The Night Land, a Story Retold

by James Stoddard

  In the wide field of my glass, my eyes first fell upon the bright glare of the fire from the Red Pit shining upward against the underside of the vast chin of the Northwest Watcher—The Watching Thing of the Northwest: That which hath Watched from the Beginning until the opening of the Gateway of Eternity. So Aesworth, the ancient poet had written.

  To my amazement I suddenly realized the bard was incorrect, for deep within my soul I saw, as dreams are seen, the sunlit splendor of the past. Thus, even as I, Andrew, dreamed of the future, the youth in the embrasure remembered his former existence, though it seemed to him a vision old as the dawn of the world. I looked back upon my life as Andrew Eddins as if seeing dreams my soul knew as true, but which appeared as a far vision, hallowed with peace and light. Since I had often demonstrated a knowledge of antiquity that perplexed the men of learning of that age, I cannot claim to have been completely unaware of the past before then, but from that moment my memory of the lost eons grew tenfold.

  The knowledge struck me with such force that I groaned and fell to my knees, overcome by the power of the revelation. I knelt there, stunned by all I knew and guessed and felt, overwhelmed most of all by the memory of Mirdath. As I recalled the way she had sung to me in the days of sunlight, my longing for her reached across the ages, and for the first time I understood the emptiness that had haunted me even from my childhood.

  "Are you ill, Andros?" a voice asked.

  I looked up to see the ancient, friendly face of Cartesius, my mentor and friend, who had taken me under his protection after my parents died six years before.

  "Why are you up so late?" I asked, avoiding his question as he helped me back to my feet. "It's past the fifth hour of sleep."

  "I can sleep later. A waste of time, sleep. I haven't slept in . . ." he blinked in thought, "forty-two hours. There is too much to do. The Thing That Nods has changed the angle of its movement by point three degrees. We can see a fraction more of its face, if it is a face at all; the scholars are in furious debate on the issue. The whole tower is astir with excitement. According to the Records, such an event last happened four thousand seven hundred and twenty-six years ago, when Olin was Master."

  "After all these centuries? How extraordinary."

  "Precipitous times, indeed. Who knows the ramifications?" He smiled happily, his eyes lost in distant horizons, and then, remembering himself, made his expression stern. "It is extremely serious, of course. We are gauging the rest of the land, to see if any reactions arise. So far, we show a twelve percent increase in movement around the Giants' Kilns, but nothing more. We are watching the points of the compass steadily, though I just sent most of my assistants to bed—for some, exhaustion overcomes passion. A pity they lack fortitude."

  He paused, his eyes suddenly focusing on me. "But you were distressed when I first approached, and now you are trying to divert me. What is it, Andros? How can I help?"

  I sighed. "It's hard to explain. I've . . . seen something."

  "Something unusual, by your demeanor. A vision?"

  "I think so."

  "Tell me all about it. Leave out no detail, no matter how small. We shall find the significance in the insignificant."

  I smiled at his old turn of phrase. A brilliant man, Cartesius served as the Master Monstruwacan within the Tower of Observation located at the pinnacle of the pyramid, where he and his fellow Monstruwacans observed everything that occurred within the land, peering into the darkness to extend their knowledge, always seeking new information despite being thwarted by distance—the plain of the Night Land remaining always beyond their reach. Their main duty was to watch, measure, and record the movements of the monsters and beasts besieging the Great Pyramid, so that should one merely sway its head in the darkness, every detail was noted. The name Monstruwacan itself, in the language of the people of the pyramid, literally meant Scholar of Monsters.

  Though snow-haired with antiquity, Cartesius stood straight and unbowed, his dark eyes shining. He wore a perpetual stare, as if peering through the Great Spyglass had fixed his expression.

  He had noticed me in my youth, for I possessed that rare talent my people call the Night Hearing, a gift so uncommon that out of all the pyramid's millions, only I showed any degree of skill in its use. I could detect, with better accuracy than the recording Instruments, the invisible vibrations pulsing continually through the eternal darkness of the ether.

  "I have seen the past," I finally said.

  His hoary eyes grew bright; he gave a happy smile. "Tell me."

