Dagons Mirror | Creepcast

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Welcome back to Cribcast.

Today, we are going Lovecraft in, my friends, and I am foaming at the mouth for Dagon's Mirror.

I've tried to get him to read this story for a while now, and he's been like, Oh, yum,

because I thought it sounds cool.

But then he has that intro, so he did think it sounded cool this entire time.

He just didn't want to show me enthusiasm for the thing I was interested in.

That's fine, that's fine.

We're reading it anyway, so it's whatever.

I like it.

But yes, today we are reading Dagon's Mirror.

I uh do sound like a baby, and I will always sound like a baby, and I won't apologize for it.

Did you like that?

The story was written by Nick Lowe.

It's hard to find any information about him because every time I search Nick Lowe, it just brings up stuff related to the songwriter.

But it seems that the author, this story came out in 2024, so it's a little over a year old.

He has this story.

He has one called The House of Dead Gods, which sounds really cool.

And another one called The Shambler in the Attic, which also also sounds cool what's what is a shambler is shambling like when you're you like the shake right like you're shambling no no no like uh like it's it's like a limp kind of like um i'm i'm a shamble yeah like a like a slow like you can't really walk right but you're trying to like work over to something yeah so it's like dragging itself around the attic a guy with gout in the attic pretty much so He has these three stories, and they're all recent.

Like the oldest one, The House of Dead Gods, is from November of 2023 so this seems to be an up-and-coming writer so if this story is cool uh you all certainly check him out and uh hopefully continue nick continues to make these kinds of things uh but first of all let's check out the story it's got an 8.7 out of 10 on creepypasta.com which is pretty good do these even have are the rating system on creepypasta.com is it actually

Is it something to take seriously, I guess?

You know what I mean?

Well, it depends.

If it's a famous story, no, because then people will vote it highly or lowly for the meme, right?

Like Jeff the Killer is like nine stars or something, right?

Or wise, um, to because it's funny.

But if it's not super popular, then typically the ratings are more legitimate because people are rating it in earnest, right?

So if you go to like Ben Drowned, it's got like thousands of 10 stars because people are, you know, being the people.

But something like this having 8.7 is probably pretty close, pretty close to the bottom.

I mean, February 28th, 2024, last year upload.

My word.

So pretty, pretty recent, especially like older stories on creepypasta.com too have been around there long enough that people have like voted willy-nilly on stuff.

But if it's this recent, most people who are still reading the website mean it, right?

I don't think so.

We'll see.

We'll see.

We'll see.

Nick Lowe, is he going to be, you know, is he going to do H.P.

Lovecraft

justice?

We'll see.

What's your opinion of Lovecraft and how much stuff of his are you like familiar with?

I love, I love Lovecraft.

Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love.

I know I say Lovecrafting a lot.

It's a fucking meme that needs to die on this channel, okay?

I like saying it, all right?

It's applicable in a lot of ways.

I just want to say that, but I love it.

Also,

I love all of the Arkham House publishings.

Like, there's a lot of great stuff from his publish house and stuff.

A lot of him and his buddies, those are the guys who made the publisher with him.

They published a lot of the stuff even after he died and stuff too.

But there's a lot of great stuff from like the 50s and 60s and stuff.

I forgot that Arkham House was Lovecraft stuff originally, so I always think of Batman whenever I think of Arkham.

Yeah, I know.

Arkham Asylum.

I think that's been totally taken over by like Joker memes and stuff.

Yes, of course, yeah.

The inmates are running the asylum.

I'm curious.

I'm curious to see if he holds up.

Is he going to even, maybe Nick Lowe himself is a little like H.P.

Lovecraft?

Maybe he's a racist man who's staying in his

mother's house.

I don't know.

This is great things to say about an author we're just now introducing to a large audience, I think.

So very good.

Good on you for that.

I will say I like Lovecraft stuff a lot.

I've made a video about Call of Cthulhu, which is his most famous work, but Lovecraft has all kinds of

interesting stories and topics.

And I really love the way a lot of his work gets adapted.

Like, probably my favorite season television ever, True Detective, you know, season one, of course, is like based off of like Lovecraft stories and theories and stuff like that.

So, it's all very cool.

Yeah, if you're not familiar, it's all very,

it's the fear of the unknown.

It's like ancient civilizations and people going mad, and it's like incomprehensible things that the human mind can't understand.

Very influenced by his time and providence and stuff, which is usually why a lot of the stuff is from the ocean.

Very inspired by the ocean.

And also,

he was literally afraid of immigrants.

That's like an actual thing.

Oh, he was deeply xenophobic.

Also, be sure to check us out on audio platforms such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts.

Be sure to leave us a nice review there.

It really does help.

And goddamn, I am ready to get in with Dagon.

If there's not fish people in this, I'm going to be furious.

Better be fish people.

That's all I got to say.

I hope there's fish people.

I hope there is as well, buddy.

We'll see.

Or this could also be based off, another thing about the old, like Old Testament god, Dagon, but whatever.

We'll see.

Dagon, Samir, are you ready to begin?

Oh, I'm ready.

Uncle Marsh had always been the black sheep of our family.

A thorn to my father's side and a constant reminder of how corrupt and decayed our ancestral roots truly were.

Sebastian Frederick Marsh was my mother's elder brother.

A genetic throwback, a deviant.

If the rumors surrounding him were true, a man acquainted with the most hellish of sins.

His appearance was enough to make the most stoic of hearts skip a beat before its shambling gait.

Flat-headed, thick-lipped, and possessing the largest, glassiest bulging eyes found in the sockets of any earthbound creature.

His appearance.

Is this how you would describe me?

I just, I was just, I was like, that's a fucking awesome description, actually.

I love thick-lipped and possessing the largest, glassiest, bulging eyes.

He's just like perpetually about to cry, basically.

Just like wet, just wet sockets.

So

he looks like a giant fish.

Yeah, I mean, it would have to be like a giant trout or something.

Yeah.

His appearance was nothing less than outlandish.

He would stumble along the cobbled streets of Barton Village every Saturday morning in his weekly sojourn to the local stores.

His journey caused his neighbors great unease and passerbys across the street in an effort to avoid exchanging even the simplest of pleasantries with the man.

I was particularly disturbed by my uncle's visage as I unfortunately shared a few or more loathsome traits myself.

Thankfully, however, these were less pronounced and shocking than those found on my uncle's grim face.

My mother, too, shared what was known in Barton as the marsh look,

although her deviant features, like mine, were softer and even less obvious than my own.

She got away lightly, indeed, with large, watery eyes, her only obvious heritage of the tainted marsh bloodline.

I wonder if this angle of the story is going to go into like a teen wolf vibe.

You ever see teen wolf, the movie with

I haven't seen it, but it's about like the whole family's werewolves, right?

Yeah, our guy, like, I think it was like something to be, maybe not necessarily puberty, but at a certain age, he basically turns into a werewolf, and he finds out that his dad is is as well and so and I'm wondering if this is gonna be oh I'm finding out that I'm a fish person so so very saying that all member or at least it's his mom's brother right so his mom has some traits and they're pronounced in himself the author but his uncle's the one that looks like a fish person yeah well she kind of does too she has a lot of watery the watery eyes softer features but i'm wondering if

If there's like a

maybe they transform or something.

I don't know.

The watery eyes just being a reoccurring theme makes me think

there's something.

Uncle Marsh lived alone, tucked away in a rotting abode that lurked and leaned queerly at odd angles at the back of the Gunner's Clough, a feral grotto that skirted the cemetery at the south end of the village.

It was a lonesome stretch of sepulchre woodland, home only to the witch elms, the creeping moss, and my gloomy uncle.

Many an odd tale was attached to the gunner's cloth.

Strange lights and raised voices were often heard from the depths of the woods on those days leading up to the nights of Hallows Eve and Walpurgus.

It was not unknown for local pets and occasionally even children to go missing turn up dead on the mornings after those nights, when the frogs croaked loudly and the owls hooted, their omens of warning.

Yeah, I'm...

Just not to immediately glaze this guy, but I love his riding style, at least so far.

Like, it feels very fairy tale.

Well, I mean, it's a clear homage to even a Lovecraft, the way that Lovecraft does very similar shit where it's like excessively detailed.

Like, instead of just being like, it was a dark hallway, he's like, the crimson dark peered over, you know, like it's the same kind of vibe.

And I feel like it's very intentional.

It's nice.

It's nice whenever someone is taking material from somebody else.

or like not material, but

inspired a story from Lovecraft and then they include some of his maneurisms or some of the, you know, like it feels like an extension of his work.

It feels very

genuine.

Feels like it's almost, you know, like a timepiece.

Like, there is a story here we don't know about yet, but the author's determined to let us know it.

And that's also kind of the joke with Lovecraft, right?

That he'll say something is unexplainable or what's the one he says all the time?

Incomprehensible.

And then he will comprehend it for seven pages straight.

Yeah.

I do think that you're...

I think saying fairy tale also fits this this very well too because it does feel does have kind of like a grim fairy tale Yeah, especially like at the cemetery at the gloomy and witch elms on the edge of town.

Yeah, it's very like setting up a little folk tale of like oh people are known to go missing whatever

Yeah, I remember when I was very young my mother issued me a warning to never enter the gunner's cloth despite my uncle living there And I often wondered just what witchcraft was being played out in secret underneath the skeletal trees.

These warnings were ubiquitous among all Barton children, and with good reason.

Before I was born, a local child had been found dead in the woods, half submerged in the black slop that had once been a stream passing through the cloth.

Little was done about the matter.

It was assumed that the child had fallen into the muck and drowned, and every Barton resident was quick to attribute a more sinister conclusion to the life of little Maggie Hagen.

Despite the macabre reputation, or perhaps because of it, the whole area was the haunting ground of young boys during the summer months, and sadly, and with great embarrassment, my uncle was seen as something of a local boogeyman by my peers.

As a result, he suffered relentless taunting at the hands of Barton's children.

There was precious little else to do in the village during the school summer break, and the taunting of my uncle became something of a local sport.

Boys would prove their metal by hurling rocks at the windows of the gunner's cloth cottage where my uncle resided, resided or knocking on his door only to flee as the frog-faced resident cautiously answered their call before sinking back into the dark of his home.

God, how sad.

Jesus.

It's depressing.

I'm like getting carried away with the flowery language, but at the same time, it's like a guy looks ugly and they're like, idiot, throwing rocks at his window and stuff.

I mean, but very true to childlike harassment or whatever.

Yeah.

