How much time did I have before my absence and desertion was discovered? Hours? Minutes? I ran hurriedly down towards the lower city, and its cyclopean architecture older than prehistory.

  I ran past faces in the street, small groups or individuals walking on the main paths of the city, or resting idly on a bench or leaning against a transfigured flesh-wall; laughing as they grasped vertebrae- railings or delicate columns of bone, reaching claw-like for the cloud-veiled mountaintop above.

  Did they know? I avoided their gaze, yet no one tried to stop me.

  My mind grasped madly for some plan, some means of escape – perhaps I could stow away on board one of their black galleons, or flee into the countryside and make my way as best I could – god knows where. I only knew that I had to escape, I knew they would not let me go – I had seen too much, progressed too far down their dark, unholy track to shrink back now, yet shrink I had.

  Then I heard the deafening, terrible tooting of a horn call blasting from the alabaster tower. The alarm had been sounded. The chase was on.

  I ducked into a back alley, then another, proceeding ever downwards, crossing the main streets only when quirk of the city’s layout required it of me. Twice I saw patrols of masked men on the road, but ducking furtively under the shadowy eves of an apartment, or awning, I managed to avoid their dragnet.

  I made it to the old district unhindered, but found myself lost amid the labyrinthine alleys and lanes, scrambling like a rat in a maze, the guards growing ever nearer. One dead-end, and then another! To my left I found a small, unmarked opening in a cyclopean wall, and stairs leading underground, and thinking I had discovered some passage to a subsurface aqueduct, or a way leading outside the city, I entered, and proceeded down.

  The stairs were cold, ancient, cut from bedrock, from a time predating even the building of the old quarter. Down I went, inexorably, lead on by some strange pale light far below, and my footsteps echoed after me, endlessly reverberating off of the narrow walls and low ceiling.

  My hands slipped against the smooth-straight stone walls, my breath hung vaporous in front of me in the form of a pale cloud, and my mind flailed desperately for a way out.

  Down, down, abyssally down I went, until the stairs abruptly terminated and the passage opened into a great chamber – evidently an ancient cave used for burials, for the cavern was populated by countless rows of mummified figures, arms folded in death, all resting upon cold, stone plinths. The cavernous rock walls of that subterranean crypt were slimy to the touch, and dripping with an ominous phosphorescence, and the air was thick with the smell of decay.

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  It was the same terrible crypt I had seen in my turbulent nightmares, now made manifest!

  I heard noises, voices, yelling on the stairs behind me – the cruel authorities of this cannibalistic horror-draped city were close upon my heel. Hoping to find some alternate exit, I raced into the depths, running between rows of the interred dead, all awaiting resurrection, desecration, or worse profanities hitherto unnamed and unknown.

  Then, ahead of me – a door! Carved from the stone of the dizzying slopes, larger than belief, as if made for a giant or a living mountain. Frantically, I pushed apart the ancient stone gates and passed through the opened portal. I looked, I saw, and I fell screaming, as I succumbed to the final, ultimate horror:

  I saw HIM. I saw IT. I saw THE GREAT OLD ONE who lies eternal sleeping in the darkest, cruellest crypt beneath the necropolis, whose somnolent breath creeps putrescently through stone and mortar to rise and settle upon the queerly twisting streets and verdant gardens of the city of the damned.

  ITS abdomen, if such a thing can have a chest, rose and fell in terrible perpetuity, endless, as the stars are endless, decayed, as all life decays. And as IT laid ITS moulding, bulging, vacuous eyes upon me, squinting with terrible focus and abominable inscrutable intensity – the eyes of death, of amorphous age and ceaseless depth – I drowned, in damnation, in silence, as an eclipse drowns the world in blackest night, and all life left me shudderingly at last.

  ...

  So spoken, the speaker set down their cup, and their voice ululated grotesquely, rising from dull and throaty, gaining pitch and softness of tone, as commonly associated with the female of the species. From her place on stage, the being formally known as Dr. Eliza Hugo looked about the veiled opulence of that otherworldly tea-house and addressed her enraptured audience:

  “Thus concludes the final confession of Johnathan Robert Briggs, Mortician, lifetime resident of Providence, New England, my friend and former student. A man who could find no joy or fulfillment in his terrestrial existence, yet wholly unable to take that final frightful leap, and join us in new and resplendent life. I shall mourn his passing, and his failures.

  “Fear not, however, although he was a promising sort, and his tea was prepared most excellently, we of the clergy are already pursuing several new and promising leads, and have no doubt we will soon secure a permanent replacement for the good Doctor. Even now, we are preparing new copies of the Necronomicon to seed on earth, to entrap new and curious minds.

  “The ceremony will go ever on, for we are eternal.”

  And as the speaker finished, a hideous laughter arose from the patrons of that strange and otherworldly tea-house, and all present murmured and agreed: the old adage was true: DEAD MEN TELL THE BEST TALES.

  The End.