Small horror story in h.p lovecraft style

the most painful things in life are ones we least expect, like river khonlin that runs as a creek in the upper hills of green forrest , slowly sipping into the ground and continuing its life as the part of underwater ocean ,until it tears the ground and turns into a unstoppable torrent of moving liquid right around the great canyon of mir and turns right to the mot!r region of hudson valley ,where the titular river that gives the region the name starts and continues to run next to kaolin , a stark contrast to any who see motr the muddy river , which in hay day of demoniac and unreligious lives natives lead was also called the black river or the dark spew , while khonlin was called the light sister , or the bright one. But the name of the river meant nothing to the horror that accused there in 1911 , at that time i was just a young reporter working for the new bridge press ,seeing some bloodshed in the war and on the streets of new york made me think that i was ready for anything that life could throw at me , no matter the weather .But how wrong was I when i got to the place where the horror was found near the place where two sister rivers almost kiss , was the place where well what horror sprang to exist? was found?was brought ?

a ditch that wouldn’t stop leaking black blood from the ground , twenty bodies were taken out of it , twenty from a ditch of size that in my head would have only fitted two persons if those two were as lanky as the willows that found a home on the same shore as the horror and even some how to my eyes showed shame for where they grew .

As my old time accountant doctor James batterly would later tell me ,with blood red eyes as we got as far from the vesinity of the horror as half hour drive could bring us , to the town of bolton ,after five hours of silence , “Hobbs what we found there , that was something that would have made the bloody ripper of London shudder , twenty people , stacked into a hole of 2m on 0.5m , thats physically impossible to do , twenty people not all grown man ,but that that isn’t a thing i want to see again , but even stranger my friend are the bites !” . well that puzzled me for i saw some of the mangled remains , with half of there faces bitten off , they were wolf bites or of some dog, without giving me time to respond James continued a mad rambling

“they were precise to precise almost a pattern of bites that repeated its self all over the copses , only on side of the face missing the same one on all of them , and the torn parts they were only organs and body parts that have symmetric analogs in human body .Im telling you that scares me no animal would do that and no animal is capable of slaughtering a bunch of villagers and putting them like that ,nor a human is possible of that no matter how cold blooded he or she might be this shit would make even that psychotic son of a gun H.H Holmes shudder in his underclothes and crawl back into his horror show hotel.

and hobbs you won’t believe me but all of them all of the bodies are from one family , i can swear on the grave of my father that resemblance it doesn’t come from inbriding even in this remote place , i can see that , and horror i saw it in there eyes more in each eye they had remaining when we pulled them out they saw something horrible , what ever they saw it makes all of things me and you saw on the battlefield feel like child play to what this poor fated folk saw , trust me hobbs , what i saw won’t leave me ,It just can’t , shouldn’t whatever did this its out there.And nobody cares you know what the local sheriff is gonna say as good as me , animal attack , no other medical expert or someone with even slightest clue of what was wrong with this bodies wants to think of it , smart people I’m telling you , they will go home and kiss there wifes and children , i won’t not now ,not until i know that unantural thing is gone ,even if it takes me out as well.Better to die like that than to live in dread of things capable of what we saw there “ .after telling me this in half craze the normally calm man stumbled out of the bar and went to his room , but even then i saw that he was shacking from within , I was too but i didn’t examine the bodies i didn’t look into the eyes of half eaten children and find a abyss of unknown darkness lurking in them , and I knew that as a friend I had to help him for when a man like James batterly , a calm man who would just leave it be if it could be handled without his help ,started shacking like a mad man swearing the vengeance to the unspeakable horror that leaving him alone was like giving him a death sentence.So therefor on the next day i set out to find some information about who those corpses used to be , as james said they were a family, so all i had to do was find a missing family of twenty easy thing to do , at least on paper , not as easy when you realize that people in this region would rather not have contact with one another , that coming from some superstition that some folk in this region still practice witchcraft ,foolishness you hear from a rural folk still stuck in the 18th century. After two day search for a missing huddle of villagers all i found was some rumor that for three days there were no lights seen in the Holingers household and that no one of 23 member family almost a mountain clan , was seen not that strange for such families but still one that bedazzled me but that wasn’t only concern for me for the once portly friend of mine james was burning down he didn’t joke when he said he wouldn’t stop until he saw the end to this . I saw him sleep during our stay in bolton for only a hour or so before he woke up with a scream that brought terror to the whole floor in our small hotel , not a scream but a howling of mad animal hurt in a way that can’t be explained in any words i know of .

