The Altar in the Hills and Other Weird Tales

by Brandon Barrows

  Again taking my assumptions as at least temporarily true, this would actually explain a good deal and I fear what we may have done.

  I must try to contact Layport via telegram again as soon as possible.

  January 22nd, 1887 -

  Still nothing from Layport. No letters, no return telegrams. I inquired at the Western Union office as to whether my telegrams had actually been delivered and the clerk assured me that they had been transmitted successfully and that his English counterpart would have alerted him had his office been unable to remit them to their recipient. I have no reason to doubt the man’s word, but the alternatives are unsettling. Is Layport ignoring me? Does he think me insane? I wonder, also: does he share my experiences of these last weeks?

  The phantasms have grown to at least equal those of my childhood, but I am powerless before their might. None of the coping tactics I developed all those years ago alleviates the experience in the slightest. I am now constantly followed by a swirl of dusky flame, and the onyx man follows me everywhere, at the edge of my vision, always just out of sight.

  I sleep but I do not rest, for that same fellow hounds me in my slumber with his interrogations and no longer gives me the courtesy of accepting my rebuffs or protestations of ignorance as to the situation. He has yet to become opening hostile, but badgers me with his questions unceasingly until I wake, sweating and exhausted and more uneasy than when I lay down the previous night. The visions, both diurnal and nocturnal, fray my nerves and make even the most common of tasks challenging.

  I must find a way to reach Layport. I am convinced that something was unleashed by our meddling and he has as much part in the release of whatever cosmic genie has been uncorked as do I. I know the machine I created could not do what that device did and I know his modifications are responsible – though whether Layport is consciously culpable or not, I could not say. Regardless, I would like to have his input so I may examine this dilemma from all angles.

  January 29th, 1887 -

  Made a desperate gamble and used the last of Layport’s funds to send a telegram to the address of his rooming house, but directed to “landlord or lady,” and inquiring after Layport. Received a response from a Mr. Edmund Rose indicating he had no such boarder nor had he ever.

  I am a patient man, but even I have limits to my tolerance for mysteries and oddities.

  Damn these visions. Damn Layport. Damn the ether, if it even exists.

  Damn me, as well, for not leaving well enough alone.

  February 11th, 1887 -

  I am through with self-pitying. My situation is dire, but I have known adversity before and I did not bow then nor will I now. Though I am exhausted and it becomes increasingly difficult to focus my attention to a task, I will fight through.

  Layport does not exist in this world, apparently, so I am at a loss as to with whom I have been communicating for nearly a year. Other than the missives I’ve received from him, I can find no evidence he exists or ever did. I cannot go to the authorities, who would simply lock me away, and my much-reduced position leaves me with few contacts or resources, none of which has been sufficient to the task of finding the ersatz English cipher.

  That Layport’s obsidian counterpart is real, however, I have no doubt. He has become my constant companion, whispering to me by day and chattering maddeningly throughout the night in my dreamscapes, his voice still smooth and cultured, but his words increasingly taunting. Last night he asked, “Why do you waste funds on the telegraph, Mr. Tesla, when I am ever within your reach?” then tittered evilly through those perfect teeth. I have long-ceased responding to him and his very occasional flashes of irritation at my impassiveness give me some small measure of satisfaction.

  I sleep very little now but I have used the additional time to examine and reexamine ad nauseum the details of the ray-emitter that began this nightmarish affair and I have come to the conclusion that I will have to repeat the physical experiment. I have gone so far as to disassemble the device to its smallest, most basic components and still I cannot find any cause for the results it produced. There is simply nothing about it that is out of the ordinary or unexpected. I am quite obviously missing something, but I cannot for the life of me determine would it could be.

  For the first time in my life, I am not able to create solely in my mind the results I need. My mental power has been so sorely diminished that I have even quit my position as a ditch-digger, though likely only narrowly before I would have been fired. If I can no longer scrape together the acuity necessary to move shovefuls of earth, how can I visualize the inner workings of reality itself?

  Now, I must rest as best as I am able. Merely putting word to paper exhausts me with the state I am in. Very soon I will have to take action and I will need every iota of strength I can muster.

  February 14th, 1887 -

  Whatever hand guides the workings of the universe has spun yet another unexpected thread into my life’s tapestry.

  I received this morning a visit from two Manhattan gentlemen – an attorney named Peck and one Alfred Brown, the director of Western Union of all things. They arrived quite unexpectedly at my rooms around ten a.m. and asked if they might treat me to breakfast. I did not feel up to an outing, particularly with strangers whose intentions I was unsure of, but I still retain enough of my wits to know not to turn down a free meal.

  During our meeting they played coy, at first, but I am in no fit state of mind to dance around any issue or play at the politics of business and asked politely that they state their intentions. Attorney Peck was taken aback, but Mr. Brown seemed amused and explained they would like to discuss my going into business with them. As much as I would love to return to my work, and secure once again facilities and financial stability, I had to respond by explaining that I have an on-going “personal project” that I must see concluded before embarking on any new pursuits. I added, however, that I would be more than happy to listen to their proposal afterwards. Before Peck could say a word, Mr. Brown declared that sounded very reasonable and we concluded our meal amicably.

