At last I felt able to act, and stretched myself vigorously to regain command of my muscles. Arising with a caution more impulsive than deliberate, I found and donned my hat, took my valise, and started downstairs with the flashlight’s aid. In my nervousness I kept the revolver clutched in my right hand, being able to take care of both valise and flashlight with my left. Why I exerted these precautions I do not really know, since I was even then on my way to awaken the only other occupant of the house.
As I half tiptoed down the creaking stairs to the lower hall I could hear the sleeper more plainly, and noticed that he must be in the room on my left—the living-room I had not entered. On my right was the gaping blackness of the study in which I had heard the voices. Pushing open the unlatched door of the living-room I traced a path with the flashlight toward the source of the snoring, and finally turned the beams on the sleeper’s face. But in the next second I hastily turned them away and commenced a cat-like retreat to the hall, my caution this time springing from reason as well as from instinct. For the sleeper on the couch was not Akeley at all, but my quondam guide Noyes.
Just what the real situation was, I could not guess; but common sense told me that the safest thing was to find out as much as possible before arousing anybody. Regaining the hall, I silently closed and latched the living-room door after me; thereby lessening the chances of awaking Noyes. I now cautiously entered the dark study, where I expected to find Akeley, whether asleep or awake, in the great corner chair which was evidently his favourite resting-place. As I advanced, the beams of my flashlight caught the great centre-table, revealing one of the hellish cylinders with sight and hearing machines attached, and with a speech-machine standing close by, ready to be connected at any moment. This, I reflected, must be the encased brain I had heard talking during the frightful conference; and for a second I had a perverse impulse to attach the speech-machine and see what it would say.
It must, I thought, be conscious of my presence even now; since the sight and hearing attachments could not fail to disclose the rays of my flashlight and the faint creaking of the floor beneath my feet. But in the end I did not dare meddle with the thing. I idly saw that it was the fresh, shiny cylinder with Akeley’s name on it, which I had noticed on the shelf earlier in the evening and which my host had told me not to bother. Looking back at that moment, I can only regret my timidity and wish that I had boldly caused the apparatus to speak. God knows what mysteries and horrible doubts and questions of identity it might have cleared up! But then, it may be merciful that I let it alone.
From the table I turned my flashlight to the corner where I thought Akeley was, but found to my perplexity that the great easy-chair was empty of any human occupant asleep or awake. From the seat to the floor there trailed voluminously the familiar old dressing-gown, and near it on the floor lay the yellow scarf and the huge foot-bandages I had thought so odd. As I hesitated, striving to conjecture where Akeley might be, and why he had so suddenly discarded his necessary sick-room garments, I observed that the queer odour and sense of vibration were no longer in the room. What had been their cause? Curiously it occurred to me that I had noticed them only in Akeley’s vicinity. They had been strongest where he sat, and wholly absent except in the room with him or just outside the doors of that room. I paused, letting the flashlight wander about the dark study and racking my brain for explanations of the turn affairs had taken.
Would to heaven I had quietly left the place before allowing that light to rest again on the vacant chair. As it turned out, I did not leave quietly; but with a muffled shriek which must have disturbed, though it did not quite awake, the sleeping sentinel across the hall. That shriek, and Noyes’s still-unbroken snore, are the last sounds I ever heard in that morbidity-choked farmhouse beneath the black-wooded crest of a haunted mountain—that focus of trans-cosmic horror amidst the lonely green hills and curse-muttering brooks of a spectral rustic land.
It is a wonder that I did not drop flashlight, valise, and revolver in my wild scramble, but somehow I failed to lose any of these. I actually managed to get out of that room and that house without making any further noise, to drag myself and my belongings safely into the old Ford in the shed, and to set that archaic vehicle in motion toward some unknown point of safety in the black, moonless night. The ride that followed was a piece of delirium out of Poe or Rimbaud or the drawings of Doré, but finally I reached Townshend. That is all. If my sanity is still unshaken, I am lucky. Sometimes I fear what the years will bring, especially since that new planet Pluto has been so curiously discovered.
As I have implied, I let my flashlight return to the vacant easy-chair after its circuit of the room; then noticing for the first time the presence of certain objects in the seat, made inconspicuous by the adjacent loose folds of the empty dressing-gown. These are the objects, three in number, which the investigators did not find when they came later on. As I said at the outset, there was nothing of actual visual horror about them. The trouble was in what they led one to infer. Even now I have my moments of half-doubt—moments in which I half accept the scepticism of those who attribute my whole experience to dream and nerves and delusion.
The three things were damnably clever constructions of their kind, and were furnished with ingenious metallic clamps to attach them to organic developments of which I dare not form any conjecture. I hope—devoutly hope—that they were the waxen products of a master artist, despite what my inmost fears tell me. Great God! That whisperer in darkness with its morbid odour and vibrations! Sorcerer, emissary, changeling, outsider…that hideous repressed buzzing…and all the time in that fresh, shiny cylinder on the shelf…poor devil…“prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill”…
For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance—or identity—were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.
