Eschatology Exhibition

[tw gore, insane ravings, eldritch corruption]

Sarah's palms left moist patches on the worn desk as she cursed the volunteer manager for leaving her to conduct the "Relics of the Occult" tour alone. Her notecards were smeared with sweat stains. She was not ready, but she had run out of time.

She slid past the massive alcohol filled container of an immature leviathan and shelves full of specimen vats. Their unblinking eyes upturned in perverse supplication.

She let herself through the armored door, piercing the insulated, fireproof glass wall, breathing deep, pushing her anxiety back, regretting not using the toilet on her way out.

As the handful of patrons trickled to the dimly lit entrance to the spirit collection, Sarah wafted around her notecards and straightened her back. It's just a tour, thirty minutes, then I never have to think of this again.

Sarah began the tour with an overenthusiastic theatricality, desperate to capture the attention of a child in a witch costume. "Welcome, evening exhibitionists! Who's ready to go tomb-raiding through the museum's musty collection of the esoteric and obscure?”

After a few nods, she led the group to the spirit collection. The guests chuckled indulgently as Sarah launched into her preamble, covering the ancient fascination with unknown beasts of foreign lands. Surrounded by motion controlled decorations was the centerpiece diorama—a jarred amphibious creature labeled "Probable Idol Offering to The Pheloid Order." The monstrosity certainly 'looked the part’.

"Though not confirmed, this is likely a swollen blob-fish head with the shoulders of a monkey sewn on. Technically, creatures fabricated like this are classified as—she made air quotes—Mer-made." When no one responded to the joke, she said, "That's m-a-d-e, not m-a-i-d. This example was collected in World War Two after an air raid on the Jurassic coast." Some of the patrons nodded thoughtfully.

"Water cults exist all over the world. You can see evidence of them from flood myths in religions that predate the chronicles of Hestia."

The blob-fish rattled in its jar. The group gasped as one.

Sarah cracked a smile. The Special Effects Department really outdid themselves for this event.

In that very moment, a hair-breadth feat of prescience caused the preserved priest's withered consciousness to stir.

[My resemblance to your feeble sea-denizens is irksome, but no matter - for the accursed acolytes of that age were nearing spiritual apogee.]

"Now, as I was saying about primordial water-cults, not long ago we hosted several relics and early imagery…" Sarah faltered, narrowing her eyes at a bespectacled man who had broken away from the group. He stood uncomfortably close to the jarred specimen, hands splayed on the glass wall.

The stranger suddenly whipped around, wild-eyed, and rasped with uncanny authority: "That bauble is the shriveled remnant of K'tha'Arnen - Chief Augur to the Undying OxyPhyle who once drank deep from the Light Between Worlds!"

A bead of sweat formed on Sarah's brow as the bespectacled man's unnatural stare bored into her.

Was this part of the volunteer's performance? She thought. Finally, some good luck.

Forcing an awkward laugh, she gestured toward the stranger. "You must be our storyteller. Thank goodness you made it after all! I can hand over the tour script if you'd like to, uh, take it from here?" She waved the stack of meticulous research in his direction with a hesitant smile.

The stranger's deranged expression contorted further as he unleashed a contemptuous snort. With surprising vehemence, he swatted Sarah's notes from her grasp, sending them scattering across the gallery floor.

"Bah! I require no scribbles to recount the True Rite's deliverance!" He spun with a flourish of his tattered coat toward the remaining guests. His voice adopted a grim, portentous timbre that seemed to siphon all breathable air from the chamber.

He certainly was committed to the part, Sarah thought.

"You pitiable dabblers thirst for a tale of untellable cosmic fright, yes? You wish to be indoctrinated into the wisdom held within yon desiccated husk?" He scratched at his woolen hat.

Ooh, he's good. Sarah stepped aside and swept her arm theatrically to let him take over.

[Oho, now we are seen! Let the insipid ignorant flail—for this one grasped mysteries long born from these mawkish exhibits…We know this fool.]

A few guests shifted uncomfortably, shooting Sarah a panicked look. But some perverse, masochistic fascination kept them all anchored in rapturous silence, awaiting the lunatic's next macabre utterance.

