He Who Walks in Shadow

by Brett J. Talley

  “Enough,” Carter said. “Enough of your lies. If you are going to kill us, at least do us the courtesy of not boring us to death with your absurdities.”

  Thunder rumbled through the clouds. I wondered if Carter had finally done it, if after all these years, he would lay us low. But Nyarlathotep had other plans, and the thunder turned to his own laughter.

  “Would you give them to me then?” he said with a smile. “Would you make forfeit their lives, sacrifice them for your greater good? Ah, I see in your eyes that you are tempted. You didn’t consider that, did you? That perhaps if the sacrifice is great indeed, it might be enough to consign me once again to the light, until another time when the stars come right and my servants tear down the wall that divides the here from the there? Would it be worth it to you, to kill them all to kill me?”

  In that moment, I admit that I feared what I saw in my old friend’s face as much as I feared the demon before me. We were truly pawns in a game I did not fully comprehend, and these two masters were determined to pin the other, no matter the cost of the gambit. Then Nyarlathotep’s eyes fell upon me.

  “Ah, yes, what a blow it would be to lose dear Henry.” He stepped forward, and in an instant he had crossed the yards between us, as fast as lightning might travel a mile. He was inches from my face. His hand reached up and caressed my cheek. He was cold personified, and the air turned to ice around us, and even my thoughts seemed to freeze. “He who has stood with you through so many confrontations. Perhaps that would add power to the spell, his blood. Perhaps in spilling it you would undo me. Perhaps you should try.”

  “There are other ways,” Carter cried. “Other ways to defeat you. You may revel in the blood of the innocent, but we do not. The holy have tools you cannot imagine. Our ways are not your ways.”

  Now there was no question that the thunder that followed bellowed from the mouth of Nyarlathotep, so deep was his cackling cry.

  “Holy. Good. Evil. You cling to these like a child to its mother’s breast. But they are only illusions. In this world as in all others, there is only will and power and sacrifice.”

  Nyarlathotep stretched forth his hands. Across the stone plain, Zann stood. His eyes went wide, and then they went to the rod that he clasped in his hands, the one he had taken from the soldier beside him, I suppose in an effort to defend himself. The Staff of Dyzan began to quake. Cracks formed along its surface, from which blood red light poured. The air around us rippled. There was a sound of splitting rock and crashing waves. In one instant of dark fire and unaccountable sound the staff exploded. Down we all went, and even Nyarlathotep stumbled. In that instant, he seemed diminished, as if all the life had gone from him. I wondered then what ungodly power it must have taken to destroy the staff, a power of the purest hate drawn from a sacrifice of the purest love.

  I know Nyarlathotep intended to kill us all then, but as he stood, bent over, his face a mask of rage and pain, I saw a tinge of fear in his eyes, too. Great was his triumph, but mighty was the cost, and if ever he was vulnerable to some hitherto unknown attack, it was now. He stumbled to the parapet overlooking the salt flat. He glanced back at us as we struggled to our feet, and there was a promise in his gaze that we would see him soon.

  “You think that before your beginning there was nothing?” he almost whispered. “You are wrong. There was the deep, and the dark, and the void. And there shall be again.”

  He dropped over the side of the wall, there was a sound like a clapping of hands, and he was gone.

  The German soldiers—the ones who remained alive—ran. Carter pulled himself up from his knees and stumbled to where Zann lay. A shard of the staff had driven through his throat, and blood poured out around it. Zann reached up and grasped Carter by the shoulder. Carter leaned over, and Zann whispered into his ear. When he released his grip, he took two more gasps, and he was gone.

  We stood on the summit of that ancient cathedral, bathed in blood and death. And all hope, it seemed, was lost.

  Chapter 35

  Excerpt from Enûma Anu Enlil, Tablet 71, as translated by Dr. John Dee, 1567

  When upon the unseen plains of Leng,

  The night black stars of Yorn align,

  The ancients of days will unite to sing

  The coming of the Yellow Sign.

