The Disciples of Ilg’thar were immortal. That’s what they insisted, and lived by. Unfortunately for them, it seemed that this was very much correct.

Doctor Shen was happy to watch them suffer. Doctor Gray, however, did not feel the same way.

The two of them, watching from behind a glass window, injected the sixteenth needle into Subject 231’s right eyeball. She shrieked in such a horrible way that Gray wanted to keel over and hurl. Shen, however, looked almost… aroused.

Subject 231’s name was Helena. She was somewhere in her mid twenties, of average height and build for an Irish woman. Short red hair, blue eyes… well, not anymore. One of them was good and gone, and the other would be soon.

The metal gag in her mouth rattled as she writhed and shrieked, unable to speak. But she did make noises of anguish, and spittle traveled down her chin. Even though the Disciples of Ilg’thar didn’t bleed and didn’t die, they certainly felt pain. Gray believed possibly more so than normal.

A robotic arm, mounted on a mechanism right in front of the poor girl (strapped with belts to an upright gurney), slowly drove the seventeenth needle into her eyeball. This final needle was the one to make it pop, just like the other. Gray watched with revulsion as it sunk back into her socket with a rubbery whine. Drooping, like a glove. But no blood, no fluids.

Shen nodded, noting this on his clipboard. “Very fascinating,” he said. “I want to try with her tongue next.”

Gray’s legs wobbled. He struggled to stand.

Had the cultists deserved any of this? This horrific, inhumane torture… all in the name of science? Of seeing how far it could go?

Then, he thought—

Maybe they did. After what they had found the cultists doing… maybe they did.

…

The Facility discovered the buildings many weeks before.

Made of concrete, perfectly square. They all had a single-entrance door with a long metal bar, like that of many school gymnasiums, seemed to be the only way into these tiny concrete box buildings. It was the only way in or out.

So naturally, with appropriate caution, they went inside. Doctor Gray felt his heart drop when he’d discovered their contents.

Many held the decomposing, emaciated corpses of children. Most of which appeared to be around the ages of eleven to twelve, it so seemed—who had died of starvation, or dehydration, or both. Insects had made it into the building, having burrowed inside from beneath, due to their dirt floorings. They had made a meal of the scattered remains.

Yet there were more horrors to see. One such building displayed a child’s corpse adhered to the outside wall, as if stuck with glue. His body had been eaten on by some foul beast. Eyes, lips, feet, hands and groin torn clean; leaving brown, rotting holes. What remained of his flesh, his teeth, his hair, indicated he’d received some kind of electric shock. The damage it had done to his clothes and internal organs implied that his body bore some kind of anomalous magnetic property. He’d adhere to any surface, and…

The other thing discovered inside of these buildings were light bulbs, screwed into the walls, arranged in lines that ran along eye level. The inside walls of these rooms were completely solid, meaning the light bulbs were plugged into nothing at all. No cords, no wires, no outlets or any hint of electrical devices anywhere, other than the incomplete line of dead sockets they’d been screwed into.

“I can’t make heads or tails of this,” said Doctor Pilfro. “What exactly were they doing? Starving kids to death?”

Doctor Gray shook his head. “No. No, I think it’s something else. Look at the way they’re built. One way out, no way in. And the child on the side of the wall. He had left this building. Maybe this was… some kind of torture game, or testing a way to change body chemistry…”

Pilfro and the many other doctors walked around the boxes, moving into swirling, cloudy mists. This forest clearing was isolated enough to where no one would’ve seen what was going on, should the culprits want to smuggle captives into these buildings.

Unhappily, Doctor Gray examined many of the bodies, and determined that many of them did not look like Irish children. They wore American clothes, or British clothes, a few even wore brands made or popular in South American countries, Russia, Taiwan, and Vietnam. There was almost no trend in their race, ethnicity, or gender.

There is something much more sinister happening here, he thought.

Doctor Hach, surrounded by the Facility’s guards, soon came out of the deeper wood. “All of you,” he’d said to Gray, Pilfro, Shen, and the three or so other doctors by the buildings, “Come here. This instant.”

They walked through the trees, toward a much smaller, much more hidden clearing. They wouldn’t have found it if not for Hach climbing over bushes, through groves, past tangled branches. Here, the mist was thicker. Looming.

And as Doctor Gray poked his head through the trees to get a closer look, he spied a single woman, wearing a black monk’s robe. She was kneeling, praying at a kind of altar—carved of stone, atop it a representation of some kind of alien creature, who bore the head of a squid. Runes lined this carving, traveling down each side. They—and the statue’s eyes— glowed…

…a sickly, wan, purplish white.

The woman noticed them.

