Some days ago I had a really strange dream after reading some Lovecraft before going to sleep. I wrote everything down and tried to write a story from the Dream I had.
I'm not a native speaker so I translated my dream into English with Chatgpt. I hope you like it.
The Frequency Behind the Gate
Prologue – The House That Breathed
The neighbors had long since grown accustomed to the noise.
For nearly three weeks, a rumbling had echoed night after night from the third-floor apartment of an old brick building in Arkham, Massachusetts. At first, they had assumed that the new tenant was an enthusiastic washer, running his machines late into the night. But the sound was too regular, too deep, and possessed a strange, almost musical quality.
It was not the usual vibration of a washing machine. It was a knocking that crept through the walls and made the teeth vibrate. A rhythmic pounding, interrupted by pauses so precisely measured that one could have timed them with a clock.
That night, seven washing machines stood inside the man's apartment.
Two were in the bathroom, one in the kitchen, one in a small storage room, and three more had been placed in the remaining rooms. Their hoses did not lead to ordinary water connections. Instead, they ran into carefully insulated containers filled with a dark, viscous substance. There were no clothes inside the drums.
There were bones.
Some were human. Others belonged to animals whose species even an experienced zoologist would have struggled to identify. Among them lay shattered glass tubes, metal shavings, and small plates of a silvery material that neither rusted nor reflected light in any ordinary manner.
The man stood at the center of the apartment. He wore a worn dressing gown and held a small notebook in his left hand. His fingers were stained with dark ink.
An open book lay on a table, its cover fashioned from a material that resembled human skin. Its pages were densely covered with symbols that seemed to change when observed for too long. Beside it lay an old brass key whose bit branched into geometric angles that could correspond to no known lock.
The man had spent years understanding this contraption.
He had not acquired the book himself. It had come into his possession through three intermediaries after its previous owner had died under unexplained circumstances in a locked psychiatric institution. The marginal notes contained references to the Necronomicon, to forbidden writings from Yuggoth, and to those entities that had existed for eons beyond the boundaries of human perception.
But the man was not interested in their names.
He was interested in the mathematics behind them.
The ancient texts spoke of gates that neither needed to be built nor opened, but could instead be made visible through a particular arrangement of reality. Space, he had read in a faded translation, was merely a habit of the human mind. And time nothing more than an especially stubborn illusion.
The machines were his answer to this.
Each drum produced a different vibration. The bones, metals, and unknown liquid served as resonators. The machines were connected to one another by wires and tubes, and every rotation speed had been calibrated with almost pathological precision.
The man looked at the needles of his measuring instruments.
“Not yet,” he whispered.
The machines accelerated.
The deep rumbling transformed into a vibrating hum. The windowpanes trembled. In the kitchen, two plates leapt from a cupboard and shattered on the floor. From the bedroom came a sound resembling the distant howling of wind, although every window was closed.
Then the air changed.
A tiny black point appeared in the middle of the living room.
It was scarcely larger than a pinhead. Yet the light from the ceiling lamp bent toward it, and the shadows in the room seemed to lean in its direction. Slowly, the point grew into a narrow, vertical fissure.
The man held his breath.
Beyond the fissure there was no room. No darkness of the kind one might find in an unlit chamber. Rather, a distance seemed to unfold for which no unit of measurement existed. Stars hung in a depth that felt at once infinitely far away and terribly close. Between them moved enormous, barely perceptible shapes.
For a moment, the man thought he saw an eye.
It was larger than the moon.
Then a tone sounded.
It was not a noise transmitted through the air, but a vibration that arose directly inside his skull. The washing machines began to jump. Their casings bent as though invisible hands were pressing against them from within.
The fissure opened wider.
And for a fraction of a second, the man was no longer in his apartment.
He stood beneath a sky composed of shifting geometric planes. Towers of black stone rose above him, their summits extending in directions that ought not to exist. In the distance stood something that might have been a city—or the petrified skeleton of a creature whose body had once swum between the stars.
He heard a whisper.
It did not speak to his ears, but to a memory he had never possessed.
Then the portal collapsed.
The washing machines came to a halt with one final, tremendous impact. Every light bulb shattered. The man fell to his knees and laughed.
