Eater of Dimensions, Part I

Jacob got up at the knock and set down his hard cover copy of Three Books of the Occult down on its pages to keep his place. He crossed beneath the arch separating the living room from the entrance hall and opened the door. Standing on his cheery Welcome mat in the hall way of his duplex was a U.S. Postal Service deliveryman holding a cubic package wrapped in dark brown paper under his arm. In his free hand he held out an electronic device with a LED screen and a stylus attached to the side, connected by a thin black wire.

"Package for, uhh..." - the plump and clearly disinterested deliveryman stole a quick glance at the LED screen, then held it out again - "Jacob Hothstead," he finished.

Jacob narrowed his eyes at the deliveryman, then at the package, then back. "I'm not expecting any packages."

"Well, uhh, this was mailed first class, rush order. You sure you didn't order nothin'?"

Jacob ignored this. "Who's the sender?"

"Uhhh..." The worker started to bring the device back to his face.

"Can I see that, man?" The worker looked at Jacob, a bit startled.

"Sure, guy, take your time." He shoved the device out towards Jacob, ready to be on to his next delivery.

Jacob took it and skimmed the information on the screen. Sender: Adrian Hothstead II. Jacob started at that. Was that his great-grandfather, he wondered? The guy had up and vanished fourty-something years ago. There was no better word for it. He looked on. Return Address: Punta Ararras, South America.

"You're shittin' me...", Jacob murmured under his breath. The postal worked cleared his throat impatiently.

"You, uhh, gunna sign for it or what?"

Jacob turned his attention to the package under the deliveryman's arm. Each side of this cube was about a foot and a half in width and length. There was a white envelope sealed with red wax held to the top of the package by a thin thread.

Jacob's curiousity won out. "Yeah." He signed on the dotted line and held the device out. The worker took it and held out the package, seeming to struggle with its weight. Jacob took it in both arms and was surprised by how heavy it was - it seemed to weigh twenty pounds. He looked at the postal worker.

"Thanks, have a good one." Perfectly robotic. In Jacob's mind the worker was already gone. The worker muttered something that sounded like "maybe later," and Jacob closed the door.

Jacob was perfectly entranced by the mystery he held. He quickly crossed through the living room and into his office, which wasn't so much an office as a catch-all with a desk in it. He placed the package on his desk blotter and opened the top right drawer, reaching inside and producing a letter opener. He began to pace before the enigma before him. How did his great grandfather send this to him? He had to be years dead. And from Punta... some place in South America, anyway. "Okay, gramps, just what the fuck is this?" he inquired to the room.

He could bear it no longer. He approached the package, letter opener held out before him. He saw the envelope - saw that it was quite thick. He decided to take care of that matter first.

He carefully placed the opener below the thin twine and pulled up until it snapped apart. He picked up the envelope and examined the seal. Etched in crimson hues, a shocking visage gazed piercingly up at him. Alarmed, Jacob held the envelope away from himself as though the effigy might leap from the wax and latch onto him.

After a moment of mixed confusion and revulsion, he brought the seal close to his face for inspection. The image was indeed frightful - a bald head with batwing ears, perfectly round eyes with needle point pupils, and, the strangest and most menacing feature, a nest of thick tentacles where a mouth should have been.

Jacob stared in inexplicable fear at this simple yet powerful image. "What... is it? God, what is it?" Though atheist, he frequently found the lord's name in times of stress.

Jacob suddenly regretted signing for this package. He didn't care who it was from, or where. If whatever was in this envelope and, more pressingly, this package, was as grotesque as what's pressed into the wax on this envelope, he didn't want anything to do with it. He placed the envelope back onto the brown package and turned away, starting out of the room. The moment his back faced the brown cube on his desk, his fear doubled. A primitive reflex kicked in, dumping adrenaline and triggering his flight response. But he wasn't an animal. Instead of running full blast away from his predator, Jacob exercised a more dignified stride and quickly departed his office.

