The Strange Dark One

by W. H. Pugmire

  He stood before the black window, one hand touching its surface. She did not hesitate but walked to and up the altar, stopping very near to him. “How did you know my grandfather?”

  “Are you musical, Miss Dorgan?” He raised his other hand, in which he held an exquisite thing that had been created out of what looked like white gold. She had never seen anything more beauteous. He offered it to her. The flute was chilly to the touch. Bringing it to her face, she smoothed its texture against her skin, and then she placed it at her mouth. No music sounded.

  “I can’t seem to play it.”

  “So I see. Pity, you have such a tender soul. What a treasure you would have been, numbered with me and mine. What do you see when you look upon this surface?”

  April gazed at the surface of the hanging window, at the thick opacity within which were whorls of electric life. “I see the sky – and beyond.”

  “You see the Audient Void, a place that waits and listens, that hungers. It has touched you as it touched your grandsire, and it will taint your dreams for all your mortal days. It could have been yours, intimately – but you are not the one. You don’t pine for it. Sweet dreams, Miss Dorgan.”

  She felt herself float toward the ground, her mind spinning like the shapes on the black window. She dreamed of nameless things, and in those dreams her grandfather called her name. And then another called her name as hands shook her roughly.

  “Where is he?” Adam shouted at her.

  Groggily, she pushed herself up to a sitting position. “He was here.”

  “Where is Cyrus”

  Before she could answer the ground beneath them began to pound, as if some preternatural heart pulsed in some deep place of the earth. From atop the twin-peaked mountain, things wailed to starlight. Cursing, Adam rushed from her, out of the edifice and into night, where he growled at the stars that moved above him, forming signals in the sky. As April staggered from the church she saw those stars die out one by one as some thick gloom engulfed the heavens. Something in Adam’s agonized shrieking tormented her, and she rushed after him as he ran into the woodland. She found him kneeling in one spot, clawing into the earth and yowling at the figure who stood, tall and erect and supernal, some little ways away. The Dark One wore a robe of rich blackness, and his head was adorned with a triple crown of white gold. His hands caressed the head of the thing that slumped at his feet, the figure that was sheathed in living shadow that seemed to feast upon the mortal tissue of temporary flesh. April watched as that flesh bubbled and reshaped itself. She saw the young face in the head that finally raised its eyes to look at them – its silver eyes.

  “You cannot claim him!” Adam screamed. “He is spawn of shadow, and to shadow he will return.” The strange dark one smiled at them, mockingly. He brought forward his other hand, in which he held a flute composed of the same stuff with which his diadem had been fashioned. The wretched thing at his feet took hold of the flute with shifting hands and brought it to his amorphous mouth. Eldritch music haunted the valley woodland, accompanied by Adam’s wails of outrage as he rose and tried to rush forward. The Dark One held up a hand, and April felt the invisible force that plummeted Adam, and crippled him. She saw the whorls of spinning illumination that formed above the daemon and then shot to Adam’s face, and she smelled the rank scent of Adam’s percolating eyes. She crawled to him and took him in her arms as the child that had been claimed by Crawling Chaos continued to play his summoning, and she saw the wondrous realm that he brought forth with enchanted music, the forest of dreamland that swallowed the child and his new Master. She wept as she watched that forest melt from view, as the blind thing in her embrace howled idiotically to heaven.

  Immortal Remains

  “That is not dead which can eternal lie,

  And with strange aeons even death may die.”

  —H.P. Lovecraft,

  “The Nameless City”

  It has called to me from early youth, and as a child I would often climb the grassy hill to the stone edifice. It was especially beguiling in soft lunar light, which is an ancient phosphorescence, one that moves me to mutter fragments of the daemonic lore that I had learned in this valley, and elsewhere. It is potent to speak such things in moonlight, in a haunted valley, as one stands before a building black with age. The place is especially wondrous when the night-wind of Sesqua Valley hums through and within it; but what is strange is that sometimes one can hear that inner wind on evenings that are still. It was at one such time that I saw the strange dark one who stood within the structure’s arched aperture, the tall shadow-thing whose robe flowed as if tossed by storm, although the night was calm. I watched, hidden at a distance, as the being raised a midnight hand that made signals to the moon and then tilt back his head in an aspect of howling, although the only sound I heard was the soft humming from inside the ancient structure. Legend tells that the stone structure has stood on the grassy hummock for centuries so as to house the one that sleeps within it. It has a certain ambience, this edifice of stone: like the round tower in which Simon Gregory Williams houses his library of occult lore, this small stone construction seems almost like some growth of the valley itself, a part of Sesqua’s supernatural nature.

