Each of the four walls was
festooned with what resembled the crushed and scattered corpses of a thousand arthropods sporting broken, jagged or dismembered limbs and shattered
chitinous shells that had seemingly come under the force of a hammer. Many bore the likeness of tentacles each
winding around the other to form dark and eternally snaking coils that gripped
a thin trunk-like stem.
Kelligan was correct; much of the world had never seen its like, but the
few whose eyes had most recently studied the indecipherable scrawl had been
left with irreparable injuries to the mind and soul that had never quite mended. These permanent clefts had inevitably widened
over the weeks and had left those newly affected few with chronic and repellent
images of these asymmetrical and symmetrical shapes, which all at once
resembled something and nothing. Every
day those same affected inhabitants of a small and secluded town had recalled
those few minutes where curiosity had clashed with confusion to form lasting
and revisiting intrigue in one, recurring and recalled fascination in the other
and a sense of total and unnerving bewilderment in the last. John, Daniel and Benson had indeed each seen
those same symbols in that unfathomable room in that similarly unfathomable
house at the end of that derelict road lined with previously uninhabited and
derelict houses, and each would continue to do so.
As the world watched and waited alongside those at Halligan's restaurant,
so then did Kelligan observe rigidly the symbols on the walls as though they themselves
were on the brink of disclosing momentous and monstrous secrets. His eyes rattled in their sockets as they
shifted rapidly from one wall to the next while he recalled the very moment he'd
first seen the symbols. In those
recollections were ominous possibilities rising to the surface of an unfeasible
past, clawing their way through worm infested ancient earth like grisly
revenants bearing horrors wrapped in rotting skin. Kelligan had seen these symbols before
inscribed on parchment old enough to be Father Time's forebear. Previously he'd discarded what his advisors
and experts had labelled as probable and he'd instructed his soul to deem it
impossible, absurd and nonsensical, but now here it was nonetheless encased and
trapped with olden echoes that screamed their illogical truths into ears that
still burned with disbelief. For the
first time in a long time Kelligan wasn't intrigued, he wasn't curious and he
wasn't inquisitive... he was terrified.