He stopped himself about halfway into the living room, put his hands on his hips, lowered his head and started panting.

"God, what the fuck was that?" he asked no one. He turned confusedly back toward the room he'd just fleed from. Why had he just tried to escape his own office like a rabbit from a trap? He had never been a coward, never one to panic or run away.

Because something was coming after you, his internal observer replied.

What, that thing in the wax? Fuck that, are you kidding me?

You felt it, buddyoh, and don't even try to deny it.

Jacob couldn't deny it. Be breathed deeply and exhaled slowly, holding his thumb and middle finger tips to the inner corners of his closed eyes.

Alright, I felt something, but there was no reason for it. Just some weird reaction.

To what?

Jacob couldn't, or perhaps didn't want to answer. To what, indeed, that's the question.

There's nothing wrong, okay?

The observer remained silent.

Jacob sighed and flopped onto the couch next to his current book. It caught his eye and he picked it up. Within fifteen minutes the box was forgotten as he studied the occult art of demon summoning.

2

"Hey, mom?"

"Oh, Jake. How are you, hun? You should call more often, I thought maybe you dropped off the face of the earth."

"Yeah, sorry mom. I've just been busy with school. Hey, listen, you're gunna think I'm bullshitting, but I just got a package from your grampa."

Silence on the other end. Jacob waited a moment. The package and envelope sat before him, unmoved from the previous day. He was seated in a cheap swivel chair, a cordless phone pressed to his ear. He nervously swiveled the chair left and right, feeling uneasy.

He hadn't slept well the previous night, had in fact had a vague but very frightening nightmare. In it, he floated through a grimy emerald city of monolothic structures that seemed to bleed putrid black ooze from invisible cracks. The sky was a bruised purple and all around him he heard distant but feverish chanting. The words he heard were meaningless to him, in a language he'd never heard and wished he wasn't hearing now.

Jacob felt dazed but deeply frightened as he took in his surroundings. His gut was a frozen mass. His heart beat in rapid and uneven pulses. Sweat beaded down his face, leaving hot streaks before dripping off his chin and dropping into a bottomless black chasm below him. As he floated along, he noticed with some vertigo that the edges of the buildings weren't quite right. The effect on Jacob was one of dislocation, unreality that he'd never felt before, in dreams or otherwise. Even in the worst of nightmares, there's a threshold your mind doesn't cross, things seem real and tangible. This was something else entirely. This one had crossed that threshold and was off and running.

The structures warped into jagged, oblong, stretched and compressed shapes. The effect was so invasive he felt drunk, disoriented and somehow sick. Then something blotted out the greasy, polluted light in the distance. Jacob looked past subtley changing cyclopean structures and saw something that birthed the purest form of horror in him - silhouetted against the light of three suns of differing sizes was a likeness that made Jacob's breath catch in his throat. He was frozen, but the creature he now beheld was in motion.

Vast, demonic wings slowly flapped above that black chasm, connected to a gargantuan body that towered over the city surrounding it, double the height of the tallest skyscraper. Even at this great distance Jacob could easily grasp its outline. Those leviathan wings slowly ungulated and Jacob could feel a gust of sickeningly pungent air with each stroke. The air that struck his wet face stung and felt somehow heavy and dark, stinking of rot and decay. With each pulse he felt an increasing hopelessness. Beholding this creature was like staring down his own inevitable demise, made him feel like throwing in the towel and resigning himself to death, if only to free himself from this landscape of unutterable infeasibility.

The chanting voices grew louder and more urgent, and suddenly he was moving again. Towards it. He flew at a quickening pace toward the horror, and as he neared he could hear it. The sounds of gigantic wet things colliding and rubbing against each other. Sick, slurping sounds that finally made Jacob cry out in terror. He drew ever closer to the maddening manifestation and then -

Jacob broke the train of thought, shaken by his recollection. "Mom?"

