by Scott Jäeger
“Yes, our old enemies still roam,” the bo’sun replied in a whisper, facing me. “They are your enemies too now, servants of the Black Throne.”
“I haven’t heard of this faction. Do you mean the merchants from Dylath-Leen?”
“I will not tell you its true name. If in the course of your travels you learn it for yourself, try not to think on it and never speak it aloud. This sort of enemy grows more powerful the more it is in your thoughts, and speaking its true name is like a shout of invitation.”
Longbottom’s breath was coming in short, fearful bursts. There was a change in the emptiness surrounding us. The mist, I noted, had begun incrementally to recede. He shook loose of my hand and stumbled in a brief circle, head darting in every direction.
“This book of yours, is it guarded?” I asked, raising my voice against the eerie tranquility surrounding us. “What am I to do with a book I cannot open?”
The fog was growing less opaque as it retreated, and I could discern the outlines of figures within, human in shape, but ill-proportioned, too tall, too thin.
I blinked awake at the shrill ring of the Y’s front desk bell, immediately below my room. I lay still, running over the encounter in my mind. At the end Longbottom had said more about the book, but the dream was paling, already insubstantial in the daylight, and the rest was lost.
I did not need to dress for I had slept in my clothes, and though a desperate hunger racked me, it would not be satisfied by porridge or a piece of toast. Taking a scrap of coal from the downstairs scuttle, as Longbottom had instructed, I resolved to seek out the book. It was at least a place to start.
* * *
Marsh Street was a row of sullen brick buildings, half of them abandoned, the rest employed in a variety of enterprises requiring cheap labour. The few folks I saw made a slow, grim march of every errand, their resentment as palpable as the smoky air.
I was drawn to a particular structure, distinct from the others in its dilapidation. Someone had taken a pry bar to the brass numbers, but their absence still proclaimed it 313. The entrance had been the target of a determined attack, the handle, plate, and lock all torn free and discarded. Even the glass in the transom had been smashed, oddly thorough work for vandals. Though I had not been given a specific address, I did not doubt this was my destination.
It took several tries to jostle the door open against an armchair wedged up the other side, and the entryway and stair were choked with smashed furniture and debris. There being no place to shift the mountain of junk, I clambered over it instead. On the top landing a candle illuminated three blind walls. In obedience to Longbottom’s instructions, I snuffed the candle.
I worked the coal nervously in my fingers while I waited, wondering irrelevantly if it was dirtying my shirtsleeve. When my eyes adjusted to the scant light, a collection of chalk strokes and designs, which had the moment before been invisible, came clear on the wall opposite the stair. I could not make any sense of it, but after I turned away momentarily at a cry from outside, the pattern seemed to change. I was almost certain a vertical line of symbols had shifted from the left of the diagram to the right. I gave my head a shake and wiped away the markings.
After scrawling Longbottom's symbol in its place, I attended some change, but five minutes passed and nothing happened. Our conversation, I thought, had been nothing but a gin-soaked hallucination. I leaned against the brickwork in relief and a door swung smoothly open. While I waited for the pounding of my pulse to subside, a further detail from the bo’sun’s visit came to me:
Take a haunch of something with you, he had said, beef or mutton. All the better if it's starting to rot.
There would be a dog then. I unbuttoned my coat, the better to reach my pistol. I wasn't concerned about a dog.
A wainscoted entranceway led into an apartment, where a pair of violet drapes denied most of the daylight to a room dim and spare. Opposite the window was a lonely side table, and upon it a raggedly wrapped object about the size of an encyclopaedia volume. Catercorner to the table was a closet with two smashed hinges and no door. An unmistakable trace of putrification floated on the stale air.
Reminding myself that it mustn’t be opened, I crossed the room and picked up the package, very pleased with myself. Here was something tangible, weighty and solid in my hands. I do not know why I put it down again, and turned to examine the closet.
