The great black columns listed and tilted about us. Some were of an immense proportion, their surfaces graven with a scrimshaw of unspeakable hieroglyphics. The workmanship was of a skill without peer, images and phrases of an obscene beauty, many one and the same, hewn by hands on an inhuman scale. I do not know how, but I sensed that they were tales in testimony and tribute to races that are far removed from the world of men. They were ancient when the stars were but a nursery of nebulous gas and fume.
It was then I saw a face staring back at me, gibbous and manic. It was not my reflection, for the raven surface held none, but rather the image of a sea-hand like the other, yet still in possession of his human features. He screamed and pounded at his confine in wordless silence. I hammered back upon the obsidian surface but he could not see or hear me. Each facet of the pillar showed a different aspect of his person. From near and far, above and below. He turned and simultaneously ran away and toward me depending on the view within the crystal.
At times his face filled one entire section, distorted and tormented. At others, he was the faintest figure in an empty landscape. He was not bound into the pillar as if it were a prison cell but swallowed by some manner of malevolent architecture. He was imprisoned by angles, and he was not alone. Other columns showed scenes of similar madness. They were his shipmates, or some of them at least.
“Can we help them?”
Miranda was by my side. Her hand in mine.
“I don’t think so. I think they’re trapped in there.”
“Will the same happen to us?”
“Not if we’re careful. I don’t know why exactly, but I have the feeling something wants us to be here.”
“Father,” she asked earnestly, “is this real?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m tired. I am so tired. I don’t know if I’m dreaming.”
Scooping her up with my free arm, she wrapped both of hers around my neck and tucked her head tight into my shoulder.
“If you want it to be a dream, then a dream it is. Sleep, and I will wake you when we are done here.”
With my child in one hand and my sword in the other, I continued onward towards the source of the unnerving compulsion. It did not take long to find it, or so I thought. Cresting the final hexagonal step I was faced with an object that obliged me to pause in fear and wonderment.
Before me, I beheld a monolith of such immense proportion its very existence seemed an impossibility. It possessed not just extreme size but unnatural weight also. It felt as if the very ground was straining to bear it up, and that matter was drawn to it by the magnetic nature of its presence.
Hewn from a fathomless black material, it was framed, on all sides, by borders inscribed with the same heathen scripture as before. The main front panel, on the other hand, appeared to be no more than a smooth black plane. I gasped in awe at the sight of its vastness.
“In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming,” came a dry, fractured voice.
Sword clenched in my fist, I quickly sought its source and soon alighted upon a bundle of rags and sticks huddled in the lee of another base stone.
“Yet his death is but a brief punctuation and his dreams are all but done.”
The ragged mound was a man, a Moor like the mariner but twisted and wizened like the roots of an ancient tree. His bare head was scarified with raised signs and sigils, as too was the rest of him. He looked at me with empty, hollow eyes, the sockets raw and caked with dried blood from where the eyeballs themselves had recently been plucked out.
“Do not look upon the tabernacle, lest he set hooks into your soul and make it his.”
I pointed the blade at this wraith and clung tightly to Miranda but mercifully she did not stir.
“Speak, old man!” I growled. “Explain this madness to me!”
“You are already his to some measure, else you would not be here, but if you can talk and reason with me then there is still hope for you.”
“Not just me but my daughter, also.”
This spectre scrambled urgently to its feet with a robustness belying its age.
“There is a child here? Then you must leave while you can!”
“We have no sound ship to speak of. To chance the ocean would be certain death.”
“To stay would be worse.”
“Why? What is it that so afflicts this troubled place?”
The old man slumped back against the stones, his fleeting burst of strength now draining from him.
“This… this is a site of worship that beggars belief. It is both a temple and tomb for that which never truly lived and so can never die.”
“There is magic here?”
“Deeper and darker than you can imagine. It belongs to the Great Old Ones, who came to our young world from the sky long before the ages of man.”
He slumped and shrank back onto his haunches.
“They are dead and gone now, as much as such things can die. Entombed, inside the earth, under the sea, but they spoke in dreams to the first men who formed a cult that never died.
“In elder days, chosen men talked with them in dreams until the body of the Earth itself rebelled against them and the dread city of R’lyeh sank beneath the waves. The one primal mystery through which thought cannot pass… but the memory of them never died.
“But it is said that when the stars are right, the great priest Cthulhu will rise from his dark house to bring the world again beneath his sway.”
My glance swept across the alien geography that surrounded us.
“And this is it?”
He nodded. His hands folded in his lap were rimed in a deep scarlet crust. His fingernails clogged with a ruddy ichor.
“As much as the Old Ones had their acolytes so too there were others set on keeping them bound beneath the ocean and the earth. When the storm came and the island rose, we thought we were prepared but we were not. I had my tools to bind it, my books and my staff but it was our flesh that was found wanting.
