Searchers After Horror

by S. T. Joshi

  “—Hundun . . . Primordial chaos, in some translations . . . buried in the stars . . . worn-out worlds breaking apart, worlds remade from the shards…not ours any more…”

  There was something familiar about the connection noise.

  “Are you driving?” Jen sucked in breath as her ankle throbbed. “Where are you?”

  After a long moment, their connection seemed to clear.

  “Just got into town. Left Estes as soon as I realized . . . what I should have from the beginning. When I might have stopped her, if I’d been listening . . . Are you in your apartment, Ms. Maxwell? Is it still—”

  Even from her desk chair, she could see the image. Couldn’t stop seeing it. That solid knot of dark, just under the surface— “Yes.”

  “Get out. Tear it up if you can, but get out.”

  She stood up cautiously, good foot first, testing the ankle. White pain stabbed through.

  “Can’t.”

  Gerard swore indistinctly. “I’m nearly there. Stay away from—”

  “Are your prints doing this, too?”

  “Not since I burned them.”

  Someone else’s horn blared, followed by a screech of tires. He hung up abruptly. Still clutching her phone, Jen felt a cold wave of disbelief as she stared at Vernal Ascension. That spectral knot was still there, curled at the heart of the largest egg, but it hadn’t changed since she’d fallen. There were no new changes at all. No cracks in that other world which was not her world.

  Insomnia, she told herself firmly. Plus caffeine, plus academic desperation, plus this damned ankle she’d probably broken in a fit of stupidity. Maybe Gerard could drive her to a clinic when he got here.

  Swiveling away from that strange patched landscape at last, she turned to her desk and the window beyond it. The street below was poorly lit, weeknight quiet, too iffy for pedestrians at this hour. There were only a few parked cars. Part of a moon.

  Her world after all.

  Gerard’s old pickup showed up minutes later, nearly clipping a traffic sign on the last corner. It slid into a parking space across from her building, sputtering to a stop as the driver’s door flew open and a coatless Gerard scrambled out. He stared up at her window. Then, without pausing to lock his vehicle, he started across the street at a run.

  The massive van came out of nowhere, one headlight out and not even trying to stop. Somewhere beneath her screaming, Jen felt rather than heard the impact as Gerard’s body flew. An answering crack of midnight sounded behind her, but it was only when the fire flowed up her arms—the gnaw of flesh transforming to reptilian scales—that her trance broke and she turned to face Leonie’s final creation.

  And beheld its occupant ascending at last, the world of its remaking streaming through.

  A darkness more brilliant than light.

  Et in Arcadia Ego

  Brian Stableford

  Great Pan was dead, and history was in gestation— which is to say that the documents that were ultimately to provide the raw material of history were in production, but that their collation into a nascent narrative was yet to begin. The two events were not unconnected, although the connection was not of a kind that history could recognize. Indeed, they were, in essence, the same event.

  While history was still in gestation, however, and chronology had not yet settled into a mathematical pattern, dead Pan’s reign of confusion had not yet reached its ultimate terminus.

  It was almost noon when the poet found the dryad lying unconscious at the foot of her tree. He had seen nymphs in the flesh before, but only fleetingly, and almost always after dark, when his improvisations on the lyre achieved a fortunate combination. Flesh was something such folk only put on rarely, for mysterious purposes of an erotic nature. He had never heard mention of a nymph appearing in broad daylight, even when in dire distress.

  The dryad was small and delicate, dark-skinned and dark-haired, but her skin was smooth, with none of the roughness of bark, and her body hair, except for the pubic mass, was very fine indeed. Her toenails and fingernails were neat, seemingly filed down. The poet put his fingers to her neck, feeling for a pulse; she did not flinch away from his touch, but a slight sound escaped her lips. She was alive.

