The moon lowers its crescent nail through the skin of dawn, peeling it back to reveal its underside, night. In a darkened alleyway rows of serrated teeth close down one after another until they wink out altogether into a shut mouth.
A stranger hides in obscurity with a tightly clamped grin. It advances before dawn under the cloud cover of a new moon. Only the light of its occasional leaked smile reveals the path before it in splintery, shard-like reflections.
Its eyes, could they ever afford the opportunity to be closely examined, would reveal blacknesses compacted into an even deeper blackness. They are extremely dark, hidden eyes that themselves see quite vividly without the need of light. The pupils blossom by a strange and remote aperture system, and for this reason fill the eyes with a striated darkness of a most unusual configuration.
The specimen standing silently in the alleyway is the shutter-mouth, lone leviathan of the night. It has been known by many names throughout humankind's mayfly-like existence: lycanthrope, doppelganger, vampyr, madman. But the shutter-mouth has no name other than those lent him by mankind.
The stygian configuration of its glossed pupils lost in impenetrable inkiness form an almost impossible to see triangulation whose three points open into tiny clustered triumvirates budding from the tips. They realize a gaze which leads back through a descending line of unfolding chaos whose purpose is to visually inform the master being which delivered it.
This being is even lesser known than the shutter-mouth, and with far fewer names attributed to it. It sleeps in a special kind of dormancy. It could be described, in human terms, as the Buried Thing. It sends its messenger spies throughout time and across various latitudes of the world. These emissaries live, and die, just as men do. Some live longer than others; some continue to elude death.
The shutter-mouth is one such tenacious deputy of the Buried Thing. It functions as a sort of remote camera device, and occasionally as a messenger. Like very few others that have and still exist, its life has spanned at least a couple and maybe well over a few centuries, the actual date of birth impossible to pinpoint. But then virtually every piece, part and bit of information that mankind acquires over its brief career on planet earth amounts to largely a collection of assumptions on its behalf, placed over that empty abyss that has been labeled "the unknown".
The unbeknownst: that vicinity from which all knowledge takes root. Thus, this tree of knowledge has its roots sunken in oblivion. Human beings cannot be consciously aware of oblivion's real nature, for not only do human memories fade away fast, but oblivion itself by definition may not manifest within humankind's universe. Man's most common mistake in this matter is thinking oblivion awaits them, when in truth, something closer to the opposite of that awaits.
Oblivion resides before the past and everything that has already passed. Oblivion remains absent from time and space. Humanity has been slowly seeded from it throughout the aeons.
What lies beyond for humanity is merely death, patiently awaiting with jaws agape for its complimentary sustenance: creation, swirling down the drain and into the cosmic disposal machine. Oblivion itself lies within a realm quite beyond death's reach.
Individual humans are like ants learning how to fly. The stragglers which continue to elude death, those survivors, camped out along the banks of time, which refuse to give in to the sand trap awaiting at what would normally be the end of their lives, these are the "special ones" which the undesignated thing has sent out its delegates for.
They are the ones the shutter-mouth has most especially been sent to retrieve. They are the ones it loves to prey on the most. Individuals such as yourself, perhaps; given to read the most esoteric treatises available, such as this one.
