From the Diary of Jochim Freiherr von und zu Furchberg-Hollestadt

Dec 25 1921

Frohe Weihnachten! And yet I can find no merriment on this supposedly holy day. The dreams were worse than ever last night. In them, I battle endlessly against shadowy figures, while in the background vast and malevolent, yet somehow unseeable things await my destruction and marshal their pawns against me. They are the merest suggestions of shadow, yet they fill me with dread and mindless fear. With every passing moment in the dream, I feel weaker, and the malevolence, and anticipation, grows.

I had hoped that our victory against the horrible corpse-cult of the debased sorcerer Artemis Gordon would lighten my mood, and lessen the severity of the dreams. I should have never read that accursed book.

When I saw the tear in reality and the thing in darkest Africa, I, a man of reason, was affrighted by the fact that there were things horrible out there that clearly science had no explanation for. I have spoken to the learned men of the Berlin Academy, but they tell me that the hole in space that I saw could never happen, even with the new scientific revolutions of the Schweitzer, Einstein. Despite the wound which pains me every day, I am grateful to the savage that cut me down in that clearing, as I did not see the THING clearly. Poor Otto did, and I have learned never to speak of it with him. But I remember the face of the accursed wizard that summoned it as though he stood before me now. What I would give to cut him down!

Yet the existence of things outside the small knowledge of man is not, in the light of logic, a surprise. Nor is it too hard to imagine that there are other forms of life that would do us harm, much as we harm the cattle in the field or the grain from the ground. I am embarrassingly grateful that we never saw what made those hellishly smooth and huge tunnels under the mine. These things are horrible, but what really brings me fear is that there are humans in league with these hateful creatures. It is these humans, whether they be slaves or, worse, willing servants, whom I am sworn to eradicate by any means. The others tell me that the thing in the Scottish Bog had been worshipped and fed for thousands of years, and it is clear that the fiend Lucas was only the latest in a long line of those sworn to the tunnel creatures.

Yet I had no idea of the sheer scale of the horror until I read the book written by the accursed v.Junzt. There are many such men and groups of men, and have been since time immemorial. These hellish cults wield monsters as their tools, and are thus damned. They must be eradicated root and branch, as the English say.

But the greatest shock is that the philosopher Neitsche was right. I have seen horrible things, and violations of what we previously thought was reality at the hands of those that the accursed cultists see as gods. Yet I know now that the God I venerated as a youth, and to whom I swore a holy oath, is dead, if ever he existed as more than a construct of the human mind. Maybe the human gods were invented as a sort of protection against the true horror of the cosmos, but it is clear that they have no power when compared to the creatures worshiped by the cults that spread across the world like a spider's web of evil and horror. So while I wish others a Frohe Weihnachten, I know that it is meaningless. Yet there is hope. If there is no God, then there is only man, and strength, against that from outside which besieges us. There is also no sin, only victory, or death. So I do not dream with horror of the Indian's execution of the wizard, nor of the slaying of his debased servants. Those who side with the horror from outside deserve no better, and I will not pause to exterminate them where I find them, by whatever means. I originally feared that I might damn myself in this endeavor. Now I know that there exists no morality outside of what we make, and thus, so long as we defeat the dark threat from outside our small lamplight of reason and science, and those that serve it, we will never be judged except as victors.