by John Shirley
Now he was the one to find this uncontrollably funny. Under such circumstances the perspective on humor, madness, sanity, righteous action, whatever, tends to dribble away like sand through your fingers when you’re trying to drink and there is nothing to drink. Speaking of which, we were both desperately thirsty from a hard day’s getting slaughtered, and our voices were no more than rasping croaks. I began to argue that unless we gave the impression that we were a pair of cackling demons up from the underworld, all this impromptu merriment just might attract the attention of Parthian patrols or looters, and maybe we’d best remove ourselves hither, or thither, or words to that effect; and Marcus Vibius agreed, and added, “We’re not deserters after all. If we run into a Roman unit, we join them and say we’re stragglers from Carrhae, which we are, and then we straggle on with them, and I guess we don’t get to be robbers in Arabia after all, but otherwise we just keep on straggling all the way to fucking Arabia …”
“Time to straggle,” I said.
“Follow me.”
Now there was a time in my life when I would have followed Marcus Vibius anywhere. I had followed him into the army when I was a poor boy shoved out of the family farm (to make room for heroic veterans, who had been promised farms!). He was a clever wastrel on the run from I didn’t know what, and the prospect of twenty years of legionary chow looked better to both of us than immediate starvation. I had followed him through marches, battles. I admit I looked up to him as a brother, a father even, the one steady anchor in my otherwise randomly drifting life. He always seemed the wiser, cleverer, stronger, more experienced one—or at least he talked a good line—and I, quite naturally followed, like when he’d grabbed me by the collar and hauled me out of the way as the Parthians, covered all over with metal scales like enormous lizards, rode down our formation. Vibius hauled me into a ditch while the tide of battle washed over us and smeared the landscape with bodies and broken weapons, stray limbs, shit, and Roman blood. Yes, he seemed to know what he was doing. He straggled. I followed. And so on through the night until we truly could not go on any longer, and he dropped to his knees, and remained kneeling on top of one of the numberless brown, barren hills, until he couldn’t anymore and tumbled down into a ravine.
I climbed down beside him and lay against him, my head on his chest, my tongue so parched I tried to lick the sweat off my own arm for relief before I passed out. And what dreams I dreamed that night! Great vistas of the black, yet burning world of the damned, over which I soared as if I were a bird, caught on an inexorable wind and blown helplessly before the very throne of King Hades himself. The wind howled and almost screamed, then died down to a whisper as the dark god leaned forward on his onyx throne and demanded of me my name, and how I came hence, and how I happened to have died, and what sort of presumptuous fool did I think I was if I didn’t know my name and was still claiming to be alive just because my friend Vibius talked a good line?
But then the wind carried me on further, out of the throne room and into a darkness filled with stars—stars like foam glowing on the beach at night, stars swirling and racing around me, the waves of them breaking around my legs, hot and cold at the same time, as I stood among them—and then the dark sky was filled with wings, not those of birds, but great, featherless, flapping things like ragged tent-cloth in a desert storm; and in the darkness, all around me, so close that I could feel it everywhere, against every part of my body as if I were forcing my way through dense, dry underbrush, the air itself was thick with hard, wriggling claws.
When I awoke, Vibius was awake and sitting beside me, and next to him was none other than everybody’s favorite officer, Centurion Macro.
“He can’t be real,” I said sitting up, poking Macro with my finger. He was solid enough, though dry and hollow, it seemed, like a husk; and the reason I had doubted his reality was that half of his skull had been sheared away, and one of his arms was missing, and where blood should have been pouring out of these grievous wounds, there was only a foul-smelling, tarry mass.
I poked him again, and his single remaining eye blinked.
“This is ridiculous,” I said, although the hilarity of the previous evening had definitely begun to fade. “He can’t … I mean, nobody could … I mean, just look at him! Poor Macro. He was a bastard, but I wouldn’t have wished this on him—”
“Shut up!” said Vibius. “This is serious. It is a sign from the infernal gods. Nobody comes back from the dead without the express permission of a god.”
