He Who Walks in Shadow

by Brett J. Talley

  Rachel took my hands in hers. “Tell me the truth, Henry. I don’t want you to hide anything from me.”

  “Of course.”

  She hesitated, and I knew what she would ask. “Do you really think my father is alive?”

  “I do. In fact, I’m sure of it. No one lives on this earth that understands the way the book works like your father. Maybe nobody ever has. Zann can’t kill him. He is too valuable.”

  Rachel shuddered at the mention of Carter’s possible murder. “What do we know about Zann?”

  “Now he is an interesting character,” I said, happy to turn to something I knew more about. “Zann’s father was an incredibly talented, if largely unknown, musician. And he used that talent in a very special way. He was what we might call a ‘closer’—a man who worked to keep the gates between our existence and those beyond tightly shut. I understand from those who should know that his music was his weapon, and he wielded it with a special ferocity. Unfortunately, as is too often the case it seems, others didn’t recognize his importance. Instead, the wider world saw only a mad man who spoke of things unseen and unheard. He disappeared many years ago from his apartment on the Rue d’Auseil in Paris, a vanishing, if I might be so bold, that was as mysterious as your father’s.

  “They say the stars were different that night and that the signs in the heavens portended some uncertain doom. The last anyone saw or heard of Zann, he was locked in a garret apartment, sawing away at his violin, the song he played unlike any produced before or since.

  “By the time of his disappearance, Zann’s son had not seen his father in many years, the latter having abandoned the family back in Germany. Following the death of his mother, Zann went to live with relatives in Munich. After a sterling career at the University of Berlin, he became a prominent scholar, attaining the position of professor of ancient history at the University.”

  “With that sort of pedigree, I’m surprised he would be responsible,” she said, as the rumble of turbulence shook the plane. She cast her gaze around the narrow metal tube. “I don’t think I’ll ever like flying.”

  “His reputation is spotless,” I said, returning to the matter at hand. “And I can find nothing in the official records of his career to indicate he’d be involved in anything nefarious.”

  “And yet you’re sure he’s responsible?” she said as she gestured to the steward for a brandy to calm her nerves.

  “Certainly. Carter always had an uncanny ability to judge character. Moreover, there is some evidence that Zann departed from the principles of his father. While his official records are spotless, there is often far more to a man than what he shows in the light of day. My research indicates that during his time at the University of Berlin, he fell in with a certain secret society, one that traces its roots back to the mythical sons of Aryas.”

  “The Thule Society?”

  “You’ve heard of them?” I admit, I was both surprised and impressed.

  “I did some research on the völkische Bewegung for a piece in the Advertiser on the new German government. Fascinating—if bizarre—stuff. It seemed that the Thule Society had been particularly influential in the halls of power at one point, but my understanding is that it was disbanded after falling out of favor with the authorities.”

  “And that is the official story. But in truth, Carter and I believed that the Thule Society merely went underground and that, indeed, its adherents were in high positions throughout Berlin. It’s a frightening possibility, given that the Thule held the ancient ones in high esteem, worshiping them and seeking their return. But now, with Dr. Zann’s promotion to Reich Minister of Cultural History, our theory seems to have been confirmed. And then, of course, there’s the reaction of the Incendium Maleficarum to Dr. Zann’s presence.”

  She took a long sip from her drink, and some of the color returned to her cheeks. “You mean the singing.”

  I nodded. “Your father confirmed the old legends. The book seeks its master, the one through whom it will accomplish its end. And only that person can hear its song. Your father heard that song for thirty years, right up until the moment Erich Zann walked through his door. From that point, Zann became its true owner.”

  Rachel sat silently in her seat, seeming to study a speck of dust on the floor. But I knew her mind was working. She reminded me then of Carter.

  “Do you ever wonder why the book chose my father? If it’s evil,” she said, finally looking back up to me, “then does that say something about him? Does it expose some weakness?”

