So, you want to know the truth, eh? The truth behind my tattoo? No, not the one etched into my forearm. I know exactly the one you’re talking about, boychik.
The spiel I usually give at Miskatonic University and the Arkham JCC isn’t the full story. It’s the — how do you say it? Sanitized version, thank you! Almost no one has ever heard the complete tale, especially not those disinterested youngsters over at the Innsmouth public high school. They look at you with glassy eyes and open mouths. Like a school of goldfish, they are. No idea of what’s going on. No sechel. Sechel. Nu? It means common sense. Sometimes I forget Yiddish is a dead language. Dead, yes, but still a newborn when placed beside some of the forbidden, eldritch tongues hinted at in the yellowing pages of the Necronomicon and De Vermis Mysteriis.
What you’re asking of me, boychik…the truth may be dangerous to repeat aloud. Oy, already I can feel the pain in my leg, and that’s just from the thought alone! But you seem like a persistent young man. Am I right? I thought so.
What did you say your name was again? Speak up! I’m a bit hard of hearing. Oh, yes, — I knew your grandfather quite well. We worked together at the kosher butcher on Sarnath Street not long after I came to this country. Greene’s, it was called. Best pastrami sandwich in all of Arkham. He and I even shared the same physician at one point, Doctor Muñoz. Son of a bitch always kept his air conditioning on, no matter how cold the weather got. It didn’t make the prostate exams any easier. Sorry, that is — what do you kids call it? — too much of the information.
What else? Oh, yes, how could I forget? Your grandfather helped me organize the big Erich Zann concert back in ’82 — all proceeds to getting Jews out of the Soviet Union. We held it at Ackerman’s Amphitheater up in Maine. Beautiful spot, right on the bank Androscoggin. Do you remember the concert? No, you wouldn’t have been born yet. Forgive me, I tend to ramble in my old age. It’ll happen to you one day.
Where was I? Right, the story of the tattoo on my leg. I assume your grandfather told you what he knew before he passed? I thought so. Yitzhak never could keep a secret for very long. He was a right pain in the tuchus sometimes. Ah, I miss him dearly. Now to the story. Come — sit and listen, boychik. We’re going to be here awhile…
***
What you must know, first off, is that I had never been what you might call an observant man. Back in Poland, before the war came, I didn’t go in for all that religion meshugas. At one time, I’d have told you it was a load of drek. And now…? I’m getting to it, don’t worry boychik. You kids are always in such a hurry these days.
Anyway, the concept of God — or “Hashem,” as our people like to call Him — always seemed a bit silly to me. The idea of some all-powerful entity worrying about what food we nosh on or the people we like to shtup in private never made a whole lot of sense. Drove my parents crazy. They wanted me to become a rabbi. Ha! Me, a rabbi. Can you imagine that? As it turns out, I had a better sense of what was going on than even I knew.
The true forces that run this universe are more apathetic than the human mind can fathom. They look upon humanity, if they look at all, with the same indifference a man looks upon an anthill. What do I mean by “forces”? It’s as good a word as any, I suppose, if a tad incomplete — for the human tongue was not designed to give voice to their actual names. Use whatever term you like. Forces, beings, entities, insane, dreaming things slumbering at the edge of reality.
You probably think of me some “insane thing” right now, and I wouldn’t blame you. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if I’ve lost my marbles. Do you mind if we walk a little, boychik? My leg is throbbing terribly…
***
I was in one of those camps in Poland. No, it’s not the one you’re thinking of. This one was small and not very well-known. Its name? Oy, I don’t like to say it out loud if I can help it. Alright, if I can tell it to those little putzes over at Innsmouth High School, I can tell it to you.
Nauhausen…
Yes, I’m fine just don’t make me say it again. Where’d the name come from? From Walter Nauhaus, founder of the Thule Society. “What is the Thule Society”?! What do they even teach you kids in school? The Thule Society was a band of German fanatics obsessed with the occult. Himmler — yemach shemo — took to it like a fly takes to shit. Before the war, he and his merry troupe of SS bozos scoured the globe for ancient traces of the so-called “Aryan” race and artifacts of indescribable power — the Holy Grail and Spear of Longinus being at the top of their wishlist.
