A Day at the Library

by Ásgrímur Hartmannsson

Source: H. P. Lovecraft, “The Library”
also inspired by “The Hound” and “The Unnamable”

I was sitting in a way too small chair in the children’s section of the local public library on a cold autumn day, reading an ancient tome I had stumbled upon in the shelves. It must have been from the sixties, that old book; it was Mark Knopfler’s English translation of Olaus’ Wormius’ Latin translation of the Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred, the mad Arab. It was a mostly entertaining read, although obviously quite evil and frightful.

Some children were sitting beside me, some playing, some pretending to read, others occupying themselves with various grotesqueries too obscene to recount. One child in particular came to disturb me more than the others, although he was not the one who committed the violent act that I seem to have neglected to mention before now.

The child in question occupied himself with drooling on a piece of paper he had in front of him all the while flapping his tongue in a most unholy rythm, issuing forth noises I could only imagine coming from the outer most darkness of cold and empty tartarean regions of space, far out of reach of any sun.

I tried to ignore the child as best I could, immersing myself in consentration instead, trying to make sense of the words Mark Knopfler had so clumsily tried but failed to translate:

“Flt’ Prrrhh Phrr! Flprrr! F’llurrrp slr’rp-fzzhrr zrt’llp!”

The damned, putrid-smelling child, that abysmal offspring of parents unknown to me, had interrupted me enough so what came before that horrid text had skipped by my notice to float into the chaotic vortex of forgetfulness that resides in the heart of all men. I backtracked a few lines and read again the lines which had escaped my keen notice, and to my great horror I found what Evil lurked so close to me:

“In the outermost regions, where no man can ever venture live the most horrid creatures; they have no form that man can discern with the naked eye. It is of old rumour that this beast can be summoned into our world, where it must dwell in the living body of another to cause chaos and evil while the body lasts. This unmentionable evil can be summoned by the words recollected and thus written by the old and wize Sultan Of-zwing: Prrrhh Phrr! Flprrr! F’llurrrp slr’rp-fzzhrr zrt’llp!”

As I read the words that were so feebly spelled out, for surely they were not meant to be uttered by any human tongue, it became frightfully clear to me that somehow, in a most sinister of coincidences these very syllables were being uttered near me:

“Prrrhh Phrr! Flprrr! F’llurrrp slr’rp-fzzhrr!”

That slime-covered phlegmatic child! With his wheezing and incessant droning he was articulating those very words which no man had uttered since the days of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, intended only to summon forth some unimaginable antediluvian evil. And I looked around in fright to see if his utterances had an effect, and to my utter amazement I saw that they had:

A quiet, shy little girl, who had all the while sat by and read a book of lesser evil, her face free of slime, had become afflicted, albeit ever so slightly, by the great cosmic evil so clumsily hinted at in my copy of the Necronomicon. I can not say with any certainty how I came to know this, perhaps it was something in my subconcious mind that picked it up, perhaps it was the ancient mystical connections between all humans, perhaps it was the ominous phosphorous red glow in her eyes; I cannot say with certainty. I can only say that somehow, I just knew she had become posessed by cosmic evil.

But by some uncanny mercy, the very cosmic evil that was being summoned so accidentally brought its own downfall through its own evil ways; the girl had only been noticeably posessed for a few breaths when she leant towards the droning and slime-dripping kid and mauled him in the arm.

The child stopped his incantations forthwith, without ever stumbling on to the very last of the arcane syllables which would have completed the manifestation of the demonic entity and let out instead a hideous scream.

I stayed just long enough to ensure myself on the surface that the girl had not been totally swallowed up from the inside by the obscure mythical being. Of course, I can never be sure. How can I be sure that the temporary rift opened by that random slime-covered spit-spraying child was so temporary, or that it can ever be closed?

A time will come, but I want not to think, that some outermost unknowable regions of space will flow out of this innocent little girl, mingle with our own and form a cacophonous swirling chaos of doom. Until then, I plan to stay the hell out of the library.