The emperor spent the better part of a year searching for the goat's-meat vendor before admitting that he was indeed the last living man in Miraab. He spent five years expecting rescue before admitting that he was indeed the last living man in all of Tasuun. He learned to open for himself such doors as remained on their hinges and to step on his own cockroaches, but the necessity of learning to clothe himself never arose.
Perhaps a hundred years passed before the full import of the goddess's parting words sank in. Flinging himself off walls and stabbing himself with sharp instruments did no good except to cause him some pain and temporary inconvenience.
He vowed to placate her by mending his ways, but he reached the conclusion that it was impossible to properly serve the Goddess of Iniquity without others on whom he might practice her preachments. She probably sneered at him when he swept her temples and polished her idols. He came to doubt that she would consider it iniquitous at all when he masturbated on her images, but he found it impossible to break a habit of two centuries.
Whenever he happened to notice black grit under his fingernails, he would be reminded of Ataglutisia; and he would weep.
* * *
Beyond the Wall of Time
Jeff Combs was engrossed in his battered paperback of Interview with the Shaman, by Kermit Armitage, when thunder burst right over the hospital. It damn near knocked him off the toilet.
He'd lost his place, but finding it again was no problem. He'd read the book at least five times. The very passage he'd been re-reading had been highlighted in yellow:
I hesitated to drink this stronger infusion of stramonium, but Gray Eagle was insistent: “You must drink without fear. The Hounds of Tyndalos will sense your fear in the windy spaces between souls or in the waste times beyond millennia."
"I can't,” I said. “They'll know I'm afraid."
"Perhaps they already do,” Gray Eagle said. “They are not confined to the astral plane. They may burst in upon us even here, unseen, unheard, like a plague, but infinitely more terrible, a plague of the spirit."
Impelled by his urgency, I drank, and I instantly knew I had been fatally poisoned. But no, this was worse than death. A comet had descended from heaven to atomize my body and soul, I was being raped by a supernova, I was at once torn and burned and scattered....
...only to find myself slammed together in the body of Klarkash-Ton, a philosopher in the court of High Atlantis, where—
The bathroom door rattled under a furious fist. “Combs!” It was Nurse Johnstone.
“Shit,” he muttered, but she heard.
“Yes, Combs, that's what the lavatory is for, but that's not what you've been doing for the past hour and a half, is it?"
“I have this stomach bug,” he called, hastily pulling up his pants and wondering how to conceal the book. And it would have to be concealed. She suspected he was studying Hustler or some such, but to be discovered with this perfectly respectable paperback would be far worse. Dr. Wagner had warned him against prying into the patient's former life and “encouraging his delusions."
He bloused out his white uniform shirt, planning to hide the book there, but he'd forgotten the vial already tucked in a knot in the shirt-tail. He swore as it clattered to the floor.
“What the hell—” The nurse's voice was drowned out by a second peal of thunder.
He examined the little bottle. No harm done. He'd been astounded when he learned that Jimson weed, something he'd associated with coyotes and cowpokes, actually grew in the swamps of Massachusetts, and that it was the same Datura stramonium prescribed by Gray Eagle. He'd gathered a plastic kitchen-bag of seeds and leaves and flowers, mashed them, brewed them on his hotplate in a borrowed lobster-steamer, strained the broth through paper towels and boiled it down to two ounces of brown liquid, which should be strong enough to send the whole population of Boston back to Atlantis.
This time he just stuck the vial in his pocket. The book—he hated to do it, but while Nurse Johnstone was hammering again, he slid the lid off the toilet-tank and dropped it in. He could retrieve it and dry it out later. Maybe he wouldn't need to read it again, once he'd actually journeyed beyond the stars and the centuries with the two greatest minds of the twentieth century.
Even so, he felt a deep sense of sacrilege. Interview with the Shaman would one day be revered as the Bible is now. Every word of it was true, and every page vital to humanity's continued existence.
He flushed the toilet and opened the door.