  Journal of Henry Armitage

  July 28, 1933

  The night was passed fitfully by all. The brothers generously provided us lodging, and we did not need to leave the island. Their kindness was surprising, perhaps, given that we had only a few hours hence broken into their cloister with the intentions of stealing their most prized possession. But now, whatever we had been before, whatever crimes we might have committed against them, all was forgotten and forgiven. They, the Tzadikim Nistarim, had sworn a solemn oath to guard the world against Nyarlathotep’s return. With the staff destroyed and the dark one walking free, new alliances were necessary.

  When I went to Carter’s room this morning, it was evident to me that he had slept little, if at all. The Incendium Maleficarum lay open before him; with Zann’s death, its old master had become the new.

  “Anything?” I said as I walked over to where he sat. Carter turned a page and sighed.

  “Nothing. I stare at pages I have studied more times than I wished, looking for a secret, a code. But I don’t even know where to start.” He closed it with a thud. “The monastery’s library is vast and deep, but it would take a lifetime to understand it. And I don’t think we have that much time.”

  He picked up an open volume and flipped it around to where I could see it.

  “It’s an English translation of the 71st tablet of the Enûma Anu Enlil. Done by John Dee, of all people. I’d know that handwriting anywhere.”

  I was astonished. “The 71st tablet, you say? But it was lost, if it ever even existed…and even that’s unlikely.”

  Carter smiled, albeit wearily. The exhaustion hung heavily on him. “In a collision between your learning and your eyes, Henry, believe your eyes.”

  And Carter was right. The handwriting was distinctly Dee’s, the phrasing and syntax, a classic Elizabethan take on a Babylonian text. The document was short, the central thrust some sort of riddle I did not understand.

  “I take it you have a theory.”

  “I do.”

  “And what do you make of it then? The ‘night black stars of Yorn’? ‘The plains of Leng’? It’s a riddle if I’ve ever seen one, with no key to break it.”

  Carter leaned back in his chair and fixed me with that gaze I knew too well. Even now, the excitement was still there, the daring. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think it’s pretty straight forward.”

  “But the Plains of Leng…”

  “A limitless plateau in a world beyond our own, where darkness and light collide, and the Great Old Ones await the time of their return. The ancient texts tell us that the gods will rise when the stars are right. Now we know what that means. It’s an astronomical alignment all right, just not one in the sky we know. And when it happens…” He held up a hand, and in doing so waved away all of human existence and all we’ve ever known.

  “And how exactly does that help us?” I asked as I sat in a chair on the other side of the room. “If we can’t see it, how can we know it’s happening?”

  “Well, I have a theory about that, too.”

  “I suspected you might.”

  “Take what we know. The darkness and the light, the eternal dichotomy, the mirror of this world and the next. What if it really is that simple? What if, when the black stars of Yorn align above the plains of Leng, we experience our own astronomical phenomenon?”

  “All right, given that we have absolutely nothing to go on, I’ll accept that as a possibility. But I still don’t see how it helps us.”

  “It was 1919 when we last faced Nyarlathotep, when we stopped him the first time, albeit temporarily. He came back then for a reason, and had we not interrupted his plans, I have no doubt he would have accom
plished the task set before him.” Carter searched through the pile of books on the desk. It could not be denied—he’d done quite a bit of reading while I pretended to sleep. “Ah, here it is.” His hands found an astronomical almanac. “Now look at this. Some six months later, in June 1920, Venus, Mercury, Earth, and Mars, all the inner planets, stood in perfect alignment to the sun. It’s a rare occurrence. It happens only twice every few hundred years, exactly thirteen years apart.”

  “Thirteen years?” Like the switch of a light, illumination.

  “Precisely. If you take a look at that French newspaper on the table next to you, a few pages in is a story from the Académie des Sciences. It confirms it. That same alignment is upon us again, in three days’ time.”

  “Three days?”

