That Is Not Dead

by Неизвестный

  Diderot protested vehemently, but Voltaire was adamant. At one point, he threatened to call off the entire mission if Diderot did not acquiesce. Grudgingly, the Parisian relented, continuing to express reservations at the dangers Voltaire might experience in his solitary venture.

  “There is no getting around that,” Voltaire said. “I must face what there is to face.”

  With that, he took up one of the sconces and began his descent.

  Once again, the illumination from the sconce seemed to waver bizarrely as he proceeded. The stone steps, leading down in a circular fashion, were by turns rough and slippery and at times so smooth and weathered that Voltaire came close to slipping and plunging headlong into the lower darkness. The cool, dry walls at periodic intervals were covered with colored drawings of surprising vividness but increasing vileness, depicting entities even worse than the one pictured in Cultes des Goules and disheartening the philosopher with their depths of barbarism and insanity. It was this, even more than the fatigue of the seemingly endless descent, that caused Voltaire to stumble more than once.

  At last, he arrived at what appeared to be the foot of the stairway—an incredibly spacious but dimly lit area with countless arches leading to other realms of unholy mystery. Stunned at the thought of this underworld labyrinth lying beneath the fair skies of a rational world, Voltaire walked in a weary daze, scarcely knowing what would become of a mission that seemed increasingly foolhardy and misguided.

  A slightly stronger light shining through one of the arches drew him toward it. Exhausted, apprehensive, and with a sense of foreboding that verged on dread, Voltaire passed through the archway.

  He saw Pierre Malnéant sitting on an immense throne at the back of a small room, flanked by torches on either side of him, giving off an oily, unwholesome illumination.

  “I wondered,” Malnéant said, “how long it would take the premier intellect of Europe to find me.”

  The sight of Malnéant, sitting brashly and smugly in these inner depths, roused Voltaire to something like fury.

  “What is the meaning of this? What are you doing down here?”

  “I could,” Malnéant replied blandly, “ask you the same thing. Are you not the invader of my domain?”

  “I did not come to mince words with you,” Voltaire said hotly. “I want to know what you know about the death of little Marceline Bedard.”

  Malnéant uttered a derisive chuckle. “That is a matter of the utmost inconsequence. We have much larger matters to discuss, you and I.”

  “What have I to discuss with you? You are nothing but a…a…”

  —Voltaire almost spluttered before he could finish—”a cultist, a leader of a pathetic band of superstitious peasants. And you are the killer of that little girl!”

  “I am none of those things,” Malnéant said with a quiet impressiveness that made even Voltaire pause in bafflement. “It is not clear that you will recognize me under my true guise, but it may at least amuse you.”

  With that, Malnéant briskly removed the mask that covered his face.

  What was revealed was nothing Voltaire could have predicted—not any horribly disfigured countenance, but a radiant, beautiful young face of an antique pharaoh. And yet its superficial youth also carried a paradoxical atmosphere of inconceivable antiquity—not in any sense primitive, but embodying the ultimate apex of refined civilization. Adding to the anomaly, it appeared that his eyes were of different colors—one blue, one brown.

  “I have gone under many names over many millennia,” he said suavely, “but am most comfortable with the eponym Nyarlathotep. In my last incarnation, I arose in Egypt out of the blackness of twenty-five centuries, but I have heard messages from places not on this planet. None of this, however, concerns you—or us.”

  Stunned by the revelation, Voltaire could only gape as Nyarlathotep continued.

  “As for the death of that little girl, I do feel a sense of responsibility. I was careless—inexcusably careless. I allowed one of my followers to handle a job I should have handled myself.”

  With that, Nyarlathotep snapped his fingers crisply. From a curtain that hung at the side of the room, which Voltaire had in his wonderment failed to notice, emerged the living image of the hideous entity pictured in the woodcut in Cultes des Goules, its wings folded demurely as it stumbled on its wiry legs, uttering a raucous cry that seemed inexplicably prehistoric.