“Sounds like you dropped your crack-vial,” the nurse said, alarmingly close to the truth. She frisked him, using only her hawk's eyes and bloodhound's nose. She was up to all the inmates’ tricks, and she regarded attendants as a more contemptible subspecies of inmate.
“What's that in your pocket?” she demanded.
His heart stopped. She'd caught him. But she meant his other pocket. He pulled out a wadded handkerchief, some keys and change, dropping the coins and stooping for them to distract her.
“What did you think, that I was glad to see you?” he said to distract her further.
“You're not going to last much longer around here, not with your attitude, mister!” she snapped, but he believed she wasn't entirely displeased.
“Is something the matter? You need me?"
“This weather. In the old days, before meds really worked, this place would be a madhouse on a night like this.” She giggled shrilly at her inadvertent joke. “But they're all a bunch of little lambs tonight. All except your special pal, Armitage. You did medicate him, right?"
“Just like it says on the chart."
“Well, he's been having one of his four-way arguments with himself all evening.” She shuddered. “Blocky seems to be winning."
Glaaki, you moron, he wanted to say, but of course he didn't.
“Check on him, will you? I can't stand to look at him. Or smell him. But I have doctor's authorization to shoot him full of Thorazine if the oral dose doesn't work.” She called after him, “And button your shirt, Combs! I know it's hard to tell the difference, but this is not a mosh-pit."
Glaaki certainly did seem to be winning, Jeff determined as soon as he unlocked the heavy door to the “Disturbed” wing and was assaulted by a roar that seemed unlikely to have emanated from any human throat. But the man was made of rubber: considering how widely he could open his mouth in his “Glaaki” phase, incredibly exhaling a stench of putrid fish, it was no surprise that he could expand his lungs like the bellows of an organ.
Of course if you believed Kermit Armitage, he was stuck between dimensions, and on a different but nearby plane he was largely composed of an amphibious abomination called Glaaki....
Whatever one chose to believe, Armitage was a phenomenon. According to Dr. Wagner, multiple personality disorder was a neurotic contrivance, and Armitage was the only paranoid schizophrenic in his experience who had ever exhibited the syndrome. Unlike other cases, his personalities weren't sequential. They were always present, fighting for control of his body.
Supermarket tabloids inclined more toward alien abduction theories. Armitage had disappeared in 1975 at the height of his popular success, to the intense relief of his colleagues at Harvard, who regarded his books about his conversations with a Native American shaman named Gray Eagle as an embarrassment to the university and to anthropology. Most scholars damned them as a pack of lies, a shameless pandering to the drug-crazed hippie anarchists who were then hammering at the gates of their button-down, ivy-covered sequestration.
Armitage had left the university hastily, claiming that Gray Eagle had died in Oklahoma, and that certain ceremonies must be performed over the body to prevent a malignant entity from conquering the earth. His colleagues were not terribly surprised when he vanished without a trace, especially since he was at the time awaiting trial on a charge of distributing psilocybin to some of his grad students.
Much as the university would have liked to sweep his memory under the rug, it was kept alive by the hippie a
narchists, even after most of them had evolved into sedate New Agers. His books never went out of print, and it stirred a ripple of small headlines when, twenty years later, Kermit Armitage himself was discovered writhing in the throes of an apparent seizure at an Indian burial mound near Binger, Oklahoma.
They didn't know who he was at first—just “some loony who tried to bite my head off,” in the words of an Oklahoma state trooper—but his fingerprints matched those of the missing professor, a fugitive still wanted by the FBI. Sent to question him, most reporters retreated in despair, although a rather bizarre interview saw print in Rolling Stone.
Reporters and police alike were baffled by one apparent anomaly: that although Armitage had been forty-nine years of age at the time of his disappearance, he now appeared to be no older. The doctors, however, refused to be baffled. Although granting his extraordinarily good physical shape for a man nearing seventy, they insisted that the determination of age was not an exact science.
