My father waited until I was seven years old before he sacrificed my mother to Nyarlathotep; later, he would tell me he had wanted to make sure I was old enough to remember.

On that he succeeded, although some things are missing from my memories, and others strangely clear. I have to suppose my mother screamed, at least before he cut her throat, but I don't remember any noise coming from her despite her mouth being open as if she were screaming. I do remember distinctly wondering not why I couldn't hear her, but how I could see them, as the slab in the middle of our basement was at that moment light years away from the chair where he had told me to sit to watch.

I don't remember what sound or gesture I made, if any. The only sound I remember is a faint, omnipresent tune coming from a flute even farther away than my parents. The tune never repeated, and although I didn't think it at the moment, in my memories I'm certain it will outlast the stars and never play a recognizable bar.

I don't know either what my father did between killing my mother and burying her under a stone slab, when the basement no longer looked infinite. If I was looking I forgot.

* * *

I believe my father loved me. He just didn't love me, or my mother, nearly as much as he loved his own father, the proud man, so strikingly similar to his son, scowling at the universe from a painting in the study. He would always tell me stories about his adventures, how he had traveled the world, looking for things so old they hadn't been made, written, or prayed to by people.

My father would often tell me the story of how my grandfather had been killed. He had been betrayed by cowardly and ignorant people when he was interrogating some monks about a carved stone they had hidden in a place so secret they had removed its name from their maps and stopped teaching it to their children, more than a thousand years ago.

My grandfather had learned from an old parchment that words could be learned not only through the ear, but also through the blood, which was why people shuddered at hearing words for places, things, and actions nobody had heard or understood in centuries. He had the theory that if you applied enough pain the brain would not only recognize those terms but also remamber both words and meaning. His previous experiments had failed, but my father was certain he would have succeeded with the monks if the mercenaries he had hired hadn't rebelled and killed him.

* * *

One day, not long after killing my mother, my father asked me if I didn't find it unusual that there could be books older than people.

"No," I said. "Not everybody is people."

He smiled at me. Not proud. Satisfied.

That night after he tucked me into bed he read me for the first time a story from the book. I had never seen that book before in the sprawling antiquarian treasure that was our library, but from that night it would become the most important object in my life.

Every night he would read to me a different story, and as time passed I think I assumed to book was infinite, with more pages in it than space to put pages into. It was the kind of thought that came naturally to me, specially after the first stories.

I will not write down those stories here. That's not the book I'm writing. But I should write at least something about them.

The first ones were about the desert, about looking for old stones and old books. The man who had written the stories sounded from what I imagined my grandfather had talked like, but I could feel some brotherhood between them, as if they could have been, not friends, but brothers who hated each other. The names of lost cities and sunken temples, so often mentioned by my father as he described my grandfather's travels, were also mentioned in the stories. I learned their geography, architecture, their languages and almost-forgotten rituals, until they were more real to me than the gardens I saw through the windows sometimes.

If I ever left the house I don't remember it. I think I would.

Later stories would be stranger, or I guess I would have found them so if I had heard them earlier. By the time my father was reading to me tales of migrations between stars and from places so far distance wasn't a number, it sounded as possible as everything else. Having neither servants nor playmates, there was nobody to tell me it wasn't, and they'd have been wrong anyway.

* * *

Sometimes I had nightmares. My father would ask me to describe them; he would look disappointed if I could, but when I couldn't, when the thing and the image and the everything had been too much to fit in my mind or get out through my words, he would smile and tell me that I was having those dreams because I was a very special girl.

One night, after reading to me a story about dead people praying to something that was dead (but only until the sky was right) instead of taking the book with himself like always he gave it to me.

"I want you to sleep with the book tonight," he said. "But don't open it" (I was twelve then, and I could read the language of the clay tablets just as well as the old ones).

I nodded, very happy. "Will it keep the nightmares away?"

"Only the bad ones," he said.

He was right about that. He wouldn't always leave the book with me at night, but every night he did I would hug it and fall asleep quickly, something inside me just happy whenever I touched the book, and then have, unfailingly, the nightmares I couldn't describe.