“He is dead, then? Not just a bit banged up? I mean, you never know; some people have survived the most remarkable wounds; there was that guy we heard about in Gaul with the spear that went in one ear and out the other –”
Vibius slapped me on the side of the head, hard, and said, “You’re babbling. Shut the fuck up.”
My friend was in charge again. Yes, definitely. I would follow him anywhere.
To Centurion Macro, Vibius said, in a muted, respectful tone, “Sir, can you hear me?”
Macro turned his one eye toward Vibius. He opened his mouth. At first there was only a whispering, hissing sound, like the wind in my dream, and a foulness so thick you could almost see it. The air rippled.
“Sir,” said Vibius again. “What message do you bring from the land of the dead? What god has sent you back us?”
And the Centurion replied, quite plainly, “Nyarlathotep.”
Somehow, for once, both of us had the good sense to say nothing.
“Nyarlathotep,” the Centurion repeated.
We stared at one another, and at the Centurion, both of us amazed and stunned, and beginning to be very much afraid, which was itself frightening. I mean, we were soldiers, Roman soldiers, who are quite used to imminent death, destruction, mangled bodies, and gaping wounds. But this was turning theological. We were out of our depth. The only thing I could think of, inasmuch as I could think at all, was that this was some new, unknown god of darkness, first revealed to mankind through us two, which made us prophets or sages or something—not bad work; you can get used to the benefits, gold offerings, buxom priestesses, the whole bit—but somehow, somehow I really doubted any of that was coming our way, any more than our lives would ever be what we wanted again. We weren’t going to get to pillage Arabia, I didn’t think, no, not a bit.
“Can we straggle now?” I whimpered.
“Yeah. Straggle.”
Vibius hauled himself to his feet, then me. We climbed out of the ravine, looking this way and that for Parthians, but saw no one. Overhead, the sky still seemed to swirl with smoke and dust, and it was filled with cawing, black birds all streaming toward the battlefield to feast on our late comrades. You didn’t have to be an augur to know that was an unpromising omen.
I tried to formulate a prayer to someone. To Mars, god of warriors. Yeah, we were still warriors, weren’t we? To Mercury, god of thieves. We’d need him if we ever got to Arabia.
“To the unknown god, whose name is—”
“Just shut up and straggle,” Vibius said. Good advice.
You want to talk about omens? Portents? How about this? The ruined corpse of Centurion Macro followed us. We couldn’t get rid of him, as much as we had the strength to try. He, being dead, did not tire as we did. He, being entirely dead, was not half-dead with thirst. He, admittedly, stood by patiently later that afternoon when we finally came to a stream, and Vibius and I dropped down to frantically refresh ourselves.
Overhead, some of the black birds cawed and began to circle.
Not good.
Somehow we survived the day, Vibius and I who were alive, and the dead thing that followed us. That night, when we camped in another ravine between two more dry, jagged hills, I think it was Vibius who had the truly terrible dreams. I dreamed only of an abyss, and I had a sense that something terrible sat there in the darkness, waiting patiently, but it did not stir and it did not speak.
But it must have been Vibius who dreamed the great dreams that night, because when I awoke ju
st at dawn—and the sky was still mostly dark, just beginning to lighten in the east, yet with cawing black birds circling overhead—his dream was still going on. He lay on his back, his eyes wide open, staring at the sky. He was still asleep or at least not awake in the usual sense; I could tell that—and he called out in a loud voice in a language I did not know—all clicks and coughs and grunts, and it seemed as if he were conversing with something out there in the fading darkness, something he was calling down out of the sky. Something huge and winged; not the black birds, but something I thought I glimpsed myself. I must have still been dreaming too, then, for in one instant the sky was thick with bat-winged monstrosities with too many limbs, slightly resembling enormous wasps in their shape, or maybe winged crabs or lobsters—absurd as that sounds—part of the joke, the joke, the joke, remember? The one we were still laughing at.