Freak!

And they're like, eeee!

And I run off.

What does every kid do when they see a guy with a disability at the grocery store?

Point and laugh.

Point.

I just like.

Why is it like that?

Mom, why does he look like that?

Mom, what's wrong with him?

Mom, why doesn't he have two?

Why don't him do his other arm?

Has it said also?

I was going to ask, has it said, uh,

what year is this?

I don't know why, but I keep picturing like 50s.

It hasn't said a thing about it yet, I don't think.

No, it hasn't.

But I get just like the way of like being like a guy living down in the, like, I don't know, like by the marsh or the bog or whatever.

I don't know why, but

my mind is putting me in like a 50s era kind of thing.

I don't know why.

Well, he said village.

So village makes it sound older than that.

Yeah, European, therefore older.

Yeah, but he also said high school.

So,

right?

He did say high school.

Did you say high school boys?

I'm pretty sure.

But that's also what made me think of like high school guys that had like hardships.

I just said young boys.

Okay.

He just said young boys.

Yeah.

But he says, okay, that's what he says.

He says summer break.

So it has to be a time period where schools have a summer break and also a village.

So

it's feel it feels almost

anachronistic, right?

It's almost like you get modern details mixed in with like

old Grimm's fairy tale stuff.

You know who does that kind of well, too, not to sidetrack it?

The movie it follows feels very ambiguous in its time.

You know what I mean?

That movie feels like it could be in the 70s, 80s, 90s.

You know what I mean?

It's like it's so ambiguous.

And I think that's what makes it so evergreen, too.

Another movie that does a great job of that is

The Substance.

Oh, yeah, dude, definitely.

Because everything's 70s.

Everything's 60s, like all the cars, the furniture, the store.

But then they pull out an iPhone.

Yeah, it's all super Stanley Kubrick shining kind of like homages and stuff.

So everything feels like it has that 70s color palette and stuff, a lot of the oranges and browns and stuff.

You know,

that's another thing, too, I think I like with sci-fi is whenever it feels ambiguous.

Like it almost feels like older technology that's presented as new.

Anything that feels like analog,

I think it's just it's going to stand the test of time more.

You know, I really hate when shit's like super sleek and clean.

It's like, give me the fucking bulky, wiry shit.

You know, it's like what the best example of that, uh, the original alien.

Oh, yeah, like the cockpit in there of just all the dials and buttons and like the white, yeah, yeah, give me dials and buttons, dude.

Give me those buttons.

I want, I want to slam my hand into them in here.

I wouldn't mind pressing a couple buttons.

I love pressing buttons.

Light up the button.

Let me press it.

I love to touch stuff all the time, whatever it is.

Oh, absolutely.

I love touching things.

Being the nephew of Mad Marsh meant that by proxy, I too suffered from the attentions of my uncle's tormentors, and I tried desperately to make myself invisible in and out of school.

I succeeded in this endeavor to such a level that I had successfully alienated myself from everyone outside of my family in just a few short years.

One year, on Halloween, the onslaught of abuse directed towards my uncle reached such feverish heights that it culminated in a planned mass egging of his home.

Only one boy in town possessed enough bravado to see this task to conclusion, however.

Jamie Byrdle.

Man, this does feel like such a

fairy tale we're reading about.

That's great.

It was Jamie alone who entered the gunner's cloth on that dreadful night, chest puffed out and a box of rotten eggs held confidently in his hands.

The boy finally returned, many hours later, to the circle of children crowning the edge of that necromantic woodland.

Waiting in anticipation for their champion, he was forever and irreversibly changed.

Transmuted, transformed, and left naught but a shell of what was once a lively child, he staggered out of the woodlands a dumb and silent specter.

Poor Jamie Birdle, the terror of all children younger than himself, said nothing about what he had seen in the dark that night, nor would would he ever speak a single syllable again his whole miserable life.

Fuck.

Eventually, the glassy-eyed mute was taken away from his parents and moved to Byron House, home for the mentally disadvantaged.

There he stayed for many years, banging his head against the wall of his cell to a silent, alien rhythm until fate gave him the opportunity to escape his confines and leap to his death.

Exactly 13 years since he first lurched out of the shadows of the witch elm trees.

I love all that, dude.

That's so fun.

This is a ton of fun.

I'm bought in already.

So he goes out there and he comes back.

The only description he gives us is he's glassy-eyed and mute, right?

Yeah, he goes out to the woods.

We don't know what happens, probably stumbles across something, sees something, whatever, unexplainable.

If it's Lovecraftian, then it's probably, I mean, it could be anything, a statue, like an obelisk, anything that is just like,

has such unknown, horrible powers, you know, know that uh it drove him mad or like it destroyed his brain or his psyche or something

yeah yeah my uncle was questioned about the incident of course but denied ever seeing the boy let alone speaking to him or causing him harm this event left me even more isolated from the other children before that night they might have included me in their torments but once jamie had been forever silenced they avoided me completely.

I very rarely saw Uncle Marsh in person.

Occasionally, he would show up at a family get-together or function to make a token effort to remind us that he still existed in this world, only to disappear just as abruptly as he had arrived.

My father, in particular, despised the man.

He hated the appearance of his brother-in-law, and he hated that his wife and son were kin to the man.

Most of all, he hated the way Marsh collected queer objects and strange, moldy tomes.

Marsh was something of a scholar, at least of a certain sort, and loved to devour information from his astounding collection of books.

His library consisted of a mass of sprawling grimoires and papers scattered around his living room in no discernible order.

Chaotic, crumbling mess of ancient and esoteric knowledge.

Many of those decaying, musty volumes were written in languages unspoken in the isolated villages and hamlets of northwest England.

Archaic German, French, Latin, Greek, scripts so wholly alien in structure that they must have been impossibly extraterrestrial in origin.

Other, far stranger items dotted the cramped rooms of the cottage that Marsh called home.

Warped, bent skulls, exotic stuffed birds, crystals shaped in geometric arrangements that were mattingly complex.

This was the legacy of my Uncle Marsh, a repulsive, isolated, semi-antiquarian, semi-human recluse, obsessed with the forbidden and in love with the wicked and strange.

It's like the guy lives in an odyssey in an oddity shop, and he himself is also like an oddity.

Exactly, like a functioning piece in this museum.

At the edge of a cemetery in a swamp on the corner of town, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, just like a Resident Evil house.

It really is.

Well, you know what kind of made me think of was the Resident Evil Village house a bit.

Like

out in the swampland, you know, and stuff.

You're talking about Resident Evil.

Biohazard.

My apology.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Biohazard of just a weird family being out in the middle of this swamp, except it's one guy.

And then just to think of like, you know, going out there, the smell of like moldy paper.

Like, I would imagine the whole house is damp constantly.

Yeah.

Just weird shit like that.

Yeah, it's like it's constantly humid there.

It's like a swamp bubbles up.

Everything stinks.

Yeah.

And I don't know how familiar you are with goosebumps, but dude, my mind, all I can think about is werewolf of fever swamp.

Oh, yeah, I remember that one.

I remember that one.

Yeah, I just think of like the weird hermit dude living out in the woods.

I love that.

I love that episode too, because the dad's just like, we're deer scientists.

And he's like, okay and he's like the old man the old crazy son of a bitch who lives in the swamp just leave him alone he's like well he grabbed me and put me in a net today ah he's eccentric he's eccentric what they do look they're old do you want them to not put people in swamps in swamp nets well son you're in his swamp you might you might get netted a couple times it happens

he bought the net do you want him to not use it okay so i guess he's just not supposed to use it okay if you want him to not use it you should have talked to him before he bought the net yeah then i think that you should you should have sent out some kind of memo or you buy the net from him if you're gonna be that inconsistent look if you're willing to make a deal that's fine but to just ask him not to do it

okay now you're being a bit of a cry baby i love those 90s those 90s uh the 90s parents and media where they're just like god you're being irrational stop you're being so mey It was at the tail end of like parents recognizing that children can die.

Children can die and they can also have a functioning mind.

That's like they don't just tell like lies.

Every parent thinks that all their children are just like Archie or something like some like comic strike.

I don't care.

Jean-Biller's comic, but Jamie Biller's mom.

Yeah, I'm going to go paint a fence.

You're like, cool.

Get the fuck out of here, Archie.

Yeah, stupid idiot.

But then it's like around like the 80s and 90s, it was like, man, people keep taking these things.

Like, you should maybe do something about that.

Yeah, no shit.

Well, maybe the, maybe the hermit living in this, which in this case, the hermit ends up being a pretty cool dude, but still, creepy, weird.

In real life, you should probably call CPS.

No, I would not be messing with the hermit living in the swamp.

Absolutely not.

I'm with the kids.

I'm throwing eggs at his house.

Yeah,

I'm just going to piss him off to where he goes and fucking slits my throat in my sleep.

I would love an excuse to use my Stingager Gram doctrine to eliminate this freak from the earth.

You threw eggs at my house, just like driving a knife into the kids.

He's like, this is a bit excessive.

All these memories and thoughts flashed vividly in my mind as I sat opposite the stern, cold face of Mr.

Fisher, a family's long-suffering solicitor.

Just seconds ago, he had impassionedly read out aloud the contents of my uncle's last will and testament, in which a man I barely knew and had good reason to despise, had left me all his earthly and unearthly possessions.

Uncle Marsh's death had been as singular and strange as his life

in the early morning of july the 24th 1954 oh my god bear trap moment absolutely fucking bear trap moment holy shit what what do you mean bear trap didn't they say i said it wasn't gonna be in the 50s you know what that is a

bear trap

that one was pretty

that one was that one i will say i was not getting 50s at all i was getting like 1800s Really?

Did you actually think it was going to be like 1800s?

Something about the reading in the early part made me feel like this was like an old village.

i mean dude

it reads like fucking hansel and gretel or something yeah like i mean that's what gave me the idea of like grimm's fairy tale yeah yeah yeah i mean it has that vibe until he said high school or not high school he said summer summer break and i was like okay maybe not then but you you saying 50s i was like no way and that all right you know what you can have this one Fine, whatever.

In the early morning of July 24th, 1954, he had stood naked on the sands of Seascale Beach, Copeland, Cumbria,

Cumbria, and walked slowly and deliberately into the waiting maw of the churning Irish Sea.

Trail of large flat footprints in the sand and a pile of scattered clothing were all that had remained of the man.

Yes.

He became a fish person.

I love the idea of it's just like, it's time.

He's like,

walks his big, goofy, flat-foot ass out to the beach.

