Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4)

by David Hambling

  By rights, his skull should have been crushed by the force of that blow, given our combined momentum. I had no time to assess the effect, though, as the second creature had crawled out from under the bed and regained his feet.

  He swiped clumsily, and the blow went wide; he seemed too dazed to take proper offensive action, as though bashing the head of one of them had stunned them both. He had no defence, no guard to speak of, and I rained blows on him without mercy. It felt more like an exercise against a padded opponent than a real fight. Satisfying as it was, I might as well have been tickling him with a feather for all the lasting effect it was having.

  Then I saw the impossible door. It was beside me, and still ajar. “When is a door not a door?” I taunted.

  Faint light showed around the edges. By rights, that door should have opened into the next cell, but I was nearly certain that it led somewhere else entirely. And it was open. Sometimes, especially in a fight, you do not take too long thinking about things. You just act.

  I was through the door and pulling it shut behind me before my two opponents could move to block me.

  I did not know where I was. Given how little progress I had been making in the fight, it had to be an improvement. I had expected a holding pen where the beasts were kept before being unloosed. Maybe I had only escaped into another cell, but if it put a solid door between me and them, then I was in a far safer place.

  To my delight, there was a sort of door bolt on the side I was on, a metal wheel like those used to make ships’ hatches fasten closed. I spun it, and a bolt or bar or catch moved, and the door was solidly in place. They could hammer on it—not that they had proper fists to hammer with—but they could not get in.

  It was not, however, the cell-within-a-cell that I expected.

  It was more like a narrow corridor with white, lime-washed walls and floored with matting. The corridor ran perhaps thirty feet in both directions before turning, and what light there was came from narrow, rectangular windows set slightly above eye level. This was the only door.

  There was a chemical smell like vinegar in the air.

  After a minute, I cautiously put my ear to the wall to hear what was happening on the other side. There was nothing, only the rushing of blood in my head.

  “Well, that’s a strange thing,” I said and burst out laughing. The whole thing was so utterly ridiculous, so entirely impossible, that it made no sense at all. I laughed hysterically for half a minute before I managed to bring myself back.

  The corridor I was in could not be where it was. I knew the layout of the hospital perfectly well, and there was no room for a whole corridor to fit there. Only some mad freak of geometry could put the corridor there; but here I was.

  The window showed an unfamiliar garden, bathed in moonlight. Strange topiary and peculiar metal statues were arranged around a sort of water feature. It was not an English garden, I could tell that much—it was more like one of those Chinese or Japanese gardens. Rounded shapes churned and flopped in the water feature.

  One of the metal statues moved, and I ducked away instinctively. If I was seen, things could go very badly indeed. The inhabitants of the place were unlikely to be friendly.

  I set off down the corridor, hoping for a way out. There were junctions and side turnings, but no doors. A steel plaque set into the wall looked as though it might be a map, but I could not make any sense of the hieroglyphic markings however long I stared. Maybe it was not a map at all.

  The place simply could not be there, inside the asylum. Perhaps it was somewhere else. If doors could connect places a distance apart, maybe I could find one that would take me back somewhere else.

  A few paces farther, an alcove housed a glass case on a stand. It contained what looked like scientific instruments, silver and glass things with quivering needles and dials, but the markings meant nothing to me. A glass cylinder was full of clear liquid which changed as I watched, forming murky scenes that dissolved into one another. For a moment, robed figures seemed to form, then dissipated. It was hypnotic, but I forced myself away.

  A turn took me to a winding staircase, and I went up two flights. I stalked onwards with a growing sense of purpose. I had some idea where I must be going. My route was a spiral. An archway appeared ahead of me, like a light coming on. I suspected the arch would be gone in another second, but I was through it by then.

  Perhaps I should have used my time better. I should have scouted the place out properly; I should have found a weapon. I could at least have broken the case and taken some of the instruments. It is easy to be wise after the event.

  The two I had left behind me were still trapped in my cell, I hoped. They were only the minions of the one ahead of me. Dr Nye was a far more dangerous creature.

