Mister Schwartz's Demise

A Lovecraftian horror homage/parody written for a friend.

The circumstances surrounding the demise of my friend, the late Mister Schwartz, are scarcely unknown to the astute members of certain esoteric societies. My correspondence, then, is not addressed to that occulted and august hierarchy, but to the world at large, presently unaware of unnerving recent events which evidence the immanent reemergence of an ancient antagonist whose very existence promises the abrupt annihilation of our oblivious race.

I have long been stalked by the suspicion that our fates are not of our own provenance. In the course of quotidian affairs we may be struck by an instant of such exquisite, apparently unwarranted, significance as to feel that we have gained a millisecond’s apprehension of our point of intersection with the vast network of synchronous strands spun around every energy and entity that has ever existed. To be granted a glimpse of the forces behind our being is not truly to understand them, nor indeed ourselves. What appears a deus ex machina moment in which Truth reveals Himself to the attendant audience is, in fact, not miraculous, but another Brahmanic incarnation of the machine: vast, alien, and incomprehensible. In regards to what metaphysical purpose men serve by experiencing such miracles, I have no frame of reference upon which to begin discourse. What I do know is that a man who witnesses the web underlying his very essence may often like an absent-minded arachnid become trapped within that structure when it once again recedes into invisibility.

I submit to you that my colleague Schwartz was such a man.

As a man, his character comprised a compelling catalogue of contradictions: soft-mannered, yet sharp-witted; fastidious, yet playful; laconic, yet eloquent; studious, yet skeptical. In the course of our unfortunately abbreviated academic comradeship, I never fully sounded the depths of his deep-coursing intellectual current, for he was frequently content to formulate his theories and ruminate silently, his process invisible behind his round, gold-framed spectacles. The most extravagant extroversion of his inner nature could be experienced only indirectly, when in the evening he would retire to his room and play privately for hours upon his violin, passages of Bach, Scarlatti, Vivaldi, or other old masters emanating from his quarters en mélange as a shimmering, sweet, sometimes vigorous stream with the aesthetics of both mathematical and poetic genius as tributaries.

When not engaged in his studies or shut up in his chamber with his instrument, Schwartz’s wont was to wander the mist-swathed shore of our peninsula with his hands pocketed, doubtless pursing some internal discourse to which the public was not privileged. As unportentous a pursuit as his solitary divagations-- both mental and pedestrian-- may have seemed, they imperceptibly, inexorably led toward his ultimate demise.

For what remains of my report, I must partially depend upon my lamented friend’s journal, his chronicle of obsession that leads to frenzied, feverish lunacy and terrible finality. That I became privy to these notes was heretofore unknown to the authorities, but I do not fear the consequences of my revealing my source here, as I feel they can inflict upon me little worse than they already have, in my current irreducibly debased and feculent interment.

We must begin our reconstruction of events from Schwartz’s details on that first of his last days. It began as inauspiciously as we are accustomed to winter days beginning on this coast. The gray, overcast sky promised precipitation and a chill seeped into the air not like a gust, but rather a gasp. Undaunted, Schwartz donned his warm woolen coat and tartan scarf and set off down the hill that leads from the old Spanish Presidio to the beachfront where boats jostle each other in their mooring and sea lions drone in the basso profundo clucking peculiar to their species.

Slowly he made his way down the old paths, overstepping rainwater runoffs and crunching through iceplant till at last he gained the band of sand licked by frigid February waves. Gulls shrieked overhead in mocking accompaniment as he hummed lines from the Sonata in D Minor of Francesco Maria Veracini, his left hand fingering imagined notes inside his pocket as he finished and recommenced the piece again and again. The Baroque complexity of this locale’s flora and fauna in constant flux seemed magnificently communicative of the overwhelming intricacy and indifference of the world. We may have crawled out of the tidepool, he thought, but her denizens do not envy our upright prodigality.

His melancholy meanderings were interrupted quite suddenly by a momentous discovery near the creaking old pier. At first, it seemed merely an odd rock or perhaps bizarre sea creature’s chitinous corpse. He stood quite still a moment observing the partially-sand buried shape, and I can imagine him thoughtfully blinking behind those round spectacles of his. At last, he decided to pick up the foreign object. At glance it seemed organic to the surroundings, a fragment of some time-immemorial terrain feature, yet at once perplexingly out of place. The book-sized thing was roughly rectangular, though with rounded edges and an irregular surface. It was of many irrational attributes: smooth, but not polished�"in appearance composed of a rock-like material not unlike granite, yet light as lava rock. It seemed neither tooled, nor machined, yet was of such finish as to make accidental origin impossible. All of this object’s implausibility in composition paled next to its most astonishing and inexplicable aspect.