“It preyed upon the weakest of our number, turning them body and mind into its vassals. Those who were stronger fell prey to the abnormal geometry of this loathsome acropolis until only I endured. It sought to make a puppet of me. To read the words and give it egress. I resisted it the only way I could.”
Miranda murmured and stirred in my arms. I hushed her and rocked her as I had done when she was a babe.
“You have to leave, for your child’s sake!”
“If as you say such darkness is going to be unleashed upon the world, will there be any safe haven from that which lies here?”
“On some remote island, perhaps? Cthulhu is tied to this place and cannot free itself unaided. That is why it tried to use me to open the way. That is why I put out my eyes so it could not use me or my books.”
“Then there’s nothing to fear.”
“There is all to fear, for you are here. You have been touched by magic and it can sense it. That is why it cast wide its web of the elements, to draw you in. And if it cannot use you, it will have your child. These things do not happen by chance.”
I felt rage roiling within me like thunderheads.
“Where are your books now?”
“Scattered, by that cyclopean edifice when I spurned my sight. Do not go looking for them, it will take you too close to what lies within.”
I already knew what I had to do. I debated whether to leave Miranda behind, but I could not. Whatever fate might befall us, we would face it together. She would not be alone; I would watch over her for the rest of my days. Sensing my departure the old man called out but I paid him no mind.
As we fell under the ominous shadow of that titanic presence all sound seemed to cease. I was reminded, unnervingly, of my recent time in that nether-space. Sweat beaded my face and body yet I shivered with the sudden cold.
There, up ahead I could see the sorcerer’s books. An unassuming pair of thick, brown leather tomes fitted with brass clasps and locks as if to keep their contents f
rom breaking free. I crouched down, laying the sword aside to tuck the books into a capacious buckskin satchel that lay close by. The floor was splattered with dark splashes of dried blood and gobbets of matter that I tried not to focus upon. I slipped the strap of the bag over my shoulder.
“Father?”
“Close your eyes, child. Go back to sleep.”
It is the nature of children to be contrary, hence she sat up and stirred, surveying her surroundings.
“Where are we? I don’t like it!”
There was an edge in her voice, a cracked note of genuine terror.
“What is that?”
She was pointing at the smooth featureless surface of the monolith. I was about to reassure her that there was nothing there when I stifled my words.
There was something – a tall beam of darkness, darker than the rest. A narrow ribbon of a void set between two intractable surfaces. My mind struggled to process what it was seeing when suddenly, instinctively, I took a step back as my body reacted to the revelation before my consciousness had fully absorbed the truth.
It was a door and it was open.
Only a crack, the merest sliver but it was enough. I knew what lay on the other side. I had seen it. I had been there in spirit at least.
“Father!”
I heard Miranda’s voice, frantic and full of desperation yet it did not seem to be part of my world. It was as if she was in another room, remote and far removed from my presence. I was transfixed by that black window. It had a gravity all of its own, a singular presence that demanded my all. I had no other desire but to obey what lay beyond above all things.
Then the darkness shifted and I saw a familiar flash of sickly white.
It was the eye.
“Fool!” came the cry and a searing blow landed across my back.
I staggered forwards, holding tightly to Miranda. I turned to face the old man, who was brandishing a staff almost as long as he was tall.
“Go! Now! While you still can!”
Stirred from my torpor I barely had time to respond when Miranda indicated several figures that were capering across the rocks with a reptilian gait. Even at this distance I could hear their shrill chittering and their nails scraping like knives upon the stone.
“They’re coming! They’re coming!” she wailed.
The old man grasped my arm with a fearsome strength and thrust the staff towards me.
“Take it and go!”
My mind was my own once more but I did not know for how long.
I gripped my daughter and the staff and ran back down the incline up which we had so recently struggled. I leapt from step to step praying my footing would hold. I tried not to think about the old man or the terrible, brief scream that cut through the air behind us.
Our woeful boat was still buoyed on the tide where we last saw it. I hastily put Miranda and the satchel inside before jumping aboard and using the staff to push off from the shore.
Several of the things that were once men reached the bay, shrieking and snarling at us as we departed. Some made to leap for the water but scampered back when I held out the staff, ready to defend us to the death. There was power in it and the books too, even if I did not know how to wield it yet, but I would learn.
The current caught us and swiftly yanked our frail refuge out into the wild water. Already the skies were darkening and the seas thrashing, echoing the impotent fury of the beast behind the door at our escaping its clutches.
Lightning shatters the sky and the tides writhe in torment, but now I have no fear.
We will ride the maelstrom. We will find a safe haven that I will gird with magic to keep the flesh of my flesh safe from harm. I will brush this time from her memory so it takes on but the aspect of a bad dream and keep her innocence unspoilt.
I will steep myself in these books of magic, clothe myself in their words and bend the world about me to my will. I will become the tempest, wrathful and merciless and woe betide any who would seek to test me.
The Suns of York
Adrian Chamberlin
“Three glorious suns, each one a perfect sun;
Not separated with the racking clouds,
But sever’d in a pale clear-shining sky.