  Someone had hammered an iron spike into the dryad’s tree. There was no reason why anyone would do such a thing, save for the purpose of killing the tree’s resident spirit. How the would-be killer had known that the tree was enspirited was a mystery—perhaps it was a random act of hopeful cruelty—but the motive for the action was not. The spirit folk were being systematically hunted down and exterminated; their existence was held to be incompatible with the quest of civilization—or, at least, with the agriculture that civilization required as its mainstay. The extirpation was a matter of shame, however; it was not something people talked about, let alone recorded.

  The poet, whose allegiance to the cause of civilization was as yet ambivalent, immediately put his bag and his lyre on the ground to one side and set about trying to withdraw the spike. He did not know whether that would save the dryad’s life, but he felt obliged to try. He soon found that he could not hope to extract it without loosening it first, and that he could only do that by moving it from side to side—movements that brought little cries of agony from the stricken nymph.

  The poet was so intent on his work that he never saw the faun creeping up on him, and was astonished, just as the spike finally came free, to find a hairy arm suddenly wrapped around his neck, attempting to strangle him. He tried to strike backwards with the spike—a blow that would surely have broken the faun’s hold had it made contact with the creature’s flesh, however fleetingly—but the faun had two arms and was ready for the ploy. His other hand gripped the poet’s wrist and held it fast, twisting it to make the poet drop the weapon.

  The faun was strong—considerably stronger than the poet, although he was shorter by a hand’s width—and had had the advantage of being able to plan his attack in advance. The poet felt faint almost immediately, as the clenching arm prevented blood from reaching his brain, and he knew that he was in dire danger. He tried to throw the faun, using a wrestling move, and might have succeeded if the other had not been so powerful, but the maneuver failed.

  Then, just as the poet had concluded he was doomed, someone grabbed the faun and dragged him off his victim, shouting for him to stop—not in Greek, of course, but in the coarse language of the Pelasgoi, which the poet had learned to speak in childhood, from the household slaves.

  The poet had to overcome his dizziness and take several deep breaths before he was able to stand up straight again and look at his assailant and his savior. He had seen fauns in the gloom, just as he had seen nymphs, since learning to play his lyre, but he had never come into brutal contact with one before, and all those he had glimpsed had been true fauns— the young of their species—like the one who had attacked him.

  The creature that had saved him was of the same kind, but very different in his individuality. The faun that had attacked the poet was only goat-like from the waist down, save for the shagginess of his head and his small horns, but the one that had saved him seemed at least four-fifths goat, and perhaps more than that, being human only in his upright stance and the bizarre configuration of his remarkable ugly face, which harbored human eyes and a human mouth within its masses of hair. The creature was leaning on a staff, in a manner that suggested that he might have had difficulty maintaining an upright stance on his oddly articulated and cloven-hoofed legs without that crutch, but the way he had thrown the faun aside suggested that he had strong arms as well as an authoritarian voice.

  The “older” members of the satyr race, the poet knew— because he was, after all, a poet—were the sileni, and the oldest of all were the papposileni, whose antiquity was such that only a pleonastic name could represent them. The poet did not quite understand how the aging process worked in creatures that were supposedly immortal, but he was
in no doubt at all that he was looking at a papposilenos, perhaps the oldest of the old.

  Looking into that strange hybrid face, he felt slightly dizzy, as if he were somehow looking into another world, or another time. He could not meet the creature’s stare and looked away, up the mountain slope at the distant cloud-shrouded peak. His gaze was immediately drawn back to the unconscious dryad, though. He had not felt lust when he first saw her, even though she was naked and by no means ugly, but the presence of the two satyrs seemed to have triggered a reaction in his own body that he had to fight to suppress.

  “Imbecile,” said the papposilenos to the faun, harshly. “He was trying to help her, not hurt her.”

  “But he was hurting her,” the faun pointed out, not inaccurately. “Anyway, he’s human. He’s a city-dweller.”

  The papposilenos knelt down beside the dryad and touched her gently.

  “Will she live?” the poet asked, in the language of the Pelasgoi. If the papposilenos was surprised to hear him speak in that fashion, his bizarre face gave no indication of it.

