I’ve spent much time in the last few years, then, musing on the nature of things, now believe the world, the universe, every once in a great many ages, shrivels to a dead core, a dead core that then becomes the seed another cosmos sprouts from. Many have argued this, or something similar, at different times in Earth’s history (though my formulation of the notion has, of course, been, in part, shaped by the beliefs of the folk of this mountain region). I don’t reckon, though, as some thinkers of past ages have, that the cosmos is reborn to the same over again; Rashmi’s uncanny feeling she was sundered, perhaps on reading this very document, had an eldritch twin who knew a life different from hers, has suggested something other to me. I reckon the Earth, on returning from cold and stasis, may sometimes have a slightly different history, and suppose the cause of any changes to be objects that survive the end and, lasting into the next cycle, set up eddies time’s flow. Though the cosmos perhaps resists such shifts, those, in particular, that give rise to paradoxes, I’d suppose the possibility of transformation to remain. I’ve, then, become determined to somehow ensure the survival of this account of mine.
This region has always had its roving holy folk, known as weavers of spells, but in all the time I’ve lived here there’s only been one who’s seemed to me to possess any real power, a woman, once almost terrifyingly vital, latterly, at the end of a very long life, a withered crone, though still formidable. I’ve, myself, witnessed her bringing back to health men, women, and children seemingly beyond hope, rid a field of rice of fungal blight, and raise, by mumbling some words over a line scratched in the dirt, a weird barrier that kept a village from being swept away by an avalanche. Thinking on this last, I decided I’d speak to her about my typescript. I’d only met and talked with her a few times, but felt she might help me if I explained things to her. I thought, then, I’d track her down next spring, when Rashmi and I went down the mountain, lugging furs to trade for rice, iron arrowheads, and other things. But, hearing from a passing traveller the holy woman been taken badly sick, I asked Rashmi if we could go early. She was reluctant to travel in winter, but knowing the hardships of it could only hurt, not kill us, and half swayed by my ideas, agreed.
We left our cave a week ago then, went down to the foothills, and, in the first settlement we came across, made enquiries as to the whereabouts of the holy crone. We were told her illness had got even worse, that she’d returned to the village of her forebears to die. So we set out, in haste, for the place. Partway through our trek, the weather turned really bad, squalls, driving snow, very cold, and, as our way took us through a defile where the drifts were waist high, by the time we arrived we were sore weary, had painful chilblains on our hands and feet. It wasn’t, then, till the following morning, when I was recovered, rested, warm, I sought out the witch.
Leaving Rashmi drowsing in the yurt we’d been offered for the night by a kind villager who’d taken pity on us, I made my way to the drystone and sod roundhouse where, I’d been told, the holy woman could be found. The storm had died, and it was eerie quiet; the snow and heavy cloud muffled.
Reaching the place I’d been directed to, I was let in, saw the witch lying on a heap of bearskins against the wall. I was sad to see she really was near death. Family, the brood of a sister, sat sunk in sorrow, were loath to let me speak to her. But hearing my voice, she called out in a reedy tone for them to bring me over. They did, but pleaded low that I not tax her waning strength too much.
She lay slumped, gaunt and wan, shivering in spite of the furs piled on her. She greeted me with a wave of her hand, then, suffering pangs, sat up, clawed at her coverings, moaned. I was moved to see her like that, asked if she couldn’t be healed by either her own sorcery, or the remedies of others. But she shook her head slowly and, smiling feeble, told me the span she’d been allotted was drawing to a close, that she was well-prepared for the end.
She gestured for me to take a seat on a three-legged wooden stool drawn up by her pallet. We talked a short while about the weather, friends in common, then she told me of her worries about the cranes. The numbers flying over the range in autumn and spring had been dwindling every year, and hunters were now wary of shooting many down, lest their end be hastened. The flesh had been one of the staple foodstuffs of the Himalayan people’s winter diet, so this caused much hunger and misery.
This served as a natural lead into the matter I wanted to broach. I told the holy woman how I believed the end of days drew near and outlined my notion of recurrence with shifts. Listening, she nodded sagely.
