by Неизвестный
I understand now why they considered me insane. How could anyone believe what I had seen? Father Espinoza could not verify my story. Even if he had not been cooked and devoured, it appeared that he had actually converted to the faith of the Azothi. Perhaps he too had only been a misguided madman. I screamed and wailed and insisted that my brothers listen to me.
“You are all going to die!” I bellowed.
They locked me in my cell. Eventually, I ceased raving and fell asleep.
I dreamed of the ultimate chaos boiling at the heart of eternity and woke up screaming the name of Azathoth.
So it began. First the news came that savages had attacked the Mission San Pedro y San Pablo de Bicuñer. The chapel was burned to the ground, the surrounding field set aflame, and all the priests slaughtered. The women and children of the nearby pueblo were taken as captives. This came as no surprise to those who knew the ways of the warring tribes.
When Father Ramirez whispered to me of these terrible events, I knew that the Azothi would neither adopt nor ransom their captives. They would torture them, spill their blood and bones into the great pit in the name of Azathoth. Only blood and pain could open the Gates of Eternal Night. I had seen it in my vision.
Father Ramirez indulged me by listening patiently. Yet he would not untie my restraints, and he did not believe me. He prayed once more for my lost sanity, asked Christ to bestow me his infinite mercy. This only enraged me more, and I spouted blasphemies.
“We are next!” I told him. “They will come for us!”
Two days after the slaughter of the Mission San Pedro y San Pablo de Bicuñer, the Azothi descended upon our own mission. They came in the night, setting fires and slitting throats. The black coyotes of the desert came with them, tearing out the throats of men and lapping at their blood. I lay helpless in my cell, weeping while the slaughter proceeded outside the adobe walls. I smelled burning wood. Then burning flesh.
The cries of women and children drifted to my ears, and Father Ramirez came rushing into my cell. He locked the door after him but it splintered open. An Azothi rushed in with a flint-headed spear and impaled him through the belly. Ramirez fell across my bed and his blood stained my new robe.
I thought the Azothi spearman would kill me too, but instead the one-eyed hunchback entered my cell. He laughed upon seeing my helpless state, then raised his bloodstained knife and cut my bonds.
“Come,” he said through broken teeth. His companion grabbed my wrists and dragged me out of the cell into the courtyard. There, I was forced to my knees among a crowd of wailing women and children. The Azothi strolled about the burning mission grounds, gruesome warlords cherishing their victory.
They mutilated the bodies of my brother priests, hanging them from the walls with strands of their own entrails. Yet they refused to kill me, even when I begged for death. They tied rawhide thongs about my wrists, as if I were one of the women. They led me away from the burning mission, as if I were no more important than any of their captives. The crying of the women echoed the despair in my own soul. I knew what awaited us at the heart of this unholy wasteland.
Once again, I endured the hellish crossing of the dunes—this time with my wrists bound and in the company of thirty-six women and forty-eight children taken from the peaceful Quechan river valley. I would have prayed for death then, yet I no longer possessed the faith to do even that. I had seen the reality behind the myth of a Supreme Being, and it was not my god. It was the god of these monstrous freaks. They had stolen my faith, my sanity, and my mission. All I had left was my life, and they would take that too in good time.
The stars were ripe for the great bloodletting.
For three grueling days, the deformed ones led us through the waste, allowing us barely enough water to stay alive. The cries of hungry children filled the hours. After marching all day beneath the burning sun, we were allowed to rest when the sun went down. Every one of the captives, including myself, fell immediately to sleep. Yet often one of us would awaken from terrible nightmares, only to fall unconscious once again. I remember waking several times to the low chanting of the Azothi, who stood about us in a circle with their bulging eyes turned up to the stars. Even this cruel trek of deprivation and misery was part of the coming sacrifice. The greatest of their ceremonies had already begun.
On the fourth day, we reached their village, where the great pit yawned open to receive us. They fed us well then on dried strips of meat. I chose to continue my starvation, yet I did not have the heart to tell the ravenous women or their little ones the nature of the flesh upon which they fed. I kept the dreadful truth to myself and emptied my mind of what was to come.
