13. The Wrong Style

And now for something completely different, in which we were asked to write something in entirely the wrong style. This is an excerpt from a diary entry describing a man's breakfasting, written in the style of a cosmic horror/Weird Fiction story.

15th January 2009 (moon sliding to gibbous – ominous portents).

I resume this account only to provide prudent warning to those foolish enough to be tempted to wander down the same path as myself, who have, for my cares, lost all enduring grip on sanity. I started in bed in the cold sweat that has gripped me each night for an incalculable length of time, the dark visions which will permit me no nourishing rest flashing from before my eyes like bats before a burning phosphorescent lamp. Shrieks impinged on my consciousness from I knew not what kind of creature, lurking outside my locked, shuttered and curtained window; they impressed upon my still part-asleep mind images of horny, stabbing beaks, blackened eldritch forms covered in rippling, waving down, and hollow, inhuman gazes whose depths reveal aeon-ancient mysteries. I flung the covers from me, and closed my dressing-gown – whose embrace I can never dissociate from that which fills my dreams with screaming terror (but a replacement for which remains, as a mere scholar, beyond my slender means) – around me, advancing to the kitchen. An occasional suggestion of some blasphemous, unholy shape treading in my footsteps set my eyes twisting over my shoulder – but nothing revealed itself. As I approached the fridge, considering to have toast for my morning meal, a curious thought suggested itself to me. There was some aspect of the toaster which perturbed me; even the dog, stood in his basket, barked at it vehemently. With trepidation, I crept over slid two slices into the strange, alien orifices of slots, and pressed the pendulous tab down. Whilst turned to make my coffee – the smiling visage of a cat that bedecked the side of the mug had a queer look about him, as if he harboured knowledge of some foul and secret cosmic joke that would set human minds gibbering with madness – I began to detect a slight acrid odour; it reminded me of the must that old Gibbons, a scholar of ancient and secret lore, had told me he had smelt whilst reading a bewormed copy of the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, kept under lock and key after its long journey from the nameless city of Arabia. I felt a curious repugnance, but focused my mind on my task, which I knew would take all my mental powers. Then, I began to notice tendrils of darkness creeping round me. I swung around and saw it rising from that unholy contraption – that accursed, horrible, indescribable machine spewing abyssal dark in every direction. I recoiled instinctively, hardly prepared for such an onslaught of madness. I cannot remember what happened next, although I must have fled – my feet, when I stopped some miles away, were slick with mud, and my dressing-gown still on me.

And thus it carried on. The horror never ends.