There was a notable incident — in 1936, I believe — when an American archaeologist was discovered snooping around some Nazi dig site in Egypt. I don’t know what the bastards were looking for, but the man was captured and detained by the Gestapo who executed him as a spy. The US government denied any involvement. What was that poor fellow’s name again? Dr. Harold something or other. Again, my memory isn’t what it used to be. Why am I telling you this? To impress upon you just how fervent the Nazis were in keeping their Thule-related endeavors a secret from the world.
So, back to my time at Nauhau—the concentration camp. I arrived there via cattle car in the summer of 1944. Had it been under different circumstances, the surrounding environs might have taken my breath away. It was located in the middle of the Polish countryside, a remote getaway shielded by a lush sea of pines and firs standing tall in every direction. The interior of the camp, however, stood in blasphemous contrast to the staggering beauty of the natural world. Manmade barracks, manmade gas chambers, manmade crematoria. Every structure displayed the same harsh right angles, the same Euclidian geometry with which humans are so comfortable.
Death, misery, starvation, and disease were common bedfellows beneath the uncaring gaze of anyone — or anything — who happened to be watching from above. Being a heretic from a young age, though, I didn’t bother with the prayers and psalms some of the other inmates liked to mumble in vain. Upon first entering the gates of the camp, I saw a guard wrench a bundle of blankets from a woman, throw it to the ground, and empty his rifle into the wailing child swaddled within the fabric. The Nazis only seemed to underscore my personal belief in a universe ruled by chaos alone. Such a harsh outlook didn’t win me many friends.
Every month, a crimson moon would rise in the sky like a bloodied eyeball. Never any stars on those nights, except for the sickly yellow ones stitched to our uniforms. A terrible place. Have I said that already? Well, I’ll keep on saying it. Words don’t do it justice, not really. How does one properly describe a waking nightmare?
Those of us who were young and fit and capable of hard labor were made to dig every night in a nearby field just outside the camp. That is where I usually leave the story for my general audiences. I say we mined granite from a local quarry until the Russians showed up to liberate us in the spring of 1945.
Oh, how I wish that were the truth, boychik. Now, I will ask you one more time, because there is no turning back after this. Are you sure you want to hear the rest? Okay. If you want you should have night terrors, I will continue. Here, come sit. My leg is feeling a little better now.
***
None of us had any idea what we were digging for. Anyone who asked the question was immediately shot. And with that motivation, we shoveled dirt and chipped stone, our hands building up blisters that popped and oozed, by the blinding spotlights the Germans pointed down into the hole. I thought they might be looking for coal, something to keep their war machines turning once Hitler’s plan of conquering over Russia’s oil fields had backfired, but we never found so much as a single briquette.
The man who oversaw our little project, Reichsführer Johann Shmidtt, was always present, consulting a crumpled piece of old parchment and barking instructions to widen the excavation site. Even by SS standards, Schmidt was an extremely cruel individual. If a man wasn’t digging fast enough, Schmidt would jump down into the hole, beat the worker to death with his own shovel, and, still dripping with the other man’s blood, show us the speed at which he expected us to lift mounds of dirt.
Other times, he would pull out a Luger, cover his eyes like a child playing a party game, and fire blindly into the pit. We were all expendable, simply a means to an end. I was at my lowest then. Surely, there was no other reason to this futile exercise than to see us either drop dead from malnourishment, exhaustion, or one of Schmidt’s stray bullets.
It took five months, and almost three dozen individuals sacrificed to Schmidt’s sadistic whims, before anything of consequence was found. I remember it being a humid morning in early September when we hit something solid in the impenetrable blackness of a manmade fissure — now several hundred feet deep. We slowly hauled the item out into the dawn with a rudimentary system of pulleys. Schmidt was overjoyed, jumping up and down like an animated schoolboy. He even managed to give us what probably passed for a compliment in his mind: “Well done, rats!”
I tell you what we pulled from that hole was like nothing I have ever seen — before or since. Hewn from the purest block of white marble you can imagine, it stood six feet tall and depicted an unnamable effigy of equally unknown origin. To compare the sculpture’s resemblance to that of a mollusk would do some small justice to the thing, but it would be a wholly false impression to imagine a garden-variety snail inching its way across a leaf.
