Protectors of the Veil

by Dawn Matthews

  Helmut pulled up alongside the upturned roots. He was in luck. The fire smoldered but had not spread, thanks to a combination of a green tree and the volume of rain that fell last night. Few trees grew near the blasted streambeds.

  He grabbed the rusty roll-cage of his ATV, swung out onto the broken earth, and got down on his knees. He glanced here and there into the hole. The stale smell almost took his breath away. There was almost a dead, carrion rankness to the overpowering odor.

  “Well, would you look at that…” Helmut muttered to himself. Perhaps this was his lucky day after all.

  Below the moldy roots, caked soil, and squirming immature cicadas lay a partially exposed cave mouth. It looked as if it were constructed like a mine entrance, a rectangle formed by three roughly-balanced table-stones, five feet tall and wide. The bottom and walls of the hole were a muddy mess. Amid the mud, he saw a few rotted timbers, long bronze hinge straps, separated chain links, and skeletal remains of a 10th-century barrel-screw lock?

  He sat bolt upright, his mind a whirl with the possibilities. He needed to clear his head, take a few deep breaths. He wanted to make sure of what he saw. The lock was an anachronism. Helmut was no expert, just a person who liked to read antique books.

  He arose, grabbed a flashlight and a rubber floor mat from the ATV. He placed the mat near the rim of the pit and lay prone. A flash of purple caught his eye where the rays of the morning sun angled inside the otherwise darkened den. He turned on his three-cell flashlight and aimed its powerful beam into the depths of the grotto.

  Curious angles of white and purple crystals, clustered like jagged canines, encircled the inner mouth of the hollow. He could see little more, for an immediate bend near the cave entrance hid its deeper recesses.

  As he turned off the flashlight, he thought he saw a shadow shift, as if cast by flickering lights cast from inside the cave. Helmut straightened up and chuckled nervously to himself. He couldn’t chance it, not a descent now. He needed a longer rope before he took the plunge, a rappelling harness, and a cave helmet with light—all items secured in a hasped locker in his garage. However far the den tunneled back underneath his property—ten yards or a mile—he needed to be prepared for the worst.

  That afternoon would be soon enough. What treasure there was, if there were any, would be there when he returned.

  ***

  An Arkham County Sheriff’s black and white pulled up to Helmut’s dilapidated homestead as he swung his ATV into his garage. He left his gun and holster on a table inside the garage and closed the building’s door.

  Helmut casually walked over to his porch, where he met the Deputy Sheriff.

  “Good morning Officer…Officer Bishop, may I help you?” Helmut asked nonchalantly, as he read the Deputy’s name tag.

  “Are you Helmut Heydrich?” Deputy Bishop said, pulling his notepad out of his hip pocket, and scribbling something.

  “Yes sir, that’s me. Do you need some I.D. or something else official?” replied Helmut, toeing the ground and looking past the officer, uniformed in the black and grays of Arkham officialdom.

  “No, Mr. Heydrich, I just wanted to ask you a few questions. You’re new here, right?” said the officer, eying Helmut up and down.

  Helmut sighed and shrugged his shoulders.

  “I work for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as civil servant like yourself. But in the department where I work, they furlough people at the end of the fire season. Been here a month or so. Right now, I’m slowly fixing up the place, based on my limited funds and carpentry skills. Why?” stated Helmut, curious as to the officer’s reason for questioning him.

  “The Billington’s place got a lot of history in these parts, yes sir,” replied Deputy Bishop, as he eyed the old house behind Helmut.

  “What’s the problem, Deputy?” Helmut asked, slightly raising his voice impatiently.

  “Oh yes,” the deputy said, pulling a photo from his notebook, and sticking it in Helmut’s face. “Ever see this man?”

  Helmut took the photo—an ugly, glassy-eyed young man, with strange birthmarks that discolored the edges of both his lower cheekbones. Helmut tried to hide his revulsion—there was something alien about the photo.

  He handed the photo back to the deputy. “Can’t say that I have, should I?” wondered Helmut out loud.

  The deputy flipped a page. “His name is Ernest Whateley. He is a student at the Miskatonic University, located in the County Seat.”