  My job lay ahead of me, and Harry Stubbs was not one to avoid a fight.

  Chapter Nineteen: Master of Chaos

  The room was dark, with only a few circles of illumination. At the middle of it was Dr Nye.

  When you’re hunting a tiger, the last thing you see is the tiger, Ryan had told me. That phrase “the last thing you see” had a double meaning, I now realised. Dr Nye might literally be the last thing I ever saw.

  “The end is nigh,” Hooper said. But maybe it was really “The end is Nye.” Hooper had been trying to warn me about Nye because he was in danger – but he was only in danger because he was trying to warn me about Nye. A vicious circle had taken him.

  Dr Nye was a tall, slim man. His face was familiar, because it was exactly the face of the two things that had come into my cell. Except while their eyes were as dead as pebbles, his sparkled with a mischievous humour. He was younger than I had expected.

  And I realised with a slight shock that I had seen him before. I had seen him visiting patients at the hospital. It was as though the memories had been blotted out, or rather misplaced, until this exact moment. He had been there in front of me the entire time. Laughing at me. The fact that I could see him now and remember him suggested that he no longer needed any sort of concealment.

  The lighting momentarily confused me, and the room looked unfamiliar, until I saw we were in the superintendent’s office.

  Nye was sitting behind an enormous desk—the superintendent’s desk—with an array of wooden boxes before him. Prismatic colours played on his face from the indicator lights. Thick wires sprouted and coiled around him to the mass of equipment that filled much of the room. It looked like a power station, with glass and metal columns and stacked copper plates all connected. The Faradisation apparatus had been expanded and extended almost out of recognition, like some sort of weed running wild and allowed to overrun the whole garden.

  Facing him, strapped to a chair on the other side of the desk, was Ross. He was wearing a peculiar headdress which at first looked Egyptian until I saw that it was made of at least twenty thick electrical wires, each taped to his shaved scalp.

  “We should work together,” said Ross quietly. He sounded reasonable and not at all like a man who stood to be electrocuted at the flip of a switch. Maybe a low voltage would not kill him, but the apparatus was infinitely more powerful than the one we had used on poor Jenkins. Surely it would scramble his brains in an instant. “Do something constructive instead.”

  “I don’t need help from a lunatic,” said Nye. His voice was mellow and every bit as reasonable, and he stroked a switch before him teasingly.

  “But still you hesitate,” said Ross. “You are as unsure of me as I am of you.”

  “Don’t you dare compare yourself to me,” said Nye, peevish rather than angry. “You are a pathetic, insane prisoner. I am master of this place—and anywhere else I choose to go.”

  A contest was being played out between of them, and it appeared to have been going on for some time. Ross looked to be in the inferior position, but he was the less agitated of the two. Nye had the irritable look of one who had cornered an opponent but couldn’t finish him off.

  “And yet, here you are,” said Ross. “With m
e.”

  It had been my intention to talk to Ross and form a plan of campaign against Nye, but clearly it was too late for that. Nye could put a tremendous and presumably lethal voltage through the other man with a flick of his finger, which still caressed the device before him. The thick wires covered the floor like coiled serpents, blocking my way. I could never hope to cross to Nye quickly enough to stop him. I had fought past my—or Nye’s—demons to get there, but I had no idea what I should do next.

  “You should not have come,” said Nye, turning and addressing me for the first time. It occurred to me then that my presence was not accidental, but that it was part the contest between them. I was as much a part of it as a card that had been played. If the sphinxes were Nye’s pieces, then I was Ross’s. “You have been certified insane, Stubbs. You are not mentally competent to make any sort of judgement. You have no lawful authority. Go back to your cell—before you have an accident with those electrical wires.”

  He spoke with such command that I almost found myself obeying him. But I stayed my impulse to move, and instead spoke up as firmly as I could manage. “I know who you really are,” I said.

  His gaze seemed to sharpen, but so did his amusement. “Oh? Speak, madman.”

  I spoke quickly, stringing together fact and inference and supposition. Everything I had gleaned must be used now or lost.