  “My pet,” Nyarlathotep proceeded calmly, “needs an airing every so often—and a feeding. But I was occupied, and I entrusted the job to one who could not control the creature as ably as I. The result we all know. I hope you will convey my apologies to the grieving parents.”

  It was a wonder that Voltaire could remain in the same room with the monstrous entity. Noting his alarm, Nyarlathotep snapped his fingers again, and the beast retired as quickly as it had come.

  “This whole unfortunate affair of the little girl,” Nyarlathotep continued, “did have one good effect: it has brought us together. For you see, my dear M. de Voltaire, it is you who have impelled my presence here.”

  “What are you talking about?” Voltaire managed to utter.

  “Don’t you see?” Nyarlathotep said with curious urgency. “I have been on this planet for nearly as long as human beings have existed. I have a peculiar interest in them. They are the most inveterately irrational, hypocritical, superstitious, and insane species ever to gain ascendancy over any planet in the universe, and for that alone they are of inestimable use to me. I am called the Crawling Chaos, and I take that designation seriously. And I also take seriously the continuing folly of this species, for ends that I do not care to expound to you.

  “It is to my long-term benefit that the human race remain plunged in intellectual darkness. Chaos is so much easier when stupidity lends a hand. It is helpful for your species to be terrified by the specter of a jealous, vengeful God—so useful for keeping them in line, as you yourself have argued! Why, I myself have been worshipped as a god. I have heard my devotees invoke me with ridiculous incantations, such as this: ‘To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told. And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides, and come down from the world of Seven Suns to mock…’ In the past few centuries, I have appeared frequently as the Black Man of the witch cult, which is even sillier than the Christianity it seeks to supplant but which then leads to pogroms and fanaticisms that keeps the populace in a state of inspissated ignorance.

  “But”—Nyarlathotep shifted a bit in his seat, as if it discomfited him—”you and your compatriots have now come along to shed a bit of light amidst the darkness. You, Diderot, d’Alembert, La Mettrie, Montesquieu, Condillac, Helvétius, d’Holbach, Condorcet, and so many others have actually instituted an Age of Reason. Fancy—reason among human beings! A novelty, to be sure, but one that is catching on with greater dispatch than I would have imagined. And it must stop.”

  Voltaire continued to be speechless at this verbal onslaught. But at last he found his voice.

  “Even if you say you are what you are,” he said with a sneer, “your account is incoherent. If you were the Black Man in the witch cult, then you caused the deaths of your own votaries. What was the good of that?”

  Nyarlathotep brushed aside the objection. “There were many more where they came from. Believe me, Voltaire, there is no shortage of dupes and ignoramuses among your kind. The miracle is that they manage to survive at all from day to day.”

  “So what now?” Voltaire said, still sneering. “What can you possibly achieve in this tiny backwater?”

  “Oh, the time is not quite right for further moves. I can wait.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “For the destruction of the Age of Reason. I almost regret that you will not be around to see it with your own eyes. It would crush you—you who have worked so hard to lift your species from the abyss of ignorance, only to see it all come crashing down in a conflagration of violence, death, vengeance, and horror
. Yes, it would be interesting to see your face. But, alas! That is not to be.”

  “You talk a big talk,” said Voltaire, “but what can you do to stand in our way? Or do you expect your little pet to do your dirty work for you?”

  “My pet? No, it is only here to keep my own votaries in order. It is capable of physical mayhem, but that is the least of my concerns. I have a larger agenda. But this talk wearies me. I think it is time for you to go.”

  And with an almost imperceptible flick of his fingers, Nyarlathotep gestured in Voltaire’s direction.

  Without warning, Voltaire was propelled violently backward, proceeding back through the archway and crashing with bone-jarring agony against the far wall of the outer chamber. When his head encountered the unyielding surface, Voltaire lapsed into a merciful fit of fainting.

