“And so you are the only adept, Etienne?” queried the girl, resuming her wine.
“There was another, but he is dead. Through my fault. Don Santiago de las Torres Negras.”
Lord, what a revelation! Here, in this awful place, I was about to learn another side of that uncanny duel fought by Pierre d’Artois at midnight, at the Spring of St. Leon.
“He challenged one Pierre d’Artois,” continued the marquis, “to fight in secret, at midnight, at the Spring of St. Leon. And the Master forbade—”
“And why did you forbid, Etienne?”
“I didn’t. No. The Master of Masters…” The marquis lowered his voice. “A stranger out of Kurdistan, one whom I recognized as a master of adepts, by the signs he gave…the Master, I now believe…Malik Taûs himself, the Lord Peacock incarnate as man! He forbade the duel. I feared for Santiago, and wished to prevent it, out of deference to the Master’s wishes, and from fear of d’Artois, a swordsman without like or equal. So I invited Santiago to a château across the border, in Spain, set back all the clocks, sought to divert him, deceive him until, when at last he did sense my device, it would be too late for him to keep his rendezvous. Rob him of his honor, yes; make him fail in his word, yes; but I sought to spare him that meeting with d’Artois, and from the vengeance of the Master.”
“And did you succeed?”
“No. Santiago detected the trick before it was absolutely too late, leaped into his car, and drove fiercely into the night, with still a chance to keep his word inviolate.”
“So he fell in the duel?”
The marquis winced.
“No, chérie. He never reached the rendezvous. A storm arose; and he skidded on a dangerous turn, doubly dangerous on account of the rain. The wrecked car crushed the life out of him. Had I but let him go, he might have won; or at least died like a man…thus I killed Santiago, my friend… And this stranger from Kurdistan may have been an impostor, a fraud…Imbecile! I believed him to be the Lord Peacock incarnate!”
Christ, what a tale! Was it then the Kurdish stranger whom d’Artois had met, and almost vanquished? The devil who had inspired the marquis to meddle, and caused the death of Santiago on that lonely road from Spain? My brain reeled with the madness of it all…
And then I raised my eyes again to regard that marquis who chanted sonorously to that lovely girl, serene and calm, reclining among silken cushions in the Adytum of Darkness, in the very shrine of the Oriflamme of Iniquity, face to face with its high priest…and this without changing expression, save to shake her patrician head in pity…what a woman!
Had they discovered the gagged warder? Were they returning? I was in a devilish mess, literally. Devils on all sides, and in an atmosphere of demonolatry.
The girl nodded…sank back among the emblazoned cushions. Drugged. Inert. The tiny pill had done its work.
The marquis rose, thrust the table behind the arras; listened to the breathing of the sleeping madonna; straightened himself to his full height. Madness and despair flamed in his sombre eyes; his lips drooped; his lean cheeks were drawn. The muscles at the point of his jaw were knotted and quivering. If not the devil, then was this marquis his double: Satan overcome with sorrow, but unrelenting.
What now? Madness was his. But what form would it assume?
With swift, sure fingers he removed the silver slippers of La Belle Allzaneau; stripped from her the glittering, iridescent gown; and then the tenuous silk which clung to her form.
Cristo del Grao! What had that madman in mind?
And then he lifted her bodily from the chaise longue, strode up the cinnabar-strewn pathway toward the shrine, ascended the altar steps, and placed his burden upon the upraised, black palms of those great hands that reached for their prey.
Turning from the altar, he took a small mallet and struck a gong whose thin note shivered and hissed, with a rustling, lingering vibration, chilling, sighing, not full-throated as bronze should be. And from panels on either flank of the altar emerged those same hooded, sheeted figures that had passed me a short time ago, filed now to their places and knelt before the shrine, a vermilion crescent of demonolaters bowing before their chief and their god.