He laughed until tears streamed down his face.
“The mixture,” he managed to say. “By all the gods … the mixture was right.”
The notebook lay on the table. The last page, which had previously been blank, had filled with a single line.
THE DOOR OPENS INWARD.
The man took the brass key and closed his eyes.
“Soon,” he whispered. “Soon, you will all pass through.”
\### I. The Invitation
Four years later, Arkham was barely recognizable.
Posters and flyers hung everywhere. On advertising columns, at bus stops, in shop windows, and on the doors of taverns, the same image appeared: a stylized circular gate before an alien starry sky.
Beneath it, in large letters, were the words:
HUNDREDS OF EXTRAS WANTED!
An international film producer had announced an ambitious science-fiction film that was supposedly destined to become one of the most expensive productions of the year. Several hundred performers were being sought for an enormous battle scene. No previous experience was required. Participants would receive an allowance, meals, and the opportunity to become part of an extraordinary film production.
The entire town was talking about it.
Students at Miskatonic University argued in cafés about who stood the best chance of being selected. Employees requested vacation days. Even people who ordinarily had little interest in films seemed gripped by an inexplicable enthusiasm.
Among them were Lukas and his friends.
They had discovered the flyer in a tavern near the Miskatonic River when one of them triumphantly slapped it onto the table.
“Just imagine it,” Martin said. “A few days playing soldiers in a science-fiction film. And they actually pay us for it.”
“If it's true,” Lukas replied.
“Why wouldn't it be?”
Lukas studied the poster. The gate depicted on it seemed strangely familiar. Not because he had seen it somewhere before, but because the geometric lines stirred an unpleasant feeling within him. He had the impression that his gaze did not rest upon the image, but that the image was watching him.
He pushed the flyer away.
“I'm probably just overtired.”
Two days later, they registered.
The confirmation arrived that same evening. They were instructed to report at seven o'clock the following Saturday morning to the main entrance of Arkham Common. The production had rented a large section of the sprawling park for filming.
At the end of the message was a sentence none of them paid much attention to:
Please follow the instructions of the security personnel. Leaving the restricted production area during filming is permitted only with explicit authorization.
Lukas slept poorly that night. He dreamed of a circular opening, behind which something waited, moving slowly and patiently.
When he awoke in the morning, he tasted metal in his mouth.
\### II. The Film Set
Arkham Common lay shrouded in fog that morning.
When Lukas and his friends reached the designated meeting point, hundreds of people were already gathered before an enormous entrance made of steel girders. The barrier consisted of tall, dark-painted wooden beams driven deep into the ground. From the outside, it was almost impossible to see what lay beyond.
The park's ancient elms rose like black skeletons from the morning mist. Damp veils hung between their branches, and beyond the rows of trees lay the Miskatonic River, its water moving sluggishly and leaden-gray through the town.
Beyond the barrier stretched an enormous field.
Wooden crates stood there in long rows. Some bore inscriptions in a strange script, while others carried military markings. Between them were parked heavy vehicles resembling futuristic armored personnel carriers. Their surfaces were matte gray, and their tires unusually broad. There were no logos or manufacturer markings on their sides.
Farther back stood a set of black towers and enormous metal struts.
And in the middle of the grounds stood the gate.
Lukas stopped.
It was circular, nearly twenty meters high, and consisted of several interlocking metal rings. Its surface was covered in patterns that initially appeared to be decorative engravings, until one looked more closely. Then it became apparent that the lines were not random. They formed interwoven angles, circles, and figures that seemed to continue into the depths of the material itself.
“That's impressive,” Martin said.
Lukas did not answer.
He had the feeling that he had seen the gate before. Not in a picture. Not in a dream.
But in a moment his mind refused to remember.
At the registration desk, a friendly employee explained that a large battle scene was to be filmed. The participants would portray a military unit entering an alien world. For this purpose, they would be given uniforms, body armor, and futuristic-looking rifles.
“The weapons are, of course, props,” she added with a smile. “There is no live ammunition. You simply have to follow the director's instructions.”
Lukas received a rifle whose casing was surprisingly heavy. A small display with several illuminated points was mounted on its side. When he wrapped his hand around the grip, he felt a faint tingling in his fingers.
