Post by Armand Tanzarian on Aug 23, 2009 0:45:58 GMT -5
Ok, so I was bored and lazy. I wrote this within the space of an hour. I'm not a writer in any sense, so be gentle.
Before you read this farfetched story I am about to tell you, there are things perhaps you should know about our history and legacy. I am Malaysian, and like so much of the world we were invaded in 1941 by the Imperial Japanese army. Their true prize was Singapore, but in order to get there they rode their bicycles from what is today Northern Malaysia and Southern Thailand into the island nation. All of Southeast Asia, save for the Kingdom of Siam which was allied with the Empire, fell, and unspeakable horrors were said to be committed by the Japanese Imperial army, some of which may or may not be true.
As a child I had listened to my grandfathers (from both sides of the family) tell these stories, and as a child they scared me so. But as I aged and matured, my mind became doubtful to the horror stories that they told me. While I did not doubt some of the stories of them being forced to hide in jungles and watching their peers gunned down in the most vicious way possible, some simply defied sensibility. Even as an admitted horror movie fan, and being familiar with the events of the Holocaust occurring at the same time, how could anyone treat another human being as such?
Or perhaps it was the mind’s ability to shut itself from the horrific side of humanity. Science fiction writers and horror enthusiasts like to attribute such horror to some external force, supernatural or otherwise, or some odd mental illness, still making the perpetrators “different” in some sense. But these murderous inclinations are as human as they can ever be. And sometimes, that horror may survive even as the body withers.
I had spent the last three years in the USA, studying in the famous Miskatonic University in Massachusetts and basically absorbing the influences of the locals there. I had, from a naïve city boy in Kuala Lumpur, become a liberal, godless adventurer, pooh-poohing religion and beliefs as nonsense, thinking everything has a solid, scientific explanation. I had also become an avid naturalist and hiker, visiting sites like the Appalachians and the Grand Canyon, spending weeks on the road and days sometimes without modern amenities, out in the woods. I believed, that as an atheist, I would enjoy Nature’s beauty as much as I could.
It was this decision that made me decide to travel, but myself, around Malaysia as I did in the USA. I had just graduated college, and did not intend to go to work immediately. For that, I borrowed my mother’s old car and drove north. I took the old roads on purpose, intending to stay clear of the freeway, and stopping wherever I felt like. I had carried myself from Kuala Lumpur, running north along the West Coast of Malaysia into Perak, and then driving almost parallel along the Malaysian-Thailand border into Kelantan, on the Northeastern side of Malaysia. Here was a state that was still very rural, with the exception the single large city of Kota Bharu. Most of the state was, for all intents are purposes, still jungle and farmland. It was also the site of one of the aforementioned Japanese landing sites.
My journey crossing into the East Coast the way I did meant running through such untamed and empty areas, with scarcely anyone along the way. Civilization was almost entirely confined to small single-street villages along the way. This little village I stopped in, Ulu Balak, a few hours outside of Kota Bharu, was one such place.
I had intended to stop here for the night; often such tiny places did not even have a hotel or lodging house and I was often left sleeping in my car; not that I minded. And this tiny town, it was definitely smaller than most. There was a sign that announced that I was driving into a designated village, and that was it. A hut here and there, many decades old and in various degree of decay. They were of the classic Malay variety; stilted and constructed with wood. Hardly any had a trace of concrete or fresh paint. With the sun setting the area seemed to become darker, more menacing, shadows dancing and casting odd shadows.
I stopped in the single place that remotely looked like a restaurant; a little stall with chairs, tables under a makeshift wooden roof. I went up to find a young woman by the stand, with, in hindsight, some very odd looking features I’ve never seen before. She was not quite attractive, her demure mouth and nose on anyone else would make a pretty girl. But her eyes were incredibly protruded, almost unnaturally. Her headscarf, a common feature among the Malay Muslims of the region, almost bulged a bit to occupy her large eyes; everything else was obscured underneath. But her face did not resemble a Malay person's, or any other common Malaysia race that I knew of. It was, for all I could discern, undoubtedly foreign though.
She greeted me unsmilingly and without words, along with a musty, fish smell. Now that I thought of it, the smell almost seemed to have originated from her, but considering this was a restaurant (or equivalent) and that we were next to a large river very close to the sea, the smell was not out of place. With no menu, I inquired about what food she had; no answer. I simply looked around the stall, at the ingredients on hand, and asked for some noodles based on what she had. She prepared and served the food wordlessly; I only knew how much to pay her when she held up four fingers at me. I paid up, exact change in my hand when she grabbed my hand and pulled me close. In my ear, she whispered to me.
