He went upstairs about half past eight. I returned to the bar and had a couple of raw Turkish brandies and thought hopeful thoughts about the stunning German granddaughters. Somewhere about ten, as I was considering going to bed, a waiter appeared and said, “You are Mr. Timothy Walker?”
“Yes.”
“Your brother Charles is at the security gate and asks that you come out to meet him.”
Mystified, I went rushing out into the courtyard. The hotel grounds are locked down every night and nobody is admitted except guests and the guests of guests. I saw the glare of headlights just beyond the gate. Charlie’s car.
“What’s up, bro?”
His eyes were wild. He gestured at me with furious impatience.
“In. In!” Almost before I closed the door he spun the car around and was zooming down the narrow, winding road back to Seljuk. He was hunched over the wheel in the most peculiar rigid way.
“Charlie?”
“Exactly what did you experience,” he said tightly, “when we pulled that marble slab out of the wall?”
My reply was carefully vague.
“Tell me,” he said. “Be very precise.”
“I don’t want you to laugh at me, Charlie.”
“Just tell me.”
I took a deep breath. “Well, then. I imagined that I heard far-off music. I had a kind of vision of—well, someplace weird and mysterious. I thought I smelled perfume. The whole thing lasted maybe half a second and then it was over.”
He was silent a moment.
Then he said, in a strange little quiet way, “It was the same for me, bro.”
“You denied it. I asked you, and you said no, Charlie.”
“Well, I lied. It was the same for me.” His voice had become very odd—thin, tight, quavering. Everything about him right now was tight. Something had to pop. The car was traveling at maybe eighty miles an hour on that little road, and I feared for my life. After a very long time he said, “Do you think there’s any possibility, Tim, that we might have let something out of that hole in the ground when we broke those seals and pulled that slab out?”
I stared at him. “That’s crazy, Charlie.”
“I know it is. Just answer me: do you think we felt something moving past us as we opened that chamber?”
“Hey, we’re too old to be telling each other spook stories, bro.”
“I’m being serious.”
“Bullshit you are,” I said. “I hate it when you play with me like this.”
“I’m not playing,” Charlie said, and he turned around so that he was practically facing me for a moment. His face was twisted with strain. “Timmo, some goddamned thing that looks awfully much like Diana of Ephesus has been walking around in the ruins since sundown. Three people I know of have seen her. Three very reliable people.”
I couldn’t believe that he was saying stuff like this. Not Charlie.
“Keep your eyes on the road, will you?” I told him. “You’ll get us killed driving like that.”
“Do you know how much it costs me to say these things? Do you know how lunatic it sounds to me? But she’s real. She’s there. She was sealed up in that hole, and we let her out. The foreman of the excavations has seen her, and Judy, the staff artist, and Mike Dornan, the ceramics guy.”
“They’re fucking with your head, Charlie. Or you’re fucking with mine.”
“No. No. No. No.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To look for her. To find out what the hell it is that those people think they saw. I’ve got to know, Tim. This time, I’ve absolutely got to know.”
The desperation in Charlie’s voice was something new in my experience of him. I’ve absolutely got to know. Why? Why? It was all too crazy. And dragging me out like this: why? To bear witness? To help him prove to himself that he actually was seeing the thing that he was seeing, if indeed he saw it? Or, maybe, to help him convince himself that there was nothing there to see? But he wasn’t going to see anything. I was sure of that.
“Charlie,” I said. “Oh, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie, this isn’t happening, is it? Not really.”
* * *
We pulled up outside the main gate of the ruins. A watchman was posted there, a Turk. He stepped quickly aside as Charlie went storming through into the site. I saw flashlights glowing in the distance, and then four or five American-looking people. Charlie’s colleagues, the archaeologists.
“Well?” Charlie yelled. He sounded out of control.
A frizzy-haired woman of about forty came up from somewhere to our left. She looked as wild-eyed and agitated as Charlie. For the first time I began to think this might not be just some goofy practical joke.
