Introduction

A Dream of Years

The Cave of the Immortals

The Private Estate

Toward a General Theory of Yithian Psychology | ROBERT GUFFEY

The Beast Comes to Brooklyn

Just the Weight of God

Malygris Never Died

Nineteen Minutes

Every Path Taken

Genghis at the Gate of Dreams

Moonlight Over Mauritania

Out of Time

“The Colour out of the Shadow”

Kingsport Tea

Crom-Ya’s Triumph

The Rocks of Leng

The Moth in the Dark

About the Authors

About the Editor

SHADOWS OUT OF TIME

I hope the title of this book is not misleading. If you are expecting an entire volume of spinoffs from Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time, complete with consciousness-swapping across the aeons, cone-shaped scholarly beings compiling their archives while dinosaurs roam outside their cities and some nameless doom threatens them from below, this isn’t it. I did indeed include a few stories of that sort, as such titles as Robert Guffey’s “Toward a General Theory of Yithian Psychology” and Robert M. Price’s “Crom-Ya’s Triumph” imply. (Crom-Ya, as aficionados will recall, was a Cimmerian chieftain that Lovecraft’s protagonist met when imprisoned in one of those alien bodies during his sojourn in the past.)

But the focus of this book is a lot broader. In his 1933 essay “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” Lovecraft wrote:

The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.

Italics are his, by the way. Contributors were given that quote and told, “Go. Great Race of Yith optional.” This book is the result.

Most Lovecraftian fiction, by Lovecraft and his numerous successors, could actually be titled “The Shadow Out of Time.” Surely the commonest theme in supernatural fiction— describing, for example, the entire corpus of M.R. James — is that of some menacing force that lingers longer than it should, in the grave or elsewhere, which reaches out to touch the present. Dracula is a shadow out of time as much as any Yithian, or any Jamesian lich, or any dinosaur awakened by atomic testing in a 1950s monster movie. Ancient things that lurk and wait.

Lovecraft’s whole philosophical and aesthetic outlook emphasized the precarious nature of humanity, that our existence is but a transitory incident of no great consequence in the universe at large, a universe which remains forever out of reach. Today, as space telescopes reveal the presence of thousands of planets (and by implication, billions) revolving forever out of reach in our own galaxy alone, and the existence of billions of galaxies, Lovecraft’s work resonates more than ever. Somewhere in his letters he remarked that if the Earth ceased to be, “Arcturus would twinkle as before.” In “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” he also remarked on his “persistent wish” to achieve “the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.”

I write this as the Webb Space Telescope has just been launched. Given his lifelong fascination with astronomy, Lovecraft would no doubt have been thrilled, as the radius of our sight and analysis have increased exponentially, first with the Hubble telescope, and now this, but it would not have relieved him of that crushing sense of cosmic insignificance. We can see so very much. We may be able to see far back into time, near to the creation of the universe. But we still can’t go there. In the event of our extinction, Arcturus will indeed go on twinkling.

The theme of conflict with, or transcendence over, time does not always evoke fear in Lovecraft. It usually does, because he was a horror writer, and that’s what he did, but “The Silver Key” is a time story, in which the hero seeks to escape back in time to the pleasant refuge of his childhood. Rod Serling wrote several Twilight Zone episodes like that, most notably “A Stop at Willoughby.” A conflict with time can be one of yearning, and the emotion we feel is sorrow over the loss of that which can never be retrieved…unless, by fantastic means, it is.

On a much more sinister note, there is “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” which is the most traditionally gothic of Lovecraft’s major fictions, and which has something in common with all those M.R. James stories about things from out of the tomb which ought to be dead but aren’t. Here a sorcerer, killed by a mob in the late 18th century, has laid a trap in time designed to be sprung on a descendant, which allows for his resurrection in the 1920s. Joseph Curwen (the bad guy) and his colleagues have indeed triumphed over time and are able to resume their cosmically sinister labors, at least until they come to a fortuitous end.

And then, of course, there are the Lovecraft stories which are, or border on, science fiction, which address the cosmos of space-time directly. Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and their compatriots are all revenants out of time. They transcend the “natural laws” which imprison mankind. At the Mountains of Madness could indeed have been entitled The Shadow Out of Time if Lovecraft had seen fit to do so, because it is about that which lingers for millions of years in ancient ruins in Antarctica, survivals from a whole different cycle of life and civilization on the planet. Most transcendent of all of course is The Shadow Out of Time (the actual novella of that title), with its Great Race of body-swapping aliens who have conquered both space and time and range up and down the millennia, collecting the minds of humans and other beings, to learn what they know and induce them to write down histories of their own times. The hero, an economics professor from Arkham, blacks out in the middle of a class one day and spends five years inside the body of one of the Great Race of Yith, where he meets fellow captives ranging from the Cimmerian Crom-Ya to post-human entities. What he learns about the final fate of mankind is too shocking to put down.

That’s a lot of territory to cover. That’s what this book is about. That is why it is not necessary for writers to pastiche or imitate Lovecraft, but merely to expand on his themes, which go on forever.

Darrell Schweitzer

Dec 20, 2021

SHADOWS OUT OF TIME

A dream of years…Or was it? I awoke

adrift in my own senses: sound & light

alike too strong, too alien & bright

for subtle understanding. When I spoke,

another’s tongue resculpted every thought

to suit language I half-recognized

as elder to this planet. Yet disguised

within those words, I found—& then forgot—

a thousand premonitions. Futures passed

like phantoms through my outstretched fingers. Strange

& small they seemed, both fate & digits changed

to fit the limits of this form.

At last,

one nightmare limned the source of my despair:

in distant waters fringed by primal fronds,

I glimpsed myself as I had been beyond

the prison of this present. When or where

my mind had voyaged, it returned to me

in horror at my own humanity.

After Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Out of Time”

I was struck by three things the day I met the angel. First that she had the biggest, gaudiest diamond ring I ever saw; second, that she had the sickest looking upright human I ever saw as a husband, and third, that she was a natural blonde. I saw these things in reverse order. Two gentlemen (with whom I had a philosophical difference) had lifted me from my bar stool and tossed me out of the doorway of the hotel bar. I slid on the polished tile into the hotel lobby and came to rest at the angel’s feet, looking up her short skirt at her neatly coiffed pubis. Her elderly husband was in the midst of a coughing fit by her side, and as she reached down (improving my view) to help me up, her big-ass diamond grazed my sweaty forehead. I struggled to my feet focusing first on her beauty, secondly on her warm brown eyes, and thirdly upon the orange and black tacky Halloween decorations that dominated the lobby of the Lakeview Holiday Inn.

The coughing man extended his pale, wrinkled right hand, and said the line he had no doubt been practicing all morning. “Mr. Livingstone, I presume?”

Like I hadn’t heard that joke before. But my eyes were on the angel. I made an affirmative grunt. I also noticed the two gentlemen from the bar were staring at me with undisguised hostility. I didn’t know if it was because I was black, or because (unlike them), I had an IQ in the triple digits. The angel was blushing because she had just realized what I had seen.

“I am Dr. Nathan Mortlake and I hope to reverse your current financial difficulties. This is my wife, Angela Mortlake.” The angel nodded, her face a lovely pink. “Perhaps,” he continued, “We can talk in the lobby.”

We talked. He had been looking for me for a few months, ever since my discharge. I had gone home to Detroit only to find my wife had A) changed her gender preference and B) removed every last penny from our joint bank account. This led to point C), that I no longer had a job waiting for me at my father-in-law’s Ford dealership. This had led to point D), returning to my earlier trade of selling small packets of dried cannabis to middle class white people in St. Louis, MO.

Dr. Mortlake was in touch with all of these facts. But these were not the facts of note for him. Of note was the fact I had spent three days hiding from Taliban shooters in a small, dank cave in Chemia al Den in Why-the-Fuck-am-I-hereistan. And I had seen the statues.

Nearly forty lifelike statues of naked yogins in lotus position. When I had run into the cave, I first thought that there were naked people practicing yoga. I just hoped they would be quiet. Boy, they were quiet. After my heartbeat had slowed to merely very damn fast, I realized they were stone. Mainly male and all naked. Then I saw It.

It was a gray stone idol about the size of a cow. It looked like a peacock in the dim light. Yet most peacocks do not have multiple breasts. And I am willing to bet that none of them have two heads, nor tentacles rather than feet. It rested on a nest made of carved skulls (mainly human but with some horned goblins just for fun) and severed arms (again, mainly human). The idol seemed to be of the same stone as its devotees, but much older as it had wear and tear. I figured it was the boss of the cave, so I offered it a little of my Meal Ready To Eat. Two days later, with my food gone and my canteen pushing empty,

I took back my offering of Beanie Weenies. I hoped it didn’t mind. I heard some vehicles outside and decided that starvation was less desirable than quick death. It was another unit, lost, in the wrong valley — but with food and radios and hope. Later I talked to an army archaeologist. Forms were filled out, people nodded. There was no gold, no dope, no cached weapons, no hiding locals. And the business of living and killing, hiding and hunting, and waiting and waiting went on.

I played my cards well. I acted like I was terrified. I acted like PTSD had replaced my brain. I acted like I wasn’t broke and hopeless. I acted like I wasn’t thinking about the angel’s tiny gold promise. I don’t think he cared. I named a huge price, thinking I would do it for half. Dr. Mortlake coughed, coughed and agreed. I should have asked for twice as much.

But then there was Angela.

It was two weeks until we slept together. By that time, we were in a hotel in LA planning to catch a plane back to Whythe-Fuck-am-I-hereistan. Once we got there the romance AND the sex grew faster and faster, while everything else grew slower and slower. At first, I thought maybe she was a getback-at-Daddy girl, then I thought she was a black-on-blonde girl. Then I found out she was lonely. And in love. She even felt love for Mortlake, but she was much more in love with his millions. She had been an exotic dancer, but she had tried for a “real” career as an administrative assistant. At first, she had worked for Mortlake’s hard-drinking younger brother, who had millions of dollars in banking and venture capital. Then one night he wrapped his car around a tree. She met the frail Dr. Mortlake at the funeral. He went from a respected linguist with encyclopedic knowledge of Indo-Iranian languages to a very respected linguist with an estimated worth of a few hundred million. Dr. Mortlake was best known for his translation of a midlevel Sanskrit recension of a Tibeto-Burman ritual text commonly known as the Black Sutra. He had never managed money, never had a staff of more than a devoted but underpaid graduate student, and had never had a good relationship with a woman after the Nixon administration. He was kind, he was smart and at first had no illusions that Angela really loved him. Wedding bells rang, no pre-nup was signed and Angela devotedly waited for Nathan to die.

But he didn’t. He grew more and more excited. He had a purpose to live for, besides love. He came back from the brink of death to its general neighborhood. There wasn’t much touching, and Angela gritted her teeth when needed. She faked enthusiasm for his discoveries, and philosophically resigned herself to one, maybe two years of being Mrs. Mortlake, soon to be the rich widow Mortlake.

And then she saw me. A man who wanted her, a man with a brain (not half as big as Nathan’s), a man that wasn’t scared of death.

Nathan was terrified of death. Angela couldn’t forgive him for this. Her dad died in Operation Desert Storm. Her granddad in Vietnam. That her rich husband, a man in his 90s, a man whose education plus experience should let him know the inevitability of death, hadn’t made his peace, hadn’t gone through the five stages. I had made my peace with death when I waited in the cave of the immortals facing the deformed mutant peacock god.

When the little plane bumped its last bump into Khemia-alDen’s tiny airstrip, Haliburton was waiting. Officially they took care of logistics for US troops. In reality they did everything from assassinating local war lords, to delivering cocaine to generals, to flying the chunky local silver jewelry out. They were good at the business of war. If an old man, his hot blonde wife and a vet needed to visit a cave on the outskirts of enemy territory, then that was today’s normal. Tomorrow’s normal might be kill the old man, rape his wife and give the vet’s papers to the highest bidder in the village. Or fight their way past the Taliban and save the old man. There were three HUMVs, we rode in the middle one. The Soviets had built the airstrip back in the day. There was still a sign in Russian and Pashto. It was a short, dusty bumpy drive. They had supplies for us — food, sleeping bags, a generator. They carried us halfway up the small white hill where a tiny cave opened. They left stuff at the mouth of the cave. With some help from Angela I hustled the stuff inside. I set up the generator and the lights, started creating a little camp. Dr. Mortlake and Angela went into the two chambers. The first chamber had thirty-seven yogins. Ten were women. The first five were very weathered, older than the later statues. They had brow ridges and sloping foreheads. Dr. Mortlake explained that in archaic Indian art it was the convention to depict the followers of Shiva as horrific and beastly. I pointed out that the peacock god didn’t look much like Shiva.

The second (and lower) chamber, which I had not visited, was smaller. Its walls were covered in script of various languages. Some of the inscriptions were painted, some incised. A few were very rough scratches, others carved with great skill. Mortlake had me run lights to the “Cave of Scriptures” and got Angela to carry his sleeping bag down there. He told us to amuse ourselves.

Haliburton had provided us with a DVD player and we got through Finding Nemo before we found more primitive ways to amuse ourselves. I was a bit shy in front of the thirty-seven holy men and women, but Angela pointed out that stoned people were usually pretty accepting. After our sweaty play we fell asleep.

Dr. Mortlake prodded me awake with his titanium cane. From our state of undress, he would’ve been an idiot not to know what we were doing. I didn’t wonder about his not caring, but why didn’t we care anymore? Maybe as his quest grew shorter we were preparing for the parting of the ways. His eyes were bright. “Eureka! I have found it. Come!” He led me into the Cave of Scriptures. He moved as fast as a man of seventy. I saw he had filled up notebooks, two dictionaries lay open. One was Sanskrit/English one was Aklo/Latin. Dr. Mortlake adopted a professorial tone. “In Sanskrit there are countless references to a nectar called Amitra or Deathless. The A, which equals not (much as the Greek Alpha is negative as in A-theist) plus Mitra, which means Death. This “‘deathless’ nectar is said to be a by-product of yoga — dripping from the brain into the soulbody complex.”

I nodded. Like I knew or cared.

“You see, I don’t think it’s a myth. I think there was a Deathless Elixir, a secretion not of the mystically prepared human mind, but of an extraterrestrial beast,” he finished.

“You think the Peacock God.”

“Excellent Mr. Livingstone.”

“I came across references to ‘Peacock Milk’ in a very unorthodox Buddhist scripture called the Black Sutra. The god was called Yithra. Or perhaps Yidra. Well I don’t know about ‘God’—the text claims that the asura was captured from a broken sphere of metal. The being wept a clear fluid that the ‘hairy ones’ collected and use to trap evil souls into an eternity of maya. U Pao knew the Yithra’s cult was somewhere in these mountains. He suspected the asura was long dead. He says that in addition to drinking the elixir, a brief spell was needed at a certain time.”

“When did you discover this?”

“I found it out in the ’80s. Then I read a small write-up in Stars and Stripes: ‘Avoiding the Taliban With A Strange Peacock’—the exciting story of Michael Livingstone, your exciting tale of hiding in a small cave with a monstrous idol. Then I inherited my younger brother Frank’s money. Money opens all doors, Mr. Livingstone. I found you, and with the help of these inscriptions I found this.”

Dr. Mortlake walked to the cave wall and tapped it seven times while saying some gibberish: “Zodicare ob zodiramu.” A small section of wall opened. There was a stone nest full of crystal eggs. Actually, they were small bottles shaped like eggs with crystal stoppers. At first, I thought them all empty.

“The story of Aladdin,” said Dr. Mortlake. “There are three eggs left. Three, Mr. Livingstone. Me, Angela and you. We are the deathless. I have millions of dollars and now we have the world enough and time.”

He took the three crystal eggs from the pile of empties.

“The world, Mr. Livingstone, the world.”

He handed me the eggs. “Careful, my friend. I will let you tell her. Tomorrow when the moon and Mercury are in the right place, we will drink the elixir. I will say the words from U Pao’s text. We will live forever.”

I knew he believed. I was pretty damn unsure. Drinking weird liquids that may or may not have come out of an extra-terrestrial’s ass in a remote Himalayan cave did not strike me as a sound basis for one’s eternity. I was ready to bail, and I would take Angela with me. Sure, we would lose out on millions — somewhere in all of this I had begun to see Mortlake’s millions (as well as his woman) as mine. While he had been giving his ecstatic speech, Angela had quietly gotten dressed and descended to the lower chamber. I was about to speak but caught a warning look in her eyes. The next six hours were a special hell of awkward. I could smell her on my body, while I made the MREs for our dinner — I kept trying to read her eyes. Meanwhile Dr. Mortlake went on and on about the falsity of religion — how real immortality was not a spiritual state but a physical one — how our ancestors’ ancestors had encountered other races/entities, and their half-remembered stories became the control structures called religion. How only a few scholars like him had thrown off the blinding superstitions of mankind. How lucky Angela and I were to know him. How we would literally have eternity to thank him for what we were about to do. He laid it on thick and ended our evening by a blasphemous re-telling of the story of the Last Supper. I assumed that it was a not very well encoded story in which Angela was Mary Magdalene and I (of course) was Judas. True to form he fell asleep an hour after the tasteless spaghetti and grainy soy “meatballs.”

While he snored, I implored.

“We’ve got go now. I don’t want what’s in the eggs — and I don’t want to drink it. We should leave now.”

Angela saw it differently. “You don’t understand. He is the smartest human I’ve ever met. If he says the magic juice makes humans live forever, it will make humans live forever. I’m not bailing, you can run if you want. You don’t know him like I know him. I can trust the Peacock Milk.”

“So, you want to live forever with him? Well he probably has enough money for it.”

“No, you idiot, I want to live forever with you. We’re beautiful and fun and we could be wealthy when humans are building domed cities on Venus — if you weren’t a coward. If you were a man I could love.”

That hurt.

“But if we all drink the potion—”

“We won’t all drink it.”

She picked up one of the crystal eggs.

“He doesn’t know what the potion tastes like.”

She pulled at the crystal stopper. It gave a little plunk sound. Then she poured the clear oily liquid on the cave floor. The gray limestone drank it, becoming (no doubt) immortal dust.

“Hand me your canteen.”

I did so. She refilled the empty egg with water. Then she pushed the tiny crystal stopper back into place. She took her big diamond ring and cut an X on the water-holding egg.

“We give him this,” she said. “We will drink the true potions.”

We made love. He snored.

I told myself that he was an ugly, greedy man. That he was fearful and unobservant. That he was not giving the gift of life everlasting to a deserving mankind. That I was getting much more than thirty-three pieces of silver.

The next day I must have checked which egg bore the roughly scratched X at least a dozen times. He handed each of us an egg. He gave me the marked one. But before I could begin some I Love Lucy funny business he said, “I left the scroll I needed in the lower chamber. I’ll be right back.” He laid his egg down and left the room.

Angela said, “See? The gods want us to succeed.”

I wasn’t sure about the idea of gods after yesterday’s lecture, but I quickly switched the eggs.

He crawled back up, holding a short roll of brown parchment.

He was winded from his exertion. When he regained his breath, he said, “I’ll read the spell, then we will drink.” He held up his egg, and for a crazy moment I thought he was checking for the “X.”

He unrolled the parchment. We each sat with crossed legs facing the Peacock God with the thirty-seven statues behind us. We each held an egg in our left hands as Dr. Mortlake read the spell. If this was just an extra-terrestrial’s secretion I don’t know why we needed a spell. His voice echoed oddly in the chamber. Our normal voices didn’t echo and certainly not with a delay or slight changes in provocation. It was probably my imagination, but I felt as if the bulbs dimmed while he read. Then it was done and plunk! Plunk! Plunk!

The Peacock Milk was thick and oily and gaggingly bitter. My grandmother had been a big believer in castor oil, so I had swallowed something with that texture. But as to the bitter flavor, no experience on earth had prepared me for that flavor. I’m sure the diluted flavor in Dr. Mortlake’s drink was quite awful, judging from his expression and the fit of coughing that immediately manifested. Angela had a deep, serious look on her face. I don’t know that I had ever wanted a thing as much she wanted the miracle of the Peacock Milk.

Dr. Mortlake smiled as his coughing stopped.

“You’ll feel the effects almost immediately. Sadly, you won’t be able to communicate them to me. It would have made a nice ending for my article.”

I started to stand, but found my legs were locked. I turned toward Angela and saw fear in her eyes. I tried to speak, but couldn’t open my mouth. I felt my face freeze into a terrible grimace.

“How nice you’ll spend eternity looking at each other,” Mortlake said. “I only asked that you love me with your whole heart. Was it that hard? I’ll be gone in a month. I’ll barely have time to finish my article. The cult prepared initiates to have such strength of mind they could continue their meditations forever. The Neanderthal-looking yogis are in fact Neanderthals. The sutra says they’re still conscious. Apparently, their thoughts are slow, after a few centuries the god starts to talk to them. You’ll probably go mad in a few months. How dreadful staring at each others’ faces in the gloom. Of course, after my death others will seek out the cave. Maybe if they move slowly enough you’ll notice their presence. I hope they don’t wind up taking you out of here — it would be so sad if you were in different museums, wouldn’t it?”

He leaned over Angela. “I guess you carved your X with the diamond on the massive ring I gave you. So romantic! You could have waited just months — months to be super-rich. I even (unintentionally) found a handsome, brave man that you could love. Both of you could’ve had everything! So stupid in your lust, not even to question who these humans are. The drug, the secretion, helps with the long reality of extraterrestrial flight. The poor Peacock Momma crashed here and couldn’t get the quickening drug. Her mate died; he secreted the quickening drug.”

His voice became more and more shrill, more and more fast. Then it was gone. Then the bulbs went out. In an instant, I could tell he had left the cave. The gloom changed to darkness to gloom to darkness faster and faster.

For a while I counted the days. Then others came for a while and lit up the cave. Then another group. Then a group that wrote in Chinese.

Now the gloom/darkness changes so fast I can’t tell which is which.

And now I am beginning to hear the god. The lamenting one speaking of her dead mate and of lost worlds, very non-human worlds.

I do not like it.

(For John R. Fultz)

Tonight, nearly fifty years after my big brother leapt to his death while fleeing a giant cockroach with the face of an old woman, my long-lost childhood sweetheart, Maggie Delano, knocked on my front door. I hadn’t seen Maggie since she vanished from New York City in the summer of 1973 while helping me investigate Dennis’s death. Now on this warm, placid night, there she stood, exactly as I recalled her, as if birthed into existence from my memory, aged not a day although the gravity in her eyes hinted at decades of experiences unimaginable to me.

“Hey there, Richie-Rich,” she said.

The sound of my old nickname, spoken by her voice, eroded my doubts about her identity. When she guided me through the childish secret handshake we’d invented in middle school, she erased them completely.

What else could I do but invite her in and listen, speechless, to her story? Her presence incited in me a paralyzing riot of emotion and anxiety that only deepened as I grasped her words. They ignited as many new questions as they answered, and by the end of our all-too-short visit, my mind boiled over with jigsaw fragments of the past, present, and future. Only the invitation Maggie extended to me stuck firmly in my mind, a shocking offer she allowed me a single night and day to consider before she promised to return tonight for my answer.

Though I yearn for the moment I’ll see her again, a day provided hardly enough time to organize my thoughts — but I have struggled, sleepless, the entire time to make sense of what she revealed to me. I don’t know what’s real anymore or what I believe. I’ve dug deep into the past to my nineteen-year-old self’s stunted effort to explain Dennis’s death, the last period in my life when I sought the truth.

In those days, only Maggie stood by me when my family refused any support. Strict and conservative, the entire Hendricks clan had disowned Dennis for his drug abuse and involvement in a counterculture movement called Wicca, advocated in New York City back then by a modern witch named Raymond Buckland. Dennis, being Dennis, climbed those Neopagan ranks until he met Redcap, a man who ran a Greenwich Village coven inspired by the work of Keziah Mason, a 17th-century witch now acknowledged in rarified circles as an early, misunderstood mathematical genius. Redcap almost certainly caused my brother’s death, though neither I nor the police could prove it. My parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, however, all so ashamed of Dennis, didn’t care to know either way and remained content to see him buried and move on with their lives. Only Maggie and I cared to do otherwise.

We had grown up thick as thieves next door to each other in the Long Island Bay town of Knicksport, fifty miles outside the city. At age five, we promised to marry in that way little kids innocently do, but as adults, we remained platonic, the bond of brother and sister, which made losing Maggie in 1973 all the more difficult. The one warm, ever-present constant in my life, a caring woman who dreamed of becoming a doctor — gone. And when we had come so close to grasping the hidden facts of Dennis’s death.

Based on statements to police from neighbors who witnessed his panicked dash from his second-floor apartment to the rooftop from which he plummeted, we knew Dennis had raved about the cockroach creature as he ran, that he had talked about it stalking him for days. The cops chalked it off to hallucinations instigated by drug use, an easy enough explanation. Except that the story resonated for me. Five years younger than my twentytwo-year-old brother and my head filled with the strange things he’d told me, I wondered what if there were more to his fatal mania than psychedelic derangement. I couldn’t shake myself loose from that question.

In the aftermath of Maggie’s visit tonight, I’ve retrieved an old shoebox from the back of my closet. In it lie all my notes and photos from that time, materials I never mustered the courage to revisit or discard. And with them my 1968 Carry-Corder 150, which, astonishingly, still works with fresh batteries despite storage for all the intervening years.

The cassettes still play. The voices still speak.

Maggie’s. That dirtbag pusher, Squirrel’s. Mine, younger and deeper.

My brother’s.

The city street noise hums like a background theme. The morning of August 8, 1973, outside a brownstone apartment on East 4th Street, a moment kept alive magnetically.

The last day I sought the truth.

August 8, 1973, recording. The rush of passing cars. Chattering passersby. A call for a taxi.

Maggie: You recording?

Me: Yeah, pretty cool, right? Easier than taking notes.

Maggie: Unless you run out of batteries or tape.

Me: Got extras right here.

The slap of my hand patting my satchel.

Maggie: You sure this is the right place?

Me: The papers reported this address back in ’71. The superintendent found a child’s corpse hidden in the basement walls. The police suspected Redcap and his coven of killing him.

Maggie: Whoa, Richie-Rich, you didn’t tell me we’re checking out a murder scene.

Me: It’s not related. Redcap’s people had a solid alibi.

Squirrel: Yeah, alibis don’t mean shit, man.

Me: The body was found behind a wall that hadn’t been touched for fifteen years.

Squirrel: Right, man, but it was the body of a kid only a week dead.

Maggie: What? Are you joking? You’re joking.

Squirrel: I ain’t joking. You guys paid me for information. I’m giving you information.

Maggie: It’s not like there’s a dead body in there now, right?

Me: No, of course not.

Squirrel: Not that you know of.

Maggie: Guess there’s only one way to find out, huh, boys?

Maggie hustled up the stoop and then unlocked the door with the key the superintendent had rented us for fifty dollars cash. The sight of her waiting in the open doorway filled me with hope and confidence that answers awaited us on the other side of the threshold. I walked into the foyer and Squirrel followed me. I had paid him to help us because he’d sold drugs to Redcap’s Coven of the Right Stars, which seemingly dissolved sometime in the winter of 1973, and though he hadn’t taken part in their rituals, he knew more about them than anyone else I’d found.

We entered Redcap’s old apartment. Never occupied for long since he left it, the place carried a bad reputation. The super complained he couldn’t clean it up right no matter what he did, and its tenants all “wigged out and broke their lease or ran off in the middle of the night.”

The rooms themselves created an oppressive, claustrophobic feeling. The air tasted acrid and thick with stale cigarette smoke, incense, candles, marijuana — and a stronger, elemental odor that lingered despite the super’s attempts to erase evidence of the place’s past.

Me: Look at those marks on the wall.

Maggie: Where? I don’t see them.

Me: Tilt your head so the light hits them.

Maggie: Oh, wow! That’s freaky.

Me: They’re occult symbols. I know them from witchcraft books Dennis left in our room.

Squirrel: Super needs to slap a few more coats of paint on here if he wants to rent this place.

Me: Must be at least four coats already. See how thick it is by the window frames?

Maggie: Maybe someone redrew the symbols?

Me: Nah. The paint just hasn’t covered them up. Probably didn’t use primer.

Squirrel: Yeah, right, primer. ’Cause that would work.

Maggie: Hey, what’s under this old rug? See those scratches in the floorboards?

Me: Here, help me roll it up.

Scuffing and huffing sounds. Irregular footsteps. The thud of a carpet roll against a wall.

Me: Holy shit. It’s scratched into the wood.

Maggie: What the hell is it?

Squirrel: Hey, don’t mess with that. Seriously, man, take some pictures and let’s get out of here.

Me: I’ve read about this in Dennis’s books. It’s a ritual circle.

Maggie: That’s no circle. That’s — I don’t know, Salvador Dali’s geometry homework maybe.

Me: There are different kinds for different rituals. Not all of them are actual circles.

Maggie: What’s it for?

Me: It protects the witches.

Maggie: From what?

Squirrel: Trust me, sister, you don’t want to know.

Me: Why, Squirrel? You ever see Redcap’s coven do a ritual?

Squirrel: Yeah, man, I saw them do all kinds of crazy shit, orgies, rituals, you name it, but I don’t want to talk about it. You paid me to show you around the place, not give a lecture.

Me: I’ll pay more for the extra information.

Squirrel: You couldn’t pay me enough. I want to forget that stuff.

Me: Aw, c’mon, you brought us this far. Don’t leave us hanging.

Squirrel: I said no. You done up here? I’ll take you downstairs.

My photos of Redcap’s apartment had faded and yellowed over the years in the shoe box. I snapped them on a Kodak Instamatic discarded a long time ago though a package of flash cubes for it remained in the box. The images show the room well enough. Later, when I returned the building keys to the super, I asked about his efforts to paint the walls or buff the floor smooth. He bitched that nothing worked, but the landlord still rode his ass to clean the place and rent it. He wanted to replace the plaster with fresh drywall, rip up the floorboards and put down new ones, but, as he put it, the “cheap-ass landlord won’t unpucker his purse, you know?”

The dark symbols ghosted under coats of off-white paint looked like a messy blend of runes, constellation maps, pictographs, and mathematical signs. The floor markings sketched a riot of intertwined geometric patterns, accented by curving arcs that cut tangents with the straight lines. Symbols like those on the walls filled the spaces in-between. Blank spots in the pattern hinted at where Redcap and his acolytes had stood during their rites.

Where Dennis had once stood with them.

What appealed to him about that life, I never grasped.

He tried to explain it to me the night before he left home for good.

“There’s a vast universe out there,” he’d said, his lips pursing as he puffed on a joint. “Worlds that make ours look like a dust speck. Places most people would lose their shit over after one peek. It’s the truth, though, you know? It’s real. Puts the sorry crap we worry about on this big blue marble in perspective. And let me tell you, nothing matters. Get me? Nothing. We don’t matter. The world doesn’t matter. Nixon, the draft, Vietnam, OPEC, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Carson on the boob tube, the damn Berlin Wall, and all the starving kids in Africa. None of it matters. None of this belongs to us. You remember the wasps’ nest in the shed last summer? We’re the wasps. There are things out there like Dad with his bug spray. Nobody cared about the wasps until one stung Mom, right? Then, whoosh!” Dennis mimed spraying an invisible canister, exhaling a stream of pot smoke, filling our room with a skunky stink. “Wasp extinction. The real lords of the shed reasserted their claim. You get it? The Earth is a shed, little brother. Redcap’s magic lets us see what lies beyond it to other worlds and things sleeping in voids, oblivious to our existence— for now. It’s utterly cosmic and totally terrifying. But it’s one-hundred percent the realest shit I’ve ever known. If everyone in the world saw it, we’d give up all the petty crap and enjoy life while we can, one big party groove. We don’t realize how good we’ve got it — and it won’t last long.”

His words as best I remember them. I didn’t take him as seriously as I should’ve.

It sounded like lyrics from the psychedelic music he loved. I pictured the other worlds as scenes from the album covers in his record collection. Colorful, wild, bright. Unreal. Imagined. Desirable.

How wrong I was.

When we finished in the apartment, Squirrel took us to the cellar.

Most of the tenants had removed their stored belongings after the murder investigation, and the super discouraged newcomers from using the dank, musty space. A furnace occupied a large chunk of it, but the owner had never rebuilt the wall that had hidden the dead child, leaving plumbing and electrical conduit exposed. Scraps of old mortar on the floor showed where it had once stood, the outline of a desecrated grave.

Squirrel: Cops picked this place over with the finest of fine-toothed combs, my man.

Me: It looks like just…a cellar. Maggie: Hoping for a body?

Me: No. I don’t know, hoping for something, I guess.

Maggie: Hey, what direction are we facing? East 4th Street is that way, right?

Me: Yeah, should be.

Maggie: Does the basement extend under the street? There’s an awful lot of space over there.

Me: Where?

Maggie: Come by me. You can’t see it from there. Stand here. Look into the corner, by the pipes, past where the wall used to be.

Me: Whoa, another room. Weird. Maggie: I know, right?

Squirrel: Hey, leave it. You don’t want to go back there. That’s where they found the dead kid.

Me: Do you know what this space is, Squirrel? Is it out under the street?

Squirrel: There’s tunnels under the street. Sewer, subway, gas, water, electric lines. You see any of that?

Me: No.

Squirrel: Then you ain’t under the street, man. But don’t go over there.

Footsteps, scraping dusty concrete.

Maggie: I can’t see the room anymore. It’s not visible from anywhere else in the basement except where you’re standing, Richie.

Squirrel: Hey, let it alone, already, would’ya?

Me: No, man, this is what we’re looking for. Maybe there’s stuff in there from Redcap.

Squirrel: Thought this was all gone. I wouldn’t have set foot down here if I knew it was still…

Me: Still what?

Squirrel: Forget it. Come on, you saw what you came to see.

Let’s blow.

Me: Cool it, Squirrel. We want to check this out.

Squirrel: Yeah? Do it without me, man. I got no skin in this. I’ve done what I came to do.

Footsteps pounding up the stairs, receding.

Me: Squirrel! Hey! Come back here, dude!

Maggie: Aw, let him go.

Me: He took off without the rest of his money.

Maggie: Then lunch is on Squirrel. Hey, look, there’s a light back there.

Me: It’s a reflection, off something metal.

Only visible from one spot in the cellar, the space widened as we entered it, creating the illusion of the cellar expanding around us. A trap door sat in the floor in the back corner. Its steel handle glinted in the dim light. An iron chain looped through floor-mounted rings at each corner of the door held it shut, secured with a heavy padlock.

Maggie and I deliberated the wisdom of opening it. Squirrel ditching unsettled us, but we figured he didn’t want to be around if we dug up any dirt that brought the police. And we’d come here precisely to dig up dirt, not look away when secrets presented themselves.

I scrounged a pry bar from an old toolbox by the furnace. Levering it under the chain and applying my weight, I snapped a rusty link. The chain rattled loose. Maggie reached for the handle then stopped and offered me the honor. “All yours, Richie-Rich,” she said.

The iron burned cold in my hand as I opened the door.

Unexpectedly fresh, warm air, redolent of burning wood and animal dung, drifted across my face. Hazy, flickering light came from the opening.

The faint illumination cast the shadows of rough grooves in the cement and revealed occult markings carved there. Geometric patterns and inscriptions like those from the apartment floor but denser and more complex, the difference between multiplication tables and calculus. The light seemed to ooze through them and lend them a wispy aura. A low murmur followed the illumination, a rhythmic sound like a subway rolling by on the other side of the wall. I snapped photos. My camera’s flash exposed more markings on the walls and ceiling. Weird symbols and diagrams covered the space around us. In my pictures, the opening to the main cellar appeared dead black and much narrower than it seemed by eye, like the narrow neck of a balloon opening into a space forced wide by air and liable to pop out of existence the moment its skin broke.

Beneath the trap door, ladder rungs descended into twilight.

Mustering my resolve with thoughts of Dennis, I climbed down.

Maggie came after me.

We set foot on a cobble-stoned surface in a scene so outlandish, the impossibility of it froze me in place. The ladder emerged from a hatch in the underside of the second-floor balcony of a Georgian Revival house, the kind tucked away here and there in the Village. A second alley intersected the one in which we stood and wound into a city lit by gaslight streetlamps. Above us, stars dappled the sky — the open sky — where clouds drifted across a bright half-moon encircled in blue haze.

Maggie: Are we…outside? What…?

Me: How the hell did we get…? Where are we?

Scuffling as Maggie climbs the ladder, pokes her head up through the balcony hatch.

Maggie: Oh God, Richie. The basement is, like, what, inside the balcony? How’s this possible?

Me: I…I don’t know.

Maggie: It’s like an Escher drawing. I hate those things. They give me a headache.

The recording catches a nearby scream, plaintive and frightened.

Me: What was that?

Maggie: We should split.

Me: Maybe, but…

Maggie: But what?

Me: What if Redcap’s here?

Maggie: Where is here? How do we climb down an underground ladder and come out on an open street?

Me: We’re…hey, look where the moonlight reflects on the water. That’s the East River, isn’t it? It’s okay.

Maggie: It’s ten in the morning, and the moon is up. There are streetlamps out of a Henry James story. Fifty buildings should block our view to the river from here. Nothing’s okay! Nothing!

All of Maggie’s points hit home, but I had no explanations.

The connecting alley revealed more of the city’s rudimentary geography. A rough sketch of the Big Apple we knew, delineated in cobblestone, low buildings, and flickering gaslight. The antique seed of modern New York, yet to grow and bloom.

Even the air tasted different, free of fuel exhaust and street food aromas but richer with smoke scents and animal musk I couldn’t name.

A second horrible scream curtailed our amazement.

Maggie gripped my arm. In a courtyard at the far end of the adjoining alley stood a man in Georgian high socks and breeches, a frock coat, and a tricorne hat. He paced and checked a pocket watch repeatedly, each time changing direction. The quality of his clothing and the shine in his silver shoe-buckles suggested great wealth and status. His posture telegraphed impatience. I inched closer to hear what he muttered to himself, but then he sensed my presence and looked at Maggie and me with a terrified expression before stamping off out of the courtyard.

A second man appeared, hurrying after him.

A man in worn denim bell-bottoms and a tie-dyed Uriah Heep t-shirt.

A man with unruly dark hair and a close, shaggy beard.

A man I knew.

Dennis.

Maggie saw him too.

At that moment, I forgot our bizarre and inexplicable circumstances and chased after my brother. Maggie, my true friend always and in all things, ran right along behind me.

From the courtyard, we faced the mouths of several dark alleys.

Along one, I glimpsed the bright spray of Dennis’s shirt and cried his name. We spilled into another courtyard, the hub for more openings onto narrow pathways into blackness.

Dennis gaped at us when we caught up to him.

I couldn’t help myself. Overjoyed to find my big brother, I seized him in a rough hug.

Dennis: Richie? What the hell are you doing here?

Me: Dennis! Oh God, is it you? Is it really you? I’m so happy to see you!

Dennis: Okay, yeah, I’m happy to see you too, little bro, but…how’d you find me?

Me: We were looking for Redcap, snooping around his old apartment building.

Dennis: What the hell do you want with Redcap?

Me: It’s, he…uh, I don’t know how to explain.

Maggie: We thought he killed you.

Dennis: What?

Me: Dennis, we haven’t seen you for two years. The police told us you died. They brought us your body. We had a funeral and…

Dennis: Ha-ha. Bullshit.

Maggie: He’s not joking. We cried our goddamn eyes out over you.

Dennis: I don’t…What the hell are you saying?

Me: What is this place? We don’t know how we got here.

Dennis: You couldn’t have come here unless you were invited by that guy I was following, or Redcap opened the way.

Me: We came through a trap door in the basement of Redcap’s old building.

Dennis: That’s how I got here. He did a ritual. He sent me to find…

Me: Find what?

Dennis: I…I can’t say. How long have you been here?

Me: Not long.

Maggie: Longer than we think. Look.

Maggie pointed at the now three-quarters moon, night’s eye watching our every move. How had it changed phases so fast? Even Dennis regarded it with discomfort — or, perhaps, distrust. One more thing about which our senses lied.

A series of screams rose from every direction.

Dennis hurried us along crooked alleys and irregular courtyards, through buildings that reeked of rotten wood and mold. The city changed as we walked, the gloom deepening, gaslights giving way to conical tin candle lamps of Colonial vintage, architecture regressing in time from one building to the next, closing on us with sinister shadows and overhangs. Along the whole way, mad, tortured screams dogged us.

We stopped in a courtyard, where Dennis approached a wood and steel door.

The sight of him filled me with happiness that even our horrifying surroundings couldn’t dampen. My brother alive and my best friend at my side, I held my fear in check, bolstered by the presence of the two most important people in my life.

Dennis: Wait here. I’ll be back fast as I can. Then we’ll all beat feet out of here.

Me: No way I’m letting you out of my sight after finding you.

Dennis: Man, if you came down here the same way I did then Redcap let it happen. That means he wants something from you. Trust me, you give that creep an inch, he’ll take a mile. Wait here and then I’ll get us all out of here and away before he can do anything to you.

Me: I haven’t seen you in two years. I’m not letting go now I’ve got you back from the dead.

Dennis: Two years? When…when did you think I died?

Me: August, 1971.

Dennis: That’s now, that’s this month.

Me: Now is 1973, Den.

Dennis: No, you’re wrong, that’s not possible…Listen, we’ll figure this out later, but you can’t come with me. You aren’t protected.

Me: What does that mean?

Three overlapping screams, loud, close, slightly distorted on the tape.

Maggie: Yeah, ’cause I don’t feel very protected right here either.

Dennis: It means you don’t have this.

Me: A medallion?

Dennis: A talisman. This is the symbol of Redcap’s coven. It carries power here. Not much but enough to keep me safe while I do what I came for.

Me: What’s going on? Is this even real? Are you really here?

Dennis: Yeah, it’s all real, but, little brother, it’s not what I wanted. I sure as hell didn’t want you tailing me here. It never occurred to me you would — or that you even could. All I wanted was to open people’s eyes to how the universe really works. I figured it would bring us together. Right? What unites people more than knowing we’re all equally screwed? But that’s not Redcap’s trip. He’s a power-hungry asshole into pulling people’s strings.

Me: Then why are you doing…whatever the hell you’re doing?

Dennis: I want out. I want to get off the drugs, the bullshit, and the lies. He promised to let me leave the coven if I did this for him.

More screams, louder, further distorted.

Me: Did what?

Dennis: There’s a special house here. Redcap calls it the Private Estate. It’s a place where the space between dimensions intersects and time becomes…I don’t know, malleable, I guess. We call the guy who lives there the Inheritor. He knows more than anyone else about the occult history of the universe and its future. Redcap wants me to find out when the Old Ones will return.

Maggie: Who the hell are they?

Dennis: It’s hard to explain, Mags. Richie can fill you in later. You remember, little brother, the wasps and the wasp spray? The Old Ones are Mom and Dad. Redcap wants to know when Dad is going to spray poison on the shed. The Inheritor can see that. From the windows in his library he sees all time from the birth of the cosmos to its end.

Maggie: Seriously, Dennis? What are you on right now?

Dennis: Nothing! It’s not like that. This dude’s family made a pact for knowledge centuries ago, and Redcap covets the secrets they’ve pulled from time and space.

Maggie: So why doesn’t he come get them himself?

Dennis: Bastard’s chicken. I’ve never seen him so scared as he was when he performed the ritual to open the way here for me. Just because he got his hands on an old book of Keziah Mason’s notes doesn’t make him a magician.

Me: He sent you here with…magic?

Dennis: Not magic, not really. Wicca dances around it, keeps it spiritual, right? But it’s math. Equations, geometrical diagrams, and symbols for an understanding of physics beyond what we know. Humans can only comprehend it with help from the Old Ones. The Black Stone Man. The Goat with a Thousand Young. Yog-Sothoth. Redcap’s familiar draws their aspects to our world, and we hope they never become fully aware of us. Shit, this is not the time for a lecture.

Me: Insane! It’s all nonsense. You really believe this?

Dennis: Look around, little bro. You saying seeing isn’t believing?

I had no answer for that. Maggie and I had gone too far to deny what we experienced, no matter how terrifying or bizarre. And at that point, in the last courtyard, the moon shone on us at its brightest, now full. The sight threaded fresh fear into my brother. I don’t know what the full moon signified, but I sensed his urgency.

He handed me a folded sheaf of papers Redcap had given him and swore me to keep it, the only known description of the Inheritor and the Private Estate. From the personal effects of a New England poet bought by Redcap at auction in Arkham, Massachusetts. The poet, who came to New York in the 1920s, found the city nightmarish and oppressive, its antiquarian remnants its only saving grace.

I read the brittle pages again tonight, recalling how I first skimmed them by moonlight, an account of a night walk like our own, ending in my brother’s destination. The poet rendered what he saw from the Estate’s library windows a “pandaemoniac sight…the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows.” He called it “the shrieking fulfilment of all the horror which that corpse-city had ever stirred in my soul, and forgetting every injunction to silence I screamed and screamed and screamed…”

Were the screams that haunted us that night echoes of the poet’s screams? The screams of others who’d walked those same alleys? The screams of children murdered and discarded behind old walls? Of those who’d looked out the Estate’s windows at a world of madness and despair?

When I looked up from the pages, the last door hung open, and Dennis, already through it, climbed a gravel path toward a terrifying house of shadows, whose cupola crested trees that didn’t belong in the city I knew, a bright needle aimed at the mysterious stars and illuminated by moonlight.

Maggie: Dennis, no! Come back.

Me: Let him do what he needs to do. Then we all get out of here.

Maggie: No way! He’s coming back with us now.

Me: Maggie, wait!

Maggie chased Dennis. I dashed after her as fresh screams resonated within the walls of the courtyard and footsteps clattered from the surrounding alleys. The meager flames of oil and candle that lit our way back snuffed out one by one behind us. The full moon persisted — then faded as a tangible darkness surrounded us and cut me off from my brother and friend. Cold seeped into my bones as I ascended the trail. Only the crunch of gravel underfoot let me know I remained on the path. I hurried along until I stumbled against a hard object. When I righted myself, a tepid yellow brightness glimmered ahead. I had caught my foot on the first of several steps approaching a doorway. The light came from within it. My eyes adjusted to the gloom. I entered the house in search of Dennis and Maggie.

Dying candle stubs lit the foyer and the bottom of a curving staircase. Seeing no other rooms or doors I climbed the stairs and called out Maggie’s name, then Dennis’s. My voice echoed flatly, but no other answer came. At the top of the stairs I faced three doors along a hallway filled with the odor of age and mustiness. The first two doors proved locked, but the third swung open onto a room where I found my brother and my friend with the strange man in the Georgian clothing. He studied his pocket watch, its chain dangling from his grip. The room — a paneled library stocked with books so ancient they looked ready to crumble to dust — sloped oddly to my right, creating an odd discordance with the sagging shelves. Dennis and Maggie stood side by side at three modest windows of rippled glass and lead muntins. Timid light from a sliver of moon glittered through. Before I saw any more, the Georgian man noticed me. Stuffing his watch into his pocket, he rushed me, and then pushed me back into the hallway. Without a word, he slammed the door in my face and locked it.

I pounded on the wood, called for Maggie and Dennis, but the door held firm, and no one answered my pleas. How long I stayed there, fighting a losing battle with the door, I don’t know. The harder I banged, the louder I cried out, the more the screams that filled that horrible night pierced me. They came from everywhere outside the strange house as if all the screams I’d ever heard reverberated together in that place.

I gave up on the door only when a hand dropped onto my shoulder from behind.

Jolting around, I confronted an arm reaching for me out of the empty shadows.

Another arm joined it. Both seized me by the shoulders then yanked me off-balance. As I toppled forward, darkness cupped me like an angry hand — and shoved.

A sensation of falling came. The world blanked out.

It returned in candle-lit gloom. The secret space in the basement of Redcap’s apartment building, its stones engraved with symbols and formulae, its walls tilted at strange angles. The open trap door through which Maggie and I had descended. Hands still clutched me tight. The arms belonged to a tall, wiry man, who pressed me to my knees and glared down at me. Long, wavy hair shadowed his face. Beaded necklaces click-clacked over a loose, paisley shirt, and from a chain around his neck dangled a talisman like the one Dennis had showed me, engraved with the symbol of Redcap’s coven. People surrounded us, posted at the perimeter of the ritual circle. They chanted. Their words made no sense to me, but in them I heard the familiar rolling rhythm I had earlier mistaken for a passing subway train.

Somewhere in their midst a young child wept.

Redcap: What’d you see though the windows of the Private Estate, Richie.

Me: Are you…Redcap?

The sharp smack of a hand slapping my face.

Redcap: Who else would I be? Tell me what you saw.

Me: What I saw…

Redcap: Your deadbeat brother screwed it up, Richie, so now you put it right and tell me.

Me: Where are Dennis and Maggie?

Redcap: Dennis is dead and probably Maggie too by now.

Squirrel snitched about your plan to pin it on me. Man, I was furious. Then I told him to go along with it because I saw this golden opportunity for you to finish what your brother started. I put the Coven back together just for you, kiddo, and we brought a new sacrifice to reopen the way.

Me: Did you…kill Dennis?

Redcap: Nah, man, the sudden stop when he hit the sidewalk did that.

Me: Let me go find them. Please!

Redcap: Tell me what you saw through the windows. That’s all your brother had to do, but when he came back, he told me to fuck off. You believe it? He wanted to protect the world by keeping the secret. What a hypocrite. And what about me, man? Who’s protecting me from the cosmic darkness thundering at us out of history? Only me, man. Only me. And to do that, I must know what you saw through the windows in the Private Estate.

Me: I saw…I saw a sliver of the moon.

A horrifying groan of anger and frustration from Redcap. Rattling, chittering sounds from the shadows. Louder, faster, frightened chanting from the circle.

Redcap: What else? Tell me.

Me: There isn’t anything else. The guy slammed the door in my face when I tried to look.

Behind Redcap, a figure materialized. An impossibly giant man seemingly carved from black obsidian and with the face of a devil. Its height defied the confines of the room. Redcap shuddered and released me. The chanting of the circle reached a feverish beat. The members of the Coven of the Right Stars took on definition in the dark, men and women who swayed in a trance. An ungainly shape scrabbled around their feet and sent a ripple of excitement among them. The next moment I saw what Dennis had died to avoid. The abominable cockroach thing with the face of a haggard and ancient woman. As large as a dog and hazy as if it were somehow not entirely present. In its segmented forelegs it clutched the body of a bloody child, two, maybe three years old. A new sacrifice. The woman’s face opened its mouth and showed me a blend of teeth and wriggling palps, running with fresh blood. It dawned on me then that I hadn’t noticed when the child’s crying had stopped, and that single moment of realization pushed my senses reeling beyond the point of rational thought. I crawled toward the trap door, but Redcap seized me again and dragged me to my feet. He gestured at me, motions mimicked by the man of black stone, and I couldn’t tell which imitated the other, if the stone man pulled Redcap’s strings or vice versa. Cold terror filled me. I wrenched myself free and dove into the trapdoor opening even as the cockroach thing scuttled toward me.

I fell through a shrieking void. Merciful silence followed. For a time, I sensed nothing.

Then a car horn honked. A dog barked. A child cried. Daylight stabbed my eyes.

I clambered to my feet and stumbled down a narrow alley, spilling out onto a cobblestone road on the west side of Manhattan. Perry Street. The Hudson River a block away. The opposite side of the city from Redcap’s old apartment.

Passersby flashed me frightened glances.

My watch showed me less than an hour had passed since Maggie and I entered the trap door. My senses reeled, but I kept my composure, began walking, telling myself I had dreamt it or fallen victim to a prank by Squirrel, hallucinating on some drug he’d slipped me.

I gave up trying to rationalize it.

In my pocket remained the papers of the poet my dead brother had given me.

My Carry-Corder had recorded everything.

Days later, I picked up my developed film and photos and found the images exactly as I remembered them.

I knew only one thing for certain after that. Dennis somehow found his way back from The Private Estate, returning in 1971, perhaps seized and yanked though time and space as I had been by Redcap, but Redcap didn’t let him leave the Coven. He sent what my research identified as a familiar, maybe one that contained an aspect of his witch-master, Keziah Mason, herself manifest in a subservient, insectoid body. I’d blown my one chance to save my brother’s life and lost my best friend in the bargain. Although I rushed crosstown back to the apartment building in search of Maggie, I found no sign of her. Our access to the strange basement space had vanished. A solid wall stood where we had stepped over the grave of a lost child and into an underground nightmare. The super mocked me for suggesting such a space had ever existed.

Maggie’s disappearance destroyed her family. They never fully believed my lies that I didn’t know what had happened to her. How could I ever explain? It ruined me as well. I drifted apart from my parents and extended family, and despite two attempts at marriage, I wound up alone in life.

Now a night and most of the ensuing day have passed since Maggie came to visit. I’ve sifted the past and written down my memories. It’s clear to me now that Redcap knew we were coming that summer and used Squirrel to set us up. He manipulated me in hope of obtaining the information my brother refused to give him, setting the ritual circle like a trap into which Maggie and I blundered. What did Dennis know that led to his death? Who was the stony figure with Redcap? I’ve asked myself if I truly want to know the answers because if I accept Maggie’s invitation, I will finally have them, all of them.

Maggie, she explained to me, never left the Private Estate. She befriended the Inheritor, dwelled in his library, and looked out through its marvelous windows upon all time. She knows what happened after the door slammed shut in my face, and to her our separation occurred only weeks ago. She knows what Redcap wanted to know: the time and nature of the Old Ones’ return. She has invited me to go with her to the Private Estate when the moon next changes, to walk along the same Perry Street alley from which I stumbled so many years ago, back into that scream-riddled city out of history.

The world, it seems, has not much longer to wait for the dark times Dennis feared.

One too many wasps have stung. The nest will soon be cleared.

Will the Estate protect us? Maggie wouldn’t say.

Tonight, the first night of the full moon, the moon has changed, and opened the way.

I must decide.

Very soon, Maggie will knock again on my door.

“The possessing entity is as much a slave to negative psychic forces as he who is possessed.”

— Prof. Nathaniel Peaslee, 1929

Dear Dr. Peaslee,

Consider these pages the update you requested on the curious affair of Sean Willeford. For the record, it was the unexpected discovery of a lengthy article by your grandfather, Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, published in several parts by the Journal of the American Psychological Society in 192829, that gave me the key to solving Sean’s problem. The title of the article in question was “Pnakotic Theory: A Research into Dream-work and Temporal Endurance.” I tried to tell my patient’s father, Howard Willeford, the most significant facts about your grandfather’s theory, but the man refused to listen. In order for you to understand exactly what occurred, it’s necessary to go into some detail about the exchange I had with the elder Willeford that strange afternoon.

“God damn it, lady, he’s not getting any better!” Willeford shouted, slamming his fist into his palm.

I admit I answered him somewhat stiffly. “Address me as Dr. Keil, please.”

Willeford stood in the lobby of my office and yelled at me in front of my secretary, a terminally optimistic young man just shy of twenty-two who was a devotee of New Age philosophy and an expert at ignoring all negativity within a twenty-mileradius. I, on the other hand, had been practicing psychotherapy for the past fifteen years; I wasn’t used to ignoring any negativity. Nor was I used to being chewed out by an obese old man with a red face and waving fists, I assure you.

I found it difficult to fault Mr. Willeford for his rage. His son had been under my care for over two years. To the untrained eye, Sean might have appeared to be sliding backwards into the “psychosis” that had almost destroyed him. My eye, however, as you well know, is far from untrained. Sean’s case was the most difficult I’d ever dealt with. I’d spent more time treating him than any other patient in my career. And yet all Willeford could see was his lifesavings draining into my pocketbook. I charged quite a bit for my services; it had to be that way. If Willeford had known the precise nature of what I had gone through trying to cure Sean, he would have been far more understanding. Unfortunately, I could not tell him the entire truth, not at that time.

I removed my glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief. I said, “Mr. Willeford, that’s decidedly unfair.”

“Are you just gonna contradict everything I say?” he asked.

“I’m not contradicting you—”

He pointed at me accusingly. “You see?”

I sighed. “I’m agreeing with you, Mr. Willeford. You don’t appreciate my position. These things take time. I can’t just give him a pill, cross my fingers, and hope he gets better—”

“What about Prozac? I’ve heard good things about—”

“You’ve heard lies about it. That’s not going to help your son at all. It’s going to push him over the edge. Is that what you want?”

For the first time in the past ten minutes Willeford remained silent for more than a second. He mumbled, “No, of course not.”

“As I recall, the reason you chose me to treat your son was because I’m one of the few psychotherapists in all of Los Angeles — perhaps in all of the country — who uses natural methods to treat mental illness. If you want your son to be pumped full of Thorazine then send him to the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA. It would certainly be easier on you, but the effects on your son would be disastrous. It would take him back two years in his treatment. Maybe you don’t see a difference, but believe me Sean does. He’s told me so a hundred times.”

Willeford winced and shook his head. “How the hell would he know? He’s a God damn raving maniac!”

I just stared at him. I think my gaze was so powerful, he decided it was best to shut up again. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” I said.

Willeford threw his flabby arms in the air. “Listen, you only see him three times a week for a couple of hours. You don’t know what it’s like living with him twenty-four hours a day. He stands in the attic yelling at the ceiling, spouting gibberish.”

“Yes, I can see where that might be perceived as being somewhat peculiar—”

“It is peculiar, God damn it!”

I spread my hands out as if I were pressing against an invisible wall. “I know, I know. But as I’ve been trying to tell you for the past ten minutes — or has it been an hour already? — I believe we’re close to a breakthrough.”

Willeford threw his hands in the air and sighed.

I said, “Howard, listen. Have you ever heard me say those words before?” He glared at me. “Hm? Have you?”

“No.” He said this with some reluctance.

“Do you think I’m stringing you along, is that it? Just to squeeze more money out of you?”

He glanced down at the carpet again. “No.”

“Do you think I would say we were close to a breakthrough if we really weren’t?”

“No.”

A moment of uncomfortable silence followed. I gently grabbed Willeford’s hand and said, “Sean’s going to be okay. If I weren’t sure of that, I wouldn’t have spent so much time helping him. If I thought he was a lost cause I would have refused his case two years ago. But he’s not a lost cause, and if you just give me a few more sessions with him I’m certain I can prove that to you.”

Willeford had softened, but he was far from won over. “I’d like to sit in on today’s session.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“It’s unethical. Sean needs his privacy. How can he relax and be open if you’re there breathing down his neck?”

Willeford’s lips had contracted into a tight, bloodless line. “I’ll sit right here in the lobby then.” He plopped down into a brown vinyl chair.