  “It seems he was heading home to Dunwich this weekend, to see his folks and get his laundry done. You know how those college boys are…” continued the deputy.

  “What’s that got to do with me?” asked Helmut, hoping the man would get to the point as he shifted on the balls of his feet.

  “Why…” said Deputy Bishop, as he stood upright, rather than slouching, “we found his car abandoned, soiled laundry and all, three miles south of your place on the Aylesbury Pike.”

  The deputy stopped to see what effect the facts had on Helmut. The peace officer waited for a few moments, and then he wrote something on his pad.”So, you haven’t seen him? He didn’t come to your door late last night, to ask to use your phone for a tow?” asked Deputy Bishop, as if he hoped the hermit’s story would change.

  Helmut looked at the deputy square in the eyes. “I don’t get many visitors around here, Deputy Bishop, and I like it that way. I don’t bother my neighbors, and they don’t bother me. If someone came to my door in the middle of the night, can’t say I’d be too friendly to them, but I would remember them. No, I don’t remember the kid,” Helmut almost hissed between his teeth.

  Deputy Bishop considered Helmut’s answer, then gave him a business card. “If you hear or see anything about the kid, please give me a call. We couldn’t find hide nor hair of Ernest around his car. Like he was done taken by a UFO,” said the officer, as he returned to his black and white, and climbed behind the steering wheel.

  Deputy Bishop rolled down his window, to say one more thing to Helmut. “By the way, Mr. Heydrich, have you seen an old Native American fellow around here?” the deputy said loudly out the window, “Fellow goes by the Quamis or Misquamacus. He’s got more aliases than I have notebook paper. He’s from the local Narragansetts and Wampanaugs. Those tribes settled the land hereabout aright long time ago…” the deputy rambled on.

  Impatiently, Helmut interrupted the deputy, “Can’t say that I’ve seen him either. What’s he look like?”

  Deputy Bishop looked flustered for a moment, then acting unfazed, restarted his monologue, “No, no picture of him. The older Native Americans around these parts, don’t like to have their pictures taken. That one has been responsible for a bunch of bad hocus pocus and trouble around here, for as long as I can remember. Come to think of it, he was old when my Mom was young. One of your neighbors to the North, a Mrs. Lapham, thought she saw someone matching Quamis’s overall description loitering around your hidden driveway. You wouldn’t have any boarders in that old place, would you, Mr. Heydrich?”

  Helmut was shaking his head as the deputy finished. “No, no boarders and no one lives here, except me.”

  “Well, you got my number, call if anything turns up…” shouted Deputy Bishop, as he drove off down Helmut’s driveway.

  Helmut felt relieved. He was a suspect in Deputy Bishop’s eyes. He was an outsider in this ingrown countryside. His hopes to stay off the official radar of local law enforcement were dashed.

  Then Helmut’s mind turned again to the cave beneath the tree and the spelunking tools he needed for the afternoon.

  ***

  Helmut’s booted feet landed on wet earth at the bottom of the hole with a sickening squish. His boots visibly sank a few inches into the mire. He tugged the rope that he had anchored to the ATV above. It held tight. His hands roamed over his person, as he verified his mental checklist—gun, canteen, knife, hip-pack with a survival kit, spare flashlight, and a 100-foot coil of rope. On his head, he wore a hardhat with miner’s LED li
ghts. He adjusted the Old Spice-soaked bandana around his face.

  It was a good thing, for the stench at the cave mouth nearly took his breath away. He glanced down the tunnel, for there was a slight incline to its depths, and thought he saw a faint, purplish glow. His fingers tested the hard hat lights—they weren’t on. And no light came from above. Overhead, shadows of late afternoon flooded the land. Strange.

  Helmut bent low to avoid the jagged roof of the den and stepped over an irregular outcrop of quartz crystals that formed its lower threshold. He had to turn sideways, still stooping, and penguin-walk past the crystalline corner. That milky wall partitioned off the inner chambers of the cave from its vestibule. As Helmut stepped free of the obstacle and uncoiled the rope, he felt confused at what he saw.