“Heading east,” the woman blurted. “Toward the stadium or maybe all the way out to the goddess sanctuary. Dick saw it too. And Edward thinks he did.”
“Anybody get a photo?”
“Not that I know of,” the woman said.
“Come on,” Charlie said to me, and went running off at an angle to the direction we had just come. Frantically I chased after him. He was chugging uphill, into the thorny scrub covering the unexcavated areas of the city. By moonlight I saw isolated shattered pillars rising from the ground like broken teeth, and tumbledown columns that had been tossed around like so many toothpicks. As I came alongside him he said, “There’s a little sanctuary of the mother-goddess back there. Wouldn’t that be the logical place that she’d want to go to?”
“For shit’s sake, Charlie! What are you saying?”
He kept on running, giving me no answer. I fought my way up the hill through a tangle of brambles and canes that slashed at me like daggers, all the while wondering what the hell we were going to find on top. We were halfway up when shouts came to us from down the hill, people behind us waving and pointing. Charlie halted and listened, frowning. Then he swung around and started sprinting back down the hill. “She’s gone outside the ruins,” he called to me over his shoulder. “Through the fence, heading into town! Come on, Tim!”
I went running after him, scrambling downhill, then onward along the main entrance road and onto the main highway. I’m in good running shape, but Charlie was moving with a maniacal zeal that left me hard pressed to keep up with him. Twenty feet apart, we came pounding down the road past the museum and into town. All the dinky restaurants were open, even this late, and little knots of Turks had emerged from them to gather in the crossroads. Some were kneeling in prayer, hammering their heads against the pavement, and others were wildly gesticulating at one other in obvious shock and bewilderment. Charlie, without breaking stride, called out to them in guttural Turkish and got a whole babble of replies.
“Ayasuluk Hill,” he said to me. “That’s the direction she’s going in.”
We crossed the broad boulevard that divides the town in half. As we passed the bus station half a dozen men came running out of a side street in front of us, screaming as though they had just been disemboweled. You don’t expect to hear adult male Turks screaming. They are a nation of tough people, by and large. These fellows went flying past us without halting, big men with thick black mustaches. Their eyes were wide and gleaming like beacons, their faces rigid and distended with shock and horror, as though twenty devils were coming after them.
“Charlie—”
“Look there,” he said, in an utterly flat voice, and pointed into the darkness.
Something—something—was moving away from us down that side street, something very tall and very strange. I saw a tapering conical body, a hint of weird appendages, a crackling blue-white aura. It seemed to be floating rather than walking, carried along by a serene but inexorable drifting motion almost as if its feet were several inches off the ground. Maybe they were. As we watched, the thing halted and peered into the open window of a house. There was a flash of blinding light, intense but short-lived. Then the front door popped open and a bunch of frantic Turks came boiling out like a pack of Keystone Cops, running in sixty directions at
once, yelling and flinging their arms about as though trying to surrender.
One of them tripped and went sprawling down right at the creature’s feet. He seemed unable to get up; he knelt there all bunched up, moaning and babbling, shielding his face with outspread hands. The thing paused and looked down, and seemed to reach its arms out in fluid gestures, and the blue-white glow spread for a moment like a mantle over the man. Then the light withdrew from him and the creature, gliding smoothly past the trembling fallen man, continued on its serene silent way toward the dark hill that loomed above the town.
“Come,” Charlie said to me.
We went forward. The creature had disappeared up ahead, though we caught occasional glimpses of the blue-white light as it passed between the low little buildings of the town. We reached the man who had tripped; he had not arisen, but lay face down, shivering, covering his head with his hands. A low rumbling moan of fear came steadily from him. From in front of us, hoarse cries of terror drifted to us from here and there as this villager or that encountered the thing that was passing through their town, and now and again we could see that cool bright light, rising steadily above us until finally it was shining down from the upper levels of Ayasuluk Hill.
“You really want to go up there?” I asked him.