The detestable thing carved from stone had more in common with the spiral-shelled ammonites of prehistory, but only where the head was concerned. I cannot bear to describe the rest of it, least of all because there are no words sufficient enough for that warped frame, nor the crab-like appendages on which this anatomical impossibility seemed to scuttle. The original sculptor had even felt compelled to portray a nauseating trail of pus-like slime trailing in its wake.
All manner of indescribable pictograms were etched over the thing’s body like noxious tattoos. The statue’s base, meanwhile, was covered in its own set of odd ciphers — not too dissimilar to the hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt. Although I could not read them outright, I somehow understood — perhaps on some deep, unconscious level — that these runes provided the instructions to the end of all things.
The marble itself did not seem to be tarnished whatsoever by the earthly grave from which it had been recovered. Moreover, everyone in the general vicinity made note of a fetid odor coming off it like a palpable heat. Not the decay of hastily buried bodies or the char of burning flesh we had become accustomed to, but something worse. The rancid, sulphuric fetor of bubbling primordial ooze is the best description I can give you. I remember wondering kind of long-dead belief system would worship such a heinous idol. Despite years of shunning my Jewish upbringing, I began to understand why our people had been forbidden from bowing down at the altar of false gods.
In a rare show of generosity, Schmidt ordered we all be fed double rations and sent back to our barracks for a well-deserved rest. Even the crematoria smokestacks spewing the ashes of our fallen brethren into the atmosphere were told to cease operation. The gears of the industrialized murder machine had stopped for the first time since the camp’s establishment. All of us slept like the dead, boychik, and that’s no exaggeration.
I have not slept soundly since.
***
We arose hours later to the sound of ominous chanting, a low and grumbling sound that raised the hairs on the back of my neck and set my teeth chattering. Getting up from my bunk, I could see shafts of a curious green light seeping in through the loose boards of the barracks like a mist.
A few of us chanced a peek outside, our faces swathed in the bloody glow of a freshly-risen crimson moon. The queer green light glowed brightest in a thicket of trees at the far boundary of the camp. Our prison seemed deserted. Even the guard towers were devoid of a human presence, their spotlights blind and unseeing. While the fear of being shot on sight was heavy on our minds, our curiosity could not be contained and — very cautiously — we crept toward that light and chanting.
Why didn’t we escape then? A very good question, to which I cannot provide a satisfactory answer. I still wonder how different life would have been if I just walked out of the front gates and never looked back. All I can say for certain is that something, a magnetic force you could call it, pushed us inexorably, almost hypnotically, along.
The weather had been sweltering when we first went to sleep, but now the air was like ice and, for all the good it would do, we pulled our ill-fitting uniforms closer to our flesh. As we crept closer, we could hear the words of the chant, words I will never forget:
“Das ist nicht tot , das ewige Lüge und mit seltsamen Äonen kann sogar Tod sterben kann.” What does it mean? Of course, I forgot you don’t speak German. It means: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”
Those words were not written, boychik. They were sent! By whom? I don’t even know myself, but it was long before our ancestors crawled out of the ocean and took their first breath on dry land.
We walked through the trees to find a clearing drenched in that otherworldly glow. My eyes adjusted after a moment to behold the strangest thing I have ever seen. Dressed in sweeping robes of some heinous scaly material, the camp guards had formed a tight-knit circle around the idol, now pulsing green like some radioactive element. Even more disturbing was that the designs etched into the marble abomination were moving, squirming, coming to vivid and horrendous life! I wanted to scream, but only a feeble squeal escaped my throat.
I could see the tall hooded figure of Schmidt standing on a small mound of earth, leading the abhorrent rite from an ancient volume bound in peeling black leather. He was loudest of all, shouting in some indecipherable tongue, now conjuring up sounds so abominable to the human ear, my mind stubbornly — or mercifully — refused to make sense the incantations. And then, quite suddenly, the brilliantly green luminescence hovering around the effigy shot skyward and into the blood-red moon.
The lunar satellite became a swirling mass of profound darkness and the sky itself seemed to crack open like an eggshell, revealing insane planets and constellations. If my sanity had not left me in that instance, the next occurrence certainly finished the job. From that blacker-than-black unknown slithered the creature depicted in the statue.