“Baik lu keluar.”
Best you get out of here. She spoke in a raspy, breathy, hollow voice and made my heart jump to my throat. Then she pulled back and walked away from me, tidied up her cart, and left. Then I caught a little mischievous smile and a glint from her eye. My sensible mind took those clues to mean what she pulled a practical joke on me. It must’ve been; I was a city boy and dressed the part. A little fun on the obvious foreigner.
I returned to my car at the last sign of light, driving a little way forward to get away from the creepy girl and her little stall. I had utterly convinced myself that it was a practical joke at that point, though my heart was still going. A few mouthfuls of vodka I kept in car alleviated my nervousness, and I fell asleep quickly.
I awakened several hours later; I was not aware of the time until much later. My subconscious had probably heard what my conscious mind did not discern until it was much too late, a low humming sound that slowly materialized into discernable sounds. It was a language, but I could not discern for the life of me what it was. It was strange, guttural, and numerous. Slowly, individual syllables formed as the creatures speaking got closer, but one repeated fragment of a sentence finally caught me, and sent a massive chill down my spine.
As I mentioned I had spent my tenure in America in the great Miskatonic University in Massachusetts, and we had some unusual fellows there. Many dwelled in the cults and supernatural, and of course I the Sensible Secularist never had the time to attend their little rituals. Except once, when I watched for a distance, as some friends and others danced around fire and wooden idols, chanting in a strange language, repeating that same odd gibberish sentence that, I realize far too late, the creatures around me were chanting.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."
I had attributed such rituals to silly superstition back then, though for some reason that odd sentence remained in the back of my mind, brought back to the forefront by what was about to occur. And as I restarted the engine and turned on my lights, there was no reasoning my mind could do to explain away the horrors surrounding me.
On this moonless, starless night, my car became the only source of illumination within eyeshot. And standing in front of my car, and beside, and behind, were some of the most loathsome creatures I had ever seen. They were absolutely not human in any sense, but were standing like, and as tall as, humans, in addition to some unmistakably human characteristics. They were like life-size toads standing on two feet; their eyes were massive, unblinking and bulged, made even bigger by the bright floodlights of my car. I sat paralyzed in my car seat by the terror of seeing these creatures. It must be like an atheist seeing God, except God looked repulsive and loathsome.
And then, a massive thud on the window on my side jerked me out of my stupor. A creature had already come right next to me car, and landed a fist hard on the window. A single hairline crack appeared on the window, but it held fast. I saw the creature up close, its sickly greenish skin glistening under the reflected lights, its webbed hand leaving a slimy print on my window. With that, I gunned it, driving out as fast as my little car could take me, almost hitting two of the creatures in front of me.
I drove on until I hit a residential area by the beach. I had become incredibly tired, and the combination of the post-adrenaline crash and remaining traces of alcohol made me faint the very moment I killed the engine. I woke up around midday the next day. At first my sensible mind tried to deny it. I drove to Kota Bharu, got myself a cheap hotel room, and slept the rest of the day away, and the end of which I had convinced myself it was a dream.
Yet I found myself looking up a history of the odd village I passed by on the internet. It seems that a small group of Japanese soldiers stationed near there had followed some unusual and blasphemous cult, against the orthodox at the time whereby the emperor was the Living Deity. They worshipped gods and devils that were vague to the major religions that I knew of, though my tenure at Miskatonic meant I heard these names uttered amongst the cult fanatics of the student population. I read the few online articles I could find, and was struck by how similar the Japanese cult and the Miskatonic worshippers seemed to be, and also that these factions were not alone. There were cults, worshipping deities or Godlike beings with names like Azathoth, Cthulhu and Shug-Niggurath, all over the world, scattered everywhere, yet remarkable in their similarity. The major difference was, perhaps, the Japanese army’s penchant for brutality. There were stories of people being tied together by threading wire through their hands, like Jesus on the cross, led through the jungle, disappearing forever. Some were made to work in menial labor, but many merely disappeared, especially in this area. Where I encountered those Frogmen-like creatures, that area seemed to report whole villages disappearing into thin air.
