Matt dived back into the pages of weird script – whorls, strokes and curved lettering so elegant and beautiful it ranked with that of the finest Japanese calligraphers. It resisted all his efforts to be understood.

He knew its secrets were there, but just at the edge of his consciousness, dropping hints but then dancing away, like a shadow glimpsed from the corner of the eye, gone when you turned to look. It was unlike any language ever constructed by a human hand or mind. Of that he was sure. For some reason, Matt had the impression it was strings of blasphemic spells, and incantations, secrets whispered by some race or species that might have touched humankind long before. But it remained impenetrable to him.

In the end, maddeningly, Matt had to skip over the strange passages, and instead work at translating the chapters that had been omitted from Albadi’s copy of the Al Azif. Even then the ancient prose was revealed to him as impressions, and it spoke to him, directly into his mind, and more. When he closed his eyes to rest them from the rush of fantastic information, he saw everything, every page, every word, he had read. It was if the thing were imprinting itself on his mind, once his eyes had captured their images.

Several times it became too much, and he had to rub his eyes hard in a vain attempt to banish images that tore at his sanity. Periodically he felt light-headed, as if he were on a rollercoaster rising and falling, and becoming dizzy from vertigo. Baruk had come over once and laid a hand on his shoulder, checking on him. He had brought water, and Matt had thanked him, having sometimes forgotten he was even there. Though the rooms were small, the proximity of his personal bodyguard hadn’t bothered him at all. Baruk, true to his word, had remained silent, and near invisible. But then, Matt thought, the passages had been absorbing; unless he was grasped he would have missed a fire alarm.

The hours sped by as he sat hunched over. His back and neck screamed but he was transfixed. He had never seen anything like this material before, and the current events of the earth-drops, disappearances, and monstrous emergences had made the fantastic things described all the more horrifying.

Matt learned of the things that came before – the Elder beings, the Great Old Ones, a race of creatures or entities that once ruled the Earth and who now slumbered deep below the crust of the planet, or deep in the dark, fathomless seas. There were Xastur, Azathoth, Ghatanothoa, Shub-Niggurath, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, and the vilest of all, the great Cthulhu, hidden behind colossal red gates of a lost city.

He read how they were worshiped by humans and non-humans alike, mentioning the crawlers in the filth and the great eaters of flesh, which Matt took to mean the roaches and sharks. He then read of the Shoggoths, the hapless monstrosities that were like the fleas on the hide of the Great Old One: they were its servants, its workers and slaves. And finally, he learned more of the giant form of Cthulhu itself, the slumberer beneath them all – beneath us all.