She stood. “Ilg’thar! Great God of Infinity! He who will consume all! So absolute even black holes spit him out! Lend me strength! Lend me—”

The obelisk turned red. The woman stopped, staring at it, but then Doctor Gray heard Doctor Hach murmuring…

“Whispers,” he said. “I hear whispers. I… I hear…”

The statue’s eyes and lettering flared a bright purple.

Doctor Hach fell to the ground. The doctors and guards swarmed around him, flies on a carcass. He convulsed and heaved, writhing about in a great deal of pain, before vomiting and soiling himself. Doctor Gray watched in horror, jaw slack. The smell had already started to permeate the surrounding mists…

But then he stood. He glared at the cultist… and attacked.

…

“She said the God of Infinity will consume all,” said Doctor Shen.

Gray could hear the cries of the other cultists. Even the cries of Doctor Hach, strapped in a chair of his own, electrocuted over and over. If they truly were immortal, as so claimed of all Ilg’thar’s apostles, then it had to be tested.

But under project direction of Shen, it had quickly turned into a game of sadism. It was no longer about attempting to take their life. It had spiraled into an exercise of inflicting agony.

He watched the footage from the cameras of cultists in their cells. Subject 236 lie on a steel bed, tendons slowly pulled from his sliced, peeled ankles. They looked like worms, suspension cords. He thrashed and struggled, strapped tightly down. The pain was so great he couldn’t form words.

Subject 240 no longer had teeth, or nose.

Subject 246’s entire scalp had been gloved and peeled, brain inflated with a quick injection of air. He could no longer speak or move, but he continued to look around.

Subject 250’s gums had been bolted—

God, I can’t even look at that one—

Subject 251’s fingers, toes, fingernails, toenails, were in a bucket on the floor. He was blindfolded, but only because… because…

Gray looked away, and toward 237’s black screen.

Subject 237’s camera was off. But he could hear her screaming for relief, begging to be let go, in the room beside theirs. And what they’d done to her… was…

Shen had gotten the idea from a film, Gray thought. A crime thriller film, with Pitt, and Freeman—the name of it was some number…

He clenched his gut, and rested against the wall.

Doctor Gray wanted to feel right about what they were doing. About trying to see where their weakness lie, what would finally kill them—but it was more than that. This was punishment, for what they’d done to those children. And though they’d sold one another out, a domino effect of a not-so-devout cult of turncoats, they had yet to explain what was going on with the mind-controlling obelisk, with the rooms, with the light bulbs, why they’d taken and imprisoned those kids.

Until finally, on the camera feed, subject 232 screamed—

“Okay! Okay! I’ll tell you! I’m sorry! Please, please!”

Doctor Gray, Doctor Shen, and Doctor Ermond immediately grabbed their pens, boards, and summoned four guards, heading down the hallway for her chambers. They opened the door with a single key, and left it ajar.

The woman should not have been alive.

Her abdomen had been opened, bowels pulled free, strung up from the ceiling with surgical threads. Doctor Gray could see her heart beating somehow, without the force of blood. Her intestines, limp pink snakes, gurgled and whined. She trembled, naked, prodded with needles that split back her flesh in folds, and kept her nailed to the gurney. Gray remembered… middle school science class.

Dissecting frogs.

Her head had been twisted around so many times that it looked right to snap off. Her neck, wrapped into a sharp pencil point, had discolored to a black-purple-red. She coughed her words through a pin-prick tight windpipe, and each time she spoke her head bounced back against the prongs of the machine that had treated her like taffy.

Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Please, please,” she begged. “I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you everything.”

The doctors made no effort to release her. Doctor Shen, smiling, stepped forward.

“Then start from the beginning.”

“Our master! Our master! Ilg’thar the God of Infinity! He told us to feed It! To give It sustenance!”

“Feed him?”

“No! Not him! His spawn! It! It that feeds!”

She heaved breath after breath. Gray could see her lungs rising and collapsing beneath her exposed ribcage.

“What is this ‘it,’ Marion?”

She squeezed her eyes and howled.

Doctor Shen waited patiently.

“…Set her right, Doctor,” said Ermond. “Please. I—I can’t stand this.”

“What is this ‘it,’ Marion?” Shen repeated, putting his face to hers.

She opened her watery eyes, breathing with a quick catch, as if in the throes of a hellish labor. “It that c-comes from Him! It t-told us to find children—children from the world—”

“Why? To feed on them?”

Shen was enjoying this very much. Gray felt lightheaded.

“Yes! YES! To eat them! It feeds on their fear! It feeds on their insanity! It creates… it… and—ARGHH!”

Doctor Ermond walked from the room, head down.

“That won’t do,” said Shen quietly. “You need to tell me more.”

“Kill me,” said Subject 232. She stared off into nothing. “Kill me. Please. Please.”

“Why, how would I ever do that? You people cannot die.”