‘In dreams,’ she said, ‘I’ve seen the world tumbling in the void, didn’t know what this vision meant. But perhaps it’s a sign the Earth, existence, is like that game we call, in these parts, Climb the Mountain, whose players take turns to roll a die, aiming to throw all scores in turn. Perhaps, slow, so slow, all possible histories are gone through.’
‘Who, then, gambles with our lives?’
‘I suspect but the Void, and its friends Desolation and Emptiness.’
As our talk was beginning to tire her, I thought it prudent to raise the subject of the warding incantation. At first she was bemused. Then, when she realized what I hoped to do, she looked sharply at me.
‘I didn’t take you for vain.’
‘I’m not vain,’ I protested, and pointed to my forehead, to the letters Elliot carved there, that have never quite healed, that I’ve lived with so long. ‘I don’t care about memorializing my life, my deeds. It’s that, if my tale is found and read, it might impede, in the world that’s to come, the evil of a creature who’s brought misery to many.’
And I told her about Elliot, and his malice, his cruelty, about the things this typescript sets forth.
When I’d done, the witch said, her voice hoarse, ‘That explains the things rumoured about you.’
She nodded to herself.
‘Well, I will help you, best I can. Perhaps that’s the true meaning of my dream, that I’m meant, with the last of my fading strength, to aid you in gambling with history.’
Taking one of her limp, burning hands in mine, I thanked her.
‘Can I ask,’ I said, ‘how you’ll do it? It is an old magic or a new?’
She laughed.
‘I suppose I can trust you?’
I nodded.
‘Well, I’ll show you.’
And she reached beneath her bedding, took out some kind of gizmo. It was small, fitted into her palm, was made of metal, rusting in spots, had lights fluttering weakly down the side.
‘It’s that kind of magic,’ she said, then she hid the device away again. ‘Its secrets will die with me, for it can do terrible ill as well as good.’
I touched her hand.
‘Of course.’
‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘Another vision I’ve had. I thought it merely an ill fever dream before, but now…’
She broke off, spluttered. I started from the stool in concern, but she waved for me to sit back down, took up a rag, hawked, spat a dark clot into it. Then groaned, went on.
‘In this dream, I saw a man without a head scrabbling at the earth. Beneath dark, gnarled branches.’
I shuddered.
At that moment, one of the holy woman’s nephews came over, implored me not to keep her from sleep longer. The witch looked up at him.
‘Thank you. I’ll rest in a moment, but there’s something I must explain to my friend first.’
I left the roundhouse a little after, clutching a large cloth bag. The witch had told me to put my typescript in it, seal it up, bring it back to her so she could cast a ‘charm’ on it. She urged me to haste. I found Rashmi breakfasting with some villagers, related to her what had passed, and we returned here. I sat down at my typewriter to compose this afterword, as soon as we arrived back.
So now it comes time to finally conclude this memoir. Once I’ve sealed this document in the sack the holy woman gave me, taken it to her to be ‘enchanted’, it may not be opened again, for to do so w
ould break the ‘spell’. When I asked her what I should do with it after, she told me it didn’t really matter, but suggested I might bury it. After some thought, I’ve decided I’ll leave it in the stacks of the British Library, beneath London’s ruined streets; I feel that will be a fitting resting place.
Besides, we’ve another reason to go back to that desolated city. When I told Rashmi of the witch’s second vision she suggested we return, with haste, to either prevent Elliot from putting himself back together again, or, if we should be too late, find him, attempt once more to best him.
‘I don’t,’ she said, ‘want to live in fear, in hiding, ever again, even for a moment.’
I agreed with her. Though we’re sure the end of all things is coming, we wish the short time remaining to us to be as calm, as happy as it can be. We also feel we should attempt to prevent Elliot’s fleeing the eschaton by going into Tartarus.
This, then, is truly the end of my story. Rashmi, I hope you’ll forgive me if (while in my heart I inscribe it to you) I dedicate it to the hoped for, though doubtless chimeric reader who’s been so faithful to me (who may, perhaps, be some version of you). Reader, if you do exist, you’ll live on a new world, one sprouted from the germ of this frozen Earth. I’m sure it’ll be a world where good and ill vie for dominance, just as they did on this; I urge you to thresh grain from chaff, plant and nurture the seeds, burn the husks.