One of the number, after his salaam, arose and advanced to the altar steps, leaned over the brazen railing, and with a stick of rouge marked on the side of the unconscious girl; then a mark on her breast; and then on her forehead a mark. At the same time, coming from the right, just beyond my angle of vision, were four who pushed forward on rollers a massive stone trough; a trough over whose sides slopped some of the liquid it contained. Trough? No trough at all, but a sarcophagus, chiseled with Egyptian hieroglyphics! And as if by symmetry, there came from the left four others, each pair of whom bore a mummy case. These cases were placed on either side of the altar, standing upright. One, the mummy case of a man; the other, of a woman. This I knew from their sizes, and from the gilded masks which depicted the features of the deceased.
The case of the man seemed heavy. But those who carried the case of the woman bore it as though it were empty. And I wondered if indeed that could be the case we sought; Pierre and I.
The hooded figures, after putting their burdens into position, resumed their places in the crescent of devotees, leaving the marquis alone on the altar steps, facing the shrine.
Well, and at least I need fear no attack; for those who had passed me at the gate had but doubled back and waited behind the scenes for their signal to reappear. It had all been stage-setting. And it all apparently amounted to nothing more than an initiation of the girl into the secret order of demonolatry.
I relaxed and let the Luger sink into its holster.
And then I noticed what under normal circumstances I would have noted immediately; the solution of that which made both the marquis and the girl seem left-handed, and that which made the voices seem to come from my right, instead of from directly in front of me. I was looking into a mirror, into one, or three, or some odd number of mirrors which caused a reversal of left and right. Had I not shrunk back into my corner, against the door jamb, I would have noted that those who filed past me had not come directly toward me, but rather from one side. I could now distinguish my image before me, very faint, almost imperceptible, yet there, nevertheless.
So! And here I was to witness an initiation into the inner circle of demonolatry. My fears for the girl had been panic, and nerves, almost hysteria. And the mummy case, the smaller one, was doubtless that which Pierre sought.
But where was Pierre? No matter. In the morning we would return and loot the place…
The marquis, after bowing before the shrine of the peacock, extended his arms, chanted in a tongue unknown to me. Then, after tossing incense into the brazier on the altar, he began anew, this time in French.
“Malik Taûs, Standard-bearer of Iniquity, Lord of the Outer Marches, Prince of the Borderland, thee we revere, and before thee we bow! Hear then our prayer, Malik Taûs, Thousand-eyed Lord Peacock, Sovereign Rebel, Dark Prince! To thee we consecrate this sacrifice on behalf of Santiago who defied thee; and for him we crave pardon and peace, for him across the Border we raise our prayer!”
“Amin!” intoned the congregation, bowing their heads to the floor. “So be it!”
A pause. And again the marquis raised his voice.
“Santiago, Santiago my friend, whose death I caused, concede to me your pardon, and accept from me our prayer! I who sent you to your death, and these my servants alike seek to make atonement!”
“Amin!”
“And this woman without like or equal, I offer to you, Santiago; and to you I consecrate her, to be yours until the end of time. Santiago, you whom I sent to your death, accept her who is the very image and likeness of her I loved very long ago; accept as my peace offering this wondrous one who is my lost one incarnate. Santiago, in the name of Thousand-eyed Malik Taûs, I offer to you this woman whom I sh
all embalm in rich spices and wind in linen, and encase in sycamore and enshrine beside you to be yours for ever and ever!”
“Amin!”
Lord God! A poniard gleamed in his upraised hand. I drew and leveled the Luger…remembered I looked into a mirror…dropped my eyes, sick with horror…
A blinding, awful incandescence flared about me, illuminating that vault with the blue-white flame of noonday sun…a muffled, choked report…the mirror before me was clouded. A dense mist fogged the air. Hooded figures rushed to and fro, confused, colliding with each other, clawing and rubbing their eyes, blinded by that devastating flame.
And among them strode one not hooded, who moved with sure, swift certitude. Pierre d’Artois, wielding a blackjack! Each swing brought down a hooded figure; down they went before those cool, deliberately placed strokes…one stroke, one man…the cruel precision of machinery…the last man had taken the count. Pierre stepped to the wall, reached behind the arras; withdrew his hand, snatched from the wall an antique battle-ax, and dashed down the passage toward me.
“Don’t touch that grill!” I shouted.
