by Laird Barron
I don’t know. I don’t know anything about you, except that you’re here, and have done some things yourself to get here. That’s enough.
The things I did led me here, to Camside, to this house. There are places where the true world is more apparent. I don’t have to tell you this. Thin spots, as the menopausal New Agers would say. Which is fine as far as that goes.
In any case, this house is such a place, known only to a few. There was a breakthrough here, back in the Sixties. That magical time, eh? Two enterprising young warlocks had pulled a rookie cock-up, really done a number on themselves in the process. Do not call up that which you cannot put down, right? A standard caution, sure, but where would we be without the bold, I say. Without those willing to go that extra distance.
It has a name. All the old ones do, but I won’t bother with it here. Names are just more camouflage. The brief waggling of a wad of human tongue-meat cannot fully encapsulate It. It is what It is, this entity, and no more or less than that. A being. An eternal principle of that true world, a facet of how things really are.
How things really are. That, in fact, was what commerce with this old one brought. True vision. A rending of the veils. Pure sight. Few worshipped It, for that reason alone. That’s what the warlocks were after, though. The stronger one, the bold one, had an idea that our eyes were fooling us, with all those many million rods and cones embedded in a globe of viscous tissue, filtering every particle of light, flipping images on their heads, doing who knows what else. How could anyone be sure that the things seen were in fact how things really were?
They needed items to call the old one up out of the black dimensions which held it. Most importantly, an image of the being: a migraine-inducing metallic sculpture of hemispheres and rods, cylinders and empty spaces. It was the empty spaces that drew the eye, so that to look upon the image of the old one was to not see it at all. There was also a misshapen skull, a “rod with an icon,” a “weirdly shaped pentacle,” and “obscene candles.”
I’m relaying these things to you, as I found them in the scandal sheets and police reports, more for your own amusement than anything else. You and I both know what really calls these things up, and it’s the First Law of the Universe. Obscene candles! But it was the Sixties. The empty-handed methods such as you and I use were decades away.
And in any case, it worked. The warlocks called, and the old one answered. Did more than just answer, It came, and bestowed gifts upon them. Of course they were found dead the next morning, and of course it was ruled a murder-suicide, but oh, they’d left more behind than their mystical, fetishistic paraphernalia! Our boys had taped the ritual, on a nice old reel-to-reel unit. Took me a while to lay my hands on the original, but the moment I heard their death rattles, I knew it was no gag, no prank. They’d seen things as they really were, and the sight was too much.
I knew they’d been successful. Those last forty seconds or so of the tape? Pure italics.
The veils had been rent for them. The camouflage dropped away and the primal world of Truth, the sorcerer’s world, revealed. I wanted what they had, what they had been unable to process, unable to properly endure.
Now, you know what I’ve done, to become the sort of person who could survive what those two couldn’t. I was ready, able, and oh so very willing to look upon the naked heart of the universe. I had done the work, and I was ready to have the scales fall from my eyes, ready to see.
So I came here, and I called.
It answered, and the veils were rent. Gifts were bestowed. It touched me, just once, almost delicately, cracking my luminous egg wide open and permanently shifting my assemblage point to its new position. Castaneda would have shat himself, I’m sure. I certainly did.
And now I see.
I see what It is, the old one. I see how It rests in Time, the way Its limbs straddle the dimensions, the way Its eye-analogues caress the skin at the back of our reality with fevered intensity, the way It rubs up against our false world. My initial perceptions of It were a riotous confusion of forms and spastic movement, as It cycled through untold manifestations. The vision settled, though, finally, pulsing with the awful slow beat of the eternal, of that which really is.
What It is, you see (do you see? You will! Soon enough!), is everything. It is this room, and my clothes upon the desk. It’s the air moving in and out of your quickening lungs, and the rain on the windshield of the cab you took to get here, and your dogged insistence on answers that keeps you reading this through to the end, though your every animal instinct is to run. It’s the body at the bottom of the stairs that you had to step over to get up here (did you really check that corpse, I wonder?), and Castaneda thinking about how to make a little money off some soft-headed hippies. It’s the chuckle I made the first time I reached the italics at the end of one of those stories (a chuckle mirrored by my own laughter here, years later, as I pen just such a ridiculous narrative), and It’s the foolish, malnourished amateur who wrote those stories thinking that would be a decent way to finish, to take the reader out.
