by Martha Wells
At the window, one of the secretaries turned away, pressing a hand over his mouth. A crewman said grimly, “I don’t know what you mean by portal. There’s nothing out there. He’s still falling.”
***
Reja sat in an armchair in the comfortable salon of the Baroness Mille’s town flat, wrapped in a blanket. Merita was in another armchair, with her anxious mother on a stool beside her and a worried physician in attendance. Also in attendance were Fletcher, Tamith, a Prefecture inspector, a Magistrates’ sorcerer, and the Baroness’ solicitor. The silver key had already been sealed in an iron box and carried away. Reja appreciated its utility but was glad to see the back of it.
It had taken a great deal of gentle persuasion before Merita had been able to let go of Reja’s hand, and a mild sedative before she had been able to speak coherently. Reja had feared for the girl’s sanity, but she was much calmer now. The details and memories of the strange place faded rapidly, almost as soon as they had managed to escape it. Back on the airship, Reja had demanded Tamith bring her a straight brandy and rapid consumption of it had accelerated the process.
Merita was saying, “Something happened to my stepfather, something that made him start to lose his mind. Osgood told me about the fissure near the mine, how odd he had behaved afterward, and I had seen for myself how ill he had been. He was pretending to be better, but he kept forgetting things, acting so strangely. He sent away servants who had been with him for years. When he fired our family solicitor, who was like a brother to him, I had to do something.”
The inspector prompted carefully, “You and Osgood Rodrign went to the penthouse at the Vermillion Towers.”
Merita nodded. “We were trying to convince stepfather to call his physician. He was talking in made-up languages, about traveling through space. He said he picked up a strange stone when he was in the old mine, and a sorcerer from another world appeared inside his body. He said the alien sorcerer was trying to take over his mind. Challis was at the penthouse. He said he was trying to help my stepfather, that we should leave. I wish we had.” Her breath caught in her throat. “My stepfather said he and Challis were trying to open a portal to make the sorcerer return to its own world. Challis told him he thought the alien sorcerer was lying to them, that it didn’t want to return.”
“Well, I think he was wrong about that,” Tamith said softly, watching as Merita accepted a glass of water. She was still trembling and the Baroness had to help her drink. “I think it wanted to return. But maybe being inside Mille was driving it mad, as its presence was affecting Mille.”
Reja admitted, “I didn’t believe it was true until he threw me into the portal. But there was an entity inside there that offered me whatever I wanted, the entity Challis described in his notes. It makes me suspicious of Mille’s motives, and the alien sorcerer’s motives, and Challis’s motives, for that matter.”
The inspector flicked them a glance, and said, “Challis could have reported this, asked for help. He didn’t.”
Reja felt she had been lucky to have her whole being in that moment consumed with the desire to get the hell back home, intact, with her client’s daughter. There had been no time to think any stray thoughts of other wants, and to get herself into trouble.
Merita continued her story, how the Baron had attacked her and Osgood, how she had been knocked unconscious and woke to see her stepfather in the process of murdering the young man. “He said the alien sorcerer killed Osgood as a sacrifice, but it didn’t work because the Vermillion Towers wasn’t the right sort of stone tower. It didn’t make any sense. My stepfather was crying, horrified at what he had done. But then he changed again. He said something called Yog-Sothoth would give him what he wanted but the spells had to be right. I tried to run away, and he threw me out the window, and I—” She gripped her blanket again. “Was in that place.”
“You’re home, you’re safe,” the Baroness said, with a grateful look at Reja. Reja knew her bank account would be grateful, too. The Baroness told the inspector, “I think that’s enough questions for now.”
As the group broke up, Tamith leaned over Reja’s chair and said, “I know someone else who’s lucky to be alive.”
Fletcher said, reproachfully, “We ran in there and saw that broken window and you nowhere to be found.”
“It frightened me sober,” Tamith added. “Who else would hire the two of us as private inquiry agents?”