The Azothi arranged their captives about the lip of the pit, forming a circle. They waited for sundown. When the first shadows of night crawled from the desert, they would begin the torture and slaughter of their victims, one by one until the great circle of blood was complete and all our bodies had been cast into the void of the pit.
I watched the sun sinking behind the dunes, glad that I would not live to see the shape of the world that was to come—a world where the children of Azathoth would reign supreme over seas of blood and empires of bleached bone. The women and children, their bellies stuffed full of unwholesome meat, fell to sleep about the pit, while the Azothi sharpened the stone blades of their knives. I saw the hunchback mark me with his evil eye. He would take my life himself, but not before he had squeezed enough pain and anguish from me to satisfy the great ritual.
As the last rays of sunlight died between the dunes and the first stars of evening awoke in the sky, the Azothi began their chanting. Certain other their number, the most hideous and blood-eager, stalked toward the circle of captives with naked knives displayed.
A black-feathered shaft appeared in the throat of the hunchback. A second arrow fell out of the twilight and caught him full in the breast. The knife fell from his gnarled fingers. A torrent of arrows fell now among the Azothi, raising cries of pain and alarm. The chanting was broken by howling war cries. Shadowy forms darted from behind the huts to pounce panther-like on the grotesque worshippers. Axes bit deep into malformed flesh, shattering brittle bones.
The sounds of battle aroused the women and children about the pit. A great band of painted Quechan braves descended upon the village. I heard the thunder of a Spanish musket, followed by several more. Bare-breasted warriors came running toward the pit, cutting through the Azothi with knife, spear, and hatchet. They offered no mercy to their deformed foes.
I watched with little excitement as the Quechan slaughtered the lost tribe. The moon rose full and red as blood above the horizon. Several Azothi corpses were tossed into the pit, and the Quechan began to free the captives of their bonds.
A plumed and painted warrior crept to my side and sliced the thongs that bound my wrists. Only when I looked into his pigment-smeared face did I recognize Walking Ghost. The naked stars glimmered in his black eyes.
“You are free, Father,” he said. I must have grunted or said nothing at all. He picked me up and tossed me over his broad shoulder. In this way, Walking Ghost carried me away from the black pit and out of the burning village, while his war brothers set fire to every last teepee.
We fled the heat of rising flames into the cool embrace of the desert night. The joyous cries of families reunited came to my ears, but beneath them I heard still the sonorous chanting of the Azothi. I feared that I would hear that chant forever after in the low sighing of the winds, in the babble of rushing waters, in the voices of men and women and children who had never seen beyond the Gates of Eternal Night. I recall very little of what followed. I must have slept for the entire journey out of the dunes. Yet when I awoke, I lay in the camp of Walking Ghost, who had returned with the rescued captives to the river valley. He sat next to me, along with several of his loyal braves. They had not yet removed the war paint from their bodies, and their faces looked strange and monstrous to me.
“Here, Father,” said Walking Ghost. “Dri
nk this.”
“No!” I knocked the bowl of river water from his hands as if it were poison. “No! Get away from me! Stay away!”
“Father!” Walking Ghost came after me as I shuffled away from his campfire. “I broke my vow of peace to save these people—to save you. What should I do now? Will the Christ forgive me?”
I had no answer for him. I ran from Walking Ghost as if he were the Devil himself. Perhaps my dead brother priests were right all along: I had been driven mad and would never be sane again. I ran into the land of the brush and cactus, where my only company was the mute serpents and quiet lizards. There, I found a shallow cave to shield me from the bite of the sun. I lay there for days, rising only to seek a stream for water and to break open a cactus with a piece flint. I pulled the spines out and ate the vegetable flesh. Never again would I suffer the touch of meat on my tongue. I have no idea what became of the green stone and its disturbing sigils.