Across the surface appeared rows of an alien hieroglyph of character so bizarre and eccentric as to be completely indescribable. Troublingly, however, rather than presenting a nonsensical cipher, the figures seemed to speak directly to him, inside his head, as though awakening his ears to a tongue he had forgotten in a dream. He stared at the tablet, dumbfounded, feeling as must have Napoleon’s scholars in their first encounter with the Rosetta stone. But this was no language of Indo-European origin. This was no language known to our ancestors except perhaps in the days predating our oldest forgotten societies.

What a contribution this could make to our understanding of ourselves! What untold portals long-interred in the unconscious past could be opened! What new fields of inquiry, study, industry could spring from this singular object!

Quite suddenly, he knew no one must ever see this tablet.

In total contradiction to every value he ever professed or possessed, Schwartz decided irrevocably that he would be the last man to behold the immeasurably precious artifact he unearthed. He stuffed the plate into his coat and forcefully strode back to his casern, not wasting moments or words with a single soul, but sequestering himself away in his lodgment to surrender himself to the overwhelming, unwholesome lust that had overshadowed his reason and overpowered his will.

When Schwartz did not report to classes on Monday morning, many of us did not even notice his absence. His presence at every hour of lecture was so absolute that we took it for granted. Distracted by studies and the badinage of various friends, it was not until that evening that anything appeared amiss. I was in my quarters making ineffectual sorties against a small mountain of study material, molested by a malaise which grew from nothingness an almost imperceptible whisper. What was wrong with me? What was the source of this unrest?

Then I comprehended. I was disquieted by the very quiet itself. It was as when one enters a room and realizes that something is missing, yet cannot envision what has disappeared. Schwartz’s music was missing. I had grown so accustomed to his music that it had come to underscore my academic life in the late evenings. As his immediate neighbor, my studies were inseparable from the sound his strings produced so copiously and fluently. Perhaps he was ill, I thought, and no one had even thought to look in on him.

Immediately abandoning my desk, I threw open my door and turned up the hall into his, rapping softly at first, so as not to startle. After a few moments I knocked again, louder. Perhaps he was asleep. I knock a third time, much louder. Neither response, nor indication of life issued from his chamber. I tried the doorknob unsuccessfully. Perhaps he had been called away on some emergency, I rationalized. Why then should I be so ill at ease? No explanatory note was affixed to his door. I noticed a faint band of light appearing at the bottom of his door and knocked again, louder, nearly pounding, and still received no answered, save a faint echo along the darkened hall.

I returned to my studies, but found only greater and more confounding frustration, so finally retreated to my bed, exhausted. Though I fell immediately into a heavy sleep, my dreams were immediately invaded by such terrifying visions as I shudder to recount.

In the blackness of night, the horizon was half-illumined by an unholy crimson light radiating from a profane star. The acrid atmosphere was choking with a volcanic, ashy air whose tendrils forced themselves into drowning lungs through unwilling nostrils. The beach was parched and charred, and above the thrashing waves that churned and regurgitated prehistoric filth, an immense, evil cloud dominated the sky, growing, surging forward till it engulfed the bay and tumbled over the blasted cypresses, cloaking me in its horrid, greasy putrescence. Far off, in the profound depths of the ancient ocean unknown to my species since our origin, an entity of unimaginable appetite slowly arose from the slumber of HIS boundless cavern. All the blood in my body seemed to surge angrily against the vessels in my face, the landscape distorted as my eyeballs warped, and my ears pounding with a repetitive, grinding chant that seemed to come from no individual source, but the whole hellish world, again, again, the deafening chant that vibrated my teeth and saturated my brain, until the pressure crushed my joints and I collapsed into a pathetic gurgling fetal lump. Somehow, to my wretched chagrin, I could not escape glimpsing the gigantic tentacular masses which plunged through the choking cloud toward the doomed land as the Ancient Evil surfaced, hungered by millennia of fitful dormancy.                       

I awoke, gasping and thrashing against the sweat-soaked sheets that cocooned me. For I know not how long I lay shivering, murmuring, swearing I could still hear the nightmare chant that infected my sleep. My head pounded and my ears rang, and still the chant droned on�"until I realized that its voice had changed. It was no longer a full-fledged chant, but rather a groan now, a scraping din like the sound of ships’ hulls rubbing one other. My soul sank as I realized the source of this new, localized sound. The familiar, eternal blasphemy was issuing from Schwartz’s room!