“I did not jump out the window voluntarily,” Reja told them. “It was all a necessary risk. Would you rather have a transdimensional sorcerer with access to a powerful being, that will grant its every wish if asked in the right manner and with the right sacrifice, loose in the world?”
“No, of course, but—” Fletcher began, as Tamith said, “That is hardly—” Then the inspector came toward them with more questions, and there was no time for further discussion.
It was near dawn by the time everything had been settled and they were leaving the flat. As Reja stepped out onto the street with Tamith and Fletcher, she found the inspector beside them. She said to him, “You did not seem surprised by any of this.”
“This isn’t the first… intrusion of this kind we’ve encountered.” He eyed them a moment. “We’re going to that guesthouse Challis stayed in to examine that trap you found. We need to find out if Challis put it there, or the creature who took over Baron Mille. There’s a possibility it involves something called the ‘tomb-herd.’” He lifted a brow. “Would you three like to come along?”
Reja consulted her partners with a look. They had never been officially acknowledged by the Prefecture before. If they helped this inspector now, she foresaw a much more interesting, if dangerous, career for them. “Well?”
Fletcher and Tamith exchanged glances. Fletcher said, “Someone has to do it.”
Tamith sighed. “Lead on, Reja. We’ll be the scourge of transdimensional intrusions everywhere.”
Yog-Sothoth
The world is filled with transits, with portals, with gates, with doors, with circles through which we must pass in order to get from one place to another, or from one condition to another condition. Each of these portals is a mouth, and when we pass through it, we always go from inside to outside—for the place we occupy is the inside from our point of view. To pass through any doorway is akin to being vomited forth from the belly of where we are to the outer dark of where we think we wish to be.
It often befalls us that our decision to go through a gate is the wrong decision, and then we find ourselves greatly desiring to cringe back into the place that we formerly occupied, but know this—that place exists no more. There is no such thing as backing out of a gateway. Each transition leads to a new place, a new condition of being, that is shaped from the matrix of absolute chaos, even if it may seem to us that we are merely returning to the place we were before. There is no returning. Movement through all portals is in a single direction, from the known to the unknown.
In this world of passing shadows, it may be that a gate will have a keeper who has the power to open the gate or prevent it from being opened. In the higher worlds ranged above our own, which is the realm of real things, all gates have the same gatekeeper, and his name is Yog-Sothoth. But to call him a keeper of the gates is to demean his majesty, for Yog-Sothoth is not only the keeper of the gates, but the gates themselves, and more than this, he is the key to the gates by which they are opened and locked.
To go anywhere is to pass from one place that exists in the mind to another that must be created out of chaos. Such passage always requires a gateway, and that gateway is always Yog-Sothoth, whether we are aware of his presence or not. It is he who guards the thresholds to our houses. It is he who marks the changes of the months from one moon to another moon. Even the fall of the grains of sand through the waist of the hourglass are ordered and ordained by Yog-Sothoth.
The common gateways of our world he seldom shuts against us, but the higher gateways that lead from one star to another, from one realm of re
ality to another realm, he guards with greater diligence, so that to find the key we must invoke him rightly and make offerings to him that are to his pleasing. The greater the gate you seek to breach, the greater the sacrifice that is required. The higher gates must have a human offering, and only those pure in both mind and heart are well received.
The gates to higher worlds are facilitated in their opening with certain uncouth angles that mimic the higher dimensions which prevail there. Arrange the stones of the circle upon the crown of the hill so that they define converging lines that diminish in the distance to measureless points. Along these lines the portals lie. Follow the lines to pass through the successive gates, each according to its order and hierarchy.
When Yog-Sothoth has been rightly invoked with the proper words and a sufficient sacrifice, he may appear upon the air above the circle as a conflux of revolving spheres of innumerable colors that press against each other and form lines and angles with their conjoined and flattened sides. This is called the face of Yog-Sothoth. Be certain you have done all things aright if you seek to see it, for the wrath of this old one is terrible.