  When he awoke, he was in his own bedroom. Marie was arrayed in her customary silk dressing gown—she rarely dressed formally, except for dinner and on her rare ventures into the outside world—and languidly reading a feuilleton. When she saw Voltaire emerging from unconsciousness, she fluttered around him for a time and then summoned the doctor.

  Diderot also made an appearance and told his part of the tale quickly. Alarmed at Voltaire’s prolonged absence, Diderot had plunged down the stairs of the cavern. Finding his friend lying supine in a twisted heap, he feared the worst but was able to ascertain that Voltaire was still alive. He somehow managed to drag him up the seemingly illimitable stairway and back up to the surface. He saw no other figure, human or otherwise, during the entire escapade.

  Voltaire had lain unconscious for days. By this time, the mayor of Ferney had learned that Pierre Malnéant and his entire band of cultists had quietly left the town, their whereabouts unknown. Attempts made over the next several months to trace them were unavailing.

  The murder of Marceline Bedard was never solved.

  Voltaire, for his part, strove fervently to put the entire incident behind him—not as difficult a task as it seemed, since the entire sequence of events increasingly took on the aspect of a nightmare or hallucination. In any event, a new outrage—the case of Jean Calas, a Huguenot who was tortured and executed for purportedly killing his son, who had converted to Roman Catholicism—consumed his attention, leading him to write the fiery Treatise on Toleration. In his later years, he wrote with ever-greater hostility toward religion in general and Christianity in particular, abandoning the notion that religion was a useful source of social control. He betrayed to no one the source of his new conviction.

  With the passing of years, the incident at Ferney dissipated from his memory. In spite of his declining health, he continued to write and speak out on the issues that concerned him. He also expressed a desire to return to the Paris that he had not seen in decades. In early 1778, he secretly returned to the metropolis, but his presence was quickly detected, and he was received with enthusiasm by populace and intelligentsia alike—by all, in short, except the court and the church.

  The salon he had rented in the heart of Paris became a haven for all the philosophes who had longed to see the uncrowned king of the Age of Reason. Even his longtime adversary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau—himself enfeebled by age and infirmity—paid him a visit, in the company of a young man whom he had taken on as his protégé.

  Their encounter, in late May, was outwardly cordial, but Voltaire greeted the pair with an undercurrent of reserve and even apprehension that puzzled Rousseau. He put it down to Voltaire’s illness—he really did look ghastly—and he was still more baffled when Voltaire asked him to leave him alone with the young man he had brought along.

  Struggling to raise himself from his couch, Voltaire said to the young man, “I did not think we would meet again.”

  The young man peered at Voltaire with piercing eyes—one of them blue, the other brown—and a cynical smirk.

  “Didn’t you? Then you must have forgotten—”

  “I have forgotten nothing. I have striven to put it, and you, out of my memory. But I have been plagued of late by dreams—your doing, I suppose?”

  “You flatter me. I have no control over your dreams.”

  “So what are you doing here, in this guise?”

  “I have told you that it has been useful for me to put on many forms and take on many names. At the moment, I have adopted the name Robespierre. Were you to continue living, you would hear much of me.”

  With that, he seized the pillow from under Voltaire’s head and held it over his face. After a time, he walked briskly out of the room, intent on notifying the world of the sad fate that had overtaken the greatest thinker of the age.

  Arizona Territory, 1781:

  Anno Domini Azathoth

  John R. Fultz

  Late in the year of our Lord 1781, word reached the king of Spain that an uprising of Quechan Indians had destroyed two respected missions in the Arizona Territory. Many priests and colonists were slaughtered by the savage horde. The loss of these missions closed the Anza Trail where it crossed the Colorado River, isolating the region from New Spain for years. Yet in truth it was not the wholesome Quechan Indians who had assaulted the people of these missions—who had marched their living captives into the scorching desert toward torture and death.

