“Let’s take a picture,” Maggie said. Whether through familiarity or something else, the dead earth and ancient cairn did nothing to unsettle her. Not as it had Amy and Carol.
“A picture?” Amy said. “How are we going to do that?”
“Carol, you’ve got your phone?”
“Well yeah, but it doesn’t work out here.”
Maggie rolled her eyes. “I don’t want to make a call. I want to use the camera.”
“You got a selfie stick hidden on you somewhere I can’t see?”
“We’ll sit on that big rock, loser.”
“There’s nowhere to put it.” Amy said. Carol and Maggie looked around, but Amy was right; there was nowhere that made sense. The slab was too low, and the tops of the rock pylons would have been too high, even if they could reach them.
“A piece broke off. If we put it back, we could set the phone on there.”
The words hadn’t left her mouth before Carol regretted it, but she could not fathom why.
“Do you think we can lift it?” said Amy, eyeing the square of chiseled granite.
“Only one way to find out.” Maggie marched over to where Carol stood and nodded to the rock. She squatted down on her haunches, grabbing the dowel with one hand. Then she looked at Carol with expectant eyes. “You gonna help?”
Carol bent over and slid her hands under the stone. She nodded at Maggie and tried to remember to lift with her legs. With two of them and Amy supervising, the stone was surprisingly light. They maneuvered it over to the slab and tilted it so the dowel slid into the hole. The stone came to rest with an unexpectedly pleasing thump.
“See, nothing to it.”
Carol rubbed the back of the stone with the tips of her fingers. There was something there. An indentation, a carving of sorts. The sun was two hours past its meridian. Even through five thousand years of erosion and detritus, the symbol seemed almost to shimmer in the afternoon sunlight. It was a perfect circle, marred only by a single point at its bottom. In the center were three spheres fused together, like the nucleus of an atom in a textbook.
“Hey, spaz,” Maggie said, and Carol realized that she and Amy were staring at her. “Set up the camera and let’s go. I’m ready to eat!”
Carol placed the phone carefully on top of the ancient stone. She set it for ten seconds and then ran to join her friends. They all smiled and the phone flashed—pointlessly—and the deed was done.
Maggie jogged over and grabbed up the phone. “Perfect!” she declared. Amy seemed equally pleased. Only Carol felt uneasy. Something about the image didn’t sit well with her.
A sudden breeze blew the dust in swirling patterns. They gathered up their things and began their descent.
* * *
That night was early and uneventful. The women were tired from the walk, and more drinking and smoking did not interest them. Amy made dinner—Amy always cooked—and after spaghetti and meatballs, they all went to bed. Carol’s dreams were fevered, filled with dark shadows and creeping things she could not quite see. When she woke, Maggie was downstairs, sitting on the back porch, smoking a cigarette.
“I thought you quit,” Carol said. Maggie waved her off.
“I don’t make it a habit,” she said. “I had some crazy-ass dreams last night. Needed to take the edge off.”
“Amy didn’t make breakfast?”
“Still in her room.”
That wasn’t like Amy, Carol thought. She was always the early-to-rise type. Carol went back inside and climbed the stairs. Amy’s room was at the top of the riser. The door was closed. Carol knocked. There was no answer.
“Amy, you in there?”
Still, nothing. Carol pushed open the door. Amy’s bed was empty.
“Hey, Maggie,” she called out, jogging down the steps. Maggie was standing in the kitchen, drinking a glass of orange juice.
“Yeah?”
“Amy’s not in her room.”
Maggie shrugged her shoulders. “Keys are gone. Maybe she went out.”
Amy could see the Land Rover from the front window. “Her car’s still here.”
“Then maybe she went for a walk, or a run, or whatever. I don’t know,” Maggie said. “Why do you care so much?”
“It’s not like her. She doesn’t just wander off.”
“Carol,” Maggie said, the edge in her voice betraying her thoughts, “just relax. This is the safest place in the world. What’s the worst that could have happened?”
