The Curse of the Malarothe

Deep within its concrete tomb, the Malarothe sings.

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The year was 1963. Upon the campus of Dartmouth, New Hampshire, many peculiar sights might be seen; some real, and more possessing somewhat of a hallucinatory nature, caused by the high quantity of substance consumption that characterized the era. But whatever you might see there was nothing compared to the tales that were told; tales of what lurked beneath, in a vast labyrinth of tunnels and ancient ruins dating to before Cristofer Colombo first sucked his mother's teat. There were monsters there, stories told; part of a Great Catastrophe unleashed by the indigenous peoples of the region, who had dared too much and gone too far. By the tales, they contained it in the end (after a hundred years of terrible battle!), but were left terribly vulnerable to the advent of the Europeans; their tribe vanished from the Earth, and the better part of their secrets went with them. But adventurers dared the place, now and again, across the centuries in which it was known to them: for it was said that the Malarothe lurked at the bottom of that place, and to reach him would be a prize beyond price.

(For, as all men know, the Malarothe grants a wish to any that come before it, wheresoever as they might be; though very few indeed are known to have succeeded.)

So many adventurers had gone into the tomb of the Malarothe; and one young man, lifted high upon the hallucinogens which he did so love, felt the need to follow suit. He snuck into the well-guarded entrance in the black of night; broke the five seals with the crowbar he kept upon his person. And then, flashlight in hand, he descended.

The horrors he beheld were far beyond what he had been told to expect. Rooms made all of flesh, pulsing and oozing unnatural substances; strange corridors in which one might see oneself to every side, but possessing a variety of strange new appendages, and staring back with a hungry look; worms larger than horses, with teeth like knives, which dined on the corpses of men (with, of course, knives like teeth). And worst of all were the things that had once been men - had ventured in there, like our brave student, to seek out the Malarothe - and had been consumed, and turned into yet another Thing to populate that dank and noxious place. The student tried not to look at them too closely.

The concrete tomb of the Malarothe was a vile and hostile place; not for nothing had it killed so many in the past! But our student overcame all obstacles; some he passed through by means of his swifter wit, and others by his swifter feet. The things he saw there would haunt him to his grave; but he passed through them all, shivering and afraid, and arrived at the Malarothe at last.

There he stood, the place a thousand men or more had tried to reach, in vain: the sanctum of the Malarothe, a cavernous space, its bounds beyond vision, lit dimly and only by the blue glow from the vast crystalline pillar that was the Malarothe itself. The student humbled himself before it; then, arms outstretched, he made at last his wish. This is what he said:

"I wanna get laid."

(For he was, in the end, a college student.)

For a heartbeat, the only noise in that tremendous space was the faint, haunting, alien song of the Malarothe itself. Then a terrible thunder arose, shaking the foundations of the world. Ten thousand alien visions flashed before the student's eyes, and then space twisted; and when he awoke, he found himself again upon the surface, lying with crowbar at his side before the five unbroken seals upon the entrance to the Malarothe's tomb.

But this, then, is what they call the Curse of the Malarothe; that in that place, and for a hundred miles in any direction, no man nor woman should have sex - nor perform any other action! - save that they be possessed of, nay, possesssed by, a significant quantity of alcohol. For that is the truth of the people of that place, that they name Dartmouth; so it was, and so it remains, to this day.