Free Noctuary by Thomas Ligotti

beside the open doorway, was a calm face; but its calmness seemed to derive from a total despair of soul rather than from a serenity of mind. "I am referring to the altar of the god," he said. "However extensive your learning and your travels, that  one is not among those deities you will have heard about; that one is not among those divinities you may have laughed about. It could be distantly related, perhaps, to those numina of Roman cesspools and sewage systems. But it is not a mere Cloacina, not a Mephitis or Robigo. In name, the god is known as Cynothoglys: the god without shape, the god of changes and confusion, the god of decompositions, the mortician god of both gods and men, the metamortician of all things. There is no fee demanded."
    I remained where I stood, and then the man stepped out into the little vicolo in order to allow me a better view through the open doorway, into the candlelit room beyond. I could now see that the candles were shining on either side of a low slab, cheap candles that sent out a quivering haze of smoke. Between these tapers was an object which I could not define, some poor shapeless thing, perhaps the molten relic of a volcanic eruption at some distant time, but certainly not the image of an ancient deity. There seemed to be nothing and no one else inhabiting that sinister little nook.
    I may now contend that, given the unusual circumstances described above, the wisest course of action would have been to mumble a few polite excuses and move on. But I have also described the spell which is cast by the vicoli, by their dimly glowing and twisted depths. Entranced by these dreamlike surroundings, I was thus prepared to accept the strange gentleman's offer, if only to enhance my feeling of intoxication with all the formless mysteries whose name was now Cynothoglys.
"But be solemn, sir. I warn you to be solemn."
    I stared at the man for a brief moment, and in that moment this urging of my solemnity seemed connected in some way to his own slavish and impoverished state, which I found it difficult to believe had always been his condition. "The god will not mock your devotions, your prayers," he whispered and whistled. "Nor will it be mocked."
    Then, stepping through the little doorway, I approached the primitive altar. Occupying its center was a dark, monolithic object whose twisting shapelessness has placed it beyond simple analogies in my imagination. Yet there was something in its contours - a certain dynamism, like that of great crablike roots springing forth from the ground - which suggested more than mere chaos or random creation. Perhaps the following statement could be more sensibly attributed to the mood of the moment, but there seemed a definite power somehow linked to this gnarled effigy, a gloomy force which was disguised by its monumentally static appearance. Toward the summit of the mutilated sculpture, a crooked armlike appendage extended outward in a frozen grasp, as if it had held this position for unknown eons and at any time might resume, and conclude, its movement.
    I drew closer to the contorted idol, remaining in its presence far longer than I intended. That I actually found myself mentally composing a kind of supplication tells more than I am presently able about my psychological and spiritual state last evening. Was it this beast of writhing stone or the spell of the vicoli which inspired my prayer and determined its form? It was, I think, something which they shared, a suggestion of great things: great secrets and great sorrows, great wonders and catastrophes, great destinies, great doom. and a single great death. My own. Drugged by this inspiration, I conceived my ideal leavetaking from this earth - a drama prepared by strange portents, swiftly developed by dreams and visions nurtured in an atmosphere of sublime dread, growing overnight like some gaudy fungus in a forgotten cellar, and always with the awful hand of the mortician god working the machinery behind the