Awake in the Night Land

by John C. Wright

  I descended into the poisonous air. It burned in my lungs, but only at first; I soon grew numb to it. I faded into and out of a strange dreaming, where distances and time were distorted.

  Behind, I saw the great lumpy shoulder of the Widow crest the valley pass. Not long after, her deathly white face, its mouth parts working and slavering nastily, rose like the moon of the ancient world, and her lank hairs hung from her skull, trailing in a great curtain behind her.

  I found a monolith, carved with unknown glyphs. Perhaps it was made by man in ancient and forgotten times: no Monstruwacan has ever speculated that the Outer Things have writings. The glyphs were jagged curls, like entrails, as if the unknown language had no other words but exclamations of fear and pain. These ugly letters were set deep enough that my hands and feet found purchase.

  At fifty feet above the valley floor, my head cleared: the air was cold and smelled of burning metal, but the fume no longer choked me. At seventy-five feet, I was still not out of the reach of the Great Gray Widow, but I was on the side of the monument facing away from the Last Redoubt, deep in shadow, so I drew my cloak about me and held still, hoping not to be seen.

  The Widow trailed her long segmented body down the slopes, and rested her great chin on a stone not far from the base of the monument. Her wormlike arms ranged here and there across the great rocks and dells of this valley, prodding and poking into smoke-holes, seeking me. I noticed how oddly delicate her motions were. Once she sent one of her hands reaching up the side of the monolith, the fingers lightly tapping and touching here and there, trying to find me by feel. The hand passed close to me, so that I could see the bristles growing from the thick hide of her hand, and I could smell the foetid matter encrusting her long nails.

  But eventually the poison gas overcame her, and her head drooped down, and her leathery lids fell across her burning eyes.

  At that same moment, I felt a thrill underneath my hands. It was not as if the monument grew warmer, or stirred, or as if sound came from it. I can hardly explain what it was. But the knowledge came upon me that the monument was alive, charged with a monstrous awareness. As if all the crooked circular runes up and down the monolith-shaped shell had somehow become eyes, staring with inhuman awareness in all directions; staring in all directions, but concentrating its terrible will in one direction.

  The huge body of the Widow trembled slightly, and her skin seemed to press inward against her skull and bones. This valley was the trap of this monument, and the poison gas its venom, and now it was drawing some sort of spiritual or aetherial nutriment, or perhaps pleasure only, from the vast bulk of dying flesh below it.

  Quickly I climbed down from the monument. It was surely aware of me; I could feel a disturbance in the aether each time I stepped from one curving glyph to the next. Yet nothing acted to harm me.

  Except, of course, that I lowered myself back into the belt of poisonous air. As quickly as I could, I sought to climb the valley slopes and come out of the noxious gas. I could feel the watchful, patient thought-pressure from the obelisk behind me.

  In a foggy delirium, I walked, dead-footed, and knowing that to pause or rest or stumble would be to die.

  Eventually, darkness folded over my eyes. My memory is dim, nightmares of numb walking, of placing one aching foot after the other.

  70.

  I woke lying facedown on a plain of rock and gravel, and the air was bitter cold, but not poisonous. I folded away the forks of my weapon-rod, extended the haft, and placed it under my armpit, for I was too weary to stand otherwise. Slowly I rose to my feet, using my weapon as a crutch.

  How was I alive? Could my body have continued its walking motions even after I had fainted?

  It was deathly quiet in all directions in the Night Land. No voice called to one another from mountain to mountain. The machinery that throbs and murmurs in the buried houses of the Devolved Ones could not be heard. The volcanoes were quiet. The Country of the Great Laughter was still.