“The juice, he is turned off.”
And to prove it, Pierre assaulted that grillwork with his massive ax, smiting fiercely, bending and deforming the sturdy bars. I crawled through, followed him back to the Adytum of Darkness.
“Take the girl,” he commanded, as, true to his nature, and never forgetting his mission, he seized the mummy case, the one designed for a woman, and led the way to the exit.
As I leaped to the altar railing, lifted the still unconscious girl from the black hands, and wrapped her in my cape, I noted that the other mummy case was empty, and that its cover had been kicked aside.
One or two devil-worshipers stirred and twitched. Others groaned. Striding over that miniature battlefield, I followed in Pierre’s trace. And we made good time, Pierre and I, for the devil, though down for the count of ten, still lurked in that awful vault.
No one accosted us as Pierre led the way across the park to his car. What a pair we were: a vermilion-robed figure embracing a mummy case, and I, likewise robed, bearing in my arms a girl whose hair streamed to the ground, whose limbs gleamed brightly in the moonlight.
* * * *
Well, the madman’s jubilee ended in Pierre’s apartment.
Lili, quite calm and magnificent in Pierre’s silken lounge robe, sipped a bit of cognac and took the entire affair as a matter of course, though she did have certain regrets.
“Those lovely shoes! Monsieur Landon, perhaps you would return for them?” she mocked.
And then, to Pierre, “Do tell me what it all was about.”
“Chère petite, it is a very long story. The stolen mummy would not interest you, directly; but my search for Madame the Princess and—what you call in English, her wooden negligee, n’est-ce pas?—her sycamore case is what made me cross your trail. Voyez!”
Pierre showed us a photograph.
“This, Mademoiselle, does it not resemble you?”
“Quelle bêtise!” flared Lili. “What a notion!”
And then she admitted the resemblance, acknowledged that that face of gilded sycamore, carved 3700 years ago, might pass as an Egyptianesque version of her own loveliness.
“So? It does resemble, yes? And the painting in the château, that of the mistress he adored twenty years ago, that could be your portrait of today, were not the lady’s costume a shade out of date. Behold the succession of resemblances, partly real, partly fancied. That I noted, immediately. And moreover, I saw, as did you, mon ami, that book bound in human hide; but unlike you, I read therefrom, many strange things. Then those drums whose heads were of human hide, and the arms, and all the other trophies of death…death…death which has haunted Monsieur the Marquis, turned his brilliant mind, and made him do this madness which we witnessed.
“And the duel at St. Leon, two years ago. I knew that Don Santiago was the good friend of Monsieur the Marquis; and I knew also that there had been something very odd about that midnight meeting. Thus when I saw you, Mademoiselle, all so lovely in the sunset, I added the two and the two; by intuition. Very simple, n’est-ce pas?
“And this Santiago,” continued the old man, “wore on the pommel of his sword a peacock; as also did Monsieur the Marquis on that sword at his château. None of which really proved anything; however, I began to think. Thus it was but a matter of having you watched, Mademoiselle, until things happened.
“And while you watched, mon vieux, I prowled around, and found the plans of Vauban’s fortifications and engineering works, and saw that he had not built the passage leading to St. Leon. And as for last night, I attended the preliminary rites, having, as you so nicely put it, beaned one of the worshipers and assumed his costume.”
“What the devil! You joined in their ceremonies?”
“Yes. It was I who spoke to you; but you did not take the tumble, so you missed some rare sport. I had but to put myself into the case which had contained the embalmed body of my ancient enemy, Santiago. And thus they carried me into position at the altar. Then, at the crucial moment, I kicked off the cover, and fired a press photographer’s flashlight gun. Dazzled by that fearful light, they could see nothing. As for me, I closed my eyes as I fired, and then, after the flash…”
He affectionately caressed the blackjack.
“And with this wonderful little implement, I worked them over, as you might say it, while they still blinked and rubbed their eyes, utterly blinded by that sudden flare.”
“He really was going to kill me?” queried the queen of Lachepaillet, who had scarcely grasped the entire sequence of events, and their significance.