It’s the young warlocks who died in this house, and the people I used and discarded to get here. It’s me, lying to you a few paragraphs back, when I wrote that I didn’t know who you are. Because of course you’re her father, though you’re not unique. There have been so many fathers. Mothers and siblings and lovers, too. Hired investigators. Though none of them ever made it this far. Again, congratulations on your cleverness. On becoming like me, on becoming what you’d revenge yourself upon.
It’s that cavern on that island near Nan Madol, and It’s her blood on the well-used stone in that cavern, and It’s the celebrants I’d gathered there, up to their ankles in blood and spunk. It’s these pages you’re holding, and the ink that makes the letters you’re reading, and It is especially the empty spaces between those letters.
It’s the shit on that body downstairs, which was mine, caking the inner thighs and back of the legs. It’s the body itself, half-dissolved from the old one’s touch, and the energetic structure within that body swirling in a mad chaos of anguish as it mutates. Scrambled luminous egg! It’s the stirring of that body as the right hand rises from the floor and slaps down wetly upon the first stair.
You really should have checked it, though I doubt there’s anything you could have done to stop what’s happening, for you have been fooled, taken in, placed yourself within the mouth, as I did.
It’s allowed me to see as It sees, across the expanse of Time and Space, allowed me to feel what It feels, exist as it exists. Even as I sit here writing, It is doing its terrible work upon me. I write the words Nan Madol and I am there, in the cavern, doing unspeakable things to her. I write the young warlocks who died in this house and I am here with them, touching them as It touched them, and shaking with glee as they destroy themselves. I write the shit on that body downstairs and I am there, at the top of the stairs, a few minutes from now, out of my mind with terror, trying to flee from the liquefying touch of something that’s been disguised as everything, shitting myself and slipping in it, my head describing an awful, graceful arc in the air before the impact.
I write these words, and experience these things, but it is only the camouflage. There’s camouflage, and then there’s camouflage, and it is all camouflage. My life. Your daughter’s life. The world. Our reality is nothing but a skin for the ultimate predator, discarded when It is ready to eat. I cannot even guess why you are on its plate tonight. It feeds on many things, and its hunger is inscrutable.
Perhaps sorcerers taste better. Less human. We give up so much of our humanity to learn these things, accrue this power, and in the end, we’re food. Thanks for nothing, Carlos.
It’s at the door now. I’m at the door now, naked and viscous, flesh sliding on supple bones. I wonder how I’ll fit into my clothes afterwards. I am changed, made glorious and violent and true, the merest tip of the smallest appendage of It. A claw, tapping.
I am It, and It is I, right? Oh, the italics of it all! But I
won’t burden you with that cliché. I don’t find it all that funny, anymore. It’s not a decent way to finish.
You might get lucky when that door opens. For a moment, your assemblage point may shift so far that you create a world in which you’re just some schmuck reading a pulpy horror story in a cheap paperback. Only for a moment, though. Enjoy it.
Time to take you out of the story.
The Return of Sarnath
Gord Sellar
The tireless things crept over the vast desert’s brutally hot sand, each trailing a miniature pillar of black smoke behind it. As they approached, their myriad forms—endlessly inventive, dreadful, sublimely beautiful—became visible, their steely shells casting off a searing gleam. Ajal squinted beyond them, before nodding to his lady master, Terea.
“The maps were right,” she declared, smiling. Ajal stared down at the trails the things had scratched into the dust, marveling.
Terea’s caravan was the fifth to cross the wastes of Mnar seeking the source of these iron-carapaced horrors. Back in plague-stricken Celephaïs, tales had spread among the idle and dying of a new horror arising in the distant wilds of Mnar, glimpsed climbing among the ruins of Kadatheron and Ilarnek, teeming across the land’s now-dead plains and dessicated marshes.