Knowing that if try to lay this off even for one more day my companion would truly lose anything he had left of sanity , we set of to the place we were told the holingers occupied , knowing how some of people living heard saw outsiders i brought a shotgun with me and let james carry the two lighters for a while so he could busy himself and stop convulsing each moment he closed his eyes , I was guessing he saw the same horror over and over again the blood that wouldn’t stop gushing from a open wound from the ground that abonamable ditch .

and those eyes he kept on discarding at nights , when we drank in the morning when he refilled his system with more coffee and air , man was wearing thin just like what was left of his sanity .

after walking for couple hours we approached the damnable household ,not a thing we expected for it looked more like a palace that fell into disrepair than anything of mountain folks huddles found in similar region in the Arkham . as we got even closer to the place i peculiarly strange thing stood before two of us a small Stonehenge one i saw by my eyes seven years earlier after the war , and damned be I if it was anything a bloody Stonehenge in Hudson , but different instead of sleight monolithic stone it had carvings of more nordic origins and a small puddle of black liquids , on even closer observation a horrific thing came to my eyes the stones and a small alter were all stained with red , red blood . old and new stains mixing creating a history of some unnatural right that occurred here days before , but for all the blood that must have been spilled in this ungodly place there was a strange thing , me and james couldn’t find any trace of bodies something we expected but not in this way , a house torn down ,half destroyed but not a altar ,with stains of blood . But the mystery still remained what brought 20 bodies to the place where to sister rivers meet or what happened to 3 missing member of the damned family , as

everything that we saw ran into the mind of my companion i saw a spark of unnatural pain in his eyes , as he cried out “such fools what have they brought “ , followed by silence and three words “see the house” . taking one of the lantern james carried i went into the empty home , where i found a picture even stranger all of the rooms each and every covered in writings that flowed from one hand to another , the elegant way some of elders wrote in mixing with the childish hand writing ,and back and forth what we saw wasn’t a thing that was done in a night the writings were old at parts and brand new in other as if this was some ritual this strange family of holingers carried out each year or every day of there breathing lives , from the first room me and james saw a pattern , not a pattern but a word which kept on repeating

,a word I’ve heard before a name of something someone once said ,something that james said once before on that first night after the horror it was the thing he howled out “Alyth-kolter “ , when i finally realized that i ran to the place where james wondered to just to find him with a small knife carving out almost the same words that were written all over the damned place , he was trembling but sanity there was more of that in him than in days before , thru tears he said “please go , leave me here , i know what they did , or tried to, now i know ,they didn’t call that beast on us but kept it away this whole place its a ward against it the beast ,now things fall into place , they didn’t call it up its been here long before them ,they just kept it away “ . In half daze I asked him why was he so sure about this , for which he replied “hobbs don’t you know i came from here not a holinger thats right but I’m local as much as a civilized person can be I heard stories of things that lurked here when i was young before the dispute between my family and all the others ,holingers were a name i heard once in my grandmas story a thing about how a family from the mud river came to live on the mountain side of the khonlin shore ,and of the monster they brought . All of that resurfacing when i found this notebook waving toward me a small notebook all red , a dairy of some kinds . “its just a dairy of a small girl you know one we found , in that dismal ditch it tells the story of what she was doing almost everyday renewing the ward , against that beast until that day everything was going fine but as everyone that lives here the river motr called and three of her brothers couldn’t resist not anymore , the darkness in the hearts of man called them and they went to it , destroying one of the wards without even realizing killing all of them all of there family , that small girl she stopped the horror from spreading you know how i know that , the last words in the dairy “. I didn’t let him say the word for i already knew it “Alyth-kolter” a word that brought a shrill coldness to my bones and made my heart stutter .

eventho i didn’t knew the meaning behind it , I knew it was ancient and powerful enough to make the nature kneel before it .

I stood there in silence for more than ten minutes like a stone statue , like those monolithic stones of the alter that stood outside in this cold midnight. Before James roared with terrible scream “get out i can’t hold it back for long , i have to do this i have to end this , seeing in my eyes that i wasn’t about to move he did a thing that made the blood rush back into my brain , without a glance at me ,without stopping writing on those walls , he kicked the lantern and set fire to the home , we were in , the solid structure made of wood , was in flames in seconds cutting james way out of the place , and not giving me a chance to do anything but to run , and watch from the outside how the holing mansion burned down, but before the second floor on which me and james talked for the last time , burned down completely a howl that i remember till this day shout out of it , sending cracks into the blood stained monolithic alter . after that all is a blur to me even know after twenty years I can’t truly talk about that night without feeling the dread swell over me for the beast i saw that day couldn’t be defeated by weapons of war but only by thing rarly found devotion and belief that they could stop that unavoidable darkness. For didn’t holinger household sacrifice countless generations in hope of saving souls that cursed them and didnt my friend james batterly , who it turned out to be a Ashsmith from maternal side , a household that was once proclaimed to be the wicked decendents of the witches just as holingers were .

Now after so much time things make more sense and more i wish to never hear of a horror of khonlin shore , for I’m afraid that if the beast which name translates from old elrin to the watcher in the dark returns , he shall come after me , for now i too know how to slay him and be i damned if i let that unnamable thing do what it did to my friend and to that lot of rural folk in 1911 ,again.

“Alyth-kolter”