He didn’t offer me an answer, nor did he stop moving forward. I wasn’t about to turn back either, I realized. Willy-nilly I followed him to the end of the street, around a half-ruined mosque at the base of the hill, and up to a lofty metal gate tipped with spikes. Stoned on our own adrenaline, we swarmed up that gate like Crusaders attacking a Saracen fortress, went over the top, dropped down in the bushes on the far side. I was able to see, by the brilliant gleam of the full moon, the low walls of the destroyed Basilica of St. John just beyond, and, behind it, the massive Byzantine fortification that crowned the hill. Together we scrambled toward the summit.
“You go this way, Tim. I’ll go the other and we’ll meet on the far side.”
“Right.”
I didn’t know what I was looking for. I just ran, leftward around the hill. Along the ramparts, into the church, down the empty aisles, out the gaping window-frames.
Suddenly I caught a glimpse of something up ahead. Light, cool white light, an unearthly light very much like moonlight, only concentrated into a fiercely gleaming point hovering a couple of yards above the ground, thirty or forty feet in front of me.
“Charlie?” I called. My voice was no more than a hoarse gasp. I edged forward. The light was so intense now that I was afraid it might damage my eyes. But I continued to stare, as if the thing would disappear if I were to blink for even a millionth of a second.
I heard the wailing music again.
Soft, distant, eerie. Cables rubbing together in a dark shaft. This time it seemed to be turned outward, rising far beyond me, reaching into distant space or perhaps some even more distant dimension. Something calling, announcing its regained freedom, summoning—whom? What?
“Charlie?” I said. It was a barely audible croak. “Charlie?” I noticed him now, edging up from the other side. I pointed at the source of the light. He nodded.
I moved closer. The light seemed to change, to grow momentarily less fierce. And then I was able to see her.
She wasn’t exactly identical to the statues in the museum. Her face wasn’t really a face, at least not a human one. She had beady eyes, faceted the way an insect’s are. She had an extra set of arms, little dangling ones, coming out at her hips. And, though the famous breasts were there, at least fifty of them and maybe the hundred of legend, I don’t think they were actual breasts because I don’t think this creature was a mammal. More of a reptile, I would guess: leathery skin, more or less scaly the way a snake’s is, and tiny dots of nostrils, and a black slithery tongue, jagged like a lightning bolt, that came shooting quickly out between her slitted lips again and again and again, as though checking on the humidity or the ambient temperature or some such thing.
I saw, and Charlie saw. For a fraction of a second I wanted to drop down on my knees and rub my forehead in the ground and give worship. And then I just wanted to run.
I said, “Charlie, I definitely think we ought to get the hell out of—”
“Cool it, bro,” he said. He stepped forward. Walked right up to her, stared her in the face. I was terrified for him, seeing him get that close. She dwarfed him. He was like a doll in front of her. How had a thing this big managed to fit in that opening in the tunnel wall? How had those ancient Greeks ever managed to get her in there in the first place?
That dazzling light crackled and hissed around her like some sort of electrical discharge. And yet Charlie stood his ground, unflinching, rock-solid. The expression on my brother’s face was a nearly incomprehensible mixture of anger and fear.
He jabbed his forefinger through the air at her.
“You,” he said to her. It was almost a snarl. “Tell me what the hell you are.”
They were maybe ten feet apart, the man and the—what? The goddess? The monster?
Charlie had to know.
“You speak English?” he demanded. “Turkish? Tell me. I’m the one who let you out of that hole. Tell me what you are. I want to know.” Eye to eye, face to face. “Something from another planet, are you, maybe? Another dimension? An ancient race that used to live on the Earth before humans did?”
“Charlie,” I whispered.
But he wouldn’t let up. “Or maybe you’re an actual and literal goddess,” he said. His tone had turned softer, a mocking croon now. “Diana of Ephesus, is that who you are? Stepping right out of the pages of mythology in all your fantastic beauty? Well, do me some magic, goddess, if that’s who you are. Do a miracle for me, just a little one.” The angry edge was back in his voice. “Turn that tree into an elephant. Turn me into a sheep, if you can. What’s the matter, Diana, you no spikka da English? All right. Why the hell should you? But how about Greek, then? Surely you can understand Greek.”