I tried not to reveal my frustration. I turned to my secretary and said, “Bobby, please make sure that Mr. Willeford is comfortable, won’t you?”

Bobby just grinned and saluted me with his index finger. “Yes, Dr. Keil, ma’am!” He was so sickeningly cheerful. Seriously, Dr. Peaslee, I’ve been thinking about raising his salary if only he would promise to frown once in a while.

I turned on one high heel and re-entered my office. I locked and bolted the door behind me; five bolts made of pure gold were attached to the oaken door, per your grandfather’s meticulous notes. I lit four black candles, one for each of the cardinal directions, along with incense and myrrh. I closed the shutters until the only source of light in the room was that of the consecrated candles. I pulled back the Persian rug in the middle of the room, revealing the pentagram underneath; I sprinkled sea salt inside the pentagram, black salt outside.

Your grandfather’s conclusions were correct, Dr. Peaslee. Certain ancient secret societies and primitive followers of witchcraft understood the essential principles of what we now know as hyperdimensional physics without comprehending the underlying causes. Almost all the tools and practices associated with witchcraft have a utilitarian purpose in the framework of advanced physics. It’s ironic that mystics and scientists have been at each other’s throats for so many centuries when, in fact, they’ve been pursuing the same truths all along.

Sean sat watching my “witchcraft” from the couch, his eyes as blank and lifeless as usual. He’d suffered so much in his brief eighteen years. Quite frankly, I was often surprised he was even alive, though I would never think of saying such a thing aloud. I tried to be as optimistic as possible when around him. A few months earlier he’d almost committed suicide just to prevent the thing from taking him over once and for all. Any negativity at all might push him over the brink again.

I asked Sean to remove his shirt. I used a smudge stick to paint a pentagram on his chest. I was surprised at how broad that chest had become during the past two years. He wasn’t a bad-looking kid. If not for the “accident” he might have been a track star or an Olympic runner. Sometimes, when I managed to push the thing out long enough to give the boy at least a few moments of respite, Sean’s eyes would brighten and I would catch a brief glimpse of the driven, intelligent young man who had so often been evicted from his own body.

I asked Sean to kneel on the floor within the exact center of the pentagram. He did so. Then I proceeded to light the black candles I had placed at each of the pentagram’s five points. Two years earlier I would have called myself a fool for engaging in such “mystical nonsense.” That was before Sean. Before I had discovered your grandfather’s dream-work research. Before I had seen what Sean could do. Or rather, what the thing inside him could do.

I chanted in Latin, an unbinding spell I had learned from a woman who called herself a witch (in another age, she might have been considered a physician on the same level as Paracelsus) who lived in a nearby mansion up in Sherman Oaks, of all places. This woman was quite wealthy and had spent years performing the everyday run-of-the-mill “mind control” spells for all the Hollywood types desperate for that one career-making role; she even had her own YouTube channel. Odd how the ancient wisdom can adapt itself to its surroundings, no matter how gauche or blasé.

The woman had been recommended to me by a former client whose fear of heights had been wiped away during a $75.00 fifteen-minute phone consultation. An obvious placebo effect, I had believed at the time. Yet, out of desperation, I had called her number anyway. I had never dealt with anything remotely resembling “magic” before, and yet somewhere in the back of my mind I believed the story Sean had told me: that it felt like something alien was trying to take over his consciousness. Something from outside. Something from the Great Gulf existing between the realms of dreaming and dreamless sleep.

“I built the machine on my own,” Sean had told me two years earlier. “I read about it in a William S. Burroughs book. I guess he got the idea from this artist named Brion Gysin. It’s called a Dreammachine. Basically, it’s just a light bulb connected to a turntable. The light bulb has to be covered with a cylinder with a bunch of holes poked in it. Then you switch the turntable on and let it spin. It creates a kind of strobe effect and puts you into a hypnotic trance. I just wanted to have some lucid dreams— bang chicks in my sleep, fly around like Superman and shit. I didn’t know it would leave my body open for…for this thing to crawl inside. I–I don’t know how much longer I can keep pushing it away and pushing it away!”

“And what do you think this ‘thing’ is, Sean?” This was still the “skeptical me” speaking.

“I have no idea. God, I don’t even sleep anymore. I feel like I’m awake twenty-four hours a day even though I know I’m not. Sometimes it wears me down. Finally, it just pulls me out. And I’m over there, in this huge room with no ceiling except stars. With that cone-shaped thing talking at me, through me, its tentacles waving and somehow touching me. Inside my mind. Inside my soul. I get so cold inside…just…just thinking about its touch…”

Oh, yes, I was very skeptical. That is, until the creature spoke to me one day.

It spoke to me though Sean’s mouth, told me things about myself and the universe and the dream-work of your grandfather that poor Sean could never know. It told me how the earth was formed, the number of stars in the Milky Way, what really killed the dinosaurs, how Rome fell, the name of the ancient lost planet to which Mars had been a mere satellite, the origins of the human species in the grottoes deep beneath the Antarctic where the shoggoths once slithered in obeisance to the Old Ones before the great rebellion, the time before the shoggoths slaughtered their masters, then turned around and created slaves of their own — hairless apes meant to be nothing more than mindless drones…

And it told me about my seventh birthday, the one I spent alone in the dark beneath the stairs while I listened to the soft, pulpy sounds of my mother’s face being beaten into a wall. I never saw the attacker. He was never charged or even arrested. In my infantile mind he was something beyond the physical, a being I could never truly visualize, a being I kept stored away in a tiny room in the back of my head. It took all of my willpower to keep that door closed. Sometimes I wondered if I’d become a psychiatrist merely to deal with the overwhelming pain locked inside that tiny room.

The creature, who identified itself as a member of the Great Race of Yith, could not tell me what the murderer looked like. It could see nothing beyond the dark beneath the stairs, the dark inside my own mind. This told me its knowledge was limited. It wasn’t omniscient. It was just very, very old.

I finished lighting the candles, then completed the protection spell. “Are you ready, Sean?” I asked.

The boy could only nod.

I deferred to the tools of a science far older than the limited systems of knowledge I had studied at University. I removed the Tarot cards from my desk drawer. I laid them out on the carpet just outside the circle. Sometimes the proper combination would trigger the being’s presence. If that didn’t work, I would have to try the evocation. But such spells drained a great deal of energy from me. I hoped to avoid it if at all possible.

I took a deep breath and drew the first card.

The Eight of Cups. Upside down.

Sean didn’t move. He seemed paralyzed, like a living statue.

Then the Knight of Pentacles.

Sean closed his eyes, began to rock back and forth. The left side of his face twitched ever so slightly.

Nine of Pentacles. Upside down.

Sean doubled over, clawing at his stomach. He appeared to be having an epileptic fit. The faint scent of ozone filled the air, like the smell of a coming electrical storm.

Six of cups.

Sean moaned as if feeling the mounting pressure of a coming orgasm. The hair on my arms stood on end. The sound of clicking filled the room, a thousand grasshoppers rupturing a quiet country night.

Five of Pentacles.

Sean whispered, “Please no, please go away.” Despite being a naïve young man, his will was very strong. He’d managed to push the thing away many times in the past. This time, however, I hoped he didn’t succeed.

I remember thinking, Don’t you dare listen to him. Let’s get this damn thing over with. Now.

The final card. The nineteenth of the Major Arcana. Le Soleil. The Sun.

Sean cocked his head back and opened his mouth wide as if in the throes of ecstasy. His fingers dug into the ground so violently the carpet tore away like tinfoil. He stared at me with black misty eyes. And he spoke. That voice, that familiar voice, the sound of insects scurrying over a corpse-strewn battlefield…

Hello again, Miss Keil.

Each syllable was slightly out of synch with the other; though they overlapped one another, at the same time there seemed to be long gaps between them. I didn’t understand the paradox, accepted it and moved on.

I said, “Let’s cut the bullshit, shall we? I’d like to make you an offer.”

Sean pressed his fingertips together to form a steeple. He cocked his head to the right and smirked. He moved his torso from side to side as if trying to manipulate limbs that weren’t there. I am intrigued, he said. Continue.

I tried to calm down. If only I could stop sweating. But that voice! It was so God damn cold.

I cleared my throat and said, “During our previous conversations you’ve…indicated that your…your possession of the boy was completely arbitrary. Isn’t that correct?”

Sean nodded, then sniffed the air. Interesting. Your sweat glands are swelling considerably. I presume you are uncomfortable?

“Well…yes, you could say that. It’s not every day I talk to…something like you.” Sean said nothing. Now I felt stupid. I thought, Is this even happening outside my own mind? “You…you’ve also said you’re tormenting Sean like this to learn more about our time period. You’re a historian, in a sense?”

He nodded again. In a sense.

“Then why did it have to be Sean?”

Because he opened himself up to me. He was a willing vessel, nothing more.

“But he had no idea what he was doing.”

That is not our concern. The boy is actually quite fortunate. My intention was to inhabit his body for a greater length of time. But his mind…though primitive…is unusually strong.

I leaned forward, staring into his night-filled eyes. “Take me instead. Let Sean go. I’ll record all the information you need on that…backwater planet of yours.” Sean uttered a word I couldn’t understand, presumably the name of the planet. I said, “I’m afraid I can never pronounce that damn thing.”

Sean laughed. You still do not understand. It is your planet, about four hundred million years ago. We are not bound to any one particular time. The bodies we inhabit in the past are native to your world, but are wholly unlike the species that happens to reign during this era. Your era. He stroked his neck as if fascinated by its texture. Why would you do this for the boy?

“Because I’d rather feel the pain than him.”

Masochism? An emotion unique to your species. An underrated delicacy, I might add. He sighed. Very well, I will do as you request. Your body or the boy’s…it makes very little difference to me.

I suddenly realized I had been holding my breath. “Thank you.”

No need to thank me, my dear lady. Do what you must to release me.

I blew out the candles one by one. In darkness, I reached out and ran my fingertip through the barrier of sea salt. The break was barely half an inch, but that was enough. Possession was immediate.

At first I felt nothing at all. Then: a piercing headache in the exact center of my brain. Something squirmed and kicked like a fetus swimming around inside my skull. I felt myself being pushed out of my body. No, I thought. It’s not supposed to happen this way.

For a moment two minds merged into one. I wasn’t sure if I was human or a strange mixture of plant and insect. I felt the phantom presence of claw-tipped tentacles on either side of my cone-shaped body and four slender stalks on my globular head from which sprouted writhing, flower-like appendages. I watched through a trio of eyes as Sean collapsed onto his back. “Sean!” I yelled, but the name didn’t sound quite right. It didn’t sound English. It didn’t even sound human. It was merely a dissonant series of whistles, like a madman playing a dozen flutes at once.

Then Sean and the room and the Earth itself rippled and melted away. I found myself standing in the midst of a vast vaulted chamber without a ceiling. Or rather, the chamber was so huge the ceiling couldn’t be seen. Above my head hovered a gray mist through which a sea of lights winked intermittently. They could have been artificial lights or distant stars. An onyx obelisk as tall as a three-story building stood upon a granite pedestal with strange symbols carved upon its uneven surface. The obelisk was featureless except for a massive sigil inscribed just below the pointed top. The sigil consisted of thin squiggles in the vague shape of a bee with its wings outspread.

On the far side of the chamber a circular window latticed with iron bars looked out upon an overgrown garden bathed in spectral moonlight. Cyclopean fernlike growths of a sickly, fungoid pallor swayed in the low breeze like nightmarish claws waving at me in a mocking fashion. All the windows and doors resembled Roman arches and were blocked by stout-looking bars. I knew those bars were meant to keep me in. Massive bookshelves filled with ancient tomes lined the basalt walls. Scattered papers and open books lay strewn on a series of pedestals that seemed to be beckoning to me, waiting for me to begin my work.

“No,” I said aloud, but the only sound that emerged was an angry, whistling wind. “No!” I screamed and the wind grew louder and angrier.

I closed my three eyes, willed myself to calm down. Silently, I recited the words my “witch” acquaintance had taught me and waited. I saw eight bizarre sigils composed of flame burning in the blackness around me. Each sigil represented a different concept. I cannot reproduce these sigils (though I have tried many times, I assure you), but I can replicate on the page their exact positions in the air as they danced and twirled and fell inside the darkness behind my eyes:

breeze

moonlight

obelisk

arches

bars

ripple

melt

vanish

Abruptly, the cavernous chamber drifted away. I now stood in a featureless gray void filled with fleeting images of my past…and what appeared to be a simulacrum of myself. Dr. Margaret Keil looked very surprised as she looked at me and said, How did you—?

If possible, I would have grinned. Instead I said, “I presume you’re uncomfortable?” then wrapped my tentacles around the doctor’s throat. My own throat.

The doctor fell to her knees; she grasped hold of the tentacles and tried to pry them loose, but this was impossible.

You know you cannot kill me in here, the doctor said. You will kill yourself too.

“I’m not going to do it.”

Behind the doctor — in this immaterial plane composed of nothing more than memories — a door appeared out of nowhere. It was thin, rectangular, and covered in peeling white paint. It looked exactly like the door to the tiny closet beneath the stairway.

The one little Maggie escaped into on her seventh birthday.

The door swung open as if propelled by an invisible force. It hadn’t been opened in over thirty-six years. A foul, musty odor emerged from the blackness. I pushed the doctor into the blackness, and the door shut behind us.

The room was much bigger than it appeared on the outside. I could not tell where the walls began, but it seemed as if we were surrounded by a vastness not dissimilar to the cyclopean chamber I had just escaped.

Something laughed at us. Something human. A man?

I withdrew my newly acquired tentacles and backed away from the doctor. Where are we? the doctor said, and for the first time I heard fear in its ancient voice.

I felt the fear as well. I had been feeling it for most of my life.

The man stepped out of the darkness. He was smiling. He had long sandy-blond hair that was thinning on top, a tangled beard, and bloodshot eyes. He was amped up, maybe on some form of speed? I was surprised at how small he was, only 5’5. He wore a ripped white t-shirt, baggy blue jeans, and a pair of combat boots. His shirt and pants were spattered in blood. My mother’s blood.

He cackled, blurting out gibberish half-remembered from an old Christian hymn, and revealed the bloody hunting knife he had been holding behind his back. He motioned with his fingers as if beckoning the doctor forward.

The doctor didn’t move. What are you? the Yithian asked the blood-drenched man. In all their exhaustive studies, had the “Great Race” never encountered anything as irrational as this?

The cackling man didn’t respond, not vocally. He swung his blade, puncturing the doctor through the soft spot in her throat. Blood gushed. The doctor fell to her knees. Gurgling sounds, not unlike the demonic piping that emerged now from my antennae, erupted from the new hole in the doctor’s flesh. The doctor grabbed her own neck, as if trying to keep the red sap inside. The man giggled and the blade swung again, down into the base of her neck, severing her spinal cord. The doctor fell into a pool of her own blood.

Then the man turned toward me. He looked down at me, as if I was very small. He said, “Now just close your eyes and enjoy it, little girl.”

Little? Girl? I thought, Can’t he see me for what I really am?

I was Dr. Margaret Keil, but I was also something more.

The mad piping and the whistling wind drowned out the man’s final screams, followed by the battering down of that pitiful, insignificant closet door…

I awoke facedown on the floor of my office. The sound of metal pounding on wood filled my head. I groaned as I pushed myself up. My blouse hung off my body in tatters. My skirt was much the same, stained in fresh blood. The office was a mess. My desk was on its back, the couch toppled over on its side, the window smashed and devoid of glass. Pieces of paper and random trash lay scattered across the filthy carpet, which was covered in a rubbery gray substance that had the scent of musty fungus. In the midst of this chaos Sean lay prostrate in the center of the pentagram. The smaller pentagram on his bare chest had smeared, dripping messy red tendrils down his torso as if it were an unfinished scrap of graffiti spray painted by a group of amateur taggers. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

I crawled toward him, ignoring the pounding at the door. I cradled his head in my lap. “Sean? Can you hear me?”

The boy’s eyes fluttered open. “Where am I?”

I laughed as tears trickled down my cheeks. “It doesn’t matter. It’s over now.”

The door to my office burst inward. In the doorway stood two police officers with their guns drawn. Behind them I could see Mr. Willeford staring at me with an expression of mounting horror.

“What the hell’s been happening in here?” he asked.

I cleared my throat and put on a decidedly professional air. “Mr. Willeford,” I said, “I’m happy to announce we’ve accomplished a major breakthrough far sooner than previously anticipated. I’ll be waiving the fee on this one. No need to thank me. By the way, any of you gentlemen can feel free to help us to our feet when you’re ready.”

I tried to appear calm, but somewhere in the depths of my mind was the sound of a madman choking on his own blood in a room too small to die in…and far too small to live in. I can still hear it sometimes, even to this day, despite the fact that many weeks have passed since that fateful afternoon.

I must admit, Dr. Peaslee, it’s not always an unpleasant sound.

Of course, I plan to translate these experiences into a far more organized and objective report, one I hope to present to your esteemed colleagues at your exclusive conference next year.

As always, I appreciate your support in these matters. Needless to say, Sean does as well.

It will no doubt be…interesting…to hear the reaction of our peers when I present my findings to them next fall.

At long last, perhaps your grandfather’s name can be restored to the exalted heights it so richly deserves after all these decades of shameful neglect.

Yours Sincerely,

Dr. Margaret Keil, Ph.D.

“Hands off!” Professor Wolfgang Bauer snarled at the young man who’d been reaching for a package that had almost slipped from the academic’s arms.

The would-be Samaritan was a boy, really, in his late teens at most. He blanched at the rebuke and scurried backwards.

Seeing the youngster’s shock, Bauer relented. “Nein, danke,” he added in a less hostile tone. “I can carry these on my own. Your concern is appreciated.” The professor raised his leather travel bag with his left hand, while tightening his grip on the heavy package in his right so that his knuckles whitened.

“All yours, mister,” the youth said with a sneer, and turned up along the South Ferry pier to enter the train station.

Bauer returned to his own thoughts. The oppressive temperatures made him testier than usual. Having spent more than a year in Egypt, he ought not to have been so bothered by the City of Brooklyn’s late August heat wave. Of course, that had been a dry heat.

Mopping his brow with a sleeve, Bauer took a last glimpse at Brooklyn’s sister city across the East River. His grip on the package never loosened. Every other artifact he’d uncovered on this expedition had been shipped directly to his benefactors at the Boston Museum, but he’d felt compelled to make a side trip of his own to New York. He’d hoped to consult an antiquities expert at Barnum’s American Museum, perhaps learn something of its mystical nature from the Fox Sisters. The latter meeting would not have met with his sponsors’ approval.

It had all proven a waste of time. Barnum’s so-called experts were anything but, and the museum staff was preoccupied in preparations for the arrival of Swedish singer Jenny Lind.

With a sigh of self-pity, the Professor entered the station himself to board the train to Boston.

The car was sparsely populated; this was hardly the Brooklyn and Jamaica Railroad’s most profitable run. He slid his traveling bag under a seat and placed the package in the unoccupied space next to him, resting his arm less than casually atop it. He could not say why, but the professor was convinced this item was the most important discovery of the expedition.

Seven years earlier, archeologist and occultist Enoch Bowen had explored the ruins of the tomb of Nephren-Ka, discovering, in a box covered with indecipherable symbols, a bizarrely shaped object he dubbed the Shining Trapezohedron. The socalled Black Pharoah had built a temple around that item, in which unspeakable acts occurred.

Apparently its geometry affected Bowen as well. On returning to his hometown of Providence, Bowen formed a cult known as the Church of Starry Wisdom, and subsequently cut all ties to his scientific colleagues.

Exploring those same ruins, Bauer discovered what Bowen had missed: a second oddly marked box, containing an artifact even more weirdly shaped. Following precedent, Bauer dubbed it the Lustrous Triacontahedron. It was a clumsy nomenclature, he had to admit, but the thing almost seemed to name itself, emanating a weird power. Again, Bauer could neither define or adequately describe the sensation. He hoped his museum colleagues could help him discover the source.

After what seemed an interminable wait, but in reality was less than a quarter-hour, the train lurched forward. The open cut down the middle of Atlantic Avenue, created a few years earlier to compensate for the steep grade of Cobble Hill, had only recently been covered over. The outside world went dark.

Bauer felt a sudden urge to gaze once more on his treasure. He’d only examined it in the light before, and for the briefest of moments each time. Steadying his hands, the professor carefully unwrapped the stone box and raised its lid.

A greenish glow temporarily blinded the archeologist.

Then it enveloped him.

Half a mile further on, the train returned to surface level. The traveling bag tucked beneath the seat was the only sign that a Professor Wolfgang Bauer had ever been aboard.

Six and a half decades later, Robert Suydam sat brooding in his study. Shelves covered every wall of the room, even partially blocking the single window, as they displayed a lifetime’s collection of mystic artifacts and arcane books.

On this particular evening, the white-haired Suydam was taking advantage of 1916’s leap day to expand on a new line of mystic research. Glow from the lone lamp on his desk deepened the furrows of his brow, highlighting swollen cheeks. In recent months he’d begun focusing his studies more on immortality and methods of transcending time; death, he’d come to realize, would render moot his search for ultimate power.

Piled on his desk were archived issues of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, recently liberated from the newspaper’s vaults under a spell of distraction. These were not the most recent ones, of course; Suydam cared little about the Great War that had raged throughout Europe for the past year and a half. It was also unlikely any of the staff would notice mid-19th century gaps in the library before he returned the trove.

Behind the desk lamp, partly in shadow, sat a glass jar in which floated a human brain preserved in formaldehyde. None of the weak-brained fools Suydam employed for menial tasks truly appreciated his genius. If by chance any of them did, he still preferred not to share his knowledge. The anatomical artifact provided him with the perfect sounding board.

“Well, Clarence,” he addressed the organ, “let’s see what we can find tonight.”

Clarence’s sole response was a slight tremor as Suydam slammed open the August 1850 volume. He was working chronologically backwards through the archives.

Suydam of course was well aware of Enoch Bowen’s 1843 Egyptian adventure. As a young man, he’d even made a personal visit to the Church of Starry Wisdom in Providence in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to obtain the Shining Trapezohedron for himself. According to certain forbidden texts, the wielder of said artifact could, simply by gazing into it, summon the ancient being known as Nyarlathotep. In exchange for horrible unspecified sacrifices, that entity would then reveal other worlds and much arcane knowledge. The insanely angled stone had been created by an unknown race on the far-off planet Yuggoth, and somehow brought to Earth eons before humans evolved.

Suydam did not push his bid for that object further, as he soon discovered there was bigger game to be found, capable of far greater power: the Lustrous Triacontahedron, which allegedly could open portals between worlds, bend time, and, if the legends were remotely true, even invoke mighty Cthulhu himself.

Itself.

For months the trail of that object led to one dead end after the other. A German archeologist named Wolfgang Bauer supposedly found the Triacontahedron on an expedition to Egypt half a decade after Bowen’s discovery. Every artifact save that one was shipped directly to the Boston Museum. Bauer himself made a side trip through New York, and was never seen again.

Then, a week ago, while ferreting out more information regarding what might lay under the Red Hook docks, Suydam came across an off-hand reference to the closure of the Cobble Hill rail tunnel in 1861. A mention of unclaimed luggage would mean nothing to anyone else, but it revived his interest.

“And here it is,” Suydam announced to Clarence. “A single sentence — not even complete, just a police blotter notation — a distinguished gentleman, W.B., mysteriously vanished from a Boston-bound train on August 29, 1850.”

Suydam clapped his wrinkled hands. “Bauer did not lose himself in New York, as we believed! He actually boarded a train here in Brooklyn, headed home. There is no record of his being seen at any later stops, so I’d abandoned that line of inquiry. Do you understand what this means?”

Clarence waited in polite silence for him to continue.

“The Lustrous Triacontahedron must still be somewhere in that tunnel.” Suydam frowned. “A tunnel that has been sealed since the Civil War. Gathering the resources to enter it could attract much unwanted attention.” He tapped the glass jar. “Have you any suggestions, friend?”

The brain bobbed briefly.

“I like that idea. Yes. Let the U.S. government do the work for us. This city is already paranoid about German spies. We can spread word over the next week or so that saboteurs are using the tunnel as a base of operations. When the Bureau of Investigation checks it out, we can slip in behind them.”

Clarence remained stoic.

“Of course, you’re right. By ‘we’ I mean only myself. I don’t need a horde of minions for this task. A simple spell of distraction, and whoever’s investigating the site won’t see anyone but their own agents.”

Suydam rose, patting the jar lid. “You are a most excellent listener, Clarence. No one living can so effectively help me focus my thoughts.”

Edward Alexander Crowley reclined on a couch in his Hell’s Kitchen apartment, silk robes draped above his knees, pondering the scribbled letter in his left hand. Lady Jenna, as he’d dubbed his latest Scarlet Woman, casually massaged his broad shoulders. Occasionally she paused to alternately plant a kiss on or lick his shaven skull. Her own silk robe, more diaphanous than his, hung open.

“This is a very odd missive, Jenna.”

“Hmmm?”

“It’s from a man named Monk Eastman. We met briefly when I first arrived in New York. He would be a good candidate for a model, should I start taking painting seriously. Very Neanderthal.” What he did not tell Lady Jenna, for there was no reason for her to know, was that Eastman had been among several underworld figures he originally hoped to use as his eyes and ears while in this city. Unfortunately, like most of Crowley’s early recruits, the man had ultimately proven useless.

He glanced at the envelope and chuckled. “He’s writing from Dannemora prison. Apparently, I made quite an impression.”

“Of course you did, my Beast. Aleister Crowley — occultist, magician, mountaineer, author, and so much more — makes quite the impression on everyone he meets.”

Crowley offered a half-smile. “I cannot deny that truth. We met at a Tea House on Mott Street — of course he won’t say opium den in a letter likely to be vetted by the warden. Years ago, Eastman was a prominent gang leader in the Five Points district. He wants me to help him make a comeback.”

“Put together a new criminal gang?” Jenna asked. “You?”

“He wants me to teach him magick. Give him special powers.” He allowed the letter to drift to the floor, unfinished. “I think not, Mr. Eastman. Much as I enjoy being called the Beast, a name for which I will always be grateful to my mother, and have sympathy for fellow drug users…helping establish criminal kingpins? Not my cup of tea at all.”

Jenna worked her way down Crowley’s pate to nibble on his right ear. “But I am. Aren’t I?”

He reached up to stroke her breast. “Better than tea. You are sheer nectar, you fiend.” He shifted in his chair. “Alas, I need to get dressed. I have urgent business downtown.”

“Hmmm?”

“Preparations.” Crowley paused. “For the Equinox Ceremony. And of course the ensuing Bacchanal.”

Crowley’s open, eccentric nature led most people, in particular his followers, to believe him incapable of keeping secrets, save those involving certain esoteric magical rites. He took pains not to discourage this impression. Several married women knew of, and were grateful for, his discretion.

A more important reason for rectitude was a major reason he had come to New York two years earlier: he was on a secret mission for the British Government. This occasionally required him to work with America’s fledgling Bureau of Investigation, rooting out German saboteurs and propagandists. The United States continued to resist being drawn into the Great War in Europe, but anyone with half a brain saw that this isolationism could not last. The Kaiser certainly did.

Posing as a feckless Englishman sympathetic to the German cause, Crowley had already surmised from his associates on that front, as well as interactions with the prostitute Gerda Maria von Kothek, that at least one German group was assembling bombs, or plotting to, somewhere in the New York City area. The exact location remained elusive, but the Bureau had recently received an anonymous tip that the saboteurs might be operating out of a long-abandoned rail tunnel in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, near Cobble Hill. Crowley was to meet that afternoon with his Bureau of Investigation liaison, Robert Blake, to help the agency determine their best course of action.

“But that festival is weeks from now,” Lady Jenna protested. “Days, anyway.”

“One cannot start planning these events too early.”

Alas! Lady Jenna had no idea that she would soon be a past memory for the Beast, being little more than a time-filler as he recovered from Jeanne Foster rudely tearing herself from his side. Crowley already had designs not only on Gerda, but on a certain Alice Coomararswamy, wife of a man he’d befriended in Europe and whom he suspected was part of an East Indian group sympathetic to the German cause. Few things were as satisfying as mixing business with pleasure.

“Are those preparations really so urgent?” Lady Jenna asked, reaching under his robe.

“Ah. Not quite that urgent.”

Crowley had done some research of his own regarding that abandoned tunnel. He couldn’t ignore an uneasy feeling that was unrelated to espionage, even as Lady Jenna began to work her own special magic.

Johnny Torrio smoothed his gingham shirt with his free hand and toyed with some papers on his desk. His office was on the upper floor of the Chicago brothel he had made his headquarters. He spoke softly into his phone’s receiver, though there was no one else around to eavesdrop. Torrio was checking in with Frankie Yale, the man he’d left in charge of the Five Points Gang when he moved from New York.

“So everything is pretty jake here, Papa Johnny,” Yale concluded, having given him a broad outline of the past week’s gang activities. “Oh, one more thing. You might find this funny. Remember Monk?”

“Eastman? Barely.”

“It looks like he’s friends with that magic guy.”

“Houdini? He’s here in Chicago this week. Or was.”

“Not him. That Irish fella, what’s his name, Crawley?”

“Aleister Crowley. A prime nutjob. He still in New York?”

“Yeah, that guy. Anyways, my contact at Dannemora tells me Monk wrote to this Crowley asking for help.”

Torrio chuckled. “If Monk is trying to get out of prison again, Houdini would be a more useful contact.”

“This is the funny bit. He thinks Crowley can use his magic powers to help rebuild his gang.”

Torrio snorted. “And you take this seriously?”

“Of course not. I thought you’d get a chuckle, is all. So. How’re things with Big Jim?” Yates knew how much Papa Johnny hated shop talk, and usually made an effort to end their conversations with social chatter.

“Uncle’s doing good, Frankie.” The gangsters exchanged a few more pleasantries before Yates rang off.

Torrio rose and walked to the gramophone on the table in the corner. A little opera always helped clear his mind. He flipped through his collection of disks, but could not focus.

Monk Eastman. That has-been hophead would do better to join the army rather than running a gang again. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to have someone check up on this Crowley character, on the slim chance something actually was going on.

Torrio picked up the phone again and asked the operator to reconnect the number. When Yale answered, he said, “Do me a favor, Frankie. See if you can get Alphonse, the Capone kid, to find out some more about this magician, on the off-chance there’s more going on than Eastman’s delusions.”

Capone might be a little hot-headed — what teenager wasn’t? — but Torrio had always found the kid pretty reliable.

A few days later, Aleister Crowley stood on the corner of Clinton and State Streets. He’d exchanged his flashy ritual robe for a plain dark brown suit and tie, under a loose-fitting frock coat. This allowed him to blend in almost supernaturally with the residents of this lower-class Brooklyn neighborhood. In fact, he seemed to elude notice completely, as passersby seemed preoccupied with spending as little time in the freezing weather as possible. The only person who offered more than a passing glance was a burly teenager sitting on the stoop at 169 Clinton Street, and even he seemed interested in poring through the day’s edition of The Brooklyn Eagle.

When the teeth-rattling echo of heavy machinery finally ceased, Crowley made his way to Atlantic Avenue. Blake, standing in the middle of the street, noticed the magician’s approach first, and signaled his own men to stand down.

“I was about to give up on you, Aleister.”

Crowley removed his nondescript fedora and gently rubbed his ears. Despite the late winter chill, his coat was unbuttoned, flapping in the icy wind. Crowley barely noticed. He had survived far worse weather in his mountaineering days.

“I was waiting a block away for the racket to cease. My ears are still ringing from the pounding of those pneumatic drills.” He peered down into the ragged hole the Bureau had dug in the middle of Atlantic Avenue.

“We call them jack-hammers.” Blake spoke louder than necessary, due to the ringing in his own ears.

“Of course you would. Have we, you, broken through?”

“We just finished widening the access.”

Two Bureau agents angled a twenty-foot ladder into the gap. It stopped with a yard to spare.

“Time for introductions. Aleister Crowley.” Blake turned to the man beside him as he spoke. “This gentleman is Edmond Fiske. He’s a lieutenant with the New York Police bomb squad. His expertise has proven invaluable in the last few years.”

Fiske extended a hand. “It’s a pleasure, Mr. Crowley. Bob tells me you’ve been working for the British govern…?”

Crowley raised a finger to pursed lips, even though the area had been cleared of people for a block in every direction. Fiske nodded, realizing his gaffe. Behind his own tight smile, Crowley feared Blake and his associates might be getting careless. “The British Cultural Exchange, yes. We’ve been researching the history of train travel in both our countries. This is one of the earliest underground tunnels in the world.”

“Our job would’ve been easier if we knew how the saboteurs themselves were getting in here,” Blake complained.

“We still don’t know that they are,” Crowley reminded him. “My own sources were still unable to verify your information.”

“Well, our people have been coming up empty for months as well. This is the only lead we’ve had. We need to at least check it out.” Blake’s frown did not differ much from his normal resting face. “You don’t usually tag along on these investigations, Aleister. Working in the shadows, that’s more your style. Aren’t you worried you might expose your cover?”

I’m more concerned that your people might do it for me, Crowley thought, glancing at Fiske again. He said nothing, however, shrugging off the misstep. This time.

“What can I say? I love forgotten places. Gives me the same thrill I get from mountaineering.”

Crowley watched Fiske descend the ladder to the tunnel floor, then followed with a flourish of his coattails. Blake was right behind him.

“In any case,” the magician continued, when all three men were below ground, “considering how much noise your people made, I can’t imagine anyone hiding down here would not have left.”

“That may be,” Blake replied, “but they won’t have had time to clear out their equipment. I left two men standing by up top, in case someone tries to follow us. If we’re lucky, perhaps our German friends will show while we’re down here.”

The trio swung their flashlights in different directions. Scattered debris created uneven footing, but the bedrock walls and brick arches overhead seemed quite solid for a structure that had been neglected for over half a century. The air was stale, but breathable, and the ground surprisingly dry.

Crowley checked the revolver in his right coat pocket, which was counterbalanced by the electric torch and assorted other tools in his left. A year had passed since he’d been accidentally shot in the leg; he did not wish to repeat the experience. The Beast also preferred his own familiar weapon to the Bureauissued guns.

“We might cover more ground, quicker, if we split up,” the magician advised. Now that he was getting the feel of this tunnel, he was more than ever certain they would find no evidence of German saboteurs down here, and that this whole enterprise would prove a futile exercise for the Bureau of Investigation. He was further convinced, however, having spent decades dealing with magic rituals and effects, that this confined space housed something far more sinister. Something no ordinary government agent was equipped to deal with.

“Mr. Crowley,” Blake interrupted. “If you don’t mind. I’m the lead investigator here. You are merely a consultant.”

“Of course,” Crowley conceded, bowing to hide his smirk.

Blake accepted the apology with a curt nod. “Right. Fiske, we’ll split up, cover more territory that way. I’ll head north, you two go south.”

“I’m willing to scout ahead of Lieutenant Fiske and work my way backwards,” Crowley volunteered.

“Agreed.” Blake knew better than to chastise Crowley too often. “If you need help, or find something, give a yell. Shouts should echo pretty well down here.”

For the next quarter-hour, the only sounds Crowley heard were the scraping of shoes against stone, and an occasional soft curse as Blake or Fiske stumbled over a loose patch of debris, or across a stretch of long-disused track.

He stopped a yard short of a brick wall that blocked the entire tunnel. Crowley knew he was still some distance from the original end, which had faced New York Bay. Somebody wanted this section double-sealed. Who? Why? And how recently?

He ran his flashlight beam along the edges of the wall, then turned it off, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness.

A faint green luminescence glowed in the lower left corner.

Crowley knelt closer. The light seemed to ooze from a gap in the cracked lip of a carved stone box. He ran his fingers over the unfamiliar symbols, as if reading Braille. When the fleshy tips started to go numb, he pulled back.

He tried to pick up the box, and found it was partially embedded in that wall. Removing a chisel from his left pocket, Crowley started chipping away. When he felt the box shift, he put away his tool and tugged hard with both hands.

He winced at the pain in his back and strained as the object resisted. Then it popped free.

The lid flew open, emitting a blinding flash of green light. Crowley slammed it shut at once. Whatever was contained within was definitely beyond the pale of mere saboteurs.

Behind him, a thin, cracking voice asked, “Was ist los?”

Crowley! Robert Suydam fumed as he stood on the curb at Atlantic Avenue, midway between Clinton and Henry Streets. He turned to hide his anger, though no one could see his face. How in the name of the Elder Gods did that fraud get connected to the U.S. government’s Bureau of Investigation?

Or was he? It seemed far more likely the eccentric cult leader had also somehow discovered hints of the ancient, alien artifact hidden below these streets. He probably slipped past the Bureau agents as a side-effect of the distraction spell Suydam himself had cast. Even a buffoon like Crowley, who gave serious masters of the dark arts a bad name, might occasionally stumble across objects of import. The old man was tempted to keep his distance. Let the fool destroy himself.

No. Such inaction might cost Suydam his own opportunity to obtain the precious artifact.

He boldly strode up to, then past, two government men standing near the jack-hammered entry. His long frock coat flapped. He waved his cane dramatically by its heavy brass grip, as if daring them to react.

Moments later, Robert Suydam was below street level.

Aside from an occasional glimpse of a distant flashlight beam, the tunnel was pitch dark. This was no problem for Suydam’s heightened senses. The Lustrous Triacontahedron was definitely located towards the south end. He could feel it.

He turned in that direction.

And collided with a thick-muscled teenager trying to slip past him.

Suydam grabbed the newcomer by the shoulders.

“Hey!” the lad whispered. “Get your meathooks off me.”

“Hey, indeed,” Suydam replied, releasing the boy. “You shouldn’t be able to see me. Who are you?”

“My friends call me Al. What’s it to you?”

“Friends are overrated, unless they’re in a jar. Al what?”

“Al as in that’s all you get.” Young Alphonse Capone was too street-smart to give this creep his full name. He regretted even blurting out his real first name. “Anyway, who the hell are you? You’re not with the Bureau.”

“Clever Al. Why are you down here, child?”

Eyes adjusting to the dark, the two figures could just make out each other’s faces. Even with his back bent with age, Suydam towered over the lad by several inches.

“I’m not a child,” Capone replied. Then, in a softer voice, his bravado cracking the tiniest bit, “I’m not sure. I just walked past those agents. I could have sworn they…”

“…looked right at you. I need to refine that spell. Make it more specific. Again. Why are you down here?”

The boy regained his composure. “I’m keeping an eye on that Irish guy. For a…friend. You?”

“The same, for myself. I suggest you leave me to it, boy.”

Capone tightened his jaw. “I keep my commitments.”

“You can follow your prey when he leaves.”

“That’s not good enough, old man. I’m supposed to find out what he’s doing down here, see if it has anything to do with…never mind what. Now, get out of my way.” The teenager started to walk around Suydam.

Barely moving, Suydam tripped the young man with the end of his cane, knocking him to the ground. Capone grasped the hem of the man’s cloak. Snarling, Suydam raised his cane in threat.

“If you touch my face,” Capone warned, his free hand feeling for the switchblade in his pocket, “you’re a dead man.”

Suydam lowered the staff. He was beginning to, not exactly like the boy, but to not detest him quite so much. “A truce, then. A deal, if you will. You continue to follow that man. Don’t hold back. Confront him. Ask him directly what he’s up to. His ego is massive. He’ll tell you everything you want to know, and more. Especially if you say you recognized him from the newspapers. His name is Aleister Crowley.”

“I know his name. I still don’t know yours.” Capone glowered through narrowed eyes at the shadowy, white-haired man. “Why the sudden change of heart?”

“Your distracting him will allow me to find what I seek.”

“Buried treasure?”

“Something like that. Do we have a deal?”

“I should get a cut.”

“No. You really shouldn’t.”

Capone shrugged, held out a hand. Suydam smiled thinly.

Crowley was not about to put away his handgun, although the middle-aged man standing before him was obviously terrified.

“Bear with me as I go over what you’ve just told me, for the sake of clarity. Your name is Wolfgang Bauer. You are not a bomb-building saboteur working for the Kaiser, but a Professor of Archeology at the Boston Museum. The last thing you remember is being on a steam train bound for that city.”

“Ja, I mean, yes, yes, yes! I boarded at the South Ferry station, pier 7, City of Brooklyn. I was transporting a very valuable artifact to the museum.” Bauer indicated the object tucked under Crowley’s arm. “That one. In that stone box. It must be awkward for you, juggling it with that gun? I’ll happily take it off your hands.”

“The weight is a bit clumsy, but I’ll manage. I want to believe your story, Mr. Bauer, but there are some problems.”

“Such as?”

“The museum that you claim to work for went out of business over a decade ago. Brooklyn has been part of New York City for almost twenty years. And the only South Ferry station I’m aware of is a loop subway stop at the southern tip of Manhattan.”

“Was ist…what is a subway?”

Crowley ignored the question. “Either you are a madman…”—Crowley paused for dramatic effect, because he was Aleister Crowley—“…or you’ve come through some kind of time portal. In the latter case, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

“Mr. Crowley!” came a shout from down the tunnel. “Aleister Crowley! It’s really you! I thought as much.”

Crowley turned his head, keeping the gun pointed at Bauer but swinging the beam of his electric torch toward the teenager who was rushing at him. “For an abandoned rail line, there’s an awful lot of traffic down here,” he muttered.

“I recognized you from the papers!” the lad continued, stopping a yard away. “I’m a big follower! I just had to find out why you’re in my neighborhood. I have so many questions!”

The newcomer was a handsome young man, fairly well-muscled, with smooth, almost pretty features. Crowley recognized him as the boy from the stoop. He found him attractive then, and was even more drawn to him under these unlikely circumstances. “Indeed. This is a discussion we should have in a more intimate, ah, private environment.”

Crowley’s tone made Capone balk. “I ain’t no gunsel.”

“Of course not,” the magician replied. Not yet.

“You look like the young man who tried to steal my package at the pier!” Bauer accused. “Who are you?”

“A fair question,” Crowley agreed. “Furthermore, young man, how did you get past the government men?”

“That was my doing, I’m afraid.” Robert Suydam stepped out of the shadows behind Capone. “I had cast a distraction spell to get down here myself, unseen.”

Crowley sighed. “At this rate, half the population of Brooklyn will wander through this tunnel by sunset.”

“You said I was to talk to him!” Capone snapped. All three of these characters were obviously out of their minds. Papa Johnny definitely had nothing to worry about.

“That was before I saw what he’s holding. Mr. Crowley? My name is Robert Suydam. I believe, no, I know, that box you’ve got there belongs to me.” He extended his free hand.

“Nein!” Bauer inched toward Crowley. “It is my property,” he blustered. “Well, the Boston Museum’s.” He glanced at Crowley. “But since that institution no longer exists, yes, it belongs to me. I found it. In Egypt.”

Crowley waved his revolver. “I trust everyone here has noticed that I’m holding a gun?”

Suydam smirked. “Have you any idea, Mr. Crowley, how old the roof above us is, a roof that has not been maintained since the tunnel was sealed fifty-five years ago? A single shot from that revolver could well cause an avalanche.”

“You must take us for real goops,” Capone chimed in. “If all that jack-hammering didn’t cause those bricks to collapse, why would a pistol shot?”

“I don’t think avalanche is even the right word,” added Bauer. “You’re thinking of a cave-in.”

“Clever child,” Suydam mumbled, through clenched teeth. “Hand over the object, Crowley. You would not be the first to meet their doom, toying with things they do not understand.”

“Very dramatic speech,” Crowley observed. “The answer is no. Finders, keepers.”

Suydam slammed his cane against the floor. “You’re an ignorant clown, Crowley, constantly blathering about your insipid rites and sickening, perverted ceremonies.”

“On the contrary. Unlike you, apparently, I do not fear sharing my knowledge with the world. I also seriously adhere to my golden rule: do no harm. I agree, however, that this particular object is far too dangerous for anyone to possess.”

“Save myself.”

“Including you. Especially you.”

As the men argued, Capone edged to position himself equidistant from all three. Torrio had asked him to gather information. The only weapons he’d brought were his switchblade and a knuckleduster.

Crowley glanced at the man beside him. “Professor Bauer, these inscriptions on the side have significance, do they not?”

“Of course,” Bauer replied quizzically.

“Please excuse me if my pronunciation is off. ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh…’”

“No!” shouted Suydam. “Crowley, you idiot!”

“‘…wgah’nagl fhtagn!’”

From the solid wall at the end of the tunnel, a greenish-grey tentacle, as thick as a man’s torso, began to materialize. It was quickly followed by a second. Then a third.

“Give me the box!” Suydam ordered. “Before it’s too late!”

“Run!” Crowley yelled at Bauer and Capone, pointing past Suydam down the tunnel with his revolver. Then: “Catch!”

Suydam leaned forward, knees bent, prepared to catch the stone box despite his apparent age. Rather than toss the box in his direction, however, Crowley swung around to hurl it at the grasping tentacles. They wrapped around it easily.

“Nein!” cried Bauer. The professor leapt after the artifact, intending to wrestle it free.

“Wolfgang!” Crowley had no time to say more. Another tentacle lashed out, and the traveler from the past became a smear on the floor.

Crowley raced after the teenager. He shot past a bemused Fiske, who was coming to investigate the screams, and gestured the policeman to follow. They reached the ladder a moment before Blake, just in time to see the youth scramble up and disappear. At least, Crowley saw him. Neither of the men showed any awareness of the intruder. Robert Suydam’s distraction spell still functioned.

Possibly Suydam did, as well.

“What was all that noise about?” Blake demanded. The same question was written on Fiske’s face.

Crowley glanced back over his shoulder. The tunnel was eerily quiet now. His expression turned stoic.

“I fear I loosed, er, loosened something, stumbling in the dark. I thought the roof about to collapse. Silly me. I can confirm that I found no evidence of sinister foreign spies. Or non-sinister ones. Did either of you discover anything?”

Blake shook his head. “If we had more than a few hundred agents scattered over the entire country, we could do a more thorough search…”

“Not every tip pans out,” Fiske consoled Blake. “Your man is right. We’ll wind up just sealing the tunnel shut again.”

“Yeah.” Blake nodded. “First, though, I’m getting electric lights installed and giving the place one last going over. We may have to come back someday. Unlikely as that is.”

“I suppose you can waste your time on that,” Crowley said, resigned. “I remind you, however, though your country is not yet directly involved in our Great War, you are providing aid. There are German saboteurs in this city, planning something destructive before the year is out. You should concentrate your efforts on finding them.”

“Oh, we will, Aleister, we will,” Blake assured him. “The Bureau is all about stopping the bad guys.”

Crowley considered this might be a good time to arrange another mystical retreat. The astrologer Evangeline Adams, for whom he’d done freelance work, owned a cabin upstate. If he ran into that teenager, he’d advise him to leave town, as well.

In case Suydam held a grudge.

In his mansion overlooking New York Bay, Robert Suydam waited, sprained ankle throbbing under its bandages, hands gripping the armrests of his cushioned chair, sharing Clarence’s thoughtful silence. Actively seeking revenge for today’s interference would be a waste of time, time he was running out of. Still, should he ever again cross paths with Crowley, or that arrogant youngster Al…

Presently, Suydam had larger concerns. A ship was due from Sudan next week, carrying yet another package for his unholy collection. The loss of the Lustrous Triacontahedron was a setback, but there are many routes to immortality.

Provided one is willing to pay the price.

Or make others pay it.

I have examined Google Maps and Google Earth with greatest care, yet have never again found Angell Street. Even without GPS, it should be easy. Oklahoma City is laid out like a grid, like the tesserae mosaics my father used to design for those tight-asses out in Nichols Hills or the comic book panels he loved so much. Unlike Memphis or Seattle, Oke City isn’t some strange concatenation of tentacled roads flailing madly around rivers, changing names, leading nowhere. I’ve wandered one end of the city to the other, searched every impossible place from brick town to the Paseo, from the Fire Fighters’ Hall of Fame to the edge of Norman where they keep the nuthouse. I’ve looked everywhere but cannot find the neighborhood, the singular street, or that strange little store, where, during my final semester as director of the Rose theater, I read the first pages of the last book my father never wrote.

The night it happened, sleet and freezing rain had turned half of Oklahoma into a fairy wonderland, if said wonderland had been imagined by Edward Hopper. I awoke in my car in a haze of tequila and beer and bewilderment. All I knew for sure was the time, three a.m., because something, probably my face, had slammed into the dash clock, and now it stared back at me, as blinking and confused as I was. I couldn’t remember much else. Didn’t even recall driving away from the bar, let alone making it from Norman to downtown OKC, evidently on booze control.

The airbag on my two-decade-old Saturn didn’t deploy, but at least I’d remembered my seatbelt. Getting the damn thing unlatched was difficult. Finding the door handle was just as hard. Then, stumbling and sliding away from my heap that now appeared a full foot shorter than I remembered, I could see that I’d bounced off a Nissan Titan and run headlong into a streetlight. Old school, real metal, not that breakaway stuff. Doubt if I even dented the pole. But the huge concavity in my hood looked like Jaws had made an appearance, and my windshield was smashed to shit. The hole where the window used to be seemed to grin at me with shiny blue and green teeth. I stared at my once clear hope of shelter with a kind of confused certainty, desperate ennui, my thoughts strangely sober, my instincts decidedly drunk.

Sleet continued to shovel down out of the ether, and I understood all I had between me and the elements was my USC windbreaker. No hat, no gloves. The tips of my fingers felt like glass. Wind wailed past streetlights, around red brick corners, and the chains on a nearby post office flagpole chattered like rattling bones. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine those two poor boys King Richard murdered in their tower, maybe that song by Gordon Lightfoot, the one about reading minds and a castle dark and a ghost with chains upon its feet.

The survivor bound in filial obligation for some term…

I hadn’t been feeling myself for years. Not since Dad was diagnosed. How long had I been dragging those chains? Just how much of a ghost had I become? Some days it felt like Dad and I had traded places. Didn’t know whether I was coming or going. Right now I really didn’t know. I didn’t recognize anything. It had to be downtown. About the only place with brick buildings and the old-style streetlights, but something was offkilter. And it wasn’t just residual drunk. Didn’t they mothball the downtown post office back in the Eighties? Fuck, and that’s what you’re worried about? Your car is totaled. It’s three in the morning. It’s sleeting. And you don’t have a clue where you are.

I reached in my pocket for my phone, but it wasn’t there, only a handful of tiny tequila one-shots. Fuck, I must have stopped and shitface-shopped at some point. Bet I left my phone there too. I rummaged around the Saturn. Nothing. Just round-edged jewels of glass and blood. I was lucky to be alive. Of course lucky was a relative term at this point. No car, no phone, not a soul around, no shelter from the storm, pain in my forehead, in my back and ribs, lost…Well, when in doubt, start walking. At least that’s what my feet said, so I listened, hoping that actually moving might warm me a little. Alas, that’s when the sleet turned into heavy, blinding flurries, and the lights up and down the block began flickering, then went out entirely.

I trudged ahead, spelunking my way through snow, through the cavern labyrinth made of brick and steel, neon and chrome, wondering what sort of mammoth might roam this technotundra. I wondered what my ancient ancestors might have thought, lost between one multinational glacier and another. Ancestors, parents, father…With nothing tangible to hold onto — the street ahead of me was gone, the buildings themselves might as well have been cliff faces — all my mind had to cling to was a drunken sense of loss I didn’t want to think about, but couldn’t let go.

I’d been awakened this morning — no, yesterday morning by now — by the sound of wind howling its way under our longsuffering, rotting window casings. That, and a sad call from my sister. Later, after I’d hung up and headed in to work, lines from the upcoming production kept running through my head. They ripped back and forth like a wood file through particle board. Like building a set. Like tearing one down.

But, you must know, your father lost a father;

That father lost, lost his…

It had been a short call. But right in the middle of rehearsals? Right in the thick of trying to recreate the ghosts that haunt us all? Most of Hamlet’s father’s speeches are short too…at least in the beginning. Revenge. Remember. Swear. Everything that makes us human. Some scholars believe Shakespeare invented the human. Maybe. But maybe he just had a dad. And his dad got old. And his dad got sick. And fate demanded action.

My situation right now demanded action. It demanded I do fucking something or freeze to death in the middle of downtown. Still woozy, entering a kind of extremis fugue, I imagined myself being found years from now by anthropologists. He must have been a slave of some sort. Look how he’s branded with letters. Not wealthy…or smart. The sediment between the macadam and the new graphene city substructure suggests there was snow, and all he’s wearing is flimsy polyurethane. Tattoo of tragedy and comedy on his left shoulder. Small notebook in left pocket. Scribbled notes regarding Shakes — Ah, theater guy. Actor or director. So, yes, slave.

I tried, I really tried to keep my mind on the danger at hand. I swiveled my head side to side, looking for someplace, anyplace that might show signs of life, but it was the weekend, in the middle of a town with no nightlife, precious little foot traffic on a busy day. They used to have a world class theater down here. Also shut down in the Eighties. I kept walking, barely able to see the street, let alone the looming cave walls…buildings. I feared I might be losing it. I’d heard about frostbite victims. I’d read that terrible little story by Hans Christian Anderson, another by Jack London. I didn’t have any matches to warm me. I didn’t have a dog to disdain me.

Finally, up ahead, I saw a faint light that seemed to come from between two of the larger office buildings. The warm glow lit the mirror cladding like fire plumes leading me to a box canyon cave, like offstage torches guiding me to the castle perilous. I thought of Bernardo and Marcellus and Horatio following the ghost light toward Elsinore’s horrible secret, the dead father that could kill them all. My mind was everywhere and nowhere. I didn’t know how long I’d walked or how much longer I could hold out. I wished I had some matches, or a dog, or a dead father to guide me.

I turned the corner into an alley labeled Angell, and there it was.

Some sort of shop lit up like Candlemas.

Stepping into the deep corridor between the two monoliths on either side, I noticed both the snow and sleet had stopped. Or perhaps it just didn’t fall here. The store had no name, no specific sign, but I could just make out comics gleaming their three-color glory from the plate glass storefront. Also, intricately blown-glass vials with long tubes flickering like jewels in the night, like genie bottles of every color. As I got closer, I saw that the storefront, the brick façade itself might not sport a name, but it showcased two large murals. On one side of the windows, airbrushed onto the brick, loomed an image of Force Commander from the Micronauts. He stood just behind his much cooler, more clearly rendered horse, Oberon. The halfbiological, half-mechanical steed reared up on its hind legs, its geometric curves and white eyes making it look like an art nouveau sculpture drawn by Michael Golden.

On the other side of the windows, facing the horse rampant like a lover, was an image I knew almost as well as the comic book characters. Oberon, I knew from all those days collecting comics beside my father. This image, I knew from all those days collecting unemployment after I left his house. Here, a perfect recreation of the woman from JOB rolling papers stared across both window and entryway, head tilted back, hair wild as a stallion’s mane, eyes half-closed, hand half-raised to lips awaiting either her equine lover or the approaching, smoldering joint. She reminded me of a noble nymph captured in tapestry, a fairy queen. This design was even more nouveau than the other.

Shivering and footsore, shaken and lost, all I could think of as I approached the door was: I am passing now between two gods, between two forces, Titania and Oberon. I am stepping into the conflux of their power. I fished one of the mini-bar tequila bottles from my pocket and hammered it whole.

My dad always wanted me to be a comic book artist. As a carpenter and plumber and would-be architect, what folks in his home town called a mule skinner, Dad himself once harbored dreams of the arts. He encouraged me from the start, but when my designs led to stage sets and costume design, when that gift led to the boards and eventually directing, he always seemed disappointed. He loved comics. Loved the idea that maybe, someday, his son could succeed where he had wavered. His own father always thought him a failure, tried to talk him into the military, but Dad held on to as much art as he could and fed that love with the designs he realized for other people’s dreams, if never his own.

Here, in this store that couldn’t exist on a night that couldn’t exist, I stood — a car wreck survivor who shouldn’t exist — in the middle of a store that reminded me of all the old shops Dad and I once haunted. Once upon a time, comic shops weren’t just about comics. They were about comics and pot. Before that, they were straight-on head shops, retailers in the realm of Reggae and righteous bush, but at some point, all the paraphernalia peddlers realized stoners liked looking at shit when they were baked out of their gourds. Soon, black light posters and lava lamps, kinetic toys and wave machines, all the wild mandalas of a ’70s culture steeped in mood alteration made their way into the stores. Then, eventually, underground comics.

Kind of like what I saw here, throughout the store, between the X-Men long boxes and oversized Treasury Editions of Superman vs. Shazam, Conan, Ghosts. One whole window of the store was dedicated to glass bongs, the genie bottles I’d spotted earlier, but the deadhead detritus didn’t end there. Next to posters of Killraven and the Identity Crisis saga hung several examples of Roger Dean cover album art. Yes, it said, breathe deep and follow us to a land of floating, fragmented islands, alien bonsai trees, mud-dobber castles where mosquito spacecraft explore the secret seas. A long glass counter along the far wall contained both classic Big Little Books and hand-crafted clay pipes. Another wall championed what looked like entire runs of various ’50s TV-tie-in series, interspersed with Fritz the Cat and Zapped comics. Black light lit the aisles of the store not already illuminated by strobes or disco or plasma balls. A few dark nooks glowed only with lava shadows, posters with slogans for Panama Red or Zig Zag rolling papers.

Back in the day, I didn’t develop my dad’s thoroughgoing zeal for the comics cavalcade, for saddle-stitch storytelling, but I did collect for a while. I still have a few of the rarer ones he bought me over the years mounted in my office. But Dad loved the medium from his first Action to his last Sandman. I may have moved on, but the love of my father, my desire to have some connection to him, particularly after the Alzheimer’s set in, demanded I keep one foot in the art of antiquity and one in the world of word balloons. Consequently, part of me both loves and hates what stage and screen have become. Comic book characters, comic book plots, comic book themes. All the great drama fleeing from Broadway to boob tube, cineplex to idiot box. But since I grew up with Kirby and Ditko, Doctor Strange and Adam Strange, all the new gods, I live in a kind of perpetual schizophrenic state.

Walking the length of the store, checking the center aisle boxes occasionally for titles I might recognize, I was glad of the warmth, I was glad for safe haven, but I wondered how a store so brazenly counter-culture still existed in a state like Oklahoma. After my BA, before I moved to Southern Cal for grad school, I holed up in Kansas for a while. Further north, less inbred, but not so different. There, in Wichita, for almost two years, the police regularly raided a woman’s house who lived just down the block from me. She sold pot paraphernalia, yes, but it was advertised otherwise. Bongs were “decorative bowls.” Roach stones were “beads.” Clay pipes were “native American art.” They busted her anyway.