  One steps into the structure and finds a case of golden wood, and it has an ambiance of its own, of hoary age, beautiful as it is. The queer and wondrous creature that lies within the small casket has often called to me in my eeriest of dreams, requesting that I come and hum within its stony ossuary. As a little girl I would stand on tiptoe and peer into its casket, gaze for aeons at the thick

  dry flesh, the elongated head. I felt an indistinct sadness that the creature had been interred face downward, as if in disgrace. The thick reptilian skin exuded a delicious aroma, and the round disc of shining metal placed in one upturned palm intrigued me. I could not ascertain if the figures etched thereon formed a peculiar alphabet or were meant to depict a representation of some unfamiliar race of creatures. Once, I placed my small hand against the disc; and although I at first experienced nothing, gradually my vision began to blur and darken, and I fancied that I could hear, from some far distant place, the low sound of humming wind, or something that mocked the song of wind. Dizziness oppressed me, and I covered my child’s face with small hands as I tried to keep my balance. When at last my senses calmed, I lowered my hands and found that I was standing in an alien place, before an ancient city that seemed to be pushing itself from out a valley of sand, as some reanimated corpse might struggle from its plot of cemetery sod. My astonished eyes took in the sight as my heart pulsed wildly within my tiny breast. Then my blood slowed its rushing, and I flowed over the sand in the humming wind of which, weirdly, I was a part. I listened to that ageless wasteland wind as the antiquity of the city kissed my soul with spectral wonder. I felt no fear; despite the queerness of everything around me, the city did not feel unfamiliar. Dark memory began to haunt my dream-soaked brain. I remembered clans of beings, creatures with curious faces that surrounded me as I held in hand a forbidden scroll. I did not like the way they leered at me, and so I shut my eyes. I sensed the wind behind me, never touching, and I sang to it in the language of the scroll, singing to the dread lord Nyarlathotep, whose chaotic multitude of images I had tried to pay homage to with signals that had been etched onto unholy scroll. I uttered his profane name, and the wind calmed and quieted.

  Cautiously, I reopened my eyes. I stood within a dark and vaulted chamber, where along one rough stone wall I saw a line of golden caskets. Peering into the box nearest me, I saw an elegant figure draped in gorgeous robes. Its curious head, which seems a ghastly combination of the feline and the reptilian, was crowned with a thing composed of jewels and silver. The creature was small, as was the coffin in which it reclined, and as I gazed on it I felt deep apprehension.

  I turned to face a distant corridor, and as I looked at it I began to hum. I think the sound came from me, for it seemed a thing of mortal origin rather than an effect of nature. I hummed, and s
omehow I began to seethe in agitated movement and jerk toward the corridor. My movement ceased abruptly, and I found myself kneeling on a floor in a cold and dusky chamber. Before me on the ground, naked of fabulous robes, was the mummy that I had seen within a stone construction in Sesqua Valley. It lay with its face touching the earthen floor, and on its head there was a triple diadem composed of white gold, the edge of which had been hammered so as to cut into the flesh. In one paw it clutched a small black figurine of the Faceless God, and in the other, in an upturned palm, it has a round disc composed of shining metal, which even in the dark place seemed to contain a kind of phosphorescence. I could hear the wind that seemed to wheel all around yet never kiss me. I bent to the dead thing and touched the shiny disc, and everything grew darker still, and the humming wind rose in volume and then stopped. My eyesight regained a regular focus, and I realized that I was in an ancient edifice in Sesqua Valley, my little hand reaching into a golden casket and touching a metal disc.