  The words tumbled from me as I related everything I knew about the lives of Mirdath and Andrew. As I spoke, I expected Cartesius to reprove me, for I mentioned grass and trees, oceans and wind, and most of all, the glorious, golden sun—things the people of the pyramid considered only myths—but he kept a respectful silence.

  It took more than an hour to tell it all, and when I finished, my voice choking with emotion, tears glistened not only in my eyes, but in his as well. "Is it all a fantasy?" I asked. "A delusion?"

  The Master Monstruwacan sat upon a gray stone bench, his hand upon his bearded chin, his eyes lost in the fantastic world I had described. He cleared his throat. "You have certainly experienced something. Nor do I think an Evil Influence has affected your mind. How extraordinary if it is true! And how sad."

  I gave a sigh of relief. Even though, through experiments and the refinement of mental arts, the people of the pyramid spoke comfortably of concepts beyond our present understanding, as we of this day hold beliefs our forefathers would have considered lunacy, still I feared my story too bizarre to be taken seriously.

  "This strange gift you have, Andros," Cartesius said, "you have always known many things about the ancient Days of Light. How I have laughed to see you confound and anger our scholars. How they long to believe you, even when they cannot accept your stories."

  "But this—" I said. "It seems inconceivable! Can a man live again?"

  "I do not know. I have never heard of such a thing, but life is filled with unusual and wonderful events. I am perpetually astounded that we exist at all. How can I say something is impossible simply because it has never happened before? Every action must have originally occurred for the first time. I therefore grant that though your experience is unlikely, it is within the realm of the possible. I believe you."

  "Thank you." My voice almost broke in gratitude.

  "You need time to understand the revelation. Once you absorb it, you must record everything—the tiniest bit, the merest speck. You must draw the shape of every leaf, show the precise color of the sky—a thousand things. Fear nothing and tell all! That is the way of the observer. Then I will set the Monstruwacans scouring the ancient histories—a man could spend a lifetime studying all you have just told me. If only I were young! It makes me long to leap to the annals, to brush the dust away, to blow back the debris and look for correlation." A fire rose in his eyes. "This is even more important than the movement of The Thing That Nods! I must go to the Hall of Records at once. There is one volume, yes, I see it clearly in my mind. I will rouse all the Monstruwacans from bed—they've had at least an hour's sleep; it should be sufficient. We must discuss this. We must correlate. We . . . must . . . correlate!"

  He leapt to his feet, eager as a hound, and sped a dozen steps before abruptly turning.

  "Forgive me, Andros. I forget the human in the hunt for the unknown. Will you be well, my boy? I can stay if you like."

  I managed a smile. "I just need time to think."

  His eyes focused gravely upon me; I felt him studying me with the meticulous scrutiny usually reserved for his work.

  "Yes," he finally said. "You do need time. You must weep and laugh, grow angry and mourn, to prevent the vision from overwhelming you. But you will prevail, Andros. I see it. You will prevail. Come to the Tower of Observation if you need me."

  As he vanished from sight, the thought struck me that I would not be the one to correlate my story with the Records. I did not need
to; I had seen the past and knew the truth, but I loved my wise, old friend for believing me. Then the revelation overcame me again, and I sat and wept, clutching my copy of Ayleos' Mathematics, consumed by my memories of Mirdath.

  ***

  After a time, when I could no longer bear contemplating my former life, I turned from the haze and pain of my memories back to the embrasure and the inconceivable enigma of the Night Land, for none of the inhabitants of the citadel ever wearied of looking upon its dreadful mysteries. The old and young, from infancy to death, watched the black monstrosities of that fearsome country, which only our Great Pyramid, the last refuge of humanity, held at bay. But now I saw the familiar things with new eyes, from the perspective of that ancient gentleman, Andrew Eddins, and it shook me to my core to see my impressions of the world so altered. For the first time, it seemed overwhelming to think of an entire planet bereft of light, spinning through the unending darkness of a starless sky, the only illumination the unearthly fires dotting the landscape.