Equally puzzling was the man's insistence—most of the time—that he was Khem-Bei Ramses, a British subject of Egyptian parentage, and, appropriately enough, a writer of weird fiction. It was suspected that he might have created and assumed this identity during his long absence, since such a person had indeed recently gone missing in England, but photographs of Ramses bore no resemblance at all to Armitage. It was more likely, anonymous police sources theorized, that the fugitive drug-guru had murdered the missing author. In his present condition, however, he was far beyond the reach of justice.
Just how far was obvious to Jeff Combs when he slid back the panel on the little, barred window to his padded cell. “Zkafka” and “Kzweig,” as the inmate referred to his right and left hands, twitched and wriggled furiously, snapping their fingers in angry debate, while the head—Ramses, presumably—drooped wearily. A sonorous and ominous rumbling might have been continued thunder beyond the walls, but Jeff suspected Glaaki was responsible.
“Professor?” Jeff called softly.
“My dear fellow, I have told you time and again that I am not a professor of anything, flattering as your use of that honorific may be. I implore you once again to contact the British embassy in Washington—"
“No, Mr. Ramses, I'm sorry, I have to talk to Professor Armitage. Please. Look, I didn't give you your meds. I haven't put you in restraints. Can't you return the favor by at least making an effort?"
“Zkafka” perked up, not unlike an attentive hand-puppet: in this case, a hand without a puppet. “Kzweig” writhed and twitched more furiously.
“Speak to me in English, professor, it does no good to point your antennae at me."
“Oh, bother!” said Ramses. The face rearranged itself in a less petulant look. Eerily, it continued to rearrange itself until the features changed. The skin-tone and even the eye-color seemed to lighten. Meanwhile, the right hand flopped to the floor as if suddenly paralyzed.
“What is it now, Combs?” The formerly British accent was now flat, hard Yankee, with a slight Ivy League overlay. “You can have no conception of the importance of the discussion you are interrupting—"
“I do have a conception, professor, really, I do. I read the interview you gave in—could you shut Glaaki, up, please?"
The inmate's face knotted. His stomach made a singularly disgusting gurgle. Could any human willfully make such noises with his digestive tract? Glaaki stopped roaring.
“What interview?"
“I've told you—well, I guess you were medicated when I told you."
“And I'm not, now. Yes, I guess I do owe you something for that. None of us can think straight with those confounded drugs in our system. But it's vitally important that I confer with Kzweig—"
“With Gray Eagle, you mean,” Jeff said, and Armitage nodded thoughtfully. “In the interview, you said that you discovered the ancient city of Kuen-Yian beneath the Indian mound. And you found Gray Eagle, the last survivor of that civilization. The rest of the population had projected their minds far, far into the future to take over a race of intelligent beetles."
“And we followed them,” Armitage said with a touch of bitterness. “Gray Eagle wasn't truly of Kuen-Yian, you know, he was a reptilian creature from Yoth. I think he was trying to exact his vengeance on them, on me, on every being and on every age he could reach—"
“No!” Jeff cried as Armitage's left hand leaped to his throat in an apparent effort at self-strangulation. He croaked helplessly as his face darkened and his eyes bulged. Glaaki roared again. But how could that being roar, when the man's windpipe was cut off?
Against regulations and his better judgment, Jeff unlocked the door and plunged into the cramped, foul-smelling cell to seize Armitage's left hand and pry it from his throat. The attendant's strength was taxed to the fullest in an effort to restrain the hand of a frail scholar at least twenty-five years his senior.
At last Armitage could whoop for air. “Oh—my—God! Thank you, thank—Kzweig! By God, sir, I'll cut you off! I'll chew you off, if I have to. Lie still, man."
The hand did as it was told. Warily, Jeff withdrew his aching fingers.
“You seem to ... ah ... have the upper hand now,” Jeff marveled.
“You are surprised? It's true, Gray Eagle, Kzweig, or whatever unpronounceable name he used while slithering around the depths of Yoth, has great powers. But now that we have shared the same body, the same mind, I possess those powers, too. And I am a human being, which still counts for something...."
“What are you staring at?” Jeff asked.