“That’s enough,” said Doctor Gray. “She told us. That’s enough.”

“Is it, Doctor?” said Shen, facing him. “I don’t think it is.”

He grabbed her arm, and twisted it. The girl, strung up in pieces like a lab rat, howled again.

Gray gasped, and gripped Shen’s upper arm. “That is hardly professional! Stop it at once!”

Shen looked at him, and squeezed tighter. “It’s all for science, Doctor.”

“It isn’t right!” Gray screamed. “We must stop this! All of this! Now!”

Shen, with his other hand, withdrew a small syringe. Gray could see him looking at her tongue…

“I SAID THAT’S ENOUGH!”

Gray tackled Shen to the ground, knocking the syringe and both of their clipboards away. He punched Shen in the face, a blind rage clouding his vision, his judgment. Punch after punch after punch, ensuing in his fury.

“You sadist!” Gray shouted. “You like watching them suffer, don’t you!?” He punched him again, and again.

“You’re—ngh,” Shen groaned, eye starting to blacken, blood spewing from his broken nose, “…you’re in the wrong line of work, Gray.”

Then he smiled.

Gray screamed, and knocked Shen’s teeth out with the knobs of his knuckles. They snapped like little sharp rocks, blood filling Shen’s mouth. He didn’t fight back. He just laughed, eyes narrow with pleasure. Gray stood, disgusted with himself, lightheaded and cloudy of mind. The world around him didn’t seem real, nor did his actions.

But as Subject 232 whined and Doctor Shen laughed, Gray heard footsteps down the hall.

He turned.

Doctor Pilfro was standing in the doorway. Bleeding from the nose. He had a dark stain running down the crotch of his pants. There was no sign of the guards…

“Doctor?” said Gray. But he already knew something was very wrong.

On the surgical bed, 232 screamed bloody murder, and fell silent with a gasp. Gray looked at her…

Her eyes had rolled up into her head.

“The God of Infinity consumes the world,” she said in many tongues and voices. Her ribcage was rattling.

“The God of Infinity consumes the world,” said Doctor Pilfro, his eyes, too, rolling up into the back of his head. He stepped into the room.

“God!” said Gray, stumbling back. “What has happened to you, Pilfro?”

Shen’s laugh choked out, and he said, “The God of Infinity consumes the world.”

Doctor Ermond collapsed into the room behind Pilfro, convulsing. He soiled himself, froth leaking from his mouth, eyes rolling back up into his head. “Th-the voices—” he choked, but it was all he managed.

Gray knew what was going on. For he, soon, heard doors slamming, people screaming… and a little whisper, as if from behind:

Khl’ath dro’ctelho ni nawar zhigho gozhokah’ll meiargwath’o marghkai.

No! No no no NO!

He ran from the room, stepping over Ermond, pushing past Pilfro, running down into the white-walled hall. The overhead LED lights flickered.

“The God of Infinity consumes the world!” shouted one of the cultists in a nearby room.

“The God of Infinity consumes the world!” shouted one of the hallway guards.

The God of Infinity consumes the world, Gray thought and heard and thought and heard and—

Khl’ath dro’ctelho ni nawar zhigho gozhokah’ll meiargwath’o marghkai, the little voice insisted.

“Stop this madness!” Gray shouted at no one, pushing past one of the guards—he, too, had his eyes up in his head.

Doors opened. Cultists, maimed and severed in gruesome, horrible ways, stepped into the long hall. One of them shook violently, holes stabbed into their chest, arms, hands, feet. Gray could not tell who it was, or whether they were a man or a woman—for their head hung like a hood behind them, neck slit and severed, flesh a band of rubber. Their throat, out to the world like a busted red pipe, opened and closed; but did not make words—only a labored, breathy hum.

But Gray knew what this cultist, tortured so viciously by the Facility, was trying to say.

The guards, the doctors, the scientists, the cultists—they gathered. Chanting. Shouting.

They were everywhere. They converged. Eyes rolled up. Saying one, horrible thing.

Gray stumbled.

Down the hall, he saw Bryce Harnell, covered in waste and blood. He was one of the people they’d contracted for testing Ilg’thar’s obelisk on, wasn’t he?

And behind him—the homeless man they’d put in a pink mascot bear mask, to hide his horrid facial wounds. He was also covered in blood, shambling toward Gray.

Behind him. Pilfro. Shen. Ermond.

“No!” said Gray, huddling down. “Stop!”

Ahead, many other victims of the Facility.

“Leave! Be gone!”

“The God of Infinity consumes the world,” they chanted.

Gray’s breath sucked and spilled at a fierce rate, heaving, heaving, heaving—

Khl’ath dro’ctelho ni nawar zhigho gozhokah’ll meiargwath’o marghkai…

…Doctor.