Ajal watched carefully his zebra’s steps; its legs were armored, but he had seen for himself what these things had done to iron-clad Kadatheron. During his wanderings among the factories nestled in the city’s ruins, he had even glimpsed several Kadatheroni natives battling the things—some scorpion-shaped, others with dreadful forms akin to human hands, or armored mechanical centipedes. He knew how gruesomely the things performed their slaughter, and their mechanical chittering had haunted him as he’d inspected the ancient, cylindrical stones carved from top to bottom in wind-worn glyphs that few could still read.
The image of the corpses they had had left behind troubled him still, though he was miles away now, in the vast and dusty plain beyond Kadatheron; they haunted him like the memory of a lost lover might haunt a weak and tired man, burrowing through his wits and leaving him a pale, crumbling ruin—shattered like the ruins of once-great Kadatheron, or the fouled countryside of once-verdant Mnar.
Nearby, another pseudo-oasis beckoned from its shadowy hollow. The water there would be foul, Ajal knew, but he longed for the slight coolness the air held in all moist places. The endless dust and scraggy brush of the flatlands of dead Mnar were gnawing at him.
“No, Ajal,” Terea said, so softly that perhaps he alone heard her. “We’re nearly there, and will reach the lakeshore before nightfall, if we continue.”
A murmur spread out among the travelers, masters and servants and slaves both, and even their mounts—the zebras and horned calaphaxes that trudged before the slow, coal-fired landbarges—seemed to bristle at the thought of nearing the lake where lost Sarnath had once stood just as the sun sank down into the umbral earth, and the heavens revealed the trillion distant stars spattered across their cold, black depths.
But Terea was a determined sort, an unwearying adventuress who had crisscrossed the world a dozen times during during her long and colorful life: none dared challenge her. Ajal, the hardiest and most pampered of her slaves, knew all too well what criticizing her plan might incur; he knew, also, that he could never change her mind. Terea was like stone come alive—like willful, breathing granite.
So the group trudged on through the light and dust of the wastes of dead Mnar.
***
The dying light of evening had half-dimmed the colors of world when a young slave hurried back over a nearby rise toward the group, crying out, “The lake! It’s here! And the city!”
This heartened even those who feared the ruins of fabled, doomed Sarnath, celebrated as a lost city of once-gleaming parapets, an icon of folly soaked in blood with cries ringing through its drowned streets…lost Sarnath stood in the minds of the world as a warning.
Would they find, too, the ruins of that other city, the one destroyed by the Sarnathans, that fabled grey stone polis of Ib? Would they glimpse the broken towers shrouded in greenish lake-mist? Would unspeakable things emerge to greet them, soundlessly, by the flapping of drooping lips, by a threatening wave of webbed hands?
Ajal rode beside Terea, silent, while those up ahead began chattering loudly, with wonder, as they summited the rise and glimpsed what lay beyond. A curious suspense gripped Ajal, his stomach fluttering; but also a quiet, cold foreboding crouched behind that flutter, a dark whirlpool of dread swirling in the depths of his lean, pale belly.
For her part, Terea, a heroic prodigy of exploration and adventure, remained unmoved by the spreading excitement. She spurred her calaphax up the rise without betraying the merest hint of fear or pride. Her mind was fingertips poised on the strings of a zither, focused and trained solely on the task she had undertaken.
Yet when they reached the peak of the rise, none—not even Terea—could look upon that vista without some sensation, however hidden, of terror. The iron city was so near, below; the lake, so vast, the greenish mist so thick, the oily smoke that clotted the sky so dark. Distant mountains loomed beyond the lake, hunched like enormous black giants posing in the deepening gloom, staring into the chaos of the wriggling, climbing things—visibly frenetic even in the deepening twilight. The city shone, its steel spires lit by thousands of tiny glimmering lights, its walls—like the stony plain beneath them—a mad carpet of endless crawling, tumbling forms, all steely and jittering and entangled, their multiplicity and their variegation shattering something in Ajal’s mind.
