Above: An image purporting to show one of the cosmic horrors almost beyond man’s power to bear.
KINGSTON- A low-frequency “ping” emanating from the site of the Kingston sinkhole as well as other scattered weird phenomena are causing real estate investors to get skittish, sending housing prices tumbling and endangering the city’s hard-won efforts at gentrification.
“The other night I was walking my dog when I felt a malignant disturbance and perceived a voice that was not a voice which seemed to penetrate and pluck my very sinews, grasping my mind with a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods outside time,” said Sylvia Clinton, a Washington Ave. resident. “After all that disruption from years of construction, this is the last thing we need.”
There have been reports from throughout the area of strange dreams and unspeakable visions whirring from the limitless vacuum of space beyond all thought and entity, particularly affecting local artists and the mentally ill, as well as of heathen rituals performed in the woods by witches and warlocks of a secret cult of primeval origin, though those were later determined to be traceable to a New Paltz anarcho-vegan-Wiccan potluck.
Clues to the origins of this phenomena may be found in the papers of the late city engineer, Sven Ralphson, who unfortunately perished last week after pitching himself out of the tower atop city hall.
The papers, which were found despite their author’s avowed intent to burn them, are scarcely intelligible, interspersed with cryptic runes and a cipher known only to Ralphson. In the few semi-lucid passages, Ralphson alludes to what was apparently a routine inspection of the sinkhole site a fortnight ago that resulted in “a single glimpse of forbidden eons which I cannot efface from my mind’s eye” and of “Cyclopean sepulchres and sky-flung monoliths dripping with ooze sinister with latent horror” and “the geometry… all wrong” and “The Old Ones, beyond good and evil … ecstasies of joy and madness, wanton slaughter … Ryctka Cttlyabw … a cleansing fyre … Exterminate the brutes!”
As a result of the disturbances, the white-hot Kingston housing market appears to be cooling.
“Hopefully if this stuff keeps up, I’ll be able to get a place with affordable rent,” said artist Michelle Ortiz, interviewed while sculpting a bas-relief of a winged cephalopod at her Midtown studio and humming to herself disconcertingly.
“The dead ones wait dreaming in their charnel house beneath Washington Ave,” she added, before collapsing in a seizure.