He's just like, actually, he's probably like gasping, water!

But I love that.

People are like, oh, he just killed himself and he, like, went, you know, walked into the ocean, but it's like, no, he probably, like, discarded his shit and swam off.

You know what this feels like a lot to me?

This feels like it would be an Edo story.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, Edo himself is, I mean,

super Lovecraft, you know, I mean, like, oh, so much of his stuff is Lovecraftian, you know, Uzumaki and all that, all that kind of stuff.

It's all fear of the unknown, uncanny.

I can almost see in my mind this being like an Edo comic, like a large, glassy-eyed man who, like, you see him transform into a fish as he's.

If if it was an ido story it'd be a girl and it's like that's her neighbor and he's like he'd walk every day like you see him like walk around and then he would like jump scare in her window and he's like but he was gone it's a lot like that vignette from uzumaki the kid that becomes a snail yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah very similar although a body was never found he was declared legally dead some years after and had left instructions with mr fisher that i his only nephew, was to receive all he had ever owned.

The significance of the location of his demise was not lost upon me.

For decades ago, my family had lived in the town of Seascale.

The sea had always been in the family's blood.

Many a marsh had took to the waves as fishermen, sailors, and even pirates.

At least if one was to believe the various myths and legends surrounding us, for the marsh blood was tainted.

So the story said.

This is, dude, I feel like cozy right now.

Like the

sea should go too.

Yeah, yeah, like the way it's worded and like, my family comes comes from the sailors of the sea.

And it's like they got a curse at some point that made them like into fish people or whatever.

It's like, this is Joe.

He said the Irish.

The Irish Sea, right?

Where did he say?

Turning Irish Sea.

Yeah, that's the sea you walked into.

Yeah.

So is that

which, I mean, I'm dumb and I'm fucking super dumb.

Where is the North Sea at?

Because that's like the one where it's like, you do not go.

near that shit, right?

The North Sea?

I think that's the same area.

I'm pretty sure.

Well, I was going to say, if it is,

I'm wondering if it's connecting to that to where that's like the most treacherous, which obviously he's not like on.

I know that you have to go out a bit, but still, if you're localized a little bit near it.

I didn't know if it was going to connect with that.

It might be.

I'm honestly dumb to it as well, especially.

I'm surprised you've never done a video on the North Sea.

I feel like that would be

an idea up your alley.

All the crazy, mysterious shit that goes on out there.

I kind of touched on it before in other videos I've talked about.

Because a lot of that relates to like the idea of like Thule, like the lost country and the ice wall and stuff like that and old, you know, maps and things like that.

So I've kind of touched on that a little bit, but not specifically the North Sea.

But yeah, you're right.

That would be something interesting.

Look into the original branch of the family had come to England from the United States, where a great deal of my relatives had lived in the decaying and damned port town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts.

There it is.

There she is.

There's your tip of the capsule.

There she goes.

For those that don't know, Innsmouth is a city that's mentioned a lot in Lovecraft's words.

Shadows of Ensmouth is where Dagon comes from, even

the fish people.

Innsmouth itself was a nest of horrid myths and repulsive witch lore.

We had come to Cumbria under a cloud of dark suspicion and dread, chased out by the locals as warlocks and werewolves, forced across the bitter Atlantic and finally ejected upon the shores of Old Blighty.

Whatever is was that had oh this this language, whatever is was,

whatever is was that had segregated us from the other branches of the family.

For many of Marsh still resided in Roddinginsmouth.

None can say.

My grandparents certainly would not discuss the matter.

My own family had made the move away from Copeland and into the small village of Barton, Cheshire, due to a chance meeting between my mother and father during a blistering hot summer holiday, which my father had chosen to spend by the seaside.

Oh.

Oh, he was by the sea and fell in love with the mermaid.

Is that where this is going?

I'm wondering if it's going to be something like that.

It has almost a vibe of like the

it almost has a vibe of yeah, I mean, it's not that I was going to say siren.

I'm just, I'm really

I love like I love like pirate folk lore and stuff and like sea creatures.

You know, so it's always it's so weird.

And also it's so hypnotic and creepy, like the songs they sing and shit.

I always like it because for one, she says, sea shanties are beautiful and stuff like that.

But I always like these like pirate lore and stuff like that because I am terrified of the ocean So I love the idea for one of monsters being it But I also love the kind of person that would like best it that would want to conquer it, you know Yeah, and that's why yeah, so many like stories like Moby Dick or all these like crazy like fishermen like

Like not antagonists, but these these guys these men driven mad by these things in the ocean because I agree I think you're a psychopath if you don't have a fear of the ocean if I'm being honest with you 100% It's terrifying, terrifying.

But that's why there's such a, it's so cool to have stories of people like wanting to sail to it, like, you know, conquer them.

Would you rather spelunk or would you rather go deep sea diving?

This is a, that's a horrible question.

Isn't it actually?

You know, the only thing I can do is.

It depends on the intensity of either.

Well, I would say you'd have to go the most intense, which, I mean, I'm going to have, I would not, I would have to say.

deep sea diving because my fat ass could not fit in any hole but i was just going to say like

the openness there's something so scary about the openness of the ocean, but I don't think that's a good idea.

Oh, it's I have not terrified

it.

I think the bottom of the ocean is the most terrifying concept in the world to me.

I'm also incredibly claustrophobic and couldn't don't even, I don't even like thinking about this.

They say

the bottom of the ocean, that's like being in deep space, isn't it?

Like dealing with the pressure and stuff like that, you mean?

Well, let's just say you, let's say you, the pressure thing wasn't an issue.

I'm just mean like the absence of light, sound.

Well, actually, there'd be weird sounds.

That's like, it'd be a creepier version of space, basically.

Yeah.

Yeah, because you know for a fact there are things in there.

Well, yeah, things are looking at you and they can move through it way better than you can, and your visibility is lower.

So it's so insane to be so deep that light cannot has never touched anything there.

That's why you pass an area called the midnight zone where there's zero light particles.

Like they just quit.

You would probably just go insane.

Like, I just don't think that the human brain can comprehend that.

Then you hear like a far distant like

zero.

or like just you like feel something breeze past you.

You know, you would fuck that dude.

Shout out.

Let me read this.

I'm getting

over it.

I'm going to start throwing hands.

I'm at my limit.

My father had been a keen lover of architecture.

From ancient Roman ruins to Georgian estates, he had traveled the length and breadth of Britain in search of historical adventure.

It was during such a trip that he learned of Seaskell and its magnificent Victorian hotel, the Skafell.

During his stay in the town, he had encountered my mother on the beach.

She collected various seashells, live crabs, and bits of driftwood.

Trapped by her large green eyes and raven-black hair, father spent much of the summer with the strange girl who had become my mother.

Quickly became close friends and confidants.

Talk about seagirls, black hair, green eyes.

God damn, dude.

Hell yeah.

Get me to the beach.

Some months later, two young lovers were engaged, made the move to my father's home village, marrying at the parish church before buying a home in one of the cramp and sloping alleys of shadow-haunted Barton.

Fortunately, there had been an unwelcome catch to his otherwise auspicious joining.

Sebastian, my mother's elder brother, would also be making the move to Barton with them.

My grandparents, you see, were sadly in no fit state to look after the man.

who was himself somewhat mentally disadvantaged, or backward, as my father would say, wholly ignorant of of the many social norms we often take for granted in this day and age.

The elder Marshes were hopelessly advanced in age, too, and it was clear that they feared for their son's well-being when the inevitable shedding of their mortal coil take them to the cold and unwelcoming grave.

So, with great reluctance, but also out of love for his wife, my father agreed to take Sebastian with them to Barton, where he lived with them for several months before finally acquiring the decomposing cottage in the woods behind the cemetery.

Not long after my parents' marriage, my marsh grandparents succumbed to a kind of wasting disease.

I never actually seen either of them, nor had my father encountered them more than a handful of times, as they did not even have the strength to attend their daughter's wedding.

Sebastian and my mother both attended the funeral in Seascale, in which a few grey, shadowy strangers appeared, many of them also bearing the odd, marsh look.

It was during this time that my uncle acquired the vast bulk of his blighted library and bizarre trinkets from my grandparents' home, nestled as they were in the boarded-up attic bedroom, which they had queerly spent the majority of their latter years in total seclusion.

Years passed by in Barden, and while my parents had a home for themselves and started a family, my uncle continued to live alone in the woods, his collection of fungal books, stuffed animals, his only company.

As I have already mentioned, I was by no means close to my uncle, and although I did not hate him with the burning vitriol my father had reserved for the man, he had still unnerved and nauseated me on the few occasions I was unlucky enough to be in the same room as him, and I was genuinely taken aback by being made his sole heir.

All this, no doubt, accounted for the puzzled look that must have graced my face and to which roused Mr.

Fisher to once again break me away from my daydreaming with a short, deliberate cough.

Snapping out of my thoughts, I focused upon the solicitor and smiled a weak, apologetic expression, and he proceeded to inform me that the cottage was in a cankerous state of decline and would be unsafe and unfit for habitation and advised me strongly from entering it, instead suggesting I hire a few locals to fetch me whatever items I desired and deposit them at my own home.

He assured me that any effort made to restore the cottage would be nothing but a cash sink and a complete waste of time.

It was decayed even by the standards of the other groaning properties that dotted the woods.

Truth be told, I had no desire to enter it.

He gave me a few more details about various bits and pieces my uncle had left me, a few pounds swirled away in a bank account, and also the residence that my grandparents had lived in back in Seascale, which I simply asked him to put up for sale on my behalf and to sell as cheaply as possible.

As luck would have it, he managed to sell it quickly to a distant relative, a Marsh cousin, who still resided in the seaside town and wished for whatever reason to acquire the property.

After leaving Mr.

Fisher's paperwork, I left the office and headed straight to my parents' home to talk about the matter with them both in full.

My father seemed quite dismissive of the whole affair, assuming wrongly that I would have no interest in anything that had belonged to his deceased nemesis.

My mother, on the other hand, seemed greatly unnerved by the matter, first probing me to see what my intentions were regarding my uncle's belongings.

Upon hearing that I would be taking them all to my home and cataloguing them at my leisure, she could hardly contain her anxiety.

This confused me greatly.

I assured her that I simply wished to see if there was anything of worth to be sold to collectors, and this seemed to calm her briefly.

Finding some local strong arms to move the immense hoard of junk from my uncle's cottage and to my home proved to be quite difficult at first.