  To one side of me, and far away, I saw the silhouette of the Crowned Watcher against the glare of the distant Plain of Blue Fire. But its mask was turned toward the Great Redoubt, and not toward me. I was seeing the right flank of the entity, where it loomed, larger than a hill, above the broken and gloomy landscape. There was a second, smaller hill huddled up against it. I could not see it clearly, for it was merely a rounded bulk in the darkness, huge and many miles away. And yet the impression left with me was that I was seeing a child suckling at its mother. Something in the posture, position, or proportion of this second figure, the way it crouched beneath the flank of the Crowned Watcher, lent this impression. Of all the things I saw in the Night Land, it is this that the Monstruwacans question me most closely about, and yet of this I saw no details, and it may have been my imagination only, the way the tired eye will look at some hideous face of an ogre intent on the death of all mankind, and see nothing but a tumble of rocks.

  I turned.

  Behind me, not fifty yard from my position, loomed a Silent One. At first I did not see it, for the shrouds covering this great and terrible spirit-creature were of the same hue as the mists and fogs behind it. Its hood was pointed away from me, bent toward the Road which curved in a great arch, running from the south to the north.

  I fell to my knees, and then to my face, expecting death. I took the poisoned pomander in my teeth, ready to slay myself should the Silent One draw near; although its powers were known to reach over distances, and it need not draw near.

  Next I felt a pressure in my soul, and I somehow knew that this great being would not harm me, if I did not further disturb it. Slowly I crawled away from it, making as little noise as possible. The hooded figure never moved.

  The area behind the Crowned Watcher was a land we called The Place Where the Silent Ones are Never. Toward that place I made now with all speed, for reasons that should be obvious.

  This land is mostly flat, with some canyons. The plain is cracked in places with a river of boiling mud, and strange lights shine from some of the canyons, though no man knows what is in their deeper parts, being hidden from the gaze of the Last Redoubt. Steam rises from cracks and craters here, and there is an abundance of moss-bush, as well as volcanic heat. It is, indeed, more friendly to life than other places where nests of abhumans and giants have been found, so it is a matter of speculation why so few are glimpsed here.

  71.

  I crawled to a nearby smoke-hole, and approached the warm hole carefully, so that I saw the giant seated there, with the broken shards of truncheons all about him. He was motionless, though I sensed his awareness, and so I could not tell if he were alive, merely caught in a distortion of time, or dead, and lingering as a ghost or aether echo.

  The next smoke-hole I crawled to was unoccupied, save for a nest of scorpions I burnt with the forks of my weapon. I lay on the warm sand, half-awake, for many hours, while my strength returned.

  72.

  Eventually I pressed northward again. I have not recorded here, as is customary, an account of how many hours I walked, when I ate, or how many I slept. This is because, among the other equipment traditional to travelers, but not found in my brother’s locked chest, was a dial. I had no way of measuring the passing hours, so, at times, my head would nod, and slumber would come upon me, and I thought it was an Influence of the Spirit seeking to slay me.

  I would eat when I thought to do it. At first I ate when I was hungry, and found my supplies dangerously low, since hunger pangs continued whether I ate or not. The Tablets do not fill the belly, but enter the bloodstream directly, and sustain the cells by means of subtle life-essences. Eventually I lost my ability to feel hunger, which is the first step of Preparation. At some point after this, the constant aching desire to shout aloud and run toward the tall shapes of the Watching Things receded in my mind, and I was able to walk toward the destinations I selected, rather than having my footsteps unaccountably pulled toward this Watching Thing or that one. The clear-headedness which comes
from fasting had the disadvantage that now, without a dial, I could not tell when I must eat, for I felt no hunger at all.

  I ate only when my limbs went weak.

  73.

  Six times I paused in the Place Where The Silent Ones are Never, and always I found some firepit or smoke-hole to warm me as I slept. Once I woke, and found a small golden light shining from a point on the ground half a foot from me. Even as I stirred and rose, it winked out.

  I stood and looked back at the Last Redoubt. I was now far enough from it that I could see the whole shape in one glance. The aether was troubled, but it was as if with a sigh; as if the millions in the Pyramid had seen some dreadful danger pass me by as I slept, and their souls were great with relief and joy for me.