Gradually I became aware that, all around us, the late Centurion Macro had been joined by more of his kind. A least two dozen corpses in varying degrees of mutilation stood or sat or crawled among the sand and stones on every side, rustling slowly, turning toward Vibius as he spoke in his dream or trance or whatever it was. There were even a couple of dead Parthians among them, although the enemy had taken but few casualties in the recent battle.
I crawled over to Marcus Vibius and shook him. “Wake up! This has to stop! Stop what you’re doing!”
Slowly, he did wake up, but it was as if his spirit was returning to his body after a very long journey. His voice was hollow and distant, and raspy, like the wind, and it seemed to be coming from some greater depth than merely within his body.
“Nyarlathotep,” he said. “I come at the bidding of my lord Nyarlathotep.”
And the dead men around us all cried out, or made such noises as they could, to echo the name of the god Nyarlathotep, for I did not doubt it was a god, some strange god of darkness unknown even to Pluto or Dis or Mors or any other god of the Romans or the Parthians—they’ve got a Lord of Darkness too, I forget his name, but it’s not Nyarlathotep, I am sure –
“You’re babbling, my friend,” Marcus Vibius said to me, in a voice that almost sounded like his old self again. “I can hear your thoughts. Even in your thoughts you are babbling.”
I looked around at the corpses, who were staring at us intently, but, I felt, waiting for some signal or command before springing into action.
“What the fuck is going on, Marcus?” I was almost weeping then. Yes, we were the fearless, manly, allegedly invincible legionaries of Rome, but at this moment—
“Oh, if you could see what I have seen already—”
“Yes?”
He began that mad laugh of his once more.
“Yes?” I demanded.
“You wouldn’t understand a damned thing!”
I shook him once more, and slapped his face to bring him to his senses.
But he only went on as if it were all a big joke.
“And if you saw what I am about to see, well, forget it.”
A wind seemed to whirl around him, like invisible wings beating. Sand and grit swirled up, into my face. The wind blew me away, tumbling over backward, as if a whirlwind were forming around Vibius, and then he rose up into the air. Something lifted him. I could almost see it. There was something wrong with the light. The air rippled. It was as if my eyes saw something but my brain could not make sense out of it. And for a moment, as the dawn broke and the sun rose, I could see clearly against the paling sky. I saw him dangling in their grasp, as he was carried off into the sky by two of the winged things with too many limbs and impossible shapes, which I have learned from subsequent adventures and dreams and revelations are called Mi-Go.
***
Now the only rational explanation for any of this, for this entire gibbering tirade, is that I, your humble narrator, am insane, that it is all an insane joke conceived in the heat and dust and the stink of the battlefield of Carrhae, when the Roman formation broke and the Parthians in their scale armor rode us down and Marcus Vibius didn’t pull me aside before some axe or mace split my skull like a melon, and as my brains went splattering hither and yon, little hurtling lumps of gore and gray matter, on their own initiative, began to ask the question What the fuck is going on? They invented this more-than-slightly incoherent story about walking corpses and unknown gods and Marcus Vibius being hauled off into the sky by Mi-Go—
But then I am not always one for rational explanations. But let me try. Please. Just listen.
As I got up that day and staggered about the landscape, straggling, straggling, I asked myself over and over What the fuck is going on? a phrase foreign to the elegant Latin of learned men—I mean, can you just imagine the famous Cicero writing a treatise called On What The Fuck is Going On? Maybe he should have. The phrase is familiar enough in the argot of rough and semi-literate soldiers. Maybe he should have joined us in the muck as we all asked: What the fuck is going on? A question worthy of the greatest minds of our age, or the most profound of long-winded philosophers who blather for a living in all the great cities of our world, even in Athens. I was in Athens once. Didn’t like it much. The food was greasy and terrible and so were the whores. And I didn’t know enough Greek to ask one of the philosophers who abounded there, What the fuck is going on? I could have, should have, might yet, because I have my theory as to What the fuck is going on? which says that I marched that whole day without food or water throughout the landscape, trying to find my way south to Arabia where the food and the whores and the loot might be better and there would be no philosophers asking What the fuck is going on? In my delirium and weakness—for I’d had a little water, but not eaten in … however long since our last feast on much-vaunted army chow before the battle … with the result that I entirely lost count of how many resurrected dead men were inexplicably following me and whispering the name of Nyarlathotep.
