by Неизвестный
Dawes Prentice took his cousin’s hands in his own and kissed them, then kissed her on her tear-wet cheek. Then, nodding soberly, he said, “Your reticule seems very heavy. May I see what you have brought?” She hesitated. “In a moment, cousin. But first, Dawes, I thought you were dead. Hopelessly lost in those caves. I imagined you succumbing to thirst or starvation or—or something even worse. You were gone for years. You owe me, at the very least, some degree of clarity.”
“A fair request,” Dawes Prentice said. “I was not in the caves, of course. I was—elsewhere. I do not wish to be obscure, cousin, but the very notions of location and of time are not always as we think them to be. To you, I was gone for years. To me, it may have been mere days.” He hesitated, reached, and touched his cousin gently on her check. A tear had fallen from her eye and her kinsman brushed it away, brought it to his lips, and then continued.
“I do not mean merely the perception of time. There are realms where reality is not as it is in our world. The dimensions are turned. Time is distorted, stretched, or shrunken. There are corners and angles of space beyond which lurk creatures like the ones in the paintings on the walls which we both saw in Spain.”
He shook his head, as if shaking recollections the way a dog shakes water from its body.
“Where I was, dear cousin, is a realm of glorious unimaginable and terrors indescribable. I believe that you will visit that realm, dear Elsie. You are a woman of strength and of courage. You will need all of both that you can muster, but I believe you will endure. You will be transformed, dear Elsie, as I have been transformed.”
He shimmered. Waves of color passed over his image. His body became translucent. The shape of his face was altered to one of angelic effulgence or demonic menace. At length, he resumed his normal appearance.
Elizabeth Claire Prentice held her velvet bag toward him.
Behind her, President Flint smiled with approval.
Dawes placed his cousin’s reticule on a marble-topped test bench and carefully extracted from it a small mechanism—a thing seemingly of iron, topped by a disk which revolved slowly at the touch of his fingers.
Recovering herself, Elizabeth Claire Prentice reached into the reticule and drew out another object. It was a statue, not much taller than the distance from her wrist to the tip of her middle finger. It was carved with the greatest of skill. It was the image of a creature that resembled a human but was clearly not human, with its suggestion of bat-like wings and a face that was adorned with what might have been a complexly braided beard.
Elizabeth Claire Prentice placed the statue on the disk atop the machine.
Her cousin, Dawes Prentice, placed his fingers on the edges of the disk. They were long enough to circle it. He turned the disk briefly then withdrew his fingers, and the disk continued to revolve with slow deliberation.
The statue began to emit a dim glow of a color unlike any Elizabeth Claire Prentice had ever seen. A peculiar odor wafted from it. The glow simultaneously darkened and intensified until it seemed to be drawing light into itself, rather than emitting light. Each time it faced her in its slow revolutions, she felt a chill and a pulling sensation, as if the statue were drawing some element of her élan vital from her body. The room continued to darken as the statue drew radiance into itself.
Gazing at the barely visible statue in the darkening room, Elizabeth Claire Prentice, doctor of philosophy, tilted her head, concentrating her gaze upon the statue, uncertain for the moment as to whether it was actually moving.
She felt as if she could leave her body. As if her conscience, her soul, her élan vital, could take the hand of her Cousin Dawes. As if they could become something other than human. Something more than human? Or less? She could not tell, but in her innermost being she knew that she would learn.
Seattle, Washington, USA, 1889:
Old Time Entombed
W. H. Pugmire
Noah and I stood beside our bikes and looked over the area of destruction. That which would be known as the Great Seattle Fire of 1889 had damaged an area of around twenty-five blocks. One of the buildings destroyed had been the small, vacated meetinghouse that we had turned into our temporary temple, and my companion smiled slightly as he scanned the area where our tiny group had once convened. The summer weather had been balmy, with no wind for three days since the fire. The air was still tainted by the stench of smoke and charred wood, and the populace was praying for rain to come and clean the sky.
