by Неизвестный
“Near the end, when all had given over to despair, a select company sat apart in the darkness, gazing down from the defended height over the plain, knowing that they might live to see another sunrise soon, but it would be their last. There was Jehan, a knight; and Ulrich, a knight; and Godric, who was Ulrich’s squire; and a boy called Jon. No one knew who he was or where he’d come from. Even he didn’t know. All they knew was that if they did not die cleanly in the upcoming battle, very likely they’d be eaten alive, their guts hauled out of their bellies and roasted as they lay screaming—for every man had heard such stories flowing freely from maddened tongues—or worse yet made into eunuch catamite slaves to the demon Mahound, which had also been whispered from rank to rank. Maybe some of the company still prayed, but it brought little comfort, since they knew that the holy hermit who had spoken so forcefully of his visions from God and led them to this place had also conveniently managed to be elsewhere when the end came. The Greek emperor Alexius had also betrayed them. He was only too happy to send this unruly horde into Asia to die.
“Maybe somebody prayed. Maybe those four did. Maybe they abandoned all their hopes and all their ideals and prayed to Satan. And if they did, and if Satan had raised them up to this height and said, ‘I will give you kingdoms of this world if only you will fall down and worship me,’ I think many would have accepted his offer. When death is devouring you like that, you see things. There are revelations. When Jesus hung, dying on his cross, what great dark gateway opened before him?”
I forgot myself. I felt a combination of wrath, which was no doubt sinful, and righteousness, which maybe wasn’t but was still medically inadvisable, and I shook him hard and said, “When the Lord suffered on his cross for the redemption of us all, I am sure he saw the heavens open up, and he heard the voices of the angels.”
But the man on the bed only looked at me and said plaintively, “Are you sure?” Then he turned away, and sighed, “Shit…” and was still for a long time. I realized that, once more, I had erred. The one hope was to let all his blasphemies pour out of him like the foulness of a flux and then, when he was empty of them, try to direct his thoughts toward the hope of heaven. I prayed to God for the wisdom and strength to do this.
Meanwhile, I would have to listen to it all, to his despair talking, and try to forgive everything I heard.
Just then, I thought there was something at the window, like the flapping of a large bird, and then there was a scratching, almost as if something had gone skittering down the wall outside. I got up and went to the window and looked out. I saw only the desert night. I closed the shutter.
When I sat down by the bed again, the man’s eyes were opened, and he seemed entirely lucid, as if a fever had passed from him. With one side of his mouth upturned slightly, almost a snicker, he said, “You’d like to hear the rest, wouldn’t you?”
“If you want to tell it, yes.”
“All right then, brother. Imagine that those four sat on the peak of that hill, their backs to the ruined fortress, the campfires of the enemy spread out before them, and then, out of the darkness, out of the air itself, came a voice that said, “Come, follow me.”
I caught my breath and said nothing. Was he devilishly trying to bait me?
He laughed softly, bitterly. “Don’t be so shocked, brother. I know it wasn’t the first time that line was ever used, but it’s still effective, don’t you think?”
I didn’t know what to think. I had the fancy that the man before me somehow wasn’t the same as he had been a moment before, as if he were possessed by many souls and now an entirely different one was speaking. I began to be afraid. I fortified myself with prayer.
He went on speaking.
“Now, imagine further that the air itself opens before you like a door, and flickering into sight is someone clad all in streaming black tatters, who is definitely not an angel sent from any heaven you’ve read about in your scriptures but a power nonetheless, an awesome potency who holds out his hands and says, ‘Come, follow me.’ He reaches out to those who are lost, who are despairing, who think themselves already damned, and they take his hands, all four of them do, clasping desperately, and somehow they are wafted away. But I am getting ahead of myself. First, consider that company. Jehan, the pious and heroic soul, who really did give up his wealth and lands to come and fight for Christ and free the holy places. I think his was the blackest despair of them all, since he knew that he would never do either of those things. Then there was Ulrich, the bastard son of a petty lord who barely managed to inherit the armor he wore and the sword he carried and knew that if he wanted anything more in the world he was going to have to seize it for himself, even this. Godric, his squire, was even more likely to cut your throat for a handful of coppers than was his master. Jon, the boy, cannot be accounted for—a holy idiot, like the hermit who had begun the whole farce. Maybe he too saw visions. Maybe he still believed everything he had been told. You will have to admit, anyway, that this was not a very likely lot for an apparition to single out, but who knows the ways of ghosts and presences that float in the air? It was to those four that the thing came, and it was those four who were borne up, walking in the air like drifting smoke. For a time, they soared over the plains, looking down on the campfires of the Turks. Then they were among the clouds, and later still on solid earth again, making their way across deserts and rocky plains, over mountains, through windswept and ragged and sometimes frozen landscapes like nothing any of them had ever seen before. Sometimes their mysterious guide was with them. Sometimes he walked right beside them and even broke bread with them, for somehow, like Elijah supplied by ravens in the wilderness, they were never without food. Sometimes he hovered in the air, in the darkness, unseen, but present all the same, filling their minds with terrible waking dreams in which they saw before them, across a realm of impenetrable darkness, a black tower that rose into the stars, and there was one light in the window there, high above the world, and somehow they knew that within that lofty chamber atop the tower above the world there sat one who was not a man but far greater, who wore a yellow, silken mask that moved strangely as he spoke—one who would answer all their questions and reveal to them all secrets and every purpose.