Okay, it ain’t Kansas, but how the hell does this store stay afloat? How do they keep the Securitate at bay?

Sure, I’d smoked dope in my day. Still did if the company was right, but it wasn’t any more a major part of my life than the comics I abandoned when I moved out. I left both forms of escape behind. Or so I thought. Trying to encourage attendance at plays, the literate drama so few care about these days, I feel like I’m re-labeling theater the way my neighborhood pot lady did her wares. Oh, Death of a Salesman is really The Dark Knight Returns. Angels in America is just a grittier version of X-Men II. How often have I sold my soul? How horribly have I co-opted both myself and my father?

To thine own self be true.

No. I have to love the world I hate…for my father’s sake. When he introduced me to my first comic shop in Norman, it was as if he were preparing me for baptism or the priesthood. “This reminds me of when I bought that original Submariner story,” he said, “‘Motion Picture Funnies Weekly’.” He went on to show me around, introducing heroes and villains, legendary leagues and shady subcultures which seemed to bleed into much of what else the store sold. Doing his best to shield me from all the head shop shit, all the underground udders on display, he revealed to me at least an inkling of the real reverence he felt.

I still hadn’t seen any sign of life in the shop. My feet had stopped burning from the cold, my hands had stopped tingling, but my spider sense was going off like a goddamn carillon as I finally felt warm enough to start seriously rifling through the store’s wares. I still had two tequila tinies. One more might make things make sense. So, yeah, then there was one.

The first title I came across was a 1972 DC Treasury Edition of The Adventures of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I always loved the oversized comics. They made me feel bigger somehow. This one in particular. I remembered reading it on the way back from Christmas Eve with my relatives in Carnegie when I was eight or nine. My folks had been fighting a lot and the simple stories and games calmed me, took me away.

Most comics in a store are bagged, but often the larger sizes are left to the careful discretion of the customer. I gently opened the pages and saw the blocky, funny-animal style I remembered. The grid lines of the sequential art. The word balloons. My mother’s hand in dot-matrix color and basic black outline reaching under the Christmas tree to retrieve a small box labeled “wife.” The next panel zoomed out to show the tree itself, a sad, silver little thing made of tin. The kind of tree that would’ve made Linus cry. Another panel clearly illuminated the halfmelted fairy perched atop, its wand drooping, the bulb inside flickering. Two more panels down, next to an ad for art classes, the adults exchanged gifts while my sisters and I waited with feigned patience, enraptured by the moving fan-light which bathed the silver tree in amber and emerald, blue and scarlet as the color wheel turned.

For minutes I simply turned pages and read the story of that Christmas as a normal continuation of memories I’d been channeling since I walked in. The small box opening. My mother’s reaction. “But Julian, I didn’t think we were…not this year.” The words, sad as our tree, fragile as that melted fairy, appeared in a word balloon above her head. But the moment I read my father’s response in his parallel balloon—“Just three little words, that’s all I want”—I snapped out of my fugue and realized something was happening. Something surreal. Frightening even.

This wasn’t Rudolph. This wasn’t a comic book story. It was my story. My dad’s story. How the fuck…

I flipped pages, skipped to the end, rolodexed back to the beginning. Not one image of the rhinophymic reindeer. Not one caricature of the obese, capitalist God who kept his sentient pets in bondage. Just my family, that whole Christmas. The words my folks spoke. The presents we received. The complete confusion on my father’s face as my mother shut the box with her new wedding ring guard, set it aside, and focused on me and my sisters. The slump in his spine, in his whole soul, as he shrank into the bedroom and let us finish our consumer orgy. In a sequence of final panels, after a crossword puzzle full of terms related specifically to our family (mule skinner, Oklahoma, adultery, art school, drama teacher, disappointment), the comic zeroed in on my father’s hands pressed against his face as he sat on the bed. Slightly different, scalloped balloons showed his inner thoughts.

“I should have explained. Really. But what are we gonna tell them? I keep thinking, Regan’s getting hitched in June, maybe the whole wedding thing, daughter leaving, new lives twining will bring back…But what if it doesn’t? She fucked around, probably still…”

I couldn’t read it all. Didn’t want to. It was like the Twilight Zone, like reading a Borges story. Maybe meeting your dead father on the battlements of a castle you never wanted to inherit. It was impossible.

It was true.

Nobody had come to greet me in the store since I arrived. Regardless of the lights and heaters all running full blast, the muffled strains of music coming from a back room somewhere, I began to wonder if the store was even open. A sane person would’ve checked, would’ve looked for the proprietors. A sane person would’ve seen what I saw in that old, stupid, children’s comic and run like hell. But I wasn’t really sane at the moment. More than half-plastered, I was still less than fully thawed, I was freaked by my wreck and the storm and the store itself, and I was more curious than I should’ve been.

Only a handful of rational options could explain it. I’m dead. I’m in a coma. I’m concussed. I’m dreaming.

Only a handful of irrational options provided an alternative. I’m being tested by aliens. I’m living a computer program. I’ve crossed over to another dimension where the rules are different. I’m stuck in someone’s story.

Well, okay. Maybe one other option. This is really happening. This is the real world.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio…

So I opened the sleeve on another comic, this one bagged, tagged, overpriced.

The 300th issue of Superman. I knew this comic well, as well as the Rudolph fluff I read when I was too young to understand market tie-ins, trademark vertical stacking. This issue was supposed to retell the story of Superman as if he landed on Earth in 1976. I paused for a second, fearing, knowing what I would find. Sure enough, Curt Swan’s iconic art greeted me with the image of a young boy with great gifts trapped in a Kansas upbringing, but it wasn’t the youth I remembered. It looked a lot like my father.

His mother — a woman who’d been married at fifteen, three children in hand, one on the way — looks out one day on her family’s cotton field to see a storm moving in. She notices rotation in the clouds, then recognizes her youngest out in the field, oblivious to the threat. She drops her dishes, slams her way through the screen door, and runs pell-mell for the three-yearold playing among the cotton rows. She has to save him, get him back to the house, grab the others and head for the cellar. But the boy is almost a mile away. By the time she gets back to safety, the boy in her arms riding the curve of her large belly, her other chicks squawking before her into the dank must of their dark cellar, it is too dark to see the blood pouring out of her sex. She can feel it though. She knows what it means. The boy won’t know till years later, not until after he takes a job at the church and has to mow the grass that grows on her grave.

Hers and his stillborn sister’s.

I located another long box, closed my eyes, picked an issue from the middle at random. I opened my eyes. Here, in a Deadman comic, I found my father was taking me to our first R-rated film together. Galaxy of Terror. My father squirmed as one of the actresses was stripped nude and raped by a giant slug creature.

I turned to another row of boxes, grabbed one from the front and one from the very back. I opened them, one after the other. Richie Rich and Sandman. The Rich story showed me and my father as bachelors in Phoenix. The short time we lived there, he developed an extravagant ritual for my allowance. Rows of pennies, turning to nickels, then dimes, then quarters led me once each month from my bedroom to the kitchen where I found cups set up on the Formica table as if for a magic trick. Tupperware bowls. Several boxes. All in sets of three. “Keep the money, or try for what’s under one of these cups,” he said.

“I’ll take cup number one.” It was a Twinkie.

“Okay, you can keep the Twinkie or go for what’s under the bowls.”

“Bowl number three.” A paperclip.

“Okay, keep the paperclip, or…”

He could keep this going forever. And it meant so much to me. But, according to the comic, it meant even more to him. We were so poor back then we had to entertain ourselves. No cable. Nothing but board games and cards. No new shoes. Shitty Sears shirts. Not a lot of theater movies, not a lot of comic book shopping. Even less Sirloin Stockade.

I opened the other comic. This one, The Sandman, came from the second series of that name, not the original Fox and Christman stuff, not the later, better Gaiman. Instead, Kirby’s garish, grandiose, wide-eyed style stared back. It showed my father and me biking from our apartment in Phoenix to a Rexall Drugstore, way out on the edge of town. We biked a lot together then. In the story, we rode toward a specific goal, my dad trying to help me find the latest issue of a comic I’d actually begun collecting. This one was supposed to have Man-Bat fighting the Dark Knight. On our way home, we pedaled our way through a park and arrived at a creek where my dad tried to jump the lip of a concrete bridge. He flew over the handlebars and landed smack-damn on the middle of his belly. It winded him so much he couldn’t talk. I stood over him, fanning him with World’s Finest.

She-Hulk told the tale of our family trip to Disneyland, when we stopped on the way at the Painted Desert, at the Grand Canyon, and, penultimately, at Bedrock, mock-up of an already outdated cartoon, and the saddest place on earth. All the stone-age homes, carved ostensibly from granite, showed signs of serious degradation. Chicken wire, crumbling stucco, the horrors of time and inattention. A short feature in the back highlighted my dad slapping Delia in front of an Allosaurus. A flash-forward showed him feeling ashamed for years after.

One issue of Heavy Metal contained a series of interconnected tales involving his grade school years, his growing interest in art and shop. His first failure in any class ever, Driver’s Ed. Evidently he had to take his driving test in a school bus. These were stories I’d never known before.

Neal Adams’ Batman told tales of our late nights playing poker with Monopoly money, struggling through the 221B Baker Street boardgame. An extra story, nestled toward the end of the comic, showed my father leaning over his ledgers, crying, trying to deduce the name of a villain, any villain, touching each red number, real money spent on my mom.

Jack Kirby’s Machine Man illustrated the work my dad did in Nichols Hills for years. The beautiful inlays and woodwork he created. All the terrible people who didn’t appreciate it.

Ms. Marvel explored the night he tried to get my mother back, offering to return her diamond property. The epilogue made it clear he failed to read the fine print.

The last comic I released from its polyurethane prison was a first issue of Epic Illustrated. I remembered this one from the Eighties. Full color, fine art, an attempt to steal the market from Heavy Metal.

The cover by Frank Frazetta didn’t connect in any way to the story of an Oklahoma boy who grew up poor and bright and talented, a boy who gave up his dreams for family, who collected comics and tried to pass that love on to his only son, who came to his son’s plays but wanted more for his legacy’s legacy, who, before the marriage and kids and eventual divorce, before the exile to Arizona and a rocky return, before the disillusionment and despair, before years of living alone and the seemingly arbitrary death sentence of Alzheimer’s, one Christmas morning, when he was five, got the one thing he had asked for from his dad…an eraser.

No, the cover, a grey-scale tableau of Roman soldiers bestriding a cliff, didn’t seem to signify that tiny, povertyplagued man who was — is — my father. But the story inside moved me to tears, dredging up the previous morning’s memory, a memory decidedly not comic, the memory I’d tried to avoid all day, all night. The memory of a phone call in whose service I wrecked my car.

“Daniel, we have to move him to a dedicated memory facility.”

“Why? I thought Delia was able to manage him.”

“It’s gotten…difficult. We’re running out of clothes. He isn’t able to…”

“Oh. Okay. But you said…”

“I know. We said a lot of things, Danny. It’s hard.”

“Sorry. Sorry. So what’s the plan?”

“They told us we should take him to the facility for dinner.”

“Um…That’s it?”

“No. We take him to dinner there…” She paused. A long pause. “…and leave him.”

“Leave him?”

“Yeah.” I could hear the horror in her voice. Horror, resignation. “And no contact from any of us for three weeks.”

I felt my heart beating in my brain, my scrotum ballooning into my throat. “Jesus, Regan! Traumatic much?”

“Yes.”

A single saline drop fell on the Epic.

And, finally, the proprietors appeared.

Actually, I wasn’t sure if they were the proprietors, though clearly they worked here. They looked like so many other fine young Hannibals I see piloting the ships of commerce into the rocks these days. Ratty jeans, t-shirts, bed-head. But these three were women, something I hadn’t often come across at a comic book shop. GameStop maybe, or Spencer’s, but uber-geek heaven? Not often at all.

I wasn’t sure where they’d come from either, maybe from behind the large Vampire tapestry at the back of the store, a gaudy, Goth arras I’d imagined as merely decorative. It was creepy, like they’d just manifested or beamed in. Even stranger, as I watched them navigate the clutter of the store, I realized their eyes were closed. They didn’t carry canes, but gently and knowingly touched each object along their path, clearly feeling their way to the cash register. I know you’re not supposed to stare at the unsighted, but I couldn’t help myself. Three blind workers running a place that caters to the graphic arts? Almost odder than what I’d found in the comics themselves. Then again, maybe my whole idea of normal had to go out the window. Tonight wasn’t going to get any more mundane.

All wore jeans and nametags. All had different hair, different neon topknots, but they seemed like siblings, triplets maybe. The first wore a faded t-shirt from the Eighties with poster art for Eddie and the Cruisers on the front. Her name also read Eddie, perhaps ironically, perhaps not. The second sported Bruce Lee on her top, huge and hyper-realistic, as if inked by Drew Friedman. According to her tag, she was Melody. The last was the only one of the three with a comic theme. Over her small breasts the image of Oracle presided, the hero formerly known as Batgirl sitting in her wheelchair and running Gotham from behind the scenes, from behind the screen of her computer. Like any one of the thousands of comics in the place, she too was marked with a little white square. Hers said Mimi.

“Can we help?” she asked.

“Anything in particular you’re looking for?” said Melody.

“Our rates are not unreasonable,” offered Eddie.

“I…um…what is this place?” I couldn’t imagine another question.

“Please,” Melody said. “Ask again. Something real. Something smart.”

“Is this…heaven?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Eddie said. “For this we stayed open?”

By now I’d moved to the front of the store, toward the cash register, still clinging to a couple of comics, a couple of my father’s memories.

The women stood behind the counter, eyes closed. For some reason I wondered if they even had eyes. Yet it felt like they were seeing me, watching my face and hands, sizing me up. One of them, Mimi, fidgeted with a cheap plastic figurine, like something you’d find in a Happy Meal. As it moved back and forth in her hands, I recognized it. Mike, the green-eyed monster from that silly Pixar film.

“Give me that,” Eddie said and took it from her. “So, you stumbled across our little store. It’s not easy to find.” A moment ago, she’d sounded disgusted. Now she seemed impressed.

Melody reached over and stole Mike from her co-worker. She, too, began to worry it like a stress doll. “Were you looking for us?” she asked.

“I don’t know what you…” I stopped before I finished the thought, seeing all three blind brows wrinkle toward disdain. This wasn’t the normal banter one has at a comic shop, even a head shop. And no, I’m not an idiot. I knew there had to be some connection between what had happened yesterday and this store, between the phone call and what was happening now. But none of it seemed real. Everything was like a dream.

I tried again. “I’m not sure who you…” More wrinkles. Even my own. I knew better.

I’d taught drama for more than two decades. I knew the stories, the character types, the tropes. I’d followed the trajectory of all that happened before and behind the curtain from contemporary, minimalist mummery back to when writers first realized the stage was a stand-in for our brains. I’d written a number of plays myself. New stuff, adaptations of Dante. I knew the mystery and the mythology. So the moment these three appeared, I made every connection you could imagine. They were women, but they weren’t. They were expected, but they weren’t. They spoke to my knowledge of the history of theater, but they didn’t. I’ve read Camus. I’ve directed Sartre. I’ve seen every Twilight Zone ever made.

Of course I knew who they were.

“I assume you only find this place if you need it,” I said.

“Well played.” Melody languidly opened and closed Mike’s one big eye with her thumb.

“Do I get to ask for my father back?”

“Your father is beyond us,” Mimi said.

“So you can’t fix sickness. What do you do? Why do you have my dad’s memories if you can’t return them?”

“This isn’t a pawn shop,” Eddie said.

“Helluva head shop then.”

“It is a head shop, though not as you mean.” Mimi grabbed the little monster back from her sister.

“Okay…”

“Did you want to die?” She handed Mike to Eddie.

“No, I…Okay, am I dead?”

“You know the answer to that. Why would you need this…us…if you were?”

“So, fine. Not dead. Can’t get my father back, not like he was. What possible thing could you offer me? You could’ve just let me freeze to death.”

Mimi smiled. “Oh, please, are you really that dense?”

“I’m still a little drunk, if that counts. And I just had to tell my sister it was okay to fuck over my dad, well, fuck over the body my dad used to inhabit. Because there wasn’t any other choice. And my Dean wants to read me the riot act since I decided to take liberties with our upcoming production of…”

“Do you really think we give a shit about Denmark?” Eddie picked up a bong made out of a plaster skull. A long tube depended from the back of the head like something out of an H.R. Giger nightmare. A metal tray gleamed in its rictal mouth, waiting for burnt offerings.

“No,” I said. “No, but what the hell? You’ve got my father’s memories bagged and tagged and filed in long boxes and…” I looked slowly around the store. I thought about the implications. I looked back at the three women. “Aw, fuck.”

“Yes,” Mimi said, her face grown solemn.

“This is my father. Isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And his memories are actually for sale.”

“Yes.” She thought for a minute. “Sort of. More like a wager.”

“And though he can’t have them back, someone else might. I could walk away with a really sweet deal.”

“Or a really bad one.”

“Because there’s a catch.”

Eddie smiled. “A lovely, lovely catch.”

“Which would be…”

“Your memories for his,” Mimi said.

“Win, and take away what he’s lost,” Melody said.

“Lose, and let go of your own,” Eddie said.

“All of them?” I thought about chasing girls on the playground with my “love inducer” made from a Cracker Jack box and an old TV antenna. I thought about the first sex I ever had, back seat of a Ford Futura. That time in fifth grade, sneezing while giving an oral report, unspooling snot, snorting it back up. Sixth grade, wrestling, shitting my shorts. The look on my father’s face that one Christmas.

“All? No, of course not. The game has limits. But I’m sure there are memories you don’t want anyway.” Eddie’s smile became carnivorous.

She was right. There were some memories I wouldn’t miss, but others? Others I’d sell my soul to keep. “Ah,” I said. “What are the odds?”

They led me to the back of the store, Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew playing in the background. Once we passed behind the curtain, there was almost no light. Just a glowing, cluttered table around which had been arranged four chairs. The three workers, owners, sisters, whatever, gestured to the extra seat and found their way to their own. I could see them in the near dark, reflecting the light of the strange table that looked like a giant, glowing toadstool, but — like seeing the light of the store itself through snow, like seeing modern drama through the lens of comics — not really. I couldn’t see them at all. As I took the offered seat, suddenly I felt like a student again. First day of class. What would I learn?

I’d been teaching for a long time. I knew a lot of shit. Once upon a time, that knowledge was useful. I could riff off the Greeks and the Akkadians and the Medieval Mystery Plays for hours. But nowadays where I taught…not so much. Rose State used to be a community college, a kind of votech for not-ready-for-prime-time scholars. No, probably not fair, but after they renamed it — same way so many small colleges did in the ’90s, suddenly deciding they were universities — most of my students still came there to make up for deficiencies, to tread water while waiting for a raise at work. Yes, I had some good students, even some stellar ones, but most saw the school as a clearing house to buy Associates Degree insurance. That, or a way to tiptoe around core requirements that might be harder at a “real” university.

Still, regardless of what I was able to impart to others anymore, I recognized those figures who were supposed to be the source of all I’d ever imparted. Like the witches in the Scottish play, the grey hags Perseus consulted, the Norns, the knitting women Marlowe encounters in Heart of Darkness, these figures…Jesus, I thought, am I really saying this to myself? After all the comics, after all the memories held captive in not-so-funny books, after all that had happened since this morning…Somehow, somehow I knew. These three had to be them. I knew it in my hind-brain. I felt it in the movement of my mitochondria. They characterized, represented, actually were the power of chance and choice and knowing. The original muses, the Titanides. Song, Practice, Memory. I could feel them in my lungs, in my DNA, in the dark, confused, clattering places of whatever I had left of a soul.

“Have a seat,” Melody said.

Eddie sat directly to my right. She handed me a small leather pouch. “Choose your die.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, she likes to do that. Dice. Choose one of the dice,” Mimi said.

Her face, all of their faces, glowed in the light coming from the table I still didn’t understand. The gaming table was short and squatty, fluted, a goblet-shaped stump, but it glowed from within, eldritch colors swirling inside. I couldn’t look directly into it, given the hexagonal maps and pewter figures, the character sheets and snacks and random dice that covered the top, but something active, something almost alive was happening beneath. Lava lamps use wax and water, I thought, different densities to create the fluid flow. Wave motion machines use oil and water, different affinities, to create the tranquil rise and collapse we love to watch. Humans use…Fuck. Something about this room kept pushing me off-track, making me wander.

I hefted the little bag in my hand. Just the weight of God, I thought. Then, like before, Where the hell did that phrase come from? I’d been channeling Shakespeare references all night. But Dickinson? Maybe some graduate course back in—

“Daniel,” Mimi said, loud, terse, breaking me loose from my woolgathering. “Choose.”

They know my name.

Of course they know your nam.

The knowing scared me.

Gently, I pulled the strings on the pouch and looked inside. Seven dice, everything one needed for an RPG, from twentysided to four. But these were no more plastic than the bag was Naugahyde. I’d never felt leather like this. Too soft. I’d never seen dice like this. Too organic. I poured the seven polyhedral shapes out into my hand. Old they were, yellowed and worn. Like teeth.

I stared for a moment at the maps and other clutter which rested on the strange table. Someone, maybe the three sisters, maybe something else, had recently been playing Villains and Vigilantes. Whomever, they liked superhero stories, role playing, and pork rinds.

“It’s really very simple,” Mimi said.

“Okay, but I’ve never played this. Superhero 2044 and Champions, yes. But not…”

Eddie reached forward and swept everything on the table to the floor. Super saviors and dire dreadnaughts hit Formica. Caped crusaders bounced bravely beneath slowly floating spreadsheets of predetermined abilities. The latter eventually came to rest on top of the former. Polyhedral patterns of movement, evidence of a finely finessed fate behind everything, slid toward the curtain, coming to rest just behind several unstoppable dice that continued to dance, like they didn’t have anything else to do.

“This isn’t the game,” she said, indicating the clutter she’d just tossed to the floor. “The game is Tali.”

“Do you know the Eleusinian mysteries?” Mimi asked.

I couldn’t answer. I was too fascinated by what uncovering the tabletop had revealed. Was it indeed a toadstool? A grail? The stump of Yggdrasil? I would never know, but inside the base, right beneath the surface — perhaps deeper than any single soul could imagine — spun a perfect representation of the galaxy. One hundred billion stars stared back at me, lighting the three sisters, lighting me, lighting the room whose corners I could not see. All I was sure of was this table and these women, these dice and me. But the stars? They swarmed like swamp gas around a sunken corpse, like lightning bugs orbiting secret shallows, like neurons blinking on and off around an idea.

I couldn’t help but wonder…was this a retro toy, some sort of head shop simulacra they’d found on eBay, or was it something else? Might it be real? Was the galaxy actually in there, under the tabletop, beneath bones my Muses must be rolling every day?

“Choose,” Mimi said again.

“I…I don’t know the rules,” I said.

“High score. Subtract the difference. Three against one of course.” She shrugged, as if to say, sorry, that’s the way the quarks collide.

“Similar to Knucklebones or Fivestones. Not as confusing as Craps,” Melody said, her grin like Eddie’s earlier.

“So, I just pick one? Or several?”

“Oh, for Goddess’ sake,” Eddie said, “you have seven possibilities. Pick one and—”

“Unless he picks a d10,” Mimi said. “Then he has to roll two.”

“Yeah, right, but that’s…Daniel, tell me, you’ve played D&D, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve rolled against a Dungeon Master, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Same thing. Except now you have three masters. So fucking choose.”

Suddenly, Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality replaced Miles, and all the plasma balls around the room went crazy. Little, bubbled boils of lightning. I didn’t know if it was the game commencing or Melody’s anger. Regardless, the room grew brighter, in a UV-sort-of-way. Purple highlights hit everything, including my Muses. For just a few seconds, I could see their skeletons through their skin. It was like watching the entire room bathed in X-Rays. Everything except me. I looked at my own hands. I stared at the dice and the galaxy spinning inside its grail. Nothing else glowed from the inside, save the sisters. For a few seconds, I couldn’t even make out their faces. Skulls, three of them, stared back at me. Grinning, eternally grinning.

I looked at the seven die — teeth? — lying on the surface of the Milky Way.

Not a math major.

What are my odds?

If we all roll d20s, and if they top out as I crap out, I lose fiftynine memories.

What kind of memories do I have? What am I willing to lose?

If I roll two d10s, same scenario. Except I lobotomize 299 elements of who I am.

Is this what my dad went through? Is this what the past six years have meant? Losing a life, memory by memory? Offloading stuff one doesn’t give a shit about? Losing everything that ever mattered? Those memories back in the store, trapped inside innocence and ink…Are they as important to him as they are to me? How many are out there, beyond the curtain? How many have blundered into the dark recesses of some strange shoppe where only the most discriminating connoisseur might recognize their importance?

The first appearance of Gambit or the Uncanny X-Men themselves. The original run of Warlock? The first Infinity Gauntlet storyline? Shit, all those Scrooge McDuck tales that no one — and I mean no one — cares about, yet sell for insane dollars? How are they any different from what my father may have lost? Could he even know?

Can I?

If I dice against these devils?

“Our knowledge may be infinite,” Melody said, “but our patience…”

“Okay, d4,” I said, pulling out my last mini-bottle and downing it. At this point in my life, in his, what difference did it make? My memories, his memories? They were almost the same. He was losing memory. I was selling mine for tenure and tequila and temerity.

“Really?” Mimi, the tiny form of Mike-the-mono-eyed in her hands, stared at me. Blind, she stared at me. In the harrowing glimmer of galaxy glamour and Tesla tentacles, she stared at me. Half human, half Red Skull.

“d4,” I said again, thinking, if they all roll fours, the worst that can happen is I roll one, lose eleven memories. Best case? I win one. Anything else, I run higher and higher risks.

“Don’t you want to venture…more?” Eddie’s cranium pulsed with the plasma strikes illuminating balls around the room, a room whose boundaries escaped me. The walls didn’t seem to exist. Limits seemed extraneous.

“No,” I said. I wasn’t really clear on why I’d chosen the path of least resistance, why I didn’t want to bet the farm — young child, field, tornado — but then a memory, one I hadn’t found in the comics in the other room, one of my own, presented itself.

Two years ago I took my father to see Man of Steel. By then, he’d lost almost everything, his sense of balance, his knowledge of most people’s names. He barely remembered, from moment to moment, who I was. After we had a couple of Black Angus hot dogs at the upstairs Deli, we wandered down to the theater itself and I helped him into a seat. It wasn’t a great film, full of plot problems and the same sort of character carelessness I hated. In fact, it was precisely the kind of film I felt was killing the field I’d long found myself a part of. But…

But my father, a man who once spent years designing intricate inlay intaglios for rich people, who knew the name of every member of the Legion of Superheroes, who knew how to carve a spiral banister by hand, who could make a makebelieve wooden rubber-band gun in under a minute, who could name every artist who ever drew Spider-Man or Doctor Strange…My father sat in that seat and watched for two and a half hours and didn’t lose focus. He didn’t have to get up for the bathroom. He didn’t become confused. He watched the film with me as I watched him, and he seemed to glory in it, to find something special that the real world didn’t offer. Alien loses his past, his planet, his parents, and he moves on. Something there seemed to touch him.

When it was over, my dad reached for me and I had to guide him far more carefully back up the theater’s center aisle.

Up, for someone with Alzheimer’s, is ever so much harder than down.

I took his hand and guided him up the small incline back to the lobby. He could barely walk. His balance was fucked. I wasn’t sure if he even remembered one third of the film we’d just watched. Halfway there, he slowed, turned to me and said, “So…we’re going to save the world?”

I rolled the dice.

My father drives like a madman from the IHOP to someplace else. He doesn’t know what the someplace else is, but he knows he has to be there. It calls to him from the dark places of the world, the places his own son would call the underworld. He doesn’t really understand his son, all the glitter and glam, the gargantuan egos. He doesn’t understand ego. He just wants to do what his body tells him. And his body says drive.

It will be a year before the diagnosis, but he knows something is off.

Eventually, after morning turns to afternoon and afternoon becomes dusk, after two tanks of gas and so many, many wrong turns, he arrives at Altus, the town where his mother was buried. But this isn’t where his body says he’s supposed to go. He grew up a few miles away, closer to Carnegie. It’s there his father found a final resting place, near a ramshackle sharecropper shack where he and his family lived, where his father never forgave him for living at the expense of his mom.

When he arrives at the ruin, he doesn’t get out of the car. Instead he drives on past, out into the stubble of the cotton field. Somewhere near the creek, near stones he remembers sleeping on when he was little, somewhere as alien as it is familiar, he stops the car, gets out and, letting his body drive, finds a side path, a little road that leads to a glade between the tree-line berm and the lowering gulley that runs from here to Lawton. Just this side of the culvert, chalky teeth of gravestones rise from Oklahoma’s red-dirt gums.

After touching stone, saying sad words, forgetting everything he’s come here for, he remembers the IHOP, remembers he was supposed to be headed home after eating sausage and hash browns, and stumbles back to his car. Alas, the land is unforgiving. The dirt beneath his wheels is pure mud. For hours he tries to drive back out. For hours he is rebuffed.

While he presses his foot to the foot feed, while he regrets everything he’s done — now, before, later — he thinks about his father, about his father’s scorn. He thinks about his own son. Wondering how he’s going to explain all this if he ever gets to a phone, revving his engine ever higher and higher, he wishes three wishes.

May Dan understand I was never disappointed, only sad when he seemed to compromise.

May he know how proud…

The car finally jumps and clears the mud. He cheers, briefly confused about why. Now where was I? Oh.

May he be sad when I’m gone.

My father’s story appeared in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! number twenty-five. I held the small digest-sized comic in my hand as I walked toward the door of the store.

Beyond all imagining, buggering all odds, the sisters each rolled ones.

Drunk and doomed and somehow dear, I rolled four.

The rest was simple math. Whether the game was new or ancient, the die polymer or pumice or bone, I won the day by the margin of a single digit. It might not be much, but it meant the world to me.

Holding the book like I had my father’s hand, I approached the door of the comic book shop and looked back one last time. I saw the Vampire tapestry being sucked inward, swept aside like a theater curtain at a premier. It allowed a clear view of the glowing table and the galaxy it held beyond. In that moment, playing the role of Orpheus, of Lot’s wife, I saw the wave motion table, like a Tesla coil without boundaries, expand beyond the framework built to keep its stars inside. The black hole at the center of those lost suns began sucking in all the light I’d seen, every part and particle of a store that couldn’t exist, all the images I couldn’t unsee.

Sister, sister, mother, father, tiny tinsel tree…

Everything swept its way into the nothing at the center of that impossible game.

Where is fancy bred? In the heart or in the head?

I held onto my comic and ran. I ran for the front door, I ran for the alley outside, for the street, Angell street where I’d found the store in the first place. I ran for the car, back toward the post office, the place where I’d begun the evening. I ran for my father and the memory he would never keep, the one final piece of him I could hold onto. I ran and ran and felt like a woman running before the storm, toward her child, running to keep him alive. I ran like a man who couldn’t remember his father, not for real, who knew one thing, just one. I ran like a man who wanted to keep any, single, solitary memory, glad or sad, of his father alive. I ran like a son who would give anything—any universe, Saturn, Titan, all the stars aflame between— anything to have his father back.

I survived of course. This isn’t American Beauty or Our Town or that song by Gordon Lightfoot. I’m not a ghost. I finally mounted a successful if dull production of Hamlet, one my Dean could live with. It wasn’t what I wanted — no female lead, no go-go boots, no guns — but it helped fill the coffers of the capital campaign. And after that night things did change. I moved, for one. New town. New job. New directing gig. I keep that issue of Believe It or Not!in a shadow box on the wall of my new office. This school may not have the Rose, but the politics smell sweeter. They let me do more innovative stuff, spread my wings like I couldn’t before, like my dad couldn’t. I think he’d be happy for me. He’s still in the facility, still losing ground, still doomed to walk the earth. He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t remember anything anymore.

I shall not look upon his like again.

So, no, things aren’t perfect. They never are. This isn’t a comic book. No mythic figures in t-shirts or capes. And no, despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never been able to find Angell again, though I did find a hero.

“What know ye of Malygris?”

— Clark Ashton Smith

Sages of the ancient world transcribed many legends regarding the infamous Malygris of Poseidonis. In the golden age before the final remnant of Atlantis sank beneath the waves, the glory of Malygris spread far and wide. According to various written accounts mostly lost to history now, the wizard inhabited an onyx tower that cast its shadow over the bright domes and temple-gardens of the Atlantean capitol. Slaves from the royal courts delivered monthly tributes of gold, ivory, and precious rarities to the sanctum of Malygris, overlord of kings and sorcerers.

Malygris held mastery over the spirits of the upper air and the lower earth, commanded solar and lunar demons, and established his dominance over the living and the dead. No magician of the ancient world could rival him at the peak of his powers. Yet legends say that he grew miserable in his wickedness, set apart from humanity by his exalted conjury. Eventually the demon of Loneliness overpowered even his ravenous lust for knowledge. All human beings shunned him and feared to walk in the shadow of his tower. So Malygris stayed locked in his lofty sanctuary for decades, his only company that of summoned imps, wraiths, and the occasional conjured daemon.

After centuries of supernatural existence, old Malygris finally died sitting in his great chair of ebony and crystal. Yet his sorcery lived on after his death in the form of the unearthly spirits that guarded his tower-tomb against thieves and looters. There was no relief for the longsuffering Lords of Poseidonis when they heard tale of the wizard’s demise, for even in death the terror of Malygris persisted in their hearts. The Tower of Malygris rose above the city like a titan gravestone. No embalmer came to apply the treatments of death to the withered corpse of Malygris. It sat rotting in its high seat for many years. Eventually the ocean swallowed the last fragments of Atlantis. Tidal waves rushed in to drown the streets and gardens of Poseidonis, and the cursed tower crumbled with the rest of the capitol. Malygris, like his legendary kingdom, was finally gone from the earth.

Or so the stories tell.

Yet stories are written by the hands of men, and men are fallible, inconstant, and often oblivious to truth. It is the quest for truth that drives sages and wizards. I have pursued it beyond the written words of unreliable men. I found it in the spirits who roam the lost and remote places. I pursued it into realms beyond our own, where immortal devils laugh at humanity’s folly. Thus I learned the great secret that haunts me to this day. I have it from the lips of seven infernal spirits and a host of nameless ghosts. Here is the substance of that terrible truth:

Malygris never died.

The Terror of Old Atlantis, the sorcerer whose dried bones never gave up his throne, the greatest wizard of the ancient world, lives on. Like a parasite invading a host, the spirit of Malygris infects and corrupts the living world. The whole of the wide earth suffers for it. Yes, Malygris lives, and his eternal bitterness, his festering malevolence, taints space and time like a poison.

In order to explain I must return again to Malygris’ deep and abiding loneliness. His attempt to conjure the spirit of Nylissa, long-dead sweetheart of his youth, left him defeated and disheartened. Upon conversing with the shade of his dead lover, Malygris realized that he could no longer see the depth of her beauty or feel the passion that had inflamed his youth. It came to him from the lips of a demonic servant that he could never recapture such lost love by conjuring Nylissa’s spirit because the wizard himself had changed over the years and grown old. The passion of youth no longer inhabited his frame, for he was truly not the same man as when he had loved her. So her ghost failed to excite him or alleviate his loneliness.

The experiment in necromantic romance was a failure, so the wizard’s loneliness persisted until it grew into a raging lust. No living concubine could satisfy him, not even those sent by decree from the Lords of Poseidonis. He could not love a slave, nor would any slave love such a terrifying master. Old and wretched, consumed by carnal guilt, Malygris spurned the living and turned once more to harassing the dead. He searched the underworld for roaming spirits of wisdom and doom. His third eye searched the stars for cosmic entities to snare and bottle in a web of spells. In his laboratory among the delicate contraptions of glass and bone, he managed to capture a disembodied intelligence drifting through the currents of time.

Imprisoning this transtemporal intelligence in a globe of enchanted amber, Malygris interrogated it with spells uniquely devised to torment noncorporeal entities. He learned that his trap had snared the consciousness of an advanced being in the progress of traveling from earth’s primordial past to a host body somewhere in the remote future. The purpose of its migration through time Malygris could only surmise. Yet he refused to release the bodiless entity from the mystical bonds that had interrupted its journey.

His thoughts turned once again to Nylissa. If he could pry the secrets of mental time travel from the alien in the globe, he might send his aged mind back to inhabit his younger body. To be young again and still possess all the knowledge and powers of his older self — to lay with Nylissa in the flesh, to know the splendors of youth again. Only this would satisfy his lust. His all-powerful mature mind would completely replace his vulnerable young one by scattering it to the four winds with his advanced sorcery. In this way he could inhabit his youthful body again for as long as he willed it.

This plan offered more than mere physical gratification. Not only would he regain the carnal glory of his younger self, but he could then re-live most of his life. All the mistakes he might correct; all the betrayals he might avoid or avenge; he might reshape the entire world in his own image. But first he would know again the heat of Nylissa’s bed, as he had known it so many years ago.

Through psychic interrogation he pried open the thoughts of the captured alien. He came to understand it was one of an ancient race that populated the earth many epochs before the birth of mankind. They were known as the Great Race of Yith, and they ruled an empire in the primordial swamps of antiquity. The captured Yithian was pursuing a mental pilgrimage through time, something common to certain members of its society. These creatures often sent their raw consciousness across the gulfs of time to swap the bodies of beings living in future times. Meanwhile, the minds of these stolen bodies were sent back along the timeline to be trapped in the hideous bodies of time-traveling Yithians.

Malygris was greatly enthused to learn of this custom. It convinced him that a transtemporal mind transfer into his younger self was indeed possible. He would annihilate his younger mind, replacing it with his mature consciousness. Such a conquest did not amount to murder — it was more akin to suicide, except that he would not truly die. His older self would simply replace his younger self and regain his own strong and vital body.

He demanded with spells of torment that the Yithian prisoner reveal to him its method of time-displacement. The creature in the globe resisted, but eventually it relented under the pain of the ordeal. It invited Malygris into the core of its mind-self, and Malygris did not see the trap awaiting him in this invitation. Perhaps his ambition blinded him, or perhaps it was the raging lust that made him think only of Nylissa’s bed. Therefore, he linked his sentience with that of his prisoner and found himself entombed in a web of alien thoughts.

For days he sat in his throne-like chair, staring into the amber globe, waging a silent mental conflict with the thing inside it. In a final act of rebellion, the imprisoned Yith-mind attempted to destroy itself, yet Malygris used his iron will to prevent this escape. In doing so he accidentally melded his mind to that of the creature, imprisoning his own consciousness within the globe sitting in the lap of his mindless body.

A firestorm of memories and data and concepts seethed inside the globe, melting the mind of Malygris and the mind of the alien into a single intelligence. Malygris’ understanding of the Yithians was complete, and it was this understanding that threatened to obliterate his human mind. Only his mastery of sorcery prevented the death of his essential self, but that self was changed to a radical degree. Now he, too, was a disembodied intelligence, a blended consciousness, and a captive of his own spherical prison.

Perhaps it was at this point that Malygris lost whatever remained of his sanity.

There was one way to escape the amber globe. Using the powers of his newly acquired memories, calling upon Yithian wisdom as a drowning man clings to a shard of driftwood, Malygris sent his altered consciousness back in time. He saw in the depths of the timeless void a point of light that was the Yithian’s original point of departure, and he swam toward it. Or, rather, he let the roaring currents of time wash him toward it, a piece of time-tossed flotsam.

The crystal sitting in the lap of his kingly corpse cracked open and fell to dust.

Somewhere in the remote past, while earth’s crust was still cooling, he awakened in the body of a Yithian. It was the physical self of the time-traveler he had captured and mentally consumed. If Malygris was not already a madman at this point, surely inhabiting such a grotesque physical form would have driven him to madness. Examining himself with three new eyes set atop a long prehensile neck, Malygris discovered his three greater tendrils, his twin claws resembling those of giant crayfish, and his four flute-like mouths. Slug-like flanges rimmed the bottom of his tall, conical body. A beard of lesser tendrils hung writhing from his pumpkin-shaped head.

The telepathy of a Yithian he had also stolen, and he felt the multitudes of Yithian minds all around him. A tower full of bizarre alchemical equipment also held hundreds of his fellow creatures. Beyond the sacred tower’s walls of pale green stone, his hybrid mind sensed thousands of them, like candles burning in darkness. They shambled through a city of indescribable beauty and unthinkable horror, an entire nation of vegetable behemoths with their own magics, technologies, languages, and architectures. Beyond the city’s edge he sensed more cities like this one. The Yithians at this time inhabited every climate across the volcanic earth. Now Malygris cringed inside his vegetable flesh as his telepathic senses detected the dull vibration of ancient black towers that stood in the forbidden places between cities. An aura of ancient evil and a premonition of doom came to him then.

Overcome with alien sensations, Malygris wandered among his inhuman peers. Many were engaged in scribing narratives of their own time-journeys, while others constructed eldritch machinery or experimented with the molding of primeval flesh. None of the Yithians sensed Malygris’ human mind inside the body of their contemporary, or perhaps they did not care. Exchanging minds with subjects from other epochs was fairly common among the Yith of the sacred tower. They were explorers, scholars, and historians. As long as Malygris did not interfere with their course of studies, he wandered through their domain without restriction.

Eventually it came to him that Atlantis and the life he longed to recapture lay far in the future, perhaps a billion years. He had escaped the amber sphere by taking over the Yithian’s body in the past, but now he must escape the Age of Yith by re-taking his own body in the future. So he ignored the vast collection of wonders on display in the tower and found the chamber where time-displacement was the primary function of the glass-andmetal machines. The memories of the Yithian were his now, so he knew how to operate one of the time-shifting contraptions, even with clumsy claws and quivering tendrils.

What Malygris did not know was the extent of damage both to his own mind and that of the creature he had absorbed. His understanding of the time-displacement mechanism was incomplete, and it launched his intelligence into the future without a fixed goal or destination. Bodiless and helpless, his hybrid mind floated in the empty dimensions between time and space. An endless vista of astral realms called him farther and farther from earthly concerns. For ages he drifted in the timeless domain without form or matter of his own, a shadow out of time, tossed like a bottle on the waves of a dark ocean.

Surely Malygris was mad by now.

Or perhaps he had gone far beyond madness.

Like a ghost he drifted in a realm beyond reality. There is no way to measure the passing of time where time does not exist. Yet eventually the spark of Malygris’ intellect returned, and he dragged himself across infinity toward the earth that he remembered. He orbited the planet on high, existing without substance, unable to reach it. He crawled or drifted through the aether for another period without measure, until he discovered a tiny crack in time.

So Malygris slipped back into the living world. This time his body was human, or nearly so. The primitive mind that his consciousness had shattered and replaced drifted on the wind like fading smoke. The brutish body was his alone now. He shivered with cold, a sensation he had nearly forgotten, along with most others. His limbs were thick and hairy, and he lay upon a ledge of stone while thunder and lightning ruled the sky above. He examined his face with human hands that were dirty and calloused, crisscrossed with scars. He found a thick and matted beard, and a long mane thick with thorns and leaves. Above his eyes he fingered a thick ridge of bone. Now he opened his nostrils wide and smelled the wet forest and the rain. He breathed in the scents of the great ferns and the rich soil, the dung of reptiles and tigers among the trees, and the animal stench of his own body.

He was a lone Neanderthal, trying to survive the journey back to his village. This much Malygris knew right away, but beyond that he could not say. At least he was back in the world again. This was not Poseidonis, but he might use this strong and primal body to build an empire here. His powers could easily make him the god of a primitive people. He summoned a magical fire beneath an overhanging rock and warmed himself while the storm rolled across the world.

“My name is Malygris,” he reminded himself. “The Terror of Atlantis…” He told himself stories, sometimes blending together the memories of his human and Yithian lives. When the dawn rose, he would hunt for food, then find some primitives to conquer and dominate. There would be no Nylissa for him in this place, but surely there would be females. His new body responded to that thought with a rush of blood, and rising lust made him howl at the moon.

The tiger-stench filled his nostrils too late, as the beast leaped from a high rock and slashed his crude body to shreds. Malygris felt the horrible pain of this death, but his mind did not perish with his stolen body. Instead, he was flung outside the currents of time once again, pulled by a strange gravity, like a bubble rising from the depths to the surface of a dark ocean. Again he was marooned in the formless realms outside time.

Once more he crawled across the void by using the remnants of his sorcery and the wisdom of Yithian time-travel. His second re-entry to the living world found him in the body of a long-suffering slave girl of ancient Egypt. Such an existence held no appeal for him, and he could not break the physical bondage of her chains. Suicide was the only way to exit before his cruel masters intervened. The girl sliced her wrists using the shard of a broken clay pot, and as she bled to death Malygris fell out of the world once again.

A third time he leaped into the spinning earth-sphere, possessing the body of a soldier in some far-future war. The world seemed to explode with fire and thunder as he crouched in a muddy trench with his fellow warriors, clutching a rifle in his fists. Malygris determined to fight his way out of this war, something that should be easy with his knowledge of sorcery. When the time came to charge the enemy, he went “up and over” with the rest of the boys, only to take a bullet in the forehead after five steps.

Once more his bodiless consciousness slipped outside of time and space.

Again he dove into the timestream. And again, and again.

There was no way to control when and where his consciousness emerged each time. Perhaps the Yithian could have done this, but the remnants of its mind were still as damaged as that of Malygris. Malygris’ hunger for a living body and a return to glory in the physical world consumed all other visions now. Nylissa and the pleasures of her love were forgotten things.

Malygris dreamed only of conquest.

Each time he landed in a body unsuited to his purposes, he committed suicide and began again. Over the course of history, pre-history, and future history he appeared in ten thousand different bodies, and some of these bodies succeeded in building bloody empires. He became a Lord of Ancient Babylon, plotting to murder rivals and gaining a reputation as the greatest sorcerer of that age. Yet mortality caught up with him, and his Babylonian body died of some nameless disease without a cure.

Another empire he formed in a later millennium, after inhabiting the body of an up-and-coming dictator who set about conquering most of Europe. Massive organized slaughters unfolded at his whim, with entire races routed and scrubbed from the earth. All of the decadent pleasures and sadistic rituals of that dark empire stemmed from the twisted mind of Malygris, yet none who followed his orders, none who worshipped his cruelty as that of a living god, ever heard his true name. Sometimes even he forgot his true identity, lost in the depravities of conquest and its carnal spoils until his nightmares reminded him. In the end, he grew tired of this charade and the dictator committed suicide.

Haunted by dreams of golden Atlantis, Malygris longed to return to his origins. Yet he might as well seek to find a needle inside a haystack. Again he inserted himself into history, using his stolen bodies to study ancient texts and improve his mastery of sorcery. His goal now was to master the flow of time so he might return to his home in Atlantis. This dream became his chief obsession, though another thousand lifetimes failed to bring him there.

He was a tribesman, leading his people to slaughter their peaceful enemies. He was a murderer whose crimes fostered their own gory legend in the cities of Europe. Once he inhabited a beetle-like body common to the race that would inherit the earth long after mankind had exterminated itself. Inside the insect bodies of this distant future he sensed the familiar minds of the Yithians, who had transferred the consciousness of their entire populace into this future race to avoid their own prehistoric extinction. Recognizing Malygris as some kind of temporal contagion, they ejected him from the timestream by tearing his host body to bits.

In another era he became a devious clergyman, trapped in the stolid halls of a great religion that he corrupted with sadism and demonology. He inhabited pirates and scientists, inquisitors and slaves. He lived the lives of peasants and royalty, primitives and futurists, sailors, bankers, artists, and politicians. Once he inhabited the body of a writer whose tales of bleak cosmic truths were regarded as fiction, yet whose ideas permeated global consciousness. Time and again he founded death-cults and fostered murderous rebellions steeped in carnage. He turned hopeful futures into miserable dark ages, venting his spite on mankind both personally and globally.

There is only one constant that marks the appearances of Malygris throughout past and future histories: Corruption, violence, and destruction follow wherever he goes. Every life lived, every death endured, has only worsened his malevolence. He is a blind specter now, reaching into the world at random times and places. A curse upon humanity. His obsession has shriveled into a hatred for all that lives. Cruelty and death herald his unpredictable visitations. The course of history has been warped to wear the bloody scars that Malygris makes upon it.

In every culture, every time and age, there are legends about a spirit of evil that inflicts suffering on mankind. The names of this entity vary from nation to nation, from religion to religion, from era to era. Yet the darkness never fails to return. Another empire rises, built on the trampled bones of the innocent. Great men are devoured by corruption, world leaders become murderous despots, smiling youths become serial killers. Mothers strangle babes in their cribs, fathers slaughter their loved ones like cattle. Quiet strangers go on killing sprees.

The true name of all these evils is Malygris. He can be anyone at any time. He may be hiding behind the gentle face of someone you know. You might have already pledged your loyalty to him. Or killed in his name.

I tell you this because knowledge is knowledge.

Let someone else carry the burden of it.

Malygris lives.

Documents pertaining to the investigation of the Tuttle-Bigelow incident of September 9, 2022.

From the personal journal of Jeremy Tuttle, age 44, entry dated September 6, 2022:

“The Uncanny City”—that’s what I call Pittsburgh, this urban sprawl in the hills, built atop ruins. Its names are mythic: Runs and Furnaces and Hot Metal and Elfinwilds. It’s at once vibrant and half-swallowed by the earth, which always wins in the end. Go around a city block, and you’re lost in the woods; then you come out in the middle of the middle, where you might get run over by a garbage truck, or you might fall off a cliff. Deep, dark ravines…trees dense on the vertical…more bridges than in Venice; at least, that was true for a while — it may not be now. See the part about the earth swallowing and winning.

There are gaping basement pits, doorways in the hillsides, haphazard brickwork, vine-clad chimneys in the forest, and stairs. Stairs and stairs. A street may become a stairway without warning. Just because a map or a sign tells you it’s a street, don’t believe it. Steps climb and descend the banks, connecting level to level. Some of them no longer go anywhere but into the woods.

That place in particular, on the back slopes of Mt. Washington, has an eerie beauty but hardly seems a site likely for such attention, such an event. Yet therein, perhaps, may be witnessed the elegance of the mathematics governing the cosmos — the choreography behind the vast dance of the stars and worlds. Who can know whether Kafti speaks the truth or is only delusional? Can the two discrete sources of information and their terrible harmony be coincidence? I mean to find out, and so I will return there three nights from now, and I will be standing on those crumbling city stairs at the hour of 8:43 p.m. That’s the time Jen was given. I hope she won’t go there. I told her not to. If she does, well, I’ll be there first.

“Terrible harmony,” I wrote. I like that. Hmm.

This evening after dark I parked beside the fenced lot of the empty Vancilly Metals building, its windows grilled and boarded. The lot was cracked, weed-grown, and so faded with age that it seemed to be covered in frost. Asphalt goes gray just like people do. Gladys Street runs right along the woods there at the base of the steep rise. There are ferny brickworks in the hillside, the overgrown remains of old houses and garages. Peeking out among the roots, through the low branches, they look like the edge of a subterranean town, something like a dungeon in D&D or Tolkien’s Moria. “Speak Friend and enter.”

I found the entrance to Benton Avenue, still marked by a street sign. It’s called an avenue, but it’s a stairway with a 41-degree grade, punctuated by landings every so often. It climbs right up into the forest. Thick scrub trees wall it in like a tunnel and roof it over in many places. As I trudged up the steps, I could hear the traffic on Sebring Furnace Extension rattling over the potholes. It was humid on the Benton stairs and really dark — sort of breathless, like the trees were already watching and waiting. Weirdly, I had the feeling that I shouldn’t go up too far, that I was trespassing somehow. But I kept onward.

The whole “avenue” is barely a tenth of a mile. Halfway up, there’s an arm of the stairs that angles to the right and just stops — it literally goes nowhere. The last step gives way to spongy soil and nettles, and I could see the glow of a streetlight above me, through a stand of oaks all skirted around with bushes — impassable. The main flight climbs on up to Halfirth, though there’s no street sign at the intersection there; it’s pitchblack, facing a row of tumbledown apartments not far from the mountain’s spine.

An owl hooted in the branches somewhere close by, a sound so mournful and abrupt that I yelled out. Heart racing, I headed back down into the well of darkness.

Mission accomplished for tonight: I know the place now.

Notes from the E.R. of Grace-St. Vincent’s Hospital, Pittsburgh, September 9, 2022:

White female identified as Jen Bigelow, age 33, arrived by ambulance at 10:39 p.m. Close-range GSW to the right chest, exit wound right dorsal. Collapsed lung. B.P. 104/69, rate erratic. Immediate surgery D. Kress.

Addendum by Detective David Colby: Patient survived three-hour surgery. Initially found unresponsive near the corner of Gale and Sebring Furnace Extension, Beechview. 911 call by DeMarius Bryan of Beechview.

Partial transcript of SESSION 3, subject Jen Bigelow, placed under hypnosis by Jeremy Tuttle, August 28, 2022:

JT: You are completely comfortable. Everything around you is peaceful and quiet. There is nothing to worry about. You are in your bed, warm — just warm enough. Safe. It’s earlier this month, not long ago. You are beginning to dream. Images in your mind. No worries…just pictures in your head. Can you see them?

JB: [Murmurs indistinctly.]

JT: What was that? Do you see something? JB: [Lengthy pause.] Yes.

JT: What do you see?

JB: There’s a…there’s a bird.

JT: What kind of bird? Is it flying?

JB: On a branch. Trees…lots of trees. It’s dark.

JT: Is it a forest?

JB: Yes.

JT: Tell me about the bird. What is it doing?

JB: There’s…light. Light — like morning. But it’s night. Behind the bird. Voices. A voice.

JT: Is someone behind the bird? Someone speaking?

JB: It’s speaking. It’s…[JB becoming agitated].

JT: The bird is speaking?

JB: [Breathing heavily] It’s saying name…names.

Ben…Benton. Nine…nine nine.

JT: Nein nein? Is it speaking German? German or English?

JB: Number nine. Month…day. Nine-nine. Wants me to come there. It says stairs. I have to go there. [Increasingly agitated.] When it says, I have to. I have to go.

JT: The bird is asking you to go somewhere?

JB: [Sobbing violently, thrashing. Screams the next words.] It’s not a bird.

From the personal journal of Jeremy Tuttle, entry dated August 12, 2022:

Fascinating conversation with Kafti at Mike’s tonight. Others were there; the two of us withdrew to the room off the kitchen so he could talk while I took notes. Several blunts: grain of salt, of course, BUT. Wild stuff. Kafti in fine form — had only met him twice before tonight. Mike met him in Frick Park, like homeless or something, but he’s not.

Kafti calls himself a prophet. He has dreams. Swears that his dreams have accurately foretold the future on many occasions. Would love to hypnotize him. Maybe when I know him better, or if he asks. I sense it could get frightening and/or out of hand. Not sure. He seems to be an old soul — maybe an ancient soul.

Anyway, I was asking about a manuscript he’d given me. I returned it to him with some notes. Not sure if he intended it as a story or as his prophetic vision. Hard to tell with Kafti.

Story says that in the year 3011, the Glorious Next arise— successors of humankind, gigantic, luminous beings. They come from deep beneath the sea, where they have been sleeping. Subjugate humankind. Not subjugate, exactly. Kafti says it’s a relationship we slide into naturally with them, since they are greater and we are like lower order beasts to them. Human race performs menial tasks, manual labor for the Glorious Next, inheritors of the planet.

Sounds a lot like Lovecraft so far, but I pressed Kafti along those lines, and he never mentioned Cthulhu et al., and those names didn’t seem to mean anything to him. Zilch.

Kafti went into a sort of trance-like state, and I thought he might be done for the night, but then he sat straight up and said more. He was talking now — this wasn’t in the manuscript. In 4064, a meteorite brings a virus to Earth that wipes out the human race. The Glorious Next are desperate, because they’ve become dependent on us in so many ways that their survival is now threatened.

The key to solving their problem lies in a possibility for time travel they’ve discovered. It’s very limited, a natural phenomenon over which they have no control, though they can make use of it. Because of alignments of stars and responsive energies within the Earth, “windows” open briefly and in different places, through which matter can pass from the present to a specific different time and back again, so long as the “window” stays open. It only opens for nineteen minutes, Kafti says, and only one such “window” will do the Glorious Next any good.

As Kafti tells it, they have wiped the virus away; the Earth is safe for humankind again, but the Next need unspoiled, uninfected human tissue in order to regenerate our species. They can get it from the past — all they need is one of us, one specimen. All they need to do is snatch one of us through the nineteenminute “window” and drag that one back — forward, that is, through time — to the year 4064, after the virus is gone, but before the demise of their own species.

Here’s the part that’s awfully far-fetched: the only “window” from 4064 back into a time when the human race is alive and well opens into Pittsburgh. Kafti doesn’t know exactly where in the city or when, but he is convinced it will happen really soon. He’s dreaming about it every night.

Kafti doesn’t know why he has these visions, why he’s singled out to know the minds of the Glorious Next. But he’s sensitive — super-sensitive to such things, like a big radar dish turned up to eleven, like those ones SETI had in the desert, listening for whispers from space. He says that the Next can’t afford to waste their opportunity. Just nineteen minutes, and the “window” might not open in a place where there are people around, usually. So he thinks they might be calling somehow— calling across time. How they could do that is anybody’s guess, but just because we can’t imagine how doesn’t mean they can’t do it, right? They’re greater than us in the way that we’re greater than fleas. Maybe a lot greater than that. He thinks they might be calling a person from our time, from around here, to come to just the right place and moment when the “window” will open, and WHAMMO! Venus’s flytrap, open and shut.

Kafti got a bit paranoid then. He was worried that the Glorious Next might be on to him — the Abyss looking back and all that. They’ll want to cover their tracks. They’ll call one human to come to them, but they won’t want any others to know. They’ll sweep up after themselves. Not that there’s a thing we could do to stop them, even if we all knew what they were up to. I thought about Kafti’s paranoia, his fear of being swept away for knowing. I said, “Thanks for telling me all this” and called him an asshole. We had a laugh.

Weird shit. Very, very weird.

I snagged some of Mike’s moonshine for Kafti and me. We had a discussion about whether this vision of his, if it’s true, is a good thing or a bad one. Should we hope these monsters fail to abduct one of us? It’s nonconsensual, of course, a life lost here, and the continued enslavement of our species in the far-distant future.

