Festival

My mouth pressed against her throat and she gasped. Her skin was smooth and clean. She held me as close as she could and pressed herself into me, and through the thin fabric of her sundress (how could she not be cold, wearing only that all day, I wondered. Even when we went outside she had worn only a thin jacket over it?) I felt the angle of her hips, the smoothness of her thighs, the prominent rise and fall of each perfect breast. I kissed the roundness of her naked shoulder.

You're wondering if I feel ashamed, now, thinking back to that time, about the ease with which I'd given in to unabashed lust for my blood relation. Perhaps. But knowing everything I do now, understanding everything about our coupling in the light of the revelations to come, I feel perhaps that this seemingly unnatural act is the most natural thing I've ever done. Maybe the only natural thing, because it was the only time I was not divorced from my true nature. I don't expect you to understand, though you might understand better soon.

I was gentle with her at first. I was afraid of being too rough. She seemed...not fragile, but somehow sacrosanct. I thought she might really be an angel of some kind, and that to use her too roughly would be blasphemous. But her thin limbs proved surprisingly strong, and she twined her arms around me and pulled me to her. I felt her aching with need. She directed my hands to the buttons of her dress, letting me undo them one by one. The only light we had appeared dim through the lace curtains of the windows but her white dress and pale, smooth skin shone in the dark, like a ghost. I wanted to touch her all over, to take her right then and there, but she would not allow me near her again until I was completely unclothed, smiling at me with her little smile and teasing me not to go too fast as I removed one garment after another. She took childlike glee in flinging them across the room. Finally finished, she gave me a nod and a smile and then she invited me in for more kisses and caresses.

She leaned her head back and pushed her body against me while my lips roamed lower, following the curve of her. Ah reader, if you only knew what it was like, this woman who was so much more than a woman, how each and every thing about her was enough, in itself, to satisfy me for a lifetime just on its own, and how the gestalt of so many lifetimes of perfect bliss coalesced into this, my Celia. I remember pausing over her soft, perfect breasts and their rosy petite nipples, and how she ran her fingers through my hair and whispered, "Go on." And then she gasped and moaned as I drew one into my mouth, licking it. The almost helpless noise she made set a tightness in me, like I was a spring that had been wound too many times and needed release. I expected to wake up any moment, but I did not, though sometimes I wonder if perhaps everything since has been the dream, one long, hazy, somnambulistic escapade from the waking world.

I found that her legs were spread and wrapped around me, and that she was saying, "Love me. Please, love me." I wasn't sure if I could—not because of the lack of incentive or desire, but because I had no way of knowing if I could survive such a union, my senses and affections already overloaded by what was had gone on to this point. "Please," she whispered again, and despite my doubts I could not say no. I pushed into her, and she clung tighter and tighter to me, and that's when I found that what she'd said was true, that it really was our bodies that told us when we belonged, and that this was the moment when they did, and that my entire life until then had just been a prelude.

How long were we there? Less than a night, that's all I can say. Less than a night exalting in the warm, soft, smooth, loving experience of Celia's body. Less than a night of her tiny, barely perceptible exclamations: "Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!" I loved her then, truly and completely, like a tiny hot flame in the center of my chest, and some few embers of that fire remain even now, and will remain as long as the memory of my one most perfect love stays with me, which in all hopes will be forever. I consummated our forbidden union by releasing a torrent inside of her, and she gratefully received it, telling me all the while it was what she was born for. And I, naive even then, did not suspect the ramifications of the declaration.

She dozed, only half-asleep, in my arms. I wondered if the others had noticed we were gone? What if they came looking for us? What if they discovered us here? I began to feel ill, and though I wanted to stay there all night I instead began creeping about as quietly as I could, reuniting with my discarded garments and wondering how we would cover this all up. And it was then that I saw something moving outside, a flutter, against the window. It looked too big to be a bird. I went to investigate. Celia, waking, trailed behind me, a sheet wrapped around herself for warmth. Though I was now dressed against the night air in the drafty old house, my flesh crawled and my hair stood on end. A shadow passed over the window again, and I pulled the curtain aside and saw—

There are no words for what I saw, and if there were you would curse me for teaching them to you. It was winged, of that I'm certain, and the fluttering of those awful membranes held it aloft under the window awning. But what to say of that figure to which the wings were attached? How can I tell you of its unspeakable awfulness, of its loathsome, verminous, scabrous anatomy? How to communicate that bilious corruption of flesh and form, those turgid masses of biology at cross-purposes with nature, the cast-off filth of evolution twisted to such unwholesome ends? It was a thing; that is all I can say of it.

I screamed and fell down, and had I been alone in the room I think I would have divested myself of my sanity at once. Only the comforting presence of Celia provided a rock for my mind to grapple onto rather than being dragged away in the torrent of mortification. But that shelter would not stay with me for long, as I saw her face animate into an unspeakable burlesque of affection as she beheld that horror at the window and cried out in ghastly ecstasy:

"They're here! Friends from the Old Country!"