  All I could do was shake my head. “I have wondered about it, and I know your father wondered, too. It was a terrible burden, one that might well drive a weaker-minded man mad. But in the end, Carter was only a means to an end. The book is patient, and it knew this day would come. Your father has been at the heart of a secret war raging just beyond the borders of civilization and the boundaries of our world. I fear that Dr. Zann seeks to deal a final blow to our side in the conflict. He needed the book to do it, and now he has it.”

  “And he has my father, and all that he knows.”

  “Correct, and that is why we must stop him.”

  “God,” she murmured, slumping into her seat. She waved her empty glass at the steward, who came and refilled it. “This is all so unbelievable.”

  “And I wouldn’t believe it myself, were I not a witness.”

  “How many times have you done this, Henry? How many times have you and my father set off for some godforsaken part of the world, doing godforsaken things most decent people would call insane? How many times?”

  I grinned. “More than I can count, my darling. Many, many times.”

  “Like the time you and my father and William went?”

  My smile faded and I looked away. I could not bear to meet her gaze. “Yes, that was one of the times.”

  “He didn’t even tell me where he was going, you know?” she said, her eyes trailing off as she looked out the window to the sky beyond. “He told me he’d be gone for a month, maybe longer, and not to worry. He said, ‘Carter knows what he’s doing. He’ll take care of everything.’ But even then he offered to stay. I think he would have, too. But I told him that was silly. I told him to go. I insisted. So he kissed me on the cheek, told me he loved me, and was out the door. It happened so fast, like a train passing a station without a stop. I had barely registered that he was leaving before he was gone.”

  What to say to that? How to make up for a crime committed so many years before? I had no words, so I said the only thing that came to my mind. “I’m sorry, Rachel.” It was pathetic and insignificant and clichéd, but it was not empty. Rachel looked at me and took my hands in hers.

  “You don’t have to apologize, Henry. I’m fine. I’ve been fine. And I know that William would want me to help you. We’re going to find my father. I can’t imagine a better way to honor Will.”

  As she looked in my eyes, I knew she meant it. She was putting her faith in me. It was a faith that had been betrayed before.

  Chapter 9

  Excerpt from Memoirs of a Crusader, Dr. Henry Armitage, “The Tunguska Folly of 1919,” (unpublished)

  With William’s assent, Carter was anxious to depart. Our trip was urgent, and time was not in abundance. Unfortunately, the air routes of the modern age were still in their infancy in those days, and so it was by ship that we were to travel. In better times, we would have sailed for the continent and then traveled east by rail. But with the Red Army now in firm control from the Dnieper to the Ural Mountains and beyond, an eastern route was impossible. Thus, we set forth for San Francisco and a ship that would take us to Vladivostok.

  Carter brought with him a veritable library of arcane and esoteric works. He studied them relentlessly on the trip to San Francisco, but he did not speak of his suspicions about what had happened in the Russian wilderness. I knew that William was as curious as I, but neither of us asked any questions.

  When we arrived at the port of San Francisco, Carter had most
of the books posted for return to his office at Miskatonic. All but one, the one he never was without—the Incendium Maleficarum.

  We’d sailed for three days when Carter called us into his cabin. He stoked a fire in the hearth, and as he did, I had the feeling that this night would be unlike so many others before, when we had chatted on inconsequential things over brandy and cigars. Tonight, Carter had the look of a man who meant business.

  Which is not to say that the cigars and brandy were not present. Carter had his vices, and one of them was his love of tobacco. He’d smoked a pipe for a while but had complained incessantly of the hassle it entailed. I’d bought him a box of cigars one Christmas, and he never looked back. The brandy was a habit of older vintage, but one that went well with his new obsession. He poured three glasses, and after we each lit a cigar, he began to speak.

  “Tell me, Henry. Did you ever have the honor of meeting the good General during happier times?”

  “General Denikin? I can’t say that I did.”