  “You were taken from the gipsies as a baby and raised in a foster home. You were a spiteful and resentful child, and you learned early to lie and cheat. You were always jealous of another boy with the same foster mother. You were always lucky and took an interest in what is called black magic—tricks learned from gipsies, mainly—and how to twist people’s minds. Maybe there was a real Dr Nye. Maybe he was your brain physician after they first realised what you were like and sent you for treatment.”

  “You took his place after you disposed of him. That must have been no great feat when you invoked or generated minions which can penetrate any closed space by using other dimensions.” It was wild, half-made-up stuff, but it felt like a rough approximation of the truth.

  “Really?” asked Nye, raising one eyebrow.

  “The superintendent was seduced by your supposed triumphs, your standing. Beltov succumbed to you because he could not resist what looked like science. How was he to know that what he called ‘statistical significance’ was just your luck, or cheating? You’re a fraud, you’re not a doctor. And the name given you by your foster mother was Ross, not Nye.” My aim was to convey this information to Ross. It was not entirely to be relied upon, but perhaps he could use it. I could not tell anything from his expression.

  “Is that all you have?” asked Nye, mock-disappointed.

  “It’ll be enough to see you dethroned from your position,” I said. I did not trouble to add “if anyone listens to me.” Needing a stronger finish, I added, “And maybe you’ll be the one that ends up in a cell downstairs, with a diagnosis of megalomania at the least.”

  “The gipsies are a tribe of outcast Egyptians,” Nye said, invoking a piece of folklore of which I was aware but had not connected. “You omitted to mention that my gipsy blood is royal. It is the blood of the pharaohs. My soul, too, is the soul of a pharaoh.”

  As one who was supremely presumptuous himself, Dr Nye despised presumption in others. I was being put in my place for daring to suggest that I knew who he was.

  “Perhaps I can guess which pharaoh,” said Ross. “Not Amenhotep, or Akhenaten, or Khufu.”

  “No.” Nye’s voice was silky and superior.

  “One of the Damnatio Memoriae,” said Ross, “whose name was erased from every obelisk and stele, whose deeds are their only monument.”

  “Yes. I am Nyarlathotep,” stated the other proudly. “Incarnate again as man after forty centuries. Pray that you never see any of my unhuman forms.”

  The name meant nothing to me. I guessed that it must be connected with the mummy whose spirit Mathers had tried to summon, the one that the Sphere group of the Golden Dawn had contacted and inadvertently guided back to our world. They had allowed it to be born here again, its hour come round at last.

  Nye seemed to swell up at the sound of the name he had given himself. “I am not a man, but a god come again, come again to set intricate devices into motion and unwind this world.”

  “The anti-Messiah,” said Ross, quiet as anything.

  “You thought I was just a magician,” said Nye, his eyes fixed on Ross. “One of those dabbling idiots, making cocktails of science and mysticism and getting drunk on the results. Petty little men who think that one glimpse of the ankles of Truth means they have seen all her glory. My roots are sunk millennia-deep; eternity and infinity are my playthings.”

  “What exactly do you want?” asked Ross, entirely untroubled. This was the calm courage that had made him an air ace, while my mind was turning somersaults.

  “I am here to destroy madness,” said Nye, his voice cool again. “I will stamp out every delusion and hallucination, chip away the accretion of defences which encase human minds, dissolve the comfortable illusions humanity clings to. I will dig down to the roots of the psyche, dig out the futility of life and the certainty of death. I will unbury what is hidden in dreams, bring back every dread thought pushed out of mind. I will draw out Leviathans from the pool of the subconscious with a hook and release them, lithe and glistening, into the waking world. I will reveal the truth everywhere by cinematograph and radio. I will not rest until all humanity stands bare, nakedly exposed to the cold wind of reality, unprotected by lies and fallacies, utterly and irrevocably sane—screaming endlessly into the night.”

  “Humanity is better left as it is,” said Ross.