  I hope I have not burned a bridge before even crossing it.

  March 4th, 1887 -

  The Black Man, or Ethan Layport or whatever he calls himself, knows what I intend. I suppose it is not surprising, since he has access to my mind other than a small corner that I believe I have successfully safeguarded using a variation on the techniques for my mental experiments. Suffice it to say that I have a plan and I dare not cement it in reality by writing it down should it not work. I do not wish for anyone to find this account and attempt to recreate what I will do tonight.

  The creature does not know all, else he would surely brandish the information as yet another mental weapon and taunt me with his knowledge, but he knows enough to increase his attempts at driving me mad. He dances before my vision and whispers poison in my mind even as I write this. His presence has become so pervasive that I almost cannot remember a time when he was not my constant companion. If I am successful, it will be strange to have peace once again. I wonder if I shall even miss him, just a bit.

  But I digress.

  As intimate as we have become, yet a portion of my mind remains solely my own and I will not allow myself to touch upon those fragile barriers for fear of unintentionally alerting my enemy. He will know my full course of action only when I set it into motion. It will not be much longer.

  I will not write again until I have resolved this matter. If, my unknown audience, this is the last entry in this journal then you will know that I have failed, though I suspect there will be other indicators, as well…

  March 5th, 1887 -

  It is the early evening, an hour or so still before sunset, as I write this. The past twenty-four hours have seen me engaged in a battle of mythic proportions that even I can scarcely believe, yet I know has happened from the scars my body bears. Or rather, it will when my wounds have healed.

  But I know that this is real, and that I was victorious, because of the blesse
d silence in my home. I am free from the wordless whispering, the ethereal, unwholesome fire that has plagued my vision and most glorious of all, I am free from “his” sight and attention. My mind and my life are once again my own.

  This is how it occurred:

  On the night of the fourth, around seven p.m., long after the workers at the Tesla Electric Light firm had gone home for the day to begin their weekend, I returned to the hill east of the facility and set up my equipment once again. I had to repeat my “experiment” – a word which I use loosely now that I know the results were never in any question – at the site of the original but I did not wish to endanger anyone innocent of involvement and so waited until I knew the area would be deserted. I was not alone, however; my tormenter had followed me, as was his habit, and grew excited to the point of hysteria, clapping his hands and gibbering in so delighted a fashion that were he a living, breathing man he’d have collapsed in paroxysm. From the gist of what little I could understand, he apparently believed that it was simple adherence to the scientific method that had lead me to repeat the process with which my troubles began. The unspoken undertone was that he thought he had succeeded in wheedling me into completing his own plan.

  Once the instrumentation was in readiness, I settled down and waited until nearly midnight to begin, in the meantime trying my utmost to ignore my arcane harrier and center myself as best I could. This was due not only to recognition of the esoteric power in the so-called “Witching Hour,” but the very-late hour would ensure no witnesses to the event. Once the device was activated, the sputtering rapidly smoothed into a hum which, shortly after, transformed somehow into a low pulsing that sent matching trembles both into the earth and down my spine. Interestingly, the moment the system was active the Black Man and his unearthly flames vanished from my vision. Encouraged by this, despite the tingling fear growing in the base of my skull, I allowed the machine to continue, ignoring the instinct to switch it off and cut short the infernal throb that was working its way into my very being.

  Before my eyes, the device began to produce the same indescribable, save to say it was unnatural, light that I had seen months before. I stared, fascinated, as the edges of everything around me and, indeed, reality itself, began to take on a blurriness caused inexplicably by the recondite mechanics of my modified machine. And as the eerie light tore away into the night, ripping the sky with its passage, this time I did not look away. In spite of the growing numbness in my brain and soul, born of both fear and exhaustion, that threatened to consume me, I was determined to see this thing to its conclusion. Unexpectedly, I thought of my conversation with Misters Peck and Brown, to whom I had alluded to a “personal project,” and chuckled slightly before regaining my concentration.

  As I watched, the field of strange light expanded slowly but surely, throbbing like some grotesquely-huge vein, until it was large enough that it could have engulfed me had I been in its path. Scrutinizing the effect with as much detachment as I could muster, I noticed that when I peered through the weird luminescence, rather than at it, I was privy to a far different view than I should have been. Seen through the perverse light, the familiar world became an alien vista not unlike what I saw on my trip into the recent visions that haunted me, save that I knew now with certainty that I was seeing reality – no dream or hallucination had ever stopped cold the blood in my veins as did this.

  It was a world of strange shapes, formed from precise angles, that was somehow counterpart to the world we know, for I vaguely recognized landmarks. Beneath a heavy blanket of stars in an unknown configuration, an analogue to the town lay. Rather than being peopled with ordinary citizens, however, its occupants were amorphous, blasphemous things that flopped and pranced and danced and capered to an unheard tune around the base of a gigantic, black throne the size of a large building and located where the town’s square was in our own sane world. Upon this sat the most disturbing denizen of that mad landscape – a being of gargantuan size composed of a gray, pulsating and gelatinous mass which shook and quivered in time with whatever music the dancers cavorted to and which was covered in polypous appendages that nearly masked its most hideous feature: an eyeless and seemingly vestigial face with a drooping, drooling mouth. Despite its utterly alien nature, that hideous physiognomy held an unmistakable semblance to humanity’s.