Most men of labor in Barton proved to be stupefying in their reluctance to enter gunner's cloth and superstitious regarding the marsh name.

In the end, I was able to hire a few Polish laborers who, despite being superstitious themselves, were strangers to Barton and ignorant of the mark upon my family's name.

I busied myself with work during the week or so it took to ransack my uncle's cottage and at first barely noticed the hoard of books, stuffed animals, skulls, crystals, and various other brick abrac that I had the workers stack as neatly as possible in my cellar.

By the time they had finished, the once vacant space beneath my house had become a labyrinth worthy of crete, a tartaris of crinkled yellow papers and moaning, saggy shelves.

Fortunately, I had fitted the old cellar with electricity when I moved in, but the feeble light provided by that one naked bulb hanging in the center of the room seemed to cast more shadow than light, and gave the various glassy-eyed dead animals a haunting quality that kept me away from the collection until I could find someone to take the whole ungodly collection off my hands.

The whole collection stayed well out of my mind in life for some weeks to come, as work kept me busy and I put off my once planned mass cataloging in favor of working towards a promotion at the office where I worked as a minor clerk.

However, once that promotion passed me by, I took a few weeks' leave from my job and decided to see how much money I could make from selling my uncle's grim treasure trove.

Working through the collection proved to be a lesson in patience, and it took what seemed to be a lifetime to separate my uncle's notes and diaries from actual printed books and handwritten manuscripts.

When I finally did so, I had before me a collection of wicked and unwholesome tomes.

Musty, fat, and swollen with hundreds of pages of information, some of the books dated back centuries.

The volumes before me threw me into a state of excitement at the possibility of how much cash could be coughed up by a willing collector.

I wrote down the names of as many of the books as I could.

There was Cultus de Gulis by the Comte de Arte,

Der Vermus Mysteris pinned by the necromancer Ludwig Pryn,

and Unus Prechlichen Colten by Frederick von Junce.

There was also an English translation of a book called Things of the Water with its original title, Cthot Aqua Dingen.

Haha, Cthot.

We get the cth.

The thing.

Chip of the hat, my lord.

Tip of the.

Erm your gold, sir.

Presented on the inner pages in a sprawling, spidery pinmanship that I suspected to be of my uncle's creation.

The latter was filled with pages of notes written by my uncle.

Various rites and rituals underlined in pencil appeared sporadically throughout the interior.

I tried by best to skim the book, being one of the few written in English, but its contents were so haphazardly laid out and unorganized that I simply could not digest any significant information from within, instead relying upon various words underlined by my uncle.

These included Father Dagon, Mother Hydra, Cthulhu, Ubo Sathla, Azatoth, and other stranger arrangements of letters.

Admittedly, I was totally ignorant of the contents of all the books presented before me and dismissed them as either works of fiction or loose fantastical treaties of witchcraft and the occult.

Neither of these topics interested me in the slightest, so I decided to write down all I could think of as interesting to collectors, such as titles, authors, dates, and the strange names of pseudo-gods and prehistoric peoples, put them in a letter that I sent off to several rare booksellers in London.

It did not take long for a reply to reach me.

One Dr.

Artemis Harlan Glass, a collector and bibliophile, had been put in touch with me via one of his contacts and wrote me a fevered response.

His excitement barely contained within his beautifully worded letter, he offered to buy the entire collection from me for a king's ransom.

It was a six-figure sum so high that I had to sit down immediately upon reading it in order to finish his letter in full, and had to reread it several times to let its contents fully sink in.

Dr.

Glass had also made it clear that he wanted any and all personal notes made by the book's previous owners in full, which I understood given the gibberish contents contained within the tomes.

However, I decided that I would not hand over my uncle's diaries for whatever absurd cinemonial reason I may have attached to them.

In my reply to the doctor, I simply stated that the collection had come as is and that no notes had been found among them.

I did, however, smooth this over by stating that several of the books had pages underlined underlined with a few scribbles here and there, denoting other manuals and page numbers where other notes and information could be found.

It wasn't quite the spider web of information the doctor had sought, but it appeared to please him nonetheless and he organized to come and collect the books in person at a pre-arranged date just a few days after his reply to my offer.

I informed my parents over some afternoon tea of what the doctor had offered me for the books.

And to much humor, my father nearly spat out a mouthful of Earl Grey upon hearing that his son was to become so fabulously wealthy.

He seemed overjoyed at the news, not for any dreams of personal gain.

He had always been the non-materialistic type, but at the life such money could provide for me.

I knew that he was also secretly happy that being related to Sebastian March had actually paid off in the end, and the money was at once a source of sweet revenge for him and an ointment to smooth over the wounds left by their various clashes.

My mother's reaction was somewhat similar to my father's, but I could not help but but think that it was all a put-on, an act,

and that she truly did not want to see my uncle's library in the hands of a stranger.

If she had but voiced her concerns, I may have changed my mind, or at least sold perhaps only half of the collection left to me.

I informed her that I intended to keep my uncle's diaries and personal notes, but she simply shrugged whilst nursing a lukewarm cup of tea.

My father made a comment about how they would best be used to kindle a fire, and we quickly moved on to the topic of what I would be doing with the money that was soon coming my way.

I'll admit that when the day came for the doctor to collect the books, a cloud of regret had fallen over me.

Despite the ludicrous amount of money that he was offering, I felt somewhat reluctant to part with my uncle's collection.

These feelings of doubt, however, were quickly dispelled as a series of brisk rapping penetrated the quiet of my usual afternoon routine.

and I opened my front door to welcome my visitor.

Dr.

Glass had an appearance wholly shocking and disturbing to me, despite my familiarity with the grotesque and misshapen.

He was both painfully thin and shockingly tall.

Despite being bent over at the shoulder, he still towered over me by a clear foot.

He had the complexion of a fresh corpse, blood-drained and transparent, while his head was crowned by a thick head of bushy hair, raven black despite his obvious advanced age.

Clothes, too, were as distinct as the man himself, for he clearly dressed in the manner of a gentleman many decades removed from the current age we occupied.

These fine clothes were, however, somewhat lost on the man, as his willow-like frame caused them to hang off him like folds of dark, dead skin.

This scarecrow of a man stood at my threshold, nodded, and extended a withered, wrinkled hand which I met, almost in a trace, with my own.

I tried my best not to be repulsed by the doctor's winter-cold skin and long nails as our hands clasped, but I fear that a modicum of my discomfort must have been made apparent to the man as a cruel smirk broke across his features as I stepped aside to let him in.

I watched as the vampiric form of the doctor entered my home, and another wave of anxiety washed over me.

For the man whom I had just invited into my house was so far removed from what I imagined a cultivated millionaire scholar to look like.

that I half fancied a cruel hoax being played upon me.

I had already prepared the collection, and they stood on the table in my living room wrapped in brown paper and string.

Upon seeing the pile, the doctor turned to me with his pale gray eyes and spoke to me in a voice so frail and hollow that I had to strain to hear the shriveled syllables that emanated faintly from his thin lips.

Would you mind, sir, if I took the liberty of confirming the contents of those packages?

I nodded automatically, as if hypnotized by the man's voice and watched in fright as he glided over to the table and used his long, gnarled talons to cleanly remove the brown paper barring him from the prize that lay underneath.

I watched the grim spectacle of the doctor using his sharp nails like some kind of organic letter opener and then greedily scooping up the books in his hands, flicking through their contents with the hungry gaze of a wild predator.

Happy with his lot, he turned to me and without even looking me in the eye sharply withdrew a folded check from his waistcoat pocket and handed it to me.

I unfolded it and was once again taken aback by the amount written upon it, along with my name, quickly placed it in the top drawer of my study desk with an obvious, avaricious celerity.

Our business seemingly concluded, I regained my senses and offered the doctor some refreshment, which he took thankfully as he singled out a seat in my lounge and with great effort lowered his mummified body down onto.

As I poured us both a cup of tea, he continued to plump through his new acquisitions with a look of pure joy.

It was a look that seemed out of place, and it was disturbing to see it grow upon his cold, rigid face.

We talked at length for several hours, during which time he made several inquiries as to where I had acquired my collection, and I felt that he was trying his best to gauge just how much I knew about it.

Being one of the world's worst liars, I couldn't bring myself to deceive the man who had given me such a huge fortune for some old books and decided instead to tell him exactly where I had acquired the collection.

I told him all about my uncle, the Marsh family, and our Inn's mouth origins, along with the legends surrounding the gunner's cloth and the horrible fates that had befallen several of Barton's children.

The latter of which he did not seem entirely ignorant of, and he listened with interest as I reeled off the collection of even stranger relics that still sat waiting in my cellar to be catalogued.

Upon hearing this, the doctor set aside his tea and asked politely if he could be permitted to look over these objects.

As being knowledgeable of such things, he could quite possibly put me in contact with several antiquarians of his acquaintance who might be interested in purchasing them from from me.

I saw little reason to deny the man who had so generously secured my future and helped to lead him gently down into my cellar by one of his spindly arms.

Upon reaching the bottom of the creaking stairs that adjoined the cellar to my house, I stood back as he picked through the objects like a carrion crow looking for the juiciest parts of a rotten corpse.

He ignored most of the artifacts before him.

picking up several crystals and tossing them back dismissively before making his way to the back of the cellar where, covered in a dusty sheet, there stood a tall object that I had yet to bother with, and which he revealed at once dramatically with a swift, sharp tug.

As the dirty, grayed sheet felled ennobly to the ground, the spectacle before us caused us both to pause, slack-jawed for its horrid resplendence.

For resting gently against the wall, there stood an object so magnificent and terrifying that neither of us could barely speak a word for several minutes, frozen as we were in complete awe.

It was a mirror that stood some seven feet tall, three feet wide.

A perfect rectangle that was framed by the most amazing display of carved golden creatures, the like of which I had never seen.

The frame was a collection of fish, crustaceans, octopods, and amphibians, all carved beautifully out of a spectral white gold.

At either end of the mirror, there stood a large carving of what at first appeared to be a mermaid and a merman.

On closer inspection, the faces of these characters were not fully human, being instead a horrible amalgamation of fish, frog, octopus, and man.

They danced and frolicked along the mirror's edge in such a vivid manner that they appeared to sway, as if caught in an invisible breeze, causing my head to spin slightly if I looked upon them for too long.

The mirror itself was equally bizarre.

A green-blue tint tint was washed over the glass, and even in the dim light of the cellar, it was obvious that it did not fully reflect the room back at us.

