Concerning the Nature of the Elder Ones and Their True Habitation
I have spent thirty-one years in the study of those ancient and terrible beings which the oldest human records call by names too varied to reconcile: the Outer Gods, the Elder Things, the Dreaming Ones, He Who Lies Sleeping, the Crawling Chaos, the Blind Idiot God. I have read the tablets. I have compared the manuscripts. I have corresponded with men who later went mad, and I have, in my pride, attributed their madness to insufficient scholarly rigor.
I was wrong about nearly everything. I am writing this document because I believe I now understand something correctly, and correct understanding of this particular thing carries an obligation to record it before the understanding takes its natural course.
The first thing I was wrong about: the Elder Ones are not outside.
Every tradition places them beyond: beneath the sea, between the stars, in the spaces between spaces. The Necronomicon speaks of sunken R'lyeh. The Pnakotic Manuscripts describe geometries that do not intersect with our own. The Voynich material, as best as anyone has decoded it, refers consistently to a threshold: a door between here and there, between our waking world and the place where They wait.
No one in thirty centuries of scholarship asked the obvious question: what if the threshold is not a door in space, but a door in us?
Consider the dreams. Every serious researcher eventually notices that the accounts of dreaming in the primary sources are not metaphorical. They are not literary flourish. Carter did not merely dream of the Dreamlands — he went there, and the going had a consistent topology, a reproducible geography, that dozens of independent accounts corroborate without collusion. The dream is not a symbol. The dream is a place.
A place with an entrance. An entrance that is, in every account, located not in the external world but in the act of sleeping; which is to say, in the act of the conscious mind releasing its grip on the machinery beneath it.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."
H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926)We have always read this as being about external horrors, about what we might learn of the universe, if we looked closely enough. I now believe it is about something more specific. The inability to correlate all its contents. Its contents. The mind's own contents.
What if the mercy is not that we cannot see the universe clearly? What if the mercy is that we cannot see ourselves clearly? What if the thing we have been trying not to know is not out there at all, but folded into the tissue of our own cognition, sleeping behind every thought we have ever had, using our dreaming as its dreaming, our imagination as its communication, our mythology as its mirror?
I will not lay out the full argument here; the document in the locked box in my office contains it in technical detail, and I have left instructions for its retrieval. Here I will say only this: the anatomical evidence is decisive.
The human brain contains structures that have no adequate evolutionary explanation. Not the cortex — the cortex is understood. Not the limbic system: understood, in broad strokes. I refer to certain formations in the deep brainstem, identified and then quietly set aside by three independent neuroanatomists between 1890 and 1920, whose notes I have studied in this archive. Formations that do not correspond to any known cognitive function. That produce, when stimulated in the small number of surgical cases where they were inadvertently activated, responses the surgeons documented as: the patient described a feeling of immense presence; the patient became briefly unable to communicate in any known language; the patient, on recovery, had no memory of the episode but retained a permanent alteration in dream content.
The structures are not vestigial. They are not deteriorating. They are, by all available measurement, active. They have always been active. They are simply active in ways our instruments were not, until very recently, designed to detect.
What they contain (and I use this word deliberately, with full awareness of its dual meaning) is not a cognitive function. It is a resident. Something that has been with us since before we were us. Something that our mythology encoded not because our ancestors encountered it outside, but because they caught glimpses of it inside, in the unguarded moments of sleep and fever and religious ecstasy and the particular madness that comes from too much scholarship applied too carefully to the wrong questions.
We did not dream of the Elder Ones because they called to us from sunken cities.
We dreamed of them because we are the sunken city.
I will describe what happened plainly, because I think plainness is the only mercy available at this stage.
Dr. Armitage helped me design it. He does not know what we were designing, and I did not tell him, and I am sorry for that now. The protocol was straightforward: simultaneous deep stimulation of the brainstem formations in six volunteer subjects, all academics, all briefed only on the ostensible neurological research. The stimulation would last eleven seconds. I would be observing, not participating, and I would record what happened.
I did record what happened. The record is in the box. I am going to describe it here as well, because I am not certain the box will be found by the right people, and because writing it down is the only way I know to keep from simply sitting in my chair and staring at the wall, which is what I have been doing for the last three days when I am not writing.
At the three-second mark, all six subjects simultaneously turned their heads toward the east wall. Not toward each other. Toward the wall, and at the same angle, and with an expression I have seen in paintings of saints receiving visions and in photographs of soldiers who have just watched someone die and in no other context.
At the six-second mark they opened their mouths.