  I opened the forks of my weapon-rod and saluted the Pyramid, and the aether was disturbed as if with a great cheer.

  What the danger was which came so nigh to me, or what that point of golden light had been that bathed me as I slept and saved me, I do not know.

  74.

  In another place, as I rested, I doffed my helm to wash my hair in the astringent chemical which I found, warm and bubbling, at the lowest point of the bowl of a crater. The crater seemed a safe place, for the walls to each side were rock, all of light hue save one square dark patch, and there was sand underfoot. I was hidden from view, and there was no approach to surprise me.

  As I knelt wringing out my locks, I became aware that the slope of dark rock to my left was not rock at all, but a crevasse. In the darkness my eyes had deceived me. There was a large square doorway set in the sloping side of the crater where I hid, and the gap of the door was perhaps thirty feet wide and fifty feet tall.

  A great troubling came upon me when I beheld it, for one the dreams I had suffered when in the valley of poisoned smoke was that I would descend into such a door as this, and it troubled me greatly to recognize certain outcrops and shapes in the rock from my dream.

  At that moment, as I stared in horror at that great gap, the mighty voice of the Home Call sounded across the Night Land. It is not sounded save when danger is so near and so terrible that to give the monsters, half-humans and unseen Forces of the Night knowledge that a child of man crept forth was held to be of no account.

  The black mist which hung above me parted, and I saw, coming from the north, the Slowly Turning Wheel. Only the rim projected from the dark clouds around it, and the reddish light of the northern volcanoes splashed against it, making it visible to me. The hub of that huge wheel was still hidden in the cloud, and so I did not die when I looked up.

  I looked down and noticed that I was standing very near the opening of the dark gap. My helmet was many yards from me, and the poisonous pomander which held my death in it was out of my grasp. I doubted I could sprint across the sandy floor of the crater, and reach the helmet, before the Slowly Turning Wheel descended the slope of the crater. To slay myself with my weapon-rod would be difficult, since the spirits that dwell in such weapons are protective of the lives to which they are attuned.

  Instead I ran, even as my dream foretold, into the doorway in the rock wall. Here was a great highway, sloping downward into the Earth. It was utterly black, and I was sorely afraid, but the Slowly Turning Wheel was coming into view above the rim of the crater, and it is one of the Greater Powers which no human spirit can withstand.

  Perhaps it was many hours, perhaps a week while I descended that highway. I did not notice when the way became tangled before me with other openings, some of the paths straight, some curving. By the time I turned, it was too late: I came to a fork, and did not know which was my road.

  Much time passed while I crawled blind through the underground city; and I was filled with dread when I scented a sickening odor, or felt my gauntlets or greaves become entangled with some sticky slime trails which were traced across the floors and walls and ceilings there.

  More than once, I felt the air move past my face, as some great bulk in the dark moved past with wondrous silence. Sometimes, straining my ears, I would perhaps catch a hint of many tiny soft, sticky noises, as if a monstrous slug-thing, larger than a mansion, were sliding past me in the gloom.

  My fingers touched both the corpses of many abhumans and larger creatures rotting there, as well as what I guessed were tools, and the wreckages of the machines once used to give warmth and air to these dwellings. There were metal circles which were perhaps the rims of vents or sewer lines here and there, and often I felt knobs or chains or toothed cogwheels scattered across the floors, some of them flat, others buckled with age.

  How deep and wide that dead and buried city is, I cannot guess; but I wonder if the Silent Ones avoid this country out of respect or terror for the great and stinking creatures that moved so quietly past me in the utter darkness.

  I passed back and forth across certain roads and buried chambers so often that I have memorized them, even now, and know the shapes of the rock and metal beneath my fingers, though I have never seen them.

  I slowly ran short of rations.

  I resisted the temptation to light my weapon and look around me, for whenever the temptation came upon me, I knew not whether there was a great creature clinging to the wall or ceiling nearby, whose transparent skin might react to the light, and sense me there.

