Secrets of Koth

Well, I ain’t much of a storyteller…but here goes.

There was always somethin’ funny goin’ on in my hometown. When I was in school I had to do this history project, lookin’ into the meanin’ of our town’s name? An’ what I found was real surprisin’. My town had been founded by two men, William L. Gordon and Steve Allison—the latter also bein’ called the Sonora Kid. Both of ‘em were cowboy types, rough ‘n’ tumble gunmen of the Old West. William’s son Francis Xavier Gordon and Steve’s son Steve Allison Jr. became friends, as their fathers had been. They were adventurers who went on weird adventures all over the world together. Anyway, when William Gordon and Steve Allison Sr. founded the town, they named it Alldon, a combination of their names. This was simplified to Allon, then Allen, and then what it is today. I guess town names in Texas used to be pretty flexible in the old days. I blame beer.

What stood out to me at the time was the fact that William Gordon kept talkin’ about the town “puttin’ somethin’ away.” Like it was built over somethin’ bad that the buildings and roads helped keep packed down. I remember learnin’ in a separate school project that some of the Indians who lived in the area supposedly practiced cannibalism about seven centuries ago, but I don’t think this related to any of that. No, this was somethin’ different. Somethin’ that ran a little deeper.

I got my first glimpse of it one Halloween—my last Halloween before high school. I didn’t especially wanna go out trick-or-treatin’, but my dad, as was his style, was insistent that I do it. Told me it was what a boy my age ought to be doing on Halloween. He really liked going on about what was right and what was wrong, my dad. Anyway, I ended up gettin’ scared stiff by this wacko lady who started comin’ around town. In proper retrospect, she was just another of those off-the-deep-end Christians who hate gay people and Goosebumps books and fun and all that kinda stuff. My cousin, who lived with us at the time, was a little on the gullible side, so she bought into everything this lady said. And I was just a kid, so I trusted my cousin when she started saying Halloween was the Devil’s work. I had a weird fear of the Devil in those days, and not just because I was Methodist. Now that I think about it, I have to blame that school project I did: I think after I read Gordon’s account, I started having nightmares about the Devil being buried under my town.

My dad, like I said, had a thing about right and wrong—and he hated that someone was usin’ faith to prevent people from trick-or-treatin’. He vowed that he was gonna go out and celebrate, especially after the lady got a curfew goin’ in town. She wanted kids comin’ out to her Hell House instead, to learn the horrors that awaited them in the afterlife if they stepped away from the path of Jesus. (Never mind the fact that she charged five bucks a head.) My cousin and I went, and she’d got me so riled up that I was convinced my own dad was a demon-lover. He was goin’ out dressed like the Devil, but weirdly enough his costume wasn’t red, like Satan. It was yellow, a sort of dark, murky yellow. He didn’t have any horns, neither. If he had, he’d look like the first version of Daredevil. Only a little creepier.

He and his buddies, the broken-down alley losers, were goin’ out with him, chantin’ their protests against the curfew. I have to smile a little bit, lookin’ back. My dad did what he did for me, without any knowledge of what was about to ensue. He wanted me to have a good Halloween, and it’s not his fault that that ain’t what happened.

That Hell House of that old lady’s was messed up beyond belief. She musta forgotten we were kids, or, more likely, crossin’ that line was part of the point. As we walked through the house we saw these badly-acted scenes of all sorts of horrors: teens gettin’ diagnosed with AIDS, dyin’ all shriveled up alone in the dark in hospital beds—gory abortions, where they pried a fake dead baby out of some lady’s belly. That sorta thing. After we saw some girl die from smokin’ a marijuana joint, the lady wanted us to go outside, for what she called the grand finale. We stepped out her back door—and that was when the weirdness began.

Once we crossed into her backyard, there was a chill wind in the air. Made sense—it was October, after all. But this was Texas, and this wind was damn cold, if you’ll pardon my French. And there was somethin’ weird about it—somethin’ old—somethin’ ancient—

The last scene of the Hell House was a car crash; I guess it’s a pretty customary finish for those sorts of Houses. They had a bunch of mannequins playing some dead kids in the twisted wreck of a cardboard car. One of them had its head lopped off—another had a pile of red yarn on its stomach that I guess was supposed to be guts. Broken beer bottles were scattered around the corpses, showin’ what had brought these poor souls to their deaths.