Even then I could not bring myself to face that I had, finally, seen something I could not explain. Did I really see something alien, or was I merely influenced by those damned stories I heard in Miskatonic?
Of course, when I returned to the car when I checked out of the hotel, on the driver’s side window, smack in the middle, was this little hairline fracture. Surrounding it, like dried snot, was a faint, tennis ball-sized print of dried slime.
As a child I had listened to my grandfathers (from both sides of the family) tell these stories, and as a child they scared me so. But as I aged and matured, my mind became doubtful to the horror stories that they told me. While I did not doubt some of the stories of them being forced to hide in jungles and watching their peers gunned down in the most vicious way possible, some simply defied sensibility. Even as an admitted horror movie fan, and being familiar with the events of the Holocaust occurring at the same time, how could anyone treat another human being as such?
Or perhaps it was the mind’s ability to shut itself from the horrific side of humanity. Science fiction writers and horror enthusiasts like to attribute such horror to some external force, supernatural or otherwise, or some odd mental illness, still making the perpetrators “different” in some sense. But these murderous inclinations are as human as they can ever be. And sometimes, that horror may survive even as the body withers.
I had spent the last three years in the USA, studying in the famous Miskatonic University in Massachusetts and basically absorbing the influences of the locals there. I had, from a naïve city boy in Kuala Lumpur, become a liberal, godless adventurer, pooh-poohing religion and beliefs as nonsense, thinking everything has a solid, scientific explanation. I had also become an avid naturalist and hiker, visiting sites like the Appalachians and the Grand Canyon, spending weeks on the road and days sometimes without modern amenities, out in the woods. I believed, that as an atheist, I would enjoy Nature’s beauty as much as I could.
It was this decision that made me decide to travel, but myself, around Malaysia as I did in the USA. I had just graduated college, and did not intend to go to work immediately. For that, I borrowed my mother’s old car and drove north. I took the old roads on purpose, intending to stay clear of the freeway, and stopping wherever I felt like. I had carried myself from Kuala Lumpur, running north along the West Coast of Malaysia into Perak, and then driving almost parallel along the Malaysian-Thailand border into Kelantan, on the Northeastern side of Malaysia. Here was a state that was still very rural, with the exception the single large city of Kota Bharu. Most of the state was, for all intents are purposes, still jungle and farmland. It was also the site of one of the aforementioned Japanese landing sites.
My journey crossing into the East Coast the way I did meant running through such untamed and empty areas, with scarcely anyone along the way. Civilization was almost entirely confined to small single-street villages along the way. This little village I stopped in, Ulu Balak, a few hours outside of Kota Bharu, was one such place.
I had intended to stop here for the night; often such tiny places did not even have a hotel or lodging house and I was often left sleeping in my car; not that I minded. And this tiny town, it was definitely smaller than most. There was a sign that announced that I was driving into a designated village, and that was it. A hut here and there, many decades old and in various degree of decay. They were of the classic Malay variety; stilted and constructed with wood. Hardly any had a trace of concrete or fresh paint. With the sun setting the area seemed to become darker, more menacing, shadows dancing and casting odd shadows.
I stopped in the single place that remotely looked like a restaurant; a little stall with chairs, tables under a makeshift wooden roof. I went up to find a young woman by the stand, with, in hindsight, some very odd looking features I’ve never seen before. She was not quite attractive, her demure mouth and nose on anyone else would make a pretty girl. But her eyes were incredibly protruded, almost unnaturally. Her headscarf, a common feature among the Malay Muslims of the region, almost bulged a bit to occupy her large eyes; everything else was obscured underneath. But her face did not resemble a Malay person's, or any other common Malaysia race that I knew of. It was, for all I could discern, undoubtedly foreign though.
She greeted me unsmilingly and without words, along with a musty, fish smell. Now that I thought of it, the smell almost seemed to have originated from her, but considering this was a restaurant (or equivalent) and that we were next to a large river very close to the sea, the smell was not out of place. With no menu, I inquired about what food she had; no answer. I simply looked around the stall, at the ingredients on hand, and asked for some noodles based on what she had. She prepared and served the food wordlessly; I only knew how much to pay her when she held up four fingers at me. I paid up, exact change in my hand when she grabbed my hand and pulled me close. In my ear, she whispered to me.
“Baik lu keluar.”