But I’ve waxed sententious. I must now curtail these foolish ramblings, place this text in the sack the holy woman gave me. After that’s done, Rashmi and I will climb to the peak of this mountain, spend some time gazing at the welkin’s tapestry, telling each other stories of the things we see sketched in the weave, the tales of our own sidereal mythos, a common pastime of ours. Then, tomorrow, we’ll leave behind this cave we’ve spent a long happy time in, and, after seeing the witch on her deathbed, will strike out for that place once known as London, on what, I think, may well be our final journey. Homeward bound once more.
Endnotes
1 This is one of three alterations to the typescript. The name of the book here has been blotted out by thick hatching, and in Peterkin’s hand, just above, this title interpolated. At the Mountains of Madness is a 1931 novella by H.P. Lovecraft. It is not possible to make out the original reference, the heavy erasure has obliterated it.
2 Many of Peterkin’s stories and novels feature minor characters who share his surname. But a note, in Peterkin’s distinctive crabbed hand, in the margin of the typescript at this point, works against the reassuring interpretation. It reads: ‘Coincidence? Or an obscure threat?’
3 Here Peterkin has scrawled, in the margin: ‘A coincidence?’
4 Another of Peterkin’s marginal notes: ‘Never heard tell of this.’
5 By this text is written another note in Peterkin’s hand. It is heavily underscored. It reads: ‘This dates it!’
6 This is the second of Peterkin’s changes to the typescript; again the original title is heavily crossed-out and illegible. The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields is a novel, of 1897, by Jules Verne (original French title, Le Sphinx des glaces). It is a sequel to and re-imagining of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), a novel Peterkin was fond of and whose title is interpolated in a similar fashion later in the typescript.
7 On this page is another of Peterkin’s marginal jottings: ‘Was a smoking ban not in force then? Whenever ‘then’ was?’
8 This is the third of Peterkin’s changes to the typescript. His pen was, it seems, pressed against the page with excessive force while he hatched out the original title – the nib has perforated the paper in places. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is Edgar Allan Poe’s novel of 1838. And there is another marginal note on this page: ‘Both Verne’s and Lovecraft’s formulations vitiate the horror of Poe’s original conception.’ It is underlined three times.
9 There is another of Peterkin’s marginal notes here: ‘Reading this again, I realize the notion gives a dreadful cast to things I’ve thought consoling.’
10 On the back of this page of the typescript, with clear reference to this roll of artists and writers, Peterkin has scrawled: ‘Am I to be part of this illustrious company? To date my evil has been shabby, my imagination tame. But what might I be able to write now? And, am I one of the successes? Now an everliving quarry?’
11 In the margins here, Peterkin has written: ‘Things will go differently this time.’
12 Daubs of some darkish matter do mark this chapter of the typescript and the one immediately following.
13 All of the pages of The Wanderer typescript up to and including chapter XII, are indeed creased, as if at some point they have been screwed up then smoothed out again.
Appendix I
Editor’s Note on Peterkin’s Emendations to the Text
After my second, and thorough, read through of The Wanderer, I passed it to Fiona G. Ment, to get her opinion. I told her I’d been fretting over the authorship and provenance, indicated to her those elements I thought uncanny. When she’d finished the typescript, she came back to me to say she was, herself, certain it was a work of fiction.1 She’d come up with a thesis. The preponderance of evocations of the works of Edgar Allan Poe had started her thinking about their significance (though the text alludes to other works, largely in the Gothic tradition, references to Poe’s corpus outnumber those to any other writer’s).
Ment noted three things. First, the number of Poe allusions, in and of themselves, point to Peterkin as the author, for he was a Poe obsessive, had stated in interviews that it was reading ‘The Mask of the Red Death’ as a teenager that had infected him with the desire to write, had even composed two tales, ‘Reynolds’ (collected in The Black Arts (1999)), and ‘Bottle Found in a MS.’ (collected in The Blood Cults of Bognor Regis and Other Weird Tales (2003)), that fictionally account for Poe’s lost last days.
