Zach Shephard lives in Enumclaw, Washington, where he writes science fiction and fantasy stories whenever he’s not busy worshiping at the altar of Roger Zelazny. You can check him out at http://www.zachshephard.com/, but not until after you’ve done your homework and read A Night in the Lonesome October. Twice.
Story illustration by Ronnie Tucker.
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The Gotterdammerung Gavotte
by Josh Reynolds
For J.U. Giesy, J. B Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, Norbert Sevestre, Algernon Blackwood, Frederick C. Davis, W. H. Hodgson, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Roger Zelazny and all of the other Openers and Closers.
It was the 31st of October, 1921 and six men were discussing the end of the world.
“The stars are right,” Semi Dual said, softly, peering at the others gathered in the sitting room of No. 472 Cheyne Walk over the tips of his intertwined fingers. Dual was an astrologer and astronomer without peer and his tone was that of a man who spoke a harsh truth.
“The stars are always right,” Harley Warren drawled laconically, lighting a cigarette. Dual gave Warren an irritated glare. The Persian astrologer and the South Carolina mystic were old opponents, though they duelled with pen and ink rather than sword and pistols. Their most recent affray had concerned the super-nova which had appeared all too briefly near Algol in the Perseus constellation and had sent junior astronomers and would-be star-readers running for cover.
Appearance-wise, they were a study in contrasts. Dual was tall and handsome with a carefully barbered Vandyke beard, and dressed fashionably, while Warren was shorter and broader, with a strange cast to his oddly-coloured eyes that put a thrill of unease into those who met them.
“An over-generalization, but not incorrect,” John Silence said gently, trying to head off an old argument. The lean, aesthetic Englishman, clad in his slightly archaic black suit, flicked the air with a precise finger. “The point stands, however.” He looked at Dual and gestured solicitously. “Please go on, Dual.”
Dual cleared his throat and said, “As I was saying, there are certain patterns now writ large on the night sky; patterns whose meaning we all grasp.”
“Obviously, otherwise we wouldn’t all be here, sipping tea and eating cookies,” Warren said genially, punctuating his statement with a delicate sip of from the steaming cup he held.
“We call them biscuits, old bean,” Charles St. Cyprian said. The current resident of No. 472, he was a slim man of Mediterranean complexion and he was dressed in one of the finest sartorial creations to ever leave a Savile Row tailors’ and deign to live in man’s closet. He had been shocked to find the other five standing on his doorstep that morning, bringing with them tidings of doom and cosmic nightmare; not that he wasn’t used to the latter, being the current holder of the offices of the Royal Occultist.
Formed during the reign of Elizabeth the First, the office of Royal Occultist (or the Queen’s Conjurer, as it had been known) had started with the diligent amateur Dr. John Dee, and passed through a succession of hands since. The list was a long one, weaving in and out of the margins of British history, and culminating, for the moment, in Charles St. Cyprian, who was distinctly nervous, and trying to appear as if he were anything but.
He fiddled with the hang of his coat. Clothes made the man, and vanity was one of the few indulgences he allowed himself. He had been shriven by a Purgatory spent in uniform drab in the trenches of the Continent only a few scant years before, after all. Though among this assemblage, he felt distinctly underdressed and outclassed.
“This ain’t a biscuit,” Warren said.
“When in Rome, Harley,” Ravenwood interjected. Of an age with St. Cyprian, Ravenwood was equally well-dressed, albeit with more flash. There was a trace of the showman to him that set him apart, even in a gathering such as this. “Now, if we could cut out the socio-culinary digressions, gentlemen?”
“Agreed,” Sar Dubnotal said, his mellifluous voice carrying easily over Warren’s muttered retort. His sun-browned fingers smoothed the elegant Oriental sash wrapped about his waist, before rising to the white turban that crowned his head in an unconscious gesture. “We have wasted enough time waiting for the others. They are obviously not coming.”
“Disappointing as it is, I’m forced to agree,” Silence said, nodding in Dubnotal’s direction. “De Grandin is with Thunstone and Pursuivant in the Appalachians the last I heard, and Ms. Crerar is investigating ghostly swine at some unpleasant edifice or other in Ireland.”
“Kirowan is…wherever Kirowan is, the spooky son-of-a-bitch,” Warren said, eyeing his digestive biscuit with continued suspicion. “And Zarnak is off busy killing something that ought not to have been born, according to that manservant of his.”