Best you get out of here. She spoke in a raspy, breathy, hollow voice and made my heart jump to my throat. Then she pulled back and walked away from me, tidied up her cart, and left. Then I caught a little mischievous smile and a glint from her eye. My sensible mind took those clues to mean what she pulled a practical joke on me. It must’ve been; I was a city boy and dressed the part. A little fun on the obvious foreigner.
I returned to my car at the last sign of light, driving a little way forward to get away from the creepy girl and her little stall. I had utterly convinced myself that it was a practical joke at that point, though my heart was still going. A few mouthfuls of vodka I kept in car alleviated my nervousness, and I fell asleep quickly.
I awakened several hours later; I was not aware of the time until much later. My subconscious had probably heard what my conscious mind did not discern until it was much too late, a low humming sound that slowly materialized into discernable sounds. It was a language, but I could not discern for the life of me what it was. It was strange, guttural, and numerous. Slowly, individual syllables formed as the creatures speaking got closer, but one repeated fragment of a sentence finally caught me, and sent a massive chill down my spine.
As I mentioned I had spent my tenure in America in the great Miskatonic University in Massachusetts, and we had some unusual fellows there. Many dwelled in the cults and supernatural, and of course I the Sensible Secularist never had the time to attend their little rituals. Except once, when I watched for a distance, as some friends and others danced around fire and wooden idols, chanting in a strange language, repeating that same odd gibberish sentence that, I realize far too late, the creatures around me were chanting.
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."
I had attributed such rituals to silly superstition back then, though for some reason that odd sentence remained in the back of my mind, brought back to the forefront by what was about to occur. And as I restarted the engine and turned on my lights, there was no reasoning my mind could do to explain away the horrors surrounding me.
On this moonless, starless night, my car became the only source of illumination within eyeshot. And standing in front of my car, and beside, and behind, were some of the most loathsome creatures I had ever seen. They were absolutely not human in any sense, but were standing like, and as tall as, humans, in addition to some unmistakably human characteristics. They were like life-size toads standing on two feet; their eyes were massive, unblinking and bulged, made even bigger by the bright floodlights of my car. I sat paralyzed in my car seat by the terror of seeing these creatures. It must be like an atheist seeing God, except God looked repulsive and loathsome.
And then, a massive thud on the window on my side jerked me out of my stupor. A creature had already come right next to me car, and landed a fist hard on the window. A single hairline crack appeared on the window, but it held fast. I saw the creature up close, its sickly greenish skin glistening under the reflected lights, its webbed hand leaving a slimy print on my window. With that, I gunned it, driving out as fast as my little car could take me, almost hitting two of the creatures in front of me.
I drove on until I hit a residential area by the beach. I had become incredibly tired, and the combination of the post-adrenaline crash and remaining traces of alcohol made me faint the very moment I killed the engine. I woke up around midday the next day. At first my sensible mind tried to deny it. I drove to Kota Bharu, got myself a cheap hotel room, and slept the rest of the day away, and the end of which I had convinced myself it was a dream.
Yet I found myself looking up a history of the odd village I passed by on the internet. It seems that a small group of Japanese soldiers stationed near there had followed some unusual and blasphemous cult, against the orthodox at the time whereby the emperor was the Living Deity. They worshipped gods and devils that were vague to the major religions that I knew of, though my tenure at Miskatonic meant I heard these names uttered amongst the cult fanatics of the student population. I read the few online articles I could find, and was struck by how similar the Japanese cult and the Miskatonic worshippers seemed to be, and also that these factions were not alone. There were cults, worshipping deities or Godlike beings with names like Azathoth, Cthulhu and Shug-Niggurath, all over the world, scattered everywhere, yet remarkable in their similarity. The major difference was, perhaps, the Japanese army’s penchant for brutality. There were stories of people being tied together by threading wire through their hands, like Jesus on the cross, led through the jungle, disappearing forever. Some were made to work in menial labor, but many merely disappeared, especially in this area. Where I encountered those Frogmen-like creatures, that area seemed to report whole villages disappearing into thin air.
Even then I could not bring myself to face that I had, finally, seen something I could not explain. Did I really see something alien, or was I merely influenced by those damned stories I heard in Miskatonic?
Of course, when I returned to the car when I checked out of the hotel, on the driver’s side window, smack in the middle, was this little hairline fracture. Surrounding it, like dried snot, was a faint, tennis ball-sized print of dried slime.