“Forgive me. Those tattoos of yours. They look oddly familiar.” The skulls and demons Jeff had acquired during the height of his Heavy Metal phase were supposed to be unsettling to outsiders, but the professor was the first person who had ever seemed truly horrified by them. Armitage at last averted his eyes as he said, “It's nothing, never mind."
“Anyway,” Jeff said, “you have to warn the world that Tulu, the being, the god, whatever, that brought the people of Kuen-Yian to earth in the first place, is in danger of rising from his eternal sleep, with horrible consequences for the human race."
“The human race will not be the only thing to suffer, young man. The result will be universally disastrous."
“And of course no one will believe you. They believe you're crazy even before you try telling them this story."
“Tact, obviously, is not—” The inmate sighed and moderated his tone: “No, of course, you're right."
“Then why don't you get out of this body? You've made jumps before, tremendous leaps into the future. Why not go back into the past and give yourself some breathing room while you figure out a way to alert people?"
“I can do that now as well as Gray Eagle could—better, perhaps. After all, it was that stupid reptile who transported us to England as a couple of giant cockroaches...."
Armitage paused to stare at his left hand, as did Jeff, but it accepted that judgment without so much as a twitch.
“But do you know what it requires?” Armitage said. “Absolute internal peace, total concentration, iron self-discipline—things that simply cannot be achieved when one is sharing a body with three other creatures, even without being deadened and disoriented by psychoactive drugs. If you knew the thoughts even now squirming in Glaaki's vile mind...."
“What if you had the right psychoactive drugs? The sort of drug that enabled you to project your mind back to the court of Kull of Atlantis?"
“Mescaline, you mean, or.... “Armitage's voice trailed off as he stared at the vial of muddy fluid Jeff had withdrawn from his pocket.
“Yes,” Jeff said. “Jimson weed. I've read your books, professor, I've memorized your books, I've even taken the drugs, I've tried—"
“Combs!” The voice of Nurse Johnstone rang down the corridor. “What the hell are you doing in there, Combs?"
“I want to go with you!” Jeff cried in desperation. “I want to stride through the glorious boulevards of Atlantis, I want to descend into the red-litten depths of
Yoth, I want to see the beings of Yuggoth take wing—"
“Then give me the damned bottle!” Armitage snapped, seizing it with his left hand and unstoppering it with his teeth. He drank.
“Good Lord,” he said, shivering as he proffered the remainder to Jeff. “Hold onto me, and—"
Jeff drank and clutched the inmate. At the same time the left hand, the Gray Eagle hand, ripped open Armitage's shirt. Jeff felt something writhe wetly against his chest. He was reluctant to let go of the professor, but he was forced to pull back from a contact that nauseated him.
It took him a moment to grasp what he was looking at: a broad face that covered Armitage's chest and belly, an inhuman face that opened its mouth impossibly wide. Now he knew how Glaaki could roar without using the professor's mouth, but that knowledge did him no good as the left hand seized his neck in a steely grip and forced his head into the jaws of the beast.
Kermit Armitage might have wept for his deliverer as he was torn loose from time and hurled into the void, but his own plight left room for no emotion but fear. The infusion had been far too strong.
But at least, and at long last, he was alone. The drug had blown apart his compound personality. No more would he hear the sibilant insinuations of Gray Eagle inside his own mind, no more would he cower at the bellowing of Glaaki, no more would he endure the fatuities of that quasi-English twit....
And he suddenly came to himself in the blinding brilliance of real time and space, enclosed in a box of glass and metal that was hurtling down a rutted road at a speed far in excess of any envisioned by road-builders with ox-carts in mind. Dark, thick woods rushed by, a blur until the bloated bole of a giant oak loomed before him in dreadful, discrete clarity.
“No!” he shrieked as the world exploded in a red flash and a crashing of metal. “Not like this!"
“Not like what?” said his companion.
Armitage looked cautiously around him, patted himself down without finding any broken bones. He was wearing a shiny and much-mended three-piece suit and an article of clothing he had only heard tell of, a detachable, celluloid collar. The brim had torn loose from the crown of his natty new boater, which he had held in his lap, but that seemed the only damage. Except to the machine.
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