Instead, it distorted our reflections in a wavy, sloshing manner that made it appear like we were instead looking upon our faces from a murky pond or pool.

The doctor stood forward and ran his hands over the gold frame, and then shockingly, he gripped the tail of one of the carved mermen and with great ease simply bent it and pulled it off.

The metal fin he then worked over in his hands, rubbing it between his fingers, where it molded and distorted like clay, and not as any earthly metal should have.

The plastic metal he then rolled into a ball and placed in one of his pockets.

He then bent down with a grimish gesture and picked up the sheet to cover the mirror once more.

Turned to me with clear concern etched over his grey face, suggested that we leave the cellar immediately and make for the lounge.

Upon seeing himself back down, he requested some fresh tea, bid me to sit with him

bro this story

i'm like we're so hooked in i'm i'm in yeah this is this is so fun this is just the way it's worked the way the mystique of it ugh just to go in does it feel like the artifacts are changing people into things like it seems like the the dad knows that it changes people into things he's pissed off by it the mom is just kind of like well you know you didn't throw it away did you or you know she's upset because she doesn't want pieces of her history and like i guess like infinity and family

it could be, but it could also be that the dad's just dumb to it and didn't like how weird and like the uh the shame that his brother-in-law brought on the family.

That's true.

But maybe the mom knows and knows that there's a power to this kind of thing.

And that's the kind of curse that's affected their family.

And that's why it's now been passed off to him.

But there's like, maybe the mirror, it says it looks like you're looking into water.

Like you're seeing your reflection in water.

Maybe it can summon things.

Maybe it could change you.

I think the doctor's about to explain, so I'll keep reading.

But yeah, just want, just want to comment.

The reason I'm so locked in is because

this is dope.

I'm loving this.

We have not got a story like this, I don't think, yet.

This is great.

The doctor then proceeded to tell me such a fantastic and macabre story that I became dazed, swooning on occasion at the strange mysteries he was inducting me into.

He spoke as if my uncle's collection of books were factual, containing within them all the lore of mankind and the millions of years that had rolled on before our race made the slow climb down from the trees.

He spoke of extraterrestrial invaders who had once called the Earth home, creatures that had seeped down from the stars and held dominion over our world while man's most distant ancestors were still billions of years from appearing on the cosmic stage.

These dreadful beings, gods compared to humanity, had experimented with life and in accident had given birth to the ancestors of the human race.

He spoke of the elder things, the old ones, the dreaded fungi of Ugoth, as well as the great race of Yith.

All visitors to our small and lonely blue planet, he spoke also of the few remnants of this horrid mythology that could still be found swimming and plodding in the darkest reaches of our planet's oceans.

This last point he spent much of his time elaborating upon, bringing out quotes and page references from things of the water, uttering those unspeakable names I had once glanced over myself, Cthulhu, Dagon, Hydra, The last two of which had their images carved into the mirror's frame, represented by the frog fish thing seated at either end of the disturbing object.

A whole race separate from humankind, but also disgustingly intertwined with it, that lived undying in the dim reaches of the ocean bed, swimming through the slowly dissolving ruins of dead, sunken cities such as the dread Yunthale, where the sun's rays failed to penetrate through the salty gloom.

Oh, brother.

Oh, Hunter.

Oh, baby.

What do we do?

What do we do to deserve all this?

Oh, it's so good.

Oh, it's just so cool.

It's so cool.

I love it so much.

That's one of my favorite things about Call of Cthulhu.

Like, how it talks about there's a city that is so big we can't comprehend it and it lies beneath the ocean.

Things like Cthulhu seem dead or they seem gone because they're just sleeping, but eons to us are a second to them.

Yeah, oh, so good.

Time is completely different.

Yeah.

He spoke of an ancient pact made with these Deep Ones that resulted in a mixed heritage of humans and something,

and of the twisted families of New England who carried this taint within their blood, Marshes being but one.

He spoke too about the mirror in my cellar.

How occasionally the deep ones had made such a gift to the tribes of humans who had worshipped them and their old gods as a means of contacting the people below the waves, should they ever be needed in dire times or upon the approaching times of their disgusting, unholy rites.

By the time the doctor had finished spinning his tail of antiquated horror, the hour had grown late, far too late for him to catch the last train back to London, and so, with a little reluctance, I assured him that a bed would be available for him in my guest room.

He retired long before I did, for I found it difficult to sleep at all after hearing about the so-called Marsh taint and how it connected with things written down centuries ago within the books my uncle had kept and adored.

Was Uncle Marsh looking for something within those books?

Was he looking for a cure to his condition, perhaps?

Whatever he had uncovered from the tome, it had caused him to calmly walk beneath the waves of the freezing Irish sea without so much as a second glance back at the life he once lived.

I do not know exactly what time I had fallen asleep on the couch, a half-empty glass of brandy still cradled in my hand, but I was aware of what had stirred me from the depths of my slumber.

It had been a crashing sound, like something heavy falling down, and it had greatly disturbed the silence of the house.

Blinking the fatigue from my eyes, I immediately thought of the doctor and imagined, aged as he was, that he had left his bed in the night to make use of the facilities and had fallen in the dark.

Dancing up the steps slightly, I found the door to my guest room open widely, and upon inspection found no occupant within.

Indeed, the bed looked like he had not been touched at all.

I continued my investigation.

finding no one in any of the upper rooms.

Hurrying back downstairs, I made for the kitchen and was greeted by a source of light emanating from under the door leading to the cellar.

Pausing as I touched the door handle, I took a moment to collect my thoughts.

Just what was the doctor doing down there?

I quietly opened the door and winced as it made a light creaking noise.

Whatever misdemeanor the doctor was performing within my home, I was eager to catch him at it red-handed and without excuse.

As I walked slowly down those rickety wooden stairs, I noticed that the light coming from the cellar was not from the bulb I had fitted, but instead from the far corner, that it was no ordinary light, but a curious green gold that bathed the various artifacts and boxes in a sick phantom glow.

The scene that greeted me was at once mesmerizing and terrifying, for the glow appeared to come from the mirror itself, which was lying flat upon the floor and not up against the wall as we had left it.

The light immediately began to wane as I drew closer until it finally extinguished altogether, causing me to retreat to the stairs and turn on the electric light.

As the orange bulb hummed into life, another scene invaded my senses and caused my heart to fly into a panic.

As bundled up against the wall before me, there lay the doctor.

His limbs stiff and his face frozen in an agonizing, bulging-eyed fright.

The doctor's lifeless hands were clawing at his own throat.

A strange smell, like that of the rotting debris found on the beach, penetrated the whole room.

With ultimate horror, I noticed a set of of wet, inhuman footprints leading from where the mirror lay to where the doctor had expired.

Carefully, I made my way down to the floor where the terrible prints lay.

The water that composed them was thick and gluey, and possessed an awful stench of the sea that made bile rise in my throat.

Suddenly, the mirror caught my eye, and I half fancied I saw the surface of it ripple like disturbed water.

As if something had just decided, as if something had just decided to spy upon me before quickly retreating.

I must have then fainted, for the whole room around me slowly disappeared in a cloud of gray and merciful oblivion, took me away from the cellar, Doctor's corpse, smell of rotting driftwood, and the odious presence of the mirror.

Oh, man,

that's so cool, Hunter.

The mirror, the mirror looked like water when it was on the ground, and there was something that surfaced in a killer.

There's a greasy thing.

I love when movies do that.

Makes me think of that great spot in

At the Mouth of Madness

with the John Carpenter movie where at the end, like the mirror, she puts her hand in it, it's like water, but they film basically like it's a black void of space, whatever.

It's really great.

We should play a little piece of it here, but it's so fucking good.

Such a great visual too.

Mirrors are so creepy.

The idea of something behind them is terrifying, right?

Yeah, of course.

Because they give the perception of space, even though nothing's there.

So to imagine that there is a space, it's just what we can't see.

It's like it plays on natural human like experience like I see things through there I know they're not real but what if they are real right like it's fine of course an investigation was carried out by the local constabular constabulary whom I had contacted as soon as my consciousness

whom I had contacted as soon as my consciousness had returned from whatever restful place it had been slumbering I was deeply worried that I would come under suspicion of foul play, but upon hearing that the doctor was paying me close to a million pounds for some antique books, a fortune I would no longer be getting due to a dispute with his estate that I later became embroiled in, I was cleared of any wrongdoing.

It was ruled that the doctor had suffered a heart attack and died of natural causes while looking around in the dank of my cellar.

For whatever reason, the police force decided to conjure up in their follow-up report.

I did not mention the mirror and lied when informing the police that the light of my cellar was on when I found the doctor's body.

In truth, I had returned the mirror mirror to its position, complete with covered sheet before I had called the police and had also taken the pieces of gold from his pockets.

I did this in order to deprive the police of a motive, but also because I simply had no desire for the mirror to come under anyone's scrutiny.

Had I told a single living soul about strange, glowing, and disgusting seaside stenches attached to the grisly scene in my cellar, I had little doubt I would have been carted away and given a new home at Byron House.

Thankfully, I still had plenty of time left before returning to work, so I was able to come to terms with the loss of my dreams and ambitions that the doctor's money would have afforded me.

It was particularly crushing to have had such a fortune laid before me, only to have it cruelly snatched away, seemingly by one of my uncle's possessions.

I'd purposefully kept a thought of the mirror and of those dread footprints far out of my mind, but try as I might, they returned again and again to me, mainly at night when lost in the abyssal embrace of hypnos.

Again and again, the grotesque pantomime played out in my dreams, occasionally with extra details that had either been omitted from the original memory due to shock or added anew from the depths of my disturbed imagination.

Sometimes the doctor was still on the cusp of life, sputtering out a blood-drenched warning and pointing at the mirror desperately in his last thrashing moments.

Other times I witnessed his body slowly being dragged into the mirror as its glass surface splashed and rippled like water.

Finally, one terrible night, I had seen what I thought to be a a huge flabby claw sinking back into the surface of the mirror with deliberate

lugubris.

What is that?

Is that

lubrious?

Lugubrius.

With deliberate lugubrious intent.

Lugubrious.

Lugubrious.

Lugubrious.

I've never heard that word in my life.

Lugubrious.

Lugubrious.

Lugubrious.

Lugubrious.

Lugubrious.

Lujubriagas.

Lujubriagas.

Okay, lugubrious is an adjective that means causing or marked by an atmosphere lacking in cheer.

Red bull.

Causing or marked by an atmosphere lacking in cheer.

Red bull.

Red bull.

Thank you.

