Through The Gate of Dreams, The Catalyst, chapter 1:1

​CHAPTER ONE:
THE CATALYST
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
LABOR DAY, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 1979
LAMONT CORAZON[1]
I’m sick in bed with a raging fever.  I feel disjointed, disoriented and on the verge of delirium.  I’m in that illness born sleep.  And I dream.  I hear voices in my dream.  I can’t make out what they’re saying.  Then it comes upon me.  Meaning catches me with a horrid blast, colder than ice.  They’re chanting, over and over, they’re chanting.  “In her house at Tenochtitlan, dead Tezcatlipoca lies dreaming.  And behold, that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons, even death may die.[2]”

The chanting dissolves into a mass of thick swirling gray smoke.  I’m getting a tingling sensation at the back of my neck, it’s like something is crawling across my neck or as if those hairs were antennae, which can sense changes in the aether caused by the presence of the weird and the unknown.  And right now, I’m definitely in the presence of something very old and very alien.

I’m being watched.  There’s a sense of malicious glee and expectancy.  I don’t like this dream.  I want out.  But I can’t leave.  I’m moving through the smoke.  I see the city from above looking down.  I have black wings.  I think I’m a raven.  There’s Golden Gate Park.  I land on a branch. 

Despite the uninviting gray, the coolness, and the dampness of the fog-rain clouds, the lure of the park is still strongly heard.  I’m not alone on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, there are others.  Below me are two teen-agers walking together, a white guy and a Filipino girl.  They’re the focal point.  They’re in danger from whatever it is that’s watching me, watching them.  The air around us is a solid mass of gray fog below and grayer rain clouds above, there’s no separation between the two.  What is above, is so below.  Empty unoccupied space fills the scene.  Everything is flat and gray.  It’s like a blank movie screen.  Waiting.
 


[1] Note: I will use this convention to inform you who is the current first person narrator.

[2] The first line is a variation of a phrase quoted by, and attributed to the author Howard Philip Lovecraft.  The original version is: “In his house at R’Lyeh dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.”  Throughout the writing of Lovecraft, he makes many references to this phrase and to the last couplet concerning the dying of death.  Lovecraft states that he is quoting these phrase out of the writings of the Arabic poet and mystic Abd al-Azrad’s [whose name when translated into English means “the worshiper/slave of the great devourer”]. 
These lines are to be found in al-Azrad’s book, the Kitab Al-Azif ,which was written in Arabic in the city of Damascus in the year 730 C. E..  The title of the book when translated literally is ‘The book of the buzzing’.  The buzzing refers to the nocturnal insect-like chirping of the Jinn.  Jinn are spirits of the desert.  (The Jinn are referred to as genies by Sir Richard Burton in his book written in 1885, Arabian Nights.)  Therefore this buzzing denotes the whispering of supernatural secrets into Alhazred’s ear by the supernatural Jinn.  In light of this concept the title Kitab Al-Azif takes on new meaning, something like ‘Revelations of the Jinn’, or, with just a bit of license, ‘Secrets of the Demons’.  [Source: A Critical Commentary on the Necronomicon an essay by Robert M. Price.]  The Kitab Al-Azif was translated into Greek by Theodorus Philetas in the year 950 C. E. and given a new title: The Necronomicon.  This title when translated into English could be rendered various ways.  Some of these variations are: Things pertaining to the customs/laws of the dead, Image of the Law of the Dead, Book of the Names of the Dead, Book of Dead Names, Book Concerning the Dead, or Knower of the Laws of Death.  The first full English translation of the text was done by Prof. Donald Tyson, in 2004, Llewellyn Publications. The original version of those two phrase can be found on pg. 90 & 91 of Tyson’s translation of the text.

​KEYWORDS: H P LOVECRAFT, LOVECRAFT, DREAMLAND, DARK FANTASY, FANTASY NOVEL