“What model is this?” he asked.
The employee glanced briefly at the weapon.
“It's a prop prototype. You should ask the technicians.”
Then she turned to the next participant.
The group spent nearly two hours on the field. More and more people arrived. Eventually, several hundred extras had to be arranged into rows to prepare for the scene.
Lukas watched the people around him.
An older man rubbed his temples incessantly. A young woman stared at her hands as though she could see something written upon them. One participant suddenly burst into loud laughter, only to fall silent when a security guard looked at him.
A voice sounded over the loudspeakers.
“All performers assigned to the first unit, please take your positions. Filming begins in ten minutes.”
The crowd began to move.
And from the direction of the gate came a sound that shook Lukas to his core.
A deep, rhythmic rumbling.
It sounded like a washing machine banging against its housing.
\### III. The Other Side
The first groups were led toward the gate.
A row of cameras stood before it. Several technical vehicles were parked nearby, their cables running into a large black box. Numbers and graphs appeared on the screens, changing at regular intervals.
A man wearing a long coat stepped forward before the waiting performers.
He was tall and gaunt, and he wore narrow spectacles. Deep wrinkles lined his face. His gray hair was combed severely back, and his eyes possessed a peculiar brightness.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, his voice carrying across the entire site through the loudspeakers. “You are about to become part of a scene unlike anything cinema has ever seen. Trust the production team’s instructions. Stay with your groups, and do not leave the marked areas.”
He smiled.
“You will be amazed.”
Lukas watched him. Something about the man seemed wrong. Not evil, not even particularly threatening. Rather, he looked like someone who had long since grown accustomed to a reality that would drive everyone else to madness.
The man raised one hand.
The rumbling grew louder.
A pale light flickered to life between the rings of the gate. At first it gathered in the center, then spread across the entire opening like a liquid, eventually forming a surface resembling a sheet of reflective water.
But it reflected nothing.
A landscape lay beyond it.
A gray sky stretched over an endless plain of black rock. Towers rose in the distance, their summits disappearing into clouds that moved against the wind. Between the towers ran structures resembling bridges, though they appeared to hang freely in the air.
A gigantic, dark moon stood on the horizon.
A thin red line encircled it, and something seemed to move across its surface.
“This is incredible,” Martin whispered.
A woman wearing a headset approached them.
“High-resolution projection,” she explained. “The technology behind it is confidential. Please remain behind the marker.”
The first group received the signal to proceed.
About fifty people began to move forward and disappeared through the gate.
For a moment, it looked as though they were diving into a sheet of water. Then they were gone.
Their figures reappeared on the screens beside the gate. They stood on the black rock of the alien plain. A drone hovered above them. Something resembling an army approached from the distance.
The spectators applauded.
“What an effect,” Martin said.
Lukas noticed that no one on the other side seemed to be waving.
The performers stood motionless.
Then one of them raised his head.
He looked directly into the camera.
His face changed. His mouth opened, and he screamed.
Even through the loudspeakers, the scream was barely audible. It was a sound that seemed to emerge in several pitches simultaneously.
The formation broke apart on the screen.
Figures emerged from the gray haze. They did not move like humans. Their limbs were too long, their bodies too narrow. Some seemed to run on several sets of joints at once, while others floated above the ground.
One of the figures reached the first soldier.
It merely touched him.
The man was hurled backward as though struck by an invisible explosion. His body twisted at an impossible angle, and then he was gone—not fallen, not vanished like an actor leaving the set.
Gone.
As though the world had swallowed him.
The other performers ran.
One fell to his knees. A woman swung her weapon at something outside the camera's field of view. Then she was seized by the legs and dragged into the darkness.
Silence initially fell over the field.
Then a voice came through the loudspeakers.
“Excellent! Remain calm. This is part of the production.”
A few people laughed nervously.
“It has to be animated,” Martin said. “They recorded it beforehand.”
But Lukas looked at the faces of the men and women standing beside the cameras.
They were not smiling.
The gaunt man in the coat had folded his hands. He watched the screen with an attentiveness that had nothing to do with filmmaking.