The space was deep enough that the feet of the corpse, sat spraddle-legged within, did not protrude into the room. The man’s skin was as pale and rubbery as last night’s boiled meat, though I figured from the relatively mild odor he could not have lain dead long. I bent to look more closely, and started back, wishing I had not. The head was grossly deformed, the cranium too small and the skull elongated, with pointed ears and a face tapering towards a snout, giving the impression of a hairless jackal. The arms were also unnaturally long and ropey. Two bones sat in the V of its thighs, splintered open and sucked clean of marrow. I hoped I was wrong is judging them human femurs. Pushing down my gorge, I kicked at one of its feet.
“Nothing,” I laughed to myself, letting go the butt of my revolver. “He’s dead, you ninny.”
Turning again to the book, I saw from the corner of my eye that the deformed man was now standing.
I tripped backwards, one hand reaching for, but missing, my holster. The creature pitched forward awkwardly, knocking against the table as it shifted to face me. It did not stand straight, but hunched bobbing in place, as if resisting the urge to rest, apelike, on its knuckles. It eyed me redly for several seconds before an arm swung out like the boom of a sailboat. When I dodged to the side its talons raked four identical gouges in the hardwood floor. It swiped at me and missed again, blundering on its ungainly legs, and I drew my gun.
The abomination stopped to growl at me, black lips pulled back over curving, canine teeth, but did nothing to spoil my aim. I fired, leaving a neat black hole in its ribs. The back of one claw knocked the gun from my grip and it clattered on the floor.
My opponent shook its head like a dog killing a rat and, apparently in bewilderment rather than pain, looked down at the wound. It did rock forward on its knuckles then, and gibbered at me in what sounded like an insane parody of speech. Backed to the window now and weaponless, I glanced past it at the door to the stairs. It followed my gaze and smiled cunningly. This, more than its fangs and claws, forced a half-choked scream to my lips as the beast ducked its shoulders to attack again.
Hoping that sunlight must drive it back, or reveal it to be a man or, better, a hallucination, I reefed with both hands on the rotting drapes. They tore away, rods and all, and I fell in a heap with them. My foe chose that moment to leap, face flinching away from the light, and went through the window with a crash. A brief, moaning cry presaged a thud on the street without.
Coughing in a miasma of dust and mildew, I rolled to my feet, brushing glass shards from my hair. Grabbing up my prize and my gun, I scrambled once more over the debris in the stairwell. I should have been steeling myself to finish the battle, but could not stop shaking. Peering out gun barrel first into the street, I discovered no body, nor spot of blood or sliver of glass. I looked up at the second storey; the windows were all intact. I fled the scene before Fate should take back my reprieve.
Many blocks from Marsh Street, I weaved automatically amongst the lunchtime crowds, the book pinned beneath my right arm as if I feared it would try to escape. My brain rejected my encounter with the book's ghoulish guardian, lingering instead on something worse. My body’s yearning for opium was beginning to return in force.
I moved with no destination in mind until the traffic broke like a river around a rock for a tramp on the edge of the path. Painfully bent, he stood in the classic pose, one hand out for alms, the other clutching the remains of a coat over his bare chest. He wore no article of clothing without a noticeable hole, from his shoes right up to a hat the colour of stains, and his beard was so tattered it looked like the tug of a comb might
pull it free. The passersby took no notice of me when I stepped into the bubble of space around him, which was guarded by a terrible stench. When I made to pitch him a four-bit piece, he stepped back as if afraid.
“Here now, old fellow”, I said, as if he were an animal of questionable disposition, “you should be able to use this.”
He withdrew into the alley behind him, and looked over my shoulder at the oblivious citizens traipsing past. Satisfied that we were not watched, he gestured me closer and I, holding my coin aloft like an idiot, followed. It was dim and cool off the street. He continued to retreat, his gaze locked onto mine. The passage must have become covered at some point for soon only his red-rimmed eyes were visible, jogging along always five paces ahead. When the eyes winked out, I was enveloped in darkness absolute.
I shuddered violently, both to free myself from whatever hypnosis I had been under, and at the abrupt, freezing cold. I stamped my feet, too perplexed at first to be afraid. The tramp was gone, but I was not alone. Something massive shifted in the umbral nothingness, stirring a rank breeze. There came a voice, slow and ponderous as that of a sleepy giant. Its vibrations thrummed in the soles of my feet.