  I was so enthralled with and disturbed by the images seen through this ghastly radiance that was somehow able to bridge cosmic gulfs that I had not noticed the light-field itself was expanding very rapidly now. I startled with the realization just as a strong wind kicked up and threatened my balance, carrying on it the faint strains of beating drums and whining, tinny-sounding pipes. Looking down to make sure of my footing as I retreated several steps, I then shifted my gaze back up to find that the Black Man, absent these past moments, leered sightlessly and obscenely at me from out of the abstruse and oddly-colored window my device was projecting into the sky. I gasped in surprise, which elicited a toothy grin from the creature – one which seemed to stretch the dimensions of that obsidian face outwards, widening to accommodate the showing of far more teeth than should rightfully have fit inside that jet skull.

  Still smiling depravedly, the thing reached towards me from out of the sickly luminescence, beckoning with a finger, as a mother might silently call a naughty child. “Oh, Mr. Tesla,” he said, his voice still unaccountably pleasant. “You had me worried for a time, but I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me in the end.”

  Ignoring the unsettledness of my mind and the discomfort of my body as the thrumming continued to rattle my bones and the wind whipped my hair and clothes about, I set my jaw and replied, “So, creature, you think you have me figured out.”

  It nodded, its grin remaining hideously static while the rest of the head moved. “Oh, certainly, my good man. You are a scientist! And while your distaste for hands-on experimentation is well-known, you could never just walk away from an exercise in progress, could you? After all, an experiment performed only once is worthless.”

  It was my turn to nod. “You are correct, sir; at least in that regard.”

  A low chuckling spewed from between coal-colored lips. “And in what regard am I incorrect, Mr. Tesla?”

  Demon or man or something else altogether, the being was enjoying itself and I hoped that, feeling secure in its victory, it was letting down its guard. I did my best to mimic its cavalier demeanor. “Before I answer that, may I ask some questions of my own?”

  The soft laughter resumed, but faded nearly instantly. “Curious to the end, eh? Of course you may. I would expect no less of a man of your great intellect.”

  Bowing slightly at the compliment, despite its presumed insincerity, I continued. “You are too kind.” I moved a step closer and gestured past the Black Man towards the exotic landscape behind him. “That world – is it related to the ones I visited as a child?”

  “Very astute,” its head bobbed as it spoke. “Related, but not the same, no. There are more planes of existence than even you could imagine, vast though your mind may be. Rest assured, though, that the worlds you visited are as a real as the ones you see now.”

  “And did you send those youthful visions to me?” Rarely does one have a chance to ask directly the questions of empyrean importance that have plagued his entire life; even in those circumstances, I would not pass it by. As I interrogated the thing, a hint of suspicion entered my voice, but if it noticed, no sign was made.

  To the contrary, the creature seemed immensely amused by the question, and its grin grew somehow even wider as a fresh gush of laughter roared from its sooty throat. “You give me more credit than I am due, sir! Far more! No, those were all your own. Your brain is abnormal, to say the least, and you possess far greater abilities than any others of your species.”

  During our discourse the portal, as I came to think of it, was still growing, though its pace seemed to be holding steady, thankfully. I chanced one more query. “Thank you. I believe you are being honest with me, an
d I do appreciate that. If I may ask,” I hesitated, as if unsure I wanted to form the question. “If I may ask… who are you, exactly?”

  I expected mocking laughter or more sinister smiles. Instead, the figure leaned in close and practically whispered, the words all but lost in the gusts roaring around us. “Oh, no one but old Nyarlathotep.” Here he gestured towards the monstrous being draped vulgarly across its gigantic seat. “Beholden to that great, drooling imbecile who goes by the name of Azathoth.”

  My eyes darted away from the face before me to sweep once again across the being even more dreadful than its servant.

  “But you, Mr. Tesla,” Nyarlathotep began again, “You can call me Ethan.” And though it had no eyes nor any discernible features save that terrible grin, composed of those perfect teeth, I swear the being that I had once mistaken for a friend and kindred soul winked at me.

  I don’t know what another man might have done in my place, but in the face of that awful creature and the revelations I experienced, I suddenly felt saner than I had in many weeks. This being was not the cause of all my troubles, but it had preyed upon me in a time of weakness and exploited the core of my personality – my endless curiosity – for its own foul ends. I take full credit, however, and as with other mistakes, I intended to correct the error. I had to keep the thing talking to distract it from my purpose but, my curiosity sated at last, I also needed to move quickly while there was still something I could do. Even now, I did not know if my plan would work and so once again, I was forced to experiment.

  A moment passed in which neither of us spoke; my gaze was locked on a point just over the creature’s shoulder, somewhere in the world which it sought to unleash upon our own. Nyarlathotep, or Ethan Layport, or whatever it chose to be called, broke the silence with the oddly-human gesture of clearing its “throat,” breaking my concentration as well, before speaking.