Necronomicon 1.1

Here's a look at the finished result, with music by Nox Arcana.  Amazing how well a turd shines up when polished with the right soundtrack :)  The 'old film' effect from Windows Movie Maker also adds a certain level of creepiness missing from the original photos.

Necronomicon 1.1 A note on the text

Previously I’ve noted that a problem with a substitution cipher is that it can still look like English – e.g. common letters/symbols recur in obvious patterns.  On the other hand, if I’m taking the time and effort to handwrite a paper prop, I’d like it to say something rather than nothing.  It’d be all to easy to fill pages with random scrawl, but that would be too far in the opposite direction.  Even an entirely unfamiliar script such as Kanji, Arabic or Mandarin has a certain patterning within it.  I wanted the text to look slightly alien but recognisably a language of some kind.

  For the main body of the text, I used Lovecraft’s own ‘Fungi from Yuggoth’, his exotic and often disturbing cycle of sonnets, available here from the H.P. Lovecraft Archive.  Let’s look at an example:

XX. Night-Gaunts

Out of what crypt they crawl, I cannot tell,
But every night I see the rubbery things,
Black, horned, and slender, with membraneous wings,
And tails that bear the bifid barb of hell.
They come in legions on the north wind’s swell,
With obscene clutch that titillates and stings,
Snatching me off on monstrous voyagings
To grey worlds hidden deep in nightmare’s well.

Over the jagged peaks of Thok they sweep,
Heedless of all the cries I try to make,
And down the nether pits to that foul lake
Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.
But oh! If only they would make some sound,
Or wear a face where faces should be found!

My first step was to cut and paste the poems into a Word document.  I then lost the Roman numerals.  Next I swapped Times New Roman for Microsoft Symbol:

 Night-Gaunts

Out of what crypt they crawl, I cannot tell,
But every night I see the rubbery things,
Black, horned, and slender, with membraneous wings,
And tails that bear the bifid barb of hell.
They come in legions on the north wind’s swell,
With obscene clutch that titillates and stings,
Snatching me off on monstrous voyagings
To grey worlds hidden deep in nightmare’s well.

Over the jagged peaks of Thok they sweep,
Heedless of all the cries I try to make,
And down the nether pits to that foul lake
Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.
But oh! If only they would make some sound,
Or wear a face where faces should be found!

That immediately added an aura of strangeness to it, but on close examination, it was still fairly easy to decipher as English.  Those first few words obviously read ‘Out of what…,’ after which it wouldn’t be impossible to work out the rest.

  To combat that, I cut out all the usual letter pairs.  First to go was ‘th’, turning ‘the’ into ‘te’, ‘they’ into ‘tey’ and so on:

Night-Gaunts

Out of what crypt tey crawl, I cannot tell,
But every night I see te rubbery tings,
Black, horned, and slender, wit membraneous wings,
And tails tat bear te bifid barb of hell.
Tey come in legions on te north wind’s swell,
Wit obscene clutch tat titillates and stings,
Snatching me off on monstrous voyagings
To grey worlds hidden deep in nightmare’s well.

Over te jagged peaks of Tok tey sweep,
Heedless of all te cries I try to make,
And down te neter pits to tat foul lake
Where te puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.
But oh! If only tey would make some sound,
Or wear a face where faces should be found!

Other common pairings, ‘oo’, ‘ee’ and ‘tt’ for example were next to go.  Any such pairings would be replaced by a couple of dots over the letter – similar to the German umlaut – in the handwritten version.

  Punctuation can be another clue to a cipher, so I took out the commas and so forth, removed some spaces and broke up others.  Once I’d worked through all the sonnets doing this, I printed the finished result so I’d have a ‘working copy’ to transcribe into the Necronomicon, rather than writing it all from scratch.  I’m quite pleased with the result.

An illustration of the Night-Gaunts.  The town is copied from a medieval woodcut; the little flying critters are my own take on the Children of Nodens.

We've all got to start somewhere...Necronomicon 1.1

There are several sites and blogs out there that have served as my inspiration for starting to write my own, most notably the fantastic Propnomicon, and the now sadly defunct Propping Up the Mythos.
While I've got a few projects I'm working on just now, I thought some other amateur fans of all things Cthulhu might like to see my first attempt at a Necronomicon.

The base was a common or garden hardbound A5 sketch book.  These are great starters, but finding one without perforated pages can be a challenge. 

I wanted to give the impression of a new binding on a much, much older book.  Incidentally, the warping on the back was due to using a microwave oven to dry a 'bloodstain' without thought of what it would do to the glue.  Actually, I quite like the effect, as though something inside is trying to burn its way out - kind of a budget Ark of the Covenant.

The inspiration for the library label came from a template on Propping Up the Mythos.

The page layout was based on a 17th century Book of Common Prayer, i.e. the red lines on the margin.  The text was handwritten, based on Microsoft Word's Symbol font, as I don't read Greek.  Mind you, nor does anyone that's ever perused the prop so far...

One of the problems I've found with any substitution font is that English text still looks like English.  For that reason I broke up some of the words in case of any canny cypher-breakers getting too smug.  As a clue, the frontispiece is a quote from Annie Lennox, who obviously knows something...

This part of the text is a straight lift from the Simon Necronomicon, along with Lovecraft's version of the Elder Sign. 

Knowing that I would later be staining the pages, I wrote/drew with a permanent marker.  While I had read that brown pigment gave an illusion of time-faded ink, I hadn't realised how aggressively it would bleed through the pages.  If I were to do the same again, I would be tempted to use a better grade of paper, or possibly a different approach to the lettering, possibly acrylic ink.  I don't have access to a colour printer at the moment, much less the wherewithal to use natty art programmes - besides, as an old-school technophobic luddite, I quite like the (in)human touch of a handwritten prop.  The downside to this is that you can't make anything in a hurray...

  I hope you've enjoyed this first peek into my slightly mythos-addled mind.  More picture to come later.

And so it begins...

Well, that was remarkably straight forward, even for a rampant technophobe...
As it's now so late it's early, I'll sign off from this inaugural post and plan something more impressive at a later date.