Like thousands of folks across New England, I experienced a certain seismic activity on Sunday, October 10th.
It was a “mysterious” boom that has left us all positively “mystified”. That’s according The Guardian of London and The New York Times of, uh, New York. Whatever they know. (The Times, for their part, proudly sourced their reporting from Twitter randos.)
Folks in New Hampshire aren’t so quick to call things “mysterious.” We may not be able to explain the boom, but that doesn’t mean it’s inexplicable. Lots of things happen that we can’t explain, because—unlike London and New York—every inch of land isn’t covered with asphalt and monitored by surveillance cameras. There are lots of mysterious things that go on here because we haven’t tried to tear down all the trees or drown out the stars.
Anyway. What I heard was a small explosion followed by a roll of thunder. I was out in the woods of Hollis with my little brothers(-in-law) Willie and Ben. They heard it, too. We felt it in our bellies like a train.
My guess is that it was a meteorite. There was a pretty significant meteor shower passing by our corner of the galaxy on the same day as the Mystery Boom. As you know, hundreds of meteorites of meteorites (bits of space rock) hit the Earth every. If we happened to hear one on October 10th, lucky us.
But as we strolled back to the house, my brothers got to speculating.
“It was probably a rocket taking off from the Space Force base,” said Willie, age 14. (The New Boston Space Force Station is less than half an hour from Hollis.)
“That’s stupid,” Ben, age 12, pointed out. “There are no launches at the Space Force base.”
“Well, then, what do you think it is?” Willie snapped.
“Probably a space ship, like Tucker’s always talking about,” said Ben. Invoking Tucker Carlson is always a mic-drop in our family.
“Hold on,” I said. “You just said Willie was stupid because he thinks it was a rocket. But you think it’s a rocket, too. Only Will thinks it was a manmade rocket, and you think it was made by aliens.”
“Yeah,” said Ben. And that was the end of it.
Well, all right. Let’s say it was aliens. But who says they had to come in a ship?
If I’m wrong, and the boom was not a meteor, I have another guess. I think it was the Son of the Nameless Mist, the Lurker at the Threshold, the Key and the Gate, the Beyond One: Yog-Sothoth.
… Or, rather, his son, the Dunwich Horror.
If you’ve not read the story by H.P. Lovecraft, I strongly recommend that you do. Get a copy of his complete works and start reading them before Halloween, while horror still lingers in the air. (If you like, you can also read my old post on why Lovecraft ought to rank alongside Hawthorne and Poe as one of the great New England authors.)
Anyway. When I heard the Mysterious Boom, my first thought was of the scene in The Dunwich Horror where the heroes use a spell to banish the selfsame horror from the selfsame town. In its final moments, it cries out for its papa:
“Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah—e’yayayayaaaa … ngh’aaaaa … ngh’aaaa … h’yuh … h’yuh … HELP! HELP! … ff—ff—ff—FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH! ….”
But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at the indisputably English syllables that had poured thickly and thunderously down from the frantic vacancy beside that shocking altar-stone, were never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they jumped violently at the terrific report which seemed to rend the hills; the deafening, cataclysmic peal whose source, be it inner earth or sky, no hearer was ever able to place. A single lightning-bolt shot from the purple zenith to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force and indescribable stench swept down from the hill to all the countryside. Trees, grass, and underbrush were whipped into a fury; and the frightened crowd at the mountain’s base, weakened by the lethal foetor that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were almost hurled off their feet. Dogs howled from the distance, green grass and foliage wilted to a curious, sickly yellow-grey, and over field and forest were scattered the bodies of dead whippoorwills.
The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again. To this day there is something queer and unholy about the growths on and around that fearsome hill. Curtis Whateley was only just regaining consciousness when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the beams of a sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were grave and quiet, and seemed shaken by memories and reflections even more terrible than those which had reduced the group of natives to a state of cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions they only shook their heads and reaffirmed one vital fact.
“The thing has gone forever,” Armitage said. “It has been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know. It was like its father—and most of it has gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outside our material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the hills.”
The good news, then, is that the New Boston Horror is dead. Some nameless sorcerer vanquished that spawn of the ancient evil. We may never find the exact spot on the Uncanoonuc Mountains. The smell may linger; the soil may be tainted for years, centuries, millennia, eons….
But threat was destroyed before we ever knew it existed. The blasphemy was silenced before it could twist mortal ears and pervert mortal souls. All we heard was the sound of its wretched self being scattered across lonely galaxies and silent dimensions.
Yet upon this question shall my own fragile psyche be dashed to pieces, like a wooden ship upon the cyclopean cliffs of R’lyeh:
What became of Yog-Sothoth?