  A purple haze hovered over the irregular face of the cavern in all directions. Instead of stalactites and stalagmites, white and lavender crystals swarmed in odd, geometric patterns across the walls and ceiling. Trapezoids flourished and quatrefoils flowered among heptagons and nonagons. He must be hallucinating, for in the dim mist, crystalline tendrils with curvilinear maws elongated and swarmed towards him. Helmut felt himself temporarily suspended in violet, vibrating gulfs between the stars.

  He tried to blink the psychosis away, his imagination overwrought by the stench and claustrophobia. Then his fingers remembered what his mind could not. Helmut flicked on his headlamp and the hallucination dissipated. He stood still for a moment, calming himself.

  In the far end of the hollow, stood an enormous amethyst cathedral. Some dense bronze straps, weathered green by age, hung loosely from its sides from exposed pinions. Other straps held fast, despite their age. They sealed the jagged lid of purple crystals to the curved geode body, like a quartz coffin lid.

  Helmut slowly crept forward, for where a slab of amethyst had fallen away from the top of the cathedral, hung a serene human face, executed in scales of lavender crystals. Native American in cast, the image reminded Helmut of the noble face of Crazy Horse, executed in stone atop the Black Hills of South Dakota.

  Curiously, a weathered bronze band immobilized the statue’s head against a pillow of purple crystals behind it. A greenish, bronze wire sowed the fetish’s lips together.

  “Why?” questioned Helmut, as he faced the strange image, and unconsciously cut the bronzed thread that bound shut its lips.

  A small black stone fell from its amethyst mouth. It came tumbling to a rest at Helmut’s booted feet. In the light, and to a queer tightening of his scalp, he beheld a rough star, in the center of which was chiseled the caricature of a single eye, but not an eye in the rock face. For the lines that crudely formed the eye were suggestive of flames or a singular pillar of fire, streaming from a vast pupil.

  Instinct whispered to him that the image was alive and potent, but his mind quickly dismissed that absurd impression.

  A cold wind from the bowels of the earth sprang up around Helmut. His lights dimmed in the dark conflagration. He choked on the stench and now smoke, as shapes fluttered like demonic butterflies in the enveloping haze.

  A deep, distant roar grew in his ears to a triumphant, caterwauling laughter. Helmut felt himself tossed sideways, his frame crashed hard against the cavern wall, his bowie knife clanging against the floor.

  “I am free, free from the accursed outer gods, free of their ancient scourge and their accursed sigil! Free! No longer will I depend on a shade of myself to walk among mortals. No longer a servant to Richard, Alijah, Ambrose or any other weak-willed scion of that fallen house. No longer bound by their squeamishness. The Ancient Ones were, the Ancient Ones are, and the Ancient Ones ever shall be! This world will be wiped clean of its terrestrial vermin, and returned to its rightful plane, among those worlds that forever encircle the mighty throne of Set. I am their Herald, the One who goes before Them…”

  The words pealed forth as the mist began to clear. The somber-faced Native American, its lips still pierced, came forth in its fullness—every detail, the birch breeches, the leather moccasins, a strong chiseled chest— rendered in shards of amethyst and white quartz.

  “Who are you?” whimpered Helmut.

  The amethyst apparition turned its bejeweled head, and black eyes that mirrored the depths of the twilight nights fastened on the blathering man.

  “I am Misquamacus…” it said in triumph, as it further eyed Helmut. A hiss emitted from its pierced lips, and its rocky form shuddered in place, as it glanced at the sigiled stone near the man’s feet.

  As Misquamacus reached for Helmut, the man still possessed enough presence of mind to shrink backward. Helmut paralleled the wall until he felt something warm, wet and angular. He looked down and saw a fresh skull. Tattered skin, hair, and gore still clung loosely around it. Helmut glanced down the side tunnel, and in the dim light, saw a mineral-encrusted wash of skulls and bones that trailed off into the dark depths.

  He shrieked in a falsetto. Then a man entered the cave with a white light flame about him. The golden, jackal-headed figure spoke aloud, fiercely and suddenly. Beside the flaming creature hovered a small, rat-faced man in worn sandals, Bedouin rags, and crumpled fez. The little mongrel stepped forward, a long dagger in hand.

  “Effendi, would you be the One who summoned my Master?”

  Helmut, still a basket case, stammered meaninglessly.

  The crystalline shaman strode to face the intruders.