  Carter nodded gravely. “The stars are right, my friend. The veil is thin. And if we don’t stop him, Nyarlathotep will open the gate, and this time there will be no closing it.”

  “But how can we? The Staff is destroyed. The Oculus, still missing. We have nothing.”

  There was a knock on the door, and Rachel entered without waiting for an answer.

  “Hi, Henry,” she said casually. “Figured I’d find you here.”

  “I’ll leave you two to it,” I said and began to rise. But she would have none of it.

  “No, no. Stay. It’s about time we stopped walking on egg shells around each other. We have much to discuss.”

  “And we were just discussing it,” I said, as I fell back into my chair.

  “You don’t look like you’ve slept,” she said, as she sat beside her father’s desk. “In fact, if I’m being honest with you, you look terrible.”

  Carter coughed a little laugh, and Rachel rested her hand against his cheek. For a long while, she simply looked at him. Her eyes were soft, softer than I had seen them in some time. The events of the night before had shaken her, as they had shaken us all. Perhaps they had done more than that.

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I know you both did what you thought you must, all those years ago. And after what I saw last night, maybe you were right to do it. In fact, I’d say you probably were.”

  I was surprised to see Carter shake his head. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think so. Something Nyarlathotep said last night struck me. In the midst of his lies was a moment of truth. I’ve always thought, as a matter of faith, I suppose, that the lines between good and evil were bright and clear. I believed it was possible that one who would see the righteous triumph could keep himself pure. I guess I had to believe that. But it’s not true. I can’t say I put much stock in Nietzsche, but on this point he was right. In a conflict such as this, it is not only our blood that we sacrifice, not only the price of our lives that must be paid to keep men safe. It is our virtue and, if need be, our very souls.”

  The sun crept through the ancient panes of the great windows that made up the eastern wall of the chamber. Outside, a gull called. Life moved on, and I wished fervently that I could be amongst it, instead of there, the weight of all things bearing down on us.

  “I guess what I’m trying to say,” Carter continued, smiling wanly, “is that there is no need to apologize. We did what we had to do. That doesn’t make it right.”

  For several minutes no one spoke. I watched as Rachel held her father’s hands across the desk, him deep in thought, her studying him with an expression that almost seemed pitying.

  “Well,” she said finally. “No use sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves. What do we do now? And before you try to cut me out of this, you can forget it. Inspector Villard left this morning to conduct the body of Margot and…” She hesitated over the name. “And…the others back to Paris. He’ll have a lot to work out between the German embassy and the French government, not to mention explaining what happened here. That leaves just us. Just the three of us. Whatever needs to be done, we will be the ones doing it.”

  “And time is short,” I added, leaning forward. “Your father has worked out that we only have three days before Nyarlathotep will make his move.”

  “Even more reason to act quickly.”

  “But how?” I asked. “The last time we faced him we were fortunate, and even for that fortune we paid a horrible price.”

  “Rachel,” Carter said finally, “do you still have the necklace I gave you the day after William’s funeral? The golden sphere?”

  Rachel’s hand went to her neck. “Of course. I never take it off.”

  “Can you make an exception, just this once?”

  Rachel’s eyes were filled with confusion, but there was also trust there, trust that perhaps had been missing in recent days. She nodded almost imperceptibly and reached behind her back. A moment’s fumbling, and the chain came loose. Rachel lifted the orb from within her blouse and dropped it into Carter’s outstretched hand.

  Carter held it between his thumb and his forefinger, and it shimmered in the morning light. He slid the chain out from the tiny circle of gold that ringed it, and took the sphere in his hands.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you.”

  He continued to work the orb, and Rachel leaned forward to see exactly what he was doing.

  “I had my reasons. Some of them were selfish. I knew that you would hate me. I knew that you would blame me. And why not? I blamed myself. It was my fault.”

  Carter’s hands jerked once, and there was an audible “click” that seemed to fill the room.

  “But I had other reasons to keep some things from you. And now it is time to tell you what really happened all those years ago. Hold out your hand.”

