THE CALL OF B'HARNI by Brian Bull "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh B'harni R'lyons wagn'nagl fhtagn". ("In his house in R'lyons dead B'harni waits dreaming".) Dedicated to the works of H.P. Lovecraft

III. Nightmare at R’lyons

That which is not dead can love eternal you
And with strange aeons you can love it too.
--from the Necrobarneycon

Upon my return to Miskatonic University, I set about my scholarly tasks and soon unburdened a vast accumulation of old papers and clippings into the garbage depository located near the back of the building. As I assembled yet another stack of filmy and yellowed documents, my eyes were inexplicably drawn to a more recent tabloid, The Arkham Gazette dated April 2nd, 1927. In a conspicious column tucked away inside the main section, was a curious summary of an event with hideous connections.

A bulky steamship, the Stupendous, was found drifting outside the main harbours of New Zealand. The only crew on board was a delirious Norwegian named Bjorn Frei, and the body of a hapless sailor of Moroccan descent, who appeared to have died under some stressful occurrence of mind or heart. Found tucked away in the cabin was a mysterious plush purple object that matched the description of my dreaded B’harni totem. So unmistakable was the account’s description of its sickly saurian features and unnatural colour that I closed my office and immediately set about making arrangments for a trip to Norway, in order to see the sole survivor of what must have been a calamitous incident.

A few weeks later I arrived into the small whaling village of Abbafjord, and located the house of the Frei family. My anticipation gave way to horrid surprise when I was told by the small woman at the door that poor Frei had died just a few days previously, having fallen out of an inn onto the rough streetways below. The poor man had been through immense stress, and suicide had not been ruled out in this unfortunate tragedy. The woman told me she was his widow, Anja, and our conversation was greatly limited by her poor English. What I was able to decipher from her was that Frei had hastily compiled a journal shortly upon his return from New Zealand, and had hidden it among his nautical equipment in the cellar. After insuring her of my credentials and good will, she allowed me into the house and to remove the journal for safekeeping.

Upon the freighter’s journey back to America, I spent several days deciphering the rantings and scribbling of poor destitute Frei, and learned of the fate which had befallen his comrades. Originally en route to Singapore, the crew and their fair ship, the Snuffleupagus, encountered a mysterious ship, the Stupendous, filled with evil-looking men dressed in long purple robes and cradling saurian totems. A debate ensued, as the crew of the Stupendous insisted that all hands on the Snuffleupagus abandon their craft and become their "Special Friends". When Frei and his shipmates refused, the long-robed, moronically-smiling men pelted them with their saurian totems and attacked with long purple sabers.

After a violent and brief struggle, the entire evil crew of he Stupendous lay dead, but a stray plush purple totem had crippled the Snuffleupagus by getting wedged between the gears of its port engine. Sadly abandoning their ship and boarding the Stupendous, Frei and the rest of the crew discussed fervently among themselves and decided to steer the craft onwards in the direction it was originally headed before the loathsome encounter.

It was three days later an immense pillar, formed of a sickly purple and green stone of unknown origin, was spotted sticking out from the ocean’s crests. At S. Latitude 47’8, W. Longitude 124’ 44, the men came upon a coastline of mingled mud, purplish ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which could only be the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyons, where lay great B’harni and his minions, hidden in syrupy dark vaults. All of this Frei did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!

Leaving the Stupendous at partial steam, the crew left it anchored alongside a sprawling wall of cragged rocks and weeds. The dreadful city of death was of sickeningly sweet odour and composed of erratic hieroglyphs and images. In his writing, Frei talked of the sheer madness of the geometry--sprawling planes, jutting and retracted angles, all of which shifted and heaved within peripheral vision. It was not long before the first mate, Rodriguez, ascended a speckled monolith and cried to the rest of what he had found. The rest approached and saw with astonishment what the young Portuguese had seen.

An immense carved door with the now familar saurian-eggplant bas-relief, emblazoned with a great star which I suspected was the Purple Seal, ward of the Elder Gods. Briden, one of the sailors, pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then another fellow, Donovan, felt over it delicately edge to edge, pressing each point separately as he went. All the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to recess and slide downward from the top. Donovan rejoined his fellows at the step of the door, who gazed on in captivated awe.

The aperture revealed was deep purple with a darkness almost material. The sacharrine odour from the newly opened crevice was unbearable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, sloshing noise from deep inside. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered into view and squeezed its gelatinous purple and green enormity through the doorway and into the tainted air of that poison city of madness.

Poor Frei’s writing almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he suspects two perished of pure nausea at that hellish moment. The Thing cannot be described--there is no language to fully capture the utter lunacy, the eldritch contradiction of all matter, force, and cosmic wonder. A mountain wobbled or jiggled. God! The Thing of the totems, the purple and green fuzzy spawn of the stars, had awakened to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what age-old cults had failed to perform by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After countless eons great B’harni was loose again, and giggling with delight.

Three men were swept up by the knobby paws before anyone turned. They were Donovan, Guerrara, and Engstrom. Parker slipped as the rest were plodding furiously over insane vistas of slime-crusted rock to the boat, and Frei fears he was swallowed by an angle of masonry which shouldn’t have been there; an angle that was acute, but behaved as if were obtuse. So only Briden and Frei reached the Stupendous, and set the craft into motion as the mountainous monstrousity wiggled down the weedy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.

As Frei turned the Stupendous out further and further away from the legendary island-tomb of R’lyons, the titan Thing from the stars giggled and wobbled, then slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals until death found him one night in the cabin while Frei was wandering deliriously.

But Frei had not given up yet. Knowing that the great B’harni could overtake the Stupendous until steam was fully restored, he resolved on a desperate chance. Setting the engine for full speed, he steered the helm and maneuvered the craft full circle, head on against the immense saurian blob smiling and singing moronically. The awful head, rising incredulously above the churning green waters, bore its hideous white jawline, seamless in design, and almost bore wholly upon the bowsprit of the sturdy craft, but Frei drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a squishy nastiness of an overcooked eggplant, and a stench of a thousand rotting sugarcanes. For an instant, the ship was befouled by an acrid and pulpy purple cloud, and then---God in heaven!--the scattered plasticity of that pudgy behemoth from Hell was nebulously recombining into its original hateful form, whilst its distance widened every second as the ship gained impetus from its mounting steam.

That is all. Poor Frei spent the remainder of the journey frazzledly staring at the plush felt totem left inside the main cabin, tending to Briden up until his demise. Finally, rescue came to him outside the shores of New Zealand, though he told no one of the horrid ordeal with the Thing from R’lyons. Even now It may be reaching out to more unsuspecting minds, to dream and pray for his release.

I am leaving this manuscript along with Frei’s account in my private collection, kept in obscurity with the dreaded Necrobarneycon and the purple plush idol which is an image of It, born of the stars, great B’harni. I can provide only half-hearted confidence in my own sanity and safety, and I collect that somewhere out in the vast depths of the sea, great B’harni and his kin rests in waiting, for the time to rise and slay again. A time will come--but I must not think of it! When I am finally released from this world, and freed from the knowledge which tortures me, I hope the world can confront and retaliate against the horror of He Who Chortles Insipidly, great B’harni from the death-isle of madness, R’lyons.