You meddle. This was said in puzzlement rather than menace, like a man addressing a housefly who he suspected of interfering in his plans.
An unmeasurable length of time passed, during which I was paralyzed from toes to crown.
I want the book, it said.
My stupor ebbed enough for me to understand the object in question remained pinched beneath my arm.
“This book?” I asked thickly.
There was no response, yet its attention on me was as palpable as dry leaves scratching my skin.
"No," I said, quite steadily, considering. These words followed, inexplicably, from my lips: “I have been tasked with an important mission, and I will not shirk it, no matter the consequences.”
Come closer.
I bleated a laugh of pure hysteria. I'd sooner have stepped in front of the Boston-Arkham Express.
A scraping sound anticipated something touching my skin. It was the blunt tip of an appendage which in my imagination was similar to a broom-stick, but wavering and flexible as an insect’s antenna. After briefly probing my torso, it recoiled like a hair singed by flame. With this, I fell unceremoniously on my bottom and my sight returned, the world pouring back into me like ice water into a pitcher.
After establishing that the book was still in my possession, I blinked spasmodically around me. I was in a courtyard, a perfect square uninterrupted by window, door or drainpipe, except for a gap on one side for an exit. When I looked up it must have been mental fatigue that made the enclosure seem ten storeys high, and the square of sky at the top that greenish hue which heralds a tornado. Near the exit were a holey shoe and heap of rags. I kicked at it; there was nothing beneath but more rags. I hurried through the brick-roofed passage, and after many twists and turns staggered into Main Street, upsetting a carter’s horse and nearly getting myself maimed.
Anchored by one hand to the pillar of a bank, I tried to steady myself. Part of that unreality had followed me however, and the world warped as if viewed through three panes of leaded glass. Deciding that any action was better than swaying in place like a drunk, I lurched forward. A strong breeze moved the flags outside a hotel, but did not stir my hair. I felt beneath my feet a springy surface like moss, but looked down at paving. In my peripheral vision, bizarre shapes darted or floated or hopped. Worse were the ones which chose to remain carefully still.
Though I did my best to fight it back, a terrible notion was gathering within me, that what I saw as everyday life was nothing but a magic lantern play. If my perspective were to shift ever so slightly, another world, perfectly juxtaposed with our own, would be revealed, and what was now barely suggested would come plainly into focus. About to rest against it, I spun away from a lamppost, fearing it would have no more substance than a moonbeam. I would tumble through it and the pavement, and into that which waited beyond, a void separated from the quotidian trappings of the twentieth century by the flimsiest shroud.
It was a harrowing journey back to the Y, but though some of the denizens of that unspeakable Other Place could see through the veil, they were as yet harmless to me. By the time I made it to my room, the horrors had receded to a place just out of sight, but the exact location of the border between delusion and reality eluded me. I considered that rather than rocking manically on the edge of a cot, I might be lying in a coma at St. Mary’s, my broken mind convulsing as it caved in on itself. Apprehending that the hoarse droning I heard was my own voice, speaking these thoughts aloud, I shut my mouth with a click.
Despite Longbottom’s admonitions, I had opened the parcel from Marsh Street. The tome inside appeared neither old nor valuable. Between two untitled boards, a rent binding held what I estimated to be half the original contents. The book had at one point been submerged in water, and the handwritten scrawl within was illegible. Yet it must be the book I had been instructed to find, else it would not have been hidden, so carefully guarded, and sought out by the unseen entity with which I had parleyed.
One last piece of misfortune: outside the YMCA I had chanced upon the pharmacologist I had befriended when last in Arkham.
With anything but tranquility, I held the little brown bottle up to the light. This enemy, at any rate, was undeniably real. I resisted opening the bottle, but did not release it. I paced, trying to breathe the ember of resistance to life, and mumbled again the defiance I had spoken to the black entity. I must discover the purpose of the book, must return to my home, else all was madness. Gripping the warped wooden frame of the window, I looked out on the street. By forcing myself to be motionless, I compelled the room to do the same.