See, see! they join, embrace, and seem to kiss,
As if they vow’d some league inviolable:
Now are they but one lamp, one light, one sun.
In this the heaven figures some event.”
Henry VI, Part Three: Act II, Scene I
“When the sun sets, who doth not look for night?”
Richard III, Act II, Scene III
May 5th, 1502 – The Garden Tower, London
Sir James Tyrell looks a man at peace, at ease with the knowledge he will die on the morrow. But when I hold the lantern closer to allow his secret visitor to gaze upon the traitor’s face, to dispel the shadows, darkness remains in the condemned man’s features: his eyes are bloodshot and sunken, rimmed with black circles, the mark of one who has not slept for many a night.
He is in his fifty-sixth year, yet seems much older. He is weak from his sleepless nights and his inability to take sustenance – and his slumped, albeit broad shoulders and hunched posture on the edge of his cot show a man whose spirit is utterly broken by his guilt. My fellow jailers believe ghosts do haunt Tyrell when night rules the land, punishing and harrowing him for his role in the Boar’s tyrannical rule, that he even bore responsibility for the disappearance of the two princes.
If he was responsible for the killing of the boy-king Edward V and his younger brother Richard, perhaps ghostly visitations are not beyond the bounds of reason, for Tyrell spends his last days in the same fortress the two princes spent theirs. My visitor sneered at me when I told him of the turnkeys’ fantasies, ordered me to engage logic and reason over superstition.
That is easy for him to do. A student of law at Inns Court, Thomas More has access to learning I, a humble servant of the Constable of the Tower of London, will never see. He has trained his fine mind to analyse and critique every word spoken by man. His star is in the ascendant; despite his youth, he has been trusted with a very special mission, by royal command no less – albeit one that must needs remain uncertified. Secret.
More is seated at the rough-hewn table, his thin wrists and elbows jutting through the thick black robes like the bones of a bat through its wing membranes. He places his bundle – wrapped in red silk – upon the table and begins to sharpen his quill beside a stack of fresh vellum. His haughty posture and thin-lipped scowl show his disapproval of the surroundings; there is no comfort here. The tapestries and ornamentation of what were once the royal apartments, to lodge important prisoners of state in comfort and dignity, are not to be found in this small turret room. Slime-encrusted brick and cold flagstones are Tyrell’s furnishings, a simple wooden cot with straw his sole comfort.
More has begun to write, his fastidious eyes taking in Tyrell’s appearance and describing it in slow, careful movements of his quill. If he is surprised at the condition of my prisoner, he does not show it.
Tyrell’s face is quizzical; a frown adds to the darkness lining his cragged features, and yet the pupils of his eyes do not constrict when I hold the lantern close to him; they widen, twin pools of blackness that seem to hunger for light rather than shun it.
The candle flame shrinks and the light dims. I blink, then Sir James lowers his eyes to the rough flags of the floor and the lantern shines more brightly.
“Visitor at this hour? Yet you do enter in secrecy – just as I did, all those years and bodies ago.”
His voice is deep, the words elegantly delivered yet marred by that course northern accent. This was the voice that commanded armies at Barnet and Tewkesbury, that spoke into the Boar’s ear to tell the usurper that his bloody wishes were fulfilled. It is a voice that still carries strength and command, belying the owner’s enfeebled body and soul.
It is the voice of evil. I am aware of the dank smell of the chamber, the f
resh sweat of the prisoner and the scent of fear, yet the fear is not of us. Sir James Tyrell has seen the bundle Thomas More has placed upon his writing desk. The red silk clings to it, betraying its cruciform structure. His breathing quickens.
I cast my eyes to the transom window. From this elevation Constable Brackenbury’s garden is in full view, its early summer flowering a pleasing sight – yet darkness has encroached upon the shrubberies and rosebushes, the trees now silhouettes of distortion as the sun sinks. Only the white roses contain the remains of the summer sunlight, glinting like shards of skulls.
The white rose – the flower of York – now a symbol of death and destruction.
“The Flower of York in its last bloom.”
I start at Tyrell’s words, and turn from the window. He glowers at me.
“I know the Sun in Splendour, the Sunburst, to be the true symbol of your house,” More speaks evenly, softly yet commanding. There is no fear in his tone. “Perhaps you know the king has ordered the symbol be struck from all heraldic devices.”
Tyrell nods warily. “Another generation and it will be forgotten history. Perhaps it is for the best.”
“That will be for the king to decide, Sir James.”
Tyrell laughs. “Will it, sir? What exactly do you know of Richard? Of his reign, of Bosworth, of the two boy princes? Only what your masters tell you. And yet you come here to hear my story. Is Tudor’s version of events so poor that even the young disbelieve it?”
Thomas More stands tall, to his full height, and sets his shoulders. “That is not why I am here. My royal master would know the true story of York’s fall, from one who was there at the beginning and the end.”
Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu Page 17