“This book,” he whispered conspiratorially as he held me, “is a diary. A journal chronicling the studies of a man named Horgan. I’ve no idea of his first name, but he was a Freemason, a good Widow’s Son who spent the last years of his life travelling in the East, squandering his retirement on a search for lost Hiram. Most of the journal,” and here he tapped at my forearm with one long, stained finger, “is in code.” He stood up then with a lightning rapidity, his voice becoming stronger with every word until it had become almost strident. “Or rather, I should say, in codes. There’s a half dozen of them, all sorts of sources, from Cabalistic to Hermetic, with the inevitable Masonic thrown in of course. It took me quite a while to trace his studies, to follow his steps. But, oh, where they led me,” he crowed. “Von Juntz’s little, German secret is all mine. Ia!”
As he squatted beside me once more his eyes, obscured by the shadow of his once-noble brow, seemed to bore into me, through my skin and into the deepest and darkest recesses of my heart. His breath, even more so than the rest of him, was rank, filled with the dark perfumes of an old and untended cellar. “Do you know,” he asked with a banal lilt to his voice, “what a Gate is?”
“Charles,” I stammered in reply, “I really...”
“DO YOU?” The cracked roar of his voice was so sudden, so shockingly violent, that, as I felt a fine rain of saliva fleck my cheek, I barely suppressed the urge to leap from the chair in fright and revulsion. Indeed the resolve that kept me in that attic room, quaking and trembling from more than the early morning cold, came purely from the uncertain dread of what Charles’ reaction might have been should I even attempt to flee.
Rather than waiting for any form of reply or response as I wiped the sticky combination of sweat and spittle from my face with a shaking palm he continued his insane monologue.
“Gate,” he started, as if lecturing a packed theatre of undergraduates. “The most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines the word as ‘a movable barrier or means for entrance or egress through a wall or fence’. As definitions go it is woefully inadequate and laughably simplistic for anything other than the most artless linguistic usage, and Horgan’s studies in the field of Gates was concerned with more than just the petty, tawdry fabrications of architecture. His work on the construction and utilisation of Gates – and I use the word now in the more complete metaphysical sense – helped me immeasurably in the study of this...” He held up his left hand, pushing that obscene, German book towards me until it filled my field of vision, forcing me to press myself back and into the soft embrace of the armchair. My scrabbling heels ploughing erratic furrows in the drifts of paper covering the floor as I squirmed away from that loathsome volume and if I close my eyes I can still see it now, every crease, wrinkle and flaw of its cover. Even the grain of the paper, its coarse, almost wholesome texture so at odds with the undeniable value and unutterable depravity of the words recorded upon its uneven pages, is imprinted on my mind’s eye. All these years later I still shudder when I think of its uncontrolled vileness. “Unauspreclichen Kulten”, “Nameless Cults”, call that book by whatever name you will, I call it Evil, pure and simple. And it was when I felt the malignancy wash over me in almost palpable waves that I knew my dear friend was irrevocably damned.
From that point on his rambling lost all semblance of coherence, my mind unable to grasp the obscenely alien nature of the theses and philosophies he tried to delineate. Not, I hasten to add, that the failing was mine for I firmly believe that no man who still had a grasp upon sanity could have understood Charles’ theories. As to what pitiful scraps I did understand... Well I count myself lucky that the years have acted to obscure my memory of them, drawn a veil over even the words he used, obliterating those last traces of Charles’ monstrous and heretical learning. All I clearly recollect now is his last words, and those only for the dreadful understanding they imparted. With them he described the use of ritual designs and sigils to travel, displacing a person’s body through the mundane dimensions, the magnitude dependant on the exact combination of symbols used. He even spoke of his belief that such travel was not limited to our earthly realm but could be extended with the proper knowledge to take a man to the stars. And all this insanity was possible, he insisted, through the use of these Gates.
As he spoke he moved to the patch of bare boards I had noticed earlier and, producing from his trouser pocket a blunt stick of off-white chalk, began to mark a design upon the wooden floor, each line building to illustrate his insane concepts. With the first, smooth motion he scribed a circle fully two foot across and perfectly round before placing within it a similarly flawless triangle. Still he lectured me, almost as Professor Simpkin would address a recalcitrant class of first-years, explaining the significance of both the triangle and the eye-straining marks he placed along each of its edges. “These,” he said, “control the traveller’s exact displacement over each of the three dimensions. One mistake in the placement or form of these sigils could propel me to appear miles above the ground or entomb me within the living rock itself.”
By then he stood within the triangle, crouched down to scribe a final mark between his feet in the exact centre of the design, a twisting and convoluted line of chalk that made my temples throb and my eyes water even to glance at it. “Von Juntz called this symbol ‘The Wings of the Angel’,” he explained as he cast a critical eye over the whole blasphemous design he had constructed, “while Horgan knew it as ‘The Dragon’s Tail’. This orientation – placing it the correct way up – will allow me to travel away from this point in space, away from my natural place. A similar Gate created at my destination will allow me to return here, to my precise point of origin, necessitating only that ‘The Dragon’s Tail’ be inverted – turning it from a plus to a minus if you will.”