After another hour, Maggie started to worry, too. They sat in the kitchen, drinking cups of coffee, one eye on the door and another on the clock.
“I’m going to kill her when she gets back,” Maggie mumbled.
“I think we have to do something. Something’s not right.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“We’ve got to call somebody, maybe. The cops or whatever.”
“There’s no landline here, and I don’t get reception. We’re getting away from it, remember?”
“Then we’ve got to go get somebody.”
“Amy took the keys.”
“Then we walk—”
“Dammit, Carol! It’s 9 miles to the nearest house.”
Carol slammed her fist so hard against the counter the coffee cups leapt into the air. “We can’t just sit here!”
Maggie held up a hand. “Look, look, let’s give it a little more time before we freak out, OK? Then, if we don’t hear anything, we’ll walk.”
So they waited. Amy never came back. Carol had bitten her fingernails down to nubs. She tried to rationalize it, tried to tell herself that it was all going to work out, but none of the scenarios she created that ended with Amy walking through the front door made much sense. Carol was pacing across the room, the feeling that they should be doing something so overwhelming she could barely stand it. Maggie sat at the kitchen bar, a coffee cup clutched in one hand, looking as if she was utterly exhausted.
“What if she went for a swim, got a cramp and drowned or something?”
“The lake’s freezing,” Maggie said. “She wouldn’t have done that.”
“And she didn’t take the car. So either she went for a walk in the woods and something happened or somebody came and took her.”
“Nobody took her. And there’s nothing in the woods that could hurt her.”
“Well something happened. I can’t wait any longer. I’m going.”
Maggie sighed. Carol couldn’t take it.
“Why are you acting like this?” she shrieked. “What’s wrong with you?” But Carol knew the answer. Maggie was scared, maybe more than she ever had been before. She wasn’t used to being so out of control.
“You’re overreacting.”
Carol looked like she might explode, and Maggie saw it.
“Fuck it. Let’s go.”
A flash of light and a boom of thunder. The rain began to pour.
Carol cursed under her breath. She drew back the curtain on the front window just in time to see a bolt of lightning crash into the lake. The sound of thunder followed on top of it, and Carol wondered how such a vicious storm could break upon them so suddenly.
“Oh God,” she murmured.
“Well, I guess we’re not going anywhere now,” Maggie said. Carol heard the relief in her voice.
The hours passed, and yet still the storm raged. The thunder shook the cabin, and when the power finally gave out, the lightning was all that lit it. After a while Carol stopped wondering how a storm could last so long, how it could seem to sit over one place in its fury for hours on end. She thought of the hillside, and the stone, and she knew.
By the time night fell hard on the lake, Maggie was drunk. The two of them sat on the floor, their backs against the breakfast bar. It somehow seemed safer that way.
“My grandfather built this place,” Maggie said, dangling the bottle of beer between her knees. “His ancestors had owned the land for forever. Bought i
t for nothing. But nobody would build out here. Not for generations. The Indian legends, you know?” She took a drink. “My granddaddy, he used to say that there were things in the hills that were older than they should be. That this was a place out of time. ‘The trees walk,’ he’d say. I never really understood what that meant.”
Two words left unspoken, but Carol knew what she was thinking.
Until now.
“It’s going to be fine, Mags,” Carol said. She hadn’t called her that since college. Maggie shook her head.
“Granddaddy said that he built this place to change things. To bring order to chaos. ‘The wild is theirs,’ he would say. And he thought he could push it back. With a little cabin and running water and electric lights. He died thinking he had. But he was wrong.” She had started to cry. “I’m scared, Carol.”
Carol reached over and hugged her tight, but there was nothing to say. She was scared, too.
Carol wasn’t sure when she fell asleep. In her dreams, she was running through the woods. Stumbling really, her feet slipping in the muck. The rain had stopped, and on the wind, she could hear voices.