Gone were the sacred songs of Bach and the vital brilliance of Mozart, gone were scintillating snatches of Saint-Saens and Sarasate…. overtaken by the strains of that unwholesome incantation, over and over again, each new variation from growling bass to shrill scratching bringing new agonies of discordant horror like slashes from a sacrificial blade… wwrraaah, wwrraaah, ruu-ruu, ree-raaaa-raaaa, wwrraaah, wwrraaah, ruu-ruu, ree-raaaa-raaaa, wwrraaah, wwrraaah, ruu-ruu, ree-raaaa-raaaaaaaaaaaa…

I lay, paralyzed with body-wracking spasms as Schwartz’s violin hurled its strident assault against the walls again and again, until the incessant theme became clearer and clearer: WOO-WAH, WOO-WAH, RU-RURU, RA-RARA… WOO-WAH, WOO-WAH, RU-RURU, RA-RARA… WOO-WAH, WOO-WAH, RU-RURU, RA-RARA…                

Somehow, I knew the libretto to this unspeakable aria. It could be found in the forbidden volumes of the cursed mad Arab Abdul al-Hazred’s Necronomicon: OOOAH, OOOAH, CTHULU FHTAGHEN… OOOAH, OOOAH, CTHULU FHTAGHEN…

I rejected these words, tried with every raw atom of will to resist their loathsome pronunciation… throwing myself against the floor, I wrestled myself to my feet and staggered to the door, flung it open, and hurled myself against Schwartz’s door like a maddened dog, again, again. The screech of his strings reached a crazed crescendo, then abruptly ceased. Freed from the din of evil exhortations, I regained enough control of my mind and body to crash through his door. Sharp pain that shot through me as this last effort separated my shoulder. It revived my spirits like smelling salts, and I was nearly myself.

A single glance revealed Schwartz’s absence. His window was shattered outward, a gaping maw against the early morning darkness. His violin lay brutally smashed on the floor beside his desk. Of the many paper and books strewn about the room, only those on the desk drew my attention. His journal was torn at the spine, and despite the chaos that ruled his ruined room, several sheets of journal paper were neatly arranged on the desk blotter. They evidenced a sort of evolution. Drawn on the first sheets were diagrams of a bizarre foreign system of writing, gradually morphing from page to page as the diagrams became more and more eccentric and hastily scrawled, finally in the last becoming ink blobs joined by ink slashes against a kind of grid. While the first images gave an impression of carefully copied, but uncomprehending reproductions, the intermediate pages seemed part mathematical, part linguistic interpretation, until at last what emerged was a heretofore unseen and insane system of musical notation.

I frantically scanned the preceding pages, still attached to the journal, which provided the only documentation of Schwartz’s tragic last hours and surrender to madness. Tears filled my eyes as I read of his discovery, his determination to be the only human to learn his tablet’s secret language, his cryptographic experimentation, at last his conviction that the symbols could be converted to musical notation. The diagrams laid out on the desk sketched in the rest of the sad history.

The tablet was gone, and I knew Schwartz had taken it, and where.

I piled all the notes together and set fire to them, unconcerned that the flames should consume the whole building, save that they destroy every trace of my friend’s miserable, misguided labors. An instant later, I was plunging headlong down the hill, somewhere taking a bad tumble, knocking the wind from my lungs and bloodying forearms and face. No such things mattered anymore, and I pursued my breathless sprint downhill, till at last I reached the waterfront. I scrambled over a fence and clambered down boulders, slipping on moss and sliding to the beach sand. Regaining my feet, I ran toward the underside of the pier. At first, my eyes could scarcely make out anything in the slimy chill underneath the boards. Then I saw him.

He lay facedown, slowly bobbing against a post with the undulations of the morning tide. I grasped him and half-swum, half-walked, pulling him behind me till we both were recovered on the beach. The tablet was gone, returned the waters from which it had appeared.

Poor Schwartz had himself become the instrument of music greater than himself, an inexorable and terrifying refrain whose theme could only resolve itself in madness and destruction, for man is ill-equipped to learn of the primordial ignominy from whence he issues and the inevitable, thoughtless annihilation that is his future.

I’m not sure how long I sat next to him, shivering in the early morning air. A strange sort of clarity seemed to fill me, almost�"peace. I scarcely remember being discovered, questioned… all these seem unimportant details, now. I do not care if the doctors believe me, or even you. As I sit here in my little room I look out the little window, and I know what lurks soundlessly in the bay. Everything else is of supreme inconsequence.