Rust Eaten
Dreams
A Lovecraftian horror story
By Jameson Ortiz
Copyright © 2025 by Jameson Ortiz
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Jameson Ortiz
Disclaimer:
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, locales, or organizations is purely coincidental. All names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any other method, without the prior written permission of the author.
Rust eaten dreams
I have prayed to God for a new body, yet He has not answered. I have whispered to the hidden arts, but no reward has come. I have called upon Satan himself, and still, only silence. I fear I am utterly alone. No one comes, for I have no one. None can see me, for I am unseen. Therefore I am alone — yet I am unafraid.
It was through dreams that I discovered the book: the Necronomicon. A tall figure appeared, bearing it with both hands as though presenting some dreadful sacrament. He named himself the Gatekeeper, and in a voice like a veil drawn across the abyss, he declared that only I might wield its power, should I consent to follow. He promised that within its pages I would find what I sought. I agreed. His name was Nyarlathotep.
Within the book I uncovered another name: Azathoth, the shapeless, the incomprehensible. A thing whose form is no form, whose essence is chaos unbound. He could aid me in my design to be made new. I called to him, though at first his words were nothing but the raving of madness. Idiot, I thought. And yet, in the end, the madness resolved into meaning.
I closed the book and began to see flashes: rust, shards of twisted blackened metal, filth and dirt all around, oil pooling upon the ground.
Nothing came to mind. For days I pondered as I went about my routine—until it struck me, when the light on my dashboard signaled that I needed oil. An obscure and dreadful certainty took hold of my mind.
I drove an hour out of the city to the rural edge of the county, where I came upon a wrecking yard. The sign was fashioned from old car parts. It had long been abandoned, its cars rusted and overgrown with weeds and tall grass. I could hear the sounds of twisted metal groaning and scraping against itself. A low, growling rumble seeped into my ears—almost too faint to hear, yet enough to make me aware of something… something near.
I seized my bag, sliding my phone and water within, and locked the car behind me as though sealing away the last remnant of safety. Circling the perimeter, I came upon a gap in the chain-link fence and slipped through.
Before me sprawled a labyrinth of derelict cars, their rusted husks rising like monuments to forgotten ages. The rumble endured, low and insistent, threading through the marrow of my bones. With it came a restless compulsion — a certainty that I must seek its source, for within it lay the promise of deliverance.
Eight hours yet remained until sunset — enough, perhaps, to uncover the mystery. And if not, then I would dwell amid this graveyard of iron and ruin, a solitary camper in the shadow of nameless things.
I made my way through the maze of rust. The ground was hard-packed dirt, mottled with black stains and littered with fragments of old car parts embedded like jagged fossils. I tread carefully, for a single misstep could impale me upon some treacherous shard of rust. Every corner I turned seemed the same—endless corridors of decay—and time itself became meaningless. My watch had stopped, and my phone flickered and scrambled with static like some ancient, dying television.
It felt as though hours had passed as I pressed deeper into the labyrinth of wreckage. The rumble grew more insistent, yet I sensed I was still far from its source. Dread seeped into my bones as the heaps of cars towered ever higher, until the world around me vanished into iron walls. All that remained visible was a narrow strip of pale blue sky, a frail reminder that anything beyond this place still existed.
I neared a bend when the sounds of sniffing and guttural growling reached my ears. As I turned the corner, a hulking beast emerged from the shadows. Its body was an abomination—clotted with protruding shards of metal and splintered glass, patches of coarse hair jutting out between the wounds as if the thing itself were stitched from ruin. Its eyes fixed upon me, and with a howl that reverberated like tearing steel, it charged.
I turned to flee, striking my head against the edge of an open car door before collapsing into a heap of shattered glass. I staggered upright, scarcely aware of the shards lodged in my neck and arms. Behind me, the beast’s howls and guttural snarls drew nearer, echoing against the walls of rust and ruin.
I ran blindly—rounding corners, leaping through gutted cars—until I stumbled into a clearing of tires. The beast lunged, crashing into a stack of wreckage that toppled to the ground in a shriek of tortured metal. I hurled myself into the mound of tires, the balding rubber concealing jagged fragments of steel that sliced into my arms, legs, and body. I writhed deeper into the hollow labyrinth, every inch of me scraped and bloodied, until at last I lay still within the dark recesses.
The beast prowled above, sniffing and snarling, its breath a low tremor in the blackness as it hunted for me.
I felt overwhelmed and faint, my body slick with a clammy wetness. A strange sensation burned along my skin as I writhed within the suffocating mass of tires, until at last the blackness of unconsciousness claimed me.
When I awoke, I dragged myself from the hollow and saw the sun sinking low. The wetness was blood—my blood. I was drenched from countless cuts, my garments clinging to me as though soaked in some loathsome brine.
Running a trembling hand through my matted hair, a sudden sting lanced my palm. Blood welled from a deep gash. Grimacing, I crouched and drew a pad from my bag, binding the wound in a makeshift dressing. With slow and unsteady fingers, I pushed my hair aside and felt them: jagged slivers of glass embedded in my neck. Not one, nor two, but many—like the spines of some alien creature lodged within my flesh.
I sat down in the ruin, ravenous, and devoured a sandwich with desperate haste. Half my water was gone before I realized it. Then, forcing myself to silence, I crept from the tangle of tires, wary of the beast’s return.
