“Mr. Higgins is a fool,” I said swiftly. “You have been misled by a fool, Mr. Wentworth. There is no conspiracy, only a set of very odd circumstances. Coincidence.”
“There is no such thing as coincidence, Adderly—only fate,” interjected Higgins, his voice neutral. “There is only fate.”
I took a half step toward my adversary. I felt myself gripped once again by the unfamiliar passion that had been my guide through this ordeal. Before, I thought it might have been my studies in the magical arts that had borne it in me—this fire. But at that moment, standing mere feet from the man who had made himself my foil that night in Professor Josephson’s study, I was finally able to understand. It was not the magic that had brought out my hatred. It was Higgins.
“Is it my fate that I must repeatedly encounter you, Higgins?” I looked him straight in the eyes, challenging him. This time, I would not allow him to walk away—I would provoke him and we would fight. And I would win. He inched closer to me.
“Yes,” he said. “I am your Satan. And this is your own private Hades.”
“You are not Satan.” I smiled and readied myself for the melee. “You are merely a fly that is annoying me this morning.”
His rage was growing more evident. Thomas Wentworth took a step backward. He realized that he could not stop us. Higgins raised his hands and formed them into fists.
“Adderly,” he seethed, “I could kill you with my bare hands.”
Before I could say or do anything, I heard from behind me the sound of a pistol being cocked.
“There will be no deaths this morning, Mr. Higgins!” announced Vincent, stepping into the anteroom. “Unless you would like to volunteer.”
As he came to stand to my left, he smiled, and pointed the weapon at Higgins’ chest. I felt both disappointment and relief with Vincent’s intrusion—and then a split-second later, terror, as it seemed that Vincent actually meant to fire. A silence borne of the anticipation of thunder hung over us all. Higgins stood still, seeming to consider his options. I could see the anger begin to dissipate. The seconds ticked by, too slowly. He lowered his arms, relaxed his fists, and backed up a few steps. Vincent continued to hold the gun, still smiling, seemingly debating the issue of whether or not to shoot. Although I hated the man fiercely, I did not want him shot down in cold blood. I was on the verge of asking Vincent to lower the weapon when, finally, he did so himself.
“Albert.”
The servant entered, and accepted the proffered gun.
“Please put that away,” said Vincent, not taking his eyes off the still-fuming Higgins. “We are all grown men. We can settle our affairs with words. There is no need to use violence, is there Mr. Higgins?”
Higgins made no response, verbal or otherwise. Seemingly satisfied, Vincent turned his full attention to Thomas Wentworth.
“Good morning, Uncle Thomas,” he said pleasantly. “Do you wish to speak with me?”
At that point, Vincent seemed to stop paying any mind to Higgins. Not trusting that man to remain peaceful, I continued to keep an eye on him while the other two spoke.
“Vincent, you devil,” said Wentworth vehemently. “You are through!”
“Whatever do you mean, Uncle?”
“You know damn well what I mean! We know what you and Adderly have been doing. Although it has taken years, you—along with whatever agents you may have used—have eliminated everyone that stood between you and the family fortune. Even if there is no evidence as far as the law is concerned, I shall have you thrown out of this house and disowned. I shall see you destroyed!”
Vincent’s pleasant demeanor turned dark, and he made no attempt to restrain himself.
“Uncle, you know as well as I that my inheritance is incontestable. I am the rightful owner. I grew up in this house. It is mine! Mary and Catherine died of the influenza, not an uncommon event that year. William died in the War, also not unexpected. My stepparents died of some strange disease, nurtured in the steaming jungles of decadent Africa. And Elizabeth died of an inexplicable phenomenon! At least, it is inexplicable for a buffoon such as you.”
“An agent of the Ancient Ones,” said Wentworth, “could make anything appear accidental.”
I was so stunned to hear those words from that gentleman that I missed Vincent’s reaction. When I did look over at him, there was indignation upon his face.