THE EATER OF HOURS, by Darrell Schweitzer
Chronophagos, the Devourer of Time, the Eater of Hours. What man remembereth even the hour of his death if the Chronophagos hath devoured it?
—Nicephoros Attaliades,
The Testament of Nightmares
I
We rode in the dark and the cold through that forest, where no bird sang, where no beast stirred but our own horses, where black water dripped from the naked branches, though no one could remember it having rained. Would the sun ever rise? It felt as if we were already in our graves.
I tell you we all crossed ourselves then, and we were by no means godly men, any of us: rogues and brigands, bastards and younger sons, landless knights—a dozen of us, more? Who could remember?
Even I struggled to remember, as if rising from a deep, dark dream, as if swimming toward doubtful sunlight from out of a dank, muddy pond—remember? My own name, Erec de…Erec of Brittany, of some parentage or other, from some castle I could not quite bring to mind, a castle I did not own, where I was not particularly welcome at table. The boy beside me, called merely Jon, not old enough to have a beard yet, but in the company he kept, his soul was no doubt blackened already. My squire? Maybe even my own (bastard) son?
The big man beside him, with the wild red hair and the scarred face, Ulrich von Schwartzenberg, Ulrich of the Black Mountain, also called Ulrich the Axe, famed for his bloody deeds among Christians and pagans alike.
We rode in silence, even the hooves of our horses silent on the muddy path.
Would the sun ever rise? Would this night ever end?
Beside him Father Gregorias, the renegade priest, who had reputedly sold his soul to Satan, though now he lowered his head and counted his beads and muttered something I couldn’t make out.
In the cold and the dark we rode, and cursed the treachery of the Greek emperor, Isaac Angelus…even as, admittedly, we had allowed ourselves to become distracted on the way to the Crusade, never laid eyes on a Turk, turned to pillage and rapine among the Hungarians and Greeks in order to reach the East…all for the glory of God, of course, until d
efeated, crushed by our fellow Christians, we fled northward, into the mountains, into lands unknown.
And the darkness closed over us like a tide, and it seemed the night would never end.
Suddenly the lead man of our company cried, “Hold!” and we came to a halt, gathered around him, some fingering or even drawing their weapons.
The blackness of the forest was absolute. The path we rode upon, it seemed to my fancy, was like a pale white tongue extended from a dark mouth, ready to draw us in.
“There is something—” the lead man said. (A French knight. Jehan de—? In my dream, I could not recall his entire name.)
I leaned forward. Jon, the boy, looked to me expectantly. Father Gregorias, alone, did not look up, though his mount came to a halt with the rest.
“Yes, I see it.”
And I saw, like a returning memory, like a face slowly unmasked, the dim shape of a tower with darkened windows, a wall, a gate. I shook my head. Horses neighed nervously. Father Gregorias went on with his praying, the tone of his voice rising to a frantic whine.
One of our number, who was wounded and soaked with blood, fell from his saddle with a splashy thud. No one moved to help him, not even the priest.
We filed, one by one, like doomed men, through the gate and into a courtyard. We were…twelve? The number of the apostles. Eleven? The apostles minus Judas? Twelve again, when Matthias was chosen?
Would the daylight never come?
So we dismounted, leaving our horses as they were (there were no grooms come to greet us) and we stood for a time, short or long, beyond counting, in the cold and the dark, while gradually the windows of the castle around us filled with light, like glowing eyes lazily opening from a deep and troubling dream.
And I thought I remembered all this happening before…in a deep and troubling dream.
The boy Jon held onto my arm with his pale hand, as if he had slipped in the mud and needed to steady himself, but actually, I think, for comfort.
It was Ulrich Bloody-Axe who grunted and turned his head and said, “We’d better go in.”
The door before us was already open, the way lit with candles held in cupped hands carven of palest marble and set in little alcoves along the walls.
Single-file, again, we ascended worn marble stairs, and emerged into a broad room, hung with rich draperies, the walls decorated with ancient shields and arms, a table set with a rich feast before us.
And we twelve (if it was twelve) sat down, waiting first in silence for some host to appear and greet us.
I noted, pleasantly surprised, that the knife on the table before me was my own. I’d thought I had lost it. I took it and began to eat of the meat set there (which was cold, but not spoiled) and the others ate, too, in silence, until after a time, after a few cups of wine, we were more at ease, and small talk arose among the company.
The boy Jon beside me nudged me and gazed up at the lofty rafters.
“Do you think this place is full of ghosts?”
“No, lad,” said Ulrich from across the table. “Not ghosts.”
But the conversation turned to the subject of ghosts, and several of our company told of ghosts, one, how a man had been slain on the way to the wars, but had not known it, his ghost going on, thinking himself alive, performing deeds of great valor, even returning home in triumph where he bought lands, begot sons, and lived in contentment for many years before discovering one day, by chance, that he was already dead.
“Then how can any man know,” someone said, “if even his eyes and his memories deceive him?”
“Even his dreams,” said Jehan, the French knight. “I have dreamed things, which have proven false, though I remember them as if I had lived them, as if somehow I dreamed the dreams of another man.”