It gives you wings.

Legubrious.

It gives you

lugubrious wings.

It gives you Luigi Brius wings.

It gives you

lugubrious monster.

This dream sickness soon became an invading presence in my life.

And even when the time came for me to return to work, I would often be so fatigued from the stress of my nightmares that I would finish work early or call in sick on the days after I had experienced a strange session of the feverish night.

haunted imaginings.

I consulted my family doctor who simply dismissed the dreams and prescribed me sleeping pills, which I soon discovered made my dreams more vivid, forcing me to discard them after just two nights.

Yeah, great time.

Desperate to starve off the midnight illusions that plagued my dreams, I took to consuming copious amounts of black coffee and spending my nights sat in my garden smoking cigarettes.

However, this dude did little to alleviate my condition, as the glowing stars looking down upon me took on a far more sinister meaning since my talk with the doctor, and I quickly grew fearful of their incessant twinkling.

This period of restlessness lasted for nearly a month month and resulted in me being fired from my job and losing what little human contact I had in my lonesome life.

It was an irregular visit from my mother, however, brought me out of my malaise and sharpened my focus once more.

I confided in her all those things that Dr.

Glass had told me on that fateful night and watched her face remain unchanged throughout the entire revelation.

Not so much a revelation for her, I felt.

Surprisingly, she said very little and simply made a comment while sipping a cup of tea in my garden.

Such things had been said about the Marsh family for years, as well as cursed Innsmouth from Witzar family came.

She did admit that she knew very little of our family's roots and had almost no contact with relatives.

She had practically raised herself, and it was my uncle who had cared for and spent most of his waking hours with their decrepit parents before they died.

She then casually reminded me that a marsh had bought my grandparents' house not long after I had been left it in my uncle's will, and I realized that I could perhaps alleviate myself of my uncle's possessions in the hopes it would calm my mind.

Quick visit to Mr.

Fisher, and I was furnished with the name Eli Marsh, some kind of distant cousin on my mother's side who had bought and moved into the rotting home my grandparents had dwelled within and to which my uncle was left when they passed away.

Not wishing to travel to Seascale on the chance that I would catch this relative at home, I instead sent a simple note detailing who I was, some details about Uncle Marsh's books, and a description of the mirror.

I asked if he knew any other details of our family's history that could help to shed some light on the strange occurrences that happened to Dr.

Glass and detailed the strange effects that the mirror had played out in my cellar that dreadful night.

In response to my inquiry, a sparse letter arrived asking me to come visit him at my grandparents' home at my earliest convenience.

I wasted little time in heeding the summons and boarded the train from the nearest station in Eastwish towards Eascale the next day.

At Elay's request, I had things of the water securely tucked away away in a briefcase along with many of my uncle's notes as I could carry.

The train's journey was pleasant enough, with changes over at Manchester Piccadilly and then Barrow in Furnace.

Despite the usual overcast weather of northwest England, the countryside was still an open beauty to behold, and I allowed myself a few hours to and I allowed myself a few hours of respite as I drank in the dark green essence of its untamed rolling hills and feral woodlands.

Eventually, the scenery gave way to the various villages and towns that precipitated the train's arrival in Seascale, and the greenery disappeared amidst the dull grey buildings and hotels of the seaside resort.

Eli had no intention of meeting me at the station, and had instead given me instructions to call upon him at any time of day at my grandparents' home.

He had expressed a dislike of the daylight, and I imagined that he too must be a victim of the sinister wasting disease that had afflicted my mother's parents in so gruesome a fashion.

I had intended to make more of a day for myself in town whilst visiting Eli, but the autumn clouds and light rain do little to vitalize the tourist hunger, and after a short, 30-minute stroll around and a lunch at one of the many seaside cafes, I instead decided to make my way straight to the house on Reeds Avenue and see exactly what light my distant cousin could shed upon the macabre conundrum that had made its way into my life.

Reeds Avenue was a street crowded by various bed and breakfast establishments and other tall, narrow buildings, nothing more than a simple row of heartless Edwardian constructions that overlooked the crumbling coastline and rolling sea.

I paused several times and overlooked the benches on my way, allowing myself to fantasize morbidly over my uncle's suicide and final moments.

That plump, naked, flabby body making its way to the water's edge with as much momentum as its master could muster, and then a simple wade out to sea until his body finally gave into the cold grip of the sea, sank beneath the water.

The wind around the coast was particularly ferocious, and it not only chilled me, but also carried upon it the seaside stenches of rotting crustaceans and slimy rocks, an aroma that caused my nighttime terrors to resurrect momentarily and persuade me to finally move along towards the home of Eli Marsh.

The house was sandwiched in between two beds and breakfasts, a tall three-story building painted in a washed-out white with a rusting iron fence crowning the outside.

Every single window visible was either boarded up or concealed with thick curtains.

It appeared that Eli was a man who valued his privacy.

Some simple stone steps led up to the red-painted front door, the only source of color found in the entire building.

This was somewhat offset by the peeling paint that revealed the dull, cracked brown beneath.

I was about to knock.

I noticed a piece of card on the ground, held in place by a bottle of milk that had most definitely soured.

Short message, or more accurately, an order, scribbled upon it in a poor but strangely familiar script.

Holding up the card, I opened the front door, which was unlocked as per the notes description, walked into the gloom of the narrow hallway.

Notes had to be written by the uncle, right?

That's what I think.

That's what I think.

Because he's been looking at the notes and stuff for so long that he's like, oh, it looks familiar.

The uncle might be alive.

Oh, the uncle is definitely alive.

I think that he emerged from the ocean, left that thing, and went back probably.

Yeah, yeah.

Like the outside, the interior of the home was much taller than it was wide, and the staircase presented before me appeared to lean oddly at the top, giving the illusion that the house was fatigued and resting upon its neighboring establishment for support.

It was difficult to see much in the dark of the hallway.

I tried to turn on the lights with a few flicks of the nearby switch, but to no avail.

A doorway to my right led into what must have been a downstairs living room, and I proceeded to investigate.

A bare wooden floor and not a scrap of furniture to be found.

This coupled with thick sheets that had been crudely nailed into the window frame and were doing a superb job of keeping out the feeble light, was all the living room had to offer.

I quickly established that this was not a home, it was a mausoleum.

I was about to enter another room leading off from the back of my current whereabouts, kitchen perhaps, when a series of loud sharp knocks startled me and immediately made me look upwards at the source of their location.

I will admit freely that this disturbed me greatly and I wondered if I had perhaps left reality behind and stumbled onto the pages of the apocryphal ghost story.

You were 100% right.

This reads exactly like Lovecraft.

Yeah.

Like the way things are described in moments and stuff.

100%.

Nail on the head with that one.

I froze like a rabbit confronted by the side of a predator and waited in silence to see what would happen next.

Again, the thumps pierced the silence I stood within, but this time I followed their source and stood at the bottom of the staircase, its thin, decayed carpet doing a poor job of concealing the dry rot beneath.

Whatever courage I summed up must have come from the realization that I was here to see a member of my own family, not some moaning spirit wrapped in chains.

I smiled to myself in an effort to banish away the fear that had coiled its way into my heart.

Surprisingly, the stairs made little noise as I ascended them as quickly as possible, jumping two steps with my stride until I arrived at the landing.

Several doors lay before me, but only one was open.

From the room within, I could hear a series of low wheezes and finally a sickly wet cough.

With more than a little reservation, I knocked and gently pushed the door inwards.

What greeted me was similar to the downstairs.

Bare floorboard underfoot and a covered up window frame.

Although, that was not all to be found.

Two chairs, large and crimson, covered in dust, have been placed in the center of the room.

And sitting in one of them was a shadowy bundle of rags, worn clothing,

and worn clothing that at second glance contained the body of a man.

It gestured towards the vacant chair opposite.

I reluctantly obeyed, placing my briefcase down, taking off my hat.

I could see very little underneath what I presumed to be my cousin's clothing.

Even his face was concealed with a scarf and a flat cap balanced ignobility upon his somewhat misshapen head.

Words issued forth from my host's mouth, impossible liquid words that were punctuated with wet coughs and struggled breaths.

There was movement beneath that scarf, but not the simple parting of lips, a series of movements from the neck area, restless movement of something opening and closing to the rhythm of his speech.

The only part of his body visible to me were the eyes, huge, bulging eyes that stared at me unblinking and with focused malice.

These bloodshot globes were not so much sat within his head as leaked out of their sockets.

Some unseen force keeping their jelly from outright streaming down his face.

Despite their obvious vulgarity, these repulsive, gelatinous fears were at once familiar and alien to me.

The martial look was obviously something I knew all too well, but to see it in such an advanced state and up close horrified me to my core.

It took me several moments to recognize the words that Eli was forcing out of his mouth.

The book.

He spoke, bandaged hands outstretched before me like a begging child.

I nodded and picked up my case, clicking it open and passing him things of the water along with my uncle's notes.

He produces a pencil and started to write on the back pages of my uncle's diary, checking over the tome for some kind of unspoken reference and occasionally looking up at me with his flowing frog-spawn eyes.

As he finished whatever notes he had written, he handed the books back to me and we both simultaneously jumped as another series of bangs issued forth from the room above ours.

He reached down to the side of his feet and produced a broom and lifted himself with great effort off the chair.

With the bare end, he then struck the ceiling in response.

I have fancied this some kind of coded message, but the series of strikes did not appear random, some kind of perverse hidden code.

When another set of bangs responded to this, the suspicion was confirmed.

Eli, seemingly satisfied with this, waddled back to his seat and slung his body back down in a way that was also somehow sickeningly familiar to me.

Leaning forward, far too close for my comfort, he

pointed upwards with his hand and gave a simple explanation.

I think I gave a nervous smile and a few words of sympathy, but I was far too transfixed upon the awful fish oil smell that secreted from his blood that secreted from his breath with every word.

Perhaps noticing my discomfort, he leaned backwards awkwardly into his seat.

Sit, cousin, sit.

Maybe a gentleman or a Walter Hels, even an Elliott might be able to tell you what is in store for you.

But you have me instead.

I bet you're curious as to why our family left Inn's mouth behind and came back to our ancestral home, aren't you?

Well, you have these books.

Books like these.

Things of the water to thank you for that.

Our great-granddaddy was a sorcerer, you see.

Oh.

And you may laugh at such a thing,

but I tell you, it's the truth.

A great sorcerer who could conjure up all manner of gods from the sky and the sea and have angels of Cthulhu answer his calls.

