I AM GOING insane.
I couldn’t see it all, couldn’t take it all in, my vision breaking on the edges like cheap windowpanes, crackle-fracturing from the outside in. The thing in front of me filled the room, a mass of limbs and tentacles writhing in knots. The tentacles roiled against each other, worm-white membranes tearing as they rubbed. Clear ectoplasm gushed, lubricating the smearing caress of alien flesh against alien flesh. From this mass jutted spindly limbs ending in grasping, many-fingered hands with too many joints, each finger capped by a talon black and curved to pull meat from bone.
I don’t, I don’t, I don’t …
The massed tentacles were split-seamed with gaping mouths, gnashing rims of razor-sharp chitin crowding and pushing each other in jutting, jagged rows, piranha mouths designed by a mad, sadistic creator. The teeth chomped together, the noise a cacophony, driving into my mind like a drill.
… understand, no sense, what, what, WHAT …
Hundreds of orbs of all sizes dotted the oily membrane skin. A few were as large as my face; some were the size of a pea. Unblinking they stared, drinking in my human frailty, my weakness, my lowly pathetic life. They looked on me without pity, seething animosity in their cold, unmoving stare.
… toomuchdontknowwhatiamlook …
Over this sloppy, slithering form lay a shaggy hide, still raw and bloody from being cut off its original host. It moved on its own, rippling around the chaos it clothed, trying to pull away each time its sore subcutaneous inside brushed against the skin of the chaos god who wore it. Each kiss of contact raised a sizzle and a thin wailing scream that cut through the teeth-gnashing noise of a hundred hungry mouths.
My mind broke, sanity washing away like sand on a crumbling beach. I already knew fear; since that night it had been my constant companion, living in my bones, stalking my shadow, always waiting for a trigger to come screaming back into my mind.
A certain look from a man, the smell of Sax body spray, carpet against my skin, four men in a group, my face touching the bare mattress if the sheet slipped in the night, that song … that damned song that still haunts me. These things and a hundred others had stalked my life since that night, looking for any opportunity to take me and drag me back to the edge of madness.
That was nothing compared to the terror that ripped my soul at seeing the Crawling Chaos in his true form.
A tentacle slithered toward me. My eyes locked on it, unable to blink or look away. It slapped around my arm like an obscene bracelet, the membrane cold and greasy as it curled around my right wrist. Its touch turned the thick line of scar tissue running up my arm into a throbbing current of ice. It ached deep in my tendons, racing along my carpal tunnel. My fingers opened, uncurling to reveal the symbol carved into the flesh of my hand. A scream tore out of my throat.
The chaos moved, surging toward me.
Something hot and wet hit my palm, setting it afire.
The world exploded.