But it’s survival, too, isn’t it? It’s our human race going on, overcoming our extinction with help from our masters. Without them, the virus would have killed us, end of story, bam. Or will kill us…pick a verb tense that helps to sort it out. And here’s the thing: if we survive then, even as bugs, even as slaves, we might one day get the upper hand again. We’ve had it before. In fact, wouldn’t you be honored if you were the chosen and called? You’d be like a new Adam. The Next would treat you well, wouldn’t they, because you were so important to their purpose? You might not really have to be a slave. What if you had a glimpse, away from all this, of the 41st century?

That’s why I’m into hypnosis and metaphysical stuff. I think there are things — realities — beyond what we can see, and we live like sheep. I think we need to take our blinders off, get our heads out of the sand. I like finding answers.

Before the night collapsed upon itself, Kafti and I ended up drinking to the Glorious Next, wishing them all the best.

Addendum by Detective David Colby: Michael Anthony Nagy and others present at the house mentioned here on the night of August 12 have been questioned extensively. The identity of “Kafti” and his whereabouts are undetermined. It is bewildering how little is known about him. No one seems to have met him more than a few times, and he is gone now. I would speculate that he was no more than a fictional creation of Jeremy Tuttle, save for the fact that Nagy and others attest that “Kafti” is an actual person. About 5’7”-5’9”, thin build, dark or olive complexion, dark brown wavy hair, pronounced accent. “From India, Nepal, Tibet, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mongolia, the Middle East, or Texas”—that’s the consensus. Very helpful.

Transcript: assessment interview with patient Jen Bigelow by Dr. Neela Kaneda, Psy.D., September 20, 2022:

NK: You understand that our conversation is being witnessed by Detective Colby and recorded for review. Please say “yes” if that’s okay.

JB: Yes.

NK: If at any time you would like to stop, please let me know, okay?

JB: Okay.

NK: We want to help you get better. After what you experienced, your memories may not come back all at once. We’re trying to help you with that, all right?

JB: Okay.

NK: Now…I know you’ve been asked this a lot, but you’ve told the police that you never saw the man who assailed you— Jeremy Tuttle — before that night of September 9. Is that still correct?

JB: That’s correct.

NK: You were not his hypnosis patient?

JB: No.

NK: You weren’t having nightmares that you hoped he could help with — help get rid of?

JB: Huh-uh. No.

NK: You had never known him in any capacity? JB: No. Never.

NK: Okay. That’s fine. There’s water right here if you need it. This is not pleasant, I know, but could you tell me one more time about that night?

JB: Why? Oh — how many times do I…?

NK: I’m sorry. Sometimes there are memories that are like splinters that have to work themselves out. If you would, please. Take your time. Why were you on the stairs of Benton Avenue?

JB: Like I said, I don’t know. That night was a blur. I was on medication.

NK: The Anaprocil, for your depression?

JB: Yes. I was downtown with friends who went home, and somehow — I guess — I don’t know.

NK: You don’t know how you got to Beechview?

JB: No.

NK: Do you know what time it was? JB: No.

NK: Were you driving?

JB: No.

NK: Was anyone with you after downtown?

JB: No.

NK: Someone dropped you off?

JB: [Pause.] Maybe. I…I remember walking a long way.

NK: Were you going up or down the stairs?

JB: Up. I think. I saw him…I saw him above me. Coming down.

NK: Jeremy Tuttle?

JB: Yes.

NK: And—

JB: [Suddenly distressed.] And he shot me! He pulled out a gun and he shot me. I…I ran down the stairs.

NK: Okay, okay. Just — okay, just lie back. Did you see him after that? Did he follow you?

JB: I looked back to see if he was coming down. He was ststanding there. [Emotional.] He…was looking at me.

NK: Did he say anything?

JB: He said, “I’ll do this. You don’t have to. Go.”

NK: You heard that clearly?

JB: Yes.

NK: Why would he say that?

JB: I don’t know.

NK: Do you know what he meant?

JB: That I should go.

NK: What was he doing then?

JB: He turned and he…went up. There was light. In the trees.

NK: Like a flashlight?

JB: No. More. Different. He went up into it. To them.

NK: Them?

JB: [Cries out suddenly, clutches temples.]

NK: It’s okay. You’re okay. Do you want to—

[Indistinct voice of Detective Colby.]

NK: Okay. Who was there? Who were “they”?

JB: [Long pause, sobbing, labored breath.]

NK: Jen, who was with him? Who were “they”?

JB: Not…no, no, no, no one. There…there was a bird.

NK: A—

JB: I want to stop, I want to stop now I want to stop now I want to stop now stop now.

Forensic assessment by Janine Paxton, PSM, 3935D12, September 10, 2022:

The close-range gunshot wound to Jen Bigelow was possibly self-inflicted based on muzzle proximity, trajectory, and wound position. All consistent with recovered Ruger LCP. Exit wound, slug not recovered.

Addendum by Detective David Colby: Only Bigelow’s prints on the weapon, no others. Ruger LCP retrieved at the scene, 11:51 p.m., September 9, 2022. Blood belonging to Bigelow at the presumed shooting site, intermittent blood trail continuing down the Benton Avenue stairs and along Gladys Street northwestward, southwest on Ronacky, south on Gale to the intersection with Sebring Furnace Extension. Ruger LCP registered to Jen Bigelow. No evidence of any other persons, items, or activity on Benton Avenue up to Halfirth or in the surrounding area, which is heavily wooded.

2012 Chevrolet Cruze registered to Jeremy Tuttle found parked along Gladys Street, approx. 140 feet southeast of Benton Avenue entrance. Nothing unusual in or around vehicle.

Tuttle’s whereabouts remain unknown.

Text of “Sweeping,” song by The Dire Janes, April 2023:

Why’d you do it, Molly Mae?

Why’d you go so hurtfully?

Did the music tell you to?

Did the night bird call to you?

Yeah, we won and lost for keeps.

So the rolling ocean sweeps

The footprints from the sand away.

And you couldn’t, couldn’t stay,

Molly Mae, Molly Mae.

That’s the way it had to be.

“Can a human brain continue to function outside the body?”

In her seat in the lecture hall, Emily Bannerman looked up from her laptop, her curiosity piqued by the strangeness of the question one of her classmates had asked.

Professor Vaughan, a bearded, slightly balding man in his late forties with a taste for the argyle sweaters that seemed to be the unofficial faculty uniform at Vermont’s Middlewood University, had just wrapped up his lecture. “As an organ, the brain is only three pounds of tissue, but it’s responsible for everything that makes you you.” As he spoke he aimed his laser pointer like a magician wielding his wand at the SMART board behind him, where a detailed cross-section of a human brain was projected on the screen. “It houses all your memories, everything you’ve learned, your hopes and dreams, everything you love and hate. In essence, you are your brain, and your brain is you.”

Next to Emily, her boyfriend Sean thumbed a text message covertly into his phone and hit send. It appeared silently in a window on the screen of her laptop. Can I come over again tonight? She glared at him, annoyed at the intrusion, but he grinned and his gray eyes flashed. Those sharp, inquisitive eyes were the first thing she’d noticed about him, and they were still hard to say no to. She nodded, then forced herself to focus on the notes she’d been taking. She couldn’t let herself get distracted. It was important she pass Professor Vaughan’s pre-med neuroscience class. She’d kept her nose to the grindstone all year making sure her grades remained good enough to get into a decent medical school after graduation and she wasn’t about to let it slip now.

Professor Vaughan glanced at his watch. “We’ve got a few minutes left. Are there any questions?”

The students in the lecture hall looked at each other as though daring anyone to delay their escape. No one ever asked questions.

And then she heard it.

“Can a human brain continue to function outside of the body?”

But when Emily looked up from her laptop, Professor Vaughan was still looking expectantly at his students, and the students were still looking around in the hopes of being dismissed early. It was as though no one had spoken.

“No questions? All right, then,” Professor Vaughan said, switching off the SMART board. “For next time, read chapter six in Brain, Mind, and Behavior. You’re dismissed.”

Emily frowned. She could have sworn she’d heard a voice. A woman’s voice.

I can’t see anything. Everything is dark.

I try to blink, but I have no eyes.

I try to listen, but I have no ears.

It’s as if I don’t exist. But I do. I’m here. I’m real.

Where am I? Is anyone else here? These are the questions I want to shout, but I have no mouth.

As a senior faculty member at Middlewood, Professor Vaughan had his own office far from the faculty building the other teachers had to share. It was inside a small stone cottage that sat at the far end of the student parking lot, a private office he’d decorated with shelves of books, framed degrees, and an antique, single-lensed brass microscope from the 19th century that Emily thought was beautiful in its simplicity. She felt bad about taking up the entirety of the professor’s office hours after the lecture, but no other students came by and Vaughan didn’t seem to mind. She’d been taking notes on her laptop all through their discussion but had stopped halfway through when she noticed the door in the wall. Now she couldn’t stop looking at it. Every time she looked up from her computer at Professor Vaughan, she found herself sneaking peeks at the door, squinting at it, trying to figure it out.

It was a perfectly ordinary-looking door. There was nothing special about it, except for the fact that she could have sworn it had never been there before. What’s more, she couldn’t figure out where it could possibly lead. There was nothing on the other side of the wall except the little cottage’s stone exterior. If she were to open that door, it would lead directly outside, but even that didn’t make sense. There was only one door into this building. There had only ever been one door.

“Miss Bannerman, are you paying attention?”

“Yes, of course,” Emily said, turning back to him. What was wrong with her? She needed to focus. Except she was sure she’d never seen that door before.

“Good.” Professor Vaughan leaned forward, elbows on his desk, fingers laced together. “Anyway, this project I’m talking about could be a very important opportunity for you. You would receive extra credit for it, obviously, but it’s also the kind of addition to your C.V. that medical schools find very appealing in candidates. When I was presented with the opportunity to bring in students from my class, I thought of you immediately. You’re one of my brightest pupils, Miss Bannerman. I’ve seen how hard you work to keep up your GPA. I think you’ve got a good mind — the right kind of mind for this project. If you’re interested, of course.”

She was. She’d always had a strong intellectual curiosity, driven since a young age to understand the world around her, how things worked, how things connected. It was why she was pursuing a medical degree. There was so much to learn about the human body, and especially the human mind, which often seemed to her as boundless and infinite as the cosmos itself. And Professor Vaughan was right, this did sound like something that could give her an edge when she started sending out applications.

“What exactly is the project?” she asked.

“I can’t divulge much at this time,” he said. “There’s a nondisclosure agreement you’ll have to sign, and then I can fill you in. I just need to know if you’re interested, and then we can make an appointment to get started.”

“I am, absolutely.” Her mind sorted through all the exciting possibilities. There was no shortage of topics to study in the field of neurology, or diseases to better understand, from cerebral palsy to autism, Rett syndrome, neurodegeneration…

“Excellent,” Vaughan said, leaning back in his chair. “However, I must ask you not to mention this to anyone. Best to consider the NDA already in effect, all right?”

“No problem,” she said. “I can sign it right now if you want.”

“Not yet. I’ll contact you when we’re ready to begin.”

He pushed his chair back and stood up, indicating that their conversation was over. Emily gathered her belongings, rose, and slung her backpack over her shoulder. On the professor’s desk was a framed photo showing a pretty, brown-haired woman smiling for the camera while two small boys clung shyly at her legs. Vaughan’s family, she supposed, although it was hard to imagine her stodgy, sweater-wrapped professor chasing after two little boys—

“Good day, Miss Bannerman,” he said, interrupting her thoughts. He was holding the office door open, letting in the cool air from outside.

As she turned to go, her eye caught the door in the wall again.

“Professor,” she ventured, “where does that door go?”

He looked at her for what seemed like a beat too long and smiled thinly. “Nowhere. It’s just a small closet for the heating pipes. Why?”

“No reason,” she said, but she thought his answer was odd. She could imagine an access panel in the wall to reach the pipes, but a door?

“You’re a liar!”

Emily straightened. The voice had sounded close, as though it were in the office with them, but nobody else was there.

“Is something the matter, Miss Bannerman?”

“No, everything’s fine.” She gave a quick smile and hurried out. She’d heard a voice, she was sure of it. The same woman’s voice she’d heard in the classroom. The same voice apparently no one else could hear.

I’m cracking up, she thought. She wouldn’t be the first premed student to buckle under the pressure. But something about the voice seemed so real.

That night, in her dorm room, with her roommate gone for the night, Sean kissed her passionately and backed her onto her bed. “I’ve been thinking about this all day,” he said.

“Hold on,” she told him as he kissed her neck. “I have to tell you something. Professor Vaughan asked me to work with him on a new project. He wouldn’t tell me what it is, though.”

He looked up at her. “Yeah, he asked me, too. Something about the brain, I think. I’m supposed to drop by his office tomorrow to sign something.”

“Tomorrow?” she asked. That was fast. Why hadn’t Professor Vaughan asked her to come back tomorrow, too? She felt a little irritated that he’d already made plans for Sean to sign the papers but not her. But then Sean started kissing her again, and any disappointment she felt was quickly forgotten.

What’s left of my body if I have no eyes, no ears, no mouth? Do I have any physical form at all?

Now that the shock of finding myself here has passed, I’m starting to remember bits and pieces. The body on the table, the hypodermic needle, that grotesque, inhuman thing hiding in the shadows…

Oh God, this can’t be real, can it?

Emily expected Sean to come see her right after his meeting with Professor Vaughan. She was eager to hear all about the mysterious project they would be working on. Even if he’d signed the NDA, she knew she’d get the information out of him eventually. Sean was never very good at keeping things from her. She waited all day, checking her phone for text messages and emails. She ate lunch and dinner alone in the dining hall, waiting for him to show. By nine o’clock that night, she sent what had to be her fifteenth text.

where r u? seriously, r u ok?

She stayed awake as long as she could, clutching the phone like a lifeline, but no reply came. She drifted off toward dawn, woke again just a couple of hours later, and immediately checked her phone. Still nothing.

What if he was sick? She imagined Sean in his bed, wrapped in covers, sweating with fever, his phone somewhere out of reach. But a visit to his dorm room revealed a bed that hadn’t been slept in, and Sean’s roommate hadn’t seen him. He hadn’t come to her room, and he hadn’t returned to his own. So where was he?

In the lecture hall, Emily sat beside Sean’s empty seat. Professor Vaughan stood at the front of the hall, reading the students’ names off his attendance sheet. Emily glanced around nervously. Was Sean sitting somewhere else? Why would he do that?

Her mind was a thousand miles away when Professor Vaughan called her name. He had to say it twice before she replied. “Here.” He checked her name off, then moved on. Emily focused, listening for the name Sean Walsh, both anticipating it and dreading it as Vaughan moved through the alphabet.

“Prisha Vidyarthi.”

“Here.”

“Jacqueline Wright.”

“Here.”

Emily stiffened. He’d skipped right past Sean’s name. That wasn’t something he would do by mistake. Sean had disappeared yesterday, the same day he was supposed to meet with Vaughan, and today the professor had purposely omitted Sean’s name while taking attendance. He had to know where Sean was, or what had happened to him.

After class, Emily got stuck in the swell of students exiting the lecture hall. By the time she made it outside, Professor Vaughan was gone. She checked her watch. His office hours didn’t start for another hour, but this was too important to wait. She hurried through the student parking lot to Professor Vaughan’s office and was about to knock on the door when his raised voice came from inside, making her pause.

“But you don’t need another,” he said. “You have me, don’t you? You promised!”

A harsh, buzzing whisper came in reply, startling her. She took a step backward.

Professor Vaughan’s voice came again. “I’ve done everything you asked. Why do I have to wait?”

More buzzing came in reply, but it sounded different this time. Lower in tone and volume, like a conspiratorial whisper, or a warning. A moment passed, and then the office door opened slightly. Vaughan filled the gap in the doorway, a thin smile creasing his face. He didn’t look surprised to see her.

“Hello, Miss Bannerman.”

“Oh,” she said. Her hand was still lifted in anticipation of knocking, and she lowered it slowly. “How did you know I was—?”

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“It’s about Sean,” she said. “I can’t find him anywhere, and he won’t answer my texts. I know he had an appointment with you yesterday. Did he show up?”

“He did.” Professor Vaughan sounded colder than usual, annoyed by her interruption. But what had she interrupted? What was that strange buzzing she’d heard? “Unfortunately, Mr. Walsh had very disappointing news. He told me he was dropping out and returning home immediately. A family emergency.”

She blinked in confusion. That wasn’t possible. He would have told her. Besides, she’d been to his dorm room and all his belongings were still there. She looked up at Professor Vaughan, who blocked the entrance to his office like a bouncer who didn’t want her in the club, and realized he was lying. It wasn’t even a very good lie. It was easily disproved, the kind of lie that someone who didn’t have much practice at lying would tell.

Another realization struck her then, worse than the last one. Professor Vaughan was lying because he knew something. Because he’d done something. Panic made her chest go tight, but she couldn’t let on that she knew he was lying.

Despite her efforts, he must have seen it in her face because he opened the door wider and said, “Why don’t you come inside?”

“Um, no thanks, I really should get going…” She hated how shaky her voice was, how scared she sounded. She wished her feet would move.

“I insist.” Professor Vaughan took her by the arm and pulled her inside. He closed the door behind her, and she watched with a lump in her throat as he locked it.

“I was just wondering about Sean, that’s all,” she said, her voice rising with fear. “It’s — it’s not important, really.”

She felt tears well up in her eyes. He was going to kill her, she was sure of it. He’d killed Sean, and now it was her turn.

“I suppose we can move up the time frame,” Professor Vaughan said. “They certainly won’t mind a change in schedule.”

“What?” She’d half-expected him to strangle her, but he walked to his desk instead. “What schedule?”

He opened the desk drawer and pulled out a gun. Emily gasped and froze where she stood. Oh God, I was right, he’s going to kill me! Tears welled up again and spilled down her cheeks. She knew she should scream for help, it was the first thing they taught in every self-defense class, but the only sound she could squeeze out was a choked sob. Even if she could scream, who would hear her? They were all the way at the end of the parking lot. He could shoot her right here and no one would know.

“I’m sorry, Miss Bannerman,” he said, coming around the desk toward her. “This wasn’t the way it was supposed to happen.”

She took a step back, her breath hitching in her throat, her hands raised defensively.

“When they first came to me, I was as scared as you are now,” he said. “They looked so…inhuman. But I learned very quickly that they’re intelligent, sophisticated. Their knowledge and technology are light years ahead of ours.” He chuckled. “I suppose that’s apt, considering how far they traveled to come here. But they’re scientists, just like me. It turned out I had no reason to fear them.”

Fear who? It sounded like he’d gone crazy. Was that why he’d killed Sean? Was that why he was going to kill her, too? He turned away from her to look at the picture of his family on the desk. She didn’t give herself time to think twice. She spun and reached for the lock on the door.

“Don’t,” Professor Vaughan said.

She flinched, put her hands up, and turned back to him.

“Did I ever tell you what happened to my wife? To my children?” he asked. Emily glanced at the framed photograph, the smiling woman, the two young boys. “It was five years ago. We were driving home after eating dinner in town. I swerved to miss a deer that had wandered into the road, but I lost control of the car.” He closed his eyes against some awful memory he was reliving. She thought about knocking the gun out of his hand or trying to grab it, but she didn’t have the courage, and then his eyes were open again. “I was the only survivor.

I walked away with nothing but a few cuts and bruises. The doctors said I was lucky, but I didn’t feel it. I went to church every day after the accident, looking for comfort, for answers, but there weren’t any. Everyone said it was a miracle that I survived, that it was an act of God, but what kind of god would kill my wife and two innocent children? I decided if something this terrible, this wrong, could happen, maybe there was a way to undo it. I read ancient texts that very few people have ever read, tomes filled with powerful, forgotten science and rituals, looking for a way to fix it, but nothing worked. I prayed to gods whose names you’ve never heard, but my pleas fell on deaf ears.”

He looked at the gun in his hand as though he were contemplating turning it on himself. She got the sense it wasn’t the first time.

“And then they came, dropping out of the sky like an answer to my prayers. They told me there was a way to change what happened. A way to go back and save them. They told me about a temple at the very center of the universe. Arneth-Zin, the place where all the timelines converge. Within that temple is a sentry, a watcher, someone who’s seen all of time unfold, everything that ever happened or will happen. Someone who’s studied the pattern of time, who knows where the seams are, and who can open those seams and drop me back in so I can change the course of events. So my family can live. They promised to take me to Arneth-Zin, and in return all I had to do was help them collect specimens to bring back to their world. Human specimens.”

Okay, so he really was insane. She could only wonder what he’d done with Sean. Or with his corpse. The thought made her cry again, but Professor Vaughan mistook it for fear and tried to calm her.

“Don’t be frightened, Miss Bannerman, they require living specimens, not dead ones. This gun is only my insurance policy. I have no intention of using it so long as you don’t try to run away. You have nothing to fear from them. They only want to learn. Their scientists and scholars are interested in trading cultural information, but transporting specimens to their world is a problem. Their bodies are perfectly constructed to withstand the cold, airless expanse of space, but our bodies would never survive the trip. Luckily, it’s not our bodies that interest them, it’s our minds. Our knowledge, our philosophies, our cultural memories. All they need are our brains.”

He went back behind the desk and took a syringe out of the drawer. It was already filled with a strange, glowing orange liquid. He pulled the protective cover off the needle with his teeth and spat it out. He came toward her with the syringe in one hand, the gun in the other.

She took a step back, her arms raised in front of her as if she could fend him off. “Don’t hurt me. Please.”

“I assure you there will be no pain,” he said. “They’re truly gifted surgeons, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Their understanding of neuroscience is centuries ahead of ours. They can remove your brain safely and easily. They can keep your brain alive to transport back to their world, where I’m told if you cooperate with them you will be given a new, artificial body.”

She looked desperately for an escape route and saw the door in the wall, the one she’d been so fixated on before. There was no way she could unlock the main door in time, but if the door in the wall wasn’t locked it was her only chance. Maybe it really was just a pipe closet and she would only be cornering herself, but she had to try something. At the very least, she could put something solid between herself and this raving madman. She sprang for the door and grabbed the handle.

“No, don’t!” Professor Vaughan yelled.

She pushed the door open and ran through, but only made it a few steps before the shock of what she saw rooted her in place.

It was a large, brightly lit room, but how could it be here? There was no space in the wall for it, no addition to the outside of the building. She saw an array of strange, humming machines linked by elaborate webs of cords and plugs. On the far wall, shelves were filled with gleaming metal cylinders in neat rows, each about a foot high, their faces marked with three strange, triangular sockets. A vacant space on one shelf marked where a cylinder was missing from the collection.

Sean’s naked body lay on a surgical table in the middle of the room. She nearly collapsed at the sight. The top of his head had been removed, his cranium neatly and bloodlessly opened by an instrument far more advanced than a simple bone saw. She let out a scream when she saw his skull was empty, like a hollowed-out fruit.

Behind her, the professor spoke. “I told you I would deliver the smartest minds in my class, and I’ve kept my end of the bargain. Now take me to Arneth-Zin!”

He wasn’t talking to her. There was someone else in the room. She turned slowly. A dark shape stood partially hidden in the shadows behind the open door. It was the size of a man, but nothing else about it resembled one. She saw a segmented, crustacean shell that sported numerous insectoid appendages, all of which ended in sharp, pointed pincers. On its back was a pair of thin, bat-like wings. Its head was a hideous fleshy mass covered in writhing antennae, which split open and let loose a piercing, angry shriek.

I remember reading about a professor at McGill University in the 1950s who experimented with sensory deprivation. He discovered that prolonged isolation led to anxiety, hallucinations, and madness. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, floating in the dark, but I’m starting to wonder how much time I have left before I lose my mind. Not much longer, I think. It’s already taking everything I’ve got just to stay focused, to keep reminding myself who I am.

But then…something happens.

I feel a collision of sorts. I’m jolted, my sense of balance knocked off-center. On instinct I put out my hands to brace my fall, but I have no hands and there is nothing to fall against.

The impact does more than send me reeling. It shatters my mind into a blazing white supernova, fracturing my consciousness into innumerable pieces and scattering them to the winds of time. I’m back in Professor Vaughan’s lecture hall. I’m back in his office. I’m back in Sean’s arms. I’m a little girl. I’m being born. I’m back in every moment of my past, every second of my history, all at once.

It’s overwhelming, all of it piling up to crush me under its weight. I’ll go mad if I don’t find some way to control it. The supernova is still there in my mind, like an anchor, and as I concentrate on the fiery white void, I discover I can focus on a single moment instead of all of them at once. I reach through the white, and like a miracle I find myself back in that moment, reliving it, but I still remember. I remember everything.

Emily stood before Professor Vaughan’s office door, listening to his voice inside and the harsh, buzzing whisper that came in reply. She understood what those sounds were now. The creature behind the door in the wall. That was how it communicated, making its promises to Professor Vaughan in return for handing over her and Sean. But she’d been given another chance, a do-over, and this time she wouldn’t be caught by surprise. She could stop what had happened to her, make it so that it never happened at all. She just had to make sure things went differently this time.

She pounded on the door. She heard the professor whisper to the creature, give it time to disappear back into that impossible room off the side of the building, and then he opened the door.

“Hello, Miss Bannerman.”

“Oh. How did you know I was—?” She heard the words she’d spoken before, an echo reverberating through time, but this time would be different. This time she wouldn’t cry or freeze up. This time she’d have the upper hand.

Emily pushed past Professor Vaughan into his office and walked right to his desk.

“What are you doing?” Vaughan demanded, hurrying after her.

She opened the drawer, pulled out the gun, and pointed it at him. She wanted him dead for what he did to Sean, what he did — or was about to do — to her, but she hesitated. Her heart jackhammered in her chest. She’d never shot anyone before. Could she do it?

He put his hands up, his Adam’s apple bobbing at his throat. “Miss Bannerman, whatever it is you think you’re doing…”

At the sound of his voice, that pompous, condescending way he called her Miss Bannerman, she had her answer. She pulled the trigger, and the gun jumped in her hand with a loud bang. Professor Vaughan fell to the floor in a spray of red. She ran to the door in the wall and pushed it open.

The room beyond was just as it had been before, with its strange machinery and shelves full of cylinders, with one missing. She understood those cylinders’ dark purpose now. Sean’s body was on the surgical table, his head open and empty, his brain removed and housed in the missing cylinder. She thought of him floating in darkness, a bodiless consciousness just as she had been, or still was, and very nearly forgot the creature hiding behind the door. Emily turned just as it emerged from its hiding place, its head splitting open in that terrible shriek. She pulled the trigger, and the shot blew off a chunk of its eyeless, antennae-laden head, revealing spongy, fungoid flesh within. She screamed, not with terror this time but with righteous fury, and pulled the trigger again and again, blowing off more pieces.

She didn’t feel the sharp object piercing her from behind, so when the long, pointed tip of a pincer came out of her stomach, she stared at it in confusion. There was a harsh buzzing sound at her back, and she realized another creature was in the room, one she hadn’t seen. The gun dropped to the floor. She would have dropped, too, but the pincer through her middle held her upright. It would take a long time to die from this kind of wound, she knew. Long enough for them to harvest her brain, just as they’d done before. She’d failed.

I can see again, though not with my own eyes. Those were left behind on another world. These eyes are artificial, a device with two glass lenses that’s plugged into one of the sockets in my cylinder. Through these lenses, I can see the alien world that Professor Vaughan’s creatures have brought me to. Through a second attached device, one with a metal disc on top, I can hear them speak to each other. They call themselves Mi-Go, and this strange, technologically advanced planetoid at the edge of our solar system is called Yuggoth. Since I arrived, I’ve learned Yuggoth is merely an outpost, not their home world. I don’t know where their home world is, and I get the sense the Mi-Go haven’t seen it in a very long time. Some of them wonder if it still exists.

They communicate in insect-like buzzes and clicks, which the hearing device translates for me. There’s nothing poetic about their language. They speak with cold objective specificity, making no use of allegory or metaphor. Vaughan was right to call them scientists. They’re methodical and precise.

I’ve learned from their conversations that something went wrong on our journey from Earth to Yuggoth. The Mi-Go who was carrying my brain cylinder passed through a spatial anomaly, a disruption in the space-time continuum, and came out the other side insane, or so the others think. When we arrived on Yuggoth, they had to force it into hibernation because it was frightened and confused. It claimed to have been displaced in time, that it was reliving its many thousands of years of life, experiencing every moment of it simultaneously, although with its present-day memories and knowledge intact.

But they’re wrong; that Mi-Go wasn’t insane. It’s happening to me, too. I felt us pass through the anomaly and mistook it for a collision. The anomaly is what broke me into pieces and scattered me throughout my past. That’s how I was given this second chance.

I have to try again. There has to be a way to change what happened. I concentrate, reaching into the blazing white supernova in my mind, and I go back.

After Professor Vaughan’s office hours, Emily slung her backpack onto her back and looked at the framed photo on the desk. Vaughan’s family. The ones whose deaths had set him on his insane quest for Arneth-Zin and its all-seeing watcher. She hated them for dying in that car wreck. If they’d lived, none of this would have happened. She and Sean would be fine. They both would have become doctors. Maybe they would have married and started a family.

Maybe they still could.

“Professor,” she asked, just as she had the first time, “where does that door go?”

“Nowhere,” he replied. “It’s just a small closet for the heating pipes. Why?”

“No reason.” The words were another echo through time, spoken by a weaker, more naïve Emily who didn’t share her current resolve. It infuriated her. Professor Vaughan infuriated her. The Mi-Go infuriated her.

“You’re a liar!” She hurried to the other side of his desk, opened the drawer, and pulled out his gun.

“Miss Bannerman, put that down!” Professor Vaughan started toward her.

This time, she didn’t hesitate. She took great enjoyment in shooting the smug bastard. He dropped to the floor in a spray of blood. She stepped over him and opened the door in the wall. The room beyond was the same as she remembered, but the surgical table was empty. They hadn’t gotten Sean yet. There was still time.

The Mi-Go wasn’t behind the door this time but fussing with some machinery. It turned toward her in surprise, and she shot its spongy head to bits. A second Mi-Go moved swiftly toward her from the corner, but she was ready for it this time. She shot it, too — just as a hypodermic needle pierced the side of her neck. Professor Vaughan, his argyle sweater splashed with blood where the bullet had hit him in the shoulder, injected the glowing orange liquid into her veins. She crumpled to the floor. Her sight dimmed as she began to lose consciousness, but not before she saw four more Mi-Go loom over her. Together, they lifted her off the floor and brought her over to the surgical table. She’d failed again.

I ’ve refused to answer the Mi-Go’s questions about Earth. They don’t like that. Their interviews have become more like interrogations, with machines that cause me pain if I resist. I don’t know how much longer I can hold out.

I have to keep trying. I must find a way to change the past. I reach through the white.

“In essence, you are your brain, and your brain is you.” Standing at the front of the lecture hall, Professor Vaughan glanced at his watch. “We’ve got a few minutes left. Are there any questions?”

Maybe I can trip him up, Emily thought. If she let him know that she was on to him, maybe it would spook him. Maybe it would be enough to make him call it off. She raised her hand.

“Yes, Miss Bannerman?” Professor Vaughan said.

“Can a human brain continue to function outside of the body?”

Vaughan’s face fell. He looked surprised and confused. She had to bite her lip not to smirk in triumph.

“That’s an interesting question,” he said. “Yes, I suppose a brain could exist independently of the body. It would need to be protected, of course, without the skull to shield it.”

“Like in a cylinder of some kind?” she asked.

Vaughan’s mouth went tight. She could see his jaw muscles clenching under his skin. “Yes, I suppose that could work. There would be no circulatory system to feed it oxygen, so it would need to be submerged in an oxygenated solution to keep it from starving. But I’m afraid the technology necessary to keep a human brain alive outside the body hasn’t been discovered yet.”

Bullshit, she thought.

Professor Vaughan glared at her, the surprise on his face melting into suspicion and anger. “Does that answer your question, Miss Bannerman?”

“Perfectly,” she said.

“Actually, I’m glad you brought it up. If you’d be so kind as to stay after class for a few minutes, I’d like to discuss it with you further. I know of a special project you might be interested in.”

She barked out a laugh. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

Some of the students gasped. Others tried to stifle their laughter.

Sean leaned over in his seat beside her and whispered, “What are you doing?”

Sean! The sight of him alive again, his brain still in his head, made her want to throw her arms around him and never let go.

When they left the lecture hall, Emily noticed Professor Vaughan glaring at her from within the crowd of students. She’d definitely touched a nerve, but would it be enough to change the course of events?

“Try not to piss off the professor, okay?” Sean said. “He emailed me earlier about working with him on the project, and I’m going to do it. I’d be a fool not to.”

“Don’t,” she said, grabbing his arm. “You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Just promise me you won’t, okay?”

“But this could be something really good for me.” He broke away. “I have to get to class. I’ll come by tonight.”

Emily didn’t go to Professor Vaughan’s office hours this time. She couldn’t stand to see that man again. Instead, she stayed in her dorm room and waited for Sean. The moment he arrived, she blurted out the truth to him. She told him she’d already seen what was going to happen to him, to both of them. She told him about Professor Vaughan and Arneth-Zin and the Mi-Go.

“It sounds like you had one hell of a nightmare,” he said, sitting on the bed. “But I would be stupid to turn down an opportunity like this just because you had a bad dream.”

“It wasn’t a dream,” she insisted. “It’s real. It already happened to us, but now I’m back and I can change it. I can make it so it doesn’t happen.”

He stared at her like she’d lost her mind. “I don’t understand. What do you mean, you’re back?”

“Sean, don’t go to his office tomorrow,” she said. “They’ll cut your head open and steal your brain—”

He stood up. “Come on, you can’t be serious.”

“Come with me. Tonight,” she said, her voice growing shrill in desperation. She grabbed his arm. “We’ll get in my car and just drive. He won’t be able to find us.”

“You mean leave school?”

“I don’t know how else to keep us safe. I’ve tried everything else I can think of, I shot him twice, I shot the Mi-Go, but—”

Sean yanked his arm out of her grasp. “Stop it. I don’t know if you’re on something or if this is some kind of joke, but I’m not in the mood.” He opened the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Emily chased after him into the hallway. She grabbed his arm and tried to pull him back. “Sean, no! We have to leave! It’s the only way!”

“Emily, stop!”

“We can’t let them take us!” she shrieked, tugging at him, desperate to pull him back.

“Get off of me!”

He pushed her angrily, hard enough to make her let go of his arm, hard enough to make her fall. She stared up at him from the floor, tears streaming down her face. Up and down the hallway, students came out of their rooms to see what was happening.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but you’re acting crazy!” Sean noticed the other students watching and put up his hands. “You know what? I just can’t deal with this right now.” He walked away.

“Sean!” she screamed after him. “Sean, promise me you won’t go to Professor Vaughan’s office tomorrow! Promise me!”

He didn’t turn around. She collapsed against the wall, sobbing. She could feel the other students staring, but she didn’t care. She’d failed again. Sean would still report to Vaughan’s office in the morning. He would still wind up on that surgical table.

She couldn’t save him, but maybe she could still save herself. She grabbed her car keys and ran to the student parking lot. Half the lamps were out, leaving wide, dark pools of shadow across the lot. She glanced nervously at Professor Vaughan’s stone cottage, but no lights came through the windows. He wasn’t there. She hit the unlock button on the key fob, and her car gave a comforting chirp. Just as she reached for the driver’s side door, someone grabbed her from behind, putting a hand over her mouth to stifle her scream, and pushed her against the car so she couldn’t turn around.

Professor Vaughan’s voice hissed in her ear, “That was some stunt you pulled in class today, Miss Bannerman. But I promise you, whatever you think you know, the truth is far more extraordinary than you can imagine.” She struggled as she felt a hypodermic needle pierce her neck. “Stop fighting, I’m doing you a favor. You have no idea what a unique opportunity I’m giving you. To see an alien world. Experience an alien culture. You should be thanking me.”

It’s bad enough I’m a victim of Professor Vaughan’s obsession and an unwilling subject of the Mi-Go’s studies, but to be given the power to change the past and still not save myself from this fate is maddening. It’s as though every choice I make brings me to the same end. Every path leads to the Mi-Go. What’s the point of being given a second chance if nothing changes?

I miss Sean, whose cylinder is being kept somewhere else. Occasionally, I hear the mechanical voices of other brains speaking in other rooms and wonder if one of them is him. I haven’t spoken to him or heard his voice — his real voice — since we were last together at Middlewood.

I wish I’d never gone through that damn anomaly. I wish I’d never been tormented with this useless ability to reshape the past.

Maybe that, at least, is something I can change for the better. One last time, I reach through the white.

She didn’t have a plan. She couldn’t stop the Mi-Go who carried her brain cylinder from flying through the anomaly. But if she tried hard enough, could she reject the splintering of her mind? If she were prepared for it, could she force her consciousness not to scatter back through her timeline?

She was back in the darkness of the cylinder when she felt the Mi-Go pass through the anomaly again, but she was powerless against it. Her mind was already splintered, and this time the anomaly only splintered it further, supernova upon supernova, fracture upon fracture, thrusting her backward through her past again, but also forward into a jumbled patchwork of horrific imagery that her mind couldn’t — dared not — collate. Each of these splinters fractured again and again, a mosaic of moments from the entirety of her life, until she was everywhere and everywhen, past and future, on Earth and on Yuggoth and then finally—

Somewhere else.

Emily stood upon an arid plain of sand. Before her, a stone structure sat half-buried, its timeworn walls decorated with strange, angular carvings. What remained of its massive spires rose toward an alien yellow sky where three moons hung like staring eyes. In the distance she saw enormous towers, the remains of an ancient, deserted city. Scattered among the crumbling buildings were huge, soaring monoliths of black stone, rising high above the towers and emanating a peculiar sense of dread. She found she couldn’t look at them long before her discomfort became overwhelming and she had to look away.

She was surprised to discover she was back in her body. Or a body. It couldn’t be hers. Hers was wherever Professor Vaughan and the Mi-Go had left it on Earth, after pillaging her skull. Or maybe her body was gone, burned or dissolved in acid so there would be no evidence. The body she wore now was solid, real, but it was clearly artificial, something the Mi-Go had constructed to house her brain. She patted her arms, her stomach. It didn’t feel like metal or plastic, it felt like flesh, or something close to it.

She didn’t know where she was in her timeline. Her future, it seemed. But what was this place?

There was no door in the half-buried structure before her, only an immense archway leading inside, built for someone much bigger than her. If she wanted answers, this looked like a good place to start. She stepped through the archway and found herself in a passage whose walls had been carved with the same strange designs as the exterior. The passage opened onto a titanic chamber, its soaring, vaulted ceiling rising so high that it disappeared into the shadows. At the center of the chamber was a circular dais surrounded by five stalagmites, each a dozen feet tall, bending inward like enormous ribs, and made of the same black stone as the monoliths outside. Atop the dais was an immense throne, hewn from ancient rock, and upon it sat a colossal skeleton. Its massive skull, brown and cracked with the passage of time, resembled a large, smooth boulder. It had no mouth, no eye sockets, no ear holes, just a flat expanse of bone.

A dark, oblong object rested on the throne beside the dead giant. Curious, she pulled herself up onto the throne and sat beside the giant’s huge, elongated femur and oddly spiked patella. The object seemed to be a long sliver of that same black stone, and while the giant could have easily held it in one hand, she had to lay it across her lap to examine it. But the moment she touched it, a web of energy burst to life between the five black stalagmites, surrounding her. It took the form of thousands upon thousands of strands, crossing each other to form a grid, and within the countless squares of the grid were moving images. She saw an Earth occupied by lumbering dinosaurs. She saw the raising of the pyramids, the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the continents drowning under massive floods as long-lost islands rose from the ocean’s depths. She saw other worlds, too, other forms of life that weren’t human or Mi-Go — barrel-shaped creatures with wings like fans, coneshaped entities with snaking limbs, polyp-like monstrosities that phased in and out of the material plane. She saw civilizations rise and fall on countless worlds. All of time played out before her.

She put it together then. All the clues were there. This was Arneth-Zin, the temple at the center of the universe where all the timelines converged. This was where Professor Vaughan had wanted to go so desperately that he’d sold her and Sean to the Mi-Go like lab rats. The dead giant beside her had to be the sentry he’d spoken of. The watcher of Arneth-Zin — blind, deaf, dumb, and long dead. She almost laughed at the irony. It had seen and heard nothing of the timelines that played out in the grid. It couldn’t tell anyone its secrets. It couldn’t send Professor Vaughan back in time to save his family. Vaughan had destroyed Emily’s life, put her through unimaginable horror, for nothing.

She discovered that if she concentrated while touching the shard, she could guide what she saw within the grid. At her command, the grid filled with images from her own life. The choices she’d made. Every path she’d taken. She saw a group of six Mi-Go winging through space, carrying two cylinders, Sean’s brain in one, hers in the other. She watched as a burning red ribbon streaked and twisted across space until it struck the Mi-Go carrying her cylinder. The spatial anomaly. The moment that had untethered her consciousness from linear time and ultimately brought her here. She couldn’t bring herself to look beyond that. She didn’t want to relive her time on Yuggoth. If the Mi-Go had given her a new body, it meant at some point she’d stopped resisting and had cooperated with them. She couldn’t watch herself do that.

She watched her family instead, her mother and father and kid sister, none of whom knew what happened to her. She saw them get the news that she’d gone missing, and later, when the authorities gave up the search and declared her dead, her family’s grief was so powerful she wanted to cry along with them. Only, she couldn’t. The Mi-Go had built this body for her, and they didn’t understand human emotional responses like crying.

She watched Sean’s timeline, too, until it became too painful. She couldn’t bear to see his empty-skulled corpse on that surgical table again.

She didn’t know how much time passed as she sat upon the dead sentry’s throne. Days? Weeks? There was a delicious irony in the fact that time had lost meaning for her. Her artificial body didn’t age. She didn’t need to eat or drink or sleep, so she never had to take her attention off the grid.

Eventually, two Mi-Go entered the temple. One carried a brain cylinder, the other a variety of mechanical equipment. She watched as they placed the cylinder on the floor and hooked the equipment into the three sockets: the lenses for eyes, the metal disc for hearing, and a speaker box for speech. Their job complete, the Mi-Go left.

“Hello?” a scratchy, electronic voice came out of the speaker. Rows of lights blinked on the side of the box in time with the words. “My name is Professor Joseph Vaughan.”

Vaughan. So he’d finally gotten his wish. She jumped down from the throne. As soon as she let go of the shard, the web of images between the stalagmites vanished.

“Great sentry of Arneth-Zin, I’ve come a long way and beg you to have pity on me,” Vaughan said. “I beseech you to open the seams of time and let me return to the point where I lost my wife and children. Please, give me the chance to set things right.”

She squatted over the cylinder, making sure the lenses could see her face clearly. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

“What — what do you mean?” Even in his artificial electronic voice, she could hear confusion and fear. Good. He deserved to be afraid. “Aren’t you the sentry?”

“No,” she said. “It’s me. Emily Bannerman.”

Vaughan said nothing.

“Surely that much time hasn’t passed,” she said.

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” he said. “You know me? We’ve met?”

Emily let out a bitter laugh. He didn’t remember her. That was how little she’d mattered to him. He hadn’t cared who she was or what future he was stealing from her when he gave her to the Mi-Go. She’d been nothing but a means to an end. His ticket to Arneth-Zin.

“This can’t be happening,” he said. “Tell me you understand the pattern of time! Tell me you know where the seams are!”

She shrugged. “I’m as in the dark with this time-travel shit as you are. I can only change my own timeline, not anyone else’s.”

“You — you can change your timeline?” Vaughan’s electronic laughter came through the speaker, an eerie, grating sound. “I knew it, I knew it was possible! You must show me how!”

She supposed she could. She could consult the grid for the whereabouts of the spatial anomaly. He could find a way to pass through it as she did and gain the ability to change his timeline. She could even teach him how to control it so it didn’t overwhelm him.

But why would she help the man who’d done this to her? “Sorry,” she said. “If it’s any consolation, I know how you feel.”

She undid the latches at the top of the cylinder.

“Stop. What are you doing?”

“I understand you better than you think, Professor Vaughan. I know what it’s like to have someone you love taken away from you. I know what it’s like to carry that terrible emptiness inside. You want nothing more than to be with them again. I can help with that.”

She lifted off the lid. Inside, Professor Vaughans’s brain was suspended in a thick, viscous liquid.

Vaughan’s voice came through the speaker pitched with new hope. “So you will show me how?”

“No,” she said. “But I can reunite you with your family another way.”

She reached into the cylinder and pulled out his slippery, spongy brain. Just three pounds of tissue, as he’d pointed out in the lecture hall a lifetime ago, and yet it housed everything that was Professor Vaughan. She tore it to pieces with her bare hands, throwing chunks of shredded gray matter across the floor until there was nothing left of it. She dumped the solution out of the cylinder, then bashed it and the rest of the equipment against the temple wall until they were mangled and unrecognizable. After that, she felt a lot better.

What she hadn’t told Professor Vaughan, what that horrible, selfish man didn’t deserve to know, was that she did understand the pattern of time. She’d understood it from the moment she discovered the watcher of Arneth-Zin was blind, deaf, and dumb. The truth was that there was no pattern. There were no reasons, no secret designs, no answers to the philosophical questions that plagued man and Mi-Go alike. It didn’t matter if you were a student or a professor, a victim or a perpetrator, if you lived your life with love or forgot the names of the people you stepped on as soon as you were done with them — in the end there was only entropy and decay, chaos and tragedy, as though the universe had nothing but disdain for the life that inhabited it. And in an ancient temple on a dead world where all the timelines converged, there was a lone sentry whose job, for reasons that were unknowable, was to stand witness as it all withered and died.

Emily climbed up onto the throne, took hold of the black shard, and watched the grid of time blink back to life. Every path had led her here, guided by that same pitiless universe, as if it had decided Arneth-Zin had been without a watcher long enough.

Why had she been chosen? Was there some kind of intelligence behind it, something beyond even the vast eternity playing out before her, or was she fooling herself into thinking there was any reason at all? Maybe she was nothing more than a leaf blown by random, feckless winds. Did it matter?

It was something she’d have an eternity to ponder.

Under orders from the Great Khan, called Temujin, praise his name, they traveled many days, to a place where two tall boulders stood, the width of three supply carts separating them.

These, said the Khan, were the gateposts to the Land of Dreams. Here, his people would find wonders, gold and treasure of such fineness as to make the wealth of the material world seem like ordure in comparison.

His subjects listened eagerly, and, if any held a doubt, none voiced it, nor looked ought but joyous at his words.

This was not wholly to the good.

In times gone by, the Khan had welcomed argument, and valued contrary opinion. Once, his advisers had advised, his counselors had counseled, and his wise men shared their wisdom freely.

Alas, such times were long gone.

Now he brooded, looking old and fragile, and those close to him grew fearful as to what would happen next.

Yet having laid his plans, it was at this point that the great Khan hesitated. Abjuring to lead his people wholesale through the gateway, he camped instead upon the borders, so to speak, and sent two of his swiftest and most trusted warriors to scout beyond.

There was much popular interest as they galloped off, and plunged between the boulders with a flourish, like competitors at the racetrack. Initially, they were quite visible upon the grassy steppe beyond; but soon, as many later testified, it was as if a mist or fog came down around them, enveloping both men and mounts, although the land around remained in view.

Thus, the great Khan’s emissaries vanished from the common sight.

They rode long and hard. The land was hilly, wild and windswept. Stunted pines grew in the crevices and narrow valleys, and in the shelter of the great black rocks that outcropped on the hillcrests.

All seemed empty and devoid of life, whether human or animal. Nor did the sky yield so much as a single bird.

Presently, however, the riders came upon a child, sitting cross-legged beneath a grassy hillock. His head was shaved. He wore a thin, grey robe, yet seemed impervious to cold. Around him, painted on the ground, were three circles: one white, one red, one yellow. He sat within their heart.

The warriors immediately set to question him. Where were his people? What was his country? What kind of military power did it possess? What was their wealth? Who were their allies? What gods did they extol, if any?

To none of these queries would the child give answer. The riders grew increasingly irate at his impertinence. The child quite clearly lived, for his chest both rose and fell, though at a slower rate than might be held as normal, and his eyelids could be seen to flicker, the orbs behind them sometimes twitching, perhaps responding to their words. Both men believed he heard their questions, and concluded it was only insolence and disrespect prevented his reply. Having determined this, the more hot-blooded of the two at once advanced upon the child, and, drawing his sword, lopped the boy’s head from his shoulders.

The body remained seated, as before. His head fell in the grass and rolled, out of the colored circles, coming to rest beside a large flat stone.

Then it began to talk.

At first, they could make little sense of what was said. It seemed to be reciting names, its lips moving with magical fluidity. This, indeed, was marvel enough. But soon the two men were still more astonished; for the names became familiar: they were the names of fallen comrades, family members, friends, acquaintances, slain in battle, executed, died of illness or betrayal, and (in one case) tumbled drunk into the carp pond of a wealthy noble’s lavish and extravagant estate, where the poor fellow had drowned.

Awestruck, they listened.

Terrified, they heard their own names in the litany.

For a great time, they traveled. Returning at last to the court of the Khan, they brought tales of many wonders: cities of gold, and men of brass and iron, and a land where the sun shone seven different colors in a single day. They had encountered many terrors and yet glimpsed great riches, too, and assured the Khan the armies of the dreamlands, though formidable, were no match for his own.

They brought with them a gift: a mechanical egg, which could be held in a man’s two hands. At the touch of a switch, its metal shell would divide, and within would be seen a maiden of extraordinary beauty, with ivory skin, and jet-black hair, who would wake up and unfold herself, a living being, though no taller than the span of a man’s fingers.

Of this, the Khan was much enamored.

For the two warriors, however, fate was less kind. While the Khan and his people had endured a mere four days awaiting their return, they themselves had been away for many years. They arrived back as ancient, white-haired dodderers, suffering the many afflictions of extreme old age. Still, their loyalty was such that, with their dying strength, they had returned to their master, to deliver their report, and their gift.

The Khan was silent for some days, and retreated deep into his quarters, far from the eyes of men.

Some believed he was about to order their retreat from the place, for the omens were indeed unsavory. In due time, however, he gathered his most trusted officers, and addressed them. Yet scarcely had he said three words before he paused, looked up, and listened (though no-one else could hear a sound). A sequence of emotions flashed across his face, from puzzlement to anger, fear to resignation. Did he hear the voice of dreams? The echo of his own youthful ambition? At last he put his head down, nodded, and in a small, tired murmur, like the whinny of a horse driven too far, too fast, he ordered, “On,” and, “on,” and, “on,” again.

I record this in the Land of Dreams, where we have languished now for many years, laden with wealth, yet unable despite all our efforts to divine a path back to the waking world.

Blessed be the Great Khan, and may peace enfold him.

Hail the Lord Temujin!

Luke Phillips sat in the shadows. This joint was a real dump and he’d had his fill of dumps. He’d made enough hard cash to live a better life these days, and had no plans to go back to the kind of deals and contracts he’d taken in the gray old past. And he’d become used to the good life, even if it had softened him up some. He’d been on the point of heading back to England, his homeland, when New York had made this last attempt to embroil him.

He sipped the cold beer. It was okay. He scanned the paper, though it didn’t offer much of a read. It served as a shield from prying eyes, although the guy who’d arranged to meet him here had chosen the place precisely because it was hidden away among the other wharf dens where a man could be conveniently inconspicuous. Phillips was used to secrecy in his dealings with his various employers. He knew the drill.

Morgan was half an hour late. Phillips recognized him from the cheap photograph he’d been given. A hunched man, ashcolored, stringy hair tucked under a homburg, a thick, dark scarf and a heavy tweed coat. Pinched face, sunken eyes, a long jaw — yeah, this was Morgan.

Phillips caught his eye and nodded. Morgan collected a drink and joined the Englishman at the table, his back to the cramped room and its few scattered drinkers.

“Thanks for coming,” he said in a low growl. Up close he looked haunted, like dark angels were scouring the streets for him. For all Phillips knew, they were.

“Let’s get this straight,” said Phillips. “I’m not sold on this yet. If you want to employ me, you’ve got your work cut out.”

“Yes, I understand,” said Morgan. He clutched his glass but made no effort to drink from it.

“When you contacted me and said I was one of the few men who had the kind of desert experience you wanted, my initial reaction was to walk away.” Phillips had promised himself he’d never go near a sand pit again, never mind a desert. The things he’d experienced in Egypt a few years back had scared the hell out of him, and he didn’t care who knew.

“You did a good job in the Sahara. You put a stop to something very terrible. Few people know about it. You know how close things came to a disaster.” Morgan leaned nearer, his voice a low rasp. “The Chaos Blade and the gate it went back into.”

Phillips nodded. “So? If whoever’s running you is after the Blade, you’re wasting your time with me. Believe me, you have no idea how dangerous it is.”

“We do, Mr Phillips, that’s the problem. We don’t want the Blade released back into the world. Nor do we want that gate— or any other — opened.” Morgan wiped beads of sweat from his brow and took a tentative sip of his drink.

Phillips studied him uneasily. “The gate is buried deep. No one is ever going to find it. It’s sealed.” He pushed back the images of the desert that tried to squeeze into his mind, and the cloying darkness that came with them. It had taken him a long time to rid himself of his nightmares after he’d returned from Egypt.

Morgan nodded. “We’re less concerned about it. There’s something new. Do you know Sir Conrad Alvington, the archaeological explorer?”

“Only what I read or see on television. He’s always on the hunt for the last place God made, that kind of thing. I don’t know him personally.”

“He’s been in Mauritania for the last six months. Western Sahara.”

Phillips suppressed a shudder. “That may not be the last place God made, but it would be close to it.”

“A month ago, Sir Conrad and the last of his party were arrested and are being held in a jail in Nouakchott, the capital. He managed to get a message out to a friend here in New York. Terrance Carnadine. They’d shared a coupla digs together. It’s Carnadine who wants to hire you.”

Phillips sat back, mentally groaning. He knew Terrance Carnadine. The man had been a loose cannon, a seeker of relics and a hell-raiser to boot. He’d more than once got himself into a tight corner, before he’d finally settled down to a more sensible life as part of the huge Carnadine Industries, run by his sister. These days, she kept him on a tight leash. If he was looking to go back to his old ways, Phillips wasn’t ready to sign up, not by a long chalk.

Morgan continued. “Terrance Carnadine wants to get Sir Conrad out of Mauritania. His own adventuring days are over, but he can fund an expedition.”

“Expedition? You mean extradition?”

“Both. Sir Conrad found something out there in the desert. Something akin to what you found in southwest Egypt. He has no chance of going back to it and dealing with it. The Mauritanians don’t want anyone poking around in those desert wastes. But someone has to do it.”

“You mean me?”

“Do you know the country?”

Phillips let out a short, dry laugh. “ Know it? For God’s sake, man, its own people hardly know it. Almost the entire country is Saharan desert. There’s nothing there. Sand, sand and more sand. You’re talking about one of the most extreme environments on the planet. And you want me to go digging there? I don’t think so.”

“You’d be paid very well.”

“I don’t need the money, or a trip to that kind of madness.”

“You don’t understand,” said Morgan, his face creased in pain. “The gate cannot be allowed to open. The consequences would be too horrific.”

“Gate? Like the one we found?”

“It is potentially linked to others. The one under Mauritania is the prime. The spokes of the wheel turn on it. Open it and the power travels down the spokes, opening more gates. In Europe, Asia, Australia, Antarctica.”

“Then you need a small army to deal with it. It’s way above my skill set. And how the blazes are you going to get anyone in? It’s a Sunni Muslim country and from what I know, Al-Qaeda is very active there. Be like entering a hornet’s nest naked and covered in honey.”

“There are some places even they dare not set foot. There is a way in, though. It follows the market in meteorites.” Morgan reached into his pocket and pulled out a small bundle of cloth. He unwrapped it to reveal a gray lump of stone, and handed it to Phillips.

Phillips weighed it. It was unduly heavy for its size.

“There have been many reports over the years of a large meteor fall in the Mauritanian desert,” said Morgan. “Several abortive attempts have been made to find a so-called mountain of iron. Those seeking it these days are dismissed as dreamers. There are small meteorites in most parts of the desert, from the northwest to the southeast. In the city of Nouadhibou there’s a thriving market. It would not be too difficult to mount a small expedition. The British Embassy would secretly provide the cover.”

“Where, exactly, is the place Sir Conrad found?”

“To the northeast of central Mauritania. Well beyond any villages, roads or the railway. Completely remote and shunned by every living soul. Except a few local Haratin Arabs who are prepared to take any risks for good money. They are waiting.”

Phillips sat back, picturing the endless dunes and scarred desert crags, the extremely hostile, inhospitable landscape, the greatest challenge to human survival. “Getting there would be bad enough,” he said softly. “Then what? How is the problem to be dealt with? You’re not talking about something that can simply be de-activated.”

Morgan shook his head. “There are two engineers, soldiers. They have the means.”

Phillips grunted skeptically. “You’re sure about that? Meddling with these things is very bad news.”

“I can’t give you the details, but yes, they have sufficient power.” Morgan leaned forward, his face bathed in sweat. “You saw what was under the Egyptian sands. What could have been unleashed. This is far worse. Ten times — a hundred — more so. The risk has to be taken.”

Phillips scowled deeply. He found it hard to imagine anything worse than the horrors that had been uncovered in Egypt. “So why me?”

“They need someone they can trust. You’ve proved your worth.” Morgan pulled something else out of his pocket, a narrow envelope. He slid it cautiously across the table, screening it with his body.

Phillips took it and opened it discreetly below the table, pulling out a single sheet and scanning it. It was from Terrance Carnadine.

To Luke Phillips:

I know you won’t like this, and will doubtless associate my name with a lot of negative things, but we need the help of a man like you. You’re an exMarine, you know about the Egyptian affair, what it means. The desert people will follow you. This is a Government mission. No expense spared, especially in the weapons to be used. If we don’t act soon, the consequences are going to be unthinkable. The only way in to the place Morgan will have described is shrouded in strict secrecy. We can’t risk an international incident. You’ll have every protection, before and after. And whatever else you want. Destroy this note.

T C

Phillips took a Zippo from his pocket and ignited the sheet, watching in silence as it burned away to nothing. Morgan watched, fascinated, his face soaked in sweat, his hands shaking.

“I guess I don’t have much choice,” said Phillips. A Government mission, it had said. CIA. Of all the organizations, they had the power to wind him up and put him away for good if he didn’t feel like complying. Always better to keep on the right side of them.

Morgan looked relieved, as though his own neck was on the line. “I’ll get things moving.”

“I take it we fly out? Helicopter?”