  Nearly overcome by this new-found sense of horror, I looked again at the Red Pit and the Northwest Watcher. Slightly more than fifty-three miles separated the pyramid from the Watcher. The creature could be seen from such a distance both because of the height of the redoubt, and the Watcher's enormity, for it stood twenty-six hundred and seventeen feet tall—almost half a mile. Its form was so cragged it might have been mistaken for a mountain if not for its brooding mouth and hollow-eyed, unswerving stare. It possessed neither arms nor legs, and its whole body cascaded downward from its head in irregular terraces. The long, sinuous glare known as the Vale Of Red Fire, a valley of flames, lay to the Watcher's right, and beyond the creature's bulk stretched the dreary, shrouded leagues of the Unknown Lands, across which shone the cold light from the Plain of Blue Fire.

  On the very borders of the Unknown Lands, there ran a range of low volcanoes, which lit up, far away in the outer darkness, the Black Hills. The Seven Lights shone there, which neither twinkled nor faltered through eternity, and which even the Great Spyglass could not see clearly, since they stood over one hundred and sixty miles away. Neither had any adventurer ever returned to tell of them; if he had, a record would have existed within the Great Library, which held the histories of all who ever risked not only their lives, but their spirits, by venturing outside the pyramid, for the accounts of the Last Redoubt did not deal with mere thousands of years, but with millions, dating back to what we called the mythical Early Days, when the sun still gloomed dully in the twilight sky. Of all that occurred before that, only legends remained.

  As I read over what I have just written, I nearly despair, for in trying to describe the world I have seen, it seems I have set for myself an impossible task: to portray a land of such vast proportions, such darkness, and such looming, hideous evil. I seek to describe the indescribable. My descriptions fail; my pen falters. Yet I must make the effort, if only for my own sake.

  To my right, to the north, the House of Silence stood upon a low hill about seventy-five miles away. Many lights gleamed within it, but no sound ever came from it. It had remained unchanged through uncountable epochs—always the unwavering lanterns shining from beneath its sloping eaves and twisted windows, but never a whisper our listening devices could detect. Our people considered this House the greatest peril in all the Night Land. From my earliest childhood, perhaps because of my Night Hearing, I feared it more than any other aspect of that terrible country, for I often thought I felt the evil seeping from it, reaching toward the pyramid. It was as if some fate awaited me concerning it, and a violent trembling would seize my entire body if I stared too long into the beckoning blackness of its enormous, arched doorway.

  Beside the House of Silence wound the gray, shimmering Road Where The Silent Ones Walk. We knew almost nothing about the Road, which passed around the eastern and southern sides of the pyramid before finally vanishing in the west. Many scholars believed that, of all the structures surrounding the pyramid, only it had been built by human hands. And on this point alone a thousand books have been written, all contradicting one another, as is the way of such things. It was the same with every other monstrous creature—whole libraries had been penned on every aspect of the Night Land, and millions of such volumes had molded, forgotten, into dust.

  I stepped out of the embrasure. Because of the lateness of the hour, the wide corridor in which I stood, banding the One Thousandth Plateau, lay deserted save for a watchman riding the moving road spanning the width of the passage. Seeing this familiar scene from Andrew's perspective, I hesitated, for I could not help but wonder what he would think of it all, especially the traveling roads we called migrators, which ran around the outer edge of each of the plateaus. The One Thousandth Plateau stood six miles and thirty fathoms above the plain of the Night Land, and stretched more than a mile across. Numerous doors and passages lined the corridor's inner wall, and though most of the pyramid was made of shining gray metal, throughout the ages artists had painted colorful scenes along the passage, so that as I stepped onto the migrator, I rolled past brilliant depictions from the history of the One Thousandth City, and portrayals of battles with the monsters of the Night Land. The ceiling, which hung twenty-six feet above me, had always provided ample space before, but now, remembering the blue dome of the ancient sky, I felt confined.