  “And who is your Master?” questioned Misquamacus with an authority that shook the cave.

  The flaming figure mumbled words to its Bedouin mouthpiece.

  “My Master is Mambres, High Priest and Prophet of the Old Powers of ancient Thebes. Of old, the desert wizard Moshi imprisoned my Master…”

  The tattered man again leaned close to the now dimming demiurge, then spoke again.

  “Now that my Master is freed from the renegade’s curse, He will open the gate, so the dark powers of the Underworld—of Ammit and Sobek, of Bast and Nephthys, of great Thoth and Set—will again walk among men. The true gods will be served, as it was of old. So it is written, so shall it be.”

  The Bedouin forgetfully lowered his dagger, as he relayed the words of his living idol.

  Silence pervaded the cave.

  The amethyst shaman moved closer to Mambres as the jackal-headed form burned brighter.

  “No…” said Misquamacus, grabbing the Bedouin off the cave floor in one hand. The tattered man stabbed the shaman repeatedly, each frantic stroke glancing off its stony hide until there was no life left in the man. His dagger clattered to the floor.

  Misquamacus then grabbed Mambres in like manner. Arcs of white-hot lightning cascaded down the shaman’s stony arm, not burning, but fusing some of the amethyst scales together.

  “…PER ADONAI ELOIM, ADONAI JEHOVA, ADONAI SABAOTH, METATRON, AZAZEL…” bellowed out Misquamacus.

  “…AMAL ALFEEN WAFAET,” thundered Mambres in reply, “…HARAEYI GHOOR BA’A, GHOOR BA’A…”

  Misquamacus and Mambres struggled in a flaming conflagration. As .357 gunfire boomed across the narrow space, the dark creatures briefly staggered from surprise, rather than from harm.

  Helmut rushed past the demons and dragged himself up the side of the muddy hole. He rifled through a bag in his ATV, and grabbed a handful of dynamite sticks. He lit one, then another and another, and tossed them down the hole. He ran behind the ATV and waited.

  Three titanic explosions rocked the earth and sent showers of mud flew skyward. Helmut leaned against his ATV, both man and machine covered with layers of mud. He heard sirens in the distance.

  Helmut spoke gibberish as Deputy Bishop read the man his Miranda rights, cuffed him, and drove to the county jail.

  ***

  Months later, Helmut sat in an ill-heated cell in solitary confinement, realizing he had unleashed the gods of old on the world. Through a barred window framed in an outside wall, pale moonlight filtered into the cell.

  The authorities had found his pets and the shrine. They
also dug up the crystal cave, finding the strangled Bedouin, his dagger, the cannibalized remains of Ernest Whateley, and Helmut’s own Bowie knife—they used that evidence against him in his murder trial. He had been quickly convicted.

  But what of the sea of mineralized skeletons? What of the amethyst shaman, who called itself Misquamacus? And of Mambres, the jackal-headed wizard of Egypt?

  His public defender humored him and pressed the prosecution for answers to those questions. According to the sworn testimony of the investigators, their alleged remains had not been found. So, would he be adjudicated insane, and receive a lesser sentence for crimes he didn’t commit? Or at least, he didn’t think he committed them.

  He had problems sleeping at night, sure of his own sanity, but unable to convince anyone else. At almost midnight, he sighed on his bunk in the darkened room. He thought he heard the scraping of stone against metal dimly among the windows bars.

  “What?”

  He saw sparkling fingers slowly encircle a bar in the flittering moonlight.

  END OF STORY (back to female robotic voice).

  “Kiev will be your partner;” (he then popped into the passenger’s seat) “your assignment is to convince the men that nothing unusual happened. Kiev will listen to their thoughts and implant suggestions into their minds while you interrogate them. Do you understand, Agent Cannon?”

  Kiev was what many humans call a Nordic. He looked human with blue eyes and light hair. He could blend in, though he had an intense stare and sometimes he just freaked people out. With a human taking the attention off him, it was easier to blend in and to manipulate and read minds.

  “I do,” Jordon said.

  The next second they were parked in front of a police station. “I’m not sure why we have cars if we don’t drive them,” Jordon said. He wasn’t always comfortable with the alien technology, but the chance to interrogate and frighten others more than made up for it.