Songs that the Astral Crickets shall Sing

By Luis G. Abbadie

You will scarcely sleep with these eleven stories that will plunge you into various worlds of horror and the fantastic. Terrible visions, haunting journeys, ancestral witchery, dark humor, and a couple of jaunts into the Yellow Mythos and the realms of Cthulhu. Here you will find:
Songs That the Astral Crickets Shall Sing –A buzzing becomes a growing barrier between a man and reality… and a different reality may lurk behind the noise.
A Miracle Of Rare Device –Would the possibility of seeing the shape of your own soul be a miracle –or the trigger of madness?
R’lyeh, the Ship in the Storm –An oil painting becomes a window into a world where allegory, art and life are increasingly difficult to discern, in this decidedly non-conventional tale of cosmic horror.
Hopes –That nurse standing beside your death bed may actually be the most terrible thing in the world… and she has picked you.
The Bells –It’s unwise to venture into a village where all bells ring only the funeral toll.
The Calling of Faith –A strange manuscript brings a glimpse into a convent where a strange discovery deep devotion and madness and saints are not what they seem.
Sacrifice –a soul remains in the midst of an ancient Mayan city, shunned by afterlife; only the dying can hope to release her.
Pilgrimage to Sentinel Hill –A holy pilgrim walks past Aylesbury Pike; for him, the hill where terrible things are said to have occurred nearly a century ago will be the place of his encounter with fate.
The Ring of Aradia –A child’s dreams are placed in the hands of a witch of legend, Aradia de Toscana, and hidden magick is afoot under the moonlight.
The Day The Earth Was To Be Cleared –The world as we know it is a fragile thing; a whim might well sweep it away, or randomness might ensure that we see another day.
The Prophet’s Lot –A lost episode of the ultimate forbidden manuscript reveals the travails of the prophet Kish, and the final secret that doomed the city of Sarnath.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781667163543

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Dedication

For Joe Pulver

Out there on Hali’s shore

Acknowledgements

This book took shape thanks to the support on several levels of Héctor Martínez Villalobos, always there to get me one step further.

Mayah Stone who conceived the amazing cover concept; a continuing influence in my writing and in so many other ways.

Mariana Cabral for her great technical work above and beyond the call of sleeping hours that made it possible to adequately translate the cover into fact.

Alessa Gil, whose work for genre fiction is priceless, as is her support for friends and authors.

Thank you all.

Songs That the Astral Crickets Shall Sing

(Soundtrack: Ain Soph, Apathanathismos)

At the beginning, he wasn’t even consciously aware of the noise. It was very difficult for him to wake up that morning, when he noticed the ring of the alarm clock, it was so low that he could barely hear it; he took mental note that he must later set the volume, and deactivated it. He got up, but that sensation of disconnectedness from everything around him wouldn’t vanish; he caught himself dozing as he sat on the edge of the bed, then he stood up and got dressed.

By the time he’d reached the kitchen, he finally noticed that buzzing. It was a noise resembling that of dozens of crickets, yet somehow more uniform that that of actual crickets. He was already familiar with it; a background noise that he often perceived when he was in a state of complete silence. Apparently, most other people just didn’t hear it; he had met only one man other tan himself who was acquainted with the noise, and he had come to be reminded of him whenever he became aware of it.

But this time it was far stronger, drowning out lower noises; he now realized that the alarm wasn´t low; he had barely been able to hear its soft tingling through the noise. The phantom crickets were loud today, or rather, his ears must be blocked, causing him to hear this noise more distinctly.

Which means it is not a physical sound, just as Jack had surmised, he thought, but dismissed the thought for another time. Oh, we know full well about dismissing fancies, don’t we?

After taking a shower, he picked and cleaned his ears as best he could; his left ear above all seemed to clear a bit, but not enough.

As he went about his business at the convenience store, he was somewhat glad he didn’t really need to listen much to most customers in order to get what they required; after all, he did catch most of what they said, and after a while, he even forgot about the nuisance that was the noise. Sometime in mid-afternoon he actually thought it had ended, but he ended up realizing that he had merely gotten used to the constant murmur, so that in the store’s naturally noisy environment, he hardly noticed it. Of course, if his ears were to suddenly clear up, the contrast would no doubt be jarring.

Again he remembered his old talks with Jack, his formerly Gnostic friend. He believed that the source of the crickets-like noise was not physical, but spiritual; something like the ambient noise of the astral realms. This actually made some sense to him; he wasn’t a Gnostic like Jack, but he had read quite a bit on mysticism, Jack Parsons, Halpin Chalmers, Aleister Crowley and the like, and was open to such speculations. Now, what he was currently experiencing was probably due to his ears being blocked or maybe swelled on the inside, and the lessened perception of actual noises must be allowing the astral crickets to take predominance.

What is this you ask, of a name?

It was after he had a late dinner and shut the music off, that he noticed the change. The crickets were loud, but the noise included a new feature; a humming that suggested vibration and movement, and, when he paid attention to it, appeared to rise and ebb in intensity every couple of seconds. He conjured up an image of some weird ring-like electronic contraption going round and round, producing that hum. After briefly drowsing over his dinner, due to the obfuscating noise, he ended up playing some old Bee Gees songs in order to break the silence.