"Yeah, Jake, I heard you. I'm just trying to compute it. It's from Adrian Hothstead the Second? Are you sure? You'd better make sure."

"Mom, I'm sure, alright?"

"Well have you opened it?"

"No, I was thinking maybe you should open it. I never even knew the guy, he had to have meant it for either you or dad."

"Jacob, I never knew my grandfather either. I've only heard about him from your grandparents. They say he disappeared before I was even born, ran off to some country or another."

"South America."

"Sounds about right. How'd you know?"

"The return address was..." Jacob struggled for a moment. "Oh, Punta Ararras."

"Punta Arawhat?"

"Yeah, I've never heard of it either."

"You know what, I'm gunna bother your grandmother about this. None of it makes sense."

"So will you come open the package with me?" In truth, Jacob only wanted her company because he didn't want to be alone with the package, and certainly didn't want to open it without some backup.

"I'll be over after lunch."

"Alright, mom. Thanks. See ya."

Jacob clicked the red button on the phone and placed it on the desk. He glowered at the package. And, curiously, Jacob felt it was glowering back. The idea chilled his skin and he quickly departed the office to wait for his mother.

3

Jacob heard his front door swing open and his mother call to him. "Jake! Where are you?"

"I'm right here, quit hollering," Jacob spoke from the living room. Anna Hothstead crossed under the arch and saw her son sitting forward in a recliner, holding his head in his hands.

"Jacob, what the hell's wrong?"

Jacob looked up and Anna saw the bags under his eyes and the light sheath of sweat covering his face.

"Jacob!" she breathed. She strode over to him and placed her palm on his forehead. Jacob pushed it away.

"I'm not sick, okay? I just didn't sleep well last night."

Anna eyed him warily, then decided it was time to get to business.

"Fine. Where's that package at?"

Jacob slowly stood and walked over to the office. Anna noted how strange his gait was - it was the way she thought someone would walk in a dream. Despite her increasing worry, she followed her son into the office.

Jacob flipped on the overhead light and walked into the room. Anna saw him keep a safe perimeter around the box on the desk. Finally her concern won out. "Jacob, what's wrong?" Jacob simply stared at the box with frightening intensity. Anna touched his arm and felt the jolt run through him. He turned to her, and she saw the fear in his eyes. It was so unmasked that she started a bit.

"Jacob... what is it?"

Jacob gulped and looked away. "I had a bad nightmare last night, that's all. C'mon, let's do this."

"We don't have to. I mean, if you don't want to."

Jacob considered this. Yeah, he didn't have to open this. He could, in fact, take the box and envelope to an incinerator and never think of them again.

But no, fuck that. His nightmare last night was a real duesy, that's what was shaking him up. Had to be. Besides, what if what was in the package was a valuable family heirloom? Sure, the old fart had an associate send it to a family member posthumusly. Why, he didn't know, but who cares? Now he had it. He could at least see what it was.

Jacob approached the desk. He saw the wax monster staring up at him from the envelope. The creature from his nightmare crossed his mind momentarily, but he wouldn't allow his fear to dissuade him again. He grasped the envelope in one hand, picked up the letter opener in the other and cracked the seal with the blade. He placed the opener on the desk blotter and grasped the parchment inside the envelope. No turning back now, he thought.

His mother joined him, looking down at the envelope. Jacob carefully removed the contents, revealing the text written on the front fold of the collection of papers. In a scrawled hand was written "On Pandora's Box". Jacob and Anna recognized the named signed bow it: Adrian Hothstead II.

"Pandora's Box? Is this a joke?" Anna inquired.

To Jacob, nothing about this felt like a joke. He felt he was being smothered and it was harder and harder to tell himself that it was just the after effects of a bad nightmare. Just the same, he was determined to be done with this.