“Should we search that area, just to make certain that the small sarcophagus has been buried in the destruction?”
I shook my head and sucked the smell of destruction through my nostrils. “We did all that has been acquired, and the first portion of ritual has been accomplished. The city was unprepared to face this kind of devastation. Let’s walk a little before we mount our bikes. I like the looks of grief on the faces that we encounter. I like the waves of shock and agony that ripple in the atmosphere. How little they comprehend. This ruin is puny compared to the calamity to come.”
Late afternoon had melted into twilight, and we slowly climbed the hill toward home. I stopped to look out at Lake Union spread below us, at the few buildings with their red roofs and the distant neighborhoods across the water. The city was certainly growing. I stared at the moon as it rose above the water, and as always, when I look at that globe of dust, I felt the age of the universe and of the things that it contains. I thought of cosmic secrets and insanities, as our enchantress had whispered them to us. Then Noah and I boarded our bicycles and headed home through encroaching darkness, to my secluded cottage on the hill. The place had been a very private, very quiet home. And then its aura had completely altered with my acquaintance of the sorceress who now held dominion over our very lives.
I had been involved with ceremonial magick for many years, and during my time in Europe I had trafficked with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Yet I had never actually experienced supernatural manifestation until encountering Guan-Yin during a meeting with a group of political activists who had formed after the nauseating Chinese riots that had plagued Seattle some years before. Guan-Yin was one of the few Orientals who had stayed in Seattle in the aftermath of the violence, in which her father had been one of the few casualties. I sensed, on first meeting her, an intense connection, even though I had no idea that she too was involved in esoteric ceremony. I learned quickly that she had a distrust for most white men, but she warmed to Noah and me, perhaps because we are both Jewish and have had personal experience with ethnic bigotry.
Parking our bikes against the small tool shed at the side of the cottage, we advanced toward the front door, and I hesitated momentarily before opening the door and entering. I can’t quite explain the emotions that were stirred by our enchantress. We were beguiled and slightly fearful because of her quiet intensity and her profound knowledge of occult things. She was young but his wisdom was a deep as the ages, and it cast a peculiar light inside her jade eyes. You almost felt ashamed when she gazed at you, because she seemed to unclothe your soul and reveal elements of psyche that seemed perverse. She aroused unholy appetites and was expert at quenching them.
I felt Noah behind me and could hear his asthmatic breathing. Quietly, I pushed open the cottage door and sighed at the smells that wafted to us: the scent of incense and fragrant candle wax. Soft light illuminated the living room, which we had made our altar to the Old Ones. Within a circle of pure white sand, the young woman knelt in a fetal position so that her forehead touched the floor. She wore a black gown that completely covered her figure and into which diagrams had been sewn with dark-red silk. Her length of hair was worn up, wound upon her head and kept in place by shellacked ebony chopsticks. I allowed Noah into the room and closed the door, and then we removed our shoes and knelt before the woman in her circle of sand and listened to the almost indecipherable words she whispered to the wooden floor. Slowly, she lifted her head and torso. Her eyes had been shut, but now she opened them, and I felt a thrill of f
ear and wonder that human eyes should look so bestial and ravenous. It had surprised me, when I first met Guan-Yin, that her skin was so pale—whiter even than my own. When I once was bold enough to ask her about this, she replied that dark skin was for peasants, which I did not understand. I never asked again, although I wondered if she was a partaker of arsenic or mercury.
“What news, gentlemen?”
“The city is already planning a renewal. We saw no sign of the sarcophagus; it is buried beneath heaps of ash. The destruction was extensive. They say a million rats perished in the holocaust.”
With graceful motion, Guan-Yin stepped out of her circle of alchemical sand. “One rat yet remains. We will extinguish him tonight, with the aid of the dead-yet-dreaming. It slumbers now in a field of destruction, and from that debris it will rise to do our wreckage.”
“How do we awaken your ancestor?”
