Hey kids it's time for a story.
Once upon a time, Papa Bear and his wife, Tallulah Bear (Mama Bear had left him in the winter of '06) were chopping wood outside Bear Manors, Storybook Vale. It was late and it was getting dark. The sun was sinking behind the two mountains at the foot of the vale. "Say, Tallulah Bear", said Papa Bear, "it's getting awfully late in Storybook Vale. Time to tuck the kids in for the night".
"Oh Papa Bear", said Tallulah, "what a nice life we live in Storybook Vale".
So Tallulah Bear went to check on Son Bear, ensuring that his sheets were straight and his toys were safely tucked away. "I love you Son", she said.
"I love you too, Tallulah", he said.
Then Papa Bear went to see Daughter Bear and patted her head and made sure that her hot water bottle was piping hot. "I love you Daughter", he said.
"I love you too, Papa", she said.
Then Papa and Tallulah Bear went into Baby Bear's room. Baby Bear was nowhere to be seen. The air was still and cold, dead like a tomb. It was as if Baby had never lived; had been erased from the record of history. Tallulah ran to the bed and threw her arms across the empty sheets. They felt as cold as a mortuary slab. Papa stumbled, dazed, too shocked and numb to cry, into the little bathroom. There, in a childlike hand on the mirror, were the words: THIS IS THE WAY OF ALL FLESH.
Tallulah sobbed into the cold, empty bed. Her tears soaked the sheets. Papa walked out, his face drained of all hope and purpose. He stood by her, but he could not even reach out to comfort her. His whole body felt numb. Tallulah had sunk into the sheets, her face melting into her own morass of tears. Her tear ducts squeezed themselves dry, then they squeezed some more, until the pain blinded her even from her grief.
Papa Bear walked back to the bathroom. There, behind the mirror, he took out a bottle of pills. Not glancing at the label, he emptied the bottle into his mouth, and he lay down in the tub. The horror overwhelmed him.
Black and purple swirled before his eyes, like shadows of unnamed and shapeless things on the cave walls of his eyelids; of terrors too real to be countenanced by mortal reason. Down and down he sank into oblivion. He had felt loss before, and it had dragged his whole being down to the pit of his stomach, where it sat, empty, hollow. This time, it was as though the bottom of his stomach had given way, and he fell endlessly, without hope of adjustment, nowhere to ever find a foothold in his endless and utter desolation. His soul had been annihilated, but the pieces were not allowed to rest.
When he opened his eyes, all about him was dark, but he saw in the frightened greenish bluey whites of night vision, as though some outer aid permitted him the means to see. Down endless hexagonal staircases he walked, his feet, unfeeling, treading surer than a mountain goat's. Torches burned in rusted brackets on the walls, their fire lightless, as void of colour as his life. From far below he heard the sounds of tortured screams, and didn't even fear to tread toward them.
In the deepest cellar of the windowless descent, he came upon a living carpet. Mantises and double-ended rats cavorted among stranger things. A starfish opened human lips to sing, and all that spilled forth was insanity. Arms grasped and writhed from cracks in the stone floor. A dog that ate itself from its tail upwards stopped and regarded him with the eyes of an owl. Gold flowed liquid through the sprawling mass of crystallised madness. A shape flexed and distorted into endless facets in the thick, black air before his face, and in each of its faces he saw Tallulah, the Queen of Tears, from whose ducts flowed the oceans of the world.
He pressed on through the madness, the back halves of vermin fused together stumbling and warring with themselves to get out of his way as he stepped. Strings of intestines, molten effluent chugging its way down them, hung from the shapeless ceiling, but he scarcely noticed them. Through doors of breathing, sighing glass, onward he pushed. Blind old men in rags turned their unseeing heads up at him as they sat chained to the living floor.
Finally he came to a chamber entirely made of mouths. Where they led to, he could not see through the gloom, but all at once they spoke to him. "I am Y'thdrognorg", they said, some in a whisper, some in the tortured shrieking of prisoners from some dank dungeon of the Dark Ages. "I am the carer and guardian at the gates that lead to the dream-mind of that Mad God whose name I cannot speak".
Papa Bear nodded. "What has brought me here?" he said, emotionless. A rat with heads at both ends nuzzled at his collarbone, but he ignored it.
"I was sent to tend to the insane one's fitful waking", said Y'thdrognorg. "I am not the taker of your child, but even now it walks among your fellows in the living-world of Storybook Vale".
"What is it?" Papa Bear said, a faint quintessence of emotion stirring in his depths, as if from a forgotten life.
"It is impossible to pronounce its name in ways that you can hear, little one", said the many mouths of Y'thdragnorg, "but in your language it is called the erasure of the innocents".
"How will I know it?" said Papa Bear. "How will I see?"
"Things such as this are not meant to be in your world. By its wrongness, you will know it."
Papa Bear wept then, and so many tears flowed from his eyes that they flooded the chamber of Y'thdragnorg. There were more tears even than Tallulah had cried, for Papa Bear had not wept for many years more than her. The flood carried him up, up the long stairways that he had descended, ever up into the light.
When Papa Bear awoke, all was as he had left it. Tallulah still sobbed into the bed, now little more than mush. But something else was stirring in the house, and now where it had been forever, he could see it anew: a great beak protruding from the floor, that clacked open and shut, eyeless spiderlings jumping from it, snapping mandibles at the sad world.
Papa Bear went outside into the cool night and hefted the axe from the woodpile. As he turned back to the house, he saw the creature standing there, impossibly in a doorway that was smaller than itself. On either side of its beak camera lenses whirred and refocussed. Vestigial forelimbs grasped feebly at the air, protruding from its breast. Great blue wings stemmed from its back. Its legs were spindly and long.
"I know who you are now", said Papa Bear, and he hefted the axe above his head. The creature cocked its head and suckers opened up on its scabrous neck. Papa struck, again and again, driving it back into the hall of his dwelling. Son and Daughter stood in their doorways, eyes and mouths open, but Papa did not notice, and if he did, he cared not. The creature squawked and lashed at him with its sharp parrot's beak, drawing blood from his arms and shoulders, but he was a bear, and this only enraged him further. "Die", he said, and the monster buckled before him. Neighbours now were at the door but Papa was oblivious, and what they saw they would never again be able to describe. Finally it stumbled, its legs giving out beneath it, and Papa Bear raised his axe to strike the killing blow.
"This is for Baby Q. Bear", he spat, and cleft the thing in half.
Morning came quietly behind him. No one said a word. The erasure of the innocents lay dead, cockroaches spilling from each gash in its twisted corpse. Already crows were descending to tear at its suppurating flesh. Papa would drag it out and burn it, but for now his strength was spent.
That evening, he returned to Y'thdragnorg, leading Tallulah behind him. Her eyes were red and bloody now, a thin trickle of blood mixed with the water that had soaked back into her skin from the bed now made a pink stain that gave her an unearthly appearance. Papa led her gently to the chamber, where the many mouths had ingested the water from his tears.
"I will take her into me and care for her", said Y'thdragnorg. Papa nodded. Tallulah's mind was gone. This ancient, used to dealing with the madness of a deity, could care for her in ways that he could not. He watched her be swallowed up with nothing, no feeling at all, a spent battery.
It would take many years for Storybook Vale to recover from the terror that had befallen it that night. But the legend remained, and forever after, the folk of the Vale told it in whispers, until it passed into the folklore recorded here.
Did you like my story??? Feel free to use it with your own kids!!! Pls give feed back!!!!×ΓΈ®┴»