Several years I have lived alone in this cave. My nightmares have all but faded, yet my memory remains. Sometimes, the peaceful Quechan bring me corn and beans to eat. They consider me a holy man, but I never give them blessings. I have come to understand that to them, simply being in my presence is blessing enough.
They cannot know that I am cursed.
Doomed to know the truth of the horror that lies at the center of Creation.
Now comes the time when I must leave my little cave. I will carry this testament to the nearest mission, where the truth has some small chance of being acknowledged and perhaps preserved. In this way, I hope for some small measure of redemption before I cast aside the burden of mortality.
I can only hope that my eternal spirit, set free of its confining flesh, does not plummet into that great void, where the ultimate chaos waits to devour all that exists.
I pray to the god whom I no longer serve that death is, after all, an escape.
Yet I fear that it is only a doorway, a passage to some new and more hideous realm.
Massachusetts, USA, Early Twentieth Century. Italy, Early Nineteenth Century:
Slowness
Don Webb
Dr. Alberto Balsamo was a short man with a silver beard and an easy smile. But his smile left his face when Walter, the department secretary, told him “that man” was waiting for him in his office. He had been avoiding the too-earnest physician from Massachusetts for weeks. One does not reach old age without learning that there are people too full of life, whose very rapidity makes them a danger to others. However, likewise one learns sometimes that you have to face the music. Dr. Balsamo took a deep breath and walked into his own office. The doctor was standing by the bookcase reading the titles.
“Are you a Dante scholar, Dr. West?”
“I am afraid I have little time for the fine arts,” said Dr. Herbert West.
“That is a pity. What is life without art? Art slows life down—turns the great fire of time into a slow burn.”
“But doesn’t everything in the twentieth century urge us to increase the speed at which that fire burns?”
“You are no doubt correct about that, Dr. West. I am afraid I am somewhat the enemy of all things modern. Give me my Dante and my cats and my old brandy, and I am a happy man.”
“But such great things are in the air! True, we saw the horror of the Great War, but Banting just synthesized insulin, Eddington verified general relativity late this May. The world is expanding a thousand fold!”
“The Germans are fighting the Ruhr Reds. Mexico’s streets run red with revolution. Jews and Arabs are killing each other in Jerusalem and what do we get? Over the Hill to the Poorhouse and Way Down East.”
“Well, Doctor Balsamo, we also got Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I regret to say I went and saw Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde four times when it showed in Arkham. I find I have a weakness for Dr. Jekyll.” The blond-haired doctor smiled.
“And also Dr. Caligari, my good doctor. The world has not been made better by mad physicians, I fear.”
“Well, I hope my visit will brief and my madness excusable. I think you can give me a good deal of help in a current piece of research. Perhaps I have something to offer you as well.”
“I can’t imagine what help I could be,” said Dr. Balsamo.
“Oh, I imagine you know. You have certainly been avoiding me.”
“Please forgive my manners. Would you like a brandy? Or should I have Walter bring us some coffee? No? Well, by all means take a seat.”
“Are you going to admit to avoiding me? I have motored in from Bolton three other times.”
“Of course I will admit it. I do avoid new people, new ideas, and shiny new things. Do you know the poet Lawrence Binyon?”
“As I have said, I have little time for the arts.”
“Binyon and I are working on a new translation of the Commedia. The other day he said to me, ‘Alberto, slowness is beauty!’”
“That is a literary point of view. I practice medicine. I want to save the lives of my patients as quickly as possible.”
“Then what can you possibly want of a professor of Renaissance poetry? Eh, Dr. West.’
“I am looking into Italian history, just past the Renaissance, and I think you may be the man to help me.”
“I am a rather middling historian, Dr. West. Perhaps Dr. Flowers is that man you seek.”
“What do you know about Luigi Galvani?”
“Oh, I see. You want my father, Dr. Vico Balsamo. He wrote a short book on Luigi Galvani. I am sad to say my father has passed on.”
“I suspect your father may have told you some interesting things.”
“Too interesting for his book? Perhaps my father thought many strange things, but he was a good academic and never published speculation.”