  The years passed and I grew into adulthood. We are schooled, when young, in a small house in the valley, and our teachers are various inhabitants of this supernatural vale. My favorite tutor was always Simon Gregory Williams, because he was so easily annoyed, and because he was far more playful than most of the serious adults one encountered among the human folk of the valley. One grows up in Sesqua Valley, if one enters it as a child, knowing that there is a race apart from regular folk – and sometimes we children heard of these creatures referred to as “the shadow-spawn,” which sounded provocative and mysterious. The term was never explained to us, but we knew that it referred to they who were different, a brood unto themselves, the folk with silver eyes who, now and then, would vanish from our midst, never to return. Among these creatures lurked Simon Gregory Williams, and I attached myself to him, despite his protestations. I was drawn to him because of his library in the tower room, where he housed most of his tomes and artifacts. Among those artifacts, one morning, I discovered something that shook me to the core – a figurine chiseled from black basalt which had an Egyptian aura about its design and form. What astonished me was that this thing was exactly that which I had “seen” in childhood vision, an image of the Faceless God.

  “Ah, beautiful, isn’t he?” Simon asked one day, noticing my interest in the figure. “One of the aspects of Nyarlathotep, of whom we recently read in the Necronomicon. He has been known to linger in the valley woodland, during the Howling Sabbat, and he is the single Great Old One who, I think, has the ability to enter into Sesqua’s shadowland. I have sensed him there, and smelt the trace of star-stuff that lingers after him. Yah, how he beguiles me! What attracts him to the valley I cannot say.”

  “Perhaps,” I meekly ventured, “it is the mummy in the stone edifice on Danvers Hill.”

  “That dry old thing,” he answered, as if to brush aside my comment. But then he squinted his eyes as he regarded me. “What makes you say such a thing, girl?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing – just a dream I had when very young.”

  Simon tilted his head inquisitively and rose from his throne, picking up the black idol as he walked toward me. “A dream of the Faceless God?”

  “No, no – of an ancient city in some valley of sand and wind.”

  “A City of Pillars?” He stood very near me, and his alabaster eyes shimmered excitedly.

  “No, an age-old place, its walls nearly covered by sand, with a perpetual sound of wind rushing through it. Was it in a valley of sand that you found the golden casket and its denizen?”

  He laughed. “You flatter me. I don’t find all of our rarest treasures, young woman. No, that structure, like the round tower, was erected long before we children of the valley were awakened by the clumsy mortals who first settled here. There was another race of – things, not mentioned or remembered in any local legends. Of course not, there are no aboriginal recollections, for whoever, whatever they were, they left no written record; they left only those two structures and certain smaller statues that we have found littered here and there within the woodland. Whatever they were, these beings, they were stealthy, and we never detected them in our separate realm of mist and dream.” He squinted at me again. “But you are very clever, to distract me from my initial curiosity concerning this infant dream of yours. Tell me what you saw.”

  “I have told you – a vision of a sprawling city sunk in a valley of sand and wind, and of a room where I beheld the mummy on the hill, with that black statue in its paw.”

  His massive hand flashed toward me and he pointed one talon to my eye. “There! You never mentioned that detail. And you heard a sound of roaming windsong? Too intriguing. Did it sound something like this?” He went to a table and opened a box, from which he took a pan-pipe that seemed composed of dirty off-white bones. His mouth curled mischievously as he pressed the pipe to his lips and began to play. The sound that issued forth chilled my brain with arcane memory. “But wait,” he whispered. “One wants to be especially appareled.” Walking to a tall cabinet, he took out an open-fronted robe of scarlet silk, into which he slipped, closing the front and tying it with a tasseled fabric belt. Then he went to a small table and opened a box of red sandalwood, from which he brought forth a triple crown of white gold. Removing his hat, he placed the crown onto his dome and brought the pipe to his mouth again.

  “Oh – it was you I saw,” I said, laughing and going to him.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “One evening, years ago, wearing that get-up and howling near the opening of the edifice on the hill.” Surprised by a sudden whim, I reached for the diadem and placed it on my head. Simon watched me with his silver eyes, and I smiled at him as I pushed my fingers through his hair, tilted back my head and bayed. I closed my eyes and listened to the humming that subtly issued from some place outside the tower.