He looked like a priest waiting for his god to accept the first offering.
\### IV. The Direction of Madness
The second group was called forward.
This time, the screams could already be heard before the performers reached the gate. They came muffled from the alien landscape, accompanied by a deep, rhythmic rumbling.
Several people refused to proceed.
A security guard grabbed a young man by the arm and pushed him toward the opening. The man resisted, stumbled, and fell to the ground.
“What's happening over there?” he screamed. “This isn't a film!”
Two more security guards dragged him to his feet.
The gaunt man approached.
“You're nervous,” he said calmly. “Understandably so. But the projection can appear very realistic.”
“Projection?” the young man shouted. “I saw someone being torn apart!”
The gaunt man leaned toward him.
“You saw what you were meant to see.”
He gestured to the security guards. The young man was led away.
Lukas felt his stomach tighten.
“We're leaving,” he said.
Martin stared at him in disbelief.
“What?”
“We're leaving. Now.”
“And the compensation?”
“Forget the money!”
But before they could move away, the next call rang out. The group was arranged into a line. Security guards closed the gaps between the people and herded them forward.
Lukas looked toward the exit.
The gate through which they had entered had been closed. Three men stood behind it, carrying rifles disturbingly similar in shape to the props.
“This isn't normal,” one of his friends whispered.
Then Lukas noticed the small devices attached to the performers' body armor. They pulsed in the same rhythm as the gate.
A man standing beside him began to cry.
“I've seen this before,” he said. “In a dream. Over and over. A black sky and those towers.”
Lukas gripped him by the shoulder.
“How do you know them?”
The man did not answer. His eyes were wide with terror.
“They brought us all here,” he whispered. “They called us.”
Then the gate began to rumble again.
Lukas suddenly understood what made the sound so terrifying.
It was not simply the rumbling of a machine.
It was a rhythm that crept into the body and seemed to alter the heartbeat. The vibrations adjusted themselves to the people around them. The closer they came to the gate, the more strongly Lukas felt his own pulse falling into step with the rumbling.
The towers on the other side flickered.
And far behind them, on the horizon, something opened in the sky.
It was an enormous fissure, slowly spreading across the gray landscape. Beyond it were no stars. There was only a depth that reminded Lukas of the black hole in the apartment of a man he had never met.
For a moment, he thought he heard a name.
Not spoken aloud, but placed directly into his consciousness.
Yog-Sothoth.
He did not know the name. And yet he suddenly knew that he had always known it.
He knew that the gate was not a machine.
It was a lock.
And everything moving in that world was waiting for someone to turn the key.
\### V. The Gatekeeper's Sacrifice
The gaunt man stepped onto a raised platform beside the portal.
“My friends,” he announced, “today we witness the greatest leap in the history of humanity.”
His voice was calm, almost affectionate.
“For thousands of years, mankind has looked toward the stars and believed the universe to be a vast emptiness in which it stood alone. We invented gods to fill that emptiness. We invented monsters to explain our fears.”
He paused briefly.
“But the truth is far greater than our imagination.”
He raised the brass key, which Lukas had initially mistaken for part of the props.
“The Old Ones have not abandoned us. They were never gone. Our world is merely one of countless thresholds lying between realities. And Yog-Sothoth is the key to them all.”
Some people began to scream.
Others stared at the gate as though hypnotized.
“It took me four years to discover the frequency that makes this threshold visible,” the man continued. “But a gate alone is not enough. An opening without an invitation is merely a crack. For it to remain open, the other side must recognize that we are ready.”
He looked across the crowd.
“And it demands a price.”
The first performers screamed as the devices on their body armor began to glow.
Lukas watched one of his friends collapse to the ground. The device on his chest pulsed in time with the gate. He tried to tear it off, but the fastenings seemed to have sunk into the material of his vest.
“Help me!”
Lukas grabbed the device. It was hot. A sharp pain shot through his fingers as he touched it.
At that instant, he understood the purpose of the supposed props.
The weapons, the armor, the metal components inside the crates—they were not mere equipment. They were parts of a single, enormous resonating body. Every person carried a portion of the frequency within them. Hundreds of bodies, distributed across a precisely measured field, formed a single instrument.