If Yog-Sothoth is pleased with your chants and sacrifice, he will open the gate you seek to pass through. This shows itself upon the air as a kind of vortex of fire twisting and winding down a long tunnel that diminishes in infinity. This is the open mouth of Yog-Sothoth, and you who pass through it are his vomit. Have a care not to strike his teeth! The lesser wardens who guard the gates are known as the teeth of Yog-Sothoth, for all existing things are but extensions of his body, and they sometimes bite. They must not be angered while you pass through their assigned portals.
If Yog-Sothoth chooses, he can open a gate from one end of this universe to the other, or from the present moment into a moment in the far future or the distant past, or from the lower world of men to one of the higher worlds of the gods. All transitions are possible to Yog-Sothoth, who exists everywhere at all times. Even the gate of death is not sealed against him, for by uttering certain words in conjunction with the lunar nodes, a skilled necromancer can cause the dead to rise up from their essential salts, and walk, and see, and speak. All transformations are possible through Yog-Sothoth.
You may ask, what is the true face and form of this great old one, if the conflux of iridescent bubbles that appears when he is invoked is only his mask? His true face is all possible shapes that exist, or had existence, or will exist in the times to come. His body is the macrocosm, comprehending all worlds and all planes, past, present, and future.
What we see when we invoke him is only an illusion he presents to us so that we have an object upon which to direct our minds. We could not see Yog-Sothoth as he truly exists, for we would go mad while trying to encompass his manifold vastness. We are ourselves Yog-Sothoth. Each beat of our hearts marks the gateway of time through which we pass to shape from the void the things to come.
He is reverenced as the All-in-One and the One-in-All, for there is no point in this universe or any other that he does not already occupy. How can travel have duration for Yog-Sothoth, when he is both here and there at the same moment? Should he wish it, he can open a portal from any place to any other place, and the passage through it is less than an instant. So did some of the old ones descend from their worlds beyond the stars to our earthly realm.
The creatures who inhabit the unseen wandering star known as Yuggoth worship him as their supreme god and name him the Beyond-One. Even though he is every gateway and every portal and every transition in this world and all other worlds, he is not present in the material realm of our existence, but subsists just outside it. To enter our reality he must be called forth through one of his own gates by the appropriate words of power and with a pleasing sacrifice.
It may suit the purpose of the god not to consume the sacrifice, but to leave a spark of his own substance within her womb, to grow and come forth and in time to become his worshipper and servant. The children of Yog-Sothoth are strange of shape, for the part of their natures from their mothers is of the earth, and the part that is from the father is an expression of manifold dimensions of space wrapped one inside another. The result is a birth monstrous to look upon, or so alien to human eyes that it cannot be glimpsed at all.
It is the purpose of Yog-Sothoth that this earth that we inhabit shall be raised up from her fallen state and placed back into the higher realm from which she fell long aeons ago. This shall in part be accomplished by the invocations of the children of this old one, but before it occurs the entire surface of our terrestrial globe must be washed clean of all life with a bath of living fire. Only the children of Yog-Sothoth who possess more of their father’s nature will survive this cleansing, which shall commence as soon as the children of Yog-Sothoth are in readiness.
We Smoke the Northern Lights
Laird Barron
The White Devil
The boy awakened in the night, although he had cultivated sufficient wariness to not move a muscle beneath the leopard- and yak-hide blankets. He scanned the dim sleeping cell without turning his head. A torch sizzled in its sconce high in the corner. Hoarfrost rimed the threshold of the doorway. Wind tore at the shuttered window as snow seeped in and dusted the sill.
A stranger sat, or hunkered, at the foot of the bed. Killing cold did not appear to discomfort him. He wore a Brooks Brothers suit with a red carnation pinned to the left breast pocket. His short black hair gleamed like polished metal. Some might have considered him queerly handsome or supremely repellant, depending. He said, “My name is Tom. Hello, son.” Blandly unctuous, his skin and eyes and voice were odd. A plastic action figure, animated and life-sized, might have looked and sounded as Tom did. “Sifu has terrorized you well. Your problem is the same problem inherent to all primates, which is, you are a primate.”
