"Passing of a Dreamer" is a short Cthulhu Mythos story by American author Gary Myers.
Synopsis[]
In the city of Ulthar, in a narrow windowless alley behind the Hall of Burgesses and the Woth the Baker's shop, there is a door with questionable existence holding an altar of bones (not merely human ones) where sits an idol winged salamander-like daemon called the Keeper of Dreams, offering infamous services only to an unknown fee. The story tells of a priest named Snireth-Ko, who prepared the incense burned at all hours in the left ear of the image Nasht to confound his perception and avoid Nasht's perception of his worshipers being sinful. But he was able to discern the supposed nonexistence of the gods and turned them away. He wandered the cat-filled streets with lost faith, and he was drawn into an alley and a secret doorway. He at first believed he was in Woth's shop until he realized he was in the den of the Keeper of Dreams, fearful of what fee the Keeper will demand. He had lost his blindness to this entrance when he lost his faith, and so he entered a veil of purple cosmic flames and into a clime of a viscous shore filled with polyp-like beaked tentacled creatures and vast continent of weeds.
Snireth-Ko walked through white mist, spires, emerald minarets, crystal ways between tall columns of figured glass, riven temple-domes and cyclopean ruins of brilliant green, into a wide court approaching an emerald demigod banded with mysterious runes stood staring at the stars. He was a dreamer who sought the stars guessing what cryptic messages they gave. But he darted into the darkness when the god shuttered. He arrived in a dark necropolis in the Plateau of Leng where he saw the lurid fires of spirits and followed a mysterious hooded figure. Though the figure vanished, Snireth-Ko managed to trace him down broken steps into an ancient dark tomb through a door that held some eldritch creature that deterred Snireth-Ko. But he gets a vision of being consumed into the aether and meeting a Messenger of Azathoth on the dark side of the moon. He soon broke free from his trance seeing that the Keeper of Dreams had taken something from him as payment for its service.
The story ends with the claim that what had been taken from Snireth-Ko as payment remains a matter of grim speculation. But the narrator claims that, in London, he found an old man cowering in an alley lamenting with fleshless fingers that he lost his faith and paid an undesired price.
Publication History[]
- The Arkham Collector, Spring 1971 (1971)
- The Arkham Collector, Vol 1 (1971)
- The House of the Worm (1975)
- The Country of the Worm: Excursions Beyond the Wall of Sleep (2013)