  Rachel did as she was asked. Carter separated the orb in half, and for an instant, something inside caught the light and burned like a fire. He turned the hemisphere over Rachel’s hand. I stood, and Rachel gasped.

  “Now you should know the truth.”

  Chapter 36

  Tunguska Field Journal of Dr. Carter Weston

  December 7, 1919

  I raised my pistol. I pointed it at William’s heart. I said the words.

  “A ne a mai. Ma lei. Ma dooz.”

  I pulled the trigger, and time slowed down. The bullet struck William. The fire extinguished. The evil fled. And for one brief moment, what had been William was with us again. For one brief moment, before he died in my arms.

  I held him there. I did not feel the cold. I did not feel the wind. I felt only this man, this boy, the only son I had ever had, the life gone from him. The things I have seen in this life. The evils. And yet it was then I finally lost the last shred of innocence I still held.

  I had murdered him. Whatever else could be said for what we did, for what we had to do, it all came down to that. I had murdered him, and long before that moment. When I took him away from Rachel. I might as well have put a bullet in his brain.

  “Carter…”

  I looked at Henry and I could not bear the pity in his eyes.

  “We have to go, Carter. We don’t know what else is out there.”

  I clutched William’s body close to mine. “Go get a sheet, from the horses. Go get it and bring it back.”

  “Carter, there’s no time…”

  “There’s time! We aren’t leaving him. Not like this. Not here.”

  Henry and Rostov exchanged worried glances. But they both knew that I would not be moved. They might leave me there, but I would not leave William.

  “Come, doctor. We’ll go together and get the sheet. Leave him for now.”

  I nodded to Rostov in thanks. Henry said nothing. Soon, I was alone.

  I wept. Wept for all that had been lost, all that had been sacrificed. I let myself fall into despair, to question all that I had done, all the choices that I had made. Every turn I had taken now seemed to be the wrong one. And I wondered what future was now forever foreclosed, what doors were shut, what paths untraveled. For William. For Rachel. For their children that would have been. For their child that would be. All of it, lost. All of it, sacrificed. And I had done it on purpose. I h
ad made that choice. It was the power that I needed, and I had taken it.

  So deep in my own sorrow was I that I barely noticed that the shadow in which I sat had retreated. The sun was still absent, the gloom that covered the copse of trees total, but the darkness around me had lifted.

  A glow moved amongst the bone-white cabers. I lowered William to the earth and stood, my grief replaced with rage.

  “Come out!” I said, drawing my pistol. “Show yourself!”

  The light seemed to move away. I ran to the nearest tree, throwing myself behind it. Even in the cold, the sweat broke across my brow. I led with my gun, glancing around the trunk. The light faded into the distance. I would not let it escape.

  I ran after it, heedless of the danger, the skeletal remains of the forest whooshing past me in a blur. My feet did not stumble, my path was true. Hatred drove me, revenge prodded me on. I wanted to see Nyarlathotep again. I wanted to kill him one more time. Even if it was at the cost of my own life.

  I ran after the light until I seemed to plunge into its midst, until it surrounded me, bathing me in its luminance. Yet no torch, no man-made fire cast it. It was the cloak of a power beyond anything I had experienced in that frozen tundra.

  Before me stood William.

  He was alive. Smiling, standing relaxed with his hands in his pockets, that cocky gleam in the eye that we all loved. My mouth fell open, and for a long moment in that dim glow we gazed across the middle distance at each other. I turned and looked back from where I had run. Through the trees, I could see the shadowed figure of William’s body lying on the cold earth.

  “Who are you?”

  He shook his head and grinned, putting one finger to his mouth. “Shhhh!”

  The sound filled my mind. The apparition turned away, a pirouette completed in half-time, and began to walk further into the forest. I watched him go, rooted to the spot. He turned back and looked over his shoulder. He beckoned to me, his hand moving as if through water, and I knew I must follow.