Subject 232, behind him. Shaking. Torn apart, tied together, but moving. Dragging herself on the ground in a stream of sludge, like a slug.

“NO!”

And then, they were on him. An uncanny, eldritch fever spilled into his body as hand and hand and hand touched down—

He collapsed beneath the wait of Ilg’thar’s disciples, falling… falling…

Falling into a torturous void of alien anguish.

It washed over him as if he’d broken from a dream. He awoke, standing in the middle of a vast, open plain, and below him was an unearthly land of brimstone and carrion.

The swirling, cataclysmic emptiness of absolute reality hit him square and proper, as if he’d been railed by a train. There were no mountains in this plain, but it stretched endlessly—so flat and desolate that he could see further than he’d ever thought possible—past the supposed curvature of the earth, and past that, and past that. For in this place, there was no curvature. Everything was around him at once. Infinity.

He stood in a field of thick, bleeding arteries, upright like stems. Atop them blinked whale-like eyes, large and black, ripped and torn and sitting nestled within a peeling fleshy lid. They emanated a stench so foul it was impossible to describe. His eyes watered as he watched these many thousands of eyeball flowers bloom, their stalks the exposed tissue straw of the optic nerve.

The sky was no sky. It was an empty white void, swirling in a furious storm that crashed and roiled, so violent it could have been the end of existence itself. The billowing plumes, so large that even the smallest corner was two or three or four times as large as even the largest of supernovas, expanded inward and outward at once. A paradox of time and space, too illogical to happen; yet it cared not for the rules of the universe. A deafening roar carried on the wind.

And then It came out of the sky.

There was no way It could have been understood. Its sheer size was larger than man is wired to comprehend. Larger than the largest of suns, longer than the longest of numbers. What Gray saw was not just an Outer God, but the entire presence of celestial abhorrence. No puppet or avatar, but Its very self. A thousand swirling vortexes, each shifting between a dancing gale of interconnected ribcages—of bovine legs with human feet—of alien legs and arms and hands that split down the center and unfolded into skylit mountains, twisting back upon their bones until they were a gelatinous mass of mouths and eyes and triple nostril noses. Folding in again, again, again.

Gray’s ears burst from the roar of the great cataclysm surrounding him, in a realm unknown. Yet somehow all was quiet. For it had not been the volume; it had been the sound itself.

Consuming all.

Gray’s feeling left his body, slipping from his fingertips, palms, head and face. Gone in a wisp, like a ghost. The embers and smoke of a suffocated candle. Yet somehow he continued to stand. For he had not been feeling hardly anything but wind; it had been the implications that his brain could not take.

Gray’s eyes burned from their sockets as he watched the Outer God touch down before him, flashing a trillion different colors that human minds and human eyes were never meant to see. And with his empty sockets came great flames spouting from them both, burning away his clothes, his body. He fell to the gore around, and became a part of it.

Suddenly he could see again. He could see through each of the eyes, all ten billion—he could feel the roaring elements on their optic-nerve stems; feel the wind drying each and every one of them out as the Outer God touched down in a whirlwind unknown.

He felt everything they felt. His ego, his self, his very mind had been fragmented, forced across a field of flesh so sensitive that the slightest rupture, the slightest drip of rain or spittle would send him coiling in anguish. And it was no small storm above… it was Armageddon.

A billion beings’ most painful pain and most terrified terror assaulted his system of planet-wide nerves. He knew, in all these extremities, where the cultists, guards, doctors, kidnapped children, and millions others, had gone. For they were seeing—feeling—too. Perhaps this was their true immortality…

And then he was gone. But he continued to see. See, as black winged horrors flew down from the galaxy’s storm, circling him. So numerous they blocked all light.

And at his furthest reaches, by the beach of not-sand, grains of teeth and bone, he felt the ocean tremble. For beyond, in the seas of blood and slime, a festering respiratory mucus; there birthed armies of fish-like men from each waking shore. They stepped out of the grime, and walked over the beaches. Stepping on Gray’s many thousands of eyestalks. Trampling them. Looking down at them with anglers in their faces, each glowing a…

A…

A sickly, wan, purplish white.

Agony unknowable split down each side of the coast, doubling and tripling tenfold. A body’s pain, stretched over miles and eons.

But the one thing that finally quieted his thoughts, and extinguished his misery, was not their careless stomping, or the terror brought on by the winged horrors’ sharp fangs. It was finally seeing It. Its child. Its mangled, twisted, broken child. The spawn that had tormented all those children—that had started this cacophony of madness. And in seeing It, knowing that this monstrosity had been the last thing those children had seen, Doctor Gray finally pondered his last thought. For his severed, kaleidoscope brain, could suffer it no more. That this, this thing coming toward him, was It. It that feeds.

And fed it did.