April gazed at the blackness of the hanging window, at the thick opacity within which were whorls of electric life. “I see a haunted heaven—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 and formed sigils 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, wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame, wore his triple crown of white gold. His unholy hands caressed the head of the one who 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 aroma 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 crept toward the child and his new Master, claiming them. She wept as she watched the dreamland forest melt from view, as the blind thing in her embrace howled idiotically to heaven.
Table of Contents
Bohemians of Sesqua Valley
Introduction
In Memoriam: Robert Nelson
One Card Unturned
An Ecstasy of Fear
Unhallowed Places
This Splendor of the Goat
A Quest of Dream
The Strange Dark One
Bohemians of Sesqua Valley Page 19