  “Probably not,” the papposilenos said. “She’ll have a better death, though, if we can get her to the cave.”

  The faun reacted more angrily to that than he had to being deprived of his kill—and his expression was perfectly capable of blazing with anger. “He’s a Greek,” he repeated, “for all that he understands the true tongue!”

  “Yes, he is,” the papposilenos agreed—but his eyes were now fixed on the lyre that the poet had set down before trying to draw the fatal spike out of the tree. “Where did you get that, child?” he asked, his voice no longer quite as hoarse.

  “I bought it in the marketplace in Athens,” the poet said, refusing to take offense at being addressed as “child,” in view of the fact that the satyr must be older than he could imagine.

  “The old woman who sold it to me told me that it was the lyre once played by Orpheus himself, with which he charmed the shades of the dead when he visited the realm of Hades—but market traders are unconscionable liars.”

  The papposilenos looked up at him, in a fashion that the poet interpreted to mean that he did not understand.

  “The art of commerce is haggling,” the poet attempting to explain. “It is more highly developed in Athens than anywhere else, because Athens is the only city in Greece, probably in the world, to obtain its food by trade rather than solely from its own surrounding fields. Its forges and its kilns produce goods made of vulgar metal and earthenware in vast quantities, whose sale brings precious metals, which are used to buy wheat with money. That process sustains a much larger population that any city reliant on its own produce, and the excess provides the scope for poetry and philosophy as well as . . .”

  He did not finish, thinking it impolitic to mention the apparatus of war and genocide.

  “Athens, then, is a city based on lies,” the papposilenos observed mildly, obviously having understood more than the poet had imagined. The creature spoke distractedly, seemingly still wondering what to do about the injured dryad.

  “And money,” the poet reminded him. “If the science of calculation, which money has greatly encouraged, assists deception in trade, it also gives rise to accuracy in measurement; it is the source of a better honesty as well as the fuel of lies. That is why Athens is the guiding light of civilization. Where Athens leads, all cities will eventually follow, transforming the world. The future of humankind will rest upon the glory of Greece.”

  “This is not Greece,” the faun opined sullenly. “This is Arcadia. You have no right here.” The faun was keeping his distance from the dryad, as if afraid that his own touch might do her more harm than good, whereas that of the ancient papposilenos was safe.

  “It was Arcadia,” the poet stated, bluntly, “when the only humans here were the Pelasgoi—but it is Greece now. No cities have been built in this mountainous wilderness yet, but what was Arcadia is Greece nevertheless. Cities are the seeds of empire. Greece is the shape of things to come.”

  “Why are you here, child?” the papposilenos asked him mildly. “Your fellows come with packs of dogs, bows and arrows, spears and iron spikes. Having no war to fight between themselves, for the moment, they hunt, continuing the work of our extermination—but you have no weapons, no dogs, and no companions. My young friend would have killed you, had I not intervened. He is an imbecile—but what are you?”

  “He would not have killed me had I seen him coming,” the poet retorted, “and had I been able to reach my lyre.”

  “You really do think yourself the equal of Orpheus, then— able to charm the beasts and the spirit folk . . . and the shades of the dead?” The papposilenos had risen to his feet as he spoke and had taken a step closer to the poet. Although he had to look up to meet the human’s eyes, he seemed somehow very massive and intimidating. Despite his caprine appearance, though, the aged satyr did not give off any discernible odor.

  The poet did not step back; he held his ground. The experience was so unprecedented that it did not seem entirely real, and in dreams bravery sometimes comes easily. “His equal, no,” the poet said, “but I’m learning—and how can I learn, unless I try my skill? But I am here because the news has spread through the cities that Pan is dead, and I wanted to know how that can be, since Pan is a god.”

  “And how do you hope to find out?” the papposilenos demanded, with a hint of mockery.

