The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales by Mark Samuels Read Free Book Online Page B

He looked left and right over the shoulders of the other readers between whom he sat and saw that the volumes they were consulting were written in Thyxxolqus. The language had spread into the books, transforming the texts, working its way like a virus through them all.
    Barclay turned to the section of the De Quincey tome containing the article “Voices from the Grave” and read the following passage:
     
    Of the origins of language itself we can give no authoritative account, for speech predates writing and is lost in the period antediluvian. The academies are silent on the matter. And yet, is not language the most incredible aspect of humanity? Is it not the most suggestive of a great mystery? The written forms of antiquity do not suffer in comparison with modernity. They are in no wise inferior, even unto the earliest. They sprang, fully formed and with equal complexity, from the mysterious source whereof I assert. Words then, savour of the ineffable, and are proof that this cosmos is not easily explained. In this instance we, all benighted, continually regard what is miraculous as merely commonplace by virtue of its extreme familiarity.
    Language is the foundation of reality. Without it we would, like the beasts, exist wholly in a world of sensation. We should not be articulate, but cast adrift from the essence of creation, and unable to fathom its infinite depths. And in considering this matter, I cannot refrain from expressing a philosophic speculation that has arisen from out of gazing into that abyss. In what language do the dead converse? Are they freed from the multitude of tongues to which the living are shackled? Do they speak a language (let us call it Txxyollqus) whose meaning contains all possible meanings since their mode of being is outside space and time?
     
    Barclay finished the sentence and closed the book. He left the reading room and went outside in order to gurgle and spit some water from one of the loo washbasins. His mouth was suddenly suffused with a coppery taste.
    The sound of conversation amongst people milling around in the first floor area was in stark contrast to the silence of the reading room. He caught snatches of talk as people passed by and was astonished to find that he could now understand every word perfectly. Moreover, they were conversing of matters fantastically complex and yet rendered lucid by the words they used. Barclay delighted in the awful play of meanings within meanings revealed. He pulled open the door to the men’s loo, turned a corner and came face to face with his reflection in a mirror above the washbasins. His mouth, unsurprisingly, was now quite as deformed as everyone else’s.
    He had left the book by De Quincey at the desk and could not wait to return to it. He would sit all day in the library staring at it, if need be, until such time as its text was rendered into Thyxxolqus and yielded up even greater revelations.

 
    The Black Mould
     
    The mould first appeared in a crater on a dead world at the rim of the universe. This world, with a thin atmosphere and a surface that comets and meteors had battered for millions of years, spun in a void of sunless dark. Perhaps it had been one of those comet collisions that had brought the mould into existence, some unique arrangement of molecules mutated by radiation and lying dormant in the comet’s slushy ice, something waiting to awaken and grow. The mould may have taken aeons to reach maturity and begin the process of reproduction. But when it did so, it grew rapidly and spread unchecked over the surface of that dead world, across its valleys and craters and mountains, across the equator and from pole to pole.
    Once it had conquered that first world it became conscious, such was the size and complexity of the mould. The billions upon billions of simple cells formed a network that developed into a debased, gigantic hive-mind. The mould experienced a progressively horrible sequence of nightmares, a spiral of nameless