He smiled then, a cold and dispassionate convolution that deformed his face, giving it an unnatural and faintly perverse cast. “Horgan didn’t understand that,” he chuckled, his once warm voice devoid of the faintest shred of humanity. “I keep wondering where he is now, which part of this or any other world can claim his mortal flesh, whether living or dead or...” He stood pensively for a moment, his stained finger resting on his parched and cracked lips. “I’ve not seen him, you know. Not even a sign of him, not at the Plateau of Leng, at least. I looked, really I did, but I couldn’t find him, couldn’t repay him for the unknowing aid he rendered to me. Do you think I’ll find him at the Library of Celaeno?” Charles’ eyes were fixed on me now, torn away from the continuing scrutiny of the completed Gate. “Would you care to join me and find out, old friend? There’s more than enough room for two.” It was only at these words that I regained the use of my paralysed frame, the strength returning to my trembling legs as I levered myself up and backed in staggers towards the door.
“Don’t leave!” Charles called after me, either unwilling or unable to step from within the circle which enclosed him. “When I return I will inscribe a square and travel in four dimensions, traverse the curving river of time itself! This world – this Universe – could be ours to roam, old friend. Ours!”
God help me, how I ran. As his lips moved again, his breath rasping out the vile syllables of a language no human throat was ever meant to utter, all sense and reason fled me, and I fled with it. I wish I could tell you that I ran to summon help, to find anyone who could aid me in saving Charles – with all my soul I wish I could say that – but I did not. Instead I ran to the flimsy sanctuary of my room, slamming and locking the door behind me. Then I sat in the far corner, as far away from the door as I could, my eyes fixed upon its wooden surface, my ears alert for the slightest creak on the staircase that would betray Charles’ descent. But no sound came, either from beyond that portal or from the room above. Eventually exhaustion won me, swamping even my fear, and I slept.
I dreamt then, the only lucid dream that I can ever remember having, or at least the only one that I can now recall. I saw my body lying, naked and cold, on a mortuary s
lab, the flesh as pure and unmarked as the marble upon which it rested. Each single pore was visible to me, each mole and mark, each scratch and blemish. Every curve of muscle and thread of hair loomed stark and perfect in my eyes. But as I looked closer at my chest, studying the unmoving surface minutely and wondering at my own form, I picked out a design hidden there, a Gate identical to that which Charles had used only hours before, a design formed not of chalk but from the minute flaws and features of my own skin. In fear I recoiled, my incorporeal consciousness moving up and away, watching the figure on the slab recede into the darkness, swallowed by the distance until it appeared as little more than a doll, and I finally felt secure, safeguarded by that separation.
Until... The lips on that remote figure moved, my own corpse forming and whispering the same words I’d heard Charles voice as I had fled, words written by an insane German Necromancer as he waited for his own well-earned and much-deserved death, words that pulled my struggling awareness back down, closer and closer towards that dreadful speaker. Drawing ever nearer my struggles intensified as I vainly attempted to break the impossibly strong grip that secured me. The body – my body – began to writhe and twist in some fleshy parody of my ethereal struggles, its limbs thrashing and distorting, its very skin flowing like water until it was not my body that lay there but Charles’. There he lay, his arms spread wide to embrace me, pulling me into him, into his body, surrounding me with his flesh and sinew, washing me with his blood, baptising me with it, choking me with it even as I clawed and screamed and fought for release until, with a hoarse cry, I awoke into another world of blood.
It dripped on me, steady as a heartbeat and regular as a pulse, from the plaster of the ceiling over my head, soaking through from the room above. Charles’ room. Terrified now for my friend, frantic for his safety, I tore open my door and started slamming my fist frenziedly against the door of the room opposite me, screaming at the occupant to send for the police, an ambulance, anybody he could think who might come.
I took the first steps up the narrow staircase leading to Charles’ room at a run until my mind conjured up images of the sight that might await me at my destination, visions of whatever could have produced enough blood to soak me to the skin as thoroughly as if I’d immersed myself in a vat of gore. Those phantasms tumbled through my mind faster and faster as my forward progress slowed to a crawl until, finally, I stood trembling at Charles’ door. I had no recollection of closing it as I’d fled, but it stood secure and I shuddered before it, already horrified without having seen whatever lay beyond.
Tentatively I reached out and grasped the tarnished, brass handle as one might clutch a spray of nettles or a venomous serpent. I recall having to wipe my hand free of blood, rubbing it clean against my thigh until I could grip the metal strongly enough to turn it properly.
It was locked.
Although I was nowhere near as strong as I had been only the year before I was still more than able to break through such a flimsy barrier, throwing myself against it with sufficient force to crack the frame and tear the door free at its hinges. Taking a deep gasp of breath I was forced to pause before climbing past the shattered wood and into the attic chamber.
The noxious stench that oozed from Charles’ room, an almost palpable stream of corruption, while still recognisable from my earlier visit had become overlaid by a repellent, charnel smell, a carrion reek I would later recognise from the battlefields where I witnessed men torn apart, shredded and defiled by the terrible, organised slaughter of war.