Suddenly I realized I was sweatin’, and my heart was poundin’. I couldn’t stop lookin’ into the flames. Suddenly I was real, real scared of goin’ to Hell. But not the sort of Hell that old witch was ravin’ about. Something worse. Something dark and empty, beyond the flames, in the cold blackness of forever…an undying void, as cold as an icy lake at night…

Just then, up the street, I heard my dad and his three friends chanting. They had rounded the corner and were coming down towards the house.

But they weren’t chanting in any language I ever heard.

The wind picked up some more, billowing louder and louder, till it was howlin’, but I could still hear ‘em chanting. The lady and her group had set the fake car on fire as part of the crash, but just then the wind blew the flames out. We were left in the dark, and the cold.

And my dad’s voice just kept sounding stranger and stranger, like he was choking. Strugglin’ to breathe.

Like something was bloomin’ up inside him.

Then, all at once—the moment ended. Things felt normal again. My cousin, she snapped of it, and got all sick over the car thing. She ended up callin’ the lady who ran the Hell House a bitch for showin’ that stuff to people. Then it turned out that my dad and his friends had convinced the whole town to come out trick-or-treatin’. All the parents came up to the Hell House and started takin’ their kids out of it. My cousin and I went with my dad, who was still dressed like an ochre Satan.

I was scared shitless, especially when I looked back at that dumb lady who’d tried to spook us. She must’ve been pretty darn embarrassed, havin’ a crowd of parents takin’ their kids back like that. She looked like she was about to cry. And she suddenly seemed so small, like she was shrinking into herself. She was scared of somethin’—somethin’ more than just social change she didn’t agree with. Like, that fear of change was just how it manifested, ‘cause she was part of one of those dumb churches that don’t know a thing about God. What was underneath that fear—that was somethin’ really scary. The Devil she fought, even if he wasn’t my dad, he was real—I knew that then, well an’ true.

When I asked my dad about the things he was chanting, he didn’t answer. It was like he didn’t know what I was talkin’ about.

Or rather, like he wanted me to think he didn’t know what I was talkin’ about.

It was a bad night. I won’t forget that Halloween, I think, till the day I die—even though sometimes it feels like just a distant dream, a misremembered smudge of bitter nostalgia.

Later, I talked it over with my other cousin, Marcus. I don’t see Marcus as much as I like—his mom doesn’t like my mom, probably because my mom’s a certain kind of middle-aged white woman. My dad’s mom was white, too, being the granddaughter of some British professor who claimed to have found surviving dinosaurs. None of that matters—what does matter is that Marcus is a bona fide genius. He works at this strange university, and he told me that he had this coworker who had been researchin’ the lady who ran the Hell House. Apparently, before she turned born-again, she had been part of a cult known as the House of Om. That cult was founded way, way back by this wacko guy named John Stark, who called himself Om—weirdly enough, he wasn’t the only guy named John Stark who was doin’ cult stuff back in those days. The House of Om originally worshipped Erlik, the Ochre Monarch, but after Om died, they became all-female, and turned towards worshippin’ a woman named “Jane” instead. Only “Jane” wasn’t a real woman at all; she was actually the Bride of Erlik, bein’ some sort of goddess who was also called the She-Goat with a Thousand Young. I don’t know really what any of that means, but it sounds pretty Devilish to me. I started takin’ to believin’ that Erlik was actually Satan—and that he might be what was buried under my town. Some years later, both my mom and my cousin were tricked into joining the House of Om, and that only confirmed my suspicions—especially ‘cause we never figured out what exactly the foul-smelling “jam” the House sold was made of.

Marcus did some more research for me, and later told me that Erlik dwelled in a, quote, “black cyclopean city” called Karkotha, or jus’ plain Koth. No one really knows where Koth was, with most folks thinkin’ it was out in the Middle East. But then I thought again about Gordon and Allison’s words—that the town was sealin’ somethin’ away. After the House of Om thing went down with my mom and cousin, I kept my eyes peeled for more signs of weird things lurkin’ beneath my home. I had suspicions that I knew exactly where the city of Koth really was.