She smiled and shook her head. “The thing in its small stone coffin is not my kindred. It is a superior mage of the Miri Nigri, an antediluvian race. Its ashes have been combined with relics of sacrifice and slaughter, and with the sacred earth of an antique Roman temple. It delights in destruction and will have relished the chaos that surrounded it during the inferno that we kindled. We will stir it toward wakefulness now, with our ritual of blood and water. Noah, fetch the black window and join us out back.”
The beautiful woman took my hand and led me out of the cottage to the backyard and the ritual pool that I had constructed there. We could not detect many stars, but the moon beamed its chilly glow on us—light reflected on the pool’s water. When Noah joined us, he held a circular pane of black glass that was half the size of a carriage wheel. Our enchantress had informed us that this window, as she called it, had been part of a shrine in Malaysia that had been destroyed by her cult’s enemies. It was through this window, during certain times of ritual, that the cosmic deity worshiped by the cult would manifest its icon.
“Raise the portal above your head, Noah, so that it may drink the moon,” out enchantress spoke as she began to undress me. “I have spoken obliquely about the Outer One. His name is not something one carelessly speaks, for there is power in naming and potency in uttered language.” There was no wind, and the summer night was warm. I drank the perfume of her flesh, her hair, as she undressed me, and I sighed when finally she unfastened her robe and let it slide off her frame to the ground. She watched me silently, like some abiding beast contemplating its prey. When she lifted her eyes to the object that Noah raised to moonlight, I turned to him and studied the black circle of glass. Behind me, Guan-Yin whispered words in a language that sounded alien and insane. I saw two red stars awaken as glowing embers on the surface of the window, and then a semblance of a monstrous and malignant face began to form as our enchantress took my hand and let me into the pool. Following her, I studied the grotesque tattoo that covered the entire area of her back—an etched image that resembled the Hindu deity that wore an elephant head. Yet this image on Guan-Yin’s flesh was far more sinister and bizarre than anything I had seen, and I trembled at the sight of its ravenous mouth and wicked tusks. It was disturbing to stare at the tattooed image as the woman moved like a lithe panther into the shallow pool, for as she swayed her hips and shoulders, the image of the beast seemed almost to take on sentience. It was unnerving to behold. Again, I thought of my long acquaintance with occultists and their covens, and of how paltry their ceremonies seemed compared to the potency of this woman and her sorcery. I entered into the pool and stood beside her.
“Lift the window higher, Noah, so that moonbeams may pierce through it and touch our nudity.”
Turning again, I peered at the black circle of glass and its spots of red illumination, and I saw the purple hue that oozed from it onto me. Ah, that chilly light, as cool and smooth as the lips that kissed my back, my throat. I turned to face our enchantress and brought my hands to her breasts. She lifted one hand as a fist from which the index finger protruded, and I saw the purple light play upon the ample length of fingernail, into which small diamonds had been implanted. I watched as the woman touched that fingernail to her mouth and slit her lips, from which drops of blood began to drip into the pool. My hot phallus erected as our loins met, as her fingernail sliced my mouth. We kissed and sipped each other’s blood, and when she moved her body slightly away I heard the name she moaned orgasmically: “Chaugnar Faugn.”
Pushing away from me, Guan-Yin walked out of the pool, past Noah and into the cottage. Stepping out of the water, I picked up my discarded clothing and followed her into the house, where I could hear her moving about in one of the two small bedrooms. I dressed and then she emerged from the room in masculine attire, her hair and the top of her face covered by a hat. Spectacles with thick lenses hid the Asian features of her eyes.
“We’ll walk to town and complete our ritual,” she commanded. Nodding, I slipped on my shoes and escorted her outdoors. A black haze still hung over the area of destruction to which we had journeyed, and I was curious as to why the entire scene had taken on a vague violet hue, as if I were looking at it through some tainted piece of gauze. We finally drew near the blackened area of ash and charred wood, and my enchantress sniffed the tainted air.
I kicked at a portion of the tarnished ground and frowned. “How do we find the sarcophagus?”
