Days stretched into weeks as I sat locked in my study translating script, decoding symbol and interpreting occultic pictograph, my only reprieve the occasional trip to Arkham library, or correspondence with translators and linguists and cultural experts with knowledge concerning the dead religions of the world.

Progress was agonizingly slow at times – in the name of secrecy and prudence I asked only roundabout or inoffensive questions, often breaking particularly complex passages into multiple pieces, ensuring that none of my contacts would be able to see the whole of the puzzle I now laboured over.

Despite this piecemeal approach, my inquiries often proved fruitful, frequently leading to some new insight or revelation that represented a leap or significant step-forwards in my decoding of the Necronomicon.

Meanwhile, my dreams were getting progressively worse. I found myself haunted by strange and unimaginable visions of putrid gods writhing viscusly in their otherworldly temples and lairs, served by chanting, naked figures who offered up the newly dead to their blindly grasping tentacles.

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My business declined, and I took on only minimal work, making poor excuses concerning my health, and the necessity of a long overdue sabbatical, which my profession seldom allowed for. But after months of arduous work I finished my grisly task, and managed to produce a working translation of the dread Necronomicon.

This work alone represented a considerable accomplishment, and would have secured me a paper and perhaps a position in some academic circle. But what is study without practice?

I scoured the tome for some benign ritual I might replicate, but all necessitated materials I dared not obtain, or were blasphemous beyond comprehension, or required the recitation of sound symbols I deemed beyond the oral capabilities of the evolutionary reaches of our terrestrial sphere.

Only one ceremony seemed innocuous, a curiously quaint custom of pacifistic necromancy, less than a ritual, but more of a alchemical mixture or application of the material sciences.

It was this ritual, through rough translation I surmised was called, “the speaking of the tongue of the dead,” that I decided after long debate to make my infernal testbed.