St. Cyprian watched them, gauging the motley assemblage. Dubnotal and Silence he had known for some time. The Rosicrucian mystic was a neighbor of sorts, owning a flat on Cheyne Walk. And Silence had been friends with St. Cyprian’s predecessor, Thomas Carnacki, and had been instrumental in helping St. Cyprian shoulder the burdens of the Royal Occultist after Carnacki’s death at Ypres in 1918. But the others he’d only heard of in passing. His duties kept him confined to the borders of the Empire for the most part. What he knew could fill a note-card: Warren was an occultist with a bad reputation, Ravenwood was a playboy-detective and Dual was an enigmatic presence.
He had files on all of them, of course. That was one of his many duties, keeping up with the who’s who of the darker sort, and knowing where they were and what they might be up to, just in case it stood to give old Blighty the business. “Will the six of us be enough?” St. Cyprian said, hoping none of the others noted his nervousness. As he spoke, five pairs of eyes found his, and he resisted the urge to shrink back into his seat.
“Are you kidding?” Ravenwood said.
Silence smiled reassuringly and said, “It wasn’t so long ago that you were asking the same question, young Ravenwood.”
“And Charley here ain’t got him a nameless Tibetan mystic par excellence whispering helpful hints in his ear,” Warren said, grinning nastily.
“Charley,” St. Cyprian repeated, slightly insulted.
“Fair point,” Ravenwood said, raising his hands in a placatory gesture. “Though I wouldn’t call what the Nameless One does ‘whispering’ exactly.”
“Gentlemen, the apocalypse waits for no man,” Dual said harshly. He stood abruptly, sending his cup clattering to the floor and spilling his tea. “The end of the world is coming!”
“It’s always the end of world somewhere, sometime, Dual,” Warren said, puffing on his cigarette, his eyes glinting oddly. “I’ve been to four of these barn-dances now, and the clock never quite strikes midnight.”
“Familiarity is no reason not to take a thing seriously,” Dubnotal said. “One misstep, one mistake in what you call a dance and the world will drown in madness.”
“How is that any different from the way it is now?” St. Cyprian murmured. Silence met his gaze sadly. The older Englishman was very much a man out of time in some ways. The War had driven him into seclusion; Silence had faced fallen angels without flinching, but the blood that had been shed on the Continent had threatened to drown him. And this new world didn’t treat him much better.
“It is different, because that madness is human, and this is anything but,” Silence said softly. He waved a hand to the splatter of tea spreading across the hardwood floor, his fingers crooking in a strange gesture. “Look…”
St. Cyprian did. In the spreading tea, he saw monsters. Men capered before nightmare idols, acting as beasts and worse than beasts as the world shuddered beneath the tread of things not seen since before the first ancestor of mankind had slithered out of the surf and taken its first breath of oxygen. His mouth went dry and he closed his eyes. Pain pulsed across the invisible, lidless surface of his third eye. The spirit-eye, Carnacki had called it. St. Cyprian had learned how to open it from a Tibetan lama of his acquaintance. Aside from havin
g what St. Cyprian considered an unhealthy fascination for the color green, the lama had been a good teacher. He traced a sacred shape from the Third Ritual of Hloh in the air with two fingers and the pressure faded, leaving a taste like burnt chilies in his mouth.
“Don’t look too close or move too fast, Charley,” Warren said. “That kind of thing attracts the big, hungry fish.” Dual stretched out a foot and scraped the tea into distinct blobs. He seemed to have calmed down, though his features were pinched with strain. St. Cyprian wondered if they had all seen the same thing he had. Then he wondered how many times they had seen it…would you, could you ever grow used to that?
“You see?” Silence said. “Somewhere, in London, right now, someone is attempting to open a door which ought to remain shut. They always attempt to open it, when the stars come right, and we must stand to keep it closed. Such is the way of it.”
“It’s a ritual pre-dating recorded history,” Ravenwood said. “It has to do with the seasons and the equinoxes and all that ishkabibble.” He shrugged as Dubnotal and Dual frowned at him. “What? That’s what the Nameless One calls it, not me.” He grinned. “He’s got quite the handle on modern vernacular for an ageless and inscrutable old mystic.”