She flew to the window on the west side, throwing open the curtains and bidding me come see. The light I saw was not from the fire, not from any earthly conflagration, but from an eerie, feverish manifestation of creeping lights, some aurora borne of places and things unknown, that lit the sky over the orchard. Silhouetted against the phantom flames I saw the fluttering, wheeling, blasphemous shapes of unwholesome things, dozens of them, and below heard the sounds of inhuman merrymaking from my own kin.

"What are they?" I said.

"The descendants of our brothers from the other world. The rites of the Festival are meant to bridge the gap between us and them for a time, but it usually doesn't work." Her eyes shone. "I'm sure it's because you're here that they've come."

I could think of nothing to say, except for questions that I dare not want truthful answers to. Celia, though, provided them anyway, whispering in breathless tones: "Now you see why you felt like you never belonged, Charles. You belong here, with us and with them. We're all creatures of two worlds, and that means we don't really belong to either. We only belong with each other, like you belong with me."

She went to kiss me again, but for the second time that night I was running. I think I went mad then, for though I meant to run to the orchard and find my grandparents (in the meritless hope that they would disconfirm what I was just told) I instead ran the opposite way, a frantic, single-minded dash toward the cliffs and some phantom notion of freedom and escape. I stood at the precipice and looked down into the black waters and wondered, hysterically: If I were to jump, would I find that I could fly, like they did?

I'm not sure how the others found me, although I suspect they were there all along and had only sent Celia after me as their envoy while they waited. The robed figures of my aunts and uncles and cousins appeared, telling me not to jump, begging me not to break up the family again. My grandmother wiped tears from her eyes and said, "We wanted to tell you, Charles. We're sorry. Don't be afraid."

I felt the wind at my back and the loose dirt giving way under my heels. Celia, half-dressed, came through the crowd, running to me until I put up a hand to stop her. She froze in place and shook her head, hair blowing in the wind. "Please, Charles," she said. "We love you. I love you. Don't go." I almost relented. Even in the face of this ungodliness I might still have joined them, might still have seen a glimpse of the Old Country and learned the true history of my lineage.

But at the very moment one of the noxious, fetid creatures descended from the blackened sky and landed just behind Celia. It called to me in a gelatinous voice and held its arms out in such a graphic mockery of affection that every fiber of my being rejected it. Almost effortlessly I leaned away, and I fell, and I let the ocean take me in, becoming one with it and seeking a home on its lonely floor.

***

I came to three days later in a hospital in Arkham. They said that a fishing boat had found me washed up on a sandbar a half mile out. A miracle, they called it. Once they got me talking they asked if I had any family, anyone that I wanted to contact? I told them no.

I knew that a fall like the one I took was impossible to survive. And the hours drifting at sea, unconscious, and the effects of exposure, lying on that barren beach until some wayward vessel retrieved me? Impossible too. Nothing could have lived through that. Nothing human.

Although the hospital's tests detected no abnormalities, over time I've become aware of certain discrepancies in my physiology. It makes me wonder about the Old Country, that strange world beyond this world where my family line originated. If the other inhabitants of that place are such freakish abnormalities, what chance that a separate race, human in every likeness, would emerge from the same manic environment? Wasn't it more likely that my ancestors would be of the nature of that place, rather than this one?

And what of Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young? When that daemonic entity passed into this world to birth its progeny countless eons ago, might not those creatures have grown acclimated to this sphere? Mightn't they, over millennia, have taken on the character of creatures native to the earth, to the point of now resembling them in almost every way? Might they not form a reclusive clan of New England eccentrics, forced by their small gene pool into generations of incestuous couplings to propagate themselves, bound together by their ancient rites and mysteries, relics from the time and place beyond the stars from whence they came?

What, then, am I? A man? A monster? Or something in between? I wonder these things at nights, when I think of what my parents tried to protect me from, and contemplate the singularities of my flesh, and know the greatest fear that can be known: the fear of oneself.

And they haven't forgotten about me, my family. Every year without fail, no matter where I've moved or what precautions I take, the invitation arrives, asking me to come to the Festival again. There are even times, in the dark twilight hours of the Yuletide, when I want to go. I still want to feel loved, and to belong. And I want to see Celia, my betrothed since birth, to look on her face and—

But no. That's something I can never do. Perhaps if things had been different, if my parents had not turned their backs on the others and tried to protect me from the truth when I was so young. But now I'm too much a part of the human world, though of course I'm apart from it too. Celia was right about that much: We belong nowhere if not with each other.

Celia writes every year too, and the message is always the same. Those nights when I know the Festival happens, I sometimes fancy that I can hear her words carried to me by the eastern wind: "We love you. We miss you. Come home.

"Come home."