Others grew fearful of the power he had.

Other masters who had little power themselves and wanted this for themselves.

Only interested in paying service to Dagon or Hydra or any other god.

Glendaddy Marsh used the names of the great old ones himself, without any priest of Dagon present.

They forced him out, chased him and his deep one bride out of Insmouth along with their children, and forbid them to ever return.

Why didn't the Ord of Dagon have them killed?

Who knows?

Maybe they feared his power.

Maybe they thought old Dagon himself would come to collect his due or the traitor.

But it never happened.

Okay, so first of all,

you are an incredible voice actor.

Oh, thanks, man.

That entire time, I was like...

I just like went into a trance and I was like, I was looking at the fish man under the rags.

Oh, sick, man.

Yeah, I tried to get a gargly thing.

That was so stupidly good.

To follow up on that, how is it that you

have trouble reading a text message if you have to just read text?

But if you adopt a character's voice, you can read the cult and pragmaticians of Cthulhu and the granddaddy of Mark without a single break.

I don't know.

I think I was pretty immersed myself of a man.

You were so into it that you couldn't fathom saying a word wrong.

Okay, yeah, again, this story is awesome i love this but to clarify what was being said there so their family comes from a line of people who worshiped cthulhu right yeah obviously some kind of fish kind of people whatever that were practicing in some kind of religion and some people what seemed to be they were greedy and a sorcerer for sorcerer sorcerer but they were only worshiping certain gods and not Cthulhu as well or whatever.

So basically just Hydra and what, you know.

Others grew fearful of the power he he had other marshes who had a little power themselves and won this for themselves.

Not interested in paying service to Dagon or Hydra or any other god.

Granddaddy Marsh used the names of the old ones without any priest.

So I assume he was supposed to use a priest.

They forced him out, chased him and his deep one bride out of Vince's mouth.

So why did they have him killed?

Who knows?

Maybe they thought old Dagon himself would have come to collect his due on the traitor, but never happened.

So

That's where their family comes from.

And then you've got some more to go, so I'll shut up.

But yeah, okay, make sure I'm on the same page.

he paused momentarily to catch his breath and i watched as he struggled for several minutes before continuing his horrid mama

the mirror could be another reason

granddaddy had made the thing himself as a way to commune with the gods of the sea and to lock in on his family who had made the change and swam beneath the waters outside Innsmouth.

Who knows what the bargains he had made with the deep ones?

I reckon Zinsmouth folk and the order feared another uprising like the one in 1846 should they act against him and just let his and his kin be.

So the sea ski-so the sea scale he came where he kept his books and set his prayer spells today long and cthudo every hollow's mass and while purchase and carried on the Marsh's line

making new deals with the deep ones for the mere

bringing in other families to mix blood with them and the old sea devils

oh

and you'd be surprised by how many round these parts carry the blood of the deep ones in them and how many make the change and swim to the depths of the anthonal to dance and frolic with Dagon in the dark

I'll be making that

trip soon myself.

Me and my sister will walk down to the water and keep on walking.

Just like your uncle or daddy did those years ago.

I could see you looking more confused, cousin.

Did you think that Sebastian Marsh had no kin other than you and your mother?

He's a Marsh after all.

and had to take a mate among the deep ones just like we all do.

Just like your mother did

your mother was already carrying you

uh oh that's kind of sick your mother was already carrying you and her when she met that man calling himself your father on the beach all those years gone by

you'll change

just like i'm changing just like your uncle changed

Your mother doesn't seem to be making a change, but the blood of Day gone is stronger and I'll make us.

You just say those words I've wrote down in that book.

And you say them.

When and what it tells you to say them.

And you get those answers you seek.

That's fucking sick, though.

So his dad isn't even really his dad.

That's not his dad.

No, his mom took a father from the deep ones.

Yeah.

So that's also why, that's also, he's probably a bastard and he knows that he's going to figure out that he's not his kid.

That's why the dad's pissed.

Probably.

Okay, so here's the thing.

We've got the, um,

we have like

his family from Inn's mouth was a sorcerer that called upon these gods, right?

And then one time he did the ritual, one time his ancestors, great-grandfather, whatever, did the ritual wrong, was forced to run away, but he made bargains with the deep ones.

So it sounds like these bargains are that we will continue on your, your line, we'll continue on your people.

So they begin to have children with the deep ones,

make more kids for them, then eventually those children grow up and then return to the sea.

And it seems that's what's been happening to the family.

That's what happened to his uncle.

That's what happened to our narrator.

So, yeah, his mom knows all of this.

His mom

is, you know, had a child with one of the deep ones.

I think she wants him to, though.

You know, I think she wants him to turn.

I think that's another reason why, too, she was so like, oh, well, you're not going to sell them, are you?

Because inside of that book is the knowledge of how he can transform, you know, and

the spell can be completed to where he can return to the family.

I think that's important to her.

Well,

she also has to know that her son is half deep one, half like a well, exactly.

I think that she definitely knows.

Yeah, yeah, and there's also, I think that, or sorry to interrupt, I was gonna say, I think that

because men, it seems that men transform much faster than women.

So, what I'm guessing is more pronounced than the men, yeah.

Yeah, so what I'm guessing is she's like, oh, I need you to go because one day I'm going to join you whenever I'm fully changed as well.

Yeah, that's all like, man, what a the way

this is the kind of the thing across Lovecraft, but it's very well done in the story.

I'm forgetting that we're reading a creepypasta that was written last year and not like a Lovecraft story, right?

I just, this is this is the kind of flavor and shit I love, but like the uh, the phrasing there is so good.

Where it's like, uh, you'd be surprised how many around these parts carry the blood of the deep ones, how many make the change and swim to the depths of Yanthilly to dance and frolic with Dagon in the dark.

What a way to describe walking to the bottom of the ocean, you know?

Oh, yeah, dancing with Dagon in the dark goes so hard.

Also, too, just seaside towns, beach towns, especially this Irish water if they're in Ireland or wherever.

It's these things of like people re-entering their actual world from the beaches of like these landlocked towns and stuff.

Really fun for ocean-locked towns, whatever.

Do you think Sebastian Marsh had no kin other than you and your mother?

Uh

so that would be that would mean that Sebastian.

Sebastian had multiple kids is what I've seen.

Yeah, and he took, he had to take a deep one wife to have these kids.

Yeah, interesting.

Hunter, you're on a beach.

If fish girl comes up to you, would you do it?

Oh, 100%.

100%.

Oh.

If she looking tall and dark-haired and green-eyed, I'm not sure.

She'd be looking however, dude.

I'm telling you.

Wet and glistening, dude.

She's just coming out.

You know, she opens her mouth and there's all kinds of

eldrach sounds coming out.

I'm just like,

my ass is the literal first beginning beats.

I'm seeing that.

She's singing some kind of like hypnotic siren, right?

Whatever.

I'm thinking,

and I'm thinking, one, two, three, four, five, five.

Everybody in the classic bullets bat.

I'm just mambo number five the entire time.

I'm going to start dancing like I'm with Lou Bega, dude.

That's what I'm thinking.

I mean, you got, you got Ron.

You got me out there.

You got to start singing with me.

You're going to be like, oh, I bid farewell to the force and the lance.

And you're like, oh, yeah yeah

my bones in the ocean forever will be like you're just you're just going after that scaly that scaly oh man i'm trying to count them scales

i'm trying i'm trying to see i'm trying to see if those scales talk back you know

i'm playing tic-tac-toe on those things he's right i'm doing some morse code i'm pushing some buttons hey we're pushing buttons again is what we're doing We're flipping switches, pushing them.

Whatever they got going on,

we're going to figure this out.

We're going to crack the code.

Start speaking Cthulhu by the end of it.

Oh, shit.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm going to be rolling R's and all kinds of stuff, dude.

It's going to be unbelievable.

I'm going to be rolling.

Okay.

Anyway.

He said nothing more, and I waited for several minutes just in case fatigue had caused him to pause for breath.

He did not say anything more on the matter.

Perhaps knowing that what he had added to the diary was all I truly needed to know.

As I pondered the last few months of my life, a series of horrid realizations began to creep over me and I suddenly wished to be outside, away from the bundled menace before me.

I managed to muster enough will to lift myself off the chair and pick up my belongings.

He watched my every movement as I backed my way towards the door.

As I slowly exited the room and began to descend the narrow staircase, one final sentence barked out at me from the obnoxious, fish-stenched room and chilled me.

Marsh blood is thick in your veins, cousin, and you best prepare yourself for the change.

These last words were met with more wheezing and coughing, but also a guttural and mocking laugh.

And by the time I regained my senses, I was outside the house and underneath the gray clouds once more.

I staggered back to the train station like a piece of debris caught in the breeze, and once the train was in full gallop back to Barton, summed up the courage to look over the additions Eli had made to the diary.

The instructions were clear, but also baffling.

A ritual of sorts.

I hoped, perhaps vainly, that following through on my cousin's scribblings would grant me some measure of peace and closure.

Upon returning home, I started to make the necessary preparations for unearthing the truth about the marsh look, gathering the notes and formula outlined in Eli's notes.

I had no wish to visit the gunner's cloth, to walk beneath the witch elms as the silver light of the full moon bathed all around me in a chilling glow, but I didn't.

I had no desire either to stumble or struggle through the mud and filth of the woodland on all Hollows Eve in the direction of my uncle's home, but this too I did.

I had made all the preparations as instructed to me by Eli Marsh, whose handwriting had been so oddly similar to my uncle's.

The mirror, Dagon's mirror, had been removed from my cellar and once again brought back to the crumbling cottage, placed on the floor of the large room just as it had been on that dreadful night that still haunted my dreams.

The significance of the moon and date had been clearly set down for me.

Although I had the option of waiting for Alpurgus night in April to work the old magic of Insmouth, I simply could not wait that long for the truth.

It had to be tonight.

The moonlight was strong enough to illuminate my path to the cottage, but regardless, I brought along my torch and supplemented Luna's gaze with my own feeble cone of light.

Through the blackness I shambled, making no effort to conceal my coming from the various woodland beasts who hunted during the hour of the wolf and beyond.

I half-fancied all manner of specters and phantoms awaiting me in the woods, ghosts of little Maggie Hagen and Jamie Birdle, along with every other miserable soul claimed by the cloth formed before my vision, dancing in and out of my sight among the trees.

Suddenly the cottage came into view, a leaning, rotting husk that looked more like a disused garden shed than an actual home.