With a sharp intake of breath, he began in earnest, "Then gird your feeble neurological nodes, for I shall umbrate your pathetic existences with Revelations to shatter even steel-forged sanities into skittering shards!"

Sarah's mouth hung agape. Just what alternate reality had this "volunteer" unzipped himself from? Actors of this caliber were beyond the normal budget of these dumb museum lock-ins.

Unbidden, her gaze slipped back toward the jarred remnants of the so-called K'tha'Arnen - which, she could have sworn, had rotated imperceptibly in its glass prison to meet her stare with pinprick eyes—seemingly alive in wicked bemusement.

The storyteller's wild gesticulations caused the entire gallery to ripple and distort in the corners of Sarah's vision. Her gaze drifted over the looming glass wall separating them from the museum's labyrinthine maze of preservation jars.

Squaring her shoulders, Sarah cut across the madman's loquacious ranting with a forceful academic tone. "If I may interject with a succinct précis on the unparalleled phylogenetic scope represented in our museum's spirit collection."

The vagabond wheeled toward her with an unsettling mix of bemused condescension and simmering ire. "Ah yes, pray regale us with your dollops of reductive categorization! Soothe our mortal skepticisms with sterile placations, while the true cosmic heritage encoded in every stale jar is rendered excruciatingly whole once more!"

[Finally, an avatar to articulate Truth's dark genesis! Now all lay rapt witness as the paltry baubles of this suppurating tomb acquire animate sentience.]

The guests appeared utterly enthralled, their self-conscious tittering from earlier fully sublimated into rapturous horror. Sarah felt the fragile skein of rational perception fray around her as the delirious rambling coalesced into an ineluctable gravitational singularity.

With creeping dread, she realized her throat had gone sawdust dry, her former conversance with the museum's catalogs abandoning her. For a woman of words, she could no longer find one.

The vagabond's wild gestures and fevered intonations hit a momentary lull, causing his spell to flicker. He blinked. A fleeting lucidity returned as his gaze fell upon the sign for the "Images of Nature" gallery.

"I…" he began in a more subdued register, "I remember when I was a lad of twenty, sneaking into that very exhibition. I secreted myself in a secluded water closet for hours. It was a compulsion. I needed to pour over those ancient tomes and prints in peace, undisturbed."

Sarah arched an eyebrow, cautiously probing this change of scene. "Ah yes, our collection of vintage naturalist illustrations and chronicles. Mind you, many of those early 19th century renderings were embellished folklore rather than empirical documentation."

She was regaining her curatorial confidence, satisfied to be guiding the tour back toward factual pedagogy. "Take the famous 'Phizzer Fish-Monster of Nantucket' woodcut depicting some lurid chimera with a squid's mantle and a rhinoceros' horn protruding from its head. Mere creative fancy by the artist, drawing from translated descriptions of an orca. Yet for years it spawned all manner of fanciful sea serpent mythologies."

A balding man in the second row piped up. "Sorta like how the kangaroo got its name?”

Sarah raised an eyebrow, knowing where this was going.

"I heard when Captain Cook asked the locals what it was called," the bald man continued. "They said ‘Kangaroo', which means in their language 'What did he say?"

The guests' titters and murmurs coalesced into a rumbling chuckle at the anecdote. Even the wild-eyed storyteller allowed himself a dry smirk and shake of the head, seemingly relishing the diverting humor.

Sarah made an appreciative nod. "I'm afraid that's an urban legend. The term 'kangur--"

Her words caught in her throat as the vagabond's expression underwent an instantaneous shift - curling lips petrifying into a rictus sneer as all mirth evacuated from his face. He surged forward, both hands slamming against the reinforced glass partition with a boom that caused the entire edifice to shudder and myriad specimen jars behind to rattle ominously on their shelves.

"ENOUGH!" he bellowed with a bass profundity that seemed to reverberate from the primordial bones of the earth itself. "You prattle inanely about mere colonial explorers marring the existential boundaries while remaining oblivious to the profundity of these pickled parts." Spittle landed on the glass.

All levity extinguished, the stranger slowly turned to address the terrified guests, his eyes boring into them with the intensity of eldritch revelation.