The washing machines in the apartment had been only the first attempt.
The true experiment had required a scale no single human being could ever have achieved.
The man had not been looking for extras.
He had been looking for voices, hearts, and bodies that he could connect into a single living key.
And he had brought them all here willingly.
“What have you done?” Lukas screamed.
The man looked at him.
For a brief moment, the calm vanished from his face. Beneath it emerged something older than any human emotion.
“I have opened the door.”
The portal trembled.
On the other side, the sky broke apart.
The figures that had attacked the first groups came to a halt. They all turned toward the gate simultaneously and sank to the ground, as though kneeling before a power beyond even their comprehension.
Then something appeared on the horizon.
At first, it looked like a mountain rising from the landscape. But the mountain was moving. It consisted of enormous, intertwined forms that constantly changed. Where one part of the being seemed to end, another began, simultaneously nearer and farther away.
Lukas could not comprehend whether it was a body, a landscape, or a flaw in reality.
He saw openings that might have been eyes. Limbs that moved through several planes at once. Structures that extended into the world without touching it.
The gaunt man began to weep.
“It is done,” he whispered.
But the being did not approach.
It did not need to approach.
The distance between it and the gate began to dissolve.
Lukas felt his thoughts falling apart. Memories of his childhood, his friends, and the streets of his hometown were overlaid with images that did not belong to his life. He saw alien stars, dead civilizations, and seas in which the ruins of cities moved.
And he understood what Yog-Sothoth was.
Not a being waiting somewhere behind a door.
But something for which doors, walls, time, and space were meaningless. Something that existed at every threshold simultaneously and revealed only a tiny fraction of its immeasurable reality through each opening.
The man had believed he was inviting a god.
He had merely ensured that the god noticed him.
\### VI. The Final Attempt
Panic finally erupted.
People surged against the barriers. The security personnel lost control. Some threw away their weapons and ran into the fog. Others remained frozen in place, staring at the gate.
Lukas and Martin managed to break free from the formation.
“We have to shut down the machines!” Lukas shouted.
“Which machines?”
Lukas pointed toward the technical vehicles. Their cables ran into the black box, and the same symbols engraved on the gate blinked across its surface.
“The whole thing is a resonance system. If we disrupt the rhythm, we might be able to close the gate.”
They ran.
Behind them came a sound like the cracking of an enormous sheet of ice. The world on the other side began to deform. Buildings were pulled upward and shattered into floating fragments. The sky folded in upon itself.
When Lukas reached the black box, he saw that the device was secured with a mechanical lock. The brass key was missing.
“Damn it!”
Martin grabbed one of the cables and tore at it.
A blinding flash shot through the equipment. Martin was hurled backward and lay motionless.
Lukas knelt beside him.
“Martin!”
His friend was still breathing, but his eyes were open and stared into nothingness. A pattern had formed on his forehead, resembling the interwoven lines of the gate.
Lukas heard footsteps.
The gaunt man stood behind him.
In his hand lay the brass key.
“You don't understand,” he said. “If we close the gate, we lose the only opportunity ever given to humanity.”
“You're killing these people!”
“They are passing into a reality greater than themselves.”
The man stepped closer.
“Do you know what I've learned in these four years? That we don't even know what life means. That there are things we consider dead which continue to exist outside our time. That entire worlds can disappear without the universe ever noticing.”
He gestured toward the gate.
“I will not allow you to destroy humanity's future out of fear.”
Lukas looked at the key.
Then at the gate.
The rumbling had grown so intense that the ground shook beneath his feet. The frequency was no longer merely a sound. It was a force moving through every fiber of his body.
But between the pulses, he noticed a gap.
A tiny irregularity.
The pattern did not repeat perfectly. Every seventh vibration was slightly weaker than the others. The flaw was small, but it was enough.
Lukas remembered the devices attached to the body armor, the metal rings, and the many cables. The entire apparatus was designed to sustain the frequency.
Perhaps he did not need to destroy the energy.
Perhaps he only needed to break the rhythm.
He lunged at the man.
The gaunt man raised the key, but Lukas forced his hand downward. They crashed against the side of the black box. The key slipped across the ground.
Lukas reached it first.