  In a few minutes, I stepped off the migrator at the northeastern wall, where I gazed through another spyglass at the Watcher of the Northeast—called the Crowned Watcher because a blue, luminous ring hung in the air above its vast head, shedding a strange glow downward over the monster's dreadful folds. The light revealed its enormous, wrinkled brow, but left all the lower face in shadow, save the ear, which belled out from the back of the head toward the redoubt. Past observers claimed to have seen it quiver, though no living person had ever witnessed it. The night hid its body, but ancient travelers' accounts claimed it stood like an enormous idol, its shoulders tapering down in a severe angle, its distorted hands hanging to its sides, its lower body a shapeless mound of darkness.

  Beyond the Northeast Watcher, close by the Road Where The Silent Ones Walk, lay the region called The Place Where The Silent Ones Are Not, so named because the Silent Ones were never seen there. The Giants' Sea bounded the Road upon the far side, and beyond the sea ran another, smaller road called The Road By The Quiet City, which passed beside the unwinking, haunted lights of a deserted metropolis. We had never, in hundreds of thousands of years of watching, ever spied signs of life along its empty avenues, nor had even one of its lights ever faltered throughout that time. Its towers and domes rose, row upon row, into the sky, strange sculptures dotted its high roofs, and sweeping stairs wound between the buildings, as if it had once been home to a noble race.

  Close beside the lights of The Quiet City lay the impenetrable void of The Valley Of The Hounds, home of the monstrous Night Hounds. Beyond that, obscuring all the east, hung a tangible, absolute darkness we called The Black Mist.

  As I rolled on the migrator through the quiet Hours of Sleep, making a circuit to see each section of the Night Land, I heard a far, dreadful sound down in the lightless east, and, presently, again—a cackling laughter, deep as low thunder among the mountains. Because this came at random intervals from the Unknown Lands beyond the Valley Of The Hounds, we named that distant, unseen region The Country Of The Great Laughter. Despite having heard it many times, it always made me uneasy, a constant reminder, even in the redoubt's depths, of the horrors assailing earth's last millions.

  Again, I was struck by the contrast between my life and my vision of the world before the sun failed. How strange a man Andrew Eddins seemed to me, who could, on whim, ride a horse through forests and glades! How different and yet how similar the two of us were, he with his interest in nature studies, I with my fascination for mathematics, he loving an outdoors I had never seen. I knew my environment had made me more thoughtful than he; I lacked his quick temper but shared his impulsive nature. He seemed the strangest of
creatures, a great hulk of a man compared to the size of my people, so alien as to be almost beyond my understanding, and yet, at the same time, a part of myself.

  Stepping off the migrator, I gazed at the translucent cover of one of the pyramid's millions of interior lights. Though I understood the simple principle that powered it, the part that was Andrew, who lived in a world of torches and candles, looked upon it with awe.

  I sat down on a bench, overcome once more, thinking of that whole lost world. How unfair it seemed for my people to suffer imprisonment when humanity had once roamed the whole world. I put my hands over my eyes, as if to blot out the vision, but in the darkness I saw only a tall, gray-eyed lady, wearing unfamiliar garments.

  After all these ages, where are you? The thought came unbidden, and I looked up, suddenly struck by the notion that if I had returned to life, perhaps Mirdath might do so as well. The idea filled me with excitement, but dismayed me too, for if she lived among the millions of people in the pyramid, I did not know how I would ever find her. Undoubtedly, she would look completely different, even as I, Andros, looked different from Andrew.

  The Laughter sounded again, rousing me from my reverie. As it died away into the eastern darkness, I rose and looked through the spyglass, knowing Andrew's memories would alter my perspective. I focused on the crater of the Giants’ Pit, lying south of the Giants' Kilns. Titans tended these Kilns, enormous, bulging cylinders casting a red, sporadic light. The illumination threw wavering shadows across the mouth of the Pit, and the giants could be indistinctly seen crawling along its rim, performing unfathomable tasks. We neither knew what they did to the Kilns, nor why they did it, and this was but another of the mysteries of the Night Land.

  To the back of the Giants’ Pit, between it and the Valley Of The Hounds stood a vast, black Headland. The light of the Kilns struck the brow of the formation, revealing forms constantly approaching the illumination, looking over the edge, and swiftly returning to the shadows. Throughout our recorded history, never had an hour passed without at least one of the creatures emerging. Because of this, we marked the region on our maps as The Headland From Which Strange Things Peer.