The original unfinished short novel (as published in the ezine Letters from Outside):
FEAR AND LOATHING IN INNSMOUTH
by Duane Pesice
This is a work of fiction. You probably shouldn’t read it if you are easily offended. Any similarity to any persons, places or things in the real world is purely coincidence, and anyway it’s all in your head.
Real cosmic evil would never behave in such a disgraceful fashion. They have an image to uphold, and after all, they are professionals.
A skyful of bats…driving through the nightmare…the awful sins/crimes of hoary old New England towns…what is under those quaint little gambrel roofs? And why are you looking at me so funny?
We were just around Bristol on the edge of Massachusetts when the drugs began to take hold. Suddenly there was a terrible roar around us,and the sounds of distant drums, and flutes, piping. The sky was full of bats and batlike creatures and random interstellar nightmares, all shrieking and tittering and diving around the car like flies around money, and my attorney was screaming something unpronounceable, with far too many consonants for my liking. I remember saying something like “pull over, maybe I should drive” when my attorney suddenly wrenched the steering wheel hard right and drove the car into a ditch at the side of the road.
A few stray vultures had joined the overhead entourage, where they were joined by ravens and whippoorwills, and still more interstellar nightmares.
“Ia!” My attorney cried. “Ia! Hastur! Hastur cf’ayak ‘vulgtmm, vugtlagln, vulgtmm! Ai! Ai! Hastur!“
A couple of the more batlike interstellar nightmares wheeled down out of the sky and landed before us. My attorney, normally a man of reason (excepting certain instances where he claimed “not to be himself”) indicated that I should take a seat on the back of one of these alien beasts.
Indicating my disapproval in no uncertain terms, I stood my ground.
My attorney looked at me sadly, glanced significantly up at the sky, which was full of diving, screeching, flopping, shrieking, tittering gibbering faceless interstellar nightmares. All of the terrestrial birds and bats had gone home.
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