“Who are you? Are you a friend of Sifu?” The boy was afraid. Ruthless discipline disguised his fear. He pretended to be unaffected by the presence of a fellow Westerner decked out for a garden party. Only assassin monks and child students were permitted inside the temple, for it was built atop a remote peak of the inner Himalayas, hundreds of miles from civilization and its devils, white and otherwise.
“I’m Tom. Sifu Kung Fan is among the vilest, evilest wretches who has ever walked this planet. Of course he is a dear friend.”
“Tom who, if you please?”
“Tom Mandibole.”
“Good to meet you, Mr. Mandibole. What brings you to these parts?”
“I was once an anthropologist in service of a sultan. My master is bedridden, so to speak. He seeks diversion in the momentous and insignificant alike. Sadly, the sultan marooned me here on this lee shore. Like him, I take my pleasures, great and small, as the opportunity arises.”
“I am sure you’re a valuable servant. There must have been a misunderstanding.”
“No, my boy. He stranded me because it amuses him to do so. The universe and its design is often one of arbitrary horror. Let none of this disturb you overmuch. You won’t remember our conversation.”
The boy considered his options, and decided to say nothing.
Tom Mandibole smiled and his mouth articulated as stiffly as wet plastic. “I noticed your light as I walked by. A flame in the darkness is alluring.”
“This seems far from beaten paths.”
“I am abroad in the night with my servants. We come to smoke the northern lights, to rape the Wendigo, to melt igloos with streams of hot, bloody piss. To see and see.”
“Oh. You’re a bit east.”
“As I said, I was walking past on my way to another place. Much colder, much darker, this other place. Although, I have seen colder and darker yet.”
“The North Pole is swell. I’ve snowshoed there.”
“Would you care to guess what I am, son?”
The boy shook his head.
Tom Mandibole’s mouth contracted and he spoke without moving his lips. “I am the bane of your existence and I am going to tell you something. You will n
ot remember, but it will embed itself like a dreadful seed in your young, impressionable mind. Now listen carefully.” He uttered a few words, then slowly lowered himself into a Cossack dancer’s squat. The stranger melted into the pool of red-tinged shadows that spread across the floor.
The boy shivered. Under the pelts, he gripped the hilt of his kukri that, according to Sifu Kung Fan, had claimed the heads of two-score men, and stared at the ceiling until his eyelids grew heavy. He slept and in the morning, as Tom Mandibole promised, remembered nothing of the visit.
Rendezvous at Woolfolk Bluff
The Tooms brothers returned home to the Mid-Hudson Valley in June of 1956 after a grueling winter at the Mountain Leopard Temple. A winter of calisthenics undertaken near, and sometimes over, bottomless chasms, instruction in advanced poisoning methods that included being poisoned, pillow talk, and master-level subterfuge that occasionally incorporated assassination attempts upon students. Joyously free from the Himalayas for summer vacation, Macbeth and Drederick resolved to relish their R&R to the fullest.
The brothers dressed in casual suits, jackets, and ties, and hopped into Dad’s cherry 1939 Chrysler fliptop for a cruise. Mac had heisted one and a half bottles of Glenrothes 18 from the pantry. Dred swiped a carton of Old Gold and Dad’s third- or fourth-favorite deer hunting rifle. Berrien Lochinvar, the grizzled Legionnaire and lately butler, didn’t bother to ask why or where. He waved forlornly from the mansion steps as the boys roared down the private drive and into a pink and gold MGM sunset. There might or might not be hell to pay later, depending upon the mood of Mr. and Mrs. Tooms when they returned from vacationing in Monaco. It was no coincidence the elder Toomses’ vacation overlapped the boys’ own.