“It was the boy Jon who wept for Jerusalem, who tried to run away and turn back but could not, for the others, or perhaps even the dark companion, seized hold of him and would not let him go.
“It was Jehan, the true believer, who swore that he would learn all the secrets of this demon in the silken mask but not bow down to it or to anything of darkness, instead turning from there, armed with all the magic and power of that place, to conquer all of further Asia for Christ.
“To him, the dark one said only, ‘If this notion comforts you, dream it a little longer.’
“Ulrich and Godric were probably only looking for something to steal, concerned more than anything else with the fact that they were still alive, while their fellows with whom they had journeyed and suffered and prayed and fought for so long were being disemboweled and devoured or gelded and buggered by the Turks. Men like that live only for the instant. They let causes and purposes come as they will. They did not worry about the fate of their souls. Are they not perhaps the wiser?
“Don’t answer. You cannot answer. You were not there. You did not cross thousands of leagues to those places where the map says, ‘Here there be monsters,’ or shows the Paradise Terrestrial—beyond them, even, into unknowable darkness and distance. What perils did they face? What savage peoples did they encounter? How were they preserved against all odds, if not by an angel with a flaming sword? No, not an angel. A flaming sword, maybe. Four distinct Elijahs in the wilderness. The black ravens came to them and spoke to them in ancient tongues, which somehow, gradually in their dreams, they came to understand.
“In the end they came, yes, for unimaginable purpose, to that black tower they had seen in their dreams, which stands above the Plateau of Leng near to the world’s edge. Words are not adequate t
o describe what they experienced. Perhaps winged presences from out of the darkness, things in nothing resembling human shape, raised them up, piercing them obscenely with manifold misshapen limbs so that their fates were ultimately even worse than those of their abandoned comrades, who were merely savaged by the Turks. I say to you that in a swimming red vision of pain, each of them was indeed raised up like Christ nailed to his cross, and they screamed out to Christ or Satan or Mahound or to things that have no names that human tongues can speak. The four of them—Jehan, Ulrich, Godric, and Jon—saw the darkness open before them, and the light from that lone window dazzled their eyes, and all of them were deposited on a black stone floor, and the godlike thing upon the black throne made them pay obeisance to it. Jon indeed cried out to Jesus at this point, but no matter, no matter, ever again, for him or any of the others.
“And the thing behind the silken mask spoke to them—the mask itself moving strangely, the words forming in their minds like something rising out of the dark depths of dream—and it said to them, jokingly, ‘Welcome, friends, who have come of your own will to serve and to be made greater than you ever could be otherwise.’ Was it laughing? Is there even a word to encompass such a thing?
“All I can say is that at this point Jehan thought to reach for his sword, but found he could not move his limbs, for something like a huge crab or spider had pierced him obscenely and was inside him and wore him like a cloak. Ulrich wet himself. Godric, who was actually far more treacherous than his master, babbled some absurdity about making a deal. The boy Jon went mad, if he had not been mad already, although his sanity or lack of it had no particular relevance. Certainly he screamed the loudest, squealing like a stuck pig as the thing on the throne removed its silken mask and revealed itself fully, flowing down onto them like a centipede, like a serpent, like nothing anyone has ever seen outside of hell, as it touched them and wriggled its way inside all four of them at once, and all was made clear.
“Were they borne up again, or was it some kind of vision—a memory the thing brought to them? For an aeon, it seemed, they hung suspended in space, knowing only pain there in absolute darkness, until suddenly the lights of a million stars burst out of the darkness and dazzled them. They were borne—they and the winged presences that accompanied them—like specks of dust on some vast current, far beyond any heavenly spheres the philosophers had described, swallowed by a whirlpool of stars that spewed them out into that realm of chaos at the very center of the universe, where they heard the piping that cannot be described and saw the dancing shapes that the eye could not follow. They and even their unmasked master bowed down before that which is called—words fail me here, only gibberish syllables—Azathoth, the Supreme Discord, which is beyond all light and darkness, all gods and souls and angels and demons, all worlds. There, there, they bowed down and were newly baptized into an obscene brotherhood from which there could be no defections and no faltering.
“And when all this faded and they seemed to awaken from one dream into another, they went forth, renewed from that hideous Citadel of Leng on a new crusade, to sow darkness and terror into the world, to prepare for the ending of days, when your Christ and your Satan alike shall be as motes in the vast, devouring whirlpool of stars that leads to the throne of damnation beyond all possible hells.
“That is why I long for Christ, brother. Because I have passed beyond all hope of him.”
At that, the speaker ceased his tale and made a sound that was half like sobbing and half like laughter, and then a liquid rattling deep in the back of his throat made me think that death was upon him as he lay unconfessed and unredeemed. His whole body shook. He streamed with sweat and a black slime that oozed from his ears and nose and from his very pores. I took hold of his hands and folded them together and, weeping myself, pleaded with him to think of Jesus.