It didn’t take long at all before the veneer of normalcy collapsed again.

It happened so suddenly—my cousin, the same gullible one who got taken in by the Hell House and the House of Om, she found herself engaged to a millionaire, that bein’ the head of Larsen’s Pork Products. Y’know, they say that company was founded by a South Seas sailor nearly a hundred years ago? My grandpa fought in the Pacific during the War (havin' machine-gunned fitty men in Europe), and he saw some strange things out there. Offerings to gods who slept in the ocean, weird shapes in the water—that sorta thing. He knew a guy who claims he saw gilled fish-people swimming under the waves. But that guy went crazy near the end of the War, and got sent home to a mental hospital, so I don’t know if it’s true. Anyway, I doubt there’s a connection between Wolf Larsen, the sailor who founded the pork company, and the things happening in town, but you never know. What matters is old Wolf’s great-grandson tried to marry my cousin. She went along with it—till it turned out he thought he was a pig.

...no, I ain’t kiddin’. As a kid he got obsessed with his family’s company’s advertising, and he got himself to thinkin’ he wanted to be one of the pigs from the ads. So after trappin’ my cousin in his factory, which was also his house, he dressed up like a pig and tried to live out his fantasies with her.

It didn’t go well for him—he fell into his own machinery, and for a very long time you couldn’t buy sausage in our county, because they had to destroy all the contaminated stock. To this day I still don’t eat pork. People ask me all the time if it’s a religious thing, and I just nod.

My cousin got over the trauma of what happened pretty quick, but she never got an explanation for somethin’ she found while exploring Trip’s home. She discovered a bookshelf deep under the factory, where every single book on the shelf was somethin’ called The House on the Borderland. I looked it up, and it turned out it’s this old horror story about a guy whose house starts gettin’ invaded by these evil interdimensional pig-people. That twisted up the whole pig-cosplay thing a little bit.

I was older by the time things went down with Larsen, and I held more sway with my dad and the alley losers than I did when I was just a kid. I figured they were as good a posse as any to investigate the old factory, which now stood vacant followin’ Mr. Larsen’s grisly demise. I had to know what was going on in there, but I needed help to pull it off.

It took a bit of time to convince my dad to commit breakin’ and enterin’, especially once his buddies got interested in the prospect—the Conspiracy Guy in particular was buyin’ deep into what I was suggestin’, so long as it meant he could commit a crime, and that pissed my dad off like nothin’ else. But eventually, for my cousin’s sake, Dad agreed to come along. I found myself thinkin’ in the moment that I wished Marcus had been there to join us.

I’ll spare you the fine details of breakin’ into the factory—besides sayin’ it was easier than I thought. The factory had been all cleaned out, but there was still a smell of butchered pork in the air that was kinda disgustin’. We explored all through the factory and the house, until we found that bookshelf my cousin had discovered. The Army Guy, who was the biggest loser of them all, pushed the shelf out of the way, and we found a secret passage behind it. Turns out this factory was built over a big old cave of some kind.

We descended into the cave, and from there things get a little hazy in my memory. All I know is that we walked through the dark for God knows how long. It was damn cold down there, and it wasn’t long before I was shiverin’ up a storm. I started gettin’ a funny feeling in my gut, too—somethin’ kinda like how you feel when you have a dream about flyin’. I felt like I could fly at any moment, like I was in a dream.

I thought about that book with the pig-people, that Trip owned so many copies of. I wondered if maybe he had found a glimpse into the kinda Borderland that book talked about. Maybe it wasn’t his family’s ads at all that drove him nuts—but a glimpse of those pig-men, out there in the dark, silent void.

But it couldn’t be. I kept tellin’ myself there were no such things as monsters. No such things as buried Devils, or the lost city of Koth.

But I couldn’t tell myself that anymore when we found ourselves amidst the shadowy pillars of the buried city. The city that, if Marcus was to be believed, was ruled by Erlik, the Ochre Devil.