Sarnath—lost, dead Sarnath.
Rebuilt.
The awe that had filled Terea’s face gave way, now, to satisfaction, for Celephaïs’s great philosopher Mendt seemed correct: if the things were not designed by men, then they were surely the offspring of such things as man had fashioned. Sarnath’s survivors must have, by whatever means, returned: perhaps the city’s original denizens had taken refuge in some dreadful corner of the Underworld, or exiled themselves to the terrifying world of dreams? Their hidden secrets, Terea had sworn, awaited only her discovery.
But as Ajal gazed upon the buzzing, shivering hive of activity that covered the city walls and surrounding plain, his natural and wholly explicable sensation of terror gave way to a more poignant sense of foreboding. Terea’s quest was utterly foolhardy, on some level; after the mechanized bloodshed they’d glimpsed in Kadatheron, no sane group would have continued the journey… Yet mad though she might be, Terea was a survivor, not an idiot: she was driven, obsessed, and willful, but also successful. She’d traveled widely enough to know whence a man or woman came at a mere glance; had sketched for herself images of all the great monuments still standing, from the descending foothills before the plains of Leng to the greatest temples in the Fantastic Realms south of Oriab. Crisscrossing her arms and back, her belly and haunches, scars and tattoos commemorated the battles and victories and cunning escapes; reminders, as memory itself dimmed across the aeons of her life. The deeds and omnipotent powers of Terea the Wondrous would, she had often proclaimed, never be forgotten.
Some doubted these tales, but Ajal knew better—he had escorted her on many voyages, and had been guarded jealously at her side, for he possessed one skill that great Terea herself lacked… Dreaming. When she slept, her mind was as blank as a fresh leaf of letter-paper—no places of wonder glimpsed from the distance, not a marvelous secret unfurled. For her, sleep was just a kind of temporary death, despite the endless potions, incantations, prescriptions and disciplines she had tried.
And so, Terea had retained Ajal as her chief slave all these long years, as other servants, slaves, lovers, and enemies had each in turn risen up to engulf her days, and then fallen away from her life like the tides of the ocean, slowly but regularly. Throughout everything, Terea had kept Ajal close by her side, watched and flattered, for Ajal was the greatest dreamer ever born into their world, and perhaps even the finest living dreamer in any world, n
ow that Kuranes the Undying’s ancient mind had begin to falter at the precipice of eternity.
What if the philosopher Mendt had been correct, and the things had entered the world from the dreaming lands, through a portal that men, too, could traverse bodily? If Terea found that route into the lands of dream, and no longer needed Ajal…would he be freed? Where would he go—in the waking world, or off somewhere in the dreamlands? Would he go alone? These sudden thoughts terrified him more than the roiling vista of deadly, creeping machinery that lay before him.
Then Terea said, “Let’s go,” and side by side—he upon his zebra, and she astride her weary, growling calaphax—they carefully descended the hillside; not towards the shimmering, noisome polis of steel, but rather into the much smaller, simpler ruin of black stone a few miles eastward, down by the lakeshore. That ruin was thought to be the remnants of once-great Ib—the ancient polis of the voiceless fishlike men who had descended once, long before, from the moon; worshippers, it was claimed, of dread Bokrug, the Great Lizard of the Watery Depths. Terea was eager to venture into Sarnath, but even she realized that a journey into the chaos before them by starlight and torches was suicide.
For his part, Ajal found the strange, squat ruins of Ib no more inviting.
***
He slept poorly, that night, in Terea’s steel-skirted tent.
More than mere dread troubled him. The noises out in the darkness had bred in him a kind of insomnia he had never before experienced, for great dreamers are rarely insomniacs. Thence came the chittering, tumbling cacophony of machines, which in their multitudes resembled a vast army of giant cicadas singing death all through the night; but other noises, noises closer by, echoing through the huddled ruins of dark, low Ib, also troubled Ajal.