“I am not quite so much of a buffoon as you believed, am I Vincent?” asked Wentworth.
“How dare you make such a preposterous accusation!”
I noticed Vincent’s hand clench into a fist.
“When one is willing to accept the insanity of the forces of evil which lie just beyond the boundaries of our world, a great many things suddenly make sense. Mr. Higgins has opened my eyes. We are allied against you, Vincent. We will strip you of everything you own, everything that you hold dear. You shall be exposed for the monster you truly are.”
As Vincent listened to his uncle, I saw him relax with astounding rapidity. His hand uncurled, and the anger in his face melted away.
“Uncle Thomas,” he said calmly, “you are proceeding under a delusion induced by this madman. As I’m sure my compatriot has already told you.”
I could sense Higgins begin to get upset again. I placed my hand in my coat pocket and grabbed the knife within.
“I invite you to take whatever steps you feel are necessary at the present time,” Vincent continued. “When all of this is over, and you finally realize that you have been led astray by this man, I shall forgive you. Then we can take our revenge upon Mr. Higgins together. In the meantime, feel free to bring the police in on these matters.”
At that point Higgins spoke up.
“Yes, perhaps you are right. We do not have any legally binding proof to implicate you in the misfortune of this family.”
He paused, then looked directly at me with a bitter smile.
“But the trail of bodies you have left in your wake is not very well disguised, Mr. Adderly.”
I tried to not react at all to the accusation, but I’m not sure I was able to control myself completely. Did I flinch slightly? Did my eyes shift or widen? I do not know.
“It is a fact,” he continued, “that the police have not yet connected the recent unexplained deaths in Arkham. Not yet. But I have. The stench of primordial evil hovers over them all.”
He balled his right hand into a fist and raised his thumb.
“First, I must admit that I was wrong to dismiss your claim regarding Elizabeth Wentworth’s death.”
He extended the index finger of his right hand.
“Second, Andrew Cooke could not possibly have been killed by an earthly assailant. No human madman could leave behind such a corpse. Only a few extra-dimensional nightmares are capable of such a gruesome feat.”
He extended the middle finger.
“And lastly, there is Doctor Jakob Trautmann, who died of heart failure while perusing the Necronomicon, gun in hand, with the broken bits and pieces of an Elder Sign nearby. It is a most perplexing set of circumstances, until one considers that the description of the last two people to see him alive matches the two of you. And that the autopsy report revealed that his heart was crushed! Without a mark upon his skin, his heart was crushed within his chest.”
Higgins lowered his hand and waited. My initial reaction to his revelation about Doctor Trautmann’s death was one of shock, but I quickly recovered my sensibilities. Higgins was my enemy. How could I trust him to tell me the truth?
“To implicate us in any of those deaths is quite a stretch of the imagination, Mr. Higgins,” responded Vincent with a smile. “I believe that you shall have just as much difficulty convincing the police of our guilt as you are having with us. But please—do not let us get in the way of your attempt to publicly humiliate yourself.”
“Do not be so sure of yourself, Vincent Fenster,” said Higgins, inching closer to us. “You may have taken steps to clean up after yourself and keep suspicion away, but
what of the young and naïve Robert Adderly? He is not so clever as you. When the police decide to bring him in for questioning, they will be very curious about his presence here, so many miles from Arkham. And if a murderer is found hiding in your house, what does that make you in the eyes of the law?”
We all stood frozen in the wake of his pronouncement. It seemed as if no one wanted to be the first to move. Then, Higgins stepped back and looked at Thomas Wentworth, who only nodded in reply.
“We shall return, gentlemen,” said Higgins, as the two men turned to leave.
“Mr. Higgins,” said Vincent. Both men stopped and looked back. “I must request that you to return in the daylight, and only to this door. Any other time or place, and I shall be forced to exercise my legal right as a property owner to shoot you dead on sight.”
There was no response from either man. They walked away. We watched them go in silence, until they had moved beyond the gate, and disappeared.
