The Grimscribe's Puppets by Joseph S. Pulver Sr. & Michael Cisco & Darrell Schweitzer & Allyson Bird & Livia Llewellyn & Simon Strantzas & Richard Gavin & Gemma Files & Joseph S. Pulver

Author:Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. & Michael Cisco & Darrell Schweitzer & Allyson Bird & Livia Llewellyn & Simon Strantzas & Richard Gavin & Gemma Files & Joseph S. Pulver [Langan, John & Cisco, Michael & Schweitzer, Darrell & Bird, Allyson & Llewellyn, Livia & Strantzas, Simon & Gavin, Richard & Files, Gemma & Pulver, Joseph S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Anthologies & Literary Collections, General, Genre Fiction, Horror, Anthologies, Short Stories
Publisher: Miskatonic River Press
Published: 2014-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

After the Final

By Richard Gavin

Are you out there, Professor Nobody?

I’m hopeful that these words will somehow reach you, wherever you might be, whatever you might be.

In my starker moments I find myself questioning whether you were ever really here at all, whether those sermons that spilled from your dusty throat were not simply the vestiges of one of my wish-lush dreams.

But if you did truly grace a classroom with your singular presence, if the trances you evoked were real, then I cannot help but wonder if you might return to your more dedicated pupils, the ones you left behind on this shadow-encrusted planet.

Do your thoughts ever stray to me, Professor? Rarely, I would wager; rarely, if at all.

I have roamed many roads, exhausted so many different methods, all in the hope of finding you. Every one of my efforts has come to nothing. But how could it be otherwise? After all, how does one even begin questing after a man known only as Nobody, a man whose vocation is that of a secret shepherd to what he calls “the true macabrists”?

Macabrist. It was your phrase, yet it chimed so deeply with me that I cannot help but regard it as a grand truth, every bit as immutable as love or fear or pain.

I shall never forget that first after-hours lecture when you defined a macabrist as “one whose dreams are as a great charnel ground, dimmed by personal eclipses and slaked by a private Styx.” I remember how you stated that the macabrist is free of faith, strictly speaking, but that if they were to invent a religion it would be based not on the supernatural, but rather on the “grubby subnatural; underworlds.” We trawl up our philosophies from our unconscious, and they emerge dripping with abjection.

I remain determined to gain full admittance to the great subnature, Professor, if only to prove to you that I am worthy of seeing the darkness, that I am truly of the darkness.

Do you see how assimilated your teachings have become with me? Your “little lectures on supernatural horror,” as you somewhat dismissively called them, made me feel as though I had been granted admittance to the buried sphere from which I’d been wrongly banished, condemned to being born into this world.

I’d always thought I was the only one who longed for some grue-dimmed otherworld. But in you I had, at long last, found one who understood. You voiced things which had always felt like shameful intuitions to me, ones that I had to keep pent at the back of my mind, perennially praying that they would not leak out to condemn me among the Normals. But you uttered your bent observations plainly, with a boldness that could only have stemmed from experiential knowledge and a confidence I have never possessed.

You taught us that the Horror toward existence is not only real but is in fact more real than we are, that it is the boundless gory foam upon which all things, known and unknown, merely bob like so much flotsam.