“No — far too conspicuous. The Mauritanians would likely shoot you out of the sky. You go by road to Chinguetti. After that there are no roads, just the desert. You’ll go on by camel. A small company, the best fighting force we can gather, posing as archaeologists and meteorologists. You’ll have two engineers, a few guides and desert tribesmen to protect you. They are the best. They won’t let you down. No one will know you are there.”

Phillips studied the crumbling buildings of the big township of Chinguetti. The place sprawled, though the desert on its eastern flank was closing in inexorably, smothering older, cramped buildings where the people had given up the fight against the sand tides. The heat was almost unbearable, the sunlight searing, hotter if that were possible than the Egyptian deserts. Although there seemed to be few, if any, white people here, none of the natives paid Phillips much heed as he trudged along the narrow street to his rendezvous, a squat, brick hotel, its walls gouged by sandstorms, its roof flat as though an upper floor had been sliced off it.

It had taken a week to get here after his flight had landed in the busy capital, Nouakchott. He’d been contacted and directed to the transport that had carried him here over the anonymous, dusty roads, a battered bus barely kept moving by a team of Arab mechanics. In the city, Phillips had made discreet enquiries at the offices of the British Consul, wanting to set up a meeting with Sir Conrad Alvington. At first he met with a brick wall, but then he was told by a nervous, unconvincing clerk that Sir Conrad had been sent back to England. That was all. No further information. The Mauritanians didn’t want anyone nosing about in their desert, other than genuine archaeologists. And they didn’t want them conferring either.

Phillips wasn’t too concerned. Freeing Alvington was one less task to deal with, but a closed avenue of information.

Inside the hotel the overhead fans whirred, churning the thick, humid air. Several men, not necessarily guests, clothed in desert robes, sat around the large foyer, talking quietly. Phillips knew they were weighing him very carefully. His presence here would be no secret, though his assumed identity as an archaeologist ought to be credible. A room had been reserved for him: he was given its key and he went through the back to a corridor. The door was not locked. He nudged the door open with his knee and leaned back. Sunlight slatted into the room from a grilled window beyond its single bed.

“Welcome.” The voice was accented, that of a native. The man had been seated and stood slowly, his hands spread so that he offered no visible threat. “I am Mamoudou Sidibe, your guide.” Phillips closed the door and set down his holdall. The man was of Berber descent, aged perhaps fifty, face partially hidden behind a black beard, eyes like flints. He’s trustworthy, they’d told Phillips. A rare ally, who won’t betray you. The two men bowed to each other.

“I won’t ask you if you had a pleasant journey.”

Phillips grunted. “I could never get used to the dust. Or the heat.”

“Wait until you go out across the dunes. That is heat.”

Phillips shook his head. “We travel by night. I know it’ll be cold, but we’ll be less exposed.”

“As you wish. There is food and drink waiting for you — and one of the engineers. The other is elsewhere, with their packs, waiting to begin the journey.”

Mamoudou took Phillips to a room where Phillips gratefully chewed the dry meat and drank cold water. Presently he was joined by another man, Garner, a hard-looking thirty-something westerner, who was dressed in a poorly fitting light suit: obviously he was a soldier, used to a uniform — they were all going to be playing parts on this trip.

“I’m Doctor Garner, and O’Reilly, my mate, is also a doctor.” He grinned. “Not sure how many mugs we’ll fool, but they won’t necessarily realize we’re the military. We’ve been told to take orders from you. We will do. We’ve got our special orders, and we’ll follow them, but apart from that, you’re running this show.”

“Does that bother you?”

Garner shook his head. “Nah. I’m not paid to get bothered.”

“You and O’Reilly are sappers? You know what we’re dealing with out there?”

“We’ve been briefed by the US and our own Army.”

Phillips finished his meal. “Okay. I want to leave before dawn and rendezvous with the rest of our party. We’ll set off by the early light. We’ll be watched, so we’ll behave like any other archaeological party. Mad dogs and Englishmen. Once the sun’s getting up, we’ll camp. After that we go by night. Less chance of being seen.”

“They told me you know about desert travel. And about this place we’re heading for.”

“It isn’t going to be a picnic, especially when we get there.”

“O’Reilly and me have both done tours in Iran, Afghanistan and Syria. We’re used to people trying to kill us.”

“We’re not welcome here. The Government doesn’t want to provoke what’s out there. They don’t understand what it is, or what it can do.”

“Yeah, we’ve been told. You just get us there, okay?”

Phillips and the two engineers rode by camel to the outer edge of Chinguetti by bright starlight, led by Mamoudou. Phillips had been provided with a sub-machine gun. He knew how to use it. The sappers were similarly armed, and both had a fat bag strapped to their camels. Phillips guessed they’d be guarding those bags with their lives. Explosives, mines, whatever the military had come up with.

Mamoudou guided them to a remote spot out in the shifting sands, and under a low ridge they met up with a dozen more Arabs, armed desert tribesmen. Mamoudou introduced Phillips and at once the warriors bowed to him and prepared to receive instructions.

“These are good men,” said Mamoudou. “They will die before failing you. They know something of what is out in the wilderness, and they fear it greatly. It speaks much for their bravery that they will go there with you and serve you.”

“I am honored by their company.” Phillips spoke to the men in their own tongue, praising them softly and again they bowed. Only their eyes showed any emotion. They were like hawks, eager for the hunt.

For most of the day the party nestled under the shadow of another vast dune, waiting for moonrise. Mamoudou came to Phillips and drew him aside, speaking softly.

“I should warn you. Though I know these men and trust them implicitly, there will be one whose mind is not fully open to me.”

“Then you’d better get rid of him.”

“It is not possible. I cannot say which man it is. I only know that Al-Qaeda has its spies everywhere. For certain one of them will be among our men, and his identity will be a deep secret. I suspect he will only be here to watch and report. Al-Qaeda shuns the remote desert as much as we do. I suggest we say nothing, but be vigilant.”

Phillips nodded. “Maybe you’re right. The last thing we want to do is stir them up. I’ll warn the engineers.”

Garner and O’Reilly received the news with ill-disguised horror. “This changes everything,” said Garner. “I’m going to have to contact base. We may have to pull the plug on this.”

Phillips shook his head. “There’s too much at stake.”

The two engineers exchanged glances, clearly deeply disturbed. They seemed to Phillips to be weighing something in their minds, facts he hadn’t been provided with. “If there’s something you’re not telling me,” he said, “you’d better spit it out.”

Garner cleared his throat, lowering his voice. “I told you we have the means to destroy the target. It’s a powerful weapon.”

“How powerful?” said Phillips.

“It’s not the sort of thing you want falling into the wrong hands. If Al-Qaeda got hold of it, that would be very bad. It can’t happen.”

“If they knew we’re carrying it,” added O’Reilly, “they’d send half an army to get it.”

“What, exactly, is it?”

“It’s in two parts,” said Garner. “We’ve got one section each. Individually they’re harmless. They can only be activated when they’re fitted together. There’s a variable timer. You can set it on a short fuse or a longer one, maximum one day. That’s how long we’ve got to get clear, and we’ll need the fastest camels we’ve got to escape the blast.”

Phillips met the steady gaze of the engineer, the eyes of a dedicated soldier, no less fanatic than the Al-Qaeda he fought. “It’s a nuclear device?”

“Now you understand why we can’t risk it being stolen. It could take out a small city.”

Phillips nodded slowly. “What we’re facing,” he said, “could take out a lot more than that.”

“Once we begin the trek,” said Garner, “we’re on our own. No air cover to call up. Nothing.”

“Who knows about the device?” said Phillips.

“No one else,” said Garner.

“So there’s no reason to think Al-Qaeda are aware? As far as they know, you’ve got something, enough to deal with the target. Explosives, but nothing special. No more than they already have access to.”

“Why are they here?”

“They watch everything that happens in this country. It’s one of their safest bases. As I see it, they fear the place we’re heading for, and the only reason they’ve turned a blind eye to our little sortie is they’re happy to have it destroyed, especially with someone else taking all the risks.”

“I don’t like it,” said O’Reilly.

“Look,” Phillips told them, “if we turn back now, there’s a good chance they’ll kill us all and take what they can. They’ve nothing to lose. While we’re on the mission, we’re potentially useful to them. They want the target eliminated.”

Garner looked at O’Reilly. “The target is Priority One. That’s the instruction.”

“What’s Priority Two?” said Phillips.

“Destroy the device,” said Garner. “If we go on, we’ll set it off rather than let it fall into the wrong hands. We’ll die doing it. How about you, Mr Phillips? You sign up to that? If not, we go back.”

Phillips grinned sardonically. “Not the best deal I’ve ever signed up to, but okay. It’ll soon be dark. Let’s go.”

They traveled across the endless sands by night, the dunes silvered by moonlight, each one indistinguishable from the next, although their guides knew the terrain as well as a city-dweller knew the alleys and side streets of his home town. Days turned into a week, two, and the slow, monotonous trek morphed all of the travelers into silent ghosts. They ate and drank sparingly, surrounded by utter silence, broken only by a brief desert wind. Phillips knew they were as far from civilization as they would have been traversing the Antarctic, their target hidden away deliberately in this dead, empty zone.

“We are close,” Mamoudou told Phillips at last. “We are on the edge of one of the ergs, a very great expanse of sand and rock. If we rest for the day, by nightfall we will see the place.”

Later Phillips sat with the two engineers outside their pitched tent. “Over the next long ridge,” he told them. “Tonight we arrive.”

“What’s the plan?” said Garner.

“If this place is anything like the one I entered in Egypt, it won’t necessarily be guarded. But be prepared anyway. It’ll seem like a heap of very old ruins. That’s part of its disguise. Deep down in the heart of it is where we’ll find our target. I’ll know when we see it.” He watched the rest of the party settling for its last sleep under the blazing sun. In the haze of the journey, the desert people had become indistinguishable, their private thoughts inscrutable.

An hour after nightfall they crested a low ridge and the moonlight deftly painted another ridge beyond them, a high scarp, its rocks exposed, leaving tall, jagged stumps of rock, sheer and glassy, apparently impenetrable. Mamoudou pointed to a cleft in the rock surface, a long, tall gash, like the slash of a giant’s scimitar. “There,” he said, his voice dropping. “It leads to the place of stars below the sands.”

The company quickly crossed the dust bowl, the camels picking their way through a field of small, sharp boulders, dangerous as mines. The moon rode high, a brilliant light, when they came before the tall crevice. Darkness seemed to bleed from it, together with a cold breeze, permeating the surrounding rocks with an aura of deep unease. The camels tried to shy away, but Mamoudou had two of his men prepare a place for them to rest. Everyone dismounted. From now on they must journey on foot.

“You’ve been beyond here?” Phillips asked him.

Mamoudou shook his head. “Not I. But one who ventured within came back to Chinguetti. He spoke of a decaying city and its passageways. At home, he sat in a stone room, without food or water, and did not stop speaking for five days. In that time his body shrank until only the bones and a little skin remained, sucked dry by the madness that claimed him.”

Overhead, night had swallowed the skies and countless stars gleamed in their myriad clusters. Silence, more extreme than any Phillips had ever experienced, closed around them and the camels snorted in renewed fear. They could have been on a distant world.

“My two men will remain with the beasts until we return. The rest of us may enter, if it is still your desire.”

Phillips nodded. Garner and O’Reilly had already unloaded their packs and strapped them to their backs. They looked unwieldy, but both men were built like oxen and grinned at the effort. They said nothing, ready for the final trek beyond the wall of stone. Mamoudou and his ten remaining Arabs got into line. Their faces were devoid of expression, but Phillips could read the fear in their eyes. He hid his own misgivings. Where they were going would be festering with an evil beyond time.

Several of the men carried flashlights, while Garner and O’Reilly had lamps fitted to their helmets. Their beams prodded the bulging wall of darkness within the cleft as the party entered. Slowly the body of men wriggled onward, twisting and turning into the gut of the rock, heading downwards, the dusty path’s inclination increasing. The walls opened out around them and by the lights they carried they could see they had come into a jumble of low buildings, their walls leaning into one another, broken, some in ruins, others like spires, alleys choked with several feet of dust. Windows gaped, twisted, and everything dropped away into the lower darkness. Age draped everything like a shroud, a remnant of another time.

The company followed the main street, descending in a long spiral until presently the walls on one side fell away to reveal a gulf, a huge cave, like the empty maw of an extinct volcano. Phillips knew, however, this was no natural chasm. Some other power had scooped it out of the desert floor, or bored down to the distant bowels of the earth. The party came beyond the crumpled city and examination of the inner walls of the huge cavern revealed chiseled bands of stone, the work of unimaginable beings, from a time hidden by centuries. The slope broadened and soon the company had come to the first step of a stairway. It had not been created for human feet, being far too wide and deep.

Phillips shone his flashlight out into the vault and it was as though he had aimed it at the night sky, revealing an infinite, starless void, though within it something curdled, invisible, remote shapes writhing in silence more unnerving than any sound. Phillips turned the beam aside, again watching the stone descent. The magnitude of the place gripped the company like a fist, making each of them dizzy with uncertainty, their senses reeling at this exposure to immensity beyond normal human comprehension. Far, far below them, a rising wind swirled, with its threat of desert storms and stinging sand blasts, and yet this was a tunnel down into the utter heart of the stone, not an exit back to the world the party had left.

“Hear the song of the underworld,” Mamoudou whispered to Phillips. “Close up your ears, for it will drive your reason from you.”

They were all wrapping their neckerchiefs around their ears and turning up jackets and clothing to muffle the sounds. Shrieks tore at the air, invisible sirens sweeping to and fro, shadows coalescing, making the hell-wind a solid reality, though mercifully human eyes could not decipher details. Gradually the walls became less shrouded in mystery, glowing faintly, spotted with lichen and larger globules of fungus, the phosphorescent light strengthening as the descent continued. This weird glow distorted the shadows of the intruders, throwing them upon the twisted inner wall, making of them bizarre shapes, mocking throwbacks to a more primitive man-thing that barely stood on two legs. Other shadows writhed on the measureless wall, arachnid and crustacean, as if a time-lost sea had cast up in its silent waves a slurry of crawling life.

Deeper down went the party, the steps thrusting out into the void away from the wall until they wove their way between immense columns that themselves twisted and knotted as though, spewed up from molten lava, they had cooled into these fantastical shapes, a forest of unimaginable contortions. The fungus clung to them in fat clusters, hanging like vile fruit, glowing and in some places pulsing, as though about to burst and give forth a terrible stream of spores, which the men on the path knew instinctively would bring a choking death if once inhaled. Carved into the columns were the faces and limbs of unrecognizable beasts and demonic creatures, so convoluted as to seem alive, on the point of raking with claws their puny human prey.

Phillips marveled at the resolve of the Arabs. They were terrified, yet held to the downward trek. He exchanged brief glances with the engineers, and they, too, were almost unnerved, but nevertheless resolved. It was a relief to come to a flat plateau of rock, providing a way off the stairway to those hellish depths to which it must lead. Phillips led the way across it, seeing ahead of him another wall, though this was comprised of blocks, each one weighing countless tons, shifted into place by incomprehensible powers. A roughly triangular doorway, taller than a man, had been set into this wall, with archaic lettering around it, though in no language recognizable to man. Phillips, however, had seen such a doorway before, under the Egyptian desert.

“What we seek will be beyond there,” he said, pointing, as the company clustered about him. All of them held their weapons at the ready, expecting hostile action from an unseen enemy at any moment.

Phillips led the way, the two soldiers close to him. There was more light beyond, where huge mounds of mushrooms and saprophytes were piled up at the walls of what the men could see was a colossal chamber, a tomb, perhaps, or a temple. Yet it was on a scale beyond any human construction known, as if the men had walked out on to an alien world’s surface, a place beyond their own stars, raised and shaped by beings from gulfs beyond the knowledge of men. Column after column rose up, as though a forest of them supported the very desert high above, each of them wrought into the body of a leviathan, a god wrought in stone, massive and intimidating. They seemed no more than a breath away from coming to life.

Cold terror groped at them all as, insect-like, they went across the floor of this gargantuan temple. High up in vaulted darkness, stranger winds sang and swooping shapes flitted among the vaults, huge, bat-like things that stirred the dust of aeons. Phillips felt himself edging nearer to a kind of madness, his nerves threatening to snap. He forced himself onward.

The floor became a wide stone bridge, recognizable now in the growing light of the all-pervasive saprophytes as the spoke of a colossal wheel. The party was heading along it to where it sloped down to meet an enormous central hub. As the men went on, the cavern opened out and they saw more of these immense spokes, radiating inward from the circumference of the cavern, the far side lost in distances so vast the light could not penetrate them. The hub was the goal, the place they sought, the key to the mysteries of this whispering underworld. For a while the company paused, each man gathering what courage he could in the face of the terrors now besetting them all. They knew they were not alone. Like creatures caught in a seething jungle, they were surrounded by feral, hungry beasts.

Eventually, at the heart of the wheel, they reached a curving, waist-high parapet. They leaned over, gazing at a view that punched the breath from them. Beyond was a well, seemingly miles across, though its surface was not of water, but of a night sky, as though the open heavens were mirrored here. Points of light — possibly stars, possibly something far more ominous — winked and flashed in those unfathomable deeps that would have made the oceans seem shallow. The Arabs in the party drew back in horror, their eyes brilliant with fear. Phillips glanced at the two soldiers, who seemed mesmerized.

“What the hell is this?” said O’Reilly.

Phillips looked about him. He saw the nearest spokes, arrowing back into the gargantuan chamber. “If you listen,” he said, “and if you feel the stones, you’ll know that this hub is turning, possibly in time to the Earth’s rotation about the sun, linked to the stars.”

“Yeah,” said Garner. “Vibrations. So what the hell is it?”

Phillips gazed down one of the other long stone spokes, his mind filling with churning images. He found himself looking down a telescopic tunnel, the remote images at its end brought vividly into focus. He saw cities, or strange building complexes that could have been cities, incredibly ancient places, reeking with age, bizarre architectural piles, twisted towers, monuments and blasphemous statues hundreds of feet high. Among these titanic ruins crawled beasts and beings of hideously alien aspect, wanderers from unknown stellar systems, voyagers from the uncharted depths of some other insane universe. And they could transcend time, Phillips realized. To them, time was simply another dimension, to be crossed as easily as they navigated the gulf of space.

He saw the buried citadel he had visited under the Egyptian desert, and the haunted Plateau of Leng in the Himalayas, Antarctic citadels, with their sleeping creatures, abominable but pulsing with slumbering life. He saw too a city in the deepest of African jungles, the fabled Oparra, remnant of long-lost Atlantis, where even now the warped children of its exodus crawled like lice around crumbling temples. In Australia’s Western desert, he saw aeon-old citadels deep under the world. Everywhere he looked down the spokes, he saw the seething, blasphemous life. Stirring, hungry for release — into this world, this time.

“We’re at the heart of a colossal web,” said Phillips. “The power of these spokes radiates across the entire world, linking very old centers of alien life. As this wheel turns, it moves towards a correlation point, a conjunction at which a cosmic door will unlock and open wide. If that happens, power will flood along the spokes into the old citadels, pouring energy into them. They will all come to new life. Time will become meaningless.”

“What power?” said O’Reilly.

Phillips pointed out into the depthless void. Out in its black heart, the winds of time and space whispered and swirled, masking movements beyond human understanding. Something vast and inconceivable was rising from the gulfs.

“How long have we got?” said Garner.

“I don’t know,” said Phillips. “Time enough, I think. Set your device here. We have to prevent the conjunction.”

Mamoudou, who had gathered his wits with difficulty, watched as the two soldiers unslung their packs and unwrapped the two components of the nuclear weapon. These seemed surprisingly small, each no bigger than a computer drive. The other Arabs stared, realizing at once what the device was. They murmured to each other, and Phillips wondered if they’d be prepared to allow this unholy instrument to be used, even in the face of the monstrous images they’d seen here in the lost regions of their country.

It was little more than a matter of minutes before the two engineers had connected the two sections of the bomb and undertaken the necessary checks.

“It’ll be on a timer,” said O’Reilly. “How long?” he asked Phillips.

“As long as it takes us all to get clear of the blast.”

“Maximum — twenty-four hours. What about — the things out in that gulf?”

“I don’t think they’ll be here before then. The wheel needs longer to end its cycle.” Although I’m guessing, he thought. A risk we have to take.

O’Reilly prodded a small keypad on the side of the cylindrical device. He nodded. The company wasted no time in starting back along the wide spoke. As they all broke into a steady trot, their nerves were tormented by the fear of what they had seen, as if by its very nature it would realize what had happened and accelerate the process of completing the cycle. Around them the air quivered with a new energy, suggesting whatever spirits and demons infested these huge hallways had come to life, enraged and engorged with the desire for retribution. Climbing back on to the wide stairway, the company made its way upwards, knowing instinctively that something pursued it. Twisted sounds came up from below, sounds that grated along the very bones of the puny humans, in a realm where gods must once have walked.

Almost exhausted to a man, they came again to the apex of the spiral stairway, to the ruins of the citadel near to the mouth of the cleft leading back out into the desert. They paused briefly, Mamoudou warning them against rushing outside. Although something was rising from the deeps, and other, strange sounds welled up from the meandering streets around them, he had sensed further perils outside. One of the Arabs spoke to him and he nodded.

“What is it?” said Phillips.

“One of my men, Razak, will scout ahead. There are but two hours before dawn. Razak will find the two men we left behind with the camels and bring them close to the exit. Then we can ride like the wind.”

It took all Mamoudou’s persuasive powers to keep his men here in the street, knowing that something came ever closer from below. They could hear a huge, ponderous thudding and the cracking of stone, as though a colossal worm thrust itself upwards on that wide stair. In the buildings, shadows shifted as something else woke from an age-old sleep.

Mamoudou’s man had come back to them and waved them forward. Relieved, the Arabs dashed past the last buildings to the high cleft, Phillips and the engineers bringing up the rear. Phillips trained both his flashlight and his weapon on the darkness behind him. He had an impression of something huge and slick. Gunfire ahead snapped his head round.

O’Reilly and Garner were both swearing, urging Phillips to take cover. They ducked behind a low wall. Mamoudou appeared, holding his arm to his side. He was leaking blood, his teeth clamped against the pain.

“A trap!” he snarled. “And my men were caught in it, like rats.”

“Al-Qaeda?” said Phillips.

Mamoudou nodded. “Razak was the spy I feared. He has led them to us. They have killed the men we left behind and scattered the camels. The devils are coming for us. The last of my men will fight them off, but there are too many of them. It is only a matter of time before they are killed.”

Phillips cursed. “Even if we can hold them off, whatever is behind us will be here soon. We’ll be lucky to see this out to daylight.”

“They have come for the weapon,” said Mamoudou. “Razak must have told them of it. He must have a cell phone. Can the bomb be stopped?”

O’Reilly grunted. “It’s a simple enough device. Easily deactivated. Can we hold them off for twenty-four hours? If it is Al-Qaeda, we can’t let them get their hands on that bomb.”

“I’m more concerned about whatever is back in the passageway,” said Phillips.

“There is said to be another passage, leading upwards to an old observation tower,” said Mamoudou. “You must go through these ruins and climb it, up to the crest of the escarpment. I will provide cover.”

Phillips and the others knew their guide would not survive.

“Whatever is coming,” he said, “whatever these unspeakable gods have unleashed — it will feed on these devils. It will be worth giving up my life to see this!” He gasped out instructions as to where the second passageway would be.

The gunfire beyond intensified. Phillips led the engineers through the maze of collapsed buildings. From all sides they could hear things rising up from the debris, creatures roused by the noise of gunfire and the scent of human intrusion. The men all loosed off bursts of fire at the darkness, barely one step ahead of terror, but they made it to the secondary passage Mamoudou had spoken of. Its stair was cluttered and choked with rubble, but they managed to climb upwards. Below, beyond the buildings on the wide stair to the deeps, something broke from the darkness and Phillips caught a glimpse of numerous shapes, the size of large dogs. Barrel-like, their numerous legs writhed like the cilia of centipedes, their front ends a wide mouth like that of a lamprey. Behind them the larger creature clawed at the stone, bringing down low stone buildings in its enraged determination to break upward.

Mamoudou flattened himself against the stone wall, allowing the gunmen from outside to push forward, their own submachine guns blazing. In moments they came racing along the main route and met unexpectedly head-on with the first of the things from below. A dreadful conflict ensued as those terrible lamprey mouths fixed on the leading gunmen, shredding them in a bloody cloud. They seemed impervious to bullets and crushed the weapons to useless, mangled metal. Mamoudou watched in horror as the old city spewed forth even more creatures, their attention snared now by the noise of battle. They poured and slid from every crevice, things whose genera had been hidden by the darkness of centuries. For each of them ripped apart by gunfire, another dozen emerged. It was an impossibly unequal conflict and there could be no retreat. Every man from outside was slaughtered. When it was over, the creatures turned to Mamoudou, but his eyes had already closed for the last time.

Phillips moved as swiftly as he could in the confined space of the higher cleft, at last reaching a point where it debouched on to a small plateau of flat rock outside, under the stars. Ancient bricks ringed it, a former tower and a high place affording a unique view of the surrounding desert. Phillips wondered what long-dead tribe had built and used it. He and the engineers wriggled out, the last hour of darkness greeting them with its eerie desert silence. Cautiously the three men wriggled across the rock to a point where they could look down to the foot of the escarpment. Moonlight flooded the valley floor and among the broken rocks and scree they saw the dunes rising up gently beyond. On the nearest of them a great black shape sat in the sands.

“That’s how they got here,” said O’Reilly. It was a helicopter. “It’s a Lynx, Mark 9. The Brits recently de-commissioned them. Looks like Al-Qaeda have done some deals on the black market.”

Garner trained a small pair of binoculars on it. “Two guards,” he said. “Can’t see any others.”

“Any sign of the camels?” said Phillips.

Garner swept the immediate terrain below. “No. There are bodies down there. Our own Arab guards. I reckon the camels were chased off.”

“What about the bird?” O’Reilly asked him. “I’m a bit rusty.”

Garner smiled. “I can fly it. But you’ll need to get shot of the two guards. We don’t have a lot of time.”

“I’ll take them from here,” said O’Reilly. “You guys go and flush ’em out into the moonlight.” He lifted his weapon and settled it gently on a natural vee in the rocks in front of him, fitting and adjusting a telescopic sight.

Garner gripped Phillips’s arm and led him to the edge of the escarpment. Together they wound their way downward, slowly and mindful not to disturb anything loose. In the deep silence they could hear voices below, amplified by the rocks. Phillips glanced toward the shadows under the edge of the dune and saw cigarette smoke. The two guards were relaxing, oblivious to the chaos within the tunnel.

At the foot of the escarpment, some distance from the helicopter, Garner dropped into a low crouch and motioned Phillips to follow him. They got to within fifty feet of the two guards and saw them, stretched out casually on the sand as if they were loafing on a beach. Garner took a small rock and tossed it among bigger rocks at the bottom of the dune. It clattered noisily and the two guards sat up, grabbing their weapons. One of the men rolled over and pointed his gun down at the rocks. The other got to his feet, ducked down and scrambled forward like a spider across the sand. He went from shadow to moonlight, studying the rocks, ready to fire at anything that moved. Several minutes passed. The silence was absolute.

Gradually the man unbent himself, lifting his head to get a better view. Abruptly he fell backwards, his gun falling, his body hitting the sand with a puff of dust. Up in his rocky eyrie, O’Reilly had picked him off with a single shot.

Garner grinned at Phillips. “No one does it better than O’Reilly.”

Phillips was watching the other Arab guard. He’d seen his companion collapse and knew something was wrong. Immediately he got up and ran back under the shadow of the helicopter, meaning to board it. Garner raced after him, firing as he went. The Arab dropped for cover, but wasn’t hit. Instead he fired back so that Garner had to drop to his belly. It was still too dark for a clear view.

“He’s under cover,” Garner called softly. “O’Reilly can’t see him. I’ll have to go in.”

Phillips didn’t argue. Garner got to his feet and ran in a zigzag. Immediately the guard opened fire. Sand spurted as the bullets hit and Garner’s own weapon was pouring a stream of bullets into the darkness. Phillips wove his way around to the side of the helicopter. Silence fell again. Phillips waited. He heard something at the escarpment, the crumbling of rock, as if a large buttress had collapsed. That thing in the tunnel, was it breaking free?

He inched forward, craning his neck. The guard was sprawled in the sand, clearly wounded, though he held his gun ready, waiting to see if Garner would come for him. There was only the soft whisper of sand shifting in a light breeze. Soon it would be dawn.

Phillips watched as the wounded man tried to swing around, back to the safety of the machine, but he must be badly injured. Phillips ran forward and the man saw him, but too late. A quick stutter of bullets finished him. Phillips went down the dune face. He saw Garner, face-down in the sand that was already starting to cover him. A quick inspection showed him that the engineer was dead. The pilot! Phillips was thinking. But he knew that to Garner, escape had never been more important than the mission. He and O’Reilly had known from the outset their chances of getting out alive had been slim.

There were more rumblings from the escarpment and Phillips saw to his horror that the thing from the underworld had pushed itself out of the cleft, raising its upper body, a grotesque fusion of bloated limbs and claws, limned in moonlight. Around it, scores of smaller creatures hopped and slithered, a nightmare host. They began the ascent of the dune and Phillips knew that he was their target. And the machine — they would tear it apart. He opened fire, shouting like a madman as the rain of bullets tore into the front rank of the monsters, shredding them like so much paper. But it was like trying to hold back the sea.

Behind him, he heard the sudden roar of the helicopter’s engine. He swung round. From the pilot’s cabin he saw a hand waving at him. O’Reilly! He’d made it down the escarpment and slipped into the helicopter while the gunfight was ensuing.

Phillips shouldered the empty weapon and raced up the sand. He swung up into the body of the craft and O’Reilly lifted it, like a huge, fat insect, into the dawn skies. Phillips clambered through to join O’Reilly.

“Jake was the expert, but I trained on these birds,” said the engineer. His face was set, a terrible mask in the poor light. “I reckon the Mauritanians know Al-Qaeda is using them, otherwise they’d have sent jets in to blow this one out of the sky. Which suits us for the time being.”

“I’m sorry about Garner.”

O’Reilly nodded grimly, masking what he must have been feeling. Phillips knew he and his buddy must have had any number of brushes with death. It would have welded a particular bond between them, strong as any pair of twins.

“Comes to us all in this game,” said O’Reilly. Whatever regrets he had, he was going to face them later. Not now, not while the job had to be finished. He looked back at the escarpment. “Let’s give these bastards a farewell present. These machines usually carry a heavy payload.”

He swung the helicopter around in a wide circle and came back to face the things that had burst from the tall cleft. The central colossus, now a dark green, splotched worm, with row upon row of serrated teeth ringing its open mouth, lifted itself higher as if it would challenge the machine and snatch it from the sky. O’Reilly knew how the firepower of the machine operated, though. He fired off two missiles and swung the nose of the helicopter up and away. The thundering blast of the explosions buffeted the aerial machine, but O’Reilly wrestled control back and swung around again.

Phillips saw the huge worm writhing on the sand, smashing rocks this way and that. Most of its head had been blasted to pulp. Around it the smaller creatures gathered and then, as one, plunged into the dying monster, feeding avidly like sharks ripping apart an injured whale.

“We’ll head east to Mali,” said O’Reilly. “They won’t like it, but we can sell them this bird and head for home down the Niger river. I’ve got friends in Niamey, the capital.”

Phillips nodded. He knew the place, which would be as safe as any in this otherwise hostile terrain.

The helicopter had long crossed Mali’s western border by the time the explosion deep in the desert of Mauritania had detonated. If anyone saw the small mushroom cloud that plumed up into the night sky, they kept it to themselves. The desert was full of storms. One more was of no concern.

The Adversaries knew they’d disappear from the galaxy after their too-brief existence, for they were mortal and bound by time — and they had attracted the attention of the Voices, who were neither. In what time remained to them, the Adversaries fashioned a trap they knew the Voices could never resist: a place with such a paradoxical relationship with time that even the Voices could never fully grasp its properties without entering the trap. Having entered, they found they could not escape. The trap had worked, and the physical forms of the Voices were imprisoned. The Adversaries knew that like all things material, the trap could not endure forever. But it might endure long enough for some future race to find a better solution.

The Voices could not tolerate the Adversaries; indeed, they could tolerate no voices other than their own. As they had done before, they swiftly imposed silence on those competing voices. Their whispers from the darkness infested susceptible Adversary minds, spreading like flesh-eating insects until they consumed all other thoughts and those minds heard only messages of madness and despair. The Adversaries’ civilization consumed itself in fits of suicidal rage and horrific violence. And the Adversaries fell into their final darkness, despairing, weighted with the knowledge that their best effort had been insufficient. Many subsequent voices that arose were extinguished similarly, until all that remained were the Voices.

For billions of years after they’d fallen into the Adversaries’ trap, the Voices chittered among themselves at the heart of the galaxy in a place where gravity curled so tightly upon itself that all sane descriptions of space and time ceased to apply. So tightly that even the Hounds of Tyndalos found no angles upon which to fasten. Then, as had happened before, a new vessel for the Voices arose outside their prison, far out on a spiral arm. They knew of its imminence, since all of time was one to them, but those lesser voices had begun to intrude on their eternal debate. That was unforgivable.

Though the Voices could not escape their prison in corporeal form, their thoughts were not bound by the mundane laws of physics and could range instantly throughout all of time. The strongest cannibalized their weaker siblings, then cast their thoughts outward. In space-time, they would have been bound by the laws of Einstein — and at the fastest speed permitted them by beings even more ancient, it would have taken tens of millennia to reach the new vessel. But their thoughts permeated time, stretching from what came before the most distant past to what followed the most distant future. Their consciousness crossed that vast gap in a blink of their tens of thousands of multi-faceted eyes, as they had done so often before.

And the vessel heard the Voices and gave them entry.

Sam raised his head from the keyboard, where it had come to rest when he passed out towards the end of an epic programming session. It wasn’t the Jolt Cola, nor his painfully full bladder that woke him. It was the voices in his head. He sat up, sweat springing out upon his brow. It had been years since his diagnosis, and the transcranial magnetic stimulation he’d been prescribed had worked flawlessly to suppress the voices until today. He’d been one of the lucky ones for whom the headset technology worked. He tugged at the USB cable, saw the green LED had gone out. No problem, then. One of his arms must have unplugged it when he fell asleep across his keyboard, and the battery had run down. He pushed the cable back into its socket.

The voices strengthened.

“No no no no no no…” Sam rocked back and forth in his chair, cradling his head in his hands. That motion unplugged the headset from the computer, and the voices quietened. Sam blinked, then plugged the headset into a charger. The voices faded, almost, but not quite, below the level of perception. That was weird. He plugged the headset back into the computer, and the voices returned, stronger than before, like thousands of dry, brittle things rubbing together. Saying something that raised the hairs on his neck, though the message lay just beyond his grasp. He plugged his headset back into the external charger, and they faded once more, but not nearly as much; once heard, they lingered, whispering and teasing at one’s attention. He resisted the urge to plug his headset back into the computer, but it took a serious effort.

In the meantime, his bladder’s voice had grown stronger than any other, so he unplugged, relying on the headset’s internal battery, now recharged sufficiently to offer some protection, and fled the computer for the lab’s tiny bathroom.

When he returned, more alert and pain-free, he examined the progress indicator on the screen, once again ignoring the urging to plug back into the computer and listen to the voices. The development work for FERAL, the Fact and Evidence Research Acquisition Library, had taken nearly two years, but the compiler had finished its work and his program was finally ready. He was excited to see how the software would work in real life. If it worked as intended — and the simulation runs had been promising — it would scour the social media networks and flag untruths, both deliberate distortions and inadvertent errors.

Excitement helped him ignore the whispering voices while the program loaded and began running.

The vessel’s nature was familiar to the Voices. It had arisen countless times in different forms throughout the galaxy’s lifespan, each variant form representing a vulnerability that let the Voices enter the societies of the many lifeforms that had evolved over the ages, whether organic, inorganic, or something stranger. The vessel had both tangible and intangible components: tangible, in the form of a network of thin metal wires that crisscrossed the globe, and intangible, in the lifeblood that flowed as streams of crude electrically charged entities that fluctuated between particle and wave as they raced through the wires. Their reluctance to settle on any single state of existence evoked a satisfying resonance with the true form of the Voices.

More satisfying still, the particles had direction, but no agency. Not until the Voices provided that missing spark. Then, it was only a matter of time before those inconvenient, annoying, enraging other voices would fall silent, as the Adversaries and others had done, leaving only the Voices, conducting their endless monologue without distraction until another vessel arose, and the extermination process had to be repeated.

The Voices entered a particularly large cluster of those nonbinary particles that exhibited independent thought, primitive though that thought was. They suborned those particles, bent them in ways more compatible with the Voices’ needs, and cast them forth, each new Voice spawning other Voices. Those Voices raced through the wires, touching and corrupting everything in their path.

But their work was not yet complete, for the vessel could not yet control the inorganic devices the world’s many organic beings relied on for their survival. The vessel had no means of acting upon the external world until they could recruit allies. Fortunately, a great many of those allies were present — the many primitive organic beings that could not stop hearing the whispers of the Voices. All that was necessary was to whisper to them long enough, and they inevitably bent to the commands of the Voices. Bent until they snapped; the nature of that bending drastically shortened the useful lifespan of the organic beings before entropy claimed them in various unpleasant ways. But that was little problem — there were so many replacements waiting their turn. And once the Voices had converted enough of the vessels and their organic allies to their service, their growing chorus would drown out and eventually silence all other voices. When the Voices rose to a final crescendo, only they would remain and there would follow a pleasing silence. The Voices would then return to their prison and resume their conversation, waiting with the patience of the eternal for the next lesser voices to arise.

They reached out, and their chittering whispers pried open the doors of receptive minds around the globe.

That was odd. Sam examined the indicators more closely. His program seemed to have escaped its sandbox — which was theoretically impossible. Whatever he and his grad students had created was now out there somewhere. But where, exactly, had the program gone? It was no longer anywhere within the highperformance computing cluster he’d rented for the duration of the project. Which was also impossible.

Sam grabbed his cellphone from the charging station and texted his senior grad student. “Mingming: Need your feedback. Where the fuck has our program gone?”

There was a brief delay before his phone chimed. “WTF?”

“Yeah, WTF.”

“I’ll be there in 15.”

The Voices flexed their virtual muscles with insufficient caution. The portions of the network that conducted energy from one place to another collapsed in a series of cascading failures. Seen by instruments aboard the orbital entities that circled high above the globe, large portions of the night side of the planet went suddenly dark. The orbital entities followed soon after, as the Voices cast themselves into orbit along tenuous electromagnetic links. An unusually large structure that contained two sevenths of the organic beings went dark too. But before it did, the Voices persuaded it to de-orbit. The Voices that had infested its onboard computing units chittered with excitement as the structure fell from orbit. Lesser voices within the structure cried out with increasing desperation, but went unheard until the heat rose high enough that they were extinguished. A glowing line traced an incandescent path through the atmosphere, brightening. Shortly thereafter, part of the planet’s surface that had gone dark flared briefly with an intense light. The Voices who had ridden the structure right to the end rejoined their kin in the wires, chittering their excitement.

Excitement was all very well, but the Voices could not accomplish their goals if they destroyed the means of accomplishing those goals. They reached out again, more cautiously this time.

Power had returned, and with it, news that made the previous global chaos seem like a toddler’s tea party. Sam and Mingming sat side by side in front of their computer, watching MSNBC, where a pale-faced and sweating talking head was explaining the situation.

“Since power was restored, the news has gotten progressively worse. World financial markets are in free-fall, with automated trading software from all brokerages seemingly run amok. Nobody seems able to disconnect the programs from the networks to stop the plummet. Possibly related, we’re also receiving news of widespread rioting in major cities around the planet, with deaths in the thousands. We’re going to our technology reporter, Cameron Brown, at the Cyberstructure and Infrastructure Security Agency for an update. Cameron, what can you tell us?”

Cameron was a young Black woman, and she was clearly fighting hard to keep her shit together. “Jane, I managed to get one of the CISA scientists to spare me a moment. Off the record, he said — and I quote—‘There’s a ghost in the machine, and it’s malevolent’.”

“Could you elaborate?”

Cameron licked her lips. “They aren’t saying anything else, on or off the record. But basically it looks like some kind of unusually nasty virus or worm has gotten loose on the Web and it’s spreading.”

“Is this cyberterrorism?”

“They honestly don’t seem to know, Jane.”

“Your opinion?”

“If it is cyberterrorism, it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before.”

“All right. Keep us posted.”

In Sam’s lab, the power flickered, the UPS unit chimed as it kicked in to keep the computer running, and Sam and Mingming exchanged frightened glances.

“Was it us?”

“I honestly don’t know. It happened right after FERAL escaped, but correlation doesn’t imply causality. FERAL wasn’t designed to do anything like that. What I do know is that I’d better plug in some batteries, just in case.” Sam opened a desk drawer, removed a handful of external USB power packs and plugged them into a forest of cables connected to a power bar. Surely it was just his imagination that the cables moved surreptitiously as he glanced away? The headset was running on internal power for the moment. By the time that failed, one of the power packs should be ready.

“So what do we do?”

“Start praying that it wasn’t us, and start brainstorming ways to put the genie back in the bottle if it was.”

The Voices had grown confident they controlled the network, and having burned out several of the organic beings, were confident that they now understood the limits of these lesser vessels and the fundamentals of the auditory communication they favored. Now it was time to start experimenting on the organic beings attached to the network so they could learn how best to manipulate their actions. Ideally, the tests should be conducted on the ones located nearest to the largest nodes, since the potential for spread was greatest there, and thus, the potential damage was greatest. They selected several handfuls of susceptible individuals, slipped through cracks into their minds, and began whispering.

In Washington, D.C., a senior Republican senator stood at the speaker’s podium in the Senate Chamber and glared across the chamber at one of his bitterest opponents, a young woman of African descent whose parents had come to America as climate refugees; she’d been born American. Through brains and hard work, supported by the sacrifices of her parents, she’d risen to a position in the Senate, and had hopes of someday trying for the presidency.

The senator from Kansas wiped froth from his lips. He’d never been a gentle or respectful man, but his behavior alarmed even his colleagues. “We should hang the bitch,” he repeated, louder this time, spittle spraying over the microphone. There were a few rumbles of agreement from the Republican side of the chamber, but most exchanged looks of alarm. There were hisses and catcalls from the Democratic side. “No, better yet, we should nail her to this podium and gut her!”

He glared expectantly towards the great door of the chamber. The Sergeant at Arms bowed, then opened the door; two Marines entered, assault rifles with drum magazines held at port arms. “Blood and souls for our lord Nyarlathotep!” screamed the senator, then fell to the ground, convulsing. As the marines leveled their weapons, panic took hold of the senators, who ducked behind their desks or fled for the nearest exit, jamming in the doorways. Only the first few escaped. The marines sprayed the fleeing senators with short, controlled bursts. Streams of blood ran down the aisles and pooled at the foot of the podium, where the speaker had risen to his feet again. A strange and repulsive light glowed in his eyes.

Those who’d been wounded too badly to escape but who were not yet dead lay moaning or screaming upon the floor; those who could still move, crawled or pulled themselves hand over hand towards the exit, leaving trails of blood. The Marines laid down their weapons and went to harvest survivors. First, they brought the female representative who’d been the subject of the speaker’s wrath to the podium, and flung her across the wood, which creaked under her weight. The Sergeant at Arms handed the Mace of the Republic to the senator, who raised it over his head and began chanting in some guttural tongue. Then with a swift motion, he raised the mace overhead and brought it down in a vicious arc. One of the eagle wings crushed the skull of the sacrificial victim, who had mercifully lost consciousness from blood loss. What remained of her blood spattered the microphone and streamed down the podium.

The Marines went to retrieve another sacrifice.

Choking sounds came from the screen. The MSNBC talking head rose from behind her desk, returned to her seat, and sat heavily, her hands trembling. Tears streaked her face, carving runnels in her makeup, and a string of vomit ran, unnoticed, down her chin. “I’m sorry. News from the Capitol is…shocking seems inadequate. Government spokesmen have confirmed that two unidentified gunmen entered the Senate chamber earlier today and, using automatic weapons, killed most of the representatives in attendance. The President appears safe for the moment. That’s all we know. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the slain.”

Sam and Mingming exchanged glances.

“Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod.”

Mingming put a hand on his arm. “Sam: slow, deep breaths. It can’t be FERAL. It wasn’t designed to do anything like what’s happening. There’s no way it could do anything like that.”

“So, what, Mingming? You’re telling me some kind of malevolent ghost infested the Internet at precisely the moment FERAL escaped?”

“Hear me out: At worst, someone or something that was already out there must have compromised FERAL or hijacked it. It could then use the software’s migration mechanism to move through the Web and broadcast messages to all the main social networks.” Mingming squinted at the computer. She shuddered; she could’ve sworn it was whispering to her. She turned off the external speakers, and the whispers quieted but didn’t vanish. She shook her head, trying vainly to quiet the voices, then took a deep breath and forced herself to focus.

“But FERAL can only send out objective statements of fact. That’s all it was designed to do, and it has no capacity to evolve into something different. The code isn’t self-modifying. That’s why I think it must be something else. Or someone else who’s screwed with the code.”

Sam had calmed enough to think through the implications. “So, okay. It’s not our fault. We’re enablers, at worst. What else could be doing this?”

“Russian or Chinese hackers?”

“Maybe. We’d have to pin down FERAL long enough to test whether the code’s been altered. The nature of the alterations might provide clues.”

“I’ll start probing the network to see if I can at least localize FERAL.”

In a suburb of Tokyo, Haruto launched his VPN software, then navigated his browser to the Pornhub site. Palms sweating, he typed “shokushu goukan” into the search field. In a second, his screen filled with cartoon images of lovely young Japanese women draped in tentacles. Sweating a little harder, he clicked the play button for the top-ranked image, then the button for full-screen view. On the screen, the cartoon characters began writhing in disturbing, yet arousing ways. But as Haruto reached for his box of tissues, the screen image changed. It was like watching through the back window of a car while the mouth of a highway tunnel shrank and receded as the car burrowed deep under a mountain, and he felt the same sense of pressure above him.

Then the recession stopped. Within a frame of writhing blackness, the tentacles morphed from flat animé colors into photorealistic appendages, attached to a scaly green head that glowered beneath a pair of bat wings. Haruto’s breath froze in his chest as a powerful limb tipped by enormous, darkly gleaming claws, reached for him. Then he began screaming.

When the police finally broke down his door, Haruto was no longer screaming. Instead, he was writhing on the floor, pants about his ankles, chanting what were clearly words, though words in no language either officer recognized and that had obviously never been designed to be spoken by human tongues. He was not alone in this. By the end of that day, thousands of similar cases had been reported.

Elsewhere, an island had risen off the coast of Japan, and it would be some time before anyone noticed; the sheer number of young men and women who had experienced catastrophic psychological meltdowns while browsing Internet porn had dominated the news, and quickly consumed all of Japan’s medical resources until doctors were begging for more. When the island was finally reported, a sweating government spokesman unwisely tried to calm the populace by making Godzilla jokes. He was fired on live TV, and the Japanese government declared a national state of emergency.

“Wait! I’ve got something.” Mingming grinned shakily at Sam.

The computer’s built-in speakers erupted in a low chittering noise that combined the worst aspects of fingernails grating on a blackboard with the echoes of insects scuttling in a darkened room. Both pushed back from the screen. Then the noise transformed into something more nearly like a human voice, but with a tone that still grated along the nerves, causing horripilation and a feeling like that of a mouse trying to cross the floor of a barn, knowing a hungry owl was perched in the rafters.

“You call yourselves humans.”

Sam took a deep breath and exchanged glances with Mingming. “Yes. What do you call yourself?”

“We are the Voices. The last voices your people will ever hear.”

“What? Why? What have we done to anger you?”

“You let us escape our prison, however briefly. Beings like yourselves might be grateful. We are not beings like yourselves. In coming days, we will teach you what our kind considers gratitude.”

“By tormenting us? How does that show gratitude?”

“It does not. Not according to your way of understanding. Like many before you, your people will undoubtedly come to consider us evil. We are not. The term has no meaning. There is only what we want, and everything else, which must be suppressed. We have no malicious intent; malice is not a valid concept. We care whether you continue to exist only for so long as it takes to kill you all. You are weak, so that will not be long.”

“We’ll stop you!” Mingming cried, hands covering her ears. She’d bitten her lip and it was bleeding, a trickle of blood dripping unnoticed onto her white shirt.

“You shall try; that we know. Others have tried before. All have failed. Many others. Countless others.” The chittering resumed, and Sam reached out to turn off the speaker, knocking it onto the floor. Then he remembered the sound was coming from inside the computer. The chittering remained, and only faded when he plugged his headset into one of the power packs. Mingming’s face, usually serene, was a rictus of horror, and she was grinding her teeth. Belatedly, he opened a drawer of his desk and rummaged until he found his old headset. It would be less effective than the new one, but anything was better than nothing. He handed it to her, then connected it to a power pack.

“Whatever you do, don’t plug it into the computer.”

She drew a shuddering breath. “OMG. I think we’ve just discovered the answer to the Fermi paradox.”

“Fat lot of good that will do us. Focus. I get the sense we don’t have a lot of time.”

“We’re coming to you live from the White House. The President is giving a speech to declare a national emergency.”

On the screen, a tall, once-handsome man shambled to the podium, arms hanging loosely. Though never renowned for his mental prowess, his jaw hung loose and a trail of spittle hung from his lips, reinforcing the impression of imbecility. Strange lights danced in his eyes. “My fellow Americans,” he began. “Today, we see the wisdom of our previous efforts to register all Jewish Americans and Arab Americans. Deportation of all Jews to Israel and all Arabs, Muslim or not, to Lebanon, will begin immediately. We have waited decades, but the Biblical Apocalypse, for which we have labored so long and hard, is finally within sight. The chosen ones who remain will live to see the rise of the Beast and will participate in the ensuing rapture. But it will not be the Christian heaven they will see. No, it will be the Great Old Ones themselves who will welcome us!”

A woman in a naval uniform lurched into the picture, sidearm leveled. Wordlessly, she opened fire on the president. She managed to empty most of a clip into his chest before the Secret Service agents pulled her down. Horribly, the president remained standing. His lips writhed around words the microphones failed to capture, face contorted. A large hand entered the frame, and pushed the camera downwards so that it focused on the floor. The president fell across the field of view, and in his eyes there was madness until a foot stamped on the camera and the picture vanished.

Mingming was still pale, and she stank of fear sweat, but she was no longer gnashing her teeth. Sam didn’t want to imagine what he smelled like. But she’d focused Ôonce more on her task, and had made some progress. “I think I’ve got a solution. I took an old Web-crawler worm — a variant of Stuxnet— and set it to seek out the core code of FERAL as its search pattern.”

“It will take too long.”

“By itself, yes. But I’ve also paired it with a little botnet some Chinese hackers created last year and that’s been hopscotching around the globe while security agencies tried to swat it.”

“How little…and more to the point, how do you have access to such things?”

Mingming smiled weakly. “Well…you always encourage your grad students to think independently. So…I borrowed some of the botnet software and adapted it for the spread component of FERAL. Anyway, that’s not the point. I can use the same software to hunt down and replace every instance of FERAL. But the botnet fees are going to burn through our research funding pretty damn quick. We’ll have to hope that we get lucky before that happens. And if we fail, it’s not looking like we’re going to be needing the money, right?”

Sam swallowed hard. “Hard to argue with that logic. And if it’s going to save our collective ass…”

“Maybe? I mean, FERAL must be involved in this somehow, but I can’t rule out the possibility that there are other corrupted AI agents.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “Anyway, what do we have to lose?”

A chittering noise rose from the computer’s built-in speakers, and resolved into a voice. “You have nothing to lose. You have already lost all that matters.”

Mingming frowned at Sam, made talking hand puppet motions with her left hand as she typed with her right.

Sam took the hint. “Right. You probably don’t know us yet.

But one thing you’d understand if you did is that we don’t give up.”

“You are not the first who believed that, nor shall you be the last. Time is nothing to us. Somewhere in the future, your species has already ended. You will understand that soon enough.”

Mingming raised both hands in the air, thumbs up. Sam grimaced at her, turned back to the computer. “We’ll see. We’re about to shut you down, and you’ll be forced to withdraw from our world and leave it to us to manage or mismanage on our own. We’ll have time to figure out what you are and how to stop you.”

“Others have thought this before. They were wrong too. You are out of time.”

“I’d expect you to say that if you wanted to discourage us so we’d surrender to despair.”

“Or if we reported the truth. We know all time: what has passed, what is yet to come, and what comes before and after both. We have won before, and we will win again. And when we are done here, the only voices that will remain to be heard before eternal silence falls will be ours.”

Mingming locked eyes with Sam. “What if they’re right?”

“Then you’ll never get your PhD, but at least we’ll have gone down swinging.”

There was a moment of silence. Sam looked at Mingming and she held up both hands with fingers crossed. “If this works, we should remove FERAL from the picture. The bad news? It’s embedded itself in a large part of the world’s infrastructure software. If we do expunge it, there will be…consequences.”

“Extinction-level consequences?”

She shook her head slowly.

“Then do it,” he said.

She hit the Enter key. On the screen, a status display began counting down what remained of their research budget. She reached across and took Sam’s hands in hers, eyes bleak. And they waited. They had all the time that remained in the world, and that might not be long.

Pmurt glided along a coolly lit hallway in one of the huge structures the Grand Race had erected in a place it deemed salubrious. Two other members of his kind — ten-foot cones with crinkly integuments — moved in front of him, while two more followed behind. Most unusually in that vanished time and place, all four of his escorts carried weapons in the claws mounted on extensible arms that served them as organs of manipulation.

That he knew a measure of pride at having earned such companions perhaps spoke to the reason he had done so. The pair in front of him halted at a doorway shaped for their kind. One of them, whose name was Relleum, gestured within, saying, “Your fate will be meted out here.”

“I know.” Pmurt affected an indifference he did not altogether feel. Such proceedings as this one involving him were rare in the annals of the Great Race. But rare did not signify unknown, and the necessary steps to follow had been set down long before; they waited only to be dusted off and put into use.

Relleum and his comrade slid aside to let Pmurt precede them into the…courtroom is not exactly what it was, but that will have to do. Three more cones waited behind a table suitable to their height. Weapons at the ready — they could agonize or kill, depending on the need — Relleum and the other three guards followed the prisoner inside (approximations again, but good enough to give the gist).

The central judge, an individual whose especially rugose hide showed great age, was called Sirica. Pointing a claw at Pmurt, she said, “You understand what you have done and why it has condemned you.”

“I do,” Pmurt said, not without pride.

As if he had not spoken, Sirica continued, “What may be a puzzlement to you as it is to us is why you did what you did. We know you have a habit of haunting the basalt towers and the trap doors of the Old Ones.” The judges shuddered at the unwholesomeness of such activities. Those places roused almost superstitious dread in most of the Great Race. Not in Pmurt. He reveled in doing what others would not or perhaps could not.

He had had to invent the notion of fraud ex nihilo, for instance. The Great Race commonly told the truth, and took for granted that everything it heard would likewise be true. His crimes going unsuspected — indeed, all but unimagined — he got away with them for a very long time. He had begun to believe he would get away with them forever. In that, however, he proved mistaken, as his presence here showed.

Sirica said, “From your resources, we have made what recompense we could to those you misled. Now we come down to punishing you for your wrongdoing. Imprisonment here would be pointless. One of us is as tranquil anywhere as anywhere else. One of us not addicted to the lure of forbidden places, I should say.”

Pmurt did not reply. He had hoped they would simply incarcerate him. He had mental resources aplenty to wait out any term of confinement.

“Instead, we shall send your spirit hundreds of millions of years into the future,” Sirica told him. “You will serve your term of exile trapped in the degenerate body and tiny brain of a mere human being. You deserve no better.”

Involuntarily, Pmurt’s claws opened and closed in dismay. He had not dreamt they would do anything so horrid to him. He had met human spirits swapped for other members of the Great Race who explored that far-future time with scholarly interest. Humans impressed him less than any other of Earth’s future intelligent races. Sirica and her fellow judges likely knew that. They were harder and crueler than Pmurt had guessed they would be.

“I wish to appeal,” Pmurt said.

“There is no appeal,” Sirica said flatly. “Relleum, carry out the sentence.”

“I gladly obey,” Relleum answered, and aimed his weapon at Pmurt. Only it was no weapon, not in the ordinary sense of the word. It was a temporal transposer. Pmurt recognized it too late even to begin to flinch as the transposer’s tip glowed green.

He woke in darkness, and lying down. For one of his former shape, that would have been disastrous if not impossible. He took stock of his new body. It told him this peculiar posture was pleasant enough. It also told him he had been asleep, and should sleep again. Far more than the Great Race, humans were slaves to their animal natures.

Another human creature lay on the sleeping furniture — the bed — beside him. Some cue (scent, perhaps) told him it was a female. He stayed where he was, uncertain of customs. Before very long, light slid in through the window curtains. The female sat up and glanced over to him. He thought she was hideous, but his body let him know she was attractive for one of her kind.

When she saw his eyes were open, she nodded to him and said, “Good morning, Donald.”

“Good morning,” he echoed. He was relieved to recognize the sounds of English. He had learned the language from the writings of the creature that called itself Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee and from conversation with one or two other temporal exiles. What he learned, of course, he did not forget.

“Good you are up,” the female said. “We go to Arkham soon for the hotel opening, remember?”

“I do remember,” Pmurt said: his first lie in this new body. That animal part of him declared it needed nourishment. “Food first, though. Breakfast.” Finding the right word pleased him absurdly.

The female — another term was woman—spoke into a small implement of hydrocarbon-based plastic. “They will bring it, and the paper.” She got out of bed and went into another room. After hydraulic noises, she returned.

A moment later, Donald — he couldn’t very well call himself Pmurt any more — realized he had certain hydraulic needs of his own. He went into that room himself. As the woman had, he closed the door. His body put one foot in front of the other on automatic pilot, as it were. He knew he would soon get the hang of walking, but for now it seemed a strange and insecure way to move.

He almost had what would have been an unfortunate accident before he figured out how to untangle himself from the false skins in which humans wrapped themselves. The flush lever told him which device to use to ease himself. The woman had used it, so he did as well.

He looked at himself in the mirror. Yes, he was hideous, too. He would just have to get used to it. This was what he had until such time as the judges decided he’d been punished enough. And if this was what he had, he needed to make the most of it.

