The K'dhor Awakes

Johnson: (Editor's Note: Over the past three months we have only recieved scant notes from Dr. Hyde. Most of the partially legible writings we have recieved bear the watermark of a bourbon or gin glass. Because of that fact we fear he has plunged into some psychological or emotional crisis and hope he will seek professional help soon.

     However, as several staff reporters have pointed out, the people who have delivered his tattered and smeared reports are credible eye witnesses to something truly strange...and powerful!)

     July 21, 1998

     I seem a fool writing these reports to a magazine owned and published by the very being I believe has dispatched certain minions against my safety. That way, it would seem he learns my every move. Would it were truly that simple; given my report's sporadic postings and the fact my Nemisis always looms a hair breadth behind me, these reports provide nothing to my enemies save entertainment.

     I am living out of my car now and have been for some weeks. Since deciphering the inscription on the copper cylinder I recovered from the ancient city of Ur in Iraq, my home has been burlarized at least a dozen times. One night in particular prompted me to hit the road.

     I was awoken by the clamour of a 2500 year old bronze shield slamming onto the living room floor. I hit the police emergency auto-dial on the phone next to the bed and went downstairs to investigate. The room was empty save for the baddly dented shield lying on the floor. The shield had struck a small table holding a reproduction of a Celtiberian Falcatta. As I moved towards the shield, a shadow shifted clumsily in the darkened hallway. I had only enough time to snatch the Falcatta lose from its display and bring the back of the blade up to deflect the ninja's sword. As the assasin raised his sword to strike again, I swung the falcatta out at the man's knees. He jumped but I managed to slam my dull blade into the back of his shin, knocking him off ballance sprawling to the floor. I ran for the front door, something nasty thunking into it as it closed behind me.

     It's too obvious that someone wanted very baddly to steal the cylinder and get rid of me. Hinge was the only one who leapt readily to mind; such methods are hardly beneath him---or I should think, his Master. The copper cylinder from the well of K'dhor is inscribed with an intricate anathema against Marduk, King of the ancient Babylonian gods. It's a mandala enabling the reader to commune with beings on another plane---"The New Ones." It is a powerful device, the effects potent and astonishingly rapid after only the reading the first three turns---even more intense than a sensory deprivation tank or any comparable hallucinogen. I have shot video of myself reading the cylinder and hardly believe my eyes as I watch myself sink into a blank-face stare only to suddenly break into shouting:

     "How dare Marduk violate the sanctuary! What a pitiful gesture to hide the stone! What arrogance to believe we have no power of our own! He has been an enfeebled formlessness for nearly three millenia---as good as dead! Now he has run out of time! I will key the Stone and They will enter! His machinations hang by a thread! The New Ones will extinguish him as a sigh does a guttering candle!"

     I have never heard or seen anything like this artifact. No doubt it why Hinge has been dispatched by his Master, Hans Abbadon, to snatch it away into the gloomy laberintine bowels of the B. Lavatsky Museum. Abbadon wants the cylinder. He knows precisely what can be done with it in the right hands.

     Yet are those hands mine? I watch myself over an over again on the tape and can not remember doing any of these things I see myself doing. I can only recall a vague sensation of power, almost an after-glow of love-making. It's painfully addictive. I need to read the cylinder daily now, sometime two or three times. If I don't, a horrible migraine attack paralyzes me and my chest fills with fluid. As soon as I take up the cylinder, I recover only to plunge into oblivion again.

     August 2

     Woke up at the wheel of my car in a tractor pull-off this morning. An empty fifth of Wild Turkey jammed by its neck into the seat-fold beside me. Last night still glaring in my memory---so hard to expunge the thoughts and images incised into the inside of my skull...

     I had wandered into some forsaken hole in the wall dive, my head thrumming with unshakeable horrid visions: extinct Bablyonian monstrosities erupting into the sky only to be hurled helpless into yawning stench-filled chasms---Man cowers in fire-lit bombshelters clattering desperately on dead computer keyboards because they are his worry beads---the city streets are clogged with bloody pulpy masses of dubious provenience---5,000 years of civilization utterly destroyed...

     Hinge found me. He sat down with me in his very superior way and again urged me to give up my search. How could I? Even though it scares the hell out of me, how can I? That pasty white face of his all gnaunt and those lips drawn back---he didn't like having to come see me one bit. Abbadon was a fool for sending him---there is that smouldering fire of Pride in him...

     Hinge skipped the formalities and went straight to the threats, this time. I don't know why but I grabbed Hinge's emaculate slender wrists and squeezed hard. At once, the table radiated a terrible white light. Air rushed about us and huge blue-black shapes rose roaring out from the center of the table with all the hellish fury of Industrial Light and Magic. The look on Hinge's horrifed face---oh, how I loved that sight! And I was causing it! People screamed. Lightning sprouted out from the table like a tree on growth hormones and flung itself into the mirror behind the bar. Hinge writhed; I could feel the bones in his wrists grinding against each other like popcorn in a plastic bag. And I could feel his will, immense and dark, fighting against the eldritch fury flowing through me. At first, a red glow enveloped his body, pulsing as if in time with his heart. Suddenly, he whithered right before me; eyeballs rolled up into his head, skin sagged sickly as if he melted within, mouth gaping, tongue lolling like a dead dog. He let out a ghastly moan. Terrified, I let go of him and stumbled drained away from the table.

     The room's silence was an icy hand on my throat. Everyone had fled. Hinge sat limply before me, tendrils of steam curling around him. His hands and wrist looked as if they had melted or dissolved into black ichor on the table. A hoarse gasp rattled from his gaping maw. Incredibly, he still lived.

     His eyes lagardly came back down then. And he fixed me with a malevolent sneer stretching the skin on his drawn deathly face.

     "Amateur," he croaked. At once he drew a long raw breath and vanished in a puff of dry, blackened leaves.

     I hadn't noticed the tall old man dressed in quaint 19th century style clothing until that moment. His piercing gaze cowed me like schoolboy and for an instant, I feared it might be Hans Abbadon himself. Suddenly my head swimmed and I stumbled to the bar to steady myself.

     He walked slowly towards me, beating the cadence of his stride on the edge of the bar with his silver-knobbed walking stick. His dark eyes blazed on his austere face beneath a snowy bush of coarse, wild hair.

     "What do you want?" I blurted weakly.

     "A friend," he said. Suddenly he held a glass of water up to me and I can't be sure if it was my dizziness or not, but nothing had been in his hand before. "We share a common enemy, professor," he added.

     I drank the water not concerned how he knew me, and wearily asked his name.

     "Dués," he smiled. "I used to be in...education."