She was running to the hillside. She had no choice. She had to go. She was a passenger in her own body. She fell to the ground, crawled on her hands and knees, forced herself back to her feet, and then stumbled across the stone circle. The hilltop ahead glowed preternaturally. Dark figures waited. By the time she made it to the top, they were no longer mere silhouettes.
Amy and Maggie were standing on either side of the stone slab, which Carol now understood was an altar. They were both nude. Carol had seen them that way before, but years prior, before age and self-abuse had taken their toll. And yet, Carol knew that these were not her friends. In body, perhaps, but not in mind. She could see that in their eyes.
Maggie gestured to the slab, bidding Carol to take her place upon it.
“Come, my child. Prepare the way.”
In one blinding instant, Carol saw the world pass away, saw it blaze in an unnatural flame, as creatures of a shape and size she could not comprehend moved upon it.
Carol awoke. The storm had ceased. The cabin door was open. The air did not stir. Maggie was gone.
Her phone flashed stupidly on the living room table. She grabbed it up, praying for a signal. But there was none. Her battery was dying; that was all. The screen blinked on, still showing the last image it had displayed—the picture of the three of them on top of the hill. The day before it all fell apart.
Carol started to cry, and for one moment she forgot how uneasy the photo made her feel and longed for the moment it was taken. Then she saw it, and her tears were replaced by terror. It was the shadow that covered them, one that should not have been, not with their backs to the setting sun and nothing behind them to cast it. And yet there it was, moving against the light, falling upon them. It had taken Amy and Maggie already, taken them and done something to them that was worse than death. But Carol knew—it was her that it wanted, and it was coming for her soon.
So Carol waited. She waited, clutching a kitchen knife that could not save her. She waited as the voices of her friends called to her from the forest, from the hillside, from among ruins that were ruins no more.
She waited for the dawn, even as she knew it would never come.
THE RETURN OF THE WITCH QUEEN
Journal of Carter Weston
October 24, 1926
The legends regarding Nyarlathotep have always been of particular interest to me. It was his relationship to mankind that drew me, his antithesis to the Christ figure. For he was also a god who walked among men. But to destroy, not to save. Still, I found hope in that dependency, in that connection to humanity. If it were true that Nyarlathotep somehow needed men to accomplish whatever foul deeds he sought, then men could stand in the breech against him as well, even if we were always outnumbered by those who would do his bidding.
Only a few years ago, I personally witnessed them and their perversity. I was attending a conference on ancient Sumerian religious cults at Louisiana State University, in the city of Baton Rouge. The conference itself was a waste of time and money, but I did not leave empty handed. Not in the slightest. For there was another at the conference, one who did not belong. Yet he was the most important attendee of them all.
We met in the bar of the Bellemont hotel. He wore a seersucker suit and white patent-leather shoes. But it wasn’t his clothes that drew me to him. It was the fact he was reading my second book, Witch-cults of the Ancient World. Still, I probably would have let him be, not wanting to draw attention to myself or waste either of our time. But it was not up to me, for he sought me out.
“Dr. Weston,” he said, extending his hand. “I had hoped you’d turn up here. I am Inspector John Dubois, up from New Orleans for the conference. Two Sazeracs,” he said to the bartender. The man nodded and went to work. Dubois had an easy smile and an innate charm, the kind that made you trust him immediately. I had a sudden feeling that he was very good at extracting confessions. The bartender returned with two glasses of a frothy white liquid I did not recognize.
“To freedom.” He took a sip and then held a finger in the air. “I was hoping you would sign this,” he said, sliding the book in my direction. As I did, I asked him what would bring a New Orleans inspector of the police to such a conference.
“Interesting you should ask, Professor, for that reason sits before me.” Dubois must have seen a hesitancy flash in my eyes, because he put a hand on my arm and laughed. “Oh, it’s nothing you’ve done, Professor. Nothing at all. In fact, it’s something I wanted to do for you.” It was then he began to relay to me the story of many of the strange things he had seen on the job in Orleans Parish. It seemed that one of the cults I had written about in my book—ancient, yes, but certainly not dead—had found its way to the Crescent City.