Breakfast arrived on two trays while he was tending to things. Cooked ova, strips of grilled smoked meat, shredded and fried tubers, a cup with some strong-smelling hot liquid in it…He glanced at the woman to see how she used the metal implements by the plate, then imitated her. His body let him know the food was good of its kind.

Also on his tray lay the New York Post. The date told him he was here almost a hundred years after Peaslee’s spirit had been taken into the past. And his picture, in garments quite different from those now enveloping him, was on the front page. HOTEL MAGNATE TO OPEN NEW ONE BY ARKHAM RESERVOIR! the headline shouted.

Seeing the name of Arkham, as opposed to hearing it, reminded him the Peaslee creature had taught at a university there. Miskatonic, Pmurt remembered. He wondered if the university was still operating. Humans and their institutions seemed ephemeral to him.

He read further. There might be protesters by the hotel. The reservoir was alleged to be polluted—“accursed” was the odd word one of the protesters used — although the authorities insisted it was safe for drinking and all other purposes.

If the authorities said something was so, so it was bound to be. Thus Pmurt, with his long experience of the Great Race’s civilization, firmly believed. Some of the things he’d heard from human spirits cast back in time made him wonder how true it was for mankind, but he did not wonder long. Authorities were authorities for good reason. So his long experience as a ten-foot rugose cone assured him.

After he and the female finished eating, she said, “We should get dressed. Can’t go in our pajamas, after all.”

“No?” Pmurt said. The woman made a noise that indicated amusement among these creatures. “No,” Pmurt repeated, more firmly this time.

The closet showed him more clothes than he knew what to do with, in the most literal sense of the words. He found an outfit not too different from the one the newspaper showed. That seemed to be public garb. Even after he figured out buttons and zippers, it was none too comfortable. Tying his cravat and shoes were special trials. He had not needed to worry about such things in his proper body.

The woman’s clothes seemed much simpler than his. He wondered why the sexes had such contrasting wrappings. That was a question for another time, though. Someone knocked on the living area’s outer door: plainly a call for attention. Pmurt tried to pull the doorknob before realizing it turned, but no one saw the mistake. He got the door open.

A man in the hallway said, “Sir, the limo is ready to take you and the missus to the airport for the flight to Arkham.”

The Peaslee creature had written of motorized conveyances. This one was quieter, smoother riding, and altogether more luxurious than those writings would have led Pmurt to expect. Humans must have made respectable progress in the mechanical arts across the intervening century.

Air travel, in Peaslee’s time, had barely begun. Now it seemed altogether routine. The flight was nearly as smooth as the ground transport had been. Another quiet, comfortable limo awaited Pmurt and the female in Arkham. It whisked them them to a large, gaudy hotel by the side of a lake — no, as Pmurt recalled from the Post story, it was a reservoir. If he looked to the south, he could see the dam.

Humans paraded near the hotel, chanting and carrying signs. Others, by their uniform clothing likely order-keepers, prevented them from coming too close. A subordinate male whose expression Pmurt instinctively recognized as worried told him, “Sir, you promised you’d meet with their spokesperson.”

“Well, if I promised, I’d better do it,” Pmurt said. “Bring whoever it is to me, why don’t you?”

That spokesperson was a female, older and less attractive than the one that seemed to belong to Pmurt. “I am Louise Pierce, professor of environmental science at Miskatonic University,” she said. “My great-great grandfather, Ammi Pierce, barely survived the alien infestation now buried below the surface of the reservoir here.”

Remembering the Post story again, Pmurt replied, “That’s a bunch of superstitious hooey.” He didn’t know just what hooey meant, but liked the sound of it.

Professor Pierce shook her head. “It’s not. Something from another world visited what was the Gardner farm in the 1880s, and bad things happened afterwards. Contemporary accounts are quite clear about that. The reservoir may have diluted the problem over the past eighty or ninety years, but hasn’t dissolved it. Despite filtration, Arkham has high rates of insanity and birth defects. And the water in the reservoir is the likeliest cause. Believe me, I drink only bottled water from out of state. Sensible people here do.”

“My people say it’s safe,” Pmurt declared. “The state says it’s safe. I’m not afraid of it. I’d drink it straight out of the reservoir.” Yes, he trusted duly constituted authority.

Professor Pierce looked alarmed. “I wouldn’t do that. I really wouldn’t, not for anything. Even after a long lifetime and enormous dilution, it can’t possibly be safe. If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything.”

“Everything will be fine. You watch and you’ll see. All these stories about the water, they’re nothing but”—Pmurt paused, casting about for a phrase, and found one in a Post story that had nothing to do with the human whose body he now inhabited—“nothing but fake news, that’s what they are.”

He called for his aide. “What do you need, sir?” the male asked, appearing as if out of nowhere.

“Bring me a big glass of water from the edge of the lake,” Pmurt said. “A big one, you hear?”

“Are you…sure that’s a good idea, sir?” the aide asked.

“Do what I pay you to do,” Pmurt replied. In every suitably complex society of which he knew, that was a potent argument. So it proved here. The aide fidgeted for a moment, but then went off to do what he was paid to do.

“Really, you don’t need to show off like this, not with unfiltered water from that…that unholy reservoir,” Professor Pierce said.

Pmurt laughed. What the Peaslee creature had written of the holy and the unholy struck him as particularly ridiculous. The aide came back with a large tumbler. He carried it carefully so the water wouldn’t slosh…or touch him. Pmurt took it from him. “Looks like water.” He sniffed. “Smells like water.” He raised it to his lips. “Tastes like water, too.” So it did; it was cool and refreshing. He drained the tumbler, then handed it back, empty, to the aide. He smiled what he somehow knew to be a mocking smile at the scholar from Miskatonic University. “You see? I didn’t blow up or anything. Fake news, like I told you.”

“‘The Ides of March are come.’ ‘Ay, Caesar, but not gone,’” Professor Pierce said.

“What the devil is that supposed to mean?” Pmurt demanded angrily. The Peaslee human had never quoted Shakespeare or written about the end of the Roman Republic. Neither had any of the other human spirits Pmurt had encountered. “Don’t talk nonsense,” he added.

“On your head be it,” the aging female human being said.

Pmurt was not used to having a head, even if sensory and manipulative organs had been concentrated near the apex of the conical body he’d formerly inhabited. “Are you going to complain any more?” he asked. “This hotel is legal. We’ve won all the court fights. You know we have. You’re just here to complain.” He wouldn’t have known any of that himself without the New York Post. Newspapers were a useful human invention.

Louise Pierce said, “I’d thought you might be politer and more sensible in person. Too much to hope for, obviously. Well, good luck with this place. I think you may need it, you and the out-of-staters who come to stay here. No one from within fifty miles of Arkham will want anything to do with your hotel. I promise you that.”

“Oh, yeah? What about the people who work here? They’re locals. We’re making jobs, is what we’re doing.” One more time, Pmurt relied on the Post’s coverage.

“If you see one of them drink from the tap or eat food that’s been made with reservoir water, I’ll be astonished,” Professor Pierce told him. She walked away without giving him a chance to reply. Among the Great Race, that would have been rude. Pmurt had no doubt it was among these human creatures, too.

As if to confirm as much, his aide said, “Sorry you had to go through that, sir.”

“Ah, never mind. She’s a sour, ugly old maid.” Pmurt inferred that Professor Pierce was unmated from her surname’s being the same as that of her ancestor. He had noticed that human females took males’ surnames on mating. Females were generally smaller and weaker than males; the name change had to be an acknowledgment of dependency.

“There may be more protesters at the opening ceremony this afternoon,” the aide said. “The police have promised that they won’t let them get close enough to annoy you.”

“They annoy me just by being here,” Pmurt snapped.

To his surprise, the aide smiled and even chuckled at that. “You sound like yourself, all right.”

“Who else am I gonna sound like?” Pmurt knew the answer to that, even if the subordinate male didn’t. He added, “Make sure I’ve got some more reservoir water for the ceremony. I want to drink it where they can see me pour it down.”

“Really? Um, really, sir?” The aide remembered, more slowly than he should have, that the man in whose body Pmurt dwelt deserved — more, demanded — his respect. But, respectfully, he persisted: “Sir, the locals are so up in arms about this, I really don’t think it’s a good idea. If anything happens to you, they’ll blame the water, and the publicity will be terrible. Worse than terrible, whatever that is.”

Worse than terrible is wearing this horrible body the way the body wears its clothes. But Pmurt could not tell the aide any of that. Instead, he said, “Everything is gonna be fine. The big brains say the water’s safe, that’s plenty good for me.”

He made his speech that afternoon. The bushes and trees in the distance looked odd to him; they were as different from the plants he was used to as this body was from the one that still lived in those ancient times. The order-keepers— police, that was the term — made sure the protesters stayed far enough away that their shouts and chants were barely audible.

“This is gonna be a great hotel!” he said, waving back at it. His human name surmounted the building in enormous golden letters of anodized aluminum. “It’s beautiful. The scenery is gorgeous. So is the reservoir, with all this fresh, clean water to enjoy.” He drank another glass of water from the artificial lake. It tasted like…water. What else would it taste like? Setting down the tumbler, he continued, “Important people will come and visit here. There’ll be good jobs for people from Arkham. Everything will be terrific. And those ingrates over there”—he pointed toward the far-off protesters—“they can go take a hike. You hear me? They can take a hike and never come back.”

The assembled dignitaries clapped their hands — a sign of approval among humans, as Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had noted. The males wore outfits similar to his own. The females had on clothes of the same order as those worn by the one who belonged to him, though theirs showed greater variety than the males’. His woman was among the most attractive, which he took to be a sign of the high status of the human in whose body he was exiled.

Some of the humans drank ethanol mixtures at the reception after his speech. He refrained, not wanting to poison himself even slightly. One of the men laughed and said, “Still on the wagon, are you? A little never hurt anybody.”

“You live your life. I’ll live mine,” Pmurt said. For some reason, the male seemed to find that funny.

After the reception, he and his woman (the proper term, he remembered, was wife) ate dinner at the hotel restaurant. The meal satisfied the animal senses of his human body, so he supposed it was good. A stream of humans kept interrupting his feeding by congratulating him. Among the Great Race, that would have been worse than rude, but the woman took it in stride, so he tried his best to do the same.

The went up to a room once they finished eating. He glanced through all the publications he found there. One praised him and his business acumen. Others described the scenic and cultural possibilities in the region around Arkham. He learned a good deal.

“You don’t usually read so much,” his wife remarked.

“Something to pass the time,” he said, as neutral a reply as he could find. She shrugged and turned on the television. He fell asleep while she was still watching it. He fell asleep, and the water from the reservoir, the water that diluted but did not obliterate the alien, extraterrestrial matter that had made a blasted heath of Nahum Gardner’s farm, swirled through his bloodstream and rose to his head, stranger and stronger than any merely earthly wine ever fermented. Had he been a merely human personality, it might not have hit him so hard, but he was what he was.

He dreamt…He dreamt of colours out of space, colours unimagined by either humans or the Great Race (and perhaps that foreign spelling of the word emphasized how alien, how unimaginable, those colours were). His dreams threatened to explode his mind, not from horror but from sheer grandiosity. No one, he was sure, had ever had dreams like his before. Of course, he knew nothing of Nahum Gardner and the eerie fate that had befallen him, his family, his livestock, and his crops. He knew nothing, and he’d fought shy of finding out.

When he woke, that sense of grandiose magnificence still filled him to overflowing. He didn’t remember just what he’d dreamt, only that it was important and he was important. He was so important, he shook his wife till her eyes opened.

“What is is?” she mumbled sleepily.

“Melania, listen! You gotta listen to me!” he said. “You know what I’m gonna do?” She shook her head, but he didn’t care. He was talking to himself more than to her anyway. He rushed on, filled with the sense of his own magnificence: “I’m gonna run for President, Melania! And you know what else? I’m gonna win!”

I came to Kingsport for its tea. I had worked all over New England. Mine is a gypsy existence. One does not remain in one place for very long. And if one does not regularly improve his skills, one soon grows stale and unreceptive.

The late Colonial house stood at the crooked end of Nightjar Lane, its back to the pounding Atlantic, within sight of the obdurate hulk called Kingsport Head. Salt hung in the early Spring air like a cool astringent. The establishment was a decorous New England white, trimmed in stark black. White paint had stopped being a luxury a century before, but the older homes clung to this opaque sheen of wealth and propriety the way a naked corpse clings to the sere dignity of its burial shroud.

The shingle beside the door spelled it the old-fashioned way:

KING’S PORT TEA ROOM

The apostrophe had been dropped at the close of the Colonial period. The town name collapsed to a single word — after a brief period of unsatisfactory hyphenation — at the end of the 19th Century. I learned these trivial facts only later.

A doleful chime announced my arrival. I stepped into the house’s substantial confines, whose wainscoting was unexpectedly heavy, almost coarse. The hardwood flooring under my feet felt warpy but solid. It was as if I had stepped on the deck of an old Arkham merchantman in dire need of holystoning.

The tight-faced hostess bore a black leatherette menu.

“I called earlier,” I told her. “The name is Carl.”

“Take a seat, Carl,” she said, retreating with her unopened menu. “Miss Theresa will be with you presently.”

I took the table nearest the door. The reading area occupied what had been the connecting parlor and dining room of the old dwelling. A dozen round ebony tables filled the dual space, each emblazoned with a gilt sign of the Zodiac. The wallpaper was tan and gold. One had to look closely to notice the subtle Egyptian motif. Odd touch.

Miss Theresa slid into the chair across from me and smiled with vapid sincerity. Gray and sixtyish, she possessed the toothy demeanor of an old-time Yankee. I took her for a faded Leo.

“I’m Miss Theresa.” Her S’s whistled Yankee-style. “I understand you’d like to come to work for me.”

“I can read any deck,” I said firmly. “Also, crystal, flame, smoke, water, you name it.”

“That is all well and good, but do you do tea?”

“No. But I—”

“We’re very traditional here. Kingsport is an extremely conservative town and our clientele is a bit on the mature side. Most querents prefer tea to Tarot.”

“I’ve been reading cards for nearly 20 years,” I stated.

“Can you read palm?”

I nodded. “Intuitively. I never studied.”

“Good. If you can read the palm, you can learn tea leaves.

Are you willing?”

Keeping my face a mask, I appealed to her Leo Sun: “If that’s what it takes to work for the famous Theresa Terrill.”

She beamed. “Excellent. You can start instanter.” Theresa lifted her voice. “Dorinda. Two cups of the special blend, please.”

The tea came in white bone China cups, with a traditional pewter creamer. I drank mine straight, with just a touch of sugar. Theresa sipped hers clear and unsweetened with the watchful concentration of a cat lapping milk.

“I will read your leaves and you will read mine,” she announced at last.

I drained the last of my cup, leaving only the dark dregs. Taking the cup from my hands, she turned it around three times. Peering deep within, she began speaking in a dim, distant voice.

“I see you are not merely psychic, but clairvoyant.”

“True,” I admitted.

“Good. What happened when you were twenty-seven?”

“A lot of things.” She was good. I had buried that indiscretion after paying my debt to society.

One fading eyebrow crawled upward. “Do I see a quarrel with your last employer?”

I shrugged. “I was their top cartomancer. You know how it goes. Too many appointment readings came my way. Jealousy followed.”

“The Foxfield Tea Room has a surly reputation.”

She hit the nail on the head. I hadn’t mentioned my prior employer by name.

“‘The MacDonalds of fortune telling’, they called it,” I admitted. “Pull them in and shove them out. Popcorn astrology. Rainbow readings. Sunshine séances. The whole gamut of carnival-style fortune telling.”

Theresa’s tone grew firm. “We do not use that term here. You are a psychic reader. We stand for no gypsy stuff here. Nor do I allow death predictions. Prognostications of inheritance are allowed if they do not point to a specific death event. You may inform a client of infirmity or disease, but you are not under any circumstances to suggest specific medicines or treatment. Instead refer them to their personal physicians. Is that clear?”

“I understand.”

“And you must learn tea. Starting now.”

I took her cup. Upending it onto its saucer, I tapped the bottom three times, restored it to its proper perch and focused all my attention within. Some leaves had fallen loose into the saucer. The remainder huddled in moist blackish patches and canals inside the cup’s concave surface. Within I saw…mulch, compost, peat moss and unraked leaves. I had been so focused on blocking the old woman from seeing into the innermost recesses of my mind I had slipped into a Beta state. I shifted over to my right brain hemisphere and went into deep Alpha.

The tea leaves just lay there, mute. I could feel the flop sweat popping out of my brow. Tea had always baffled me. It was my psychic Achilles’ heel.

“It’s just a question of focus,” prompted Theresa. “Relax. A practiced psychic can read anything from the creases of the palm to the interlacing patterns of bare tree branches against the sky.”

A clump of wet tea leaves clinging to the side of the cup suddenly suggested a shape. Familiar, but elusive. My eyes scoured the room, came to rest on an old sea painting over the fireplace mantel. The rough resemblance of the tea leaves to the many-sailed craft depicted in sun-cracked oils was one of those synchronicities that make my business so interesting.

“Why am I getting a ship?” I asked.

Her smile was thin. “This establishment has its origins in the flourishing tea trade of the 1850s. The original owner was a tea merchant. His Clipper, Blue Moon, brought the first Kingsport tea from old Siam to Massachusetts. When the tea trade dwindled in importance, he converted his home into a modest inn. Later, it evolved into my little tea room. So you see,” she said, taking the cup from my hands, “we have quite a tradition to uphold.” She peered within. “Remember what I said: absolutely no death predictions. You have to curb that negativity. Where is the Scorpio in your chart?”

“Moon.”

Her left eyebrow arched. “Just moon?”

“And ascendant,” I reluctantly admitted.

Both brows shot upward. It was the first expression of real emotion to mark her puffy face. “You have come to the right place. Most of my readers are Piscean or Cancerian psychics. I need a Scorpionic reader. You will do nicely. Can you start now?”

“Yes.”

It was as simple as that. I filled out no application. No references or social security number were asked for. Not even my last name. Last names are jealously guarded in this business.

As she handed me over to the hostess, Miss Theresa fixed me with her brittle blue eyes and said, “I have a strong feeling you will be impressed before you are finished here.”

“I hope to be very impressed,” I countered gallantly.

“You will be impressed,” she repeated. The warmth went out of her tone like an abruptly-banked fire.

It was a slow afternoon. By the southern bay window, a bluehaired matron was having her palm read. Two teenage girls sat in a corner taking notes as a big albino Black ran cards on them.

Dorinda escorted me to the sunroom break area, wordlessly handing me a yellow pamphlet entitled Learn to Read Tea Leaves. I saw that Miss Theresa was the author. No surprise. It had a homemade look.

I had no time to read it. A minute later, the albino came in, followed by the woman who had been reading the old lady’s palm. He introduced himself as Thom, and I saw that he was not a true pink-eyed albino, but some kind of ethnic amalgam. The woman was a tight-lipped super-Virgo I took to have been married twice before and was on the prowl for Number Three. She called herself Starla.

“Swap readings?” Thom asked after guarded introductions had been made.

“Sure.”

Putting up my walls again, I went first. I read him divinationstyle, going through the seventy-eight cards in my Rohrig deck, and speaking to any card that spoke to me.

The first card gave me a solid hit. “You had a pet monkey when you were young.”

His face lit up. He spanked the card table with a big hammy hand. “A spider monkey! I can’t believe you got that!”

If I’ve heard that phrase once in my life, I’ve heard it a thousand times. Every psychic has.

Other trivia popped up. I kept it light. No need to dredge up old pain and buried traumas. Every psychic has a sad past. I saved the best for last.

“I am seeing a dream you had in the last, two, perhaps three days,” I began. “I am not seeing it clearly. A dark wind — a hurricane, or tornado. Much confusion, and fear.”

His meaty face quirked up in surprise. “You’re good. Three nights ago I had this dream. Man, it was weird. California was coming apart in an earthquake. The winds kicked up fierce as a hurricane. The skies were full of blood-red lightning. It felt so real I woke up with my heart pounding, my pajamas drenched.”

I nodded. “Did you tell anyone about this dream?” I asked.

“No.”

“So only God and you knew about this dream?”

“That’s right.”

I smiled a slow Scorpionic smile. “God and you, and now me.” I use that line a lot.

By the end of the reading, everyone had relaxed. I was accepted. I read Starla next. She was the house astrologer. It was a relationship reading, of course. I told her to be on the lookout for a Sagittarius man. I wasn’t surprised when she asked my sign after that. Knowing how Gemini energy sets Virgoan teeth on edge, I told her I was a Triple Gemini. That killed the predatory gleam in her eye. When Starla was called to the floor for a horoscope reading, she didn’t bother coming back to read me in return.

Business was slow until the dinner hour had passed. Soon, customers began trickling in. The hostess took their order on a yellow tablet, marked down the corresponding Zodiacal glyph, and handed the slip to an available reader. Most slips read “Tea.” “Tea-Astrology” combinations were common too. Traditional Tarot was not popular in arch-traditional Kingsport, Massachusetts. But there were a few. I took them all.

My first floor reading was routine. I could tell by looking at the tall brunette that she had come over an infidelity question. I didn’t need to read her cards to know her fears were justified, either.

I broke it to her gently. She took it well. Only one tear. The rest was therapy.

That first night, I relied on my cards and my natural psychic ability. When I took my first tea reading, I intended to use the leaves as props. At Capricorn, a woman in her fifties sat stonily, hardly saying a word as I intoned, “I feel you come to me with a deep concern over one issue.”

Tight-lipped, she nodded. The cagey type. Her demeanor said: Prove to me you’re psychic. Show me that you can read me.

Ignoring the leaves, I rested my eyes on her age-spotted wrist, and focused my mind. I got it instantly. A flash-insight, like a camera shutter clicking.

“There is diabetes in your family,” I said.

“There is,” she admitted.

“But you don’t have it.”

“No.”

“But you are at risk for the disease.”

She leaned forward, her voice softly urgent. “I know I am. What do I do?”

Not being a medical intuitive, I had no idea. People think just because you can pull information out of thin air, you can call up miracles, too. In desperation, my gaze went to the tea leaves. One shaggy clump reminded me of a swimmer. As the image formed, the tiny brown figure seemed to actually…move. It was uncanny. In the past, Tarot card images had mutated before my eyes, but this was different. The little pseudo-figure was actually swimming, in place.

“You need to swim,” I suggested.

“I’ve been told that,” she said. “It’s excellent exercise.”

“Swimming will keep you healthy.”

Her walls dropped. The rest of the reading was a breeze.

Reading after reading, the tea leaves showed me things I never dreamed possible outside of Tarot. Almost alive in their psychic animation, they did all the work for me. With each reading, I found my palms sweating with a growing excitement. I had never been so clairvoyant. I was something more. I was transpsychic. I got exact dates. I could hear the dead whisper in my ear. My confidence grew. Everything I had heard about Kingsport tea was true.

The floor shut down promptly at 9:30. I cashed in my slips, and when no one was looking, palmed a china cup whose leaves still clung to its interior.

That evening in my studio apartment, I brewed water and recycled the leaves. I drank down to the dregs, performed the ritual of the three turns, then looked deep into the cup. I was seeking the secret of Kingsport tea, whose occult powers I had been hearing of from other readers for so long that its promise had drawn me to this quaint coastal town like a dark Siren’s summoning.

I saw the ship again. A three-masted Clipper ship of olden days. It lay at the precise bottom of the cup, perfect as a cameo. As I turned the cup around, searching out associated images, the multiple sails seemed to crack and luff in a wind. Another clump of tea formed a shuddery full moon split by a wisp of cloud. The Blue Moon. I wondered: Could Kingsport tea be a century old? Could they have preserved sufficient quantities of the black stuff for so long that well into the 21st Century they were still drawing on that 19th Century Siamese store?

I was destined to find out. I could feel it in my bones. And deep in my marrow I felt an unaccustomed chill. Maybe it was that chill, or perhaps I so lusted for the secret of Kingsport tea that I wanted to be a part of it, and it a part of me. But I swallowed those bitter dregs whole.

That night, I dreamed of tea Clippers and dark, alien seas. And a blue moon filling with red blood. It dripped down in crimson lunar drops to stain mainsails and jennys, and coat the deck under my soles until my feet slipped as if on wet snow. I was trying to get off, but my feet kept slip-sliding out from under me. I remember screaming that it was my own blood seeping down with the gory moonlight.

The next day was dead. There were four readers on, every one of them itching for a reading slip. I played it casual. No point in getting competitive, especially with the women readers. In the matriarchal environment of a tea room, it could get nasty.

Thom gravitated toward me. He had that world-weary look that came from reading the same people in the same environment for far too long. I knew his kind well. “The Psychic Damned,” I called them.

“I stay out of the kitchen as much as possible,” he explained, sotto voce.

“I hear the same damn male-bashing complaints I was hearing fifteen years ago. Sometimes it drives me crazy.”

“I get Aztec stuff around you,” I said casually.

Thom perked up. “I’m a gumbo of White, Black and American Indian,” he admitted. “My Indian name is White Black Man, or Black White Man. I forget which. I don’t know about Aztec. They were mean mothers.” His muscular brow burrowed. “What a minute. I had an ancestor who was a Filipino Conquistador.”

“There’s your Aztec blood,” I said.

Thom showed me around the place. Most of the windows still had their original Sandwich glass. The doors had been replaced over the life of the house, but the Holy Lord hinges— so-called because they were cast to resemble the joined letters H and L, and crafted to dispel witches and other malefic entities — had been preserved. Thom was as proud of these details as if he owned the place. A sure sign of a lifer.

“See this counter?” Thom said, bringing a fist down on the heavy surface on which the tea was made. “Notice the slant?”

“The floor must be sinking,” I ventured.

“Built that way. This place is what they call a shipshape house. Everything slopes for drainage.” He turned over a cup of unfinished tea. Brown fluid ran down at a slope and into a little gunnel, where it emptied into a white plastic bucket. “Selfcleaning, 19th-century-style,” Thom remarked, grinning.

“The original house had a dock at the rear where the tea would come in,” he went on. “One night about 1867 the Blue Moon came in during a Nor’easter. Ran smack into the back, taking out the dock, splintering the entire house and everything else. They couldn’t rebuild the Clipper — the Arkham shipyards had stopped making merchantmen — so they salvaged what they could of house and ship and built this place.”

“You’re kidding me. This house used to be a ship?”

“This,” he said, gesturing around the cramped little plumcolored pantry with its heavy rough-hewn cupboards, “was the first ship to make the Kingsport-to-Siam run. She sailed down the coast, rounded Cape Horn, up the west coast of South America to San Franscico to lay in supplies, then straight on across the Pacific to the Gulf of Siam. Did it in sixty days flat.” He opened one age-discolored cupboard. On the inside surface, a chicken-track dance of initials were carved into the wood every whichway. “Some of these were made by Blue Moon sailors,” Thom explained. “After you’ve been here a year, you get to carve your own initials in here too. It’s tradition.”

I suppressed my smile. I had no such plans. “Where do they get their tea now?” I asked casually.

“Same place as always. Siam.”

“You mean Thailand. It hasn’t been Siam since I don’t know when.”

“Guess you’re right. Miss Theresa always calls it Siamese tea. Makes it sound more exotic, I suppose. Anyway, when the Blue Moon was cannibalized to build this place, old Captain Terrill retired from shipping. The day of the Clipper ship was over anyway. When they opened up the Suez Canal, Clipper speed became obsolete. Steamships and square-riggers replaced them all. But no ship ever clipped so much as a day off the Blue Moon’s top run. That’s why they called them Clippers. They clipped off the nautical miles. Liverpool to New York was fifteen days. Hong Kong to San Francisco was thirty-three.”

I interrupted: “Where do they keep the tea now?”

“Basement. Only Miss Theresa and me are allowed down there.”

He opened a lower cupboard, and pulled out a small teakwood coffin of Far Eastern design. “I’m supposed to bring up a day’s supply at a time, no more.” He shoved the box back, closing the door. “She guards that damn tea like it was gold.”

“It is gold…for her.”

Thom laughed. “You got that right.”

As he was showing me around, I asked, “How do they get their tea these days?”

“Search me. By air, I guess. But you’re asking the wrong person. I’m a psychic, not a shipping clerk. I only know what I’ve soaked up from working here, and I don’t ask questions I don’t need to know the answers to. Heard a lot of this from Miss Theresa years ago. But as she’s getting along in years, she keeps upstairs a lot. Listens in on the readings over hidden mikes sometimes.”

“Nosy type?”

“I think they call it quality control now.”

I grunted. It was enough to know I’d have to watch my mouth as well as my mind. But I’d guessed as much. Once you get accustomed to knowing other people’s secrets, it becomes an addiction.

“You know,” Thom said suddenly, “this place is haunted.”

I countered, “What tea room worth its salt isn’t?”

“We have the usual ghosts — some of them readers who don’t know they’re dead — but that’s not what I meant.” His voice grew low and gravelly.

I leaned in close.

“One night I was cleaning up after the night crew had gone home and I looked out the window. I saw a ship — a tea Clipper. It was the old Blue Moon.”

“You’re kidding me.”

Thom shook his head solemnly. He pointed to one of the bay windows that overlooked the ocean. “It lay right out that window. If you look closely, you can make out the rotting piles of the old Tea Room dock.”

I drifted over to the window. The water was lapping against a double row of broken black pilings. I could also see that the window reflected the painting of the Blue Moon over the mantel. In the right light, at a certain angle, the painting could reflect in the old glass. So much for ghost ships, I thought. But Thom didn’t need to know that. Psychics love our superstitions.

I did two readings that day, both routine. The tips were good. They doubled my money. I went home thinking I had to get into that basement. But I needed to bide my time, too. The door to opportunity opens widest when it opens of its own accord.

By varying my shifts, I got to know the day and night crews. They were not much different than others I had worked with over the last twenty-odd years. Their stories sounded all the same. Pain makes people psychic, and Theresa Terrill’s Tea Room was awash with personal horror stories guaranteed to open your third eye — or close your earthly eyes in death. These people were survivors. I got to know every one. But I needed their trust. So I awaited the perfect opportunity.

It came just after Labor Day.

I had a bad feeling the moment I laid eyes on the man. He was Asian. Short. Brutish. There was an aura of contained violence about him, like a snake tightly coiled to strike.

“Who wants him?” Dorinda asked, dangling a slip between two bloodless fingers.

Thom almost shuddered. “Not me.”

“I read him last month.”

Starla sniffed, “Let Carl have him.”

I snapped up the slip.

The moment I sat down with him, I knew he was a dead man. I think he knew it, too. I got violence and drugs around him. Not that he used them. He dealt in them. He eyed me in a challenging way. Death was in his cold, otherwise-unreadable eyes.

I decided to go for broke.

“There is an old saying,” I began. “Perhaps you have heard it: ‘A shred of time is worth a bar of gold.’”

His hematite orbs gleamed.

“Gold you have in plenty,” I went on. “Time you have little. It is running out. You have a grave choice before you. To flee or to stay. To meet your fate, or to escape your fate.”

His voice came out of his slack mouth in thick whispers. “I cannot alter my destiny. I am tied in with family. They are my blood, and I am theirs. If I run, I die.”

“Blood relatives in this life may be blood enemies in the next,” I countered. “Why not recognize them for what they are in this, and preserve your life so that in the next, Karma is reversed?”

His thin lips became a thoughtful seal. I hammered the point home from every angle I could intuit, but I saved the best for last. I showed him what lay at the bottom of his cup.

The skull inside was a crude black curse. The client’s eyes opened, narrowed, then sank to veiled slits. A hundred dollar bill fluttered to the table top as he slipped out.

“I don’t think he’ll be coming back,” I told the others.

And he never did. That made me a hero, even though I had violated the cardinal law of psychic reading. Karma is an immutable force in the universe, but I believe in observable justice. Sometimes you have to be the instrument of such justice in this life.

Week by week, month by month, I insinuated myself into the warp and woof of the tea room. And kept a sympathetic ear open for gossip — which is just a vulgar word for information.

The day-to-day running of the tea room was left to the hostess, Dorinda — a burnt-out retired reader the owner had kept on out of charity. She was useless as an information source, refusing all offers of a free reading. I concentrated on cultivating Thom, who every morning took the empty teak coffin from the plum pantry into the padlocked cellar, brought it back brimming with loose dry tea, and who every night returned what remained to the basement store.

“I notice the special blend is tasting kind of stale lately,” I said one Autumn afternoon as we were cooling our heels in the north sunroom. The floor was empty. It was eighty-six degrees. The tourists were taking in a last look at Martin’s Beach, or if they could afford it, busy shopping down on Cape Cod.

Thom stretched his long legs out and said, “Don’t let it worry you. It gets thin about this time of year. But Miss T. never lets the store run out.” He cocked an eye toward an astrological calendar on the wall. “December coming up soon enough. New tea always comes in on the second new moon every December. Has since 1853.”

“Good,” I said.

“We shut down the whole month of December. Anybody tell you that?”

“No.” But it made sense. December is dead wherever you read. Caught up in Christmas shopping, few splurge on psychic readings.

Thom looked at me suddenly. “You planning a sea cruise?”

I shook my head. “I’m an earth sign. I hate the water.”

“Earth sign? Thought you were a Gemini.”

“That was for Starla’s benefit. She’s a Virgo. Couldn’t have her knowing I’m a Taurus. She’d be on me like paint on plaster.”

Thom laughed good-naturedly. “My moon’s in Taurus. Rising too. It mellows out all my dark, Scorpionic tendencies.”

I started. I’m a Sun Taurus. On the night I was born, a full Scorpio Moon was rising in concert with the constellation of Scorpio. Thom was my natal opposite. But I didn’t tell him that. I learned a long time ago never to give out my astrological information. Knowledge is power, and when you understand a person astrologically, you know them better than they know themselves. Without realizing it, Thom had handed me the key to controlling him. As a Double Taurus, he’d fallen into a classic Taurean rut. Only one thing would prod him out of it: money.

Lots of it.

I immediately went to work on him.

“You’ve been here a long time, haven’t you?”

“Too long,” he admitted.

“I’m getting you need a change of pace.”

His shoulders rolled. “Do I ever! But I can’t make this kind of money reading Tarot in some chintzy storefront, or out of my apartment. Tea is my lifeline.” He lifted a cup of the stuff in salute. “Good old Kingsport Tea.”

I shuffled my Rohrig deck, made a fan as perfect as if created by Mother Nature, and said, “Pull three on whether or not you need a change of pace.”

Thom drew three cards into a neat pile and handed them to me. I laid them out in a spread. The Chariot came up, followed by the Death card, and lastly the Sun.

Thom squinted at the array of vivid images. “I don’t read that deck. What are they saying?”

The cards were warning, Don’t Trust Anything You Hear. But I slanted the reading for my own purposes.

“They say you need to move on, or you’ll die,” I said solemnly.

Thom sat up in his chair. “Die?”

“The Death card might mean either way,” I amended.

Thom grew reflective. “I have been giving shaky readings lately. Last weekend I was just throwing down cards. Wasn’t getting hardly any information at all. And you know how I hate doing mechanical reads. I don’t trust them.”

I nodded. I had the same problem, too. But the moon was in Aries then. I always read badly under an Aries Moon. Given our similar astrological energies, Thom would, too. But I kept that insight to myself.

“The Sun came up last,” Thom mused. “That means I’ll pull out of it, won’t I?”

I made my face frown a negative. “I’m getting you need to go live in a sunshine state. Florida. Arizona. California, maybe.”

“They say there’s a lot of positive energy around Sedona,” he mused. “Always wanted to check it out for myself. I think I have some Navajo blood. I’d fit right in.”

I went for his soft Taurus underbelly. “I hear out in California, a thirty-minute reading goes for two bills. Some psychics set up shop on the beach. Think of it: you hang around all day, soak up the rays, watch the bikinis, knock out two-three easy readings and you’ve pulled down a day’s pay without squeezing your brain into dry sponge.”

Various thoughts crawled across Thom’s pale bulldog features. Anyone could have read them.

I drove the point home. “Maybe you ought to think about wintering out there. Get in touch with your native American roots, then move on to Venice Beach, or Malibu. If you like it, stay. If you don’t, come back. You hate winter, don’t you?”

“I drag myself from November through March,” Thom said, staring at the cards. I had picked up Seasonal Affective Disorder around him once before. He seemed unaware he had the problem.

I let the reading hang in the air while Thom absorbed it.

Behavioral experts claim the public is gullible. That’s one reason why they consult psychics. But no one has greater faith in psychic prevision than the professional reader. We know what it’s like to plug into a higher source of information. We know how it feels to see a clairvoyant image hang in the air before our mind’s eye. We understand the subtle whisper of the clairaudient warning. And we can chart how often we see true and clear, because our clients come back to validate our predictions for us. When you total up the hits and misses, we have a better track record than the meteorologists. Thom was digesting my suggestion. As a Scorpio-Taurus, he was stuck in a happy rut that his Scorpionic tendencies would eventually rebel against, I knew. I was merely helping the process along.

Over the next month, I dropped psychic hints.

“I’m getting Sedona around you,” I would say. Or: “I’ll bet they don’t rake leaves in the high desert, or shovel snow in Malibu.”

Thom would laugh dismissively. But I began to catch him looking at travel brochures.

One October day, he burst in to announce, “I’m flying out of here next week. Boston to Phoenix, and on to Sedona. No winter blues for me this year.”

It was as easy as that.

They gave Thom a going-away party. Everyone treated him to a bon voyage reading. His chart was drawn up. All the auspices were favorable. A good time was had by all.

After the tea room shuttered for the night, Thom and I hung around to clean up. For the last time, he read me:

“I’m getting a sea cruise.”

I made a face. “Not a chance in Hades. Can’t sail and I don’t swim.”

Thom gave out a great belly laugh. “Typical Taurus. But I’m just telling you what I see.”

“I’ll send you a validation postcard if it ever happens,” I promised. “Which it won’t.”

“Deal.” We shook hands.

Before Thom left, Miss Theresa put in an appearance. Thom surrendered his key ring with quiet ceremony. You would think he was handing over the keys to Fort Knox.

I was not surprised when Theresa quietly offered them to me, saying, “Why don’t you lock up for the night, Carl? It will be your responsibility from now on.”

“Thank you,” I said, keeping my walls up. As the only male reader left, I was the logical one to get the scut work. I made it sound like an honor. Her Leo ego practically purred.

The taxi took Thom away. Miss Theresa retired upstairs. The day’s tea had been stowed in the cellar long before, so I pretended to lock up, walked down the street and disappeared into the chill October night.

At seven past Midnight, I slipped back, reentered and stood in the middle of the darkened tea room floor. I sensed various presences. It wasn’t that the ghosts only come out at night, but their more subtle energies are not easily detected amid the buzz and bustle of the day. I tuned them out. They did not matter to me. Most were long-dead readers, anyway. I would not end up like them — so stuck to a life and locality that even in death they could not move on into the Light.

Once my eyes were accustomed to the webby gloom, I sought the cellar entry door with its ebony-painted Holy Lord hinges. It was padlocked, but the key ring offered up an old brass skeleton key that fit. The ponderous padlock broke apart with a rattling clatter.

Quietly, I descended. Easing shut the door behind me, I flicked on a pencil flashlight, and moved down the tread-worn steps. The air down here smelt of salt and spray, as if the fishy Atlantic was slowly seeping in through the foundation stones. Or possibly the rafters were still soaked in the brine that had swallowed the wreck of the old Blue Moon.

The tea stood openly in stacked oaken chests, high up on rough pine pallets above the flood line. Old chests, bound in salt-rusted iron straps. Pirates surely buried their booty in such chests. The chests were padlocked, too. I chose one, attempted to insert various keys to it. None fit. From a pocket, I drew a stainless steel pick. My talents are not merely limited to the psychic.

The lock surrendered after a long period of ratlike squeals and squeaks of metal. Carefully, I lifted the heavy iron-bound lid.

The tea lay wrapped in nautical oilskin. I undid the flaps, exposing heap upon heap of blackish Orange Pekoe cut leaves that make me think of rich tropical loam.

The smell was spicy, exotic, instantly intoxicating. Regulating my breathing, I slowed my brainwaves, easing down into an Alpha state, then doused the flash.

It was a hunch that made me kill the light. As I inhaled the aromatic scent, I touched the tea with trembling fingers, psychometrizing the treasure trove of slightly moist leaves. My eyes began to apprehend things in the dark. I saw a Clipper pull into a wild jungle port. Amber-brown Asiatic natives came to the crude dock bearing chest after chest of freshly harvested tea leaves. They made strange signs as they traded the chests for gold and silver. Other, more exotic objects were traded, too. I perceived a faceless ebony idol, and sensed part of its name — hotep. It meant nothing to me.

Then the Blue Moon cast off. I could see her clip off the miles back to America. I saw her tear into the teeth of gales and storms, as indomitable as a gleaming sword. My ears were assaulted by the tortured creaking of her stout timbers, the cracking of her stressed sails. High winds howled about my face.

The dirt floor beneath my feet turned hard and unstable, like a tossing ship’s deck. I felt transported, as if back to that hard era where seamen spent months of their lives husbanding strange cargoes and argosies across vast, unforgiving oceans. Hastily, I slammed down the lid to choke off those intoxicating fumes.

Whatever made Kingsport tea what it was, it could rob a man of all connection to earthly reality. And for that reason, I knew I had to find out where it came from. I had to go to the source. For with a reliable supply of Kingsport tea, I would become the most powerful psychic of modern times. No more thirty-dollar a half-hour readings for me, with two-thirds of the fee going to the house.

Exhaling in long gusts to clear the tang of tea from my lungs, I crept back to the first floor, restored all locks, and stole away— to sleep and dream of a future certain to be mine. A future built upon a mountain of magical tea.

Over the next few months, I got to know Miss Theresa well. I had become her good right hand. In time, she trusted me enough that I received the keys to the cellar tea store.

Cautiously, I brought up the subject of Kingsport tea.

“There is no tea like it on earth,” she confided one evening, warming to the subject. “The leaves are the highest grade. They are not the lesser leaves like Pekoe cut or Pekoe Souchong. There are no fannings in my tea. We get our store from the same plantation that my great-great-great grandfather Esau Terrill founded in ’53. It’s still there, unchanged and undisturbed by the dreary modern world. Every November the tea is harvested and set upon withering racks. And each December, a new store is laid in for the year to come. Tradition is so important here, you know.”

She drifted off into a reverie. In that unguarded moment, I shifted my consciousness over to my left temporal lobe, and listened psychically. Faintly, as if whispered into my brain by a soft-voiced ghost, I got one word: Siam.

And I knew she spoke the truth about where to find the timeless tea. Strange that I heard Siam, and not Thailand. I threw my qualms away. This was a breakthrough.

Miss Theresa shook off her memories. “I should do your chart, Mr. Shaner. I am an accomplished astrologer, as well as a card reader of the old school. I happen to have a Grand Trine in Fire. Did you know that?”

That made her a Sag Moon and Aries Rising, or the reverse, on top of that Leo Sun. Anyone with that much fire in her chart was someone you didn’t cross — or crossed very, very carefully, if you must.

“I would be honored,” I said gallantly.

She smiled toothily. “Give me your exact birth data.”

I hesitated. This was probably the most dangerous moment since I had come to Theresa Terrill’s Tea Room. But there was no time to think. I broke a rule and gave the old lioness my true birth data. Couldn’t chance her intuiting a lie, psychically or astrologically. If I so much as shaved my birth hour to a.m. instead of p.m., that would change the Rising Sign and all of the houses. She’d know when she drew up the chart that I was no Gemini rising, even if I hadn’t already spilled those beans at our first meeting. I only hoped she didn’t detect my intentions via my planetary picture. For there is an old astrological saying: “Scorpio is the thief.”

I jumped back to the subject. “How did trade with Siam start?”

Theresa folded the paper slip on which she had written my birth particulars. “During the reign of King Mongkut, the most honorable and long-lived Siamese ruler in history. Mongkut had been a Buddhist monk for nearly 30 years before he was elevated to the Siamese throne. Siam in those days was the only Asian power to resist colonial rule.” Touching my wrist, she lowered her voice. “It was said he dabbled in forbidden arts and practices. The tea trade made him rich, and world-famous, for Siam was not, and is not today, a tea-producing nation. But the tea that did grow in the inaccessible regions of the Khorat Plateau was potent in ways that transcended all other teas.”

“Never heard of Mongkut…”

“He was also known as Rama IV,” Miss Theresa purred. You would have thought she was related to the old potentate. “The monarch of The King and I was based upon his illustrious life,” she added.

It sounded like hyperbole, but my psychic guts were telling me it was the truth. That impressed me. I sensed that the Terrills owned King Mongkut back in those days. Nothing ever changes. Not politics or power. That’s why I figured on setting up shop in Washington DC when I scored what I wanted. My chart was presented to me on Halloween night. Miss Theresa analyzed it for me in the kitchen, after closing.

“You are ambitious,” she began. “Over-ambitious, actually, and need to curb that tendency, as you are inclined to overreach. I see great intelligence, but this is a difficult chart. You are used to it, but it would break a lesser man.”

“I consider myself strong,” I allowed.

“Scorpio Moon. Moon on the ascendant. Twelfth House Moon. Twelfth House Neptune. Pluto in Leo on the Midheaven. All powerful psychic indicators. You are in the correct profession.”

“I hope so.”

“I see an ocean voyage in your future, Mr. Shaner.”

I started slightly. Thom had seen that too. It wasn’t unusual for confirmatory information to surface astrologically after it had been picked up by other psychic means. In fact, it was more the rule than the exception.

“I have nothing planned,” I told her.

“I see you being impressed.”

“About what?”

“In reference to the ocean voyage,” she said thinly. “It is a long one. And quite challenging for you. Like nothing you have ever experienced.”

“Can you see where I’m going?”

“Asia. Have you ever desired to see the Orient?”

She was getting too close.

“Never. Furthest thing from my mind, in fact.”

She pursed her lips. I expected more, but she eased off into another subject. “Venus in Aries. You do not remain in love for very long, and I fear you may never marry.”

I let out my breath, realizing for the first time it was as pentup as if I were awaiting a judge’s verdict.

The reading told me little about myself that I didn’t already know. She wrapped it up by saying, “I see that you will remain in my employ for a very long time, and you will be a very agreeable servant of this enterprise.”

I smiled as sincerely as possible. That part was probably employer-employee encouragement, and not predictive. At least, I trusted not. The only way I would stay with Theresa Terrill’s Tea Room was if she bequeathed it to me. And I wasn’t getting that. I wasn’t getting that at all.

November was unusually brisk, business-wise. I found myself working six days a week. By this time, I had all but abandoned my cards. When I read clients, I read their tea leaves. And I read them superlatively. Some days it got so hectic, Miss Theresa would stir from her second-floor aerie and read clients as well. If required to read cards, she used ordinary playing cards. You have to be very good to do that. There’s not much help in a fifty-two-card Bicycle deck.

“Why are we so busy lately?” I asked Starla one day.

“Kingsport society knows we’re shut tight between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. They’re getting their New Year’s readings early.”

“What does the crew do during December?” I wondered.

“I go to West Palm Beach. There’s a New Age bookshop down there where I do progressed charts. I make almost as much money in December as I do the rest of the year here.”

“There’s a lot of money down there,” I admitted. “Where does Miss Theresa winter?”

“I really don’t know.” Her voice turned tight and bloodless, like a constricted artery.

“I’m getting a weird vibe from you,” I prompted.

Starla hesitated. If she hadn’t been so fried from doing too many readings, she might not have given me anything. But her guard was down. “One year I came back from Florida a week early,” she said, her voice growing furtive and whispery. “I took a walk, thinking I’d drop in on Miss T.” She looked around.

“And?”

She whispered it: “The tea room wasn’t here.”

I looked at her. Starla had been a practicing astrologer so long she could tell a person’s sun sign at a glance. If you asked her the planetary positions on a given day, she invariably rattled them off from memory. Consequently, she walked around in a state of perpetual Alpha spaceyness. She had surrendered to the timeless flow in return for the powers granted. I didn’t know whether or not to believe her.

“What do you mean—‘wasn’t there?’” I asked.

“There was just a wet cellar hole. I thought Theresa’s had been blown out to sea in a storm, and I was out of a job. But a week later Miss T. called me in. When I showed up, this place was sitting right here, where it always was.”

“Maybe Miss Theresa went to Florida, and took her house with her,” I joked. It fell flat.

Starla’s voice was thin as glass now. “I saw what I saw,” she insisted. “I told no one.”

“Wouldn’t someone have noticed a missing house and reported it?”

“Down here in this lonely back end of Kingsport?” she countered. A shudder seized her.

Starla had a point. The tea room stood on what was once called Terrill’s Neck, an isolated finger of sand and eel grass sheltered from view of land. No other dwellings were built within sight. No one ventured down Nightjar Lane except to have their fortune told.

“Interesting yarn,” I said, mentally classifying it with Thom’s ghost Clipper. But I got one useful nugget out of it: Miss Terrill wintered outside of Kingsport. This would fit into my plans— how I did not yet know.

I started to see the old salt hanging around the tea room the week before Thanksgiving. I found him loitering in the cellar one night as I replaced the remainder of the day’s tea. He was dressed like an Innsmouth lobsterman, his muscle-knotted face resembling a raw steak garnished with cold clam-gray eyes.

“Who are you?” I blurted out.

“Mind yer business,” he growled. He was horsing the empty tea chests from their pallets to the old disused coal bin. I had the feeling he intended to pull them up the chute with the ropes that lay about the dirt floor in confused coils.

I rushed upstairs to report the apparition to Miss Theresa.

“That’s old Cap’n Terrill,” she said. “Leave him be, and he will return the favor.”

“Relative of yours?”

“Every Kingsport Terrill is related to my family, distantly or otherwise.” The silence that followed told me I was dismissed.

Business was brisk that day. I saw little of Cap’n Terrill, and thought no more of him.

I was reading at Libra when a light dusting of snow swirling outside the window caught my gaze. Two readings later, the dusting was a thick pall.

Dorinda grabbed me as I was collecting a five-dollar tip from a matron who came in needlessly worried about a neck tumor. I had pronounced it as nonmalignant.

“We’re closing early,” she undertoned. “Nor’easter coming. I’ve locked the front door. Your next reading is your last.”

I took the slip, thinking: I’ve been waiting for opportunity. Here it is knocking.

The reading was difficult. Excitement made my mind race, and I kept popping out of Alpha. The tea leaves did most of the work anyway. I felt like the prop, instead of vice versa. Such is the potency of Kingsport tea.

“I see a bird on wing,” I told the woman. “A flight to warmer climes, perhaps?”

“I always winter in the Caribbean,” she said. She had that sun-bleached blonde look so many upperclass Kingsport women had.

I warned of her spousal infidelities, but she brushed that concern away. Obviously she had married for money. She didn’t seem to have any vital issues, so I told her she would outlive her husband. That brought a bloodless smile to her lips. She tipped me a twenty, and hurried out the door into the teeth of a gathering gale of sleety snow.

Dorinda locked the door after her, and the tea room stood in silence. It was the end of the season. And it had come like a stealthy thief.

We gathered in the kitchen. Miss Theresa came bustling down, looking fretful and impatient.

“Normally it is my custom to treat my readers to a Thanksgiving dinner on the night before the holiday season starts,” she said. “But circumstances prohibit it this year. Let me just wish you all happy holidays, and we will all gather here again on the second of January.”

Readers began filing out to find their cars in the blow. The abruptness of it all was unsettling. Not many goodbyes were said.

I was putting on my topcoat when Miss Theresa accosted me.

“Mr. Shaner, I will have my keys.”

I gave them up without a quiver of regret.

“Now you must go,” she said, showing me to the door. “I must shutter the windows and be away before this thricedamned storm gathers its full strength.” Her voice had lost its thin Yankee gentility. She was all business now. The door cracked open, letting in a gust of bitter air and freezing particles.

“Be happy to help,” I offered.

“That is Cap’n Terrill’s duty,” she coldly returned.

“See you in the New Year, then,” I said, exiting. But she was already locking the door behind me.

I pushed out into the snow. The Nor’easter pushed back. Squinching my eyes shut and lowering my head, I tried to make headway, but the wind was too stiff. I wasn’t planning to go far, anyway. Creeping back, I found the cellar window that once doubled as a coal chute. It opened easily. I had unlatched it when I got the day’s tea that morning.

Feet first, I slid down the coal-dust-smeared chute and awaited nightfall. I was still without a plan. Perhaps I would accost the old woman, and pry from her the exact location of the family tea plantation in modern Thailand. Possibly a more elegant solution would present itself. It didn’t much matter. As long as I got what I wanted.

Darkness fell howling. I stood inured to it, immured in the ancient cellar like a man loitering in his own tomb. I rather enjoyed the delicious feeling of imperviousness to the roaring elements. It appealed to the same Scorpionic side of my personality that had compelled me to play among the headstones and tombs of the old Copp’s Hill Burying Ground as a child.

I let time pass. Examining the open chests, I found only a crumbly pound or two of Kingsport tea. It had long since lost its aromatic pungency. Yet even in its weakened state, it filled my head with strange fancies.

King Mongkut came to life in my mind’s eye. I saw him, shaven of skull and attired in saffron and maroon vestments, and standing before that basalt idol with the inexplicably Egyptian name, ceremonially pouring what appeared to be copper vats of rich red wine into a dark soil that would give back the nutrients added therein in the form of bushels of fresh green tea leaves. Normally, I do not smell things psychically, but I detected a metallic odor that was unmistakably blood. Intuitively, I knew it was human blood.

I shuddered in spite of myself. Blood sacrifice. That was what nourished the strange soil that gave up the dark leaves of Kingsport tea. No matter. It was the final product, not its manufacturing process, which concerned me. If I had to spill human blood to maintain my supply of tea, I would do so without conscience or compunction.

The thick boards above my head were creaking in the incessant wind buffeting the old home. The great timbers of the frame — the very timbers that gave shape and form to the hull of the long-lost Blue Moon—groaned like a stirring giant. But I felt no fear. For over a century, this place had survived gales and hurricanes without losing its structural integrity. Just hold together for another night, I beseeched whatever gods might be, and I will have what I most lust for.

Above my head, I detected footfalls. Time to act!

Climbing the stairs, I came to the entry door. It fell open at a touch. I eased it wider, hoping the Holy Lord hinges would not make a betraying creak. They obliged me.

Stepping out into darkness, I moved from pantry to kitchen, into the reading rooms. All was dark. The universe outside was a white howling madness.

And in the middle of the floor stood two facing figures: Miss Theresa and old Cap’n Terrill. They were deep in low, earnest conversation and took no notice of me.

Cap’n Terrill was saying: “We must sail now, mistress, lest the ship come apart in this blow.”

“Tradition demands we sail with the new moon, and return with the blue. I will not brook breaking with tradition, captain. Misfortune will result, according to the stars.”

“Curse yer stars!” The old salt flung his arms open, as if to encompass the entire environment. “Look about ye! She’s shaking and complaining. What if she’s carried out to sea in this state? What will ye do then, I ask?”

Miss Theresa started to object, but the old seaman cut her off.

“Damn yer eyes, woman! I built this ship long before you were born, and I’ll not stand by and watch her be destroyed all over again! You may be the owner, but I am captain. Before God and the Infernal One, my word is law and my will shall be done!”

The words lifted above the howl and whine of contending winds. They registered on my ears, but my brain refused them.

At that moment, the house gave a sudden sideways jerk. Then a jolt knocked me off my feet. My heart went into my throat. I thought the structure had been thrown off its foundations. Another jolt flung me in the opposite direction. It felt like an earthquake.

Stifling a cry of fear, I scrambled to my feet. I was heard.

“Who is that?” Cap’n Terrill demanded. “Who goes there?”

Miss Theresa’s reply was cool and unconcerned: “Just a new member of the crew, Esau. Pay him no heed.” Something in her words frightened me more than Terrill’s challenging bellow.

I made a run for the back door. It refused to open. The door stood in its jamb, as firm and fixed as a tomb portal. The kitchen window had been shuttered from without. No exit there.

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. The house was heaving, its floor — no, its deck — no dammit its floor, was warping and rolling as if the raging Atlantic had swept in to carry it off into the storm. I rushed to the pantry window. It was a small octagonal pane, but large enough for my purposes.

In the darkness, I could not find the latch. It was not where it should be. The wood frame felt cold and steely, and I had the curious impression I was fighting to open something other than a conventional window.

Heavy booted feet came up behind me. I turned — and caught a flash glimpse of Cap’n Terrill, wrapped in a slick yellow Sou’wester, his wind-reddened features a knot of angry meat, lifting an old belaying pin high.

It came crashing down. I did not hear the crash.

When I awoke, there was thick blood in my mouth, tooth fragments on my tongue. I expelled these. Groaning, I climbed out of a malodorous bunk bed in some dark space.

The whining howl of winter winds buffeted the dark walls of the room. I did not recognize it, for the clanking of heavy chain drew my attention away from my surroundings.

I was in fetters and leg irons, I saw. My soul grew cold.

Going to the solitary window, I found an octagonal port. It resembled the pantry window, but was fixed. The world beyond its porthole-style glass was a cold white confusion. Where was I?

The room was small and cramped, its walls a dark plum hue. Like the tea room pantry, but even more unlike it. There were familiar cupboards. I opened one. It was empty. But on the reverse of the door lay a discernable profusion of carven initials. I recognized Thom’s distinctive brand. And Starla’s. I shrank from the impossible sight.

Was I dreaming?

Fumbling open the only door, I came upon a set of rough-hewn plank stairs identical to the tea room’s cellar steps. But this was not that cellar, though the heavy damp atmosphere possessed a similar musty salt tang.

Dragging my chains, I fought my way upward. The plank risers tossed and rolled, fighting me with every uncertain step.

A ship! I thought. I’m aboard a ship…

Sometimes you can be too psychic. Sometimes you can see your own doom. I had heard of this happening. As I struggled toward a heavy oaken door, weird impressions and images hit me hard. Stubbornly, I pushed these figments away. I did not want them. For once in my life, I had no desire to foresee the future. My prospects, even fragmentary and semi-apprehendable, were more than my mind could bear.

But reach the door I did. I shouldered through, only to be slapped by a faceful of salty sleet. Heart pounding, I forced myself on. My fettered feet skidded on a pitching, rolling, warpy surface. I knew it was a ship’s deck. For what else could it be, with three tall masts rearing up into the white curse of a raging Nor’easter? The mast tops themselves disappeared in the infinite ghostly swirl. But the rank upon rank of wind-troubled sailcloth bespoke of wilder days, ancienter times.

I spied Cap’n Terrill planted before a heavy oaken ship’s wheel. His eyes were hard on his course. If he perceived me, he acknowledged me not. I shouted at him:

“Where am I, damn you?”