It was as he was trying to sleep that he first began to notice how the noise sometimes resembled an inarticulate voice. As he drifted in and out of sleep, he fancied some disembodied presence whispering secrets to him. The sensation became so strong that a tone time, he forced himself to remain conscious and attempted to focus on the sound, trying to catch any concrete shifts in modulation or half-articulate sounds like there would be if it were a voice, but of course, there were no such signs of pronounced sounds –there never had been, it was merely the general impression he’d started to get from the constant shifting of the noise. Still, he held on to his focused attention for a couple of minutes, his weary mind stubbornly expecting the noise to refine itself into distinct whispers and words, so strong was the sensation. He finally drifted to dreamless sleep.

Morning came in a haze. Or rather, his mind surfaced unto consciousness through a haze, itself an extension of the aural equivalent of a haze. Tides of humming droned on lazily around him, and he floated confusedly until his eyes focused on the window.

Where was the world outside? He saw the sun, the tree branches, the wall and windows of the house across the street –yet he heard no ambient noise, no passing cars, no voices. The loud silence droned on. It actually drowned outside noises in full.

Fuck, he said aloud, and found it a relief that his own voice did resound within his head. So, he had not gone deaf. Not entirely, at least. He got up, went straight to the kitchen and set the coffee pot nearly at the same time his other hand turned on the TV. He noticed with dismay that the deodorant ad’s voiceover was barely a hint of sound. He turned the volume up until he could hear it somewhat faintly, and suspected with dismay that it was actually very loud.

This was too much. After a quick breakfast, he got dressed I a hurry, determined not to go to the store but to a doctor instead. He looked up his physician’s number, called, and managed to explain in spite that he could hardly heard what he replied. Fortunately, Ralph was an old family friend and was willing to steal a few minutes between appointments in order to see him.

He had to be there in an hour and a half, so he had time to spare; so he went instead to the store, put up a sign saying We’ll be open at 11 – sorry! and as he walked away, a lady’s hand grasped his arm. He turned around to see Mrs. Castaigne, the elderly owner of the neighboring boarding house.

Where are you off to, son? he saw her mouth off beyond the humming blank. He started to explain, and she interrupted: You don’t need to shout, I hear you just fine! He tried to lower down his voice, ignoring the sensation that no sound left his mouth, and explained his problem. Mrs. Castaigne nodded a couple of times, and when he finished, she made a solemn, knowing nod. I’m glad I saw you, she declared; I believe I know just the thing you need. Come on now –you do still have time before your appointment, don’t you?

He agreed; he was willing to try anything that had a chance to return him to the noisy everyday world. He expected her to lead the way back to her old house next door, but she motioned him instead across the Arkham town square. He followed dutifully.

On the other side of the square, they turned the first corner left and walked a couple of blocks; she just hushed his questions, telling him to wait a bit; he caught something about how he was having too much trouble hearing her and it would be quicker to take him to the place, followed by a continuing prattle he was mostly baffled by; which, he supposed, proved her right.

A weathered but newly-repainted wooden slate hung over the door of an old building with an art deco façade covered older letters and proclaimed this to be The Court of the Dragon – Tea, Chai, Health Infusions. Mrs. Castaigne grinned at him and led him inside.

He passed a trendy curtain of beads after her and blinked repeatedly in order to let his eyes adjust to the inner gloom. They walked among several tables, most of them empty, straight to the service bar at the end of the room. Inklings of soft music reached him along the way; the crickets tried to play bass to the rhythm, so to speak. There, a mature man with scarce whiskers regarded them serenely. Mrs. Castaigne’s head and hands moved emphatically as she spoke to him, while he waited right behind her; the man nodded, nodded again and mumbled something. Then he gestured them to wait and walked along the bar to the open door at the end. As he went out of sight, she turned to him with a pleasant smile:

He will see us right away. Don’t you worry… he missed several words, then: …will heal you just fine.

From the looks of things, he assumed they were going to see some sort of naturist healer. Which was fine by him; he wasn’t into veganism, but he did trust natural health methods. So he waited patiently, as Mrs. Castaigne periodically regarded him with a reassuring, and just a bit enthusiastic, smile.

The man came out, simply stating that they would be attended to presently –and damn him if he wasn’t getting habituated to seek the lips and read them- and Mrs. Castaigne preceded him through the darkened doorway.

There was a faded curtain with vaguely oriental designs half-hidden in shadows, which explained why the entrance had seemed so dark; beyond it was a metal door with glass panels, the kind you would expect as a service door in a kitchen, and beyond it a plain room, with little more than four chairs, a couple of shelves with vials and jars, a few books, and a figurine with undefined contours that looked to him like a dancing wisp. There were no windows, which struck him as a bit odd for a nature healer.

Speaking of which, the elderly man who stood in a corner, holding a vase in his hands, was dressed casually, with a sweater that made him look like a regular resident in a nursing home. He turned around to greet them, a smile in his thin lips that wrinkled his eyes, half-hidden behind thick, black-rimmed glasses. His grayish hair was scarce, yet his movements, and his grip, were firm, belying the initial impression. He tried to catch his name –Noah Talbot? Yeah, that was probably it-, then caught himself squinting and leaning forward, and then pointed at his ear, with a nervous laugh, and said something about his current difficulty with hearing. Mrs. Castaigne was just eager to contribute to the explanation,