The Gutter of Yegothra

Chapter I: The Manuscript in the Walls

The house on Bolinghurst Lane stood like a wound stitched in mortar and oak, a withering edifice that the townsfolk of New Whitburn avoided with the silent caution reserved for plague carts and old execution grounds. They said it had been abandoned for thirteen years, though others whispered that it had been longer—much longer. Its windows were cataracted with grime, and the pitch of its roof sagged like a broken limb. I moved in on a Tuesday, under a soft and silver sky, believing perhaps naively that solitude would be a balm for my inner decay.

You see, I had inherited the house through the will of a great-uncle I never met, whose name was struck from most public records. His Arkham estate—a ruin filled with rotting tomes and curiosities that should have been buried or burned—had already gnawed at the corners of my mind. From there, I carried a miasma of sleeplessness and restless thoughts, thinking a change of place would cauterize the psychic wound. New Whitburn, remote and devoid of the clamor of modernity, promised silence. But silence is a veil, not a cure.

The house’s interior defied geometry. Rooms turned at impossible angles, and the walls exuded a sour dampness no fireplace could banish. Upon arrival, I sensed something like breath beneath the floorboards, shallow and deliberate. Yet I pressed on, stacking books along the shelves, unpacking clothes that already felt wrong here, as if sewn for someone else’s limbs.

The dreams began on the first night.

They were not nightmares in the usual sense. Rather, they were intrusions—echoes of places I had never seen. A corridor spiraling downward into soft blackness. A sound like teeth grinding under velvet. A child laughing through a throat full of water. Each time I awoke, I found that I had moved in my sleep, always toward the parlor, always barefoot and shivering.

It was on the fourteenth night that I found the manuscript.

A sound woke me—not a creak or scurry, but a deliberate thump, like a palm slapping wet wood. It came from behind the east wall of the parlor. Driven by a nervous compulsion, I pried at the paneling with a fire iron. The wood groaned, and beneath it I found a hollow niche—a hidden cavity crammed with cloth bundles and filth.

Inside was the manuscript. Its binding was a sickly shade of yellowish brown, its texture too soft and warm to be leather. The pages crackled with age but held together, ink etched in erratic hands, the script dancing between languages like a fevered polyglot: Greek, Aramaic, something that resembled ancient Babylonian, and symbols I could not identify, composed of serpentine spirals and fractal sigils that seemed to move if stared at too long.

The author signed himself as Elias Treme, a tenant from the 1700s, who claimed to have discovered beneath the house not a root cellar or crypt, but what he called the Gutter of Yegothra. A channel not of water, but of sequence, a corridor through moments and possibilities, through bleeding memory and folded space.

He wrote:

“The floor beneath us is not bound by earth or wood, but by a hunger for the forgotten. There are doors not of architecture, but of guilt. I have passed through. I have seen my unbirth.”

I could not stop reading.

I pored over the manuscript by candlelight for days, scouring it for coherence. Though the text swam with madness, there was method within. Treme described rituals of descent: dream-trances guided by mnemonic sigils, symbols that, when drawn on the skin in blood, would open one’s mind to the Gutter’s resonance.

“A whisper from beneath the foundation is not air nor spirit, but the echo of something deeper: a self unmoored. A tongue not meant to be heard, only remembered.”

The more I read, the more my dreams intensified. I saw my own body decaying in reverse. I vomited teeth that sang in chorus. The house would creak in rhythm with my pulse. Then, I began to see things while awake.

One afternoon, as I passed the hallway mirror, I noticed my reflection smile before I did. Another time, the wallpaper peeled back in slow undulations, revealing another room behind the wall—a twin parlor filled with motionless figures whose faces were made of ash.

I stopped sleeping. Or rather, I stopped believing that sleep and wakefulness were distinct.

My final confirmation came when I found the basement.

There had been no record of a basement in the blueprints. Yet one evening, I discovered a door behind a shelf, narrow and slanted downward. The air that spilled from it was cold and metallic, laced with a note of decay too old to be wholly organic.

I descended three steps and felt the world lurch sideways, as if my gravity had been altered.

The walls were covered in moss-like growths shaped like eyes. The ground was soft, like the inside of a cheek. And there, in the center, a trapdoor of jet-black stone, etched with the same sigils from Treme’s manuscript.

It was not locked.

And even before I touched it, I knew where it led.

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To be continued in Chapter II: Dreams Like Wounds

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If you’re intrigued by the haunting atmosphere and mysterious elements in “The Gutter of Yegothra,” you might be interested in exploring more about the concept of haunted houses. Check out this Haunted House article on Wikipedia for a deep dive into their lore and history. For those fascinated by ancient languages and scripts, you might find it enlightening to learn more about Aramaic or delve into the complexities of the Babylonian language. Lastly, the story’s cryptic symbols might evoke curiosity about Sigils in Magic—ancient symbols often associated with mystical or magical properties.

If you’re intrigued by the haunting atmosphere and mysterious elements in “The Gutter of Yegothra,” you might be interested in exploring more about the concept of haunted houses. Check out this Haunted House article on Wikipedia for a deep dive into their lore and history. For those fascinated by ancient languages and scripts, you might find it enlightening to learn more about Aramaic or delve into the complexities of the Babylonian language. Lastly, the story’s cryptic symbols might evoke curiosity about Sigils in Magic—ancient symbols often associated with mystical or magical properties.