pushing on it from the inside.

I fell to Bryson's side and attempted to console him but to no avail. As I held him tenderly and with all the care I could muster, he continued to shriek those terribly, soul crushing screams. Eventually, after a passing of minutes, or hours, or days for I cannot tell how long I sat there with Bryson in my arms, he took off towards the stairs leading out of the attic. I called after him, but to no avail, as he immediately slipped when he entered the steps and tumbled down to the upper floor below. I came after him, deeply concerned, and found to my relief, or all that I could muster after hearing those screams, that Bryson was merely unconscious. I took him into his bedroom and changed him into a nightgown before letting him rest on his bed.

But I could not stop thinking, what had poor Bryson witnessed in the attic that caused him to enter that pitiful state. Another manifestation of the decay? Or did poor Bryson decide to venture into that convex portal, which though it did not cause me terror yet, I knew to hold secrets of experiences which no man could endure. And yet I was allured by the portal, attracted to it and its undoubtedly forbidden secrets. After the whole of the day, as Bryson lie sleeping, I decided to venture into the attic to at least reexamine the convex doorway for possible clues to Bryson's fate. After some time examining the portal, I resolved to entering it.

This is, reader, the worst mistake any mortal mind could make in this dark age. There are secrets no one should know, as they can never comprehend them. What lie behind that convex portal was one of those secrets. I will tell you what it was now, in the hope that it will satiate your curiosity and prevent you from experiencing the mad depths of cosmic despair that are on the other side of that doorway.

For a brief second after I entered the portal, all the world became pure blackness. All of my senses were briefly shut off, save for my ears, which faintly detected a distant humming that was surely the true source of the noise Bryson and I had detected the day before, rather than the doorway itself. Then suddenly every sense burst forth again with painful clarity. I found myself being pulled from the Earth itself, and I could see the ground of mortal Earth beneath me disappearing as I was pulled up through the heavens. There was a brief roar of sound as I exited the atmosphere of our planet, and then the rest of my unimaginable journey was spent in terrible silence.

I saw myself being whisked past the planets of our infinitesimally small solar system which poor Shepard had no doubt studied through the merciful lens of his telescope in a bygone era of cosmic orderliness. After a time which seemed both maddeningly long and impossibly short considering the distance I was supposedly covering, I was whisked out of our sun's reach and into the vast, daemonic aether of our cosmos. I sensed being flung past uncountable nebulae of every shape and color, and stars which, like our earthly sun, seemed to be dying and dimming, or going out altogether not in great explosions, but in silent fading. I soared past indescribably horrific galactic landscapes of dying star clusters, bizarre planets and asteroids, and strange masses and formations I can't put down in words, save for the fact that they were ALIVE.

Eventually I passed entirely out of our region of the universe and gazed horrifically down upon the decaying spiral of our Milky Way, which was losing all sense of formation and order. I then soared for what seemed like unimaginable ages throughout the dark aether of extragalactic space, picking up speed as I did. As I looked around me at the galaxies I saw they were all suffering the same decay as our dismal, small corner of our dismal, small universe. Eventually I seemed to be travelling so fast that these galaxies and cosmic landscapes all swirled together into a ray of mad, multicolor light that surrounded me. I continued along this shaft of heavenly light for what seemed like aeons, before I burst out of it and the very rim of our sad universe into the truth.

I struggle even now to put down one word about what I found outside of the realm of our tiny, dying universe, but I will for your sake. As I exited that shaft of light I found myself in a terrible region of aether beyond all conceptions of time or space. It was beyond cosmic, beyond horrible. It was unknowable, yet known to me. Before me were countless, COUNTLESS universes! Each one appeared to my mortal eyes but a simple, glowing bubble of a billion billion stars and worlds, which stretched infinitely out before me in every direction I turned my head. There was no end to these countless universes, and to my indescribable horror I saw they all were marked by the unmistakable dim light of decay and cataclysm that our own world, tucked into a pointless region of a pointless galaxy in a pointless universe, had shown.

Before me were cosmos upon cosmos, each containing uncountable worlds and infinite lives as meaningless as our own, in what I can best describe as an eternal field, like the rows of corn in dead Nebraska. And the crop of that field was dying, wasting away in a supercosmic winter beyond all imagination.

It was then that I started to scream, yet in the vast, cosmic aether, my shrieks carried no sound. I was whisked backwards into my own pointless universe, past pointless galaxies and pointless nebulae and worlds before finally arriving at my own wretched corner of existence. I careened back to this dying Earth and through the accursed convex portal of that cabin's attic, landing with a harsh thump directly outside it, stripped to my bare skin as poor Bryson had been. And just like Bryson, I lay there for what seemed like an eternity, screaming shrieks as terrible or perhaps even more terrible than the one's my manservant emitted that morning. Eventually my shrieks devolved into a mad laughter not unlike Shepard's, and finally pitiful sobs of despair.

When I regained what I had left of my senses, the dim light of the morning sun was pouring into the attic, this time from the southeast. Or was it just plain east? Or was it the morning sun at all? No matter. Nothing matters anymore in the putrid corner of existence.

I shambled downstairs, still uttering faint cries of despair. After the long journey out of the attic I finally made it to my bedroom and slipped into a mismatched suit which you have found my corpse in. I was now sane enough to remember poor Bryson, and I shuffled over to his bedroom to discover he was gone. Perhaps he had awoken while I was away on my eldritch voyage, and in his insanity had run away from our cabin to be killed by our world's enraged wildlife. Or maybe it had been more than just a few minutes or hours that I had been away, perhaps it has been entire decades, centuries, millennia. I cannot tell now with the way time has degraded along with the rest of our sad little universe. Maybe the cosmos just opened its terrible mouth and swallowed poor Bryson whole. I do not and shall not know.

All I know is that someone may find this accursed cabin, with its forbidden convex doorway in the attic, which as I write hums terribly above me. And all I can do now is give that person all the mercy my frayed soul has left. As I said at the beginning of this account, I have written it for the EXPLICIT purpose of keeping you, reader, whoever you are from entering that terrible portal. I would advise you to leave this house at once and burn it down. Burn the whole forest down! Burn the whole world down! It does not matter now, for everything will be dead and rotting in the supercosmos soon enough. If you must know what secrets are beyond that portal I have just told you all that is there, so please, reader, do not experience that forbidden knowledge for yourself.

It is over now. Outside the light is either dimming into dusk or slowly coming unto dawn. I cannot tell. The only hope I have left lies in the barrel of this revolver, the same which Bryson used to mercifully execute Shepard, who too had gazed into things he should not have. As I write I am cocking the chamber. I am going to put it in my mouth now.

Goodbye.