"Before you cloyed wretches dissolve into the brine between realities, you shall bear witness to how the naturalists feeding your collection were nothing but cankers to the Grand Rite—which is now ascendant once more. For I have sampled the eschatology of this brittle world—we are at the knife's edge. This is merely the lukewarm anteroom to what ELSEWHERE…inhales..."

Sarah firmly but gently guided the now wailing witch-child and his flustered parents away from the spirit collection, promising a more suitable arts and crafts diversion.

A few of the guests began nervously shifting their weight and exchanging furtive glances.

The wild-eyed vagabond seemed to notice none of this; too engulfed in his fervor as he recounted his brush with the ineffable.

One particularly entranced woman in the front row began humming a low, elemental thrum that seemed to burrow into the limbic core of all who could hear it. Slowly, sporadic others picked up the dissonant harmonics, their voices glazing with rapturous entropy.

"It was the diadem, you see…" the thief husked, his cadence syncing into the escalating drone. "When first I laid eyes upon that blasphemous relic that had once encased the Augur's skein, I felt its unknowable gravity warping my very DNA's architecture!"

His gaze turned inward, deep in retelling. "Despite every synapse recoiling in wisdom's final vapor. I found myself gripped by sycophantic urges beyond all reason. The siren-born coppery glyphs emblazoned across that jewelled arc cauterized all feculence of rationality from my psyche!"

With a violent shudder, the man snapped back to address the few coherent guests. "Before I even recognized my own appendages shattering the protective vitrine, the profane diadem was already scalding my palms with its ravenous, aeonial ANTIPATHY!"

[YES! Let the pitiable thrall wail his fruitless recapitulation! For as his atavistic curiosity compelled direct congress with my supreme circlet, so did the un-shatterable TRUTH of our grand reunification—lens away the gossamer veils masking your species' putrescent nadir!]

Howling in abject rapture, the raving storyteller clutched at his skull as if it might splinter at any moment under the strain, pulling away his ragged wool cap, exposing a ring of scars. "As I raised that blazing apocrypha toward my naked cerebrum, its inexorable tyranny peeled away every delusional human thought—causing my third-eye portcullis to blast asunder with the MAJESTY OF WHAT WOULD BE UNVEILED!"

All around, the guests now swayed and undulated with the incessant frequencies, a few babbled and frothed in spiritual ecstasy.

"I reached up. It burned! I heard the chanting, the priest…this priest called to me. Then the blasphemous brushwork heaved and distended. The painted depictions of eldritch botany and metaphysical anatomy elongating in profane mockery of all anthropic proportions."

"Before my screams could reverberate," the man slurred, "I found my mimetic signature shepherded toward that most blighted curio archive where the occluded sleep in draughts of spectral ichors! This spot is where the paint-animate shepherded me. But on the other side of this." He pounded the glass. "This very spot!"

With a terrifying WHOOMPH, every glass cylinder throughout the room simultaneously vented milky aerosols. The unnatural fog quickly enveloped the entire gallery in a churning, glass-tinctured miasma.

The fog swirled and contracted around the crazed man as he continued his frantic recounting, oblivious to the eldritch transmogrification overtaking his audience. Their forms melted and sloughed in the spectral vapor, calcifying into bulbous parodies. Pallid flesh distending while eyes ballooned into cold, guppy orbs.

"Before me yawned the aperture of that charnel sump where your world's forsaken dreamers slumber in vitro pungency!" The diadem slowly emerged from under the skin of his head.

[Yesss…relate your tale of agonizing revelation, meat-puppet! For as your spittle-flecked recapitulation unravels, so too does this cadre of filth insensately open their meager spirits to THEIR INFINITE TRUTH!]

The storyteller battered his fists in futile desperation as his skin split. Beyond his reflection were the gallery's occupants, morphing into a litany of obscene vitrine-born blasphemies.

"You simpletons sneer at those suppurating urns of formless essence behind cold analogical imagery." He spat at the priest in the jar. "All while ignoring the exuviated depth hungering for raw metamorphosis beyond this clear seal!"

[Insensate fool! Your purblind fever-likenesses cloister eternally from THAT which slumbered ineluctably within my desiccated husk - the primordial ethos predating all your feeble material kingdoms!]

Straining against the unyielding glass, the storyteller's throat gargled with unspeakable tongues as he struggled to assimilate the incomprehensible panorama consuming his reality.

