The Chamber (Regis Harker)

Diary of Regis Harker					7/23/1933
The Chamber

I’m writing this entry to capture my deteriorating mental state. For the first twenty-five years of my life, I could have been considered normal, save for my extreme distaste of the sea. Born and raised in the port town of Gentle Maw, Maine, the very air I breathed felt putrid. As a result, I spent most of my days in the town library. Pages soaked and dried from years of sticky, salty air offered little olfactory escape, but managed to whisk my mind to distant lands. For years the towering mountains and endless plains contained in the leatherbound tomes became my refuge. I worked my way through the shelves until I had exhausted their reserves. It was a few months after my twenty-fifth birthday that I found the chamber. I had observed the ancient door in my prior years, but my attempts to open it had been futile. I assumed the ages of humid air had warped the wood and rusted the black-iron fittings. Now I think the door had been deliberately sealed.
	The shelves grew thinner, the books sparser down the windowless hall. As I approached the door I felt a certain unease I hadn’t on previous attempts. I intrepidly pushed against the oaken barrier, noticing a black key resting in it’s appropriate fitting.  The old wood groaned as it pushed through, revealing to me a rounded chamber, lined with shelves stuffed with varying but singularly perplexing tomes. The smell of the room too filled my eyes and nose, a stench somehow more vile than the small bay used to dispose of carcasses from the fishery.  I almost turned back immediately, but I allowed my nose to adjust when I saw the peculiar nature of publications. Walking along the shelves, I noticed books bound in odd leathers, and even some bound in scaly flesh.  Incredibly, some spines were moist to the touch, as if ripped straight from the ocean, yet their insides were perfectly preserved against the briny air. The contents of many of these books would haunt me for years to come.
	Many of the volumes were in hieroglyphic languages unknown to me. Others seemed to be fictional encyclopedias, depicting some madman’s ideas of things that live in the ocean’s depths.  Gigantic squid and crustaceans, multi-headed fish, sharks with too many teeth to fit in their mouth, and otherworldly, tentacled beasts filled the pages, all in elaborate illustration.
	One entry even depicted a sort of man-fish hybrid, said to live beneath the waves in abyssal cities. These creatures were supposedly immortal, only dying from violence. Furthermore, the entry suggested that the beasts could not breed among themselves, but instead mated with the inhabitants of coastal cities. Their offspring would begin life apparently human, but as they approached middle-age, would transform into hideous creatures of the deep.  Dark pacts were arranged between leaders, and women were offered in exchange for bountiful fishing and bizarre golden artifacts. Reading of such things made my skin crawl and my heart race. That feeling became an addiction.
	I spent the better part of the next four years inside that chamber. The bizarre worlds and creatures described inside both terrified and delighted me. I would read well into the dawn, illuminated only by small candles and by streaks of moonlight that penetrated the lone window.  Attempts to return to saner literature brought only disappointment.  The airy peaks and green pastures that were once my refuge now seemed boring and unengaging compared to the outlandish locales from the grim tomes. Cities like Skhar-N’huth, carved of solid obsidian deep within a mountain, home to vicious rat-like beings biding their time to one day claim the surface as their own.
	As I read more over the years, the beings in these texts seemed to manifest themselves in my reality.  Until recently I wasn’t sure if this was simply my imagination taking over, or if my eyes had been opened to a more sinister dimension.  I recall one night in particular that still chills me. I sat alone in the chamber, as per usual, studying one of the scaly grimoires beneath the window.  As I peered out to the coast I squinted and rubbed my deceitful eyes, for what I saw could not be real.
	Shadowy figures emerged from the waters, slovenly working their way towards the town. Things that looked of men, but without necks nor human hands. Some seemed to have orbs of light suspended in front of their faces which pulsated gently, granting visions of sunken eyes and monstrous mouths. At first chilled by these sights, I resolved to return to my reading, convinced these phantoms were figments of my troubled and tired mind. It was an hour later that I heard a distant, nightmarish scream from the center of town. This too I dismissed, as the sound was too ghastly to have been uttered by any earthly thing. I assured myself that such things were not of this world, and existed only within my ego. Today, I am not so sure.
	Over the years my body seemed to adapt  in peculiar ways to my new habitat.  My vision in the dark had increased significantly, my eyes growing slightly larger each year. My neck began to gain slight folds, something I attributed to my extremely sedentary lifestyle and poor diet. Oddly, I began to find the smell much less disturbing after a while, and even my walks near the ocean filled me with less and less dread each night. Sometimes I would find myself lost in thought, staring out over the waves as moonlight danced across their crests.  My dreams at night were filled with visions of cities beneath the waves, and instead of terrifying me, provided comfort.
This all brings me to tonight.  I, at thirty years of age, am not the man I once was.  Nothing brings meaning to me these days, save for my long walks along the beach. No longer do I fear the sea, nor become ill at it’s pungent smell.  Rather, I gain bouts of pure ecstasy should the air be sticky and salty enough.  I am not sure what manner of thing I have become, but I have my suspicions. I worry that this curse may have been present all along, waiting inside like the rat-things of Skhar-N’huth, now ready to claim me.
	Something calls to me from beneath the waves, and I intend to answer.  It’s siren song pulls me at my very core, and I can hardly read a word without drifting in thought, dreaming of what wonders await me. I leave this final entry, in the hopes that one day it is found by another inside the chamber. I plan to leave this earthen realm for an aquatic one, and I have no intention of returning.
	The sea has never looked so inviting.