What in God’s name had that thing been? It bore the shape of a hound—something like a Saint Bernard, though swollen, distorted, impossibly vast. Yet it was no mere animal. Its body bristled with metal, glass, and snarled lengths of wire, as though wreckage itself had grafted to its flesh. Debris and corruption formed its hide, but beneath the ruinous shell there lingered… something. Some inch of lingering life, some vestige of the creature it once was, pulsing with an uncanny will that no earthly beast should possess.
As I pressed deeper into the twisted piles of cars, further into the wrecking yard, the rumble of the earth grew into a steady, resonant hum — a vibration that seemed to throb within my bones, urging me onward.
A long stretch of dirt led toward a mound, upon which loomed a dark, protruding monument. Yet before I could comprehend its shape, the hum intensified. Behind me, towers of wreckage shuddered and toppled, and from their collapse the beast emerged once more, thundering toward me.
I fled, stumbling over jagged husks embedded in the ground, plunging into shallow pools of oil that clung like tar, ensnaring my limbs. Shards of glass and twisted metal bit into my flesh; oily wires coiled about my legs and arms like the grasping tendrils of some mechanical abyss. My body was soon a map of cuts and welts, my hair matted with the rancid sheen of rust and grease.
Still I ran, the monstrous thing at my heels, its breath a guttural tempest. Its form seemed even more abhorrent than before: a silhouette swollen and warped, its hide a writhing tapestry of iron and sinew, as though it carried within it the memory of all machines that had ever died. The very air quivered with the unnatural force of its presence, as though the earth itself recoiled from what it had become.
At last I reached the mound. I clawed my way up its slope and collapsed against the black stone that crowned its peak.
The beast halted. With a sudden, unnatural stillness, it lowered its head and loosed a sound unlike any I had ever heard from its blighted throat — a mournful cry, part whimper, part lament, like some forgotten hymn of sorrow drifting from the depths of a broken world. Its massive body hunched and quivered, as though crushed beneath an unseen weight, trembling in fear of the monument before us.
For the first time, I saw something in its eyes other than ravenous hunger. There was dread. There was pleading. A gaze not of predator, but of prisoner — a tortured warning, as though it sought to save me not from itself, but from the terrible presence of this place.
I turned back to the stone. Its surface drank the light, swallowing color and form until it seemed I gazed upon an endless void. My hands trembled as I reached for it, the vibration rolling through my bones like the heartbeat of some alien will that was not my own.
The beast lurched forward, snapping and growling — not to strike, but to drive me away. Its hulking frame interposed itself before the stone, bristling with twisted shards of metal and glass that gleamed like malign stars. It barked, roared, and rammed its shoulder into me, cutting deep with its protruding spikes, yet still I pressed on. My obsession overpowered its desperation.
And then the earth itself seemed to shudder. The hum beneath the ground deepened into a low, mind-rending drone that reverberated through marrow and skull, a sound so vast and terrible it seemed to hollow out the very notion of thought.
Nyarlathotep’s voice slid into my mind like oil coursing through a rusted pipe.
Yes… come closer…
The black stone flared with an impossible radiance, a light that revealed nothing yet consumed all sight. In that blinding vision I beheld them both — Nyarlathotep and Azathoth — looming side by side, their vastness annihilating the very notion of scale, their outlines shifting and dissolving faster than thought could grasp. To look upon them was to gaze into the anatomy of madness itself.
Azathoth’s endless gibbering now surged in perfect rhythm with Nyarlathotep’s words, a symphony of chaos made flesh. They had never been divided in their purpose. The whispers, the dreams, the labyrinth of rust and ruin — all had been but threads in their design, woven to lead me here.
“You are ready,” spoke Nyarlathotep, his voice a smile that lacerated. “You will walk with me, in the Legion of the Crawling Chaos. And you will never be human again.”
The ground split beneath me. Rusted metal speared upward, coiling around my arms and legs like the grasp of some buried titan. Wires slithered across my skin as living veins, burrowing beneath my flesh like worms through damp soil.
My breath curdled into a metallic rasp; the taste of battery acid flooded my tongue. I was nothing but a grain of rust adrift in their immeasurable shadows.
The beast howled in despair, its voice a dirge torn from the depths of eternity. In its eyes I saw the reflection of my own unraveling madness — and at last, I understood. It had once been as I was. Another who had come to the stone. Another who had been broken and reshaped. It had tried to save me, not from death, but from the far crueler fate of the Legion.
Azathoth’s voice swelled, a babble so vast and formless it resolved into meaning: We break you, that we may build you once more.
My flesh split and sloughed away, replaced with jagged armor of corroded iron and writhing copper cabling. My joints shrieked with steam; my heartbeat became the thrum of machinery. I was no longer blood and bone, but a weapon of rust and ruin. My wounds no longer bled — they wept oil.
The beast lowered its head and loosed one final cry — not of warning, but of surrender — before vanishing into the endless maze of twisted cars. The sound lingered, a fading requiem swallowed by the labyrinth.
I turned toward the black stone. Nyarlathotep’s laughter coursed through my skull, a cacophony of grinding gears and shattering glass. Beyond it, I felt the Legion stirring, countless voices overlapping in a ceaseless transmission, a static chorus that whispered of eternity.
I advanced toward that baleful monolith. When the void split open before me, I stepped into its abyssal light — and became one of them.
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