“There is no need. It is here, the antique thing entombed. You must summon it with the new properties of your alchemic eyes, for the radiance beyond cosmic space and time that flowed to us through the black window now glistens on your orbs, and from you that prehistoric illumination will awaken old time entombed, and the old one will rise from this debris of destruction. Summon it, Wilfred, so that it may break the walls of its tomb and conjoin with your flesh.”
Unable to comprehend the full meaning of her words, I knew instinctively my task. Moving further into the fuliginous mass of ruin, I gazed over the ash and burnt rubble that poked out of the ash like blackened bones of some incinerated beast. I soon detected movement. A thing that lacked substantial form began to creep toward me like some monstrous caterpillar. I could not make out what it was, for its elastic shape refused to become one solid entity. Finally, the creeping thing stopped just at my feet, and I saw that it was an amorphous mass of odorous ash and shards of blackened bone. Mingled within its mass were tarnished relics of golden metal, into which strange sigils had been engraved. It quavered before me as a mortal mouth touched my ear.
“This old one reigned in prehistoric time and moved in ritualistic orgy beneath our moon. Murdered, it was folded into its tiny coffin of stone with vestiges of worship—those icons etched in gold. In slumber, forgotten by most who had once diabolically adored it, it rotted and became this heap of ash and bone. Now, by magick and new adoration, it awakens in answer to the power from outside that has been caught in your transfigured eyes. You must feed it with your crimson kiss, Wilfred.” Her lips bit into my ear, my throat. They found my mouth and chewed into the area where my lips had been split by her fingernail. Beside me, she knelt before the leprous thing, and I knelt next to her. Winding the slim fingers of one hand into my hair, she pushed my face to the mass of ruined matter onto which my mouth bled. My face sank into its mass. When Guan-Yin’s tightened fingers tugged my head upward, the mass rose with me, conjoined to my flesh, into which it sifted. I gagged and screamed in pain as the relics of gold embedded themselves into my altered flesh. But with the pain came a kind of strength such as I had never experienced, and the taste of blood in my mouth was invocating. I erected my limbs, stretched my hands to the moonlight, and danced in this place of destitution.
“Smell the air, Wilfred, and detect the one who murdered my sire.”
I peered through purple vision. “He is not far. Come, follow me.”
Guan-Yin genuflected before me, and then we moved together to another part of town and its thin alleyway. Sheathed in shadow, we watched the doorway of a sequestered tavern, through which various figures staggered. Finally, one f
ellow emerged and leaned drunkenly against the doorframe before shuffling through the alleyway, homeward bound. I planted myself in the man’s path and ignored his cursing as he bumped into me. He glared at me and then his eyes grew wide with terror. For just one moment, I saw my altered image on the surface of his eyes. He attempted to scream, but my tusks found his throat and robbed him of his voice. My ravenous mouth feasted on his gore.
Guan-Yin knelt before me and dipped her hands into the mess I had created and its pool of spreading blood, with which she washed her face. “This is simple murder,” she spoke in her low voice. “Satisfying as it is, true sacrifice is finer. It is through sacrifice alone that we rend the veil and split the cosmos so that our dread lord may filter through and feast until fulfilled. He waits for you, Wilfred, to locate his realm beyond the rim, beyond the stars, to the Great Outside. Look into the dark abyss, my monster, and find Chaugnar Faun so that he may filter again to our demesne and bring his icons with him. Summon him from beyond time and space so that we may glory in his magnificent destruction.”
I raised my transformed eyes. I tasted the crimson stain that slipped down my tusks into my famished mouth. I scanned the haunted sky.
England, Twenty-First Century and the Middle Ages:
Nine Drowned Churches
Harry Turtledove
Alistair always feels funny about coming back to the UK. He was born in Scotland and raised in England, but he hasn’t actually lived here for quite a while. Like a lot of British musicians who did well enough when being a British musician was the coolest thing in the world, he’s put down roots elsewhere.