“Only Christ is eternal,” someone said, though it was not the priest. “All else is darkness and shadows.”
It seemed, for an instant, that I was not in that room, seated at that table at all, but far away, in a hot, dry land, fighting the pagans in the name of Christ, only to return to Europe and be unable to find my way home, to be diverted north, into mountains in an unknown land, in the darkness and the cold where I lay still in a dream from which I could not awaken.
And a voice spoke, in my mind, saying, “Chronophagos, the Eater of Time.”
Then, somewhere in the depths of the castle, a deep bell tolled, and the feast was over. The lamps expired of their own accord, the flames sinking down into the marble, cupped hands.
We arose, in the almost total darkness and made our way, as memory served, until each of us came to his own chamber, where a bed was prepared, save that Jon the squire (if so he was) shared a room with me, whether because there was no room for him otherwise, or because he so chose, I do not know.
We two lay in the darkness for a time, in silence. I think I dozed off, and dreamt (dreaming within a dream or waking from one) of a young man who loved a maiden with a face like an angel. He composed, in his mind, the most exquisite lyrics in praise of her beauty, but, alas he could not write, nor had the skill to either sing or play any musical instrument, and the maiden was, in any case, above his station. So, while he might worship her from afar, she never knew of him at all. In both despair and hope, he turned from her, went off to the wars, hoping to win fame and wealth, whereby he might return and claim her.
Soon his own delicate and pale hands were soiled with blood.
And I wept for the innocence which had died, all the while unsure if this was my own youth I was recalling, or some other.
Then a noise started me out of sleep. Jon beside me, clutched my arm.
Very far away, in the depths of the castle, it seemed that stone ground upon stone, and something was walking upon stone, its tread heavy and harsh and shuffling.
“What is it?” Jon whispered.
“I think our souls are in great peril,” I said.
We two arose from the bed, and drew out our swords, and stood on either side of the door throughout the night—Would the daylight never come? We heard screams and shouts. We heard the clash of arms. We heard Ulrich of the Bloody Axe cursing, and we heard his great axe strike like a hammer.
But we did not go at once to the aid of our comrades, not, out of cowardice, I do not think, but because we somehow knew, as if recalling a dream, that it was not so, that we had not done so, that we had lived all this before, and our adventure did not end thus.
The boy Jon was weeping when at last the door opened, and there was only darkness beyond it, and we both sensed that something stood there, waiting for us to venture out.
Somehow, all I could see for the moment were his pale hands, floating in the darkness.
II
I saw my own hands, floating, like pale paper cut-outs on a black stream. I saw them through eyes other than my own, as if awakening into another man’s dream.
My master and I stood on either side of the open doorway, swords drawn. Nothing happened. Nothing stirred. The whole castle was now utterly silent, but for a subtle wind issuing through the corridors and halls, like a deep and distant sighing.
Like the soft breath of God, turning in his sleep. And I was greatly afraid then, for if God were asleep, no one could save us now from whatever danger we faced.
At my master’s word, we two rushed through the doorway, probing the darkness with our swords. Metal scraped on the stone walls.
Then there was a faint light, almost a trick of the eye more than something actually seen. A hunched shape, moving away from us, a voice muttering the same phrase over and over again.
“You! Stop!” my master said, barely above a whisper but loud enough in that echoing gloom.
But the other did not stop, and when we cornered him, as the corridor turned sharply, there was an altercation, and I felt my blade sliding between ribs. Warm blood splashed over my hand. My master’s shoulder shoved against me as he too thrust with his sword; and then we held a dying man in our arms as we made our way, awkwardly down a flight of s
tairs in total darkness, into the feasting hall where we had dined earlier.
A few embers smoldered in the fireplace, giving faint light.
We laid him down on the hearth.
He muttered the same phrase over and over again, in Greek, “Kyrie eleison…” Lord have mercy.
It was Father Gregorias.
I looked up at my master, with hopeless despair in my heart.
“We have murdered a man of God!”
“He was no more a man of God than you are!”
“But, but…I don’t understand.”
“I think I am beginning to,” my master said.
I thought I was beginning to also. I thought I knew, or remembered, or dreamed, that the Castle of the Chronophagos, the Eater of Hours, Devourer of Time, was like an endless, dark labyrinth, from which no one who had entered there could ever escape, for once our days and hours, our lives have been taken by the Chronophagos, the Chronophagos may rehearse them over and over in memory like lines from an old song, or a half-forgotten prayer, while we must drift helplessly like paper cutouts on a black stream.
III
My only thought was to get away, from my crimes, from my various adventures, and if it suited me to be a man of God for a time, so be it. I had many names, more than I could remember, one of them Gregorias.… but, no, Gregorias died on the hearth amid the ashes, his guts ripped out by those two oafs, the Breton knight and the pretty boy I thought to carry away, because Erec de whatever-the-hell had no idea what a pretty boy was good for, being, himself, despite his own long litany of black deeds, as innocent as a pale, new-borne babe.
The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack Page 71