“Exactly that, chère petite. In his way, he loved you, for yourself, and for the sake of his departed sweetheart; and therefore he was to sacrifice you, and embalm you, and set you up in state, in the mummy case of a princess, thus performing the supreme penance, making his peace with the Lord Peacock, and with Santiago alike. An artistic soul, Monsieur the Marquis! He is leaving for Spain…unless unhappily I struck him too hard! But he will not annoy you again.”
“These uncanny resemblances, Monsieur d’Artois…it is all so fantastic,” suggested Lili. “I resemble his former mistress, and I resemble a mummy. Am I then a mere shadow?”
“That is really not so incredible. For you, Mademoiselle, are the niece of her whom Monsieur the Marquis loved twenty years ago; so that that resemblance is not at all a subject of wonder, even if extraordinary. This, however, he did not know, nor I either, until I investigated—nor did you know. As for the mummy, well, coincidence…and a stretch of fancy.”
“But your duel. Pierre, at St. Leon?”
“Who knows? Illusion…a stranger from Kurdistan…I attempt no explanation. Santiago is dead, even as may be the marquis and some of his followers; but the Stranger still lives, and the Peacock’s shadow still hangs over us.”
THE LORD OF ILLUSION
Originally published in Crypt of Cthulhu #10, 1982.
They tell a tale of a certain Randolph Carter, and of a silver key wherewith he sought to unlock the hierarchy of gates that bar the march of man from this tri-dimensional fantasy we call reality, and into the super-spatial world we name illusion.
It is said that Randolph Carter, upon finding that silver key of archaic workmanship, tarnished blue-black from ages of disuse, so that the cryptic runes with which it was engraved were scarcely legible to whatever eye might have read their prodigious syllables, went at once to his ancestral home at Arkham; and there he sought what in the old days was called the snake den, a deep grotto in an ominously shaded spot where few natives of the region cared to go, much less linger. Carter since that day has not been seen; and it has been hinted that he achieved his old dream of marching into the Land of Illusion.
There the chronicle ends, leaving a tale whose exquisite beauty is matched only b
y its incompleteness. The learned chronicler, who has in all probability peered further into the realms of mystery and the ultra-cosmic abysses than any of his contemporaries, released only what he knew, and withheld all but a hint of that which he suspected. Four years, however, have passed; and sundry startling developments have resulted in a well-founded conviction that Randolph Carter has not been irretrievably lost in the gulfs which, after sounding in fancy, he finally plumbed in person. The last of these bits of evidence warrants a statement, which will tend to show that the chronicler’s intuition was amazingly correct, and lacking only in detail.
Randolph Carter, it must be remembered, left in his car, on the day of his disappearance, a carved oaken chest. He took with him that antique silver key which was to unlock the successive doors that barred his free march down the mighty corridors of space and time, to the very Border which no man has crossed since Shadded with his terrific genius built and concealed in the sands of Arabia Petraea the prodigious domes and uncounted minarets of thousand-pillared Irem. Half starved darwishes, and thirst-crazed nomads have returned to tell of glimpses of its monumental portal, and of the Hand that is sculptured above the keystone of the arch; but no man has passed, and returned to say that his footprints on the garnet-strewn sands within bear witness to his visit. Carter, therefore, took with him that key for which the sculptured hand is said vainly to grasp; but Carter through ignorance or the absentmindedness of exultation left behind him the palimpsest which was found in that disquietingly carved oaken chest, several days after his disappearance had aroused comment and vain search.
That yellow parchment, whose reed-scribed characters baffled scholars familiar with lost languages, fell into the hands of the chronicler who first sought to account for Carter’s disappearance; but in the light of subsequent events, particularly a chance meeting in New Orleans in the summer of 1932, it seems that Randolph Carter would have done well to have taken scroll as well as key. Such, at least, was the contention of an old man who, motionless and silent, save for an occasional muttering, and an occasional replenishment of the olibanum whose fumes rose from the oddly wrought iron tripods that flanked the wine-red Bokhara rug on which he sat. But more, in due course, of that scroll, and that old man who muttered.
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