“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” intoned the priest. Ross had certainly been reduced to dust and ashes. As for his immortal soul, and whether it had a separate existence from that being that called itself Nyarlathotep, that was impossible for me to say. Perhaps it was merely another spin around the whirligig for him, as Ross had appeared to believe. As always, when things receded in time, it became harder and harder to believe what I had seen. Both of them had been mad to greater or lesser degrees, and I no longer had so much faith in the reliability of my own senses.
Sally looked neat and dignified. She cried more than I expected, probably more from the memories of losing her own husband three years ago, as she had not even known Ross. But she recovered quickly when we were walking back, arm in arm. Instead of going to the nearest entrance, we walked around the long way, past the rows of stone urns and broken pillars and angels.
Sally blew her nose and then said, in a normal tone, “It’s good to get it over with and give him a proper send-off,” she said. “He saved your life, and I’ll always be grateful for that. Poor man.”
“He was a friend,” I said. “And a hero.”
“He wouldn’t have succeeded without you,” she said with a sideways look.
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t have got through it without you,” I said.
“You did the same for me,” she said. “After I had my breakdown, I’d never have recovered if you hadn’t brought Mr Yang to hypnotise me. Once he’d shown me how to push the memories away, I started living again.” She shook her head, the black veil rustling. “I’d still be stuck with the nuns if it wasn’t for you.”
“So, we’re even,” I said.
I stopped there among the gravestones and turned to her. Sally’s upturned face was curious, but not unhappy. Black was a good colour for her.
“You’ll be burying me next,” I said, “sooner or later. If I manage to stay out of prison or another mental asylum, that is. Being around me is dangerous. You took some risks helping me, and you’ve got your little boy to think about.”
I was thinking of Miss De Vere. I had received her telegram the morning after the events in the asylum; she requested a full report as soon as possible. Communications had been re-established.
“I know,” she said.
“I can’t give you respectability, or money, or a stable home,” I said. “Stick with me, and all you’ll get is danger and mad adventures.”
There was a long silence as she considered this.
“Well, Harry Stubbs,” she said, and she was smiling. “If that’s a proposal, then I accept.”
I was speechless. Even after everything that had happened, she would not be put off. Sally believed in me more than I believed in myself. She had kept faith when nobody else had. And, despite of the prospect of more horrors ahead, she was determined to stand by my side.
It would take a heart of stone, which I do not possess, to resist such tender devotion.
Reaching awkwardly under my shirt, and I felt to where a ring with a star-shaped stone hung around my neck then snapped the fine chain. I did not exactly produce the ring with an immediate flourish, due to the awkwardness of coping with a multiplicity of layers of clothing, but Sally was patient.
I took her hand and slipped the ring onto the third finger. It fit perfectly.
Editor’s Note
Stubbs’s account appears to tally with historical records and other sources.
Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy was a pioneering meteorologist, who founded what is now known as the Met Office and invented the term “weather forecast.” Many were sceptical of the possibility of weather prediction, and this contributed to his eventual suicide. As well as introducing the barometer, FitzRoy advocated the use of the storm glass, an instrument apparently derived from Italian alchemical work. Although still popular in some quarters, the storm glass is now considered useless by mainstream meteorologists. FitzRoy is better known as the captain of the Beagle during Darwin’s voyage of discovery.
The sect of Judwalis, and the significance of gyres, are described W.B. Yeats’s esoteric work, A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka. Yeats did not distinguish greatly between objective fact and revelation, claiming that truth could not be discovered, only revealed, so the factual content of this work is dubious. The date of A Vision, 1925, coinciding with Stubbs’s account is presumably coincidental.
The summoning of the Egyptian Astral by Annie Horniman’s group, The Sphere, has been well documented. (See, for example, Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford’s, The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875-1947 ). The group was a splinter organisation of the Golden Dawn, of which Yeats was also a member. The summoning was achieved by Horniman’s protégée, actress Florence Farr, with the fragment from a coffin-case in the British Museum. The coffin was originally believed to belong to an Egyptian noblewoman called Mutemmenu. Later museum dating and x-rays have shown that the mummy in the case was actually male and from a later era. Why a male body was padded to appear female and concealed in another’s coffin remains unknown.
The supposed Pharaoh, Nyarlathotep—even the name is disputed—remains a shadowy figure. One theory suggests he was an apostate (similar to Akhenaten) who considered himself to be the incarnation of the serpent-god Apep, representing primordial chaos. Apep was depicted in Egyptian religious art as the opponent of the sun god Ra, but never worshipped. The most detailed account of Nyarlathotep is provided by H.P. Lovecraft’s monograph of the same name. As with Yeats’s book, this is a work of revelation rather than scholarship, and its accuracy must be considered highly doubtful.
WB
Master of Chaos (The Harry Stubbs Adventures Book 4) Page 25