“For Christ’s sake, Charlie—”
He ignored me. It was as if I wasn’t there. He was talking to her in Greek, now. I suppose it was Greek. It was harsh, thick-sounding, jaggedly rhythmic. His eyes were wild and his face was flushed with fury. I was afraid that she would hurl a thunderbolt of blue-white light at him, but no, no, she just stood there through his whole harangue, as motionless as those statues of her in the little museum, listening patiently as my furious brother went on and on and on at her in the language of Homer and Sophocles.
He stopped, finally. Waited as if expecting her to respond.
No response came. I could hear the whistling sound of her slow steady breathing; occasionally there was some slight movement of her body; but that was all.
“Well, Diana?” Charlie said. “What do you have to say for yourself, Diana?”
Silence.
“You fraud!” Charlie cried, in a great and terrible voice. “You fake! Some goddess you are! You aren’t real at all, and that’s God’s own truth. You aren’t even here. You’re nothing but a fucking hallucination. A projection of some kind. I bet I could walk up to you and put my hand right through you.”
Still no reaction. Nothing. She just stood there, those faceted eyes glittering, that little tongue flickering. Saying nothing, offering him no help.
That was when he flipped out. Charlie seemed to puff up as if about to explode with rage, and went rushing toward her, arms upraised, fists clenched in a wild gesture of attack. I wanted desperately to stop him, but my feet were frozen in place. I was certain that he was going to die. We both were.
“Damn you!” he roared, with something like a sob behind the fury. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!”
But before he could strike her, her aura flared up around her like a sheath, and for a moment the air was full of brilliant flares of cold flame that went whirling and whirling around her in a way that was too painful to watch. I caught a glimpse of Charlie staggering back from her, and I backed away myself, covering my face w
ith my forearm, but even so the whirling lights came stabbing into my brain, forcing me to the ground. It seemed then that they all coalesced into a single searing point of white light, which rose like a dagger into the sky, climbing, climbing, becoming something almost like a comet, and—then—
Vanishing.
And then I blacked out.
It was just before dawn when I awakened. My eyes fluttered open almost hesitantly. The moon was gone, the first pink streaks of light beginning to appear. Charlie sat beside me. He was already awake.
“Where is it?” I asked immediately.
“Gone, bro.”
“Gone?”
He nodded. “Without a trace. If it ever was up here with us at all.”
“What do you mean, if?”
“If, that’s what I mean. Who the hell knows what was going on up here last night? Do you?”
“No.”
“Well, neither do I. All I know is that it isn’t going on anymore. There’s nobody around but me and thee.”
He was trying to sound like the old casual Charlie I knew, the man who had been everywhere and done everything and took it all in his stride. But there was a quality in his voice that I had never heard in it before, something entirely new.
“Gone?” I said, stupidly. “Really gone?”
“Really gone, yes. Vanished. You hear how quiet everything is?” Indeed the town, spread out below us, was silent except for the crowing of the first roosters and the far-off sound of a farm tractor starting up somewhere.
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
“Fine,” he said. “Absolutely fine.”
But he said it through clenched teeth. I couldn’t bear to look at him. A thing had happened here that badly needed explanation, and no explanations were available, and I knew what that must be doing to him. I kept staring at the place where that eerie being had been, and I remembered that single shaft of light that had taken its place, and I felt a crushing sense of profound and terrible loss. Something strange and weirdly beautiful and utterly fantastic and inexplicable had been loose in the world for a little while, after centuries of—what? imprisonment? hibernation?—and now it was gone, and it would never return. It had known at once, I was sure, that this was no era for goddesses. Or whatever it was.
The Madness of Cthulhu Anthology (Volume One): 1 Page 13