“How interesting,” said Vincent. I would not have chosen “interesting” to describe that encounter. At the very least, they were vexing. The threat of police intervention had definitely made me anxious.
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“On the eve of our great triumph, Mr. Higgins tries this act of desperation. I believe he has revealed where his allegiance truly lies. He must know that we are close. He probably hoped that the presence of my uncle would sway you.”
He paused and searched my face for a reaction.
“Has he?”
I stared at the gate through which the men had exited, an iron veil between this world and the next.
“Not a bit,” I replied without hesitation. “Not a bit.”
Twenty-Three
With the departure of our unexpected visitors, Vincent decided there was no time for further delay. And indeed, there was no need. I was ready.
He instructed Albert to guard the front door, and we descended the stairs, making our way to the laboratory. He had pushed all the furniture against the walls, and hung thick curtains and sheets over everything. A twelve-foot circle of unlit candles sat in the center of the floor. His covering of the walls was largely effective, but I could tell that it would not eliminate all shadows from the room.
“The sheets were a good idea,” I said, “but there will still be some shadows.”
“Yes, but they won’t matter.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am.”
To his credit, he realized that my confidence was more important than his natural inclination toward secretiveness.
“It is impossible to completely eliminate all shadows from the room,” he explained. “The real goal is only to eliminate any shadows from the magical circle which you will trace upon the floor. In particular, the final step of the ceremony is really the only time that the issue of light or darkness comes into play.”
Along the base of the far wall, Vincent had lined up the items we would need: A silver censer with a removable lid; incense and matches; a glass of wine; a small brass hoop about six inches in diameter; a piece of white chalk; and a short, thin wand, like the baton used by a symphony conductor. I began to examine the items carefully. As the magician, it was my prerogative to accept or reject the material components laid out before me. I had to be convinced they were of good quality, and appropriate for the ceremony. It was my confidence, my mind that was crucial for the success of the spell. It cannot be stressed enough that my life was at stake.
The scent of the incense stopped me for a moment: the subtle but unmistakable scent of lilac, Elizabeth’s favorite flower. I took a long pause, and a deep breath, filling my lungs with it. Revenge had forced my full attention to the study of magic for the past weeks. More pleasant memories had been pushed aside, relegated to remote, unused corners of my mind. That would soon change, I swore to myself. Once this business was concluded, I vowed that I would spend more of my days recalling our time together.
After placing all of the components at appropriate locations within the circle of candles, I stepped inside. The shard sat in the center. Standing over it, I silently rehearsed the ceremony once, twice, going through the motions of picking up the brass hoop, then the shard. Satisfied that there would be plenty of room within the circle for me to conduct the ritual, I returned the items to their proper places on the floor, and nodded to Vincent. He struck a match and lit the first candle. He then lit a stick of wood using the first candle and transferred the flame to the others. Within two minutes, the room was ablaze with light. I removed my coat, and handed it to Vincent, who stepped back against the wall. I looked all around me: No shadows intruded into the circle.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
Until that point, I’d had no doubts, no fear. But as I tried to clear my mind to begin, something bizarre happened. I thought at first it was just the warmth from the candle flames distracting me. It seemed as if a presence, another mind, was pressing against my own, probing. The stress spread instantly across my nerves, as a crack through a sheet of glass. Suddenly, I could not concentrate. My thoughts darted everywhere—a confusing mass of incoherent ideas. I could not understand how I had become so unsettled. The first signs of panic set in. It was no use. I shook my head violently and looked at Vincent.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
He smiled, but it was skeletal and false. His eyes remained cloaked in shadow despite the intense light in the room. I sensed something there—something dark and old. It is said that the eyes mirror the soul. Seeing those two pits of blackness, I wondered what could possibly lie behind them. His image began to swim in my vision. The panic causing my imagination to run wild, I believed that I saw my death in those dark orbs. I saw a devil hiding within them. No, worse than a devil: It was chaos incarnate. His face morphed, no longer the Vincent I knew, had known since childhood. He had become something else. The more I looked, the more I felt my intellect slipping away, barely staying afloat in a sea of animal urges. I thought that only seconds had elapsed, but all sense of time was gone. I closed my eyes, thinking that I might be going mad.