In the windowpane’s reflection the door to the hall was open. A man stood there, long, lean and stubbled, Jacob Roth's unforgettable sneer chiseled into his features. I spun about, flinging the medicine bottle across the room. It smashed on the closed door, and I rocked as if I myself had been struck. But I had been alone the entire time.
Sparrow’s
That night I spent fleeing a parade of terrors across a cheap mattress, these ones spawned, mercifully, from my own imagination. I rose at the start of business hours and crossed town to the Hyde Street strip of specialty book sellers.
The shopkeeper at the first place, accustomed as he was to dealing with eccentrics, made no comment on my haggard appearance, and after examining the book had little to say about it either. It was hand-inked with no listed author or date of publication, though these might have been lost among its missing pages, and composed in multiple languages, none of them English. The only fact to which he would definitely attest was that it was a journal, or book of stories.
At the next bookstore the owner, a Mr. Cadogan, was apparently in the middle of a run of bad luck. He thought upon receiving the paper shambles I was making sport of his trade, and came close to striking me.
The morning wore on like an iron file on a blade as I moved from one shop to the next, all tiny, ill-lit premises housing scrawny, ill-tempered men. The final closet-sized storefront was, fittingly, at the dead end of a lane. The business consisted of a single shelf, displaying a dozen weighty, leather bound works, all beyond the customer’s reach. The female proprietor, the first woman I had met in the trade, was a frail and grandmotherly personage. She was patiently propped on one elbow, as if very used to waiting.
“Welcome,” she called, her face wrinkling into a well-worn smile. “Come in, please.”
I placed my forlorn bundle on the counter, swallowing dryly. “I came across this book in an abandoned property here in town. I’ve been to several places, but no one can tell me a thing about it.”
She spent several minutes studying the ruined heap.
“Precisely what it is, I cannot say.” With a jeweler’s loupe, she more closely examined one of the mostly intact pages. “Parts have been written in Latin, parts in Greek– some
I cannot identify.” She retired her magnifying glass and with an effort straightened herself. “You think it may be of value?”
“Well, you see,” I coughed, “I was directed to pick up a book at an apartment on Marsh Street, but now that I've done so I don't know what to make of it.”
“Marsh Street?” she said. “Not a neighbourhood known for its love of literature.”
I attempted a laugh and, suddenly dizzy, leaned against the counter.
“Do you have some reason to believe it is valuable?” she asked.
I could not forget Longbottom’s warning, nor its awful confirmation, that my enemies had agents in Arkham, but I must trust someone or give up entirely.
“Yes, I believed it would be of value to me personally. I was told–” How ludicrous it sounded! “I was told it would help me return to the Dreamlands.”
Her eyes widened slightly at this bizarre assertion. “And this person who advised you to pick up a book on Marsh Street, you have no way of getting in touch with him?”
I shook my head morosely. There was an uncomfortable silence until she said, with finality, “Lowry.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Marcus Lowry should want to see this. He’s a collector of occult works, and the foremost authority in these parts. He doesn’t have a storefront however, so you wouldn’t come across him wandering the streets” –she glanced down at my woebegone shoes– “which I presume has been your approach so far.”
“Will this Lowry take an appointment with me?”
“Not a chance. He’s notoriously unsociable. But he can be found almost any time at the Sparrow Club on College Street.”
“But Sparrow’s is an exclusive club,” I said. “I can’t just walk in uninvited.”
“Can't you?” She gaped at me in mock surprise. “Forgive me, but I thought this was a matter of importance.”
* * *
I entered the Sparrow Club by way of the kitchen where, as I expected, my appearance provoked no interest whatsoever, and found my way to the members' lounge. Sparrow's was an oasis of English gentility in the provincial backwater of Arkham, a place of hardwood paneling, teak furniture, and polished brass fixtures untroubled by the fingerprints and smudges of the working class. The air itself, a tang of tobacco smoke and aged scotch, bespoke luxury. I would have looked a beggar there on my best day.
