The Old Blog in the Desert

His note, found on the front seat of his Tesla 300, explained silently, “Whatever this eldritch thing is, I dared not speak its name into the air, for to do so, I would have brought the beast upon humanity.” It would prove to be part of the last missive undertaken by the portly, middle-aged University professor, whose course of study being that of Mesoamerica mythology.

Avery Pierce sat comfortably in his cloth and wood-framed lounge chair under his umbrella as it shielded his pallid skin from the burning orb floating many millions of miles above the earth’s sphere and shining directly onto and across the lake, they nicknamed ‘The Jewel of the Sierra,’ in which he thereby rested. He checked his cellphone as it laid atop his red-and-white ice chest; not yet noon and he’d beaten all sun-worshipers to the strip of sand that he thus occupied.

He closed his eyes and relaxed, allowing himself a few minutes to meditatively relax in the warmth of the day. But then a chill overtook his countenance and he opened his eyes to a frightful sight; the once blue and clear skies had altered and were now dark, as if an inky shadow had been cast over all.

Avery Pierce watched in horror as the lake before him filled with what he could only assess as tar. And as the ground shuddered beneath him, he concluded that he was witness to an earthquake of an unknown magnitude.

The foul stench that emanated from the dark mound forming before him caused him to wretch violently. It seems to come upon him in waves, ever stronger and with a great winded-force that he found himself unable to avoid taking in, leaving him utterly weak and teary-eyed.

The once crystalline water before him had turned to a hideous, debauched stew of shattered bones of all shapes and sizes, oozing flesh that appeared melted and bottom dwelling plants in full gaseous decay. He finally stood, as from the nearest center of this mass rose a singular monolith of shiny marble stone.

Avery Pierce moved closer to where the water had at one time been the lake’s shoreline and gazed upon the elevated structure. Fascinated, he grew bold and picking his way across the rotted detritus, stood before the ancient and worn obelisk and its abhorrent cyclopean monolith perched upon its pentacle, attempting to decipher the pictographs, crudely carved into its four sides.

On it shown shapes of known water dwellers, beginning at the bottom, with each form above those, becoming more and more hideous in design. Then he came upon the unbelievable — man-fish, large-eyed and bipedal, followed by a dual-legged, humanoid and winged, and half-cephalopod, half-reptilian creature that defied all manner of common description — and that face — too macabre to describe!

As he studied these grotesques, he became suddenly and acutely aware that he may not be alone as behind him, in the greater reaches of the depth, far beyond where the earth first percolated the appalling pasticcio, he heard the sloppy movements of a thing behind him. There, growing ever closer, crawled a feeler, dragging and lunging its way across the foulness, towards the very thing he studied.

Then he saw its massive head with a face that brought an instantaneous cold sweat to the man’s body and he slowly backed away. But it was too late, it had seen Avery Piece, as he had seen it ,and when their eyes — if one could truly say the beastly thing held eyes — he knew he must hasten an escape or died a frightful death, dragged beneath the water’s surface.

And that ghastly face!

How much further than his car had the Professor retreated, no one could tell. It was there that he had jotted down in his chicken-scratch penmanship the words he last wrote, adding “But, too late I have learned that it can read a man’s empty mind and therefore I should have never thought the name ‘Zaa-q’ran.’ This admonition comes too late as I’ve summoned her, albeit accidentally from where it resides. Forgive me!”

How much farther Avery Pierce made it beyond his still parked and now abandoned car is anyone’s guess and no one knows to this day, as he remains a missing person. And no sign of this being, this thing he called ‘Zaa-q’ran,’ has ever been found.