Surrounded by leaning witch elms and sitting in a circle of black, blasted earth, my uncle's home stood in defiance of the repugnant nature that desperately sought to reclaim the wooden structure.

It was crowned with strange, diseased orange fungus and furry rugs of crawling moss.

Insects gathered all around the cottage, feeding with indignity upon the fleshy pulp of the clinging mushrooms, occasionally pulling themselves away to dance frantically with the illuminated cone of my torch.

The entrance to the sagging structure was not barred, and I entered into the main room of the cottage and was immediately greeted by the golden mirror laying flat upon the decomposed floorboards.

Above, a crude skylight had been fitted into the flat roof.

I say skylight, but it was nothing more than a trap door that had opened readily and eagerly once the single rusted iron bolt that held it in place had been relieved from duty.

The ceiling door swung open, creaking like a walking corpse, and eventually came to a rest rest after swaying for a few seconds.

A wash of moonlight came streaming through the opening and hit the mirror's surface.

Rather than reflect off the glass, the light instead beamed directly into the mirror, drawn into it by some unseen force that then expanded the light, illuminating the whole cottage so much that my torch lay forgotten on the ground by my feet.

I dropped to my knees in horrid awe and unconsciously crawled closer and closer to the mirror's glowing edge.

Once more, the terrible forms of Father Dagon, Mother Hydra, carved in gold and glaring menacingly in my direction, came into view and I hesitated slightly before finally resting my gaze upon the vision that had patiently been waiting for me.

A vision hinted at by Dr.

Glass and my cousin, a terrible legacy that even now must be swimming through my veins and transmuting my form with languid but irreversible taint.

Had this been what Jamie Byrdle had stumbled upon all those years ago?

Had he seen the truth of Uncle Marsh's heritage and as a result suffered a mental shutdown caused by his feeble lizard brain rebuking the awful reality of the marsh look?

It is difficult for me to write down exactly what I saw in the mirror that night.

For the sake of all humanity and for those who will come after, I will try.

Now that is Lovecraft.

That's all right.

I do not know if I can describe it, but I'm about to describe it.

This is totally indescribable, but here's a description.

It's incomprehensible horror was actually quite comprehensible.

Here's a detailed analysis point by point started at the beginning of it.

By the time anyone finds and reads this, I will no longer be a resident of Barden.

I'll be changed and at home among the browny depths and salt-soaked stones of the deepest gulfs of horror imaginable.

Oh,

huh?

For I kneel perplexed, transfixed at the same.

Man,

is this just a Lovecraft story?

Just to read it.

Yeah,

I mean, to be fair, he's like, this is, he's definitely taking language and stuff, and this is all textbook Lovecraft.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah.

For I kneeled perplexed, transfixed at the scene playing out before me in the ocean grotto where the fish things frolicked and swayed amid cyclopean ruins.

Dancing blindly and madly to a silent alien beat, the fungoid flabby creatures prostrated themselves before the eroded edifices of Father Dagon and Mother Hydra and to the colossal statue of Lord Cthulhu that towered over the whole sickly affair.

Except the statue was not a statue.

It was alive and moving, overseeing its bane subjects into their chaotic worship, a tentacular titan, pleased with the spectacle around it.

They danced and copulated and tore each other to pieces as the assembly reached such hideous heights of frenzy that I was sure I would be sucked through the mirror and into the icy salt water.

of Yenthali.

But this disgusting pantomime being played out before my senses paled in horror compared to the realization that one of the creatures possessed a visage so familiar to me that I mercifully passed out as my mind recalled its likeness.

For the newest addition to the throng of the fish things were the face of my uncle Sebastian Marsh.

He had sought the embrace of the Irish Sea, not in order to end his life, but instead to take his place among the deep ones, as all men who bear the Marsh name must one day do.

That is Dagon's Mirror!

Awesome.

I, you know, this is the thing.

Dagon's Mirror is a complete and total love letter to Lovecraft.

I mean, this could be Lovecraft.

This could be Lovecraft himself.

I mean, this already reads a lot like, you know, even Shadows Over End's Mouth or like, you know, Call of Cthulhu, all that kind of stuff.

But I do think it's fun.

That's the, but the thing, if you know anything about Lovecraft, is that

the Necronomicon and, you know, these things that he, the Cthulhu universe, it's all like him and his buddies writing this.

And it's like collaborating in ways of people, it's showing up in other people's work and stuff.

So to see this is something that's like, it's cool because it adds to that tradition of adding on to the universe and like the kind of lore that is the like open-ended nature of love of Cthulhu, you know?

And

the reason that I love Lovecraftian and HP Lovescraft stuff so much too is that, which I think Nick Lowe does really well, is

this story could have been 10 minutes long, realistically.

It's like it could be way, way punchier, way more to the point, but it's all about the

like almost nauseating sense of like flavorful, sweet verbiage that gets added into describing very minuscule things that makes the story so rich.

Like it works very well in these day gone things where things are kind of sickly and they're so unimaginable, you know, and that's kind of the meme too.

They're unimaginable, but he's helping you imagine what it would be you know in some weird way so all these towns which even the town itself or you know going back to his uh uncle's house they almost feel like ruins in the ocean as well right they're all dilapidated they're worthless landlocked buildings that don't have any love because they're like why would i give a fuck about upkeeping this place you know they but even the fungus growing on them is almost like moss in the ocean growing on something it's really nice and one thing i love too just for my own personal taste i just love

just like artifacts, relics, things that are cursed or totally, you know, in this case, the mirror and that, you know, things that you see back and it like just reflects back in some weird way or drives you mad.

They're so incomprehensible.

The madness just takes your mind immediately, I think is just awesome.

And I love this shit.

But I can see how people would be like, it was just grading, like the, it's too wordy.

You know, I think that there's, it's very,

I feel like it's very divisive or decisive i mean if someone does not like this i don't want to talk to them i mean i get it if people are like i just it's it's so and also too lovecraftian stuff can be i wouldn't say one note isn't it but that's just like it's my favorite note you know i love it that was so fun

like yeah sure it's not like there were super deep character arcs and there wasn't like a ton of like ties and lows and stuff but lovecraft's original stuff isn't that way it's about the theme it's about the concept What I love about Lovecraft so much is most of his horror comes from the insurmountableness of it, that there is an entity that we can't even hope to understand, much less beat, right?

And this entire story, Dagon's Mirror, is about a guy discovering that one day he will become this monster and go to...

He is...

all from the day he was born he was set to walk into the ocean and become a part of this this ritual of darkness right and he sees it before it happens and he is powerless to stop it that is where the horror of it comes from.

And it's everything that is pushing him in that direction that proves fighting against it's

fruitless.

That's where a lot of Lovecraft's horror comes from.

And I think this story did a great job encapsulating that.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that a story about basically it's

following in your family's footsteps is...

undeniable.

Like it's on,

you can't escape it.

It's much like the movie Hereditary.

It's like you're kind of, it feels almost at times your life is already pre-planned, you know, everything that's happened, which is just kind of horrifying within itself but even he has no i think that one thing i like too is that our main character didn't he doesn't really try to fight it he's just kind of like it is what it is you know i think he understands that which is nice but i do like that nick low here because one thing lovecraft is too is i would say more often than not a short story writer and it's and it's nice i'm glad that it's like In the year 2024, that there's a guy still writing like a homage short story piece that would feel something similar that maybe Lovecraft would have written in the 30s or whatever.

Really, really fun.

I mean, I just love this shit.

It's up my, it's like everything I love.

Recommendations movie-wise, if you guys haven't seen any of Stuart Gordon's shit, like Reanimator, fucking, you know, from beyond, even they have a Dagon movie.

It's horrible, it's so cheesy, but I love it so much.

It's great.

Tons of fish people, if you like that, and even like movies like The Void

and that kind of stuff, there's so much great

influenced so much of media and like not even just storytelling music all kinds of shit it's it's uh really really cool so uh big big two thumbs up for me i had a great time with this one i'll also say this i went to nickelo's creepypasta and his two other story shamblers in the attic and the house of dead gods are both set in the town of barton okay

so it's all like tied into each other's story sure so that we all have to read those someday Yeah, well, we need to read those, I think.

If y'all like this at all, I think we need to read those.

I love that story.

It was awesome.

It caught the vibe of Lovecraft so well for me.

And I love that kind of horror.

And I think it's so fun.

It's so well done.

It's like a modern mythology.

It's great.

Yeah.

Well,

it's more modern fairy tales.

Like, that's really

a lot of the time that's what, you know, you really hit the nail on the head earlier, I think, by saying that it reads like a grim fairy tale because it is.

And even like, it reads a little bit like Edgar Allan Poe's stuff, too.

You know, that kind of like very grim, dark.

Well, that's really, that's really like the

early, yeah, gothic, exactly.

That's really like the earliest versions of Gothic or like macabre literature.

It was taking like the tones and like themes of fairy tales and then making them morbid.

And that's what like Lovecraft did for a large part.

But then he gives it this bigger mythos and lore and stuff and the old ones.

And it's like such a, it's, I mean, it is what cosmic horror is, right?

That's where it comes from.

Yeah.

And I mean, even looking at Edgar Allan Poe, which Lovecraft was heavily inspired by, Edgar Allan Poe and Lovecraft, it's kind of funny.

It's like, this is going to sound so cringe, but it's like, it's so cringe to say, say, but they were doing like

essentially what online horror stories are doing now.

Like they were the little bite-sized things that you would read and get scared in in public for like public

magazines or papers and stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like stuff like that, to where it's just interesting.

It's like history repeats itself in such a fun way.

And it's cool that the Cthulhu mythos and just the vibe of this unknown thing that even today, after, you know, 100 years later, the ocean is still so horrifying.

Such a fun

way to adapt.

and so gosh

it's just such a thing where i feel like it's it's so evergreen it'll stand the test of time more than a lot of stuff so huge huge shout out nick low really fucking love this one man for real i can't wait till read the other stuff i i was totally hooked sorry for my lack of commentary on this episode too man i was just so no no i mean i was i was i was hooked into it i was i was clocked in for that one yeah that was great once we got going on it it really got going that was great yeah i loved it well cool well guys thank you so much if you've like once as always if you or once again if you haven't been listening audio-wise on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, please consider checking us out there.

It really does help us out and give us a nice rating.

It means the world.

Until next time, y'all, stay creeped.

Stay creeped.

And if you find out that you have to be a fish person at the bottom of the ocean with Cthulhu forever, that sucks.

But hey, if you see a girl wash up on the beach, who's a fish person?

Okay, bye.