Once I was certain that I could bear that rank fetor I pushed at the door, opening the breach wider, only to find my progress blocked by some unseen impediment. Two further impacts from my shoulder opened the remains of the door wide enough for me to struggle through, toppling the desk which had blocked my entrance in the process.
The candle that had burned dimly in the far corner no longer cast any light and the darkness flooding the room was complete until, stumbling through unseen detritus, I managed to find the small garret window and tear away the black sackcloth that had been nailed securely along all four edges of its narrow frame. Ragged cloth in hand I turned and gazed at a space flooded with the dim light of the coming dawn.
X
I was discovered by a representative of the local constabulary accompanied by one of my fellow lodgers – presumably the same poor soul I had disturbed – mere minutes later, although it took the foremost of them a further ten minutes to regain his composure and control his vomiting. I was found cross-legged in the centre of the room, facing the far wall and with my back to the room’s only entrance, feeding the last few pages of Charles’ notes into the small fire I had set in the design that had lain before me, a design that had been roughly carved into the wood itself. Charles watched me with the empty orbits of his eyes from where his ruined body lay, slumped in the farthest corner of that abattoir, blood still dripping thickly from the ragged gashes that his murderer had opened in his wasted torso.
The gutter-press referred to it as ‘The Black-Magic Murder’, stressing the obvious occult connections in Charles’ life and death, and the police agreed with the analysis. For their part the authorities were as confounded by my friend’s death and the culprit’s escape as they were by the circumstances surrounding it. All access to or from the room had been sealed from the inside, opened only by my own unsubtle interventions, and there were none of the secret cupboards, doors or passageways so beloved of mystery writers, no mechanical murderers cunningly concealed by come criminal mastermind or his henchmen. In fact there was no evidence of any intruder other than myself, not the faintest of traces.
There was simply no logical explanation to be found for what had occurred.
I was an obvious suspect for the crime, covered as I was with Charles’ blood, but my single set of crimson footprints led up to that dreadful room, not down from it, and the source of my gore-soaked appearance was readily apparent to even the most dimly unobservant of investigators merely by glancing into my own rooms. Other lodgers within that narrow house also recalled clearly having heard the sounds of my forced entrance into Charles’ room after I had awoken them with my blood-curdling scream and frenzied shouts for assistance.
And so – reluctantly – the authorities released me even though, in my heart, I longed to be punished for the intolerable crime I had perpetrated in bringing that accursed diary back from Egypt. The case was closed as unsolved and to the best of my knowledge remains so. Charles’ family wished only to forget the terrible incident, desired only to be allowed to bury and then mourn for their son. Those good Christians had never known Charles’ field of studies and, once they understood the basics of its nature, wanted nothing more than to hide what they saw as their son’s shame.
I knew the truth of the matter, of course, and while I may not have known the murderer’s identity, I most certainly knew the secret of his movements, of his entry and escape. Of course I use the word “his” even though I doubt the culprit was even remotely human, yet alone male. I knew the truth then and I know it now, indeed it could be said that I acted as an accomplice to that unearthly murderer by concealing the profane reality of the situation, fully intending to obscure it forever. I vowed to keep that secret – indeed all of my secrets – until I and they were finally claimed by the grave, but after so many years holding this bitterness inside me I can take the burden no longer. So now I commit these final words to paper in the hopes of setting aside the weight of pain and laying the spectre of my dear friend to long-delayed rest.
Charles’ explanation of the Gate was still fresh in my mind when I saw that design carved into the floor, etched with the same cruel and pitiless point that had laid open my poor friend’s flesh, releasing his tormented soul to journey, I pray, to a place where he might find the rest he so richly deserved. Within that graven circle, fully half as broad again as that which Charles had drawn, had been inscribed, not a triangle for a journey in three dimensions, but a pentagon. And the symbol at
its heart – “The Wings of the Angel” – was inverted as if diving to some nameless Hell, inverted for a return journey.
IT GROWS
Sean M Thompson
I have no idea what this thing is, but I see it whenever I shut my eyes. It has huge ebony wings, and a leathery black hide. Only, sometimes the terrible abominations skin will shift and change, like the tide as it washes onto the shore in the moonlight.
I don’t know why I see it, and I don’t know how to cut the connection. How to break off the influx of images that assault my psyche, day after day, images that render me gibbering and insane. Worst of all is that I can feel it grow. Somewhere deep within, I know that there isn’t much time left for us.
Soon, the horizon shall be eclipsed by its dark form, which will blanket the land in terrible shadow. I don’t know how to stop it, but I do know what it’s coming for; it’s hungry, and it needs to feed. What’s more is that the more it eats, the more powerful it will become. I would say that it will get bigger after it feasts, but I’m afraid it may be able to change its size and shape at will.
No, it will simply be more powerful than any other thing our feeble minds could fathom.
I pray that I am just insane, that this is all in my head. Because last night, after I drifted off to sleep, I saw the thing beyond classification. I saw the great form of our undoing, and it has branded itself into my consciousness, never to leave again.
I dreamed of a field stained crimson from the blood of hundreds. Bodies mutilated beyond recognition littered the landscape. The grass was covered with entrails, organs, and limbs.
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