This was what that Hell House lady had been scared of. This is what her church, and William Gordon, and the Sonora Kid had tried to seal away.

We were all awestruck—no one knew what to say. That dreamy feeling got worse and worse, until not an ounce of it felt real. I know that my dad and his friends felt the same way I did in that moment.

The next part cemented the feeling that this was all a dream—we started wandering into the dark city, still certain it would give us a clear answer to everything. I don’t think I’d do that if I was awake—in fact, I know I wouldn’t. Why did we put ourselves at such an awful risk? Lookin’ back on that moment from the present, I feel like we must have gone a little insane.

As we explored the dead black pillars, I remember getting more and more scared, but of what, I don’t know. I recall the sound of water lappin’ at the shore, and the faint sound of moaning, like people were grievin’ or somethin’. The names Alar and Hastur kept soundin' in my head, but I had no idea what those meant...

And I seem to recall feelin’ like the King in Ochre was all around us, livin’, breathin’.

We—we found this Tower, in the middle of the city. It reached up hundreds of feet to the top of the cavern—it touched the roof and went clean on through. The last of my dad’s buds, the Texas Ranger, he said, and I quote:

“Man, I tell ya, it’s that dang ol’ Tower a’ Koth, man, what got that dang ol’ Yellow Sign, y’know, man, with the icy shores a’ Lake Hali an’ all that dang ol’ crap, man. Man, I hear they got them ol’ Gugs runnin’ wild up an’ down this dang ol’ thing out in them damn Dreamlands of Unknown Kadath, yo, snakin’ in an’ out a’ our world through our dreams, man, like...this thing could pop up anywhere, man, jus’ sayin’.”

He was right, the crazy blond bastard. Somehow we understood that Koth could be anywhere in time and space. And so while it was out in the sands of the Middle East, it was also here in Texas—under my town. Where Gordon and Allison had tried to seal it away years ago.

They had mostly succeeded. Only—bits and pieces of the city leaked through the seal, and made weird things happen up on the surface. It bound my dad to the Ochre King that one Halloween, made him his pawn. And it called out to the House of Om and those otherworldly pig-men who messed up Trip’s psyche, bringin’ them into our town.

I—I still see my dad kneelin’ at the base of the Tower. He’d stripped himself naked before I could stop him, and he and his scrawny nothin’ of an ass were down shiverin’ at the Tower’s foot, whisperin’ in that strange tongue again…

How we pulled him back, I don’t remember, but it involved a lot of tuggin’. He didn’t come willin’-like.

We got out of there as fast as our feet could carry us—the dream broke all of a sudden, and we knew what we had to do. Conspiracy Guy was an exterminator, and so he was able to rig up some sort of chemical explosive, ‘cause of course he could. We helped him brew it up, and we placed it at the mouth of that cave. We blew it up without a moment’s hesitation. And when we blew it up, it brought the whole house and factory down into the tunnel—pluggin’ it up for good.

The authorities came out to check on it, of course, but they didn’t find a trace of a bomb. They chalked it up to natural causes. That’s the second house we got away with tearin’ down—maybe someday I’ll tell you that story, it’s a real corker.

I think we did good that day, and I think it’s also good that I don’t remember too much. I think sometimes I do remember, in my dreams, and those’re the nights when I wake up screamin’.

I’m hopin’ to get married soon, and if me and my wife have kids, I don’t think I’ll let ‘em go trick-or-treatin’.

The secrets I learned in old hometown made it plain and obvious that I oughta keep of any spooky stuff.

And that’s all I’ve got to say. If you NOCTURNE boys need anything else, just give me a holler…

THE END

 

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I hope the central joke of this story is obvious. Besides that, this tale contains many references to the works of Robert E. Howard, including his stories "The Dead Remember," "The House of Om," "The Hoofed Thing," "The Fire of Asshurbanipal," and his El Borak and Sonora Kid series. Also referenced are stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Jack London, as well as my unofficial fan novelization of the Half-Life mod Absolute Redemption.

Happy Halloween!! We here at PhantomEye don't believe Halloween ever ends - so we are hoping to put out another spooky tale, "The Actual House Wives of the Exteriority," very soon!