“Fifteen years or so ago, when I was fresh on the force, we broke up one of their meetings out in the swamps, some thirty miles from the city. Middle of nowhere, kind of place that honest people don’t go if they can help it. Arrested a bunch of them, not that we could make the charges stick, even if we did believe that they were involved in some pretty nasty stuff. They left behind an artifact though, one I’m sure you are familiar with. The man in charge of my unit, Inspector Legrasse, spent the rest of his life trying to figure out just what he had.”
I was indeed familiar with the artifact. Professor George Angell of Brown University was a dear friend of mine, and he had related to me the very same story that Dubois was now telling. Of how the inspector had discovered an eldritch and untraceable idol—a grotesque, ancient stone statuette—and had sought scholarly advice on the object and the cult that possessed it, much as Dubois was now seeking from me.
“I was under the impression, Inspector, that you had succeeded in driving the cultists out of the city.”
Dubois shook his head and scoffed. “Were it so, Professor. New Orleans is not the kind of place that one can purge of such things. Oh, they’ve gone underground all right, but they are still there. Waiting. That’s why I became so interested in your particular area of expertise,” he said, gesturing to my book. “Obsessed, my wife says. But when you’ve seen the things I’ve seen, you come to believe that men, with the right motivation, are capable of just about anything. And as much as I’d like to believe it weren’t so, my eyes don’t lie to me.”
“So they are active again, you say?”
“They are. It took us a while to get a figure on it. They hide in plain sight, cover their tracks with voodoo and such. The voodoo is harmless enough. Ancestor worship, protective potions, that sort of thing. Mostly hocus-pocus and cheap tricks. But there’s one voodooeen who was different, one who had real power.”
“Laveau.”
He nodded once, throwing back the rest of his drink and ordering another with a nod at the bartender.
“Been dead thirty years at least, but they say she still walks the streets of the Old
Quarter, still peddles her wares and her witchcraft. Still preaches her black masses. Sounds crazy, I know. But probably not to you, and certainly not to me.”
“And you think there’s more to this Laveau woman than voodoo?”
Dubois leaned back against the bar. “Tell me, Professor. What do you know of the Ashmodai?” A grin flashed across his face as a shudder roiled through me. “That’s what I thought.”
The Ashmodai were, perhaps, the world’s first great religion. The fires of their worship had burned through Mesopotamia, down into Africa, and out into the Far East. Their adherents slaughtered men, women, and children by the thousands in Gaul and across the channel in ancient Britain, locking them in towering wooden figures formed in the shape of a man, before burning them to the ground. It is said that the empires of antiquity arose from the maddened cries of savaged peoples, inspired by desperate souls that begged for anyone to save them from the hordes of the Ashmodai. And while the Egyptians and Greeks and Babylonians struck heavy blows against the old faith, it wasn’t until the Roman Empire brought the sword and the cross to every known corner of the world that the flame of Asmodeus was extinguished.
And yet, even now, whispers of their continued workings still float across the winds of time, and who can say that they ever truly disappeared?
“Surely,” I said, “you don’t believe that the Ashmodai have come to New Orleans?”
“You think they are dead, then? Truly dead?”
“Dead or not, there’s been not one recorded instance of their presence for 1,500 years.”
“But there have, haven’t there? The nameless cults that exist throughout the world? Maybe not so nameless after all.”
It was true that there were those who claimed that the ancient religions had not vanished but simply gone underground, disguising themselves in the garb of more modern faiths. I had seen evidence of such subterfuge, from the Esoteric Order of Dagon, which had spread from New England’s own Innsmouth to port cities around the world, to the Circle of the Crescent Moon, which had debased mosques throughout Indonesia.
The Fiddle is the Devils Instrument Page 7