“Oh yes, I remember Jesus,” he said, “and still I yearn for him …”
“Good, good. Think on that.”
I held up my crucifix for him to kiss, but he swatted it away.
“The servitors of the Yellow Mask walk among us, brother. Not even your Christ can stop them.”
“No! You are suffering from a disease of the brain. God will forgive you that, if you cling to hope. It’s not your fault.”
Now he became calm again, and once more indeed it seemed as if an entirely different intelligence inhabited his ruined body, and now I was trying to outwit something—what? A demon? A madman?—for the salvation of this man’s soul, and I knew somehow that my enemy was vastly older and wiser than me. Nevertheless, I did not despair. I disputed with logic.
“Consider,” I said, “that your story is fantastical. Impossible. It cannot be true.”
“It is beyond anything you could understand as truth.”
“No, wait, wait. Think for a moment. When did all this supposedly happen? When did you come to the East? You mentioned the Greek emperor Alexius, who has been dead for fifty years. His grandson Manuel rules in Constantinople now. And your leader, the one who absconded—that was Peter the Hermit, was it not?”
“Yes,” said the other with a low sigh in which, I could tell, there was no forgiveness. “It was.”
“Can’t you see? It’s been too long. No one could still be alive after so many years—not even the boy Jon.”
“Jon is dead. There may be no deserters from our crusade, but still he did not serve us long. He proved too weak a vessel. He didn’t make it back.”
“Then which one are you?”
“Which?”
“Of that company. The four. Who had this adventure.”
And again he laughed. “Not the pious Jehan, I assure you, nor either of the two scoundrels. Which then? Which? Ah, a pretty problem. It has a pretty solution—”
Before I could respond, he sat up with tremendous vigor, swung himself around, his feet on the floor, and leaned over and seized hold of me around the throat with a grip like living iron. He could have broken me like a twig then or snapped my head off, but that was no his purpose—no, only to squeeze slowly until I could not cry out as his burning eyes gazed into mine and I was dazzled.
I barely managed to say, “Are you…Satan?”
How he laughed wildly, howling, and he shook me and said, “Brother Simpleton, have you understood nothing? Well allow me, then, to explain all things in a way that will be clear, even to you.”
The impossible happened before my eyes then. His face began to flow like melting wax, assuming a strange, elongated shape with protrusions and bulges where no human face has anything of the sort. He then flowed out of his ruined body, sloughing it off as a snake sheds its skin, and with his manifold and malformed poisonous limbs, he pierced me and entered in to me, sliding like a thousand knife blades beneath my flesh as if to cut me open and gut me and wear the shell of me like a cloak. The pain was beyond imagining and the smell intensely foul like excrement, blood, and decay.
Somehow I managed to scream. Somehow I managed to burst from the room, shouting that Satan was among us.
But it wasn’t Satan, and my shouting did no good. All around me, my brother monks and the hospitaler knights and such pilgrims as were among us lay as if sleeping or dead. I didn’t know which. I only know that as I staggered outside into the courtyard, the air was filled with presences I could barely make out in the darkness—vile, ancient things hovering like enormous bees, their rapidly vibrating wings thundering softly.
I fell to my knees then. I tried to pray to Christ and to his Holy Mother, but the Other within me, inside my own body, now spoke with my own lips, almost as if he were trying to comfort me, saying, “Do not be afraid. There is no point. You are beyond that now.”
I have learned a great, great deal, though I am abysmally ignorant. Everything and nothing has come unto my understanding now. I have learned that Those from Outside, one of which now wears my body like a cloak, are mightier than gods, but they have their limitations too. In certain turnings of the stars they are all-powerful, and in ot
hers they cannot live. And in these times, moments, hours, intervals of lucidity like awakening briefly from a nightmare that never truly ends, I am once again myself, able to conclude this tale, to write it down, to hide what I have written before that which I have become discovers what I have done and my very thoughts betray me.
Quickly, then.
When the human envelope wears out—when it dies, as ultimately it must, however the influence of the outside may prolong its existence—then that which wears it discards the shell and takes on another. Some trace of the former soul, the memory of the one who was before, remains. Such a preparer-of-the-way, walking unseen among men like the advance scout of an invading army, may have worn many bodies, and thus possesses the memories of a great number of dead men. My name is Legion, for we are many. There was no problem with the chronology of the story, you see, because the one who told it to me was none of the four adventurers who made their way to the dark plateau. Fifty years ago? A hundred? It does not matter, for he was the one who brought them there, and long before that, centuries before, one of his names had been Judas Iscariot. His fate was far more terrible than what has been written about him anywhere. For a thousand years and more, he yearned piteously for Christ because he knew what voice spoke out of the darkness when the sky over Golgotha opened up. He witnessed it all, and he understood, because that darkness touched him too.
Not that it matters. Not that anything matters. I yearn, but in vain. We are all swallowed up. All of us bow down before the throne of Azathoth in the end, not of Jehovah.