In desperation, I bit down hard on my lower lip. Pain, and a taste of blood, brought back a sense of normality, of sanity. But if I opened my eyes again, what would I see? Gasping for breath, I counted—one, two, three—and fearfully cracked them.
Vincent stood there, just as he had been before my…episode, except that the smile was gone, replaced by an expression of concern. He took a few steps forward and looked at me closely.
“What happened?” he asked. “Are you bleeding?”
I touched my lip and examined a reddened fingertip. Did I hallucinate? I swallowed the salty bit of blood in my mouth.
“I saw…” I said. “I thought…a demon.”
“Demon?” he asked, startled by my statement. I could only point at him with a shaking finger. He examined all parts of himself, poking and prodding here and there.
“There is no demon here,” he said, “that I can detect.”
He tried to smile, but the look of concern returned.
“Are you sure that you’re ready for this? We can postpone the ceremony.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I’ve waited too long for this. I knew it would be difficult. I need to do this now.”
“Very well.”
Vincent stepped back against the wall.
I readied myself again, breathing deeply, and relaxing my mind. With each breath, I eliminated one more distraction. Inhale. The bite in my lip had begun to clot. Exhale. There was nothing to taste. Inhale. The pain was slight enough to ignore. Exhale. There was nothing to feel.
Inhale.
Vincent stood before me, as he did before.
Exhale.
There was nothing to fear.
Inhale.
I closed my eyes.
Exhale.
There was nothing to see.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
> I was focused.
I was ready.
The ritual began with the creation of the magical circle. After speaking a few phrases in Latin, I drew it on the floor with chalk—a pair of concentric circles with a gap of about six inches between them. In the gap, at each of the four points of the compass, I etched several ancient symbols. Facing first north, then south, east, and west, I uttered a short invocation to the gods of each. Immediately upon completion of the fourth invocation, there was an indefinable shift in the atmosphere. It felt as if the area within the circle had become in some way disassociated from the rest of the laboratory. The sensation was unlike my experiences with the ceremony used to communicate with the dead. In that case, there had been definite sensory effects at the boundary, where we were temporarily transported to another plane. In this instance, the area within the circle felt wholly disconnected from reality, but still in place, as perhaps an iceberg in the ocean right after it calves from a glacier.
With the preparations out of the way, the ceremony proper began. I placed the incense into the censer and lit it, then closed the lid. A rose-scented smoke wafted through the holes in the lid and spread out, but only as far as the edge of the inner circle I had drawn on the floor. I next recited a lengthy invocation while tracing a series of swirling designs in the air with the wand. As I proceeded, the tip of the wand glowed red, and the air became charged. After several minutes of continuous chanting, I put down the wand, and picked up the small hoop. Holding it in both hands, I spoke a single short phrase. The charge in the air was channeled into the hoop, which began glowing with a reddish hue. It was no longer a simple piece of metal, but a gateway, one through which Sothoth Pnath would return to the hellish outer spaces from whence it had come.
The next phase of the ceremony tested the limit of my vocal cords. I was required to speak into the glowing hoop a dozen larynx-twisting commands in the R’lyehian tongue. Though I had practiced the string of syllables many times in the last twenty-four hours—I was sure I could have said it in my sleep—there was something about looking into that glowing hoop that caused my throat to tighten. But regardless, I managed to get them out. Something happened after I spoke the very first phrase: I actually imagined that I heard a response. A faint rumble, more felt than heard, seemed to reverberate in the air. I hear it said from beyond the gateway, if anything so alien could be translated into words. But whatever it was, the responses seemed to be positive.
The Shadow Beyond Page 27
