[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Darkness. Utter and all-consuming blackness that smothered the very soul in lightless oblivion. Yet here were also blind and senseless presences of unimaginable scale that spun and gyrated through the void in an obscene, mindless ballet to the piping of blasphemous flutes. And throughout the cosmic horror that is the motion of the Other Gods, a single voice: sweet with corruption and bathed in ancient sin; herald and soul of thoughtless, voiceless entities of unfathomable power that chanted a primæval dirge as old as darkness itself:

'You've let it run out again! You bone-idle pillocks are good for nothing! Who's got some change? Come on! I was watching something good!'

A click, a whirr and the darkness is dispelled by a terrible light, which reveals in stark and merciless detail a scene from a god's nightmare: great bulbous and tentacled things blunder in the light; a sickly smell of unwholesome incense swirls about a space as vast and unknowable as Time, in the centre of which is an old Chesterfield sofa and a wooden box on legs. Now the window in the front of the box begins to flicker, and to show things that no man should see. Images that would harrow the soul without imparting understanding; that would suck out the mind and make of it an hors d'oevre in a cosmic all-you-can-eat buffet.

And Môgul spake, and spake thusly: 'I can't wait to get out of here. Oi, you! Squid-boy! Hold this antenna for me would you? No, you can sleep later. I'd have thought you'd have had enough by now.'

*****

'Ph'gnash g'sclorble sn'vaargh. Gra'phlogre sna'glui ph'gnasha.' muttered Lord Etceteron in his sleep, and then screamed. It was a scream that had been torn from the throats of tortured captives in dungeons before the birth of the Sun. It was a scream that was the test-card on the home-cinema system of Doom. It was the scream of one who has looked upon the balance sheet of his own soul and found it to be in Confederate dollars. In short, something about him told those of his companions who remained wakeful that perhaps something was slightly amiss.

'Go 'way, Dad,' muttered Orogarn Two. 'Jus' wannanother five minutes.'

'Cooooo?' crooned Buttercup curiously. This sort of scream usually meant that she and Grrralph were about to have some fun; but she wasn't sure that she should let him off the hook just yet. Two-thousand years old if she was a day and still he expected her to cuddle up with a mutilated corpse like any hatchling. She decided to ignore the siren call of a tortured mind snapping in two, at least until he apologised.

Business, they say, never sleeps. This is, of course, an utter lie: business sleeps very soundly, but the best businessman can sense a deal from well beyond the walls of sleep. Kuruharan was upright and into his sales patter before his eyes were even open:
'Sounds as though you've just had the futility and insignificance of our existence brought into sharp focus: why not try some... errr... some of this!'

Kuruharan may be a preternaturally good salesman, but even he cannot select a useful item at random while still asleep. He was holding a wooden spoon and a salad fork. Earnur stopped screaming and started to look confused.

'Are you trying to sell me a salad set?'

'I've got a fondue set if you'd rather: honestly, every home should have one. The next castle along does.'

'I doubt it. The Count doesn't really go in for cheese much.'

'I beg to differ. I sold it to him myself, along with some patented splinter cream. Anyway, the point is you're cured. My fee is fifty gold pieces or your immortal soul. We prefer cash.'

If there was one thing that being an aristocrat had taught Earnur, it was that one should never pay today what one can put off until the next generation. Deftly, he changed the subject.

'There's no time for that now. I've had a dream of cosmic significance and I need my pipe.'

He picked up his long-stemmed briar pipe and filled its bowl with a strange brown mixture from a green pouch by his bed-roll.

'If you used this yourself,' he said; 'you might find that smoke breathed out clears the mind of shadows within.'

The mighty charger, Pinkjin, swished his tail and snorted. A clear mind was the last thing that his master would find in that packet; and well he knew it too.

By now the ever-alert (not to mention ever-groomed) Merisuwyniel had roused the remainder of the company, who had gathered around Lord Etceteron. He dragged harshly on his pipe, causing the fragrant leaves within to glow a deep red. As usual in moments of great stress or drama, he spoke in accents strange.

'It beseemed me that I saw as 'twere a mighty room of sitting. And in that place were bodies, monstrous and without form. And there was music, strange and filled with horror. And in the centre of that place there was a thing of Seeing, that did show events both real and unreal to their oblivious eyes.'

'You were in a student's living room?' asked Orogarn.

'Shut up: you'll ruin this mythic quality I've got going here. Anyway, there was one among them, whose voice was fair and foul; and whose words were words of power. And he watched these things that flickered before him, and spake a great and powerful incantation. And the words he spake were these: "Why is there never anything good on? I'm sick of these bleeding soaps!"

'It still sounds like a student's living room to me,' said Grundor's favourite son.

'Shhh... And then there came a voice that spoke to me these lines:
'By hook or crook I'll have the bits
That used to be an Ent.
And then the world shall suffer sore,
That from itself me sent.

'Then I woke up.'

'I think that I should lay off that stuff if I were you,' said Merisuwyniel. 'That's the worst poetry I've heard from a dream on the Quest so far'. But behind her the Gateskeeper stood; and his spectacles flashed in the moonlight; and he said nothing. But he did not forget.

Long billionths of a second they pondered this dark premonition. Chrysophylax and Mordaenárur glanced at Buttercup, Heavenly Creature of Darkness and preened themselves in a hopeless parody of discretion. Grrralph listened carefully and then took himself off alone to consider his options (much to his recently refurbished mount's chagrin); Orogarn fingered his crystal and then went back to bed, and Kuruharan remembered something important.

'Enough about that! Where's my fifty gold pieces? I'm charging interest, you know.'

[ 11:37 AM December 04, 2003: Message edited by: The Squatter of Amon Rûdh ]