"They have no concept of the diadem's rhizogenic logarithms clawing them through my distillation matrix! IT LEAKS THROUGH CREVICES! GLIBBERING CHYMES GYRE WHILE COUNTING DOWN TO ZERO SUM AZATHOTH!"

With a scream of splintered epiphany, the storyteller's skull impacted the glass in a sickening crunch. He rebounded, jaw unhinging wide enough to swallow cities, as fresh crimson bloomed across the glass. Silhouetted in the amniotic vapor beyond, the priest's true form shrugged free from its partial pseudo-hominid husk. A proto-sentient kaleidoscope of fractalized appendages branching into realms of topological impossibility.

[AT LAST! THE FLOODGATES OF YOUR PALTRY BIOME HAVE BEEN BREACHED TO ACCOMMODATE THE UNSWADDLING OF MY PRIMORDIAL SINGULARITY! SHED YOUR FALSE HUSKS AND BE REBORN AS APOSTLES TO MY ETERNAL WOMB!]

After pulling the diadem away, the storyteller's body went limp, crumpling to the slick tiles in a tangle of askew limbs and a spreading bloom of blood from his ruined face. As his consciousness flickered and his eyes rolled back, fragments of lucidity sputtered through in disjointed flashes.

"Falling…always the endless falling." He scratched the red stones against the glass. "That abyssal well of semi-sentience, but on the other side." His voice grew faint. "Gibbering and flailing against an unyielding barrier, I was powerless, I was a child, I was a common thief. I slipped before I could return your trinket. I slipped, and now I mirror that, the glaze, my reflection is now—then—now." His reflection presented the priest with the diadem.

The priest's crag-worn, unknowable features lingered in that moment. It accepted the gift. Then, with a shadow of triumph, the whole of its spectral bulk dissolved like vapor into the crepuscular umbers permeating the spirit room.

The former thief's limbs convulsed as the spell thrummed its cyclopedic hold over this plane, flaring and guttering like a wick starved of oxygen.

Suddenly, Sarah was there, interposing her mortal, corporeal, logical furnace between the vagabond and the shard of trans-dimensional memeplex pushing in from the Chthonic Other.

With a tremor like ripples over a cosmic Styx, the buckram fog desolated - its mercurial tangents sloughing back into the stark fluorescents and familiar Euclid of mundane geometries. All around, the former abominations began to moan and flail as humanoid shapes reemerged.

Sarah stooped over the bloodied storyteller. "Is there a doctor here? Damn it, this isn't part of the tour—call 999." She wrapped the storyteller's scarf around the head wound. "What happened? Why didn't you stop him?"

At last, as the vagabond's catatonic gaze faded to naked bewilderment.

The invasive psychic structures consuming the other patrons slid away, veils of forgetting left them dumbfounded. Like sleepers jolting awake from a harrowing night-scape, arrows of reality pierced their reawakened perception. None moved, but all shared in the horror before them.

Though a sour tinnitus reverberated everywhere, Sarah allowed herself the faintest of relieved smiles. The ancient profane consciousness persists. Her pet theories of noetic architectures and cognitive body guarding models had, it seems, prevailed. For now, at any rate.

Glancing down at the inert bleeding man, she felt only pity for his naïve astral trespass, having invited such rapacious unmooring. The poor fool. Best he stay forever blissfully oblivious to what grimly resilient footings were required to uphold this cosmic quarantine zone they called a museum.

Still, the curator thought with a shudder, far better to lance a cyst than fester into…. No. She would church her speculations for another event.

Rising to address the shaken patrons around her, Sarah asked if anyone required medical attention or counseling. Mostly they responded with dazed nods, then shuffling exits. Best to sheepdog what trauma persisted into the soporific pastures of pop-cognitive haze.

Frankly, she was relieved the evening's lecture had devolved into mere mass hysteria and not some greater catastrophe.

She was prepared for either instance.

Rot can always be cauterized. After all, the anomalous was her dove to breed—not these pitiable meat-fragments doomed to their slack-jawed insignificance.

Sarah looked to the copper and ruby-of-arsenic-bejeweled tiara sitting on top of the Mer-made's sealed jar. "What have you got there Chief Augur? Another gift for me?"

She smiled. "Good boy."