“Carnacki never told me of any of this,” St. Cyprian said quietly, rubbing his temples. Then, Carnacki hadn’t had time to teach him much of anything, had he?
“Once you learn the steps, it becomes second nature,” Warren said. “It’s just a dance like any other, as old as time and tide. We ain’t the first to dance it neither.”
“Tserpchikopf,” Dubnotal murmured, shaking his head sadly. “The modern century broke him.”
Warren nodded. “But old Jack and the rest of last century’s men are gone now, except maybe the Great Detective, who’s turned bee-keeper last I heard, and this weren’t ever his sort of party anyway.”
“What sort of party is that, then?”
St. Cyprian felt a surge of relief as his assistant strode into the sitting room, bearing a tray with a fresh pot of tea and fresh cups. Ebe Gallowglass was, as usual, dressed like some hybrid of a cinematic street urchin and a Parisian street-apache, with dashes of color in unusual places, and a battered newsboy cap on her head. The whole ensemble contrasted sharply with her quite evident Egyptian heritage.
As St. Cyprian had served Carnacki, so Gallowglass served him. And in time, the office would pass to Gallowglass, though neither of them had discussed the inevitable as yet. Frankly, St. Cyprian found the contemplation of his almost certain demise to be ghoulish at best and depressing at worst, so he was willing to avoid it as long as ethically possible. Gallowglass seemed only too happy to oblige.
“The usual, I’m afraid, Ms. Gallowglass,” St. Cyprian said.
“Oh, only the end of the world again, is it Mr. St. Cyprian?” she said setting the tea-tray down and eyeing Dual crossly. “Pick it up, chum. Those cups cost a bitter bob,” she said, snapping a finger at his fallen cup.
Abashed, Dual ducked his head and snatched up the cup. Warren sniggered until Gallowglass’ eyes caught him and made him choke. “What’re you laughing at then?”
“Nothing,” Warren said, spreading his hands. “Swear to God, nothing.” He looked at Ravenwood. “Tell them about the house.”
“It’s in London, for a start,” Ravenwood said. “Dual and I triangulated the position with the Nameless One’s help, once Harley put together the signs.”
Warren grinned and lit another cigarette. “The sinking of the Santa Isabel off Villa Garcia; the coup in Iran and the Bolshevik invasion of Georgia; the race riot in Tulsa and the more mundane kind in Munich; and, of course, the Lisbon massacre a week or so back. Signs and portents of the nastier kind,” he said. “Too, we’re not due for another full moon until the fifteenth of November, but Dual says she’ll be as full and as pretty as she’s ever been, bouncing along up there tonight.”
“None of that sounds like it has anything to do with a house in London,” Gallowglass said, pouring a cup of tea. Warren reached for it, but she drank it herself.
“Like I said, it’s not my first dance,” Warren chuckled bitterly, pouring his own cup.
“What Warren means is that the most innocuous signs can herald the most abominable moments,” Dual said. “The flights of a flock of birds or the shapes taken by wind-blown leaves are warnings for those who know what to see.” Warren shuddered slightly, nodding.
“I will show you horror in a single grain of sand,” Silence murmured.
“I have some experience in that regard, yes,” St. Cyprian said, frowning.
“We all have,” Dubnotal said. “We are all men-” he shot a look at Gallowglass, “-and women who have seen the world’s black rim. That is why we must place ourselves in the path of abomination and see that it progresses no further.”
“And which abomination is this, exactly?” St. Cyprian said. “What are we facing that requires the attentions of six men such as ourselves?”
“I thought he was supposed to be smart,” Ravenwood complained.
“Quiet Ravenwood,” Silence said. He looked at St. Cyprian. “Surely you’ve guessed, Charles…it is not one abomination. It is all of them.”
St. Cyprian choked on his tea.
“That was my reaction,” Ravenwood said.
“You also got nervous and threw up,” Warren said.
“He might yet, the night is young,” Dual said, showing a rare flash of humor.
“All of them!” St. Cyprian rasped, coughing.
“The Hog, the Shambler, the Whistler, the Walker, the Dreamer, the Lurker…the whole zoo, Charles,” Silence said. “A veritable murderers’ row of outer-dimensional horrors, one might say.”
St. Cyprian bounded to his feet. “Ms. Gallowglass, pull the Crossley around! Where the devil is this house?”