* * *

This part is a secret. One night, one of those when he hadn't left the book with me, a bad nightmare woke me up, and, for the first and only time, I went out of my room in the middle of the night, alone. I walked softly to the studio, thinking of taking the book and just hugging it for a while to make sure the next nightmare would be one of those that made dad smile.

When I entered the studio I saw him awake, writing furiously on the book. For a moment I felt betrayed — he had told me the stories were old! — but then I saw that the eyes in the painting of my grandfather looked dead, as if the artist had made a painting of a dead man instead of one who would never die, which is how it usually looked. Without any clear understanding of it, I intuited that my grandfather was dictating the story to my father, which meant the stories were as old and as real as he had told me.

I think I knew he was taking dictation because of his face. He looked hurried and scared, as if afraid of what would happen if he missed a word.

I spent minutes looking at him, thinking what I've written here, but he never saw me, so I left. That's why this part is a secret.

* * *

This will be the last page of this story. It describes what happened when my father took me down to the basement.

I had never been in there since the night he had killed my mother. I asked him if I could bring the book with us. "No," he told me, caressing the book's pale leather covers before leaving it on the table. "We should keep your mother out of it."

Neither of us said anything as we walked down the stairs.

"You'll be sixteen years old at midnight," he said as he unchained the basement door. Those weren't words in any of the rituals I had read about in our books, but I knew they were the beginning, or the end, of one.

"I'll be sixteen," I answered. When I was reading about a ritual, no matter how old or remote from human experience and capabilities of perception and action, I would often guess, with the certainty of clear memory, the next step. The one we were in he middle of felt like that, only more so. Neither guess nor memory, I said and did the right things because I could not do otherwise.

The slab in the middle of the basement was empty, and the distance between the walls was infinite. It didn't take us long to the slab. I laid myself on it without needing to be told to.

My father looked over and past me, to the infinite space beyond the wall.

"She is here," he said, and I could almost feel the strain on his vocal cords as he spoke, slowly and painfully, in a language not made for them, or even for flesh.

"She has been prepared," he said.

"She will be able to see your face when you approach her. She will be able to feel your touch when you kill her. She will be able to speak your name as she dies."

I knew what he would say next.

"Take the second, perfect sacrifice, and give me" my father. Those were the next words of the ritual, and the last ones pronounced by human lips I would ever hear.

"Unending death" I wispered, quickly and easily, for I had been speaking and singing in such languages most of my life.

I don't know what his expression was when I did it. I was turned away, looking to the space beyond. I saw what came through. I remember every glowing point of darkness and infinitely curved spike. I remember enough to know that this description is insufficient, and every description would be.

I turned my head to my father as the thing he had bargained with played its part of the amended ritual, and I think I wish I didn't. Not a cell in his body had been touched or changed, but his eyes became as dead as the stones he fell on.

He was still breathing. The part of me who knew the words to all the rituals understood that he would remain breathing for centuries, and neither move nor talk nor close his eyes until the end of that time.

The thing didn't leave. It just wasn't there anymore, and the basement was once again finite. From my point of view, that of mole crawling through the damp tunnels of linear time, he wouldn't come for me until my father's gift had been completely given.

From its point of view, it had already killed me, and it always had.

* * *

That's the end of the story. Having written so much in my private notes about the terrible, malevolent past of our world, and others beyond, it might seem strange that I have waited so long to write about my own.

The truth, that many-angled, awful thing, is that many decades have come and gone and I'm still terrified. My father is still breathing in the cradle-tomb I built in the basement, and although I grow older, it's slow. Yet I expect no more happiness from the many days ahead of me than I've received from the many days behind: I have seen and done much, but out of fear, not of joy, and I have done terrible things without guilt or elation.

I know more than the even the Mad Arab ever did about the worlds and those places that aren't worlds, which means my soul is even more tainted than his (I'd pray for the both of us if I didn't knew what gods are). And yet I would gladly take a hell I know doesn't exist in exchange for the future I know awaits for me, settled as stone in the pitiful four-dimensional slice of reality we humans think it's the whole.

This is the last page of this volume of my personal notes. Later tonight I will start yet another one. The process of sewing the blank pages together and bounding the covers is the closest I get to hope, and, among the minor mercies of my long and unmerciful life, I count the fact that my father regrows his skin fast enough every time.