  “And of course, young William here would have had no such opportunity. It’s unfortunate, really. Anton Denikin is a great patriot and a lover of his country, and I am sure he has made a fine leader of men. But he was, before the war began, a brilliant professor. His work on the belief systems of the Ankara civilization is quite remarkable.”

  “The Ankara?” William asked. Carter had opened the door to an obscure—and one might even say shunned—epoch of ancient history. My curiosity was piqued.

  “Well,” Weston said, taking a long drag on his cigar and blowing the smoke toward the fireplace, “the Ankara were a truly ancient civilization, making their homes in present-day Turkey, Iran, and along the Mediterranean coast. Many mighty kingdoms rose from the remnants of their empire, and it is said that the knowledge of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, and the Mycenaeans was, in fact, nothing more than a decayed imitation of their own. They had no system of writing that we know of, but their legends survived in the oral traditions. It was the Sumerians—devotees of the Ankaran myths—who wrote them down, and it is their tablets and scrolls that have come down to us through the ages. The University of Moscow possessed the only extant copy of these works, and Professor Denikin is the world’s foremost expert on their contents. I have never seen them in person, but the Professor was kind enough to provide me with copies and detailed descriptions.”

  The room seemed to grow darker as Carter spoke, and though I told myself it was merely the setting of the November sun and the vastness of the empty oceans, I could not help but feel that something more had descended. Words have power in this world, and at the mention of the Ankara, the air had changed around us. But Carter did not seem to notice. He sat there, smoking his cigar, staring into space as if he were looking into the past.

  “The scroll is known,” he continued, “as the Bel Xul. Within its pages are recorded the visions of an Ankaran holy man, who the Sumerians knew only as Nabu Sebet Babi, the Seer of the Seven Gates. It was said that he received secret knowledge of the time before time, when the moon had not yet found its place in the heavens, and no sun had ever dawned upon the earth. Within these visions Nabu Sebet Babi witnessed impossible visions across infinite vistas of time and space. And within those vistas he looked upon an age of earth’s history before the coming of man, when, as the Bible records, ‘the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.’ But that does not mean the world was empty.”

  I nodded as he spoke. The truth of his words I had seen with mine own eyes decades earlier when one of the older masters of this world had risen from the deep. Were it not for the sacrifice of a brave and honorable man, a sea captain named Jonathan Gray, the world might have ended then and there, all those years before.

  “The Bel Xul is thus in keeping with much we have seen in our travels, and it reflects the legends of other long dead cultures that speak of the elder gods, those ancient forms that ruled primordial earth. The Old Ones, who built the titanic cities of Ib and R’lyeh and Tikalt and that nameless necropolis that lies beneath the sands of Arabia. In fact, the Bel Xul may well be the primogenitor of these legends, the seed by which a thousand different mythos came into being.”

  “But what,” I said, leaning in close to Carter, “does this have to do with what happened in Siberia?”

  Carter looked down at the letter he had received from Denikin, rereading its key passages. “The Bel Xul is voluminous,” he said, still scanning the missive, “but the good professor has directed us to one passage. The Old Ones, of course, are unimaginable to us, and attempts to conceptualize them are as if one were to stare into the unreverberate blackness of the abyss—impenetrable. That is their nature.

  “But there is one,” he said, holding up a finger, “whose relationship to mankind is entirely different. When the Old Ones were overthrown, when light came to this world and they were cast into outer darkness, there was one who remained, who still walked the earth and sowed destruction and confusion in his midst.

  “He is the harbinger, the messenger, he who stands in between. A god to the legendary Mi-Go, a demon to early man. He wears a thousand masks, or so they say, and thus is known by many names. He is the crawling chaos, the ‘Black Man’ of the ancient witch cults, the haunter of the dark. But one name, taken when he walked along the River Nile in the city of Shem in the Old Kingdom, he wears as his own. And that name,” Carter said, the light of the fire reflected in his eyes, “the one that has come to us across the darkness of forty-seven centuries, is Nyarlathotep.”