The statue’s grotesqueness was nothing compared to the real thing, for which I have no name. It was massive, hundreds upon thousands of feet tall. So impossibly big, it defies imagination. The designs inked into its slimy flesh were pulsating and expelling pus that reeked of that primeval fetor we had detected earlier. Its multi-segmented crab legs clicked horribly, eager to touch down and usher in some unspeakable cataclysm.
Again, I tried to scream and found that certain ability had left me — if forever I did not know. The guards were cheering now. They cried out: “Freuen sich für die große Schneckenfresserdes Schicksals ist angekommen.” Sorry, boychik. It means, “Rejoice! For The Great Snail! Eater of Destiny! Has arrived!”
Now, you must understand this was near the end of the war. Whether this was a last-ditch effort to use ancient forces to turn the tide of the conflict, or something more arcane, I can only guess. What did I do then? I did all I could. I prayed. Like I said, I was never an observant man, but I began to say the Shema, that short and most iconic prayer our people save for the most dire moments. Over and over again I said it, sure I would perish at any second at the hands of the unspeakable monstrosity.
I did not believe in miracles until the moment I was pleading for one, boychik.
The thing had nearly extricated itself from the swirling blackness that had replaced the moon.“Jubeln! Jubeln!” shouted the Nazis. “Rejoice! Rejoice!” It was mad hysteria and the abominable thing seemed to revel with corruptive glee at such a warm welcome. The inked designs on its frame bulged and the swirling tentacles that were its great maw snaked toward the chanting men.
What happened next finally drew a proper scream from me. This detestation began to devour the robed guards. Do not ask me to describe the carnage in any greater detail. Schmidt was one of the first to go and while I was still shrieking my head off like a maniac, the last sane part of me did reap a small amount of satisfaction from the knowledge that the Reichsführer’s final moments were of an indescribably agony.
Finally, one of us — Dalezman, I think his name was — had the good sense to wrestle one of the uneaten guards to the ground, wrench a grenade from their belt, and lob it at the marble effigy of the tattooed horror. The idol exploded into shrapnel while its living parallel gave a madness-inducing shriek, contorting in on itself and fading from reality as the lunar doorway slammed shut. As the thing went, the appalling designs all over its body ruptured like diseased pustules. One of these ungodly spores latched itself onto the back of my left calf muscle, inviting a physical torment so great, it is a wonder I didn’t drop dead from the shock right there.
The next morning I awoke to find the entire area in a state of utter ruin. The trees ringing the immediate area were now withering husks and the camp itself was no more than a pile of rubble and carbonized wood. The earth had been scorched for a hundred yards in every direction.
I attempted to stand and was greeted by a second wave of excruciating pain. I crumpled and, upon inspected the damage, saw the entire length of striped material running down the back of my left leg had been burned away, leaving behind a nauseating mound of cooked flesh branded with one of the statue’s poisonous designs.
Yes, the very tattoo you see here today. Seventy-five years later, and it’s still as dark as it ever was. Even the skin around it hasn’t aged.
***
Did anyone else survive? Yes, about ten of us. Just ten. And of those ten, nine committed suicide in the years following the war. I don’t blame them. So there you have it, the full story of events. I know it sounds insane — like something out of a novel that fellow Denbrough would write. Believe me or don’t, boychik. No one can back up what I’ve said. I could just be a batty old man with dementia and sometimes I pray that’s all it is.
Do I believe in God? It depends on how you define that word. I do believe there are things out there; beings of great power and wrath. But these…these beings, these demented gods need our help to get down here, see? They’re trapped and need our help to take back what’s theirs.
So far, we’ve been lucky. Something’s keeping them locked up up nice and tight with no chance of parole. So no, I don’t believe in God the way our people think of Him as some benevolent, bearded grandfather sitting on high. Perhaps God is merely some positive force, older than time itself, standing between us and the seething madness trying to slither back to this reality. But what do I know? I’m just a broken old man who refuses to sleep in the dark like a frightened child. Perhaps I should have listened to my parents and become a rabbi after all. There’s comfort in belief.
Would you mind walking me home now, boychik? My leg is acting up again. Besides, it’s getting dark and the moon is looking a little red. That’s a good lad. You know your Shema? Maybe it couldn’t hurt to say it together — just this once.