  “Tell me what you see,” the beast before me whispered.

  “I don’t see anything, but I sense much. I smell the perfume of your flesh and soft hair, and they smell of the valley. Such a sweet aroma. Yet its sweetness is tainted by an odor of decay, which comes from the thing in its golden coffin, the beast that calls to me in dream.”

  “As it has called to others,” he revealed.

  I opened my eyes. His face was very close to mine. “You have secrets, Simon.” He smiled crookedly and kissed my eyes. He then began to speak in what sounded like an Arabic tongue. “What is that?”

  “It’s Alhazred’s enigmatic couplet from Al Azif, in its original language, as he might have sung it in that valley of sand of which you’ve dreamed.”

  “Speak it to me again,” I demanded. He did so, quietly, as he removed the diadem of white gold from my head and replaced it onto his own. And then he lifted me into his strong arms and carried me down the small winding steps until we stood outside. The moon was bright; and although there was no wind, I could hear still, from some place not too far away, a humming as of windsong. He carried me through woodland until we came to Danvers Hill, and he stood very still for a little while as we both looked up at the structure of stone and at the shadows that swayed around and within it. One of those shadows seemed to be a tall figure wrapped in robes of midnight that stood just inside the building, but as I gazed at whatever it was it melted so as to conjoin with other darkness.

  Simon carried me up the hill and into the edifice, from which the humming sound issued, a noise that reminded me of wind or the humming of one million insects. Simon took me to the small coffin and placed me inside it, atop the dry dead thing. Mingled with the sound of wind I could hear Simon’s uttering of the esoteric song from Al Azif, a song that blended so smoothly with the sound of spectral humming. A shaft of moonlight spilled into the structure from the wide arched aperture and hit the metal disc, which burnished with a shimmering not unlike the eyes of the beast who watched me. I took hold of the disc, brought it to my mouth and kissed it, pressed it against my forehead. The reptilian skin beneath me began to ripple, to soften, to slowly melt into a mound o
f humming sand, sand that claimed me. I lowered my face into its substance and let it occupy my mouth; and I moaned as it flowed between my legs and entered there. It covered me, the stuff, like some sediment of skin, and I could feel my face shift and alter. The metal disc was chilly on my upturned palm. Turning my head just a little, I could see the blurry silhouette that stood, tall and proud, near the arched aperture, the being whose red robes moved in daemoniacal wind as moonlight bathed its triple crown of white gold. As the creature tilted back its head and uttered an unearthly howling, I wanted so to join it in its noise; but my head was dry and dead and I could not work my jaws. Thus I closed my eyes and dreamed, of Nyarlathotep, sire of the million favored ones, who will corrupt us in his age of crawling chaos, we who are numbered in his ghastly throng.

  Past the Gates of Deepest Dreaming

  Yet for each dream these winds to us convey,

  A dozen more of ours they sweep away.

  —H. P. Lovecraft

  I.

  (Cyrus Lynchwood)

  I awakened to the sound of moaning wind; and as I listened to the sound I sensed that it was not a natural noise from out of doors but rather that it came from somewhere below, inside the old house where I was staying as a guest; for it was not a natural wind that I listened to, but something alien and beguiling, something daemonic. It coaxed, and so I pushed away the blankets and got out of bed, absent-mindedly knocking the book that I had been reading and was beside me on the mattress to the floor. I reached for the book and touched the floor, the wood of which was unnaturally chilly. I crossed that floor in stocking feet and gingerly opened the door of my upper bedroom, listening intently to the ghostly sound, and then I crept along the carpet to the stairs that led downstairs. Suddenly the door to the library was flung open and my landlord, Philip Nithon, emerged into the hallway. His face was contorted with bewilderment and fear as his hands clutched at his wild white hair. I could not hear what he was muttering because the noise from the library had increased, and I watched as the old man shuddered and then ran to the front door and out of the house. I stepped down the stairs, bewitched by the sound that continued to issue from within the library. Everything in the room was very still despite the tempestuous clamor, but I shivered as the icy air sheathed my flesh, a coldness that coiled upward and touched my brain, which it teased with vague uncanny impressions. I felt that I was suddenly gyrating