“Could you let me in on your father’s speculations? I think I can put some of Galvani’s ideas to better use in my laboratory than using them to titillate the reading public. Besides, perhaps I can offer you some of the benefits of my research.”
“I will tell you what I know, Dr. West. But you must promise not to tarnish my father’s name.”
“Excellent. Well, for starters is it true that Galvani explained his theories to Mary Shelly?”
“It wasn’t Galvani. It was his nephew, Giovanni Aldini, who took Galvani’s experiment to the next level. Galvani was happy enough to touch a severed frog leg to Volta’s pile and demonstrate the twitch to other physicians and scholars. His nephew was the showman. At first he used the heads of newly slaughtered sheep. He would apply as much current as he could, and the bloody heads would stick their tongues out or snap their teeth. And Aldini didn’t like scientific lecture halls. He liked theater. He liked paying audiences and women who swooned. Of course sheep became commonplace. Many traveling ‘electricians’ were shocking sheep into movement. So, Aldini took the performance to a more grotesque state.”
“In 1803, he set up shop at Newgate Prison. A recently hanged murderer named George Foster was taken from the gallows and transported to the college of surgeons. Aldini applied the current and George’s purple face grimaced. He shook on the slab and even threw punches in the air as Aldini hit him with shock after shock. Some newspapers claimed later that Aldini had raised the dead. Of course, the college of surgeons distanced themselves from the affair. They reacted as though their reputation had been sullied.”
“That is always the way of the medical establishment. You can offer them anything, even life-in-death itself, and they moan like scared old women,” said Dr. West.
Balsamo paused and looked at the nervous young man sitting on the edge of the overstuffed chair. Balsamo’s guests usually sat back in the chair, sipped their coffee and tea, and carefully chose their words. He hesitated a moment and began telling the rest of the story in a more subdued tone, which caused West to sit even further at the end of the chair. Balsamo couldn’t help smiling, wondering if the young man would fall out of the chair altogether.
“What I am about to tell you
is not part of the official story. It is not in my father’s book, and I will ask that you do not attribute it to me. It is not the sort of story that compliments a Yale professorship. Aldini declared that he would indeed raise the dead—not merely make them twitch and clutch at things. Aldini began to look for darker sciences.”
“Alchemy?” asked Dr. West scornfully.
“There are many chemical procedures that were learned from the experiments of the alchemists. But Aldini sought something a bit more troublesome. Europe has always rumors of a cult of men that revivify the dead. It is said to be a profitable line of work. Imagine what crime-haunted Italy might be like if no one could take their secrets safely to the grave? Imagine what might be gained by the blackmailer. Or even simple items that the dead had left unattended to, like telling the living relatives about the secret store of gold behind the painting or the plate buried near the well. Dr. West, Aldini was interested in necromancy. He didn’t assume that such grave-robbing miracles were the result of demons. But what if the preparation of certain herbs were combined with the stimulation of the nerves that a sufficiently horrible incantation could do the trick? So he sought out a sorcerer. Such things were easy to do in those days. Sorcerers made the headlines, as it were.”
“They still do,” said Dr. West. “Madame Blavatsky was a darling of the idiot press, and I am sure that we have someone similar in our midst right now, if we choose to look for such charlatans.”
“The man that Aldini sought out was no charlatan. He was Count Alessandro di Cagliostro—a man who had obtained initiation into a secret Egyptian brotherhood, the Figli del Pharaoh Negro, which had methods of making mummies speak their age-old secrets to modern men. These fearsome fellows had chosen the count to act as a spy and agitator throughout Europe. These men had reasons for wanting to overthrow the French government, for example. I am sure that you have heard of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. But they had further plans for the count. He was going to play a key role in summoning some sort of demon from the darkness between the stars. In one sense, the count was to gain powers far beyond mortal ken, but on the other hand, he would be a slave to that power. Imagine if you held in your hands the means to destroy the world. Every moment of every day, all you could think of is, ‘Should I?’ ‘Shouldn’t I?’”