  He leaned back in his chair, relighting the cigar that had gone dead in the telling of his story. The name of Nyarlathotep was well known to me, as were the tales of his wanderings across the earth. And black stories they were. It was said that he possessed power over the mind of man and that he could, merely with his words, sway the masses. He had the ability to possess and control the powerful—kings, emperors, popes—leading entire kingdoms to death and destruction. Disease followed in his wake, and there was no land that his feet fell upon that was spared an ill fate. Even William, who was but a neophyte in his knowledge of the true nature of the world around us, had heard that accursed name.

  “And that is why we are on this voyage. I believe that Nyarlathotep will return. Now, the Oculus can banish the dark one from our world, but it has been lost for a millennium. It is said that it will only reappear when the stars come right and the rise of Nyarlathotep is imminent. If it is possible that the Oculus has returned, then we cannot ignore the threat. If others were to attain it first, all hope might well be lost. And given that the last few years have brought us death and destruction never before imagined, I must believe that Denikin’s words are more than idle chatter. Then there is the matter of the ring he is said to wear.”

  “Yes,” I said, “the one that bears the yellow sign.”

  Carter nodded. “It is that sign by which he is known, the sign that heralds the aligning of the stars and the opening of the gate. The same sign that Denikin mentions, the one that rumor tells has arisen again. Rumors seldom bear the whole truth, but they rarely bear none, either. The fact is,” he said, folding the letter carefully and placing it in its envelope, “we are fortunate that Denikin wrote to us when he did, while time remains to us, even if it is short.”

  “What does the book say of Nyarlathotep?” William asked.

  I watched as Carter’s eyes trailed across the darkened chamber to the tome that sat upon the desk of his stateroom, the book that I rarely saw him without. The flickering light of the fireplace seemed to play along the crimson cover, and the gold-flaked inscription, Incendium Maleficarum, sparkled in the night. When I had first met Carter Weston, he was a skeptic, a naïve unbeliever who knew little of the world. But now he was the master to whom I looked for answers, and the book was one reason for his wisdom.

  “Little more than we already know from other sources. Whereas the knowledge contained within the book is often secret and hidden from mankind, it is not so with
the stories of Nyarlathotep. These are well known. He has walked among us for centuries. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the Necronomicon speaks so often of him. Some say that it was he who gave the mad Arab inspiration for that work.”

  “What do you think we will find in Russia?”

  “Possibly nothing. But I don’t think so. I think the signs are clear. I think the Oculus is there, and we will find it. And that’s a good thing, because I fear we will need it in the days to come.”

  The conversation ended then. Carter leaned back and smoked his cigar, peering into the distance. William and I sat in silence, pondering what we faced, hoping for fair winds and clear skies. Alas, whatever god watches over us all did not hear our prayers.

  Chapter 10

  Excerpt from Memoirs of a Crusader, Dr. Henry Armitage, “The Tunguska Folly of 1919”, (unpublished)

  We arrived in Vladivostok early in the morning of November 21, 1919, to chaos and madness. Word had come late the night before of the fall of Omsk and the defeat of Admiral Kolchak’s forces in Siberia. The eastern White Army was now in full retreat towards Baikal, with the western army and General Denikin bottled up in the Crimea. Kolchak was rumored dead, though the worst news was yet to come. The British and Americans, who had to that point provided support in the form of both men and materiel, were pulling out. The war was all but lost. The host of civilians gathered at the port confirmed that bitter truth in the starkest way possible.

  We disembarked into a maelstrom. Men, women, and children of every possible background and distinction were everywhere, surrounding us. Some stood shivering in the cold, while the wealthiest were wrapped tight in their finest furs. They came at us, each with something to sell. Diamonds and jewels were thrust into my face, while the prices asked were but a pittance, no more than the cost of transit to anywhere but Vladivostok. Others offered the clothes on their back, and at least one woman tried to sell me her daughter. When it became clear that we weren’t interested, the swarm moved on to their next victims.