I got no answer to my quite reasonable question until Marcus Vibius returned.
Did I say he returned to me? No, I did not. But he did. I am not making this up, any more than I am insanely babbling my way in the vaguely general direction of the conclusion of a joke to which I don’t know the punch line.
It was dark again. Another night? Did I but dream the day? Had the sun ever risen? Was I really accompanied now by a virtual army of mangled corpses, with black birds swirling and cawing and swooping down to eat their faces and peck out their eyes, which did not even slow them in their progress?
Well, maybe. In the darkness, then, as the air vibrated with the nearness of great wings—not the birds, something far, far larger and stranger—and there was also, everywhere, a buzzing like the sound of a million bees—in this darkness, out of this darkness, the voice of my lifelong companion Vibius spoke to me, descending from the air, drawing ever nearer, until he was again sitting beside me on a shelf of stone, as we two looked down over the battlefield where the Parthians had pitched their tents to more conveniently loot the adjacent slain—for it seemed that our long meandering march had been more or less circular, and we’d come right back to where we’d started, only now we had an army of dead men at our backs and the unsuspecting Parthians below.
He put his hand on my arm, as if to calm and comfort me, but his touch was cold and dry, like a lizard’s or an insect’s. His voice was not his own. It was as if some other spoke through him. And his eyes were not his own. They were just hollows of blackness.
But still he spoke to me, and he said that I could not imagine or hope to describe what he had seen and felt until I gave myself over wholly to Nyarlathotep as he had in his dreams. He explained a great deal to me, yes, because, he said, I deserved an explanation and an answer to the very reasonable question of What the fuck is going on? He was proud of me. Here I had gathered his army for him, and waited for his return. He would make me his first tribune, he said, and together we would serve Nyarlathotep, who was, indeed, a dark god from beyond any realms known to mankind or human priests or augurs, a god for whom the gods of Earth and the underw
orld were as insects. And this god was but a messenger of even stranger gods, who sometimes, for their own inexplicable reasons, meddled in human history even as Nyarlathotep proposed that one good historical upset deserves another and wouldn’t the Parthian general Surena be surprised when we two led an army of invincible corpses and winged Mi-Go against his supposedly victorious men and conquered the whole world and ruled it in the name of Nyarlathotep and Nyarlathotep’s masters in an endless epoch of darkness and horror?
“Yeah, I bet he would be surprised,” said Vibius, and he laughed, and for just that moment his laugh was his own and there seemed something human left in him, and to prolong that moment just long enough I repeated a mixture of an old army joke and a mutual recollection, something about greasy whores in Athens, and again he laughed, and I knew that for that instant, whatever transformation he had undergone, he was still human enough to be mortal, and so in that instant I was able to slide my sword out of my scabbard and up under his ribs, into his heart, so that he died, weeping for the grandeur of his visions, his head in my lap, spitting out honest, red blood, not black slime, and in my very last moment of sanity I told myself that the Parthians at least were human, and it was better to let them have their victory now—Rome could always defeat them later. Better Parthians than let the darkness win, after which there would be no more victories.
***
So, the rational explanation is that I, your humble narrator, who probably had a name once, Somethingus Somethingus Something, am completely mad, and a despicable scoundrel who, having deserted the Roman army after the catastrophic defeat at Carrhae, murdered his dearest companion in the desert and very likely ate the corpse—for where is it? What proof is there of any of this? It is impossible to believe, of course, that the sun came up that day and I found myself sitting alone on that rock ledge, with my old friend dead in my lap, the Parthians spread out on the plain before me, and no sign of the late Centurion Macro or any of his fellow corpses anywhere, as if they had evaporated with the first rays of the wholesome sun, which, I am told, the Parthians quite sensibly worship as the principle of goodness, cleansing the universe of all evil contagion.