I had been holding my pen. I dropped it. I am mentioning this because it felt, in the moment, like an important thing to document, and I find I cannot quite explain why — only that what came from their mouths was not sound in any conventional sense, and that the pen falling onto the wooden floor was the last purely ordinary thing I heard before the world changed its nature.
At the eleven-second mark I ended the stimulation.
The six subjects turned back to neutral. Four of them blinked slowly, as if surfacing from deep water. Two of them did not blink. The two who did not blink have not blinked since, to my knowledge, and I have not been able to locate them since Tuesday.
The structures in the brainstem were not merely active. They were, I understand this now, a seal. Not a cognitive organ. A seal. Something placed there, in the deep time before our species was our species, not by evolution but by intent, by something that understood what it was storing and understood that storage required structure, and built the structure into the meat that would carry it through the millennia.
We broke the seal on six of them simultaneously.
The question I cannot answer (the question that is why I have been sitting in this chair) is whether breaking six seals is meaningfully different from breaking one. Whether there is a threshold. Whether the six subjects, now walking about in whatever state they are in, represent a contained event or the beginning of a cascade.
The two who did not blink: I believe they are no longer primarily the people they were. I believe what was sealed inside them has found the egress it has been waiting for. I believe it is outside now, in whatever sense something without a conventional body can be said to be outside, and I believe it remembers the shape of the world from thirty-five years of dreaming through human eyes, and I believe that memory is not neutral.
I have been hearing sounds from the walls of my study since Wednesday evening. Not knocking. Not scratching. Something more like the sound of something settling, the way a very large body settles when it changes its position after a long stillness. The walls are dry. I have checked.
I want to be precise about what I believe was sealed inside us, because imprecision here is the source of three thousand years of wrong conclusions.
It is not evil. I want to say this even though it is a strange thing to say about something that has, in the last four days, apparently eaten two of my colleagues and is currently making sounds in my walls. It is not evil because it does not have a moral relationship to us any more than the ocean has a moral relationship to the things that live at the shoreline. It is immense. It has existed for longer than our planet. It has been folded inside our skulls for the entirety of our species' existence, sleeping, dreaming, sending up the occasional signal that we interpreted as religion, as art, as the persistent human suspicion that there is something vast and incomprehensible just behind the ordinary face of the world.
It was not wrong about itself. We were not wrong to sense it. We were only wrong about where it was.
It was always in here. It is out there now.
I think it is glad to be out. I think gladness is perhaps too human a word. I think it is, quite simply, expanding. Into the space it was denied for so long. I think it finds the external world novel and I think novelty, in something of its age, produces responses that a human observer might describe as enthusiasm, or appetite, or simply as: motion.
It is Thursday now. The sounds in the walls are louder. I have described them as settling but that was imprecise. They are: exploratory. A quality of probing. As if something very large is learning the interior dimensions of a new space by pressing against all the surfaces from inside.
I have been writing this document for three days and I intend to finish it. I want it on record that I understand what I did. I want it on record that I do not regret the knowledge even as I recognize the cost. I have spent thirty-one years in the study of things most people are correctly afraid to look at directly, and I have looked directly, and I know something now that no one has known before me, and the knowledge is — it is extraordinary. It is the most extraordinary thing. I wish I had someone to tell it to who would understand it the way I understand it, who would feel what I feel when I hold it in my mind, which is not fear exactly, or not only fear, but something closer to the feeling of standing at the edge of a very great height and understanding, perhaps for the first time, the true scale of things.
The sounds are coming from beneath the floor now as well. I did not mention the smell because I thought it might discredit the document. I will mention it now. It is not unpleasant. It is simply: oceanic. Brine and something deeper than brine. The smell of very deep water where no light has reached for a very long time.
I believe it has found this room. I believe the finding was not accidental.
I believe it remembers me.
If you are reading this then the box was found and I was not and please do not look for me. The document in the box contains the technical details of the experiment and should be given to Armitage who will know what to do with it or will know that nothing can be done with it which amounts to the same thing.
I want to say one more thing about the Elder Ones. About what they are, correctly understood, without the romantic distance of mythology.
They are very old. They are very large. They were inside us for the entirety of our existence as a species and during that time they learned us completely; our languages, our fears, our loves, the particular texture of human consciousness from the inside — and they are not indifferent to what they learned. I do not know what they intend with that knowledge. I do not know if intend is a word that applies.
I know that the thing in my walls has been pressing more insistently for the last hour. I know that the smell is very strong now. I know that when I look at my hands they seem...
...they seem...
I do not think I will finish this sentence
it is here
it remembers
Prof. Edmund Harwick, 1862–1926 (presumed)