The Unnamable

Today I set forth toward Scream Diego, a gathering whose very title stirs both curiosity and unease. I have walked the crowded corridors of Comic-Con, where merchants ply their wares and masked devotees pose in the guise of heroes, sorcerers, and voyagers among the stars. Yet never before have I entered a conclave devoted wholly to horror. What spectacles might await me there? Surely stalls of merchandise, yet perhaps other rites as well. Will revelers dip for apples as if in some rustic game? Will tales be spoken around a campfire fashioned for artifice alone? Might there be attendees garbed in the likeness of Poe, or perhaps even Ligotti? Dear reader, your conjecture is as good as mine.

As I prepare myself for this descent into the unknown, I turn to a tale of H. P. Lovecraft’s devising, “The Unnamable.” In this story, Randolph Carter and his companion Joel Manton linger in a graveyard beside a ruined house upon Arkham’s Meadow Hill. Carter recounts whispers of an entity beyond the compass of mortal senses, a terror unfit for any earthly name. Their discourse is shattered when the abomination itself emerges, rending flesh and mind alike. They awake within St. Mary’s hospital, marked with wounds like horns and bruises like hooves. Manton, once unbelieving, can speak only of slime and vapor, of eyes and blemishes, of a thousand shifting forms. At last he names it in trembling tones, calling it what it had ever been: the unnamable.