  To resist that temptation, which weighed upon me every minute of the uncounted hours I was there, I often thought of my brother, and how brave he was; I told myself that he would live again, and I would save him. These thoughts sustained me.

  Only once did a voice speak out of the darkness. “ . . . through tears . . . noise of eternity in my ears, we parted . . . She whom I love.”

  What these words mean, I know not, nor who or what spoke them in the darkness. I was convinced that it was not a living human who spoke, not something from this continuum of time and space, and so I did not even utter the Master Word in challenge. I clutched my knees and made no noise at all. Perhaps I dreamed.

  Eventually I found the entrance again. You will understand if I say I felt no joy in finding it, since I thought I was seeing another dream. I had suffered many dreams in the buried city of finding the exit and walking out again. I walked like a sleepwalker, with stiff and awkward steps up the sunken highway to the gap in the rock: here was the crater I had left. There was my helmet, undisturbed.

  The horrible Night Lands, a dark country lit only by fitful light from broken places in the earth, and subterranean fires, seemed bright to me, and the fair shining of the Last Redoubt, was paradise itself, the sunlight of the elder world.

  Of all the peoples in the Last Redoubt, I am the only one who has ever seen it truly. It is fair beyond words.

  75.

  You are wondering why I do not mention a great roar of aether-noise when the millions saw me climb up from the buried city to the air again. It is because none came.

  Several times over the next few hours, I would pause and look back at the shining peak of the Last Redoubt. More than once, I am sure, I must have been visible to the Monstruwacans, had anyone turned a spy glass in my direction.

  No doubt they thought I had died beneath the shadow of the Slowly Turning Wheel. It had been weeks since I was seen, more than a month. They thought me dead.

  76.

  You are wondering how I knew that it was a month I spent in that underground place, where I had no dial, no means of counting the time. I knew it was exactly a month.

  How did I know? You are too young to ask that question, child. When you are old enough to wed, your wife will explain it.

  77.

  Beyond the Place stretches the gray ribbon of the Road Where The Silent Ones Walk. On the far side of that Road, nearer than the point where the Hot Stream passes under it, was the spot where my brother lay.

  Many times I had measured the distance in the spyglass between his motionless body and the small hill on which the House of Silence rests, and many times confirmed that the terrible and silent structure was far enough away that a rescue was f
easible. Now, seeing it with my eyes, the somber House with its small, unwinking, unwavering lights in its gaping windows from which no sound has ever come forth, not in uncounted millions of years, now, I saw that it was far too close to my brother. I was many miles away from the House, and yet there seemed to be some strange clarity in the atmosphere between it, and me, so that the details of the place were sharp and visible to the eye.

  The House proper has smaller outbuildings to the left and right, brooding structures as still and silent as itself. There are monoliths and standing stones rising solemnly from the barren ground before its dark windows. Not far from the ever-open doors are two metal posts upright in the black ground, and atop these posts are two lanterns caging each one a pale point of light that illuminates nothing, a light that neither moves nor flutters, but is still.

  I was afraid to cross the Road Where the Silent Ones Walk, for it is wide, elevated a small ways from the soil, and the House of Silence commands an unobstructed view. Sleeping and waking twice more, I walked and crawled the many miles to the North, where the Hot Stream cuts beneath the Road. The bridge which spans the stream is made of the same substance as the road, whether metal or stone or some artificial substance, I did not approach the Road closely enough to see. I captured a large bubble of air in my cloak to give me buoyancy, and slid into the steaming, bitter waters, and drifted with the current beneath the bridge. There were organisms like long white worms clinging to the underside of the Road substance, and long strings or tendrils hung from their open mouths. These mouth-tendrils lit up with soft cool light as I passed beneath the worm-things, but the creatures did me no hurt. As far as I know, these beings exist in nowhere in all the world but that one spot, in the shadow of that strange bridge.