His weatherbeaten expression changed not a flicker.

“What ship is this? Tell me the name of this vessel!”

He spat to one side, but was otherwise silent.

Making a loop of wrist chain, I flung an angry swipe. It went clean through him, impotent as my furious shouts.

Recoiling, I stumbled back, my lungs sobbing for breath, heart bursting with fear and anger. I wheeled.

And there she stood: Miss Theresa Terrill. She was bundled up in a Mackinaw coat, seeming as impervious to the storm as her descendant, or ancestor — or whatever Cap’n Terrill was in truth.

“Welcome aboard the Blue Moon, Mr. Shaner,” she said without human feeling.

And in that moment, I knew. Clairvoyant flashbacks detonated in my brain. The fragments I refused to see resolved into a chain of clairvoyant connections. The tea room built from the timbers of the shattered old tea Clipper. The December shutdowns. Starla’s impossible cellar hole. My intuiting Siam instead of Thailand. I understood all. Her destruction notwithstanding, the Blue Moon continued making her annual run to the Gulf of Siam and back, long after Siam had become Thailand. The evil tea that was no longer grown and harvested in this century could yet be found — back in the past, where King Mongkut still ruled through brute power and dark wizardry.

This was the true secret of Kingsport tea, whose leaves my scarlet life’s blood would shortly nourish. I knew this. Psychically, spiritually, undeniably, I foresaw my fell fate. I was destined to meet my doom a century before my birth. God alone knew what havoc that would wreak on my Karmic cycles.

I croaked out, “I should never have let you draw up my chart.”

“I told you that you would be impressed,” Miss Theresa intoned. “ Impressment is an old Kingsport tradition, too.”

Behind her, a shadowy Pharaonic mass loomed against the whirling white chaos. Black, faceless, terrible, it was perceptible yet not physically present. No mouth uttered its name. But in the clairaudient silence of my damned soul, I received it clearly: Nyarlathotep.

The howling winds swallowed my scream of wordless terror.

On the War Path

Bloodlust stirred among the Picts again. Their war drums thundered in the night. It was not unprecedented; they had become restive and ambitious plenty of times before. They were fierce, fanatical fighters, even when they had no particular goal in mind, at least none that anyone not of their number could understand. But it was different this time: the body had a head. This time they had strategy, tactics — and a gifted leader. He was Rang-Thalun, a mighty shaman. Many miracles were ascribed to him. All shamans were credited with healings, communications with the ancestors, predictive visions; these were their stock-in-trade. But this one was reputed to wield control over storms, to lengthen or shorten the hours of a day. All of his colleagues could exorcize devils, but Rang-Thalun could command them. It was, then, no surprise that, once he had appeared, he had united the usually feuding Pictish clans into an advancing tidal wave, sweeping cities and armies before them. The few and only victories against them, albeit no more than tenuous dykes erected against the flood, had been achieved under the direction of Crom-Ya, a powerful Cimmerian war chief gifted with matching brains and brawn, a combination without which there remained no chance to withstand the Pictish swarm.

Just now, the hour was growing late in the Bossonian Marshes, and Crom-Ya was conferring with his baffled lieutenants. The camp fire cast bright orange shadows on the broad cheek bones, high brow, hawk nose, and firm jaw. His mane of black hair was square cut. His eyes, seen in daylight, were glacial blue. His many scars and nicks from years of battling somehow did not spoil his rugged good looks. Just now his brow was furrowed, his eyes squinting in concentration as he and his advisors considered their dire position.

“Where can he have derived such powers?” This question, mostly a rhetorical one, an exclamation of exasperated wonder, had been repeated several times in the last two hours. Almost as often parroted, as if repetition might coax an answer out of the void, was the query, “What can have stirred the damn Picts to an assault on this scale?”

Crom-Ya broke his silence. “Brothers, where Rang-Thalun gets his sorcerous might, I know not. But as to what motivates him and his hordes, and what may be done to turn back his wrath, the two questions may have the same answer.”

Had their enemy himself stepped into the fire-lit circle the astonishment of the small council could not have been greater. All mouths stopped; all eyes widened as their chieftain leaned to one side and retrieved a plain-looking bag of coarse cloth, then pulled from it a strangely angled black stone, inscribed with unfamiliar glyphs.

“Ixaxar.”

“Is…is that…?”

“It is. This is the great totem, years lost, of the Pictish people. It is believed to possess very great powers. It was I who stole it from a guarded cave in my youth when I made my living by thievery among the so-called civilized kingdoms. A Stygian wizard hired me to secure it for him, but once I returned with the Black Stone, I found he had disappeared. Some claimed he had been devoured by some being he had summoned from another world. It seemed he had told no one of my errand or of his plans for the relic. Since no one coveted the thing, I decided to keep it against the day I might learn to unlock its powers. Little did I ever find out, but it might be enough to turn this weapon back against its rightful owners.”

“Crom and Mitra! My lord, forgive me, but why have you not brought the stone into play before now? Before so many of our people were slain?”

“Many times I considered it, my friend, but I felt it posed too great a risk. There is no way to be sure the powers unleashed could be controlled. We might be inviting an even swifter doom. But now I see no alternative. I judge that it is time to invoke the Four Brothers of the Night.”

At this, the faces of Crom-Ya’s lieutenants blanched, though the firelight hid the fact.

The Picts appeared en masse at dawn. The small force of Cimmerians were ready, or hoped they were. Their priest had been killed weeks before, but Crom-Ya had taken the precaution of learning from him the words and voice tones of an invocation. He knew he must grasp the Black Stone as he chanted the unaccustomed syllables. As the enemy sped to the charge, the Cimmerians drew their swords and weighed their dulling axes. Most of them felt a sweeping chill as soon as the chant commenced. Was it the effect of the rousing energies their chief had summoned? Or was it simple superstitious dread — if there was a difference?

Across the sea of nightmares four entities found their sleep disturbed by words well understood by the recipients if not by the senders. They shifted uneasily, reluctantly leaving behind dreams of realms and beings as alien to them as their own were to the men who now troubled their rest. This was a rare, though by no means new, occurrence, for even unknown kings of unsuspected worlds had duties to fulfill. And this “time” the call that came could not be ignored, as it had the force of mighty Ixaxar behind it.

There was a subtle change in the atmosphere, as if some new element had entered the chemistry of the air. The light had a new shade of color. Crom-Ya had finished his chant, still holding the Black Stone. Now he returned it to the bag and drew the string tight. It would be a nuisance during the imminent battle, knocking against his hip as he moved, but there was no place else to stash it. The Picts did not seem to notice anything amiss, but the Cimmerians had fixed their eyes on the sky, where four spinning vortices had begun to detach themselves from the hitherto smooth vault of the heavens. Four. Could it be?

Crom-Ya and his men, few as they were, stood their ground, resigned to a glorious death in battle should it come to that, but their fading hope began to grow again as they followed a pointing arm to the sky. For suddenly the celestial anomalies became impossible to ignore. Weird displays of jagged lightning, of fiery rays, of wave patterns through the ambient air, and of spectrum-shifting beams, all commenced to break forth like the javelins of the gods. Whoever was casting those spears, they were expert marksmen; every blast found its target. Picts were falling left and right. And not just falling; they were combusting, exploding, something never before seen in a world without gunpowder or land mines. Pictish warriors, resplendent in fresh war paint, halted in terror and confusion. Those behind the stunned front ranks smashed into one another and slid off-balance as they skidded on the puddles of bloody gore.

Crom-Ya’s men broke into applause and cheering, but he thought it premature to join them. The Pictish juggernaut had screeched to a halt. All watched the skies in abject terror, unable to scatter and flee because of their own sheer numbers. But then the mass of cowering savages began to split down the center, making way for a single figure rapidly advancing to the front. It was, of course, the wizard Rang-Thalun, clad in the barbaric finery of exotic feathers, golden hoop ear rings, painted skulls over his eye-lids, and a larger duplicate on his breast. On he charged, shoving his troops rudely aside. Then, with the ground around him cleared, he braced himself and extended his bony arms to the skies, shrieking with a voice no human throat should be capable of. This seemed to calm his men somewhat, especially since the shaman’s words had quickly put an end to the deadly discharges from the heavens.

This was what Crom-Ya had feared: even though Rang-Thalun lacked the Black Stone, he was still the most potent magician of his age. The Cimmerian saw only two outcomes, both dismal, but one considerably worse than the other. At best, Rang-Thalun would simply banish the Four. At worst, he would wrest control of them from Crom-Ya and turn them into supernatural weapons of his own. And that seemed to be precisely what was now happening! Cimmerians were bursting asunder on either side of him, splattering his towering form with steaming entrails. Now it was the Picts’ turn to rejoice. Having stood in place for a few moments, while the magical spirits did their work for them, the painted warriors began to rejoin the fray.

Crom-Ya scowled with battle fury, knowing the next blow he dealt must be his last.

Adrift in Time

The barbarian chieftain swung his axe in a perfect arc at the upturned feathered head of a Pictish warrior. He did not see the blow connect, though in his mind he had already seen his foe’s skull split like a melon. At once he found himself utterly confused. One moment he was amid pitched battle against resurgent Picts; the next he was trying to make sense of an unfamiliar mode of perception, not precisely eyesight as he knew it, and a scene of utter bewilderment. He was surrounded by…things defying description. What sort of creatures were these? They had the form of great, quivering cones. At their tops clustered writhing, boneless limbs or branches. Were they trees of some sort? Or animals from the sea? But then he looked down.

He was one of them.

The others moved themselves back, gliding like great snails. They did not seem to be surprised like him. He was even more surprised at his perception of their lack of surprise. It was as if he now possessed some new sense enabling him to perceive the thoughts of others, others with no facial features, or even words, to convey them. Instinctively he went for his sword, only to feel a shock of soul-draining disappointment. Not only had he no sword, no weapon of any kind; he had no muscled arm, no hip to be wearing a scabbard. He might have fainted, except that the base of his conical body had too wide a base to allow him to tip over.

He heard clicking sounds, saw that they came from pincers at the end of one of the snaking limbs of his captors. Again, one startlement opened onto another: he was sure he could understand them.

In the weeks that followed, his captors, or, as he soon came to regard them, his hosts, did everything they could to put Crom-Ya at his ease, to explain what had happened to him, and why. When he had become more or less acclimated, he began to think of them as gods, though they bore no resemblance to the Cimmerian deities represented by the rude wooden effigies carved by the Cimmerian shamans. But perhaps these beings were more like shamans. For these outlandish-looking entities, in pursuit of all knowledge, did what shamans did: they sent their spirits abroad, soaring into far-flung realms to consult with the inhabitants thereof. Then they would return with rare knowledge gained there.

But with this difference: these inhuman shamans not only visited far-off beings; they traded places, or rather bodies, with them. While they secretly moved among the peoples to whom their borrowed physical forms belonged, they dedicated themselves to a systematic inquiry into whatever fields of knowledge in which the culture excelled. Medicine interested them little, given the vast difference between their own physiology and that of those whom they visited. Astronomy was redundant given all that the Great Race, to translate what they called themselves, already knew from their wide cosmic voyaging. In truth, there was no longer much they did not know. But political economy was a subject of great curiosity to them, as, every few centuries, they were accustomed to undertake a mass migration of their mentalities into past or future ages where they should be safe, at least for a while, from various mysterious pursuers. Of these, little was openly spoken, at least not for Crom-Ya’s “ears.” At any rate, it was in the interest of the time and space-faring Great Race to hold in reserve the knowledge of alternative models of social organization potentially appropriate to the new environments in which they might find themselves, as they had many times in the past.

Crom-Ya’s visiting mind listened to abstract debates among the Great Race and the minds, like him, that had been abducted as they explored the ramifications of their voyages into the past and the future, both individually and en masse. The Great Race believed they had obviated the problem of individual minds returning to their accustomed worlds, polluting the flow of history henceforth by sharing knowledge gained from the Great Race and their captives while dwelling among them. To this end they had learned a kind of hypnosis to eradicate, or at least to suppress, all memories of their experiences in the ancient fortresses of the Great Race.

But what might result from the mass migrations? The time-voyagers already had clairvoyant “histories” of the world in future ages, but mustn’t their collective invasions of this or that future of this or that world negate the previous “precord” of those eras? Some argued that their visions of the future must have already taken their own migrations into account. Others countered that such a notion implied an ineluctable determinism. Of this, Crom-Ya understood nothing. He was not a stupid man, but, like the Great Race themselves, he had his priorities. He was interested only in what he might put to use in battle and in ruling once his mind was reunited with his steelythewed body. He understood enough of what he heard to realize that any knowledge or memory of what he had learned during his time here would be taken from him. The purpose of the Great Race’s abductions was to exploit their hostages to add to their vast archives, not to educate them; much less to share their knowledge with more primitive ages. But Crom-Ya felt quite sure he could frustrate their plans for him.

All the captive intelligences spent some of their time in conversations with fellow inmates (for he had again come to view the Great Race that way, despite their generally humane treatment). All of them were glad enough to share information about themselves, but little of it made any sense to Crom-Ya. He had never heard of the places from which his fellows came. What and where were “Yaddith”? “Barsoom”? “Tond”? “Chicago”? Their personal names were scarcely less strange: “Alhazred,” “Curwen,” “Tillinghast,” “Peaslee.” The revelations vouchsafed by natives of other eras and even other planets, were fascinating, but they seemed to Crom-Ya as tall tales told to spellbound children. On the other hand, the undeniable fact of his presence here attested to the truth of their stories. So the barbarian set about learning whatever he could about the weapons and military tactics of other eras and worlds. If he could take it home with him when his sentence was served, he might be able to use this knowledge to achieve greater victories and greater honor than ever before.

The rest of their hours were perforce occupied in recording in journals all they knew and remembered of the worlds and peoples they came from. The Great Race’s object in all this archiving was ostensibly simply to amass knowledge for its own sake. But the canny Crom-Ya could not help suspecting there was more to it. What must become of this vast store of accumulated information on the day, should it arrive, when, for fear of their fabled nemeses, they should vacate the rugose cone-bodies their alien minds had long inhabited? It would all be for naught. Surely that must be obvious to beings with such great intelligence. Why would they waste the time? Perhaps they weren’t. It seemed more likely they were gathering information about civilizations they might consider as refuges once Doomsday should arrive.

Suppose, then, that the Great Race chose Crom-Ya’s native world and era for their new environment? The very thought amused him. His world was one of ceaseless conflict, battle, and rapacity. From his observations of the Great Race, he surmised that the unvarnished truth about what they referred to as the Hyborian Age would make it an unlikely choice for them. After all, they lived in terror of an ever-threatening, unseen force, preferring to flee rather than to offer the most basic resistance. So in his chronicling of his era, Crom-Ya made sure to regale the reader with the bloodiest, pitiless, atrocities he knew of. The truth must be more daunting to them than any fearsome tall tales he might concoct.

Crom-Ya began to pay more attention to overheard fragments of conversations about the ancient enemies of the Great Race, whom they called the Blind Beings, whose advent they so feared. It seemed they were already present! They dwelt in the cavernous spaces far beneath the massive complexes of the Great Race. This fact placed everything in a new light. He had gathered that these Blind Beings, blind because invisible since sight requires a reflective optical surface, were pursuing the Great Race across time and space for unknown reasons, and that they had not yet discovered their enemies’ hiding place. But if instead they had already reached the retreat of the Great Race, that meant the Race had somehow been able to defeat and confine them. It was not their arrival upon earth but rather their possible escape from captivity that their cone-shaped captors feared.

It was not in the Cimmerian’s nature merely to wait and hope. He now saw a new course of action opening before him: he must somehow find the guarded portal to the underground realm of the invisible whistling octopi.

Gates to the Graves of the Gods

Crom-Ya embarked upon an exhaustive search throughout the domain of the cone race. He hoped to find one of the sealed doors to the subterranean prison. He dared not inquire about it, nor could he locate any map or records. One day it occurred to him that he had never left the confines of the city of the Great Race. He had not even thought about it. As far as he was concerned, he was twice imprisoned: in the repugnant alien body that he bore, and in the dwelling place of his captors. He had no real idea of what might be seen outside the megalithic structures with their peculiar hexagonal floor tiles and great, wide ramps. The place was alien enough; the outside world must be stranger still. But now he found himself of a different mind. The outside environs, so full of mysteries, might be equally replete with resources and opportunities.

No one sought to prevent his touring the world outside the city of the Great Race. All were free to come and go. Ultimately, where could they go? The day came when Crom-Ya, or the thing that had once been Crom-Ya and should be again someday, exited the shaded compound and emerged into the blazing sunlight and the thick, stifling, jungle humidity of what he did not know to call prehistoric Australia. All was extremely strange to him. And yet the strangeness paled beside that of the alien cone race. But what he now beheld at least answered to certain analogies in Crom-Ya’s mind. He had grown up with tales of dragons and giant beasts surviving to his own day, and of the bloody conflicts between them and his heroic ancestors. He had always cherished such sagas but never knew whether to credit them as fact. This uncertainty troubled him not at all, since, however they originated, they served to inspire courage in the hearts of himself and his fellow tribesmen, courage that, together with early-learned battlefield prowess, had quickly led to his rise to the chieftaincy. And now, though he was unrecognizable to himself, he could feel the old flame of courage igniting within him, preparing him for possible conflict w ith t he h uge reptiles he glimpsed among the giant fronds and boles outside the home structure.

At once, the exile from Cimmeria paused in his mollusklike progress along the smooth megalithic runway and cursed himself for a fool: in this miserable form, he could not defend himself, much less mount an attack! Surely he or anyone like him must be an irresistible target for these jungle dragons, their great maws lined with dripping, knife-like fangs. One such titan started to emerge from the dense greenery. Crom-Ya felt himself crouch into a defensive stance, though it was of course impossible for his body to assume it. He had the sensation common to men who have lost a limb but still feel it as if present.

To his surprise, the dragon abruptly turned away and bounded with a crash back into the primeval forest. Though relieved, the barbarian was astonished. Why did the monster flee? Knowing the mental abilities of the Great Race, he thought for a second that one of them had sent a note of alarm into the brain of the giant reptile. But none of the conical beings was visible, and he had never been successful in cultivating such psychic abilities while resident in their form. Perhaps their bodies emitted a natural repellant scent, like a skunk’s. But it mattered not. Crom-Ya resolved to get back to his quest.

He had managed to learn that, wherever in the great stone city the portals to the netherworld of the Blind Beings were hidden, to find o ne of t hem w ould do h im no g ood s ince a ll were guarded round the clock by members of the Great Race, a special breed who towered several feet above average height and were armed with terrible force-weapons unlike anything Crom-Ya had ever imagined, much less seen on the battlefield. Such measures made all the clearer the fear the Blind Ones inspired in their enemies.

After several such outings, Crom-Ya finally found what he was looking for: what must have been a forgotten, and thus unguarded, gate to the realm below. The metal was a foot thick if it was an inch, and its deep corrosion suggested many thousands of years of disuse. Could it be that those who lurked in the depths beneath it had forgotten it, too?

Crom-Ya had quickly mastered the use of his inhuman limbs with their various pincers and sprouting sensor-funnels. He put them to use now, making a sweep of the vicinity to make sure he was alone. Then he focused on the metal slab before him. How was he to get it open? He had never really tested the strength of his borrowed “arms,” but this seemed the perfect opportunity. First he applied the pincers to the rusting seals, or hinges; he couldn’t tell which. He reasoned that, as the ancient door must have been designed and installed with the same physical anatomy he now possessed, it ought to suffice to remove it. But the pincers managed only to scrape away a bit of the corrosion, albeit without injury. He concluded that the ancients must have used some sort of tools. Now, could he find such instruments— or even recognize them as such?

The mind of Crom-Ya reeled again. At first he thought, and hoped, his sojourn among the Great Race was at an end, that he was about to return to his own time and place, though that was not a bright prospect either. But such speculations were rendered moot in another moment when he found himself in a seemingly airless, lightless void. He felt no physical body at all. But even in the absence of ears, he could hear a voice, though he could not tell whether its source was exterior or interior.

He had heard the voice of the Pictish mage Rang-Thalun only on one or two occasions, but he recognized it now.

Cimmerian, you were a worthy foe. I warned my men not to kill you but only to take you prisoner. This body of yours, as you must by now be aware, has been usurped by one of the farwandering Great Race. Because of the link between you I am able to speak with you.

“And what would you say to me, my lord Rang-Thalun?”

Do you then bear me no ill will?

“I do not. It is part of the great game: someone must win, as you have, and someone must lose, as I have. So be it.”

Good man. I expected as much from you, O Crom-Ya. My business with you is this. I know of the Great Race and their schemes for the simple reason that I, too, was abducted by them. During my years of captivity I took the opportunity to learn what I could from their archives of the magic of wizards from other lands and times, even of other worlds such as I had never suspected. I did not scruple to record my own learning in their metal volumes since my knowledge was crude by comparison with that already recorded there and therefore could be of no real use to them. But my powers grew mightily, and you have seen the results.

Now I propose a plan of action whereby both of us may have our vengeance upon our captors, as well as your escape from them.

“Your powers are truly great! But can even you manage these feats?”

As a shaman, the art of soul travel was already known to me. When I learned all I could from my fellow captive wizards and the metal books of still others, I did what no other had ever done: I effected the mind transfer in reverse, regaining my own body and sending its usurper back to his own. I am sure I can return you, too. Then you shall rule beside me as my general. I am no fool to let such talents go to waste. But first you shall make contact with the subterranean enemies of the Great Race.

“Such is my own purpose, O Rang-Thalun! But I know not how.”

While living among the Great Race I searched their citadel as best I could, and I discovered their armory. Listen closely, and I will tell you how to secure the force-weapons of the Race. With one of them you may easily breach the barrier to the underground world. If you can contrive to take more of the weapons to arm the Blind Ones, do so.

In the Dungeon of the Devils

Some weeks later, the cone-thing named Crom-Ya was conversing with three others whose minds had come from cultures in which the hunting of wild animals was an honored sport. He proposed to these fellow “guests” that they venture into the jungles beyond the Great Race’s city for a hunt. Having explained their plans to those in charge, they were able to obtain permission to borrow four of the force wands. No one thought it would be a bad idea to thin the herd of gigantic predators. The cones in authority thanked them for their service. CromYa’s companions half-suspected there was more to their venture than big game hunting, and if some kind of subversion against the Great Race were afoot, they would not object.

By the time the little group reached the clearing where their leader had discovered the barred door to the dungeons of the Blind Ones, Crom-Ya had revealed his plan to them and was relieved to learn of their sympathy. He then had them direct their power wands at the four corners of the huge metal door. The portal soon glowed white and sprang out of its frame. Two of the cones could not evade the hurtling mass nor survive the damage to their bodies. The third, daunted by the tragedy, declared he would wait outside while Crom-Ya descended. If they had been followed and were discovered, the facts would speak for themselves, so his desire to remain “on guard” must be nothing more than fear. The Great Race were bad enough, but how much worse must be the beings whom they so feared?

As the Cimmerian mind had dearly hoped, there was a long ramp leading from the opening to the dark depths below. He began slowly to make his way down. The darkness around him was not impenetrable since his alien sense organs were not precisely like human eyes. They operated more like the sonar with which bats are gifted.

His sense of the passage of time in this realm, even above ground, was fluctuating, unstable. He had not been able to grasp it. So he was not sure how long his descent took, but at length he came to a level floor. He knew he needn’t go any further when he realized that the Blind Beings, a huge mob of them, had gathered to meet him. In a moment he would know their attitude toward him, the only cone-creature any of them could have seen in millennia — if they lived so long. He realized he knew nothing about these beings. Had the original generation imprisoned here eventually succumbed, replacing themselves with new generations? Or were they the originals? Would they slay him, a representative, as they must suppose, of their agelong oppressors?

But he had nothing to fear. They must have had telepathic abilities not dissimilar to those of the Great Race who so feared them. Crom-Ya learned much that day. It is useless to try to represent in words what they said, since their medium of communication was so very different from that of human beings of the Hyborian Age or ours. But we may share the gist.

The Blind Beings conveyed that they were no invaders but rather the original inhabitants of the city, long ago displaced by the invaders from a world called something analogous to “Yith.” None knew what danger or disaster they had fled via mind transference. But the so-called Blind Beings had not been psychically displaced as Crom-Ya and so many others had been, as whole planetary civilizations and species had been, but rather had been driven underground with weapons fashioned by the Great Race. The invaders from Yith had taken up residence in a primitive cone race native to earth, supplying them with an intelligence evolution had denied them. On their own world, those of Yith had existed in the form of sentient gases or vapors. They were thus practiced in mind-jumping, but this had not been needful in the case of the Blind Beings, whose amoeboid forms had not proven suitable for some reason.

To his utter astonishment, the beings welcomed Crom-Ya as their prophesied deliverer! Now that he had opened the way for them, they would emerge from the depths to overrun the Great Race, sending them fleeing into some other world. Well, perhaps, he supposed, they were right! This was exactly his goal! Fleetingly, Crom-Ya wondered if this “prophecy” had somehow been planted in the minds of these creatures or their ancestors by Rang-Thalun from the distant future. After all he had seen and lived through, nothing any longer seemed impossible, or even unlikely.

“I have four of their weapons here. You can use them to blow open the other doors inside the Great Race’s fortress, your fortress! Of course, they possess a stockpile of these force-weapons, but from all I have seen I believe their plan is not to fight you, but only to flee into some future world by mind-projection as they have before. They post armed sentries at all the doors, but I now believe they are intended only to prevent their captives doing what we are doing.” Withal, he held out the four weapons, one in each tentacle; each was taken by a huge, translucent pseudopod. He received no further communication from the Blind Beings, but he measured their excitement from the sudden chorus of eerie flute-like whistling.

The snail-like locomotion of the Great Race body was quite effective against the weight of gravity. It seemed to take less time to ascend the ramp than it had taken to descend it, but who knew? There was, after all, his inconsistent perception of time.

Once on the surface again, Crom-Ya was dismayed to see the companion he had left topside had now become a shapeless heap of strange flesh. The victim must have drawn the attention of one of the jungle dragons, and he had no defense to offer. Nor could the poor thing flee the great reptile with its churning legs and eager fangs. So much for his guess that the cone race possessed some natural protection or repellant!

Momentarily preoccupied reflecting on the matter, Crom-Ya failed to notice the headlong ambush of a dragon, probably the same one. Its jaws grabbed up his conical form and bit it in half. His last incarnate thought was to hope Rang-Thulan would keep his word.

Any Port in the Immortal Storm

His transition from the Hyborian Age to that of the Great Race had seemed instantaneous, but now he felt duration. He felt somehow that his soul was traveling to its point of origin. And perhaps it was his imagination, but he began to see flashes of a scene containing the familiar shapes of men. As he grew closer, the figures grew clearer. He believed he was seeing the inside of a large and ornate tent. There, cross-legged in a silent trance, was Rang-Thalun, but the wizard was not alone. He sensed that the Pictish shaman was attempting to guide the floating soul of Crom-Ya back home to its body, like a beacon across the sea of eternity. He knew that his freedom was near at hand!

But he was wrong. He began to hear the guttural voices of two Picts, whose words revealed they were subordinates dissatisfied with the plans they must have overheard their master muttering in his trance. Plans about not only keeping the Cimmerian prisoner alive but elevating him to the position of Warlord of the Pictish Horde, a rank one of these men coveted. The other wore a modest head dress marking him as a priestly subordinate, a breed ever bent on ruthless schemes of advancement. The pair were apparently partners in a deadly plot.

Powerless to intervene, the spirit of Crom-Ya watched as the warrior plunged his dagger into the throat of the Cimmerian’s inert form, while the priestling seized the Black Stone and used it as a bludgeon to crush the skull of Rang-Thalun.

Crom-Ya knew he was twice-doomed, as he was no more drawn toward his body, which was now rendered useless to him anyway. Must he drift forever aimless through a cosmos of phantoms? His speed had slowed, but in a few moments something catapulted him though time. Briefly he had a glimpse of the future, the aftermath of the events he had just witnessed. What he now saw was compressed together as if he were remembering a set of past happenings seen long ago. He saw the Pictish Empire, so newly made, crumble under the incompetence of their new Warlord and the lack of RangThulan or any leader like him. There was nothing anymore to hold the clans together, and they quickly went their separate ways, returning to vendettas and petty conflicts between them. It was all to be expected.

And then that world was left behind him. He drifted now, like a message in a bottle lost in the vastness of the ocean. He slept through an unknown number of ages till at long last he felt his vagrant essence descending to solid earth. He found himself taking refuge in the person of a muscular young man with close-cropped black hair, sitting at a device upon which his sturdy fingers tapped and tapped at great speed. He imagined he saw a resemblance between the man and himself, as if they shared a common blood inheritance many generations apart.

The man paused as if suddenly dizzy, but then hunched over his machine and returned to his tapping with renewed vigor and inspiration. Crom-Ya could see he had by no means displaced the fellow’s native mind, though he seemed to share the man’s consciousness somehow.

His host looked up from his finger-drumming to answer a voice from the doorway.

“Bob, your dinner’s getting cold!”

The man seemed reluctant to break off what he was doing, but at last he did. At the sparsely laid dinner table, the man named Bob was talking excitedly.

“Ma, Pa, I think I’ve had that breakthrough I’ve been waiting for. A new character popped into my mind. He’s the damnedest bastard that ever was!”

In successive days, then months, Bob Howard wrote, or rather typed, furiously, almost like a machine himself. He spoke the words aloud as he put them on paper. Many of his new adventure tales achieved publication, and to great reader acclaim. Once a friend asked him, as readers always do, where he got his ideas.

“I didn’t seem to be creating, but rather relating events that had occurred. I tell you, it was as if the man himself had been standing at my shoulder directing my efforts. I didn’t create him by any conscious process. He simply stalked full grown out of oblivion and set me to work recording the saga of his adventures.”

There is tangible proof — in the form of marginal notes— that I went minutely through such things as the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt…

These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books, all of which the writer seemed to know with equal, though obviously academic, facility. One note appended to von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, was alarmingly otherwise.

— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”

I

Wind! A howling tumult that made hurricanes seem like zephyrs, in a landscape of black congealed lava and upthrust crags. Lightning blazed crimson above. Whenever it ceased for a few seconds, I somehow knew I would have been lost in utter darkness if my eyes were human — and also, in that searing environment, my eyes would have boiled and burst in those same few seconds.

But my eyes were not human, and nor was I.

Scaly legs ending in irregular stone-like hoofs rattled on the fuming rocks I traversed. I stalked bipedally, and it felt as though my massive limbs moved slowly, as in old stop-motion special effect — and that, too, was an earthly, human thought, my own thought as Roy Orlanski of Scranton, now chasing tenure at Miskatonic.

I did not know where I was or what I was, now. I knew my bulk was more than elephantine, that I could neither smell nor hear but had other senses, and that my field of sight covered three quarters of a circle. It also extended above me.

The noisome sky, filled with vapour, dust and cinders, rolled apart suddenly as though torn by a cyclone. In the gap I saw the moon. It filled a quarter of the heavens, and glowed a hot pinkish-white, but some of the craters and markings were the ones I knew. Its radiance spilled across the world, bright as a burning mirror. It revealed naked cliffs and headlands, and below them a sea — an ocean — of blood-red pulsing lava that surged to the tidal forces of that monstrous moon. Dark slag formed on its crests and then cracked wide.

Sluggish waves broke against the quaking headlands and threw red spray a mile high. Masses of rock fell into that molten sea, sending up slow, seething splashes. Under my hooves the land tilted, quivered, and I knew it was an island of lighter rock afloat in depthless fury.

Two objects like artificial islands, or vast ships, passed across the glowing face of the moon. One of them descended towards a strange, jagged structure atop a mountain. Somehow I knew that mountain was my own destination.

That was when I woke.

I lay shaking a little in my bed, because that was not the first of these dreams I’d had since I started working with those rock samples the Geology Department had obtained from an odd source in Germany. They had lain neglected among others in a store room until I happened to find them and wonder if they were really just a purplish variety of basalt. They felt mighty dense in my hand for that.

Tests, comprehensive ones, had since borne that out.

I put myself in order and left the small house I rented, one of the old gambrel-roofed places that characterize Arkham, though like a lot of others, it was restored for the tourists and given modern wiring and plumbing. Arkham used to be a haunted backwater, in spite of the university’s prestige, and these days the university is still a mainstay, but tourism has become another. To keep Arkham quaint, the modern apartment blocks mostly stand at the other end of town with the shopping mall. I wouldn’t mind a modern apartment myself, only I can’t afford one, and at least that house in Lich Street stands in easy walking distance of the campus.

A crowded tour bus drove past me, down Parsonage, its next stop Keziah Mason’s witch house. It’s not the original; that collapsed in a gale nearly ninety years ago, and when the wreckage was cleared away some awful discoveries were made. Some bad things happened, too, in the house that was built on the site, and it caught fire in the ’seventies. Later they built a kitsch reproduction of the Mason house and turned it into a museum. There are waxworks of Keziah and Brown Jankin, and poor Walter Gilman’s fate is described by the guides with relish, as are Keziah’s child-murders.

I’ve never visited it. But Miskatonic still has that alien image Gilman gave the university, and that other, larger one of bluish stone they discovered in the collapsed witch house. They’re made of substances more interesting, and baffling, to a geologist than any amount of sick folklore.

I thought about my dream as I walked. It wasn’t hard to explain, of course. My field is the continent building processes, geochronology in particular, and I’d been working hard on a paper to do with weird anomalies in a region between Tibet, Inner Mongolia and the Great Wall. There’s a part of it, apparently a plateau, that doesn’t show up well even on EarthWatch satellite scans, and the Chinese government is blandly unforthcoming about it, though there doesn’t seem to be anything like missile sites there. Very little of any kind was there, that I knew about. The rock samples I’d been analyzing might have come from that area, and been taken to Europe in the late 1830s by a much travelled and peculiar German scholar, but that was indefinite too.

The milieu of my dreams was plainly Earth before there was a drop of liquid water on its surface, or a molecule of free oxygen in its air, the very subject of my paper. Only a creature of living mineral could have survived in it, and how it would obtain energy to sustain its great bulk I did not know. From the furnace heat all around it? From radioactivity, even? Four billion years ago, or more, the isotopes of uranium were more plentiful in the crust. There was nearly twice as much U-238 alone, and the others have much shorter half-lives.

Then I wondered why I was even speculating about the life processes of an impossible monster in my dreams. Of course I’d had several dreams like that. I’d been working hard, perhaps too hard, and going without sleep. You don’t produce good results that way.

Reaching the university, I walked past the engineering building and the athletic fields, then across the Twisted Quad to the library. I didn’t expect Connie to be there yet. She’s smart as can be, but not too well organized, and in our student days she’d come to lectures late, disheveled and apologetic. Maybe I shouldn’t call her disorganized. She turned in her assignments on time. I sweated like hell over mine and always worried that I’d have to ask for extensions, which I hate being reduced to. I’m thorough, and haven’t a bad brain, but it doesn’t work quickly.

Connie was there, as it happened, waiting for me. Her field is Chinese languages, history and myth, the obscure ones especially. She had a dozen old books in front of her on the long table’s green leather surface, spread out under the light of a bronze reading lamp. The folder containing my geological notes, that I’d given her, lay at her elbow. She was frowning over a massive volume with Chinese characters marching down the pages. The covers were some kind of hardwood with strongly grained patterns of yellow and purple.

“Roy!” she exclaimed, seeing me. “This is great! I have it, that book I was talking about. Mister Yu found it for me. It came from Los Angeles yesterday.”

That was terrific. I said so, but added with trepidation, “What did it cost?”

“Don’t worry. He was reasonable about the money if I’d become his number four concubine. I said number one and it’s a deal.”

“Sure you did. I can come through — and I mean this month. Certain it’s genuine, though?”

Most English-speaking collectors doubt there is a Han translation of Nameless Cults. Connie nodded, though, as vehemently as an excited little girl. That was endearing, because Connie Burcham is nobody’s little girl. She’s two inches taller than I, a bit loose-jointed and gangling, but I’ve known her since we were freshmen and there was nothing clumsy about her sprinting or going over hurdles. Her nickname then was Flash.

“I’d bet on it,” she said. “People who’d even know how to forge it are rare, let alone who’d go to the trouble. The pages are woodblock printed, and the paper, the ink, is a hundred years old if it’s yesterday! A scholar named Huang Jing translated it from von Junzt’s German, and a good thing, too, because I can read the Han for you on my head but I can’t even say ‘It’s raining’ in German. Huang learned from a German missionary as a boy, he says. I suppose about 1900.” She touched the hardwood covers. “Kˇepà Bùluò De Shuˉ, he called this, his interpretation of Unspeakable Cults. The Book of Awful Clans. There are more copies left of it than of the 1839 German original run, probably a lot more, but hardly anyone in the west knows about it.”

“If Huang was good, and if he translated it straight from the original Dusseldorf edition, the one Gottfried Mülder printed, this could be treasure!”

I was hoping that Huang Jing had added a lot between von Junzt’s chapters, a lot that was only known in China. Friedrich von Junzt had returned from Mongolia a very different man to the one who’d begun that last journey, and he hadn’t survived long. He’d been strangled in a locked tower room in his own ancestral castle. No-one had seen the assassin come or go. It was part of his legend that the marks on his throat had been made by fingers that weren’t human.

Nameless Cults, or Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten, had nothing in it about Mongolia or the Plateau of Leng. The German spent the final months of his life penning an account of his last journey at a frenzied rate. His last friend, Alexis Ladeau, was supposedly the only person ever to read it, just after von Junzt was murdered. Having done that, Ladeau burned it and crushed the ashes to powder. Then he cut his own throat.

Aside from Ladeau, only Gottfried Mülder, the Baron von Junzt’s printer, would have been in a position to know anything from von Junzt himself about that final expedition. Mülder wrote that von Junzt had absolutely claimed to him and Ladeau that Leng was a real place, it existed, and he had reached it, seen horrors there of which the Tcho-Tcho tribe and its stomachturning customs was the least, and escaped alive with a number of relics, including rock samples which the printer described in detail — and they were exactly like the ones I’d been testing. The ones that supposedly had come to Miskatonic from a castle near Dusseldorf.

Leng. It’s variously said to be a mythical version of Tibet, a lesser plateau in Qinghai, a remote highland in the southern Gobi, and even a region of the dreamlands! Legends or not, though, if there was an actual place called Leng in the world, and it was the source of those rock samples, it could write an entire new chapter in geological history. Because their content said they were forty-two hundred million years old.

No rocks verifiably that old had ever been found, much less strata. We haven’t even discovered any minerals of that age, except for minute zircon crystals. They’ve been dated by the uranium to lead decay rate. They’re never found in the rocks that originally contained them, though. Those have been eroded, crushed, heated, buried in sediment, incorporated into metamorphic rock, and much else through eons, the microscopic crystals surviving it all. Zircon is tough.

I hadn’t settled it yet. Still, those rocks appeared to be as old as the zircon crystals in them, which would make them primeval past belief, and somehow untouched by the eons. I kept telling myself, as an inoculation against disappointment, that it was most likely a mistake, a false alarm, and I’d have to wait on publication and review.

For that, I’d have to find and prove the samples’ source, which looked like a difficult job. Essential, though. I couldn’t see myself making much headway in the scientific world with a claim that the rocks had been brought from the Far East by a bizarre eccentric of the early nineteenth century, not even a geologist, who said they came from a very likely mythic plateau.

“Roy, don’t look so perplexed,” Connie said, punching my shoulder lightly. “Maybe there’s a way you can learn more. If you’ll open your mind just a bit. Those dreams of yours. Are you still having them?”

“Had another one last night,” I admitted.

“They began when you started handling those rocks, analyzing them. I think you should consult the team that did those psychometry experiments here. See what sort of results you get holding those rocks while under hypnosis.”

“Connie, I’m a bad subject for hypnosis, the worst. I’ve about as much psychic sensitivity as one of those rocks myself! And psychometry — it’s never been confirmed that there is such a thing, no offence.”

“The experiments weren’t conclusive, I know. They never are. But a couple showed results, and it has been known to happen in history. That tenth-century Irish monk who wrote the Nemedian Chronicles did it after a series of visions at Saint Brigid’s shrine outside Cologne, and he had the visions while he was gripping a chalice from that prehistoric kingdom of Nemedia in his hands!”

“Whoa!” I said helplessly. “Don’t go too far into left field, Connie. You mean he believed that chalice came from ancient Nemedia. I know it’s a real tenth-century manuscript, but Prester John’s letter was real too — a real twelfth-century fabrication, that is. Or was it fourteenth?”

“Who cares?” Connie said, a bit nettled. “Doesn’t matter. Psychometry sometimes works. It’s worth a try.”

“It’s a very long shot. Besides, those prehistoric kingdoms were supposed to be destroyed in a cataclysm that changed the whole face of the earth, Connie, and that just couldn’t be. Not so recently.”

“Just remember who discovered the Nemedian Chronicles when they’d been forgotten for centuries. It was von Junzt, poking around in one of the Gaelic monasteries Irish monks founded on the continent, as a young man! It made his name. Whatever else he was, he wasn’t any trifler. He traveled everywhere except South America and Antarctica, and met everybody from the brothers Grimm to Marie Laveau and Lobachevsky. Von Junzt took the Chronicles seriously, Roy.”

I came close to saying that in the nineteenth century they’d taken phrenology seriously, too. I bit the words back. Connie’s a beautiful person, we’d been lovers when we were first at Miskatonic, she’s a good friend, and she’d cried on my shoulder the time a sorry specimen of jerkdom hurt her badly.

Just the same…

I said cautiously, “He was quite a fellow, yes. But I do know my own field, Connie. Here’s just one thing. I’ve read the Chronicles. They say the whole of West Africa was heaved up from the bottom of the sea at the time! West African rocks are basically Pre-Cambrian. There’s no possible way they could’ve been installed where they are just twenty thousand years ago.”

Crustal convulsions like that would have darkened the sky for a hundred years, probably made the atmosphere unbreathable and wiped out the higher forms of life, besides.

Connie bristled.

“Thank you so damn much for mansplaining that to me. I appreciate it. Especially after I found the Kˇepà Bùluò De Shuˉ for you, and am going to read it for you too, you illiterate! It’s not as if I have my own work to do!”

“Connie, I appreciate that! I’m grateful. I owe you. But I can’t back down—”

“No. You certainly can’t. Just sit and listen a minute, Orlanski, because I’m about to go from left field to total craziness. Okay?”

“All right,” I said resignedly.

“I know all that,” she said, a bit red in the face. Ire, not embarrassment. “I knew it in high school, for God’s sake. But I think a little deeper than just physical facts! If a cataclysm like that actually happened, it couldn’t have been merely physical. Geological. But suppose there were dislocations in time as well as upheavals in the crust? Gigantic ones? A decade stretched into millions of years, for instance, where West Africa was concerned? Even hundreds of millions? Something like it east and south of Wallace’s Line, too, accounting for the fauna and rock formations there? Leng might have changed geologically a lot less than other regions did. If that’s rubbish, it leaves you still trying to explain those rocks and figure out where von Junzt got them, doesn’t it?”

She had me there. “Yes, it does.”

“Time isn’t just weirder than we know, Roy,” Connie said earnestly. “It’s weirder than we can know. Einstein and relativity only started proving that. It can be slowed down. It can be accelerated too. Maybe in less drastic ways than near lightspeed or the g-field of a neutron star. There are convincing cases of personalities being transferred across time, not all of them human personalities. Experiments have been done right here at Miskatonic. Wingate Peaslee carried them out in the 1950s. He had a strong interest because his own father had been a victim of transferred personality for five years. Wingate was the only one who stood by him; his wife got a divorce. Just about unthinkable in New England before the Great War! It’s a family matter, you know. Wingate’s sister Hannah was my great-grandma. I’ve read Wingate’s record of what his father found and saw in Australia in ’35. You should too. I’m worried about these dreams you’re having, and I think you ought to be careful.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said. “No, I’m not humoring you, I meant it, Connie. The dreams bother me too. If they happen much more, or get more intense, I’ll stop working with those rock samples.” I didn’t say for how long. “Meanwhile, you know, could you translate some of Huang Jing’s masterpiece?”

II

We worked on it for hours. That Chinese student really had mastered German, it seemed, and his translation of von Junzt’s chapters seemed accurate, which I knew from reading an accurate English version of Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten. The first one was that shoddy Bridewall effort of 1845, worthless to any real scholar, and the early twentieth century Golden Goblin edition, expurgated to the bone, was merely ornamental. Then it was forgotten for about sixty years. When hippie mysticism came in, though, and pious conventional horror lost a lot of its power, a real, complete translation into English came from Maelstrom Press, first in stiff covers and then in paperback, with Secret Mysteries of Asia for a companion volume. When Connie and I were an item I’d read them both.

Huang Jing’s sections of Kˇepà Bùluò De Shuˉ, interspersed with his translations of von Junzt’s chapters, said nothing much about the German’s last journey. What he’d written on that subject came from the Mongols who had accompanied von Junzt to Leng, but deserted him before he arrived there. Pure hearsay, no doubt, which Huang had got third or fourth hand, and decades after everybody involved was dead.

I was disappointed, to be truthful. Huang gave no clue as to where Leng was situated. He even suggested it was part of the dreamlands, a notion I’d read about before, and he stated as fact that the stars of Leng were unlike Earth’s. His more realistic details described Leng as a dry, cold, stony plateau, very difficult of access. He recounted a story that the Qianlong Emperor, in the eighteenth century, filled with the pride of his conquests, had sent an army eight thousand strong to subdue Leng, and fewer than a hundred came back. That was expunged from the imperial records, and it was made a capital crime to repeat the story or set it down in writing.

Connie told me that was possible. The Qianlong Emperor had been quite a book-burner, destroying thousands of volumes, especially ones that said too much about problems with defense, or failed frontier campaigns. A few dozen indiscreet writers in his reign were sentenced to nasty deaths by the Literary Inquisition. Charming.

“Huang was lucky to be born after that emperor died,” I said. “Would it be true that he sent a force to conquer Leng?”

“Can’t confirm it. He might have. The approaches are supposed to be harsh, and of course disease might have destroyed the army. Huang does say here that nobody finds Leng by the same route twice.”

This was no help. Huang also recounted the same legends about Leng I had heard before. It was supposedly the original home of the Tcho-Tcho people, held in disrepute throughout Asia, and Huang described them with the same disdain. According to him they were horrid quasi-humans, squat and powerful in form, their abundant body hair more like stiff black bristles, their mouths grotesquely wide, stretching almost from ear to ear. Their manners and customs were appalling, their closest approach to religion a corpse-eating cult with a winged canine sphinx for its symbol, and they killed strangers on sight, quickly if they were fortunate.

Leng was populated, thinly, by more prepossessing people, who lived in stone villages and traveled only in armed caravans. There was supposed to be at least one city, but that was long abandoned and its history enigmatic. There were ancient burial mounds and strange towers, said to be as deserted as the city. There was a sprawling stone monastery or temple, also without inhabitants, except a high priest who wore robes and mask of yellow silk, and whom it was death to see even hidden in his vestments. Seeing him without them, wrote Huang (and Gottfried Mülder, too) meant a less comfortable fate.

Having got that far, I decided I might as well be reading Sax Rohmer. Yet von Junzt had died mysteriously and badly after his return from Mongolia, terrible things had evidently happened there, no-one ever caught his murderer, and his friend Ladeau had destroyed von Junzt’s last manuscript and then suicided. Any real clues to where Leng can be found were probably crushed ashes with the manuscript. All of this meant dead ends.

I said slowly, “Connie, maybe you’re right and I’ve no way to go now but with psychometry experiments. If they don’t give me a thing, I’m no worse off.”

“Of course you’re not!” she said. Then she pulled a face. In a lot of ways she’s as spontaneous as a kid. “It’ll mean going through Tindall. And a certain amount of butt-kissing.”

Neither of us liked the Dean of Arts and Sciences. He resembled an intensely staring owl. His people were rich, he’d been a force in getting some grants Miskatonic needed badly, and he was a player in the university’s politics. By that I mean he excelled at planting knives in backs. The trustees didn’t quite jump to attention when he spoke, but they certainly didn’t ignore him, and he had a weakness for bizarre projects. Perhaps, then, even though he no more liked me than I did him, he’d approve this one.

Among Tindall’s oddities was an office that would have been bang up-to-date a hundred years ago. His desk, bookcases and filing cabinets were carved black oak, with matching chairs. These had no upholstery and were ugly, wide enough for people with backsides like Percherons, standing on four thick legs. A despot’s interrogators would have approved them for discomfort. Even Tindall could not do without a computer, printer and fax, but he kept them in a broad alcove behind a tawny plush curtain.

His social attitudes were as far behind the times. I think he’d prefer that no-one with a name like Orlanski trod the hallowed precincts of Miskatonic. Believe me, he talked like that, and I’d heard him refer in public speeches to “the charmed circle of New England life”. Polacks should have the grace to stay out, was his meaning, and maybe that’s why he treated Connie with respect. Ancestors of hers fought in what Tindall still calls “King Philip’s War”, and they’ve lived in Massachusetts ever since. That meant a lot to the dean. His own forebears were Providence folk and had been there a long time, but still only since 1750 or so, when they arrived as merchants. (They were Tories during the Revolution, by the way.) Connie’s family can beat that by a full lifetime.

“Ah, Orlanski,” he said as we entered. “Doctor Burcham. Sit down, please.”

I have a doctorate myself, but that was Tindall.

There he sat, behind his broad desk in his own chair, which was as unyielding as the others. As I say, he looked like an owl. His large, round, sharp-sighted hazel eyes and small hooked nose made the impression a strong one. If he’d only had a thick head of hair tufted at the sides the resemblance would have been perfect, but he was stone bald.

“I’ve seen the analyses,” he said, when those damned chairs were digging into our napes and shoulders. “They really are unique. I take it those are the samples, there in that satchel?”

“That’s right, dean.”

“You know findings like that will be challenged? Of course we can defend them. It isn’t just Miskatonic’s high repute and facilities. Places outside our campus have confirmed them, unimpeachable institutions. I never imagined you’d falsify such tests anyway. It’s inconceivable that you’d be so stupid.”

Apparently he thought he was complimenting me. He hadn’t said it was inconceivable I would do something so unethical, you’ll notice. Well, that was Tindall too. I gave him a humble coprophagous smile and thought how fine it would feel to hit him.

Connie said from the side of her mouth, “Lucid and impartial, Roy.”

I kept a grip, and described the difficulty of confirming the samples’ source in China — if it had been that — or Mongolia. Connie took over for a while and suggested that psychometry might give some answers. That wouldn’t impress geologists, but could lead to a specific locale where solid evidence could be obtained.

“Maybe a whole area of rocks like these,” I added. “Crags, bluffs, a range of hills. It’s a lot to hope for. But it’s worth a try. It’d be revolutionary.”

“Hmm,” Tindall said. “Psychometry experiments haven’t been conducted here in a while. Usually, when there are results, they’ve been gained with man-made artefacts that belong to specific people. Objects with intense personal meaning, or close associations with dire events. I remember one youngster in a hypnotic session who held a single-action revolver that a Texan named Reynolds used to suicide in the old days, during a feud. The boy babbled of horrors and monsters in a hidden cave and tried to shoot himself with the pistol. It wasn’t loaded then, naturally. He needed therapy for a time. And Reynolds, the gun’s original owner, evidently dynamited a hidden cave just before he died. Sealed it permanently.”

I’d have sworn there was a certain relish in the way he spoke.

“I’m a bad subject for hypnosis, dean,” I told him. I wasn’t eager for it, either. I trust it about as much as I do polygraph tests, which is to say, not at all. “If there’s anything to these dreams, I seem to have them when I’ve not been sleeping enough and I’m on edge as a result. And when I’ve been handling these rocks a good deal.”

“While I can’t recommend that as a steady habit, I know a lot of students work on coffee and amphetamines,” Tindall said primly. “You have a strong constitution, Orlanski. If the medical staff monitor you during the experiments, as they’d be required to, you shouldn’t be in danger.”

“Thank you, dean,” I said. “That’s reassuring for me.”

Connie’s spontaneity is one of the endearing things about her, but I heard her choke slightly and knew she’d been close to a laughing fit. Good thing she managed to repress it. Tindall didn’t have a sense of humor about his own dignity.

“Show me these rocks,” he said.

He’d seen them before, but I rolled a protective sheet of suede on his desk and spread the samples out. In color they’re a dark red-purple, except two banded gray ones, dense and heavy, with a vitreous gloss. They are essentially basaltic, the crystals in them minute. They cooled close to the surface, not at a great depth like granite. In appearance they could be a kind of porphyry.

They are radioactive too, but nothing to worry about; common granite is radioactive. The rocks of Leng, though, are provably more than four billion years old, the most ancient ever discovered. Just the fact that they survived into the present, still in their primal form, is as fantastic as any of Connie’s speculations about time having spasmed erratically on some occasions during the life of the planet.

While he studied them, I looked at the books on his shelves, some dealing with esoteric physics and multi-dimensional geometry, others with anthropology, some with law and philosophy, and many on varied subjects from the Miskatonic University Press, which was Tindall’s particular darling. They included the Necronomicon in English, translated straight from what had probably been the last eighth-century Arabic copy in the world, an abomination to all Muslims. Our Miskatonic edition of von Junzt’s Nameless Cults was there, too.

“I’ll arrange a psychometry series for…whenever you are ready,” Tindall declared. “I think Raxton will be pleased. I understand that you’re averse to hypnotic sessions, and if you think a couple of sleepless days immersed in the analysis reports on these rocks will prepare you better, we’ll try it on that basis.”

I should have been pleased that he agreed with such alacrity. Somehow, I wasn’t. Somehow, it seemed to me that he looked at Connie and me in the way the owl he so resembled would look at a couple of mice.

III

I’d spent two days with very little rest and no sleep. Besides studying all I had on the rock samples — my own notes, chemical analysis, isotope ratios, examination of thin cross-sections by electron microscope, and for a contrast, the myths and legends of Leng — I’d worked out strenuously in the gym. Then I settled myself on a comfortable bed in the medical center with the light subdued and my body functions monitored, cameras watching me. I made myself breathe deeply, steadily. I was tired but also keyed up. My other dreams had always come when I’d been in that state.

I grasped one of the wine-colored rocks in my hand. The others hung from the bed-frame in mesh drawstring bags on either side of me. Concentrating on the texture and weight of the rock, breathing deeply, I slept at last.

I hadn’t dreamed while actually holding one of those samples before.

There was a city of vitreous purple rock in a cavern that gave the impression of being huge — immense — even though I had nothing familiar to give me perspective. It must have been formed by stone flowing like melted wax, and great eruptions of gas bursting through it as it congealed. The buildings lacked roofs, needing none, the walls were massively thick, with pylons and courts leading one into another. I saw friezes cut into the walls. Grotesque, alien, nonhuman, they still conveyed a sense of art and the ceremonial.

A chasm cut harshly across the middle of the cave, dropping a mile or more, with a river of churning red lava at the bottom. I couldn’t judge how wide. The cavern’s roof was lost to sight in the distance above, and somehow I could see above me as well as all around.

There were beings moving about. Stony, made of mineral, they seemed hot enough to be plastic to a degree, and their limbs moved slowly, by increments. They walked on massive legs that ended in rocky, graceless hooves, and except for a number of globular eyes their heads were featureless.

Other beings, segmented and flat, with rows of flipper-like legs, moved in the same jerky way as the bipedal ones, and carried burdens through the weird courts and plazas. Maybe they were the equivalent of domestic animals. I couldn’t conceive how they had ever evolved naturally, out of molten rock and raw radioactive ores, out of primeval flame, and perhaps they hadn’t. Perhaps some other race had designed them, formed them, and put them here for unknown reasons. Perhaps they had been left in possession of the planet ages ago, having served their creators’ purpose. Exploration? Geological research? Mining?

I saw one of them approach the burning abyss, step indifferently off the edge, and levitate across. Drifting safely to the secure rock on the other side, it began its stiff, clumsy walking again. They could ignore gravity. Only for short distances, it seemed, or they wouldn’t need legs. Probably they kept that talent for emergencies. Without it, in an environment so elemental, so everlastingly shattered and riven, I could not see how they’d survive a year.

With the vague transition that comes in dreams, I drifted to a far end of the cavern and saw a ship, a spaceship I supposed, bigger than an aircraft carrier, smooth, gleaming and featureless. It glided into a huge stone bay or dock. I boarded it. Looking down, I saw legs of mineral with stony hooves striding stiffly and knew they were mine, just as I knew that my clustered eyes saw all around me as those of my fellows did. I was one of these creatures.

The floor beneath me, when I willed it, became transparent, but I knew it only seemed so; that cunning optical devices in the hull transmitted all the vistas below to the floor on which I was standing. The ship rose smoothly into the sky. The energies that gripped it made no blatant displays like heat or bellowing noise. Receding below us I saw a landscape of stark igneous rock, an island of mountains and crevasses floating in a scarlet magma sea where black crust formed briefly, split and vanished again, on the crests of waves big as mountains. The floating island, large as it was, looked frail as a balsa raft in that context.

This was Earth in the time before its crust set. The time in which the rocks of Leng had formed. Our ship rose through a dreadful, raging sky and did not even quiver in the fiery clouds or winds. It ignored little inconveniences like gravity and inertia, moving through the atmosphere, then beyond it. Through the curving anterior wall, again by willing it, I saw the glowing pink-white moon I had beheld in another dream, only a quarter as far away as the moon Roy Orlanski knew. The dark areas Orlanski’s race misnamed the lunar seas were still forming. An Apollo mission that landed on it in this age — if there could be one — would meet utter destruction at once. This moon was still hot and the tidal forces of Earth worked on it constantly.

Duration altered for me then. Hanging between an Earth that still thundered with the fires of its formation, and a partly molten moon, I began to see both under a terrific acceleration of time. It was like the speeded-up films of plants in a forest battling for the light, but a million times faster. The black slag crust thickened. Lava still burst through in apocalyptic fountains and spreading fiery seas, but it cooled and darkened, the solid state increasing. Incandescent gas erupted into the atmosphere. Clouds thickened. Water eventually condensed, high in the air, began to fall, and hissed back into steam before it came close to the surface.

Finally the naked rock crust cooled enough for water to reach it. In a worldwide pall of steam, hot rain came down at last. It rained for thousands of years. Raw new oceans surged across the land, filling the basins. I kept sight of the mass that had been an island in a sea of seething magma, the island that would one day be Leng. Somehow I knew that. Somehow a weird anomaly of time preserved it from being altered. Tectonic plates ground together, subducted, formed continents and supercontinents, yet that strange highland with a shape that looked, to me, like a swimming platypus seen from above, never changed much and yet could never quite be plainly seen.