  To King Charles III, lost in the treacherous maze of his European ambitions, this tiny sliver of the New World was no great loss. The Crown of Spain had lost its interest in Spanish territories north of the Rio Grande, despite the numbers of settlements, soldiers, and missions that lay scattered across those untamed lands. Another power was rising in the Arizona Territory—one far more ancient and vast than any earthly monarch. It came like a raging tide of blood and fire to drown both the Mission Puerto de Purísima Concepción and the Mission San Pedro y San Pablo de Bicuñer.

  I, Father Francisco Gonzalez y Rivera, know the truth behind those three terrible days of slaughter. It haunts me like the ghosts who wail in the night outside my little cave. In order to pacify the restless spirits of my missionary brothers and to rid myself of the awful secrets I have kept across lonely years, I will set down on these pages the truth of what occurred in the sweltering month of July in the year of our Lord 1781.

  Having done this, I will carry this manuscript to the nearest mission and place it in the hands of a Holy Father who yet retains his faith in the Jesu Christi. It was this all-consuming faith that drew me across the world to spread its light in the dark places. Yet the darkness itself—and the dreadful reality which lies at the heart of it—has stolen that faith from me, as it has stolen my health and the greater part of my mind.

  I will not die a hermit confined in this squalid cave, beholden to the crippling terror of my revelations. Instead, I must do as the Revelator of old: I will inscribe the truth in black ink on yellow parchment. And when I have entrusted this knowledge to one who carries the strength of the Nazarene in his heart—for he will need such strength to endure these revelations—I will free myself from this frail body with blade or pistol or the swift tug of a hempen rope about my neck.

  I do not expect that my words will reach Charles III or that he would deign to read them if they should be carried across the great sea to his throne. No, I need only one living mind, one soul, one fellow human being to share this terrible truth with. I cannot die until someone else knows what I have discovered.

  I am aware that this makes me a selfish man. Perhaps a wicked man.

  Nevertheless, I must write as John the Apostle did before me.

  I know that I am damned by what I reveal, as you who read this account must also be.

  Read on then, if you fear not damnation. Or pass these pages to someone more brave—or more foolhardy—than yourself.

  I care not.

  The first time I saw Walking Ghost, I thought he was about to kill me.

  It was early evening and a purple twilight crept out of the desert with an army of night-colored clouds behind it. Walking across the courtyard between blossoming cacti, I fancied that the World of Man st
ood on the threshold of a great and abiding darkness. The deep night and its unseen terrors have always made me uneasy.

  I was kindling the tall candles in the chapel of the Mission Puerto de Purísima Concepción when the heavy wooden door banged open. Walking Ghost stood in the doorway, dark against the dying sunlight. He looked so very different from the humble Quechan folk who lived in the vicinity of the mission and attended its daily services that I did not recognize him as one of their own.

  Taller than most men he stood, a tuft of white feathers dangling from his braids of black hair. His skin was brown as the desert, his face painted in striped crimson with coal-dark pigments about the eyes and lips. I had never seen such a display as this among the Quechan, but I later learned that these were the colors of war. Beneath the war paint, the face of Walking Ghost was grim, his eyes tightened by a strange mixture of anger and remorse.

  About his neck hung several bead necklaces, and his only garb was a traditional loincloth of woven bark fibers. His muscled chest, legs, and arms were bare, streaked here and there with more paint in obscure sigils. A long metal knife hung at his waist, and his right fist clutched an axe with a head of sharpened stone. The sight of this ready weapon made me clutch the crucifix at my throat and prepare for a death that might be either swift or lingering. I whispered a quick prayer that it be the former.

  Beyond Walking Ghost, a band of anxious braves stood in the courtyard, painted and armed as he was. At once I knew they were waiting for him, their chosen war chief.

  I greeted Walking Ghost with my open palms raised and trembling.

  “Welcome, friend, to the Mission Puerto de Purísima Concepción.” My throat was dry, my words unsteady. “I am Father Rivera. Have you come to learn the Word of Christ?”

  Walking Ghost entered the chapel. When he shook his head, I saw that he understood my words. To my surprise, he sank to one knee before me and reached to take my hand. Afraid to deny him, I let him do so.