  I felt as irrelevant to the larger struggle as an ant crawling across a boxing ring between two heavyweights. As that other Norwood Titan had observed, my arms are too short to box with a god.

  Nye seemed to be building up his own confidence before launching the killer punch, uncertain as he was of his opponent. It was the moment he would commit himself to the blow. “I don’t care if they like it,” he said in the tone of one who enjoys crushing insects as a proof of the power that he wields. That was the only proof that mattered. He would not get pleasure from putting food out for ants or saving them from predators. But tormenting them would be a joy to him.

  If Nye was a god, he was an egotistical and insecure one that needed to boast. “I am the incarnation of a greater power, the power that rules the universe. The one that wears mountains to dust, levels forests and burns out stars. The force of that tears down every man-built thing, the anarchy that eats away every civilisation. Eternal, unstoppable, crawling entropy.”

  Nye’s voice was rising to a thunderous pitch. He was not shouting, but his voice was amplified as through a loudspeaker. “I am the Pharaoh Nyarlathotep. I AM CHAOS!”

  I reeled. The whole building seemed to boom and resonate with the last three words. The air was unable to hold them but kept echoing them back and forth. Something ghastly had been unmasked, its very presence a threat to human life. I had the sense of standing close to a whirring piece of machinery, a whirlpool of sharpened steel blades that expanded to fill the room.

  Sparks fountained around my feet. The electrical cables writhed like tentacles or fire hoses with high-pressure water blasting through them, leaping into the air. Balls of lightining shot out of copper columns as though they were so many Roman candles, and barbed electric whips lashed around, thrashing the walls and the ceiling.

  The coil of cables leaped up from the floor and struck me.

  Impossible as it was, and although there cannot have been any interval between Nye throwing the switch and what happened next, before the arcing cables struck me, I know I heard Ross’s reply. He was as clear and quiet as the fighter pilot when the clouds part and he gets the Zeppelin squarely in his sights, and as level-headed as the tiger hunter when the beast breaks cover and leaps towards him, claws bared. “I am Providence.”

  The two
men were incarnations of the same force, like those two haughty Cleopatras who refused to talk to each other. In this case, though, they were different aspects of that force, wearing the masks of angel and devil.

  Ross could not match Nye’s power; his own was merely an offshoot of the same elemental force, but it put a twist in that force and changed its direction entirely. Because chaos is chaotic, it cannot always destroy. Sometimes, despite of itself, it creates.

  Providence is the twist of chaos that reverses its effects, the one random chance in a thousand that brings order rather than confusion. It is the serendipity that causes you to get on to the wrong train and find it is the right one after all. Providence is the cowpox that gives you immunity to deadly smallpox, malaria burning out syphilis.

  The stirring up of primordial chemicals results not in ever-greater disorder, but in the molecules that form life. Providence is when the sports and freaks that affect reproduction instead turn out to be new species. Providence is when the lightning that smashes the cave dwellers’ encampment gives them fire and everything that came after. Providence throws up the stepping stones of progress.

  Providence is the madness that turns out to be genius. Providence means that even a shattered clock can be correct twice a day. Providence is when the secret door which admits assassins is the one through which the victim escaped.

  Providence is the tiniest part of chaos, but it is the part by which we survive. It is the twist which makes the all-devouring serpent catch its own tail, swallowing itself before it can annihilate the world.

  I did not appreciate any of this at the time: when I was struck, a reflex action sent my fists up to block the blow. I was hurled across the room as though by a giant hand. Thinking back, I assume the knuckledusters must have caused a short circuit that made the apparatus explode in such dramatic fashion. A one-in-a-million chance, but Ross was always lucky, and chance was serving his ends.

  I rolled to my feet, and the fireworks were still in progress on Nye’s side of the table. Ross’s side darkened. There had been enough power there to kill Ross instantly a hundred times over. The electrical attachments fell away from his head as I watched, leaving small burned circles. Ross slumped forward, and a fine ash ran out of his open eye sockets. Ross’s skin was perfectly intact, but everything inside his skull was a charred mass.