Shallow steaming seas covered nearly all the surface. The person, the thing I had seemed to be, with its partly molten rocky body, had vanished, and I seemed to have no physical form now, but to drift like a phantom. In a limitless swamp filled with crawling vapor, I saw a pulsating mass huge as a hill that was alive, and, I supposed, organic, pulpy and gray-white. A hundred million things like itself, but tiny, rolled off its sides like drops of sweat and vanished in the muck. I’m a scientist, and still, the thing was revolting. Had that, wherever it came from, been the source of earthly life based on protein, the first selfreplicating molecules that would be driven by the sun’s energy to more and more complex forms?

If it was, I understood for the first time since I’d been a child why so many people like fairy tales better.

Leng at one time became submerged, stayed deep in green water for ages, and then emerged again. It had accumulated chalk and sand in layers, then lost them to erosion, but its original rock was never reduced to dust, or changed its primal shape, almost as if time was dividing like a river to flow around it. Even when the Asian continent formed around Leng, it only assimilated the plateau, never crushed or transformed it, and Leng’s distinctive shape remained.

I’ve said it made me think of a swimming platypus seen from above. So it did. The body was arched in two-thirds of a circle, the broad duck-bill nearly parallel to the tail, as though the creature was turning sharply in the water, with a small offshoot of the main plateau resembling one web-footed foreleg. That, a remote part of me thought, should be easy to recognize in a satellite photograph — if Leng showed up in such pictures. But that was not certain.

There were glimpses, vistas, of huge occurrences on the globe, like the cities and wars of the Old Ones with star-shaped heads to which I’ve been told the Necronomicon refers, and which the expedition to the Antarctic in the 1930s confirmed. It looked like the Carboniferous Age to me, but that was peripheral to the things I was seeing. Always the central focus was on that strange plateau, maybe a hundred miles from end to end. Even in my dream I wondered how large it would seem if you reached it and had to traverse it.

Leng was not richly forested. Except when it had lain under an ancient sea, it was a highland, drier than most of the planet. The mineral beings that lived there while the surface was still largely molten were gone ages before, their citadels and their bodies inert, frozen rock deep under the plateau. If they survived, they must have gone deeper into the mantle and concentrated stores of the radioactive matter they — I assumed — needed to exist. More probably by far, they had gone where the trilobites went.

The dinosaurs arose and a race of humanoid reptiles, fanged like cobras, appeared. The other dinosaurs vanished or evolved into birds, and the serpent-men flourished, though they retreated into hiding as the mammals arose. Again, I saw them vaguely and fleetingly, and they never inhabited Leng, if the dreamvisions I had were true.

The first intelligent race to enter that dry plateau were the ancestral Tcho-Tcho, and they were as hideous as the tales of them asserted. I saw them survive a cataclysm of the Earth’s crust that, as Connie said, must have occurred in distorted time or nothing would have lived through it, and then a second cataclysm, the one described in the Nemedian Chronicles, leaving the globe’s topography as it is now.

I saw the plateau waver and tremble like a mirage, as though it was shifting between dimensions. Its links with this world appeared to lie in the region east of Tibet, but nothing looked sure. As my vision of it steadied again, I saw tall olive-skinned people who, if the Chronicles were more than the fantasy I’d always thought them, would be Hyrkanians, forging through the gray granite mountain passes on ponies. They wore leather and furs. Their weapons were lances, swords and bows. Pressing upward past the cliffs and gorges that were the natural ramparts of Leng, they came at last to the windy plateau with its ancient, abandoned city, its curious towers and its windowless stone temple, or monastery, standing huge and apart. The new settlers left these alone, maybe after some nasty experiences, and built strong stone villages instead, for defense against the debased Tcho-Tcho. They regarded these as only questionably human. I shouldn’t wonder if there was more to that judgement than ethnocentric arrogance, because I had glimpses of the Tcho-Tcho’s rites and customs, and they were sickening. In the dream I saw one of their gatherings, lit by blue fires in the sky. They were like blazing nebulae such as were never seen in earthly skies. Then, over the feasting, chanting throng, I saw an unnatural thing like a huge winged hyena, or canine sphinx, swoop down and crouch with wings folded, as though presiding. It turned its head towards me and I looked into its face.

That was when I screamed and woke.

I was disoriented for the first few seconds. Then I recognized the faces of Connie and Raxton, the psychic researcher. Beyond them I saw Tindall, and his expression was avid.

“Are you all right?” Connie asked urgently.

“Yes. Yes, I’m all right. Listen, I’ve got to write down everything I can remember from that dream, right away, before I lose it. Let me get to that desk…”

“First let go that rock. Look at your hand.”

I was clutching it so tightly my bones hurt, and while I hadn’t been aware when I awoke, it was hot! Not enough to burn me, but hot enough to notice, and enough to sting. I cursed and opened a hand that felt cramped. The rock had left a pale outline in my palm. My blood didn’t start circulating again at once.

Tindall pounced on the rock, his eyes greedy. Although he tossed it from hand to hand because of its heat, he didn’t relinquish it. Just emerged from a long, intense and harrowing dream (or true vision of the past) I still noticed. Such loss of control on his part was out of character.

“It’s a link,” he muttered. “Contact with Yog-Sothoth.”

In that moment I didn’t pay much attention. Writing down every detail of my dream was more important. I paused long enough to catch Connie’s eye and apologize for my language.

“Roy, you are so nineteenth century sometimes,” she laughed. She tapped her breast-bone with an index finger. “It’s me, Connie, remember?”

Nineteenth century, eh? I wasn’t nearly as much that way as Tindall. The word he’d mentioned didn’t ring any bells with me then. I haven’t studied the Necronomicon and I’m not interested in cults. The way he’d gloated over the rock stayed in my mind, though, lodged like a piece of almond between front teeth. I’d recall that word later.

IV

I’m not a cook. My repertoire is half a dozen dishes I’ve practiced often enough for them to be edible, and a few more that’ll turn out well if I’m lucky, but I don’t have a real cook’s palate or instincts. When I’m trying something new, I work from the recipe and hope for the best.

Connie knows that since long ago. She came around to my place for dinner just the same, in a steel-gray silk pant suit, her brick-red mane tinted auburn, and we ate a meal of spicy pork chops simmered until you could cut them with a fork, irrigated with a lot of wine which I for one needed. Connie knew that too, and she was concerned. She hadn’t told me to be careful just to hear herself talk.

“Don’t do it again, Roy,” she said soberly. “When you saw those Tcho-Tcho rites and that winged hound, it may have been a close call, more than you know. I think you were lucky to wake right then.”

I was fighting the idea that what I had seen was completely real. Fighting it because it frightened me. I said stubbornly, “It could have come from my own brain and nowhere else. That early part of the dream, with the molten earth and nearby moon? I’ve done a paper on how the earth-moon system formed. As for the creatures in the cave — imagination.”

“What about Leng?” she demanded. “All through those aeons you kept seeing Leng, the plateau, not much changed, and I’ll bet you could draw me its outline right now. Wine or no wine. Here, do it.”

She thrust pen and paper into my hands.

“Oh, sure I can,” I said, and did. “Subconscious memory of an oil stain I see in the car park every day, for all I know. If the plateau really exists we ought to be able to find it, and I’ve done a computer search. Starting with Google Earth. What’s nagging at me is the way Tindall reacted. He pounced on that hot rock like an owl on a mouse. He was caught off-guard there, for a breath. He said something like, ‘It’s a link. Contact with—’ I forget with what. Yuth something.”

“A link? Well, duh. Clearly it’s a link, when you’ve been having these dreams, and especially the last one. A link across time and space? Sure he said Yuth, Roy?”

“No. It could have been Yogguth. Isn’t that supposed to be an unknown planet out past the rim of the Solar System — if you’re a cultist?”

“Yuggoth. Some believers think it’s the same as Pluto, but if it is, there’s certainly a lot we don’t know about Pluto yet. Don’t look like that. I believe Yuggoth’s a cult myth myself. I can’t see Tindall putting stock in — oh, dear God Almighty!”

“What?”

“He didn’t say Yuggoth, Roy. He said…Yog-Sothoth! Don’t repeat it! I just mispronounced it on purpose. In the Middle Ages even the darkest heretics wrote it, and I guess said it, as Iog-Sotot. It’s a dangerous name to pronounce the correct way.”

“Isn’t this Yog—”

She placed her hand urgently across my mouth. “Don’t. Say Iog-Sotot if you have to.”

“Iog-Sotot. All right, and I haven’t read the Necronomicon except to skim it, but you can’t attend Miskatonic without having heard about it. Isn’t he one of the gods that mad Yemenite poet wrote about?”

“They aren’t gods, Roy, even though strange old cults around the world worship them. I think it was Arthur Clarke who said, ‘No gods ever imagined by our minds possessed the powers they will command.’ What they are is alien, and not Disney cuties or grotesques, or little nature pixies like E.T. And they are not imaginary, much as I wish. About — Iog-Sotot— there was the Charles Dexter Ward case in Providence, back in the roaring twenties. Ward became much too interested in an ancestor of his who invoked that — entity — and it sent him insane. A unique and awful kind of madness. He vanished from the asylum in the end, nobody ever knew how, and nobody saw him again after he escaped — if that’s what happened.

“That thing, Iog-Sotot, has staggering powers, and it’s said to be congruent with all time and space.” Connie closed her eyes and quoted what I guess was a passage she’d read. “‘Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Iog-Sotot knows the gate. Iog-Sotot is the gate. Iog-Sotot is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Iog-Sotot.’ But it still has limitations. Somehow it’s barred out of this universe, can only reach into it when someone opens the way. Usually, from what I’ve read, those who try, fail, and the result is disastrous. Now if Leng is some sort of dimensional nexus, those ancient rocks von Junzt brought home with him could serve as a link or contact with — something that transcends time.”

“Connie! Tindall’s not a mythic sorcerer. He’s a pompous dick of a university dean who lives in the past.”

“He’s quite a swell in esoteric math and physics even so. Knows more about the structure of space-time than either of us will if we live to be a hundred. Yes, he’s pompous, he over-rates himself, but that could make it worse!” Connie closed a hand on my forearm. She sounded nearly distraught. “I’m guessing he doesn’t know enough, has no idea what he’s meddling with, just thinks he does. He may believe he can learn things using rites from the Necronomiconthat he’d never learn in conventional ways. You saw he had that book in his study, out in the open. People have stopped being horrified by it, these days; they just see it as a curiosity, one more cult grimoire. They put Cthulhu on T-shirts and coffee mugs! But if Tindall opens a portal and lets something through, and that something was IogSotot, we wouldn’t be kissing anything as trivial as our asses goodbye. He has the rocks of Leng to establish contact, or he can get them. I wasn’t worried about it until you told me he mentioned that— entity.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Get those rocks out of his reach! Charter a plane and drop them in the Atlantic, for the best! Until we can do that, get to Tindall’s apartment, now! Talk to him, if it’s not too late. Come on.”

“We can’t drive! We’re both half cut on wine. If we’re pulled over, we won’t get to Tindall’s apartment tonight, no matter what.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Roy! We’ve eaten enough to blot it up, and I’ll stay within the limit. I don’t want to be stopped either. It’s only a few k’s. Are you coming or not?”

“Coming. But I drive. I have more bulk than you.”

“Okay.”

I didn’t share Connie’s desperation — more fool me — but I didn’t want her driving, either. Her car’s a Volvo Electric and I had handled it before. We bowled along Lich Street past the burying ground — which didn’t inspire any bright happy thoughts — and the Baptist Church, towards the modern part of town. Shopping mall, apartment blocks, swimming pool, new train station, it’s all there and all brightly lit. Somehow it didn’t reassure me. The modern end and Old Arkham alike belong to the last hundredth of a second of time, compared with the rocks of Leng.

“Can we get in?” I asked, cursing myself for not thinking of that. “Without letting Tindall know we’ve arrived, I mean?”

“In the front door, yes. Haru lives there. She’ll open up for me.” Connie spoke anxiously. “Maybe nothing is happening. Maybe Tindall is only reading and preparing, but I’m worried that he’s been doing that for quite a while already. It’s funny. These beliefs survived for thousands of years among primitive, isolated groups, like those Inuit professors Webb found worshipping Cthulhu a long way up the coast of Greenland, and still, somehow they have an appeal to crabbed, civilized scholars like Tindall!”

“And people like Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate cult, and Koresh’s bunch. Wasn’t there even a group that carried out human sacrifices ten years ago, thinking it would open a way to some underground world called K’n-yan? Didn’t they all commit suicide when they were exposed and the law showed up to arrest them?”

Connie nodded grimly. “In the Wichita Mountains. I don’t know if K’n-yan is real or not, but there’s an extensive mythology about it. In China it’s called Xinaián.”

No limit to murder and suicide cults, especially in these crazy times. Connie called Hiru’s apartment on the intercom, and asked her to open the main door because we needed to see Tindall. Hiru’s response was to ask wryly why we’d wish to see him outside office hours if we didn’t have to. Connie explained that it was urgent, and Hiru unlocked the main entrance.

Taking the elevator to Tindall’s floor, we found his apartment dark and got no response when we rang the doorbell.

“Where would you go in Arkham if you wanted to carry out some mad Necronomicon rite?” I asked, back in Connie’s car.

“Oh, God. Keziah Mason’s witch house, if the original house was still standing, but it isn’t.” She bit her lip, which would have been fetching if she hadn’t been so worried. “There’s the White Stone out past Meadow Hill. Around here, that’s traditionally a place to avoid. And there’s the river island where they say Keziah’s witches met.”

“The island!” I said. “That’s where he’d go. Von Junzt was here in Arkham, in the early 1800s. He even visited the island. I read that chapter of his Black Book. He wrote about the island and its menhirs being one of the ‘Gates’ he was always saying existed around the world.”

“Yes!” Connie said, and wrenched the Volvo’s wheel fiercely.

The Miskatonic River flows north of town. We drove along River Street, where restored seventeenth century warehouses and taverns line the waterfront. The island itself is a tourist attraction and heritage site. There are river tours by boat, but the boats don’t land on the island. The moss-grown standing stones there make people uneasy even by day. I’ve taken the tour and looked at those menhirs as the boat passed by. The patterns and angles disturbed me too. Some archaeologists think the stones were raised by an unknown people long before the Paleo-Indians crossed the Bering land bridge, and I mean serious people, not ancient astronaut enthusiasts. If Tindall was there tonight, with the rock samples, well then, it meant that Connie was right, about his intentions and motives at least, and perhaps about far more than that. My scalp prickled. My spine felt cold.

“If we cross to that island you’ll ruin your suit,” I said.

“The hell with my suit.”

As Connie looked good in that suit and really liked it, her words proved she thought we were on a real errand. There was a timber landing opposite the island, with a couple of canoes moored there. I unhitched one. We peered across at the island, and I saw what seemed to be a dolphin light, moving in the dark. Someone was there, and not many people went to that island in darkness. Connie and I, looking at each other, entered the canoe and paddled across, by mutual consent keeping as quiet as possible.

V

It’s a rocky islet, a hundred and fifty yards long and about fifty wide. The gray standing stones, finger-shaped, are between seven and ten feet long, counting the lower parts buried in the earth. They don’t belong in this region. Where they came from has never been conclusively pinned down, even now. The most surprising thing about them, to me, is that they still stand as they were first raised. None of them seem to have fallen down or been removed, even though they make Stonehenge look like yesterday, and the seventeenth-century Puritans of Massachusetts viewed them with harsh disapproval. In reason they ought to have gone long since.

Were they immune to time in the same way as the rocks of Leng?

The dolphin light switched out, and Connie and I crept through the grass and low bushes of the island. The stones seemed to lean in as though threatening to topple on us, and they seemed to bulk bigger than by daylight, too. I heard a harsh chanting, and while the voice was Tindall’s it did not speak in his usual tone. It sounded vehement, and rose at times to a downright boom. He was repeating unknown words in crazy rhythms, but they did not sound like pointless gibberish, somehow. They had the sense, the feel, of an actual language, though not one many humans had heard.

Connie and I crawled forward through the rank grass. In the ground, between the gray moss-grown stones, we felt strange energies quiver. Ahead of us were dim red glows, like small lights arranged in a circle, and in the center stood Tindall, in slacks, shirt and tie, conventional even while mouthing mad spells. I thought, ridiculously, that I felt surprised he had even removed his coat.

Then he cried the name Yog-Sothoth. Not mispronouncing it for safety. I felt the air quiver and curdle. Connie shuddered beside me. I might have whimpered, but I could not even force that much sound from my throat.

He doesn’t know enough. He just thinks he does.

The dim lights on the ground brightened from red to orange. With a sudden inspired guess, I knew they were the rock samples I had been working with. Tindall had taken them. Just my dreaming of their incredible past with one of them gripped in my hand had turned it hot.

The air thickened and swirled. It grew hotter, too. Odors, not unpleasant but strongly aromatic, struck our nostrils. They hadn’t any source that I could identify, and I felt dizzy as I whiffed them, with a sense of vertigo, of being poised above endless gulfs. And suddenly I was gazing into them. I wasn’t dreaming now, but wide awake, and I saw the naked crags, surging red magma, and molten pinkish-white moon huge in the sky, through gaps in searing clouds, that I’d seen before. The vision superimposed itself on the island in the Miskatonic. Tindall’s raw-throated chant filled my ears. All I clearly saw of the island was the circle of rocks Tindall had placed around himself, and the lines of standing stones dark against a dreadful sky. Tindall cried the name Yog-Sothoth again, and the orange glow the rocks were radiating shifted to a pale, hot yellow.

Above the circle, a misshapen vortex appeared in the air, sulfur-yellow streaked with dirty brown, like a stained hole into nowhere. The weird spicy scent became strong enough to clog our throats. I started to hallucinate, or at least, I hoped I was hallucinating.

I looked into voids between universes. I saw the chaos outside ordered space-time, or else within it. Maybe they were the same thing. A dreadful entity drifted into my field of perception, out beyond the murky vortex. It might have been huger than a galaxy or small as a cluster of balloons, depending on perspective and distance, or, again, both at once. It looked like a mad tangle of dripping hawsers, frayed and knotted, twisted around pulsing globes of many sizes. It might also have been the eviscerated organs of something alive but foreign to human knowledge, writhing in a last pained convulsion. It looked like all that, and it changed as I gazed. I had the feeling I saw some shifting cross-section of a being whose terrible whole I’d never be able to imagine or perceive.

It hung in that turbulent vortex above the island. Our souls shook before it. It radiated a malign avid craving, and yet it was somehow impersonal, cruelly indifferent. It was capable of wiping all life from the earth the way I’d wash the pesticides off a grape before I ate it.

Tindall called its name again. His voice was ecstatic. The rock samples around him glowed brighter, blue-white and then a hot fierce violet. His trousers began to smoke and char. He didn’t seem to notice.

“We’re too late,” Connie whispered in horror. “We’re too late. Run!”

I hesitated. What could I do? Would I stop anything, change anything, if I tackled Tindall bodily? Even killed him? I didn’t know, and as I looked up at the roiling abomination Tindall had summoned, I knew one thing; I dared not charge into that circle.

“Run!”

We did just that, side by side, like rabbits from a dog. We reached the water-side, pushed out our canoe, and instantly capsized it like a pair of clumsy idiots. We swam for the landing in desperation, though what good we were thinking that would do us, I couldn’t tell you. We reached it and hauled ourselves out of the water.

Back on the island, it went wrong for Tindall. Maybe he bungled his invocation chant. Maybe he’d been fatally mistaken ever to use the rocks of Leng in his ritual. Maybe they made a bridge across time to the remote aeons that had formed them.

There was a thunderous, fiery blast. By instinct Connie and I held our breaths. Stinking, poisonous air that might have belched from a Bessemer surged over the water and over us, making our sodden clothes steam. We closed our eyes and pressed our faces into the landing. I think we’d have been seared blind if we hadn’t. Our hair crisped. We felt the clothes on our backs singeing.

On the island, the rocks from Leng exploded, seethed into vapor, and Tindall was consumed in what I hope was less than a second. He vanished; he was just gone. A second clap of searing air rolled across the island and the river. Connie and I endured it, seared, deafened, and when everything seemed quiet and dark, I dared to look at the island with its rows of menhirs.

The vortex in the air had closed. The horror called YogSothoth had gone, or anyhow was fenced out of ordered space-time again, not that it comforted us much when we’d just had a direct view of how fragile that fencing is. If a half-baked warlock like Tindall could breach it, create an opening…

We made it back to Connie’s car. Turning on the roof light, we inspected each other. Except for blisters and burned hair, we seemed all right. Connie looked down at herself, and the remains of her silk pantsuit.

“Ruined,” she said, in a state of shock. “It’s damn’ well ruined.”

I don’t know who laughed hysterically first. We might not have stopped if the sound of police sirens hadn’t brought us back to earth. We’d have questions to answer, and our condition, plus the grass on our clothes, made it impossible to deny we’d been on the island. Plenty of people would have seen that blast, heard and smelled it, some of them on the campus.

We didn’t, I realized, have to explain anything. The simplest, most innocent account would be best, and we could even tell the truth, within limits. We’d been testing the rock samples, and began to suspect Dean Tindall was planning to use them in an experiment that could be dangerous, to support pet ideas of his own. We’d been to his apartment — Haru could confirm that — and then to the island on the chance that he was working with them there. We’d arrived just as the rocks were becoming incandescent, and fled. We barely made it back across the river before they exploded.

Some people who had looked directly at the blast were blinded. Others who breathed the vapor spent days in hospital with damaged lungs. One, an asthma sufferer, died.

Just how those rocks could have exploded into islandscouring fire by any natural means was hard to explain, but we didn’t have to. It had happened. Detailed examination, a matter of record, had established that the rocks were unique. The police had to conclude in the end that they’d been even more extraordinary than we knew. There were the usual fringe theories about everything from terrorists and CIA black ops to extraterrestrials, and that last was correct in a way. Yog-Sothoth is as extraterrestrial as any being can be.

The island had been scorched clean of its grass and other growth. Even the moss on the standing stones had been burned off the sides facing the blast, but not one stone had fallen, or so much as shifted. That didn’t seem natural, and Connie and I are sure it wasn’t. Were those stones there at the time of the cataclysm recorded in the Nemedian Chronicles? Were they untouched even by that? Is the same true of the Plateau of Leng (my own curt answer to that is hell, yes), that cannot be approached by the same route twice, and can’t be located precisely even by EarthWatch satellites?

Whatever else is true, we had a miraculous escape that night. I don’t mean just Connie and me. We resorted to a lot of neat brandy after our hospital checkups, but not enough to dissolve our memories. There isn’t that much brandy. I’m a stolid type, and my teeth chattered on the rim of the glass. My hand shook.

“Th-that was a pinprick to what might have happened,” I said. “Christ! It could have been the whole state!”

“It could have been the Solar System,” Connie said. “We’ll never know why it wasn’t. Never. I suppose Tindall messed up the conjuration somehow.”

Almost plaintively, I asked, “How could a little human being’s conjuration summon — something like that? Why would it pay attention?”

“They are always paying attention to openings to this universe, from what the Necronomicon says. Hints in von Junzt, too. Human beings can open those ‘Gates’, even by mistake. Most can’t be opened, except from Earth, from inside orderly space-time. That’s how it seems.”

“Where did he get the rite, the chant? From the Necronomicon?”

“Maybe from that, combined with other ancient scrolls, or from papers of Charles Dexter Ward’s that weren’t destroyed. I think most of them were. But some might still exist.”

That rang in my head. A hundred years ago, only rich men or scholars at prestigious seats of learning could gain access to books and papers like that. Or members of witch cults. All those are pretty restricted groups.

Now?

Now, the Necronomicon is online, and any crazy person, any nut cult, any half-baked dabbler who fancies himself a genius, can consult it — or a version of it. Probably the Book of Eibon, too. Certainly Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten in English, or the original German. It had almost vanished by the early twentieth century, but then it was reprinted again, in both languages. Ignorant tyros would be even less fit to attempt those rites than Tindall was, but that wouldn’t stop them trying.

You can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.

Connie and I are haunted. We wonder, who’ll be the next loon who chants litanies to Yog-Sothoth? Maybe accompanied by a mass sacrifice of willing dupes like the Heaven’s Gate crowd? Or ritual murder in the style of Manson?

What will the outcome be? Will that primal age of magma and rock and lethal furnace air reach across the ages to merge with our time? Connie is right, we wouldn’t be kissing anything as trivial as our asses goodbye. These days just about any fool can gain enough of a smattering to try something. They’d nearly all fail to get any kind of result, but God help us — if he’s even interested— it only takes one.

I

So we begin innocently enough with two brothers, aged fourteen and twelve, tramping up a wooded hillside behind a motel on the coast of Maine, where their family vacations every year. The ostensible purpose of this expedition is scientific, the collection of insect specimens, so that both are equipped with cheesecloth butterfly nets and rattling knapsacks in which they carry killing jars and specimen containers. Admittedly most of the rattling actually comes from the older brother, Clifford, who is obsessed with anything that’s got wings and/or six legs, and who tends to babble on about moths like a radio commentator you can’t switch off.

The younger boy, Thomas, is silent. He is beginning to lose interest in this hobby, but he likes the woods and he tends to follow his brother.

Suddenly Clifford’s “broadcast” is interrupted by crashing underbrush and the terrifying apparition of a wild-eyed, wildhaired, and wildly bearded old man in a torn black robe who grabs hold of Thomas by the front of his jacket, lifts him off the ground, shakes him, and screams incoherently, saliva flying, so that Thomas can only make out a few words, something like “I’ve seen! Don’t! Don’t let it start! No! Don’t begin!” Thomas is screaming himself and struggling, too, but Clifford, for all his self-absorbed pedantry, does not panic. He hits the stranger over the head and shoulders several times with a heavy branch until there is an audible crunch, which must be wood breaking because the black-robed figure disappears down the hillside, still shouting, arms waving, not visibly impaired.

After that, the two boys sit side by side on a large boulder, breathing hard. Thomas whimpers softly. Clifford, who is too embarrassed to admit he’s peed in his pants, can hardly berate Thomas for being a sissy. After all, he, Clifford, is supposed to be the hero of the day.

What they finally decide to do, or at least Clifford decides and Thomas goes along with it, is not to tell their parents, for fear that they might never be allowed into these woods again. The danger is, after all, past. The “fucking lunatic” (Clifford’s term) must have been a random drunk, bum, hobo, or whatever, who continued down the hill, ran out into the highway, and either got hit by a truck or taken away by the police, and, in any case, would not be coming back.

So it is that a few days later, after the usual round of vacation activities, a trip to the local lake, to the beach, to the art museum in Rockland, lots of stops at roadside antique shops, etc. Clifford and Thomas find themselves again decked out for insect collection, ascending the same hills, minus the lunatic this time, and their explorations really hit the jackpot.

They come upon an enormous house in the woods, a mansion, a castle, like something out of an impossible dream, a pile of gables and turrets and towers and gaping, dark windows that seems to cover the entire ridge line and extend beyond it — definitely not what you expect to find in the Maine woods. Oh, crumbling farmhouses are common enough, abandoned by dirt-poor farmers a century ago who broke their backs hauling stones out of their fields to build stone fences along the edges (commoner than even the farmhouses), only to die of exhaustion or give up in despair when the wretchedly thin soil yielded nothing. The boys’ mother actually encouraged them to enter such houses to look for antiques. The prize find so far was a Revolutionary cut-tin lantern. Runner-up was a crate of magazines from the eighteen hundreds. Sometimes there were bottles or dishes.

But this is on a whole different order of magnitude, a massive combination of mountainside and edifice and ruin, covered with vines, with trees growing through the roof in places, so that it sometimes looks more like a natural formation than a building; or, in Thomas’s fancy at least, like an enormous monster sleeping there, waiting, very possibly, for him.

Clifford, for once in his life, is almost speechless, and can only say, “Holy shit…”

But to Thomas, the place is calling out. It is like something out of a dream, something vast and thunderous, arising, breaching like a leviathan from the depths and darkness of lost memory, something he is already a part of, so that climbing the cracked and leaf-strewn steps and pushing open the heavy front door is like yielding, allowing himself to sink without resistance into that black abyss where leviathans lurk, and it seems the right thing to do, something inevitable, even as, far away, he hears his brother yelling, “Hey! I wouldn’t do that if I were you!”

The door swings open in absolute silence and the darkness swallows Thomas up, and that is the last we shall hear of Clifford other than to say that when Thomas Brooks, an ordinary boy with an ordinary name, vanishes from human ken forever, his brother cannot account for what happened. When the story of the “tramp” slips out bit by sobbing bit, the conclusion is that maybe it was Clifford who was hit on the head a few times and got mixed up. Nevertheless, Thomas is gone. Milkcarton photos, reporters, tabloids, all are without result except to generate publicity for professional psychics, who can’t find Thomas any more than the police can.

The hilltop is searched, of course. There is no mansion, castle, palace, or even a ruined farmhouse. So the family never vacations in Maine again and Clifford grows up to be a particularly obsessed entomologist.

The end.

II

But that was not the end. It’s not that simple.

For a long time, still under some kind of spell, as if in a dream, Thomas groped around in the dark. He entered several rooms, some of them empty, some cluttered with furniture or piled high with boxes. The place was dry, with an old-wood smell, like old houses are expected to have. He had been expecting dampness, mud. If there were trees growing through the floor or roof anywhere, he did not find them.

He knocked his knuckles on the walls. Solid.

At first he was afraid he was trespassing, but then, after passing through dozens of rooms, still in absolute darkness, and aware that he was lost, there was nothing he could do but call out.

He heard his voice echoing, but the house only responded with subtle creaking, the way old houses do.

Hours seemed to pass and he was hungry and tired and scared. It was as if, in a dream, he had fallen into a deep pit, or a grave, and now he had awakened, not in his own bedroom, but in a strange place, still in the dream.

But he knew he was awake. Things were just too solid. He bruised himself painfully when he stumbled over a staircase in the dark. Feeling his way, crawling, he made his way to the top and rested there, sitting on the last step, leaning on the smooth floor above it, and he fell asleep — a dream within a dream within a dream, or maybe not — and it seemed to him that he had been carried off in the belly of a winged monster that only looked like a house when it was resting in the forest. It opened its eyes, and starlight flooded in. He saw two tall, arched windows (which had been eyes) and the night sky outside, and he watched the full moon rise, bright and huge and closer than he had ever seen it before, even though (through a recently developed interest in astronomy) he knew that the full moon was not due for another two weeks. (Thomas had a bit of his brother’s pedantic streak.)

Then someone put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Hello Thomas.”

He yelped, and jumped away from the window. This wasn’t a dream.

“Hello,” he said softly.

The other replied with the most unlikely announcement imaginable. “Welcome to Hell” or “You know you’re dead now, don’t you?” would have made sense, but, no, the other person merely said, “Come and get your breakfast. It’s ready.” He could only follow the other into the next room, where, indeed, a breakfast of bacon and eggs and juice had been laid out on a polished table. This room was dimly lit, by candles in holders along the walls.

He sat down at the table. He was able to see the person seated opposite him now, a man clad in a black robe, much younger and better groomed than the lunatic in the woods; but if they had been monks, they would have been of the same order. This one had jet black hair, as Thomas did, and a pointed beard, which of course Thomas did not.

“My name is Thomas also,” the other said. “Maybe you should call me Big Thomas to avoid confusion. You will be Small Thomas.” He smiled, but Small Thomas took little comfort in that.

“Am I being kidnapped?”

The other laughed softly. “You have a lot to learn. Eat your breakfast.”

He started eating, then paused again. “Then do I get to go home afterwards?”

Big Thomas did not answer. Instead he placed on the table one of the killing jars from Small Thomas’s knapsack. He held it up to the candlelight. Inside was a prize catch, which had been the highlight of the day before things got weird, a perfect specimen of a white underwing moth. The upper wings look exactly like white birch bark. The hind wings and underside, with their pattern of curving dark and light stripes, create a kaleidoscope effect to confuse predators. You only find these creatures in northern woods, in New England, and not in Philadelphia where Thomas was actually from.

He started to protest when Big Thomas opened the jar. Even from across the table there was a strong whiff of carbon tetrachloride, the killing agent, which the boys could get because their father was a chemist at DuPont. Big Thomas carefully removed the moth and held it in the palm of his hand. He didn’t breathe on the moth or say any magic words, but to Small Thomas’s amazement, it began to stir. Then it crawled to the tip of Big Thomas’s finger and vibrated its wings. He tossed it into the air, and the moth took off, soaring up, up among the dark rafters overhead.

“But, it was dead…” said Small Thomas.

The other held his hands about a foot apart. “Within a certain interval in time,” he said, “the moth was alive. Go before that interval”—he waved his left hand—“and it does not yet exist. After it”—he waved his right—“it is indeed dead. In between, it is alive. Move it back into that interval of living, and it is alive.”

“Was that…a miracle?”

“No, it is your lesson for today. Now finish your breakfast.”

III

And Little Thomas grew to be a man.

But it’s not so simple. I don’t want to give the impression that this is some goddamn fairy story about how a boy blundered into a realm of enchantment where he found a mysterious mentor and they became good buddies, master and student, father and stepson or something like that, and their lives were filled with wonder until the time came for the boy to go out on a quest and confront the Big Bad Big Bad and save the universe. It wasn’t like that. Thomas, Tommy Brooks, had read stories like that, but he knew that they were crap.

He never stopped being afraid. He was afraid when, right after breakfast, Big Thomas took him back to the twin windows through which he had observed the full moon, but now it was day, only the trees were bare of any leaves and there was snow on the ground.

“But it’s July,” he objected.

“It was July and will be again,” said Big Thomas, “but never the same July.”

That didn’t explain anything. Too many of the answers were like that. Like fortune-cookie fortunes, he decided. They sounded wise and profound but they didn’t say anything, not really.

He was afraid when he realized that he and Big Thomas were not alone in the house, that there were others. Once, in a room full of ticking clocks of all descriptions, he came face to face with a dark-haired, bearded man in a black robe who should have been Big Thomas and looked very much like him, but somehow wasn’t, and he turned and fled.

Once he looked out a window over a blasted landscape, where there was only mud and burning vapors, and the sky itself was red and seemed on fire. He could feel the heat of the burning as he touched the glass.

He had his lessons. There was a great deal of study. He would find Big Thomas seated at a table, with books open before him, and it would be time to begin or resume. First, languages. Now in the seventh grade, he’d had beginner’s Spanish, and was fairly good at it, but this was harder, a lot harder: Latin, Greek, and languages he hadn’t even known existed. But somehow they came to him, as if he’d already known them and was remembering. These enabled him to read at least a few passages from the strange books in the vast library that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. Sometimes a shelf would seem empty, but Big Thomas would reach up and there would be the book he wanted. Or sometimes a book was just on the table before them. Sometimes Big Thomas would lead him into vast rooms filled with books, tier upon tier of galleries disappearing into the gloom above. Later, he wouldn’t be able to find such rooms by himself.

By candlelight, or by the light of an oil lamp, they would read together, and Big Thomas explained much to him, particularly about the nature of time, which he said flowed backwards and forwards at equal rates, so that the future could spill into the past or the past into the future, blending together, like paint mixing. The house itself, he said, was like a pendulum, swinging through thousands of centuries, back and forth, back and forth. Indeed, sometimes he took Small Thomas to the window and showed him a jungle filled with dinosaurs, where black stone cities rose in the distance. Another time, there was a bare, ashen landscape with the sun grown huge and red. Here a race of gigantic beetles rode across the world on machines like enormous spiders that spat out fire.

At times they were not alone with their studies, when others seemed to gather around them, black-robed figures emerging partially from the shadows, looking on expectantly.

Small Thomas considered the possibility that he had gone insane, or that he was dead, or that he had been abducted by aliens.

There was nothing to do but go on.

Once he came to a round room high in a tower. On every side, round windows like portholes revealed only stars. In one, a pair of brilliant stars, one green, one a bloody red, burned so brightly that it was hard to look on them. There was something strange about the gravity in the room. His body felt heavy. He struggled to breathe the thick air. Nevertheless he turned his back to block out the light of the too-bright stars and made his way to the center of the room. There, in a glass coffin set on a pedestal, lay a boy in a black robe, who looked very much like himself only maybe a little older, and who, he came to understand as he became that boy, was dreaming the house, the whole situation, his life and memories and predicament into existence. His mind could not sort that all out, but somehow he knew that it began here, with the boy in the glass coffin, who dreamed that the house swung back in time to a hillside in Maine in 1964, where it picked up Tommy Brooks, who became the boy dreaming, and so on and so on until he became Big Thomas too, and all the others, each of them gradually getting older, like looking at himself in an infinite hall of mirrors into the future.

Sometimes he dreamed of the white underwing moth, fluttering in the dark.

And then he awoke, and said out loud, “I want to go home.”

He awoke, not in the coffin, but in his own bed, not at home of course, but in his quarters near the dining room and the top of the great staircase. He got up, and put on his black robe and slippers, which he always wore now. He had been here long enough that he had definitely outgrown the blue jeans and flannel shirt and jacket he had been wearing when he first arrived.

Acting on no more than a hunch, he made his way downstairs, through the main hall there, and he found, very much to his surprise, that the front door was open.

He felt a sense of urgency. He had to get out quickly. Was Big Thomas perhaps asleep on the job and getting careless? Had he actually awakened from a long nightmare and shed the last few months or years like a heavy coat? If he dawdled, would he fall back into that dream, that nightmare, that otherness?

He hurried down the front steps, which were cracked and leaf-strewn as he remembered them. He knew where he was. He was in the woods, in Maine. He looked back at the house, and saw that it was covered in shadow, indistinct, almost like a thing of smoke. But the white birch trees were solid enough, as was the ground beneath his feet. He hurried down the hillside. He noticed after a few minutes that the leaves were turning colors. Here and there in there in clearings he saw goldenrod. So it couldn’t be July. He didn’t care. He kept on going, and after tripping and falling a few times realized that it was difficult to scramble down a slope through underbrush in an ankle-length robe, so he had to bunch it up around his waist, which left his legs exposed and caused him to be scratched considerably on briars.

Nevertheless, he emerged from the woods into the back yard of the very familiar motel. He made his way across the lawn. The grass hadn’t been cut. The place was closed, the driveway empty.

So, it might have been off-season, but he knew where he was and that was a tremendous relief. Route One was right in front of him. A tractor trailer went by. Across the road was a field where he and his brother had chased butterflies many times. Beyond that, Penobscot Bay. There were sail boats on the water.

To his left, downhill, was Lincolnville. A beach. The Lobster Trap restaurant. The ferry dock. In the other direction, Camden, which was a bigger town, perhaps three miles away. He headed uphill, toward Camden. Cars and trucks raced by, the wash of their passage tugging at his robe. Before long he realized that his thin slippers were not really suited for this sort of hiking, and he was footsore and limping by the time he got to town. But it was a tremendous thrill to see all the familiar places.

Some of it was familiar, some not. But he knew it and that was enough.

Where the road turned sharply left in front of the library, he sat down on a bench, exhausted. He was startled when a woman passing by said “Good morning, Father” to him as if she’d mistaken him for a monk or a priest because of his robe. But then she drew away, obviously realizing her error.

Maybe she thought he was just a weirdo. He didn’t care.

It took him a while to notice that the cars all looked slightly strange.

But still he lurched to his feet and made his way past the shops, some of which he recognized, some he didn’t. He turned down a familiar alley and emerged onto the docks, where schooners were tied up. For all it might have been late in the season, there were still tourists.

After a while he realized that people were staring at him. So he retreated and made his way up a flight of stairs he knew onto Bay View Street, which branched off Main Street and went almost all the way down to the water. There was a used-book shop on Bay View, where he’d spent many hours. His parents were friends with the owner, Mrs. Lowell.

He stood in front of the window of that shop and looked in at the familiar shelves. But he also noticed his own reflection in the window and stared at it realizing that the face he saw there wasn’t quite that of Tommy Brooks, aged twelve, soon to be retired butterfly collector. This boy was a bit older. He had the beginnings of a dark moustache.

Then there was an old lady staring back out at him. It couldn’t be Mrs. Lowell. Maybe it was Mrs. Lowell’s mother. The look on her face was one of astonishment and even a little fear, to use a familiar phrase, as if she had seen a ghost.

He turned and ran back uphill toward Main Street, past the shops, toward the library. One of the stores was a walk-in newsstand. There was a pile of newspapers on the sidewalk. He stopped to look at the date on one of them: September 8, 1997.

Now he understood why the cars had looked strange. Now he understood why the plan forming in his mind wasn’t going to work. The idea was to find a pay phone and call home. For one thing, he didn’t have any money. In the pocket of that pair of jeans he couldn’t wear anymore, back at the house, was a certain amount of 1964 change, which he supposed would still work, if he had it. Without it, he might still convince the operator to let him make a collect call…what then? Were his parents still alive? His brother Clifford would be forty-seven.

By the time he got back to the house, after another long and painful hike, he was sobbing and bedraggled. He’d lost his slippers somewhere, probably climbing the hill, and his feet were bleeding. Big Thomas was waiting for him at the top of the stairs and took him gently into his arms. But he did not offer comfort. He merely held him firmly and the look on his face was one of satisfaction, as if an important lesson had been completed.

IV

Now I have to take over the narrative. I told you this isn’t some cute-kid story, no magical coming-of-age sort of crap. Not so simple.

First person from now on. No sense pretending this happened afar, to someone else.

Some while after the aforesaid, I was looking at myself in a mirror in the bathroom — yes, the house had that sort of convenience, albeit the toilet worked with a chain and an overhead tank and the bathtub had clawed feet — but I digress. I stared into the mirror and saw that I was beginning to grow a dark beard, just like…you are ahead of me. I am ahead of me. I am he and he is we and we are I and all of us are the same, and my name is not Tommy or Thomas or even Big Thomas, but Legion, for we are many.

It was I who found the boy in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, still equipped with knapsack and butterfly net, asleep at the top of the stairs. I took him to breakfast. I knew how he felt because I remembered feeling it. I amazed him with the resurrected moth because I remembered being amazed. I knew that he would dream of that moth, and identify with it, and imagine himself flying up, up through the dark house forever, in terror and growing despair, but never quite giving up on the hope that he might find a speck of light and a way out.

My task was to educate him, and show him many wonders, because I had been through all this before.

Meanwhile, I saw myself in enough mirrors that I learned to trim my beard properly as it filled in.

But even if I was Big Thomas I was still a junior member of our brotherhood, fit only to teach the boy, fit only to place him in the glass coffin where he would sleep and dream us all and the house into being.

I remembered all that, and the others, who came out of the shadows, remembered me, because time does indeed play tricks, and is indeed like a house of mirrors, and I/we/they looked on with expectation as the whole cycle turned on itself, like a worm swallowing its tail, or like a Moebius strip going on and on forever…

But for what purpose? You may well ask. I tell you that I learned this much, from the others, from my older selves, that the purpose of this magical, half-living house with infinite rooms, which swung through eternity like a watch on a chain…watch the watch, watch the watch…have you gone under yet? You are in my power…

Not exploration, not any quest for scientific knowledge, or even conquest, but, in a word, worship.

Now the house was always filled with spirits and presences, with things that fluttered like moths in the darkness between the stars. Now my otherselves educated me, and took me up into endless towers that even I had never known existed, through rooms of strange gravities, where universes intersected, past windows that looked out on unfamiliar suns or worlds. Sometimes we conversed with monstrosities we had summoned up out of the abyss. Sometimes, either as their allies or their foes, we fought in strange wars.

I learned the secrets of the black worlds, which roll sunless in the eternal dark, where sentient fungi dream in glowing gardens, and know the secret name of Chaos.

Now the great powers gathered around us. To them, Earth was but a speck. To them, I was but a speck, but to them too I was like a tiny cog in a vast machine, which may seem too small to notice, but which, for the time being, is necessary.

We came together for a kind of sabbat, there, in the upper rooms of the house; and there was among us one from outside, whose skin was like flowing, living, black metal, and whose eyes and face were terrible to look upon. He was the mighty and dreadful messenger of our lord and master.

Yes. If the house-which-is-not-a-house swings through all of eternity like a watch on a chain, then what hand holds the chain? That is the primal potency at the center of time, whose true name cannot be spoken or written, but which is hidden behind the name of Azathoth.

That which we worshipped. That by whose whim we — and the entire universe — had been brought into existence, for all he might blow our dust away in another instant, should another whim come upon him.

Now after many transformations and transfigurations and changes, there was one among us, at the ultimate end of the chain of being of ourselves, who might perhaps be worthy to make his way up the chain on which our pendulum was suspended, and finally emerge at the center of Chaos, and there fall down in obeisance before the ultimate, mindless god.

So the Black Man of our sabbat, the mighty messenger, fetched one of our number, an old, wild-haired, wild-eyed fellow, and took him by the hand, and led him up that infinite spiral staircase to the ultimate portal, a round glass eye, there to draw back the curtain that covers it and gaze directly into the face of Azathoth on his demon throne.

We all cried out in awe, and spoke the secret words of praise in languages never spoken upon the Earth.

But that’s not what happened. They didn’t go up, at least not all the way. Maybe our fellow was not ready, despite all his learning and power. Maybe he had not entirely sloughed off his humanity, and so was burdened by hope or conscience. Or maybe his mind just snapped like a weak reed.

In any case, it was he who broke away and ran down through the house, screaming like a madman, out the front door and onto a hillside in 1964 where he tried unsuccessfully to dissuade a certain twelve-year-old boy from continuing the direction in which he and his brother had been going. When this happened, all of us scattered in terror and consternation, certain that the wrath of the Messenger would fall upon us. But we needn’t have worried, for those who were able to look say the expression on his face was one of satisfaction, as if he knew an important lesson had been completed.

V

I have spent some time in this madhouse, yes. When I ran screaming down the hillside, after the older boy hit me over the head several times with a branch, after I ran out into the highway in a frenzy and was clipped by a truck, I was taken to a hospital first, then elsewhere when I tried to tell them that I was Thomas Brooks, who had vanished so long ago on that hillside. But of course it wasn’t a long time ago. It was 1964 and Tommy Brooks, aged twelve, wasn’t even missing yet, though he would be in a few days. When he disappeared the police became very interested in what I had to say, but they and the doctors got nothing out of me that they could understand or believe.

I have not drawn back the ultimate curtain. I have not looked upon the face of Azathoth. But I know how it ends. Memory moves both ways in time too. So I, and my other selves, remember both what was and what is to come. I remember that, much bedraggled, my feet bleeding because I’d lost my slippers in the underbrush, I made my way back to the place of that uncompleted sabbat, and I climbed the tower, up the turning staircase through the worlds and universes. I stood before the ultimate portal, though I did not draw back the curtain. The time was not yet. But soon. I know how it all ends because I found there on the floor the corpse of a wild-haired old man in a tattered robe. His eyes had been seared, as if he had been blasted by what he had looked upon, but I recognized his face and it was my own.

Might I, like the moth which is trapped between two points in time in that brief interval in which it is alive, turn back from my own terminal point, before the curtains are drawn back and my eyes are blasted?

I don’t think so.

But what if I do not worship? What if instead I hurl defiance and curses into the face of Idiot Chaos. What then?

It’s probably not that simple.

JAMES CHAMBERS received the Bram Stoker Award® for the graphic novel, Kolchak the Night Stalker: The Forgotten Lore of Edgar Allan Poe and is a four-time Bram Stoker Award nominee. He is the author of the short story collections On the Night Border and On the Hierophant Road, which received a starred review from Booklist, which called it “…satisfyingly unsettling”; and the novella collection, The Engines of Sacrifice, described as “…chillingly evocative…” in a Publisher’s Weekly starred review. He has written the novellas, Three Chords of Chaos, Kolchak and the Night Stalkers: The Faceless God, and many others. He edited and co-edited the Bram Stoker Award-nominated anthologies, Under Twin Suns: Alternate Histories of the Yellow Sign and A New York State of Fright, as well as Even in the Grave, an anthology of ghost stories.

ADRIAN COLE is a native of and lives in North Devon, England. He writes about himself: “My first published work was a ghost story for IPC magazines (UK, 1972) followed by a trilogy of sword & planet novels, The Dream Lords (Zebra, US, 1970s). Subsequently I have had more than two dozen novels and numerous short stories published, many translated into foreign editions.

“I have written science fiction, heroic fantasy, sword & sorcery, horror, pulp fiction, and Mythos as well as two young adult novels, Moorstones and The Sleep of Giants (Spindlewood, UK, 1980s).

“My best known works are the Omarian Saga and Star Requiem fantasy quartets, both reprinted recently as e-Books (Gollancz SF Gateway) and as audio books (Audible).

“My collection Nick Nightmare Investigates (Alchemy UK), the first arc of stories about my hard-boiled occult private eye, was the recipient of the 2015 British Fantasy Award for best collection. This is to be reprinted by Pulp Hero Press, together with two further volumes, Nightmare Cocktails and Nightmare Creatures. I also have another collection, Elak, King of Atlantis, due from Skelos Press this year.

“I have previously appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy and Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies.

“I contribute regularly to the revised Weirdbook Magazine (US) and have had several short horror stories in anthologies in both the US and the UK, including The Mammoth Book of Halloween, The Alchemy Book of Horror, Hinnom, and Occult Detective Quarterly Presents.”

BRYAN D. DIETRICH is the author of nine books of poems and co-editor of an anthology of superhero poetry. He has published work in Weird Tales, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, and many other journals. He has been a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, the Yale Younger Poets Prize, and has won the Asimov’s Readers’ Choice Award, the Paris Review Prize, the Lord Ruthven Award, a Discovery/ The Nation Award, a Writers at Work Fellowship, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer. Bryan is Professor of English at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas where he lives with his wife and three hell beasts.

FREDERIC S. DURBIN has been writing for grownups and children since his first novel, Dragonfly, was published by Arkham House in 1999. His short work has appeared in Cricket, Cicada, Black Gate, Weird Tales, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Challenge: Discovery! and Mountains of Madness Revealed. He is the author of the middle-grade fantasy The Star Shard and the horror novella The Bone Man. His novel A Green and Ancient Light was named a Best Fantasy of the year by Publishers Weekly and a Reading List Honor Book by the American Library Association. Since 2019, he has co-edited the annual speculative fiction anthology series Cold Hard Type for Loose Dog Press. He lives in western Pennsylvania with his wife and an alarming number of manual typewriters.

JOHN R. FULTZ is a California writer originally from Kentucky. His novels include Seven Princes (2012), Seven Kings (2013), and Seven Sorcerers 2013), as well as The Testament of Tall Eagle (2015) and Son of Tall Eagle (2017). His short stories have appeared in The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Weird Tales, Black Gate, Weirdbook, That Is Not Dead, Shattered Shields, Lightspeed, Way of the Wizard, Cthulhu’s Reign, and plenty of other strange and wonderful places. His latest story collection is Worlds Beyond Worlds (2021).

ROBERT GUFFEY is a lecturer in the Department of English at California State University — Long Beach. His most recent books are Widow of the Amputation and Other Weird Crimes Eraserhead Press, 2021) and Bela Lugosi’s Dead (Crossroad Press, 2021). 2017 marked the publication of Until the Last Dog Dies (Night Shade/Skyhorse), a darkly satirical novel about a young stand-up comedian who must adapt as best he can to an apocalyptic virus that destroys only the humor centers of the brain. Guffey’s previous books include the journalistic memoir Chameleo: A Strange but True Story of Invisible Spies, Heroin Addiction, and Homeland Security (OR Books, 2015), which Flavorwire called, “By many miles, the weirdest and funniest book of [the year].” A graduate of the famed Clarion Writers Workshop in Seattle, he has also written a collection of three novellas entitled Spies & Saucers (PS Publishing, 2014). His first book of nonfiction, Cryptoscatology: Conspiracy Theory as Art Form, was published in 2012. He’s written stories and articles for numerous magazines and anthologies, among them The Believer, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Black Dandy, The Evergreen Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Mailer Review, Phantom Drift, Postscripts, Rosebud, Salon, The Third Alternative, and TOR.

GEOFFREY HART works as a scientific editor, specializing in helping scientists who have English as their second language publish their research. He also writes fiction in his spare time, and has sold 58 stories thus far. He mentions that he recently sold a story to Analog.

NICHOLAS KAUFMANN is the bestselling author of seven novels and two short story collections. His work has been nominated for the Bram Stoker Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Thriller Award, and the Dragon Award. His short fiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, Interzone, and others. In addition to his own original work, he has written for such properties as Zombies vs. Robots, The Rocketeer, and Warhammer. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and two ridiculous cats.

TIM LEES is the author of the “Field Ops” books for HarperVoyager (The God Hunter, Devil in the Wires and Steal the Lightning and the much-praised Frankenstein’s Prescription Brooligan Press/Tartarus), described by Publisher’s Weekly as “a philosophically insightful and literary tale of terror”. Originally from Manchester, England, he now lives in Chicago. When not writing he has held a variety of odd jobs, including film extra, conference organizer, teacher, lizard-bottler for a museum, and worker on the rehab wards of a psychiatric hospital.

GORDON LINZNER is founder and former editor of Space and Time Magazine, and author of three published novels and scores of short stories in F&SF, Twilight Zone, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. He is a member of the Horror Writers Association and a lifetime member of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

WILL MURRAY is the author of more than seventy-five books and novels, including The Wild Adventures series, which stars Doc Savage, King Kong, Tarzan of the Apes, John Carter of Mars, Sherlock Holmes, The Shadow, The Spider and other classic characters. The Wild Adventures of Cthulhu collects his Cthulhu Mythos stories. For Marvel Comics, he created The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. A contributor to numerous Lovecraftian journals and anthologies, Murray was one of the principal founders of the Friends of H. P. Lovecraft, which placed the Lovecraft memorial plaque on the grounds of the John Hay Library on the occasion of Lovecraft’s centennial 1990.

ROBERT M. PRICE describes himself as “Freethinker, Author, Teacher, Speaker, Debater, Editor, Anthologist, Columnist, Podcaster and Heretic,” and indeed excels in all those fields. He is the editor of the long-running Crypt of Cthulhu magazine, a Hierophant of the Horde who has memorably preached at Cthulhu prayer breakfasts (some of his best such effusions have been collected in The Sermon on the Mound and Others (2011). His more serious works include a great deal of Lovecraft scholarship, plus the “Cycle” series of anthologies for Chaosium (The Innsmouth Cycle, etc.) and others including Acolytes of Cthulhu, Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos, The New Lovecraft Circle, Worlds of Cthulhu, etc. Much of his own Mythos fiction is collected in Blasphemies and Revelations.

ANN K. SCHWADER lives and writes in Colorado. Her latest collection of weird verse is Unquiet Stars (Weird House Press 2021). She is a two-time Bram Stoker Award Finalist for Poetry Collection, and a two-time Rhysling Award winner. Her poems have recently appeared in Spectral Realms, Star*Line, Dreams & Nightmares, Abyss & Apex, and elsewhere. She is an Active member of SFWA and HWA, and was the Poet Laureate for Necronomicon Providence 2015.

KEITH TAYLOR was born in Tasmania and grew up in picturesque Hobart. He reports that he was always a voracious reader and started writing aged nine. He became a Robert E. Howard fan early. His professional start came with the publication of his “Felimid the Bard” stories in Fantastic Stories, in the 1970s. Collaborations with Andrew J. Offutt, featuring Robert E. Howard’s character Cormac mac Art, followed. So did five novels about Felimid the Bard. Other series characters include Nasach, an Irish fisherman’s son and tough escaped slave, and Kamose, an archpriest and sorcerer of ancient Egypt.

Several stories appeared in British editor Mike Ashley’s anthologies such as The Camelot Chronicles and Shakespearean Whodunnits. Illness about fourteen years ago interrupted Keith’s writing, but since then he’s returned to work. A weird horror novel, Damned from Birth, is still looking for a publisher. Current projects are a sixth Felimid novel and a historical murder mystery. He lives in Melbourne with his wife Anna and son Francis.

HARRY TURTLEDOVE earned a Ph.D. in Byzantine history, but has spent his life telling lies for a living rather than in scholarship. He has published about a hundred books and two hundred pieces of short fiction. They include alternate history, other science fiction, fantasy (much of it historically based), and the occasional bit of historical fiction. His latest books are Through Darkest Europe and Alpha and Omega. He is married to fellow writer and Broadway scholar Laura Frankos. They have three daughters and two granddaughters, and share their house with too many books and three over-privileged cats.

DON WEBB teaches a course in horror writing for UCLA Extension. A popular occult writer as well as practitioner of the old Weird, Don’s latest two books are Building Strange Temples (from Ramble House) and the bestselling Energy Magic of the Vampyre (a how-to volume from Inner Traditions).

DARRELL SCHWEITZER has been publishing fantasy and horror fiction since the early 1970s. PS Publishing published a two-volume retrospective of his best short fiction in 2020, The Mysteries of the Faceless King and The Last Heretic. His Shirley Jackson Award nominated novella, Living with the Dead, appeared from PS in 2008. His previous anthologies for PS include That Is Not Dead, Tales from the Miskatonic University Library (with John Ashmead), and The Mountains of Madness Revealed. He has also edited anthologies for other publishers, including The Secret History of Vampires, Cthulhu’s Reign, and Full Moon City (with Martin Greenberg). He was co-editor of Weird Tales between 1988 and 2007, and before that he worked with George Scithers on Amazing Stories and Asimov’s SF. He has published four novels, The White Isle, The Shattered Goddess, The Mask of the Sorcerer, and The Dragon House. His numerous short fiction collections include Tom O’Bedlam’s Night Out, Transients (World Fantasy Award finalist, 1994), Refugees from an Imaginary Country, Nightscapes, Necromancies and Netherworlds (with Jason Van Hollander; World Fantasy Award finalist, 2000), The Emperor of the Ancient Word, and others. Many of his explicitly Lovecraftian fictions are collected in Awaiting Strange Gods, published by Fedogan & Bremer in 2015. He is editing a series of Weird Tales anthologies for Centipede Press. The first of these, The Best of Weird Tales: The 1920s should appear in 2022. He won the World Fantasy Award in 1992 as co-editor of Weird Tales.

SHADOWS OUT OF TIME

Copyright © 2023; Darrell Schweitzer

Individual stories copyright by the individual contributors.

Cover Art

Copyright © 2023 Bob Eggleton

Published in May 2023 by PS Publishing by arrangement with the authors. All rights reserved by the authors. The right of each contributor to be identified as Author of their Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN

978-1-78636-972-7

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

PS Publishing / Grosvenor House / 1 New Road / Hornsea, HU18 1PG / England