Ignoring his mother, he set the papers down and turned his attention to the package. The item sitting on his desk seemed to call to him, urging him on to discover its secrets. He examined the package and found the overlap in the wrapping. He places his fingers into it and for the first time physically felt the item underneath. It was wooden, and deeply grained. It seemed to eminate a warmth that didn't permeate his flesh so much as crawl over it.

Jacob steeled himself and tore away the brown paper. Fully exposed, a nearly black box sat before them, constructed of some dark wood. Ornately engraved with golden symbols, characters and designs of some long-ago civilization, Jacob felt the box's hunger immediately. It was as though Jacob had removed a blindfold from a hungry boar to reveal a festival of discarded food stuffs. Jacob felt this dangerous gluttony and backed away from the box. His mother conversely stepped forward, closely scrutinizing it.

"What is this?" she asked. "I've never seen these strange symbols... the decoration is exquisite. And what's this..." She focused her attention on a carving set into the front of the box, below the lid. Etched deep into the wood in panicked strokes were two words that had no bearing in reality. When Jacob beheld these words, his nightmare recurred again. The chanting. Hadn't those voices been chanting something like this?

"I don't recognize this language," his mother continued. "Or maybe it's a name...?" Both her inquisitive nature and background in archaeology were fully indulged by this ominous artifact. Jacob only looked on, watching the box tensely as if expecting it to open and swallow him up. His mother didn't seem to notice this.

The top of the box caught Anna's attention. "I wonder if it's locked?" She placed her fingers on the side of the lid, meaning to open it.

Jacob clawed forward and grasped his mother's shoulder.

"Don't!" he shouted. Startled, his mother looked around at him, her annoyance set in her face.

"What do you mean, don't? Let's see what's in here."

Jacob pulled his mother away from the box by the shoulder. Anna was bewildered but went willingly.

Jacob pointed at the box, still holding onto his mother's shoulder. "We can't open this. Do you understand? We can never open this."

Her son's intensity frightened Anna. "But why, Jake? There's no such thing as Pandora's Box, there's probably some artifact in there that my great grandpa wanted us - you - to have. Let's see!"

"No, we can't. If we open that box, it will get out and," - Jacob gulped again, eyeing the box like a mouse cornered by a cat.

Anna blinked, suddenly reminded of Jacob's strange and distraught behavior. Her concern returned, and the box was temporarily forgotten. "Jake, what's wrong? If you're not feeling well, tell me."

Easier said than done, Jacob thought. How could he tell her that he felt the box contained the end of the world, perhaps the end of all reality? Jacob bitterly cursed his great grandfather for laying this curse upon him. What was he supposed to do with it?

"It's just lack of sleep, mom, really. I'm not feeling myself."

"You're not acting yourself. Come on, let's go into the living room. Do you have any Extra Noodle?"

"Yeah, I always keep a few boxes around." He had, in fact, kept at least three boxes of Lipton Extra Noodle Soup in his cupboard since moving out of his mother's house and rented the bottom floor of this duplex. It was his favorite since childhood, and his mother had always made it for him when he was sick or otherwise feeling low. And it always picked him up.

"Above the stove," Jacob said.

Jacob's mother went into the kitchen and Jacob fell into his couch. Soon his mother brought out a bowl of soup on a T.V. tray and placed it in front of him. They talked while he ate, talked of his mother's work, Jacob's courses, Uncle Phil's new house, and the subject of the box was forgotten for the moment.

After a while, his mother excused herself, saying she had to prepare for a seminar at the university. Jacob hugged her and they said their goodbyes. When she was gone, Jacob returned to the couch, layed back and closed his eyes. He was deep into a dreamless sleep in minutes.

The words scrawled by a dying hand into the ancient face of Pandora's Box were CTHULHU KRYON.

--

author's note: i love H.P. Lovecraft's classic horror tale of Cthulhu and was inspired by Stephen King's homage (Crouch End) to try my own hand. i also tried to meld the lore of Cthulhu with that of Pandora's Box. I don't know if i was successful but i was driven to write this so here it is. hope you enjoyed it.