Second, there are the references to Poe’s tales ‘The Angel of the Odd’ and ‘The Sphinx’. The first, a short story of 1844, describes the narrator’s encounter, while in a drunken stupor, with the eponymous entity, a creature entirely composed of various alcohol receptacles and appurtenances, who announces, in heavy-accented tones, that he’s the ‘the genius who preside[s] over the contretemps of mankind, and whose business it [is] to bring about the odd accidents which are continually astonishing the skeptic.’ The Angel has manifested before the narrator because he’s scoffed at the likelihood of such strange and terrible coincidences after reading a report in a newspaper of a bizarre death which he believes ‘a poor hoax.’ The protagonist pays scant attention to the Angel, his contempt, after a time, driving the odd creature away. As a punishment, this avatar of chance then subjects the narrator to an increasingly absurd series of trials. The story superficially seems a warning to those who’d sneer at the weird, but this ostensible meaning is undercut by comic absurdity and the unreliability of its soused protagonist; its suggestion would, in fact, seem to be that the odd happenings arise, not from an eldritch cosmos, but from the idiotic imagination of the sottish narrator. And, taken with this reference, that the characters of The Wanderer’s inset tales are all drunk, or half-drunk at least, or drugged, or high when they have their dread experiences, intimates that much in the novel is intended to be delusion, or so Ment believed. In ‘The Sphinx’, a tale from two years later, the morbid narrator’s vision from a window of a fearsome behemoth ponderously clambering up a distant hillside, taken to be a harbinger of his death, is revealed, by a clear-headed friend, to be accountable by his having seen a tiny moth climbing a gossamer thread hanging before the glass, and to have been a quirk of perspective. It’s the story of the triumph of reason over the eldritch, and the mention of it another hint from the author of the typescript, according to Ment.
And third, and in her opinion, most conclusively, Ment felt that the allusions were pointing at Poe’s well-known reputation as a hoaxer. Poe framed a number of his fictions, including ‘MS. Found in a Bot
tle’ and the novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, both referred to in The Wanderer (though the mention of Arthur Gordon Pym is one of Peterkin’s later emendations), as true accounts, and, in 1844, published an article in the New York Sun, an account of a balloon trip across the Atlantic Ocean, that though presented as reportage, was a fiction. Ment suggested, therefore, that, in invoking Poe, the author of The Wanderer, whom she assumed to be Peterkin, was subtly drawing attention to the typescript’s status as an invention.
At the time, I was convinced by her arguments, and The Wanderer’s grip on me slackened for a short while. But pondering the matter subsequently, I’ve grown unsure again. A number of things have eroded my peace, troubled me, in particular Peterkin’s three alterations to the manuscript, the three book titles interpolated, At the Mountains of Madness, The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields, and Arthur Gordon Pym, and the strange jotting, stressed by being underscored three times, in the margin of the page on which the last change occurs, ‘Both Verne’s and Lovecraft’s formulations vitiate the horror of Poe’s original conception.’
As I noted in a footnote, Jules Verne’s The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields is a sequel to Arthur Gordon Pym. It’s also a rationalization of that work. It posits Poe’s novel as a mostly true narrative, but either accounts for, by scientific principles, or rejects, as hallucinations, all the horrors and wonders of the American writer’s imagination.
H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness is also, in some ways, a sequel to Arthur Gordon Pym; it contains references to Poe’s novel, is likewise presented as a true account, a testimony, and takes from it the haunting call of the gigantic white birds of the polar regions seen by Pym, ‘Tekeli-li!’, which becomes, in Lovecraft’s novel, the cry of the vile, terrible shoggoths the narrator’s party find beneath the Antarctic wastes, a cry the shoggoths learnt from their old masters, the Elder Ones. Lovecraft’s approach to the material differs significantly from Verne’s, though. In At the Mountains of Madness, Arthur Gordon Pym is asserted to be a fabrication. It is one, though, that may have had its origins in Poe’s reading of ‘unsuspected and forbidden sources’, notably, it’s hinted, that dark book of Lovecraft’s fabulation, the Necronomicon of the Mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred. Lovecraft subsumes Poe’s tale into his nihilistic cosmology, which, though terrifying, has a certain coherence, a certain logic. This is perhaps because, for Lovecraft, the ludic chaos of Poe’s fragmentary, incomplete, and amorphous text would have been insupportable; Lovecraft’s real fear, as many commentators have noted, was of disorder; in his writings the approach of the monstrous and grotesque is often heralded by a Dionysian piping of flutes.
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