  “By means of the lyre, of course. I know that it’s capable of charming spirit folk . . . I have not yet had occasion to try it on the shades of the dead. Its magic seems to me to be increasing the closer I come to the heart of Ar—what was once Arcadia. I have not discovered all its secrets yet, but . . . here, I think, I stand a better chance than anywhere else. I have found you, after all, without even having to touch its strings—and you might be as old as time itself, perhaps older now than Pan, if the god really is dead.”

  “Kill him,” advised the faun. “Even if he’s no more than a fool, he’ll bring the others after him.”

  As if what he said were an omen, the distant baying of dogs became audible—a hunting-pack perhaps forty or fifty strong, doubtless guided by a company of a dozen bloodthirsty humans. The dryad stirred in her coma, whimpering again; she was not yet immune to fear.

  “Be still,” the papposilenos told the faun, seemingly unworried by the proximity of the dogs. “You do not understand what is happening here.” Then, to the poet, he said:

  “You will have to carry the dryad; I cannot, nor can the kid. If you wish to save her, you must bring her to the cave—but I warn you that, if you go in, you will likely never come out again.”

  Again, the faun seemed furious. “This is not right,” he said.

  The papposilenos turned to look his fellow satyr full in the face, and although the poet could not read his expression, it must have said something like: “Who are you to say what is right and what is not?”

  The faun continued to strike a mutinous attitude, but obviously had no alternative but to comply with the older creature’s instructions.

  The creature with the staff looked back at the poet, who immediately picked up the injured dryad.

  “Bring his bag,” the papposilenos commanded the faun. “Give the lyre to me.”

  “Do you play?” the poet dared to ask the aged satyr, as the faun obeyed.

  “You speak the true tongue fluently,” the papposilenos observed, as he moved off, at a surprisingly rapid pace, heading up the slope toward the mountain peaks.

  “I’m a poet,” the poet said, as he followed, having no difficulty with the dryad’s slight weight, “among other things. We have not yet educated all our Pelasgoi slaves in our own language. I never thought that I would have the chance to communicate with folk of your kind, but I was always intrigued by the Pelasgoi, and their tales . . . tales of Arcadia, and the god Pan. We have adopted him, you know, although he does not really fit our pantheon. Hephaestos and A
res as the gods of the future.”

  “And Aphrodite?”

  The poet was momentarily surprised, as much by hearing the name of a Greek goddess on the lips of such a creature as by the fact that the question had been asked.

  “Aphrodite too, alas,” the poet agreed. “Had you an equivalent— if your friend there is not the equivalent in question— he or she would doubtless represent a purer lust, unrefined by social niceties.” At least, that was what he tried to say. Fluent as his knowledge of the old tongue was, it had its limitations.

  “Purity,” the papposilenos observed, “is itself a social . . . nicety.” The way he echoed the poet’s word suggested that there was, indeed, an inherent inaccuracy therein.

  I had not suspected that satyrs could play at philosophy, the poet thought. This opportunity is even greater than I thought. I must not waste it.

  “The Pelasgoi who taught me their tongue,” the poet said, “claimed that Pan is their only God—but I have overheard them, in the darkness, appealing to another. Io Pan! they cry, when they bemoan their fate and ask the god to strike their enemies with sacred panic—but they also cry: Iä Shub-Niggurath! When I asked who Shub-Niggurath was, however, they would only say: the goat with a thousand young.”

  The faun, who was walking alongside the poet, listening to every word he said, seemed incensed once again by that remark—or, perhaps, by his suspicion that the papposilenos might explain—but all that the ancient satyr said was: “Great Pan is dead.” His tone communicated no impression of mourning.

  “Gods cannot die,” the poet replied, insistently. “The Pelasgoi might well think he is dead, given that they have lost their lands and are disappearing themselves by death or assimilation, as are all his subjects . . . but we have adopted him. We have not lodged him in Olympus, with our other gods, and will leave him free to haunt the land that was once Arcadia, and other wilderness, but we shall keep him, and praise him, and fear him, and worship him—and thus, he cannot die.”