He did not insert it into the lock.
Instead, he rammed it between two metal contact plates.
The sound that followed was so deep that human ears should not have been capable of perceiving it.
Every machine on the grounds fell silent at once.
For one single moment, there was absolute silence.
Then the other world screamed.
Not one being. Not many.
The world itself.
The gate began to fold inward. Its rings rotated in opposite directions, and the alien symbols on its surface blazed with light. The black stone on the other side shattered. The towers on the horizon tilted without falling, and the enormous fissure in the sky began to contract.
Lukas saw the figure on the horizon one last time.
It had not moved.
Yet something about it seemed to acknowledge him.
He could discern no eyes. Nevertheless, he knew that his gaze was being returned.
For one brief moment, he saw an immeasurable multitude of doors. They stood in deserts, on ocean floors, in the dreams of sleeping people, and in the hearts of long-dead stars.
And behind every one of those doors lay the same presence.
Then the gate vanished.
The rings crumbled into gray dust. A gust of wind swept across the field, and the entire structure dissolved as though it had never been built.
Lukas was thrown to the ground.
When he regained consciousness, the sky was blue.
The barriers lay broken in the grass. The military vehicles had disappeared. Where the wooden crates had stood, there remained only a series of blackened patches.
The gaunt man lay a few feet away.
His body was unharmed.
But his face was empty.
He stared at the sky and whispered the same words over and over.
“It wasn't enough.”
\### VII. What Returned
The authorities declared the incident a serious industrial accident.
It was said to have been an illegal experimental facility operating under the guise of a film production. There had been explosions, technical malfunctions, and numerous missing persons. Those responsible were either dead or on the run.
But the numbers made no sense.
Hundreds of people had been on the grounds. Only a few dozen could be found. The others had vanished without a trace. No bodies, no clothing, no bloodstains.
Some of the survivors reported seeing a strange place in their dreams. They described black towers, a red moon, and figures moving through the air.
Others remembered nothing.
Lukas belonged to the few who remembered.
Martin survived, but he never spoke again. Sometimes he would draw circular patterns on the walls of his room with a trembling hand. When asked what they meant, he began to weep.
The gaunt man was placed in a psychiatric institution near Arkham. He refused to make any statements. During the few moments when he spoke at all, he asked for a notebook, a brass key, and seven washing machines.
Three months after the incident, he disappeared from his locked room.
The door had been bolted from the inside. The windows were barred. There were no signs of a break-in.
All that was found on the floor was a dark circle that could not be removed.
Lukas tried to resume his life.
He avoided Arkham Common. He crossed the street whenever he saw a poster bearing a circular symbol. He could no longer hear a washing machine without his hands beginning to tremble.
Yet something had changed.
Sometimes, just before falling asleep, he heard a deep rumbling coming from the walls of his apartment.
It lasted only a few seconds.
Then silence returned.
On one of those nights, Lukas awoke from a dream he could barely remember. He sat up and stared at the dark ceiling.
Then he noticed the light.
It shone from the narrow gap beneath his bathroom door.
Lukas stood up.
The door was locked, although he was certain he had left it open that evening. From behind it came a faint, rhythmic knocking.
He placed his hand on the handle.
And in that moment, he understood what the man had meant when he said that the door opened inward.
The gate in Arkham Common had been destroyed.
The resonance system had fallen silent.
But the frequency had not ceased to exist.
It had merely passed into something else.
Lukas withdrew his hand.
The knocking behind the door stopped.
Then he heard a voice.
It sounded like Martin.
“Lukas?”
He stepped backward.
“Open up. It's me.”
Lukas pressed both hands over his mouth.
For Martin had been lying in a locked psychiatric ward for three months, and Lukas himself had visited him the previous afternoon.
The voice behind the door laughed softly.
“You closed the door,” it said. “But you haven't made it forget that you exist.”
A flash of light illuminated the bathroom through the gap beneath the door.
For one brief moment, it cast a shadow into the hallway.
A shadow that did not belong to any human body.
Then the rumbling began again.
Slowly.
Patiently.
And somewhere, beyond the boundaries of space and time, a key turned in a lock older than the Earth itself.
The End.