“Finally,” Dual said, clapping his hands. “Someone is showing the proper urgency.”
“Haste makes waste,” Warren said piously, lounging in his chair. Dual kicked him, prompting the occultist to leap out of his chair with a yelp.
“You’re being remarkably blasé about the end of the world, Mr. Warren,” St. Cyprian said, retrieving his Webley from the mantel over the Restoration era fireplace that occupied one wall of the study. The Bulldog was a small, tough little pistol and it was a comforting weight in his coat pocket. He glanced at the sword hung on the wall, its ancient, crumbling sheath designed in the fashion of an ancient city-state that no longer existed save in myth, then discounted it. He rather thought that if it came down to blades, the game was likely as good as done.
“Guns won’t be of any use, Charles,” Silence said, rising from his seat.
“Says you,” Gallowglass said, checking her own weapon. The Webley-Fosberry was larger than St. Cyprian’s pistol and it hung beneath her arm with awkward menace, the Seal of Solomon engraved on the bottom of the grip clearly visible. “Car’s out front, Mr. St. Cyprian.”
“Excellent,” St. Cyprian said. “I’ll drive.”
The six men and one woman hurried towards the black Crossley HP sitting on the street in front of No. 472. Across the street, the orange light of the setting sun played across the surface of the Thames. Dubnotal licked a finger and held it up. “An ill wind is building in the Four Kingdoms,” he said. “Those of the Air gather their strength.” All up and down the Embankment, the trees suddenly rattled their limbs, as if something heavy were moving through them, scattering red and gold and brown leaves to mark its passage.
“Our enemies move against us,” Silence said, raising a hand. He crooked two fingers in the Yimghaz Sign and suddenly there were things moving silently through the thin crowd of afternoon strollers walking alongside the river. St. Cyprian could only make them out dimly. They looked like ambulatory heat distortions, ripples of temperature that were only manlike in the abstract.
“What the hell are those,” Gallowglass whispered, her hand dipping for her pistol. Ravenwood grabbed her hand. Her foot lashed out, cat
ching him on the ankle and he yelped.
“Ah-the-ow-the gun won’t be of any help, I’m afraid,” he said in a rush, reaching down to rub his ankle. “That really hurt.”
“You shouldn’t grab a lady when she isn’t expecting it,” Gallowglass said primly. “The question stands.”
“Fthaggua,” Warren spat, stuffing his hands in the pockets of his coat. “Get to the damn car, lady and gentlemen.”
“I think they’ve seen us,” St. Cyprian said. And indeed, that appeared to be the case. The heat distortions were flickering and rippling with what he’d have called agitation in a physical being, and they were drawing closer in a skittering, eye-watering fashion.
“Warren’s right, everybody in the car,” Ravenwood said, pushing Dual and Silence towards the Crossley. St. Cyprian hesitated. Warren had stepped between the distortions and the car and he withdrew his hands from his pockets. Without a word, he flung out his hands and St. Cyprian had the impression of sand or dust arcing through the air. The distortions rippled and he clutched his head as a sound-without-sound thrummed through his head. He saw hint of what lurked behind the distortions, vast, inhuman shapes that bore no relation to any earthly beast, and they screamed as whatever Warren had flung at them burned them.
“In the car Charley,” Warren shouted, grabbing his arm. “They aren’t alone!”
“What-what-” St. Cyprian began.
“Fire-vampires, star-shamblers, parasites by any other name,” Warren said, glancing over his shoulder. “The dust of Ibn Gazi won’t keep them back for long! Get in the damn car!”
A hissing sound filled the air, and St. Cyprian smelled burning rock and sediment. The distortions had resumed their march, and they burned the street as they came. A wind whipped along the Embankment now, scattering hats and blowing open coats. A woman screamed as something lean and a-thirst brushed by her, invisible save for the phosphorescent saliva that dripped from its maw.
St. Cyprian released the brake and twisted the wheel, sending the Crossley into motion. Warren, not wasting any time, clung to the running board. Something struck the canvas roof, and the smelling of burnt material clogged the noses of all in the auto. Silence, in the backseat, thrust up a hand and released a shout of Latin. The sounds and smell of burning faded, but only for a moment.
Lovecraft eZine Megapack - 2012 - Issues 10 through 20 Page 61