He Who Walks in Shadow (27 page)

We stepped from the shadows of the archway into the open plain that formed the cloister. Silence greeted us. If anyone waited and watched, they did not make their presence known. I saw our destination almost immediately.

“There.”

At the far end of the cloister was a vault, what might to the untrained eye have appeared to be a narrow coffin. But I knew immediately—this was the resting place of the staff. Henry put his hand on my shoulder; it was a momentous occasion for us both.

We fanned out around the stone sepulcher. The slab that covered the top did not appear to be held in place by mortar or sealed in any way. I thought this strange, but perhaps the speed with which it had been moved in the days of the last war had led to a less than fulsome approach to the staff’s care.

Henry and Villard went to one side, while Guillaume and I approached the other. We grasped the slab and lifted, sliding open the reliquary with the sound of stone upon stone, which in the silence of that place echoed like thunder.

Inch by inch it opened. Light from the burning torches filtered inside. The slab slid away. I gazed inside and saw…nothing.

The sarcophagus was empty.

“What is it they say, Herr Weston? There is nothing which you can possess which I cannot take away? Or, in this instance, secure first.”

I did not need to turn to look upon its source to know that voice, so filled with mockery and dripping with hate. Zann had beaten us to the prize.

Journal of Carter Weston

July 28, 1933

He stood at the far side of the cloister, a pistol in his hand, his cold sneer somehow magnified by the flickering firelight. We all pointed our weapons, but as German soldiers fanned out from the surrounding doorways, armed each with machine-pistols, it become apparent that we were once again hopelessly outgunned. The last of Zann’s guard brought out an elderly man in a cassock and threw him down upon his knees. This, I was certain, was the head of the order that had vowed to protect the staff. My heart went out to him, even as our own predicament remained most dire.

Zann gestured to another of the soldiers. The man disappeared into the same darkness from which the priest had been dragged. He returned with an object, wrapped in a long white cloth. Zann nodded, and the soldier tugged on the cloth, sweeping it away.

It was everything I had dreamt it would be. Three individual pieces of wood, each long and slender and polished to a shine, wrapped around each other as if they had grown that way, so tightly bound that I could not tell where one began and the other ended. Three, forming one. And at the crown an opening, the perfect place to slip a jewel the shape of a pyramid. There it was, and I had lost it.

“Oh, don’t look so disappointed, my dear Carter. You had to know that it would end like this. We have been one step ahead of you throughout this quest. We have eyes and ears in every city and village in France, not to mention La Sûreté Nationale.”

Villard tensed beside me. I thought I might have to restrain him if he made a move, but his control was better than mine. He took the insult in silence.

“The staff was always to be mine. You should have known that. It was my destiny. From the moment the
Incendium Maleficarum
sang its song to me, I knew that I was fated to do this great thing. And ever since that moment, you have done nothing but interfere with fate, with destiny, with God’s plan, if you will.”

“God’s plan?” I said. “No god did this. You alone are responsible for what will happen if you take the staff.”

“And what will happen? If the gods of old seek to return, I will stop them, just as you would. And should I not be rewarded for my efforts? Should the world not bow before its savior?”

Even in the calamitous straits we now found ourselves in, I could not help but laugh. Zann’s madness was well beyond the absurd.

He lowered his gaze and scowled. “You laugh in your ignorance. Your inability to see beyond the lies you have been taught, all your life. But I am offering you another way. Tell me this, Herr Doctor, have you ever considered Judas Iscariot, and why he betrayed his Christ?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“Well I have,” said Zann. “I believe Judas was simply misunderstood. He looked around the world that he inhabited and he saw pain and disease and suffering and oppression. And here was a man who could cure the sick, who could raise the dead, who could call down ten legions of angels as easily as speaking a name.

“Think of it. Why should people go hungry when this man can feed five thousand with a couple fish and a loaf of bread? Why should people watch their bodies wither away from leprosy if he can cure them with but a thought? Why should the Jewish people suffer under the Roman whip when the Lord of Hosts stands ready to do the bidding of this man called Jesus?

“And yet, what did he do? Nothing. He spoke in riddles. He promised a kingdom not of this world, even as on every street and in every hovel the people of Israel suffered and died. Here, today, now. So I ask you this—given all the power that Christ supposedly possessed, who betrayed whom?”

“I have no idea what you are getting at.”

Zann flexed his jaw as he always did when my obstinacy finally got to him. “I will use the staff for good. I will heal this world. I will earn my place on the earth’s throne. The power I have will be denied to no one. They need give me nothing, pay me nothing, offer me nothing. All they need do is bow.”

Guillaume edged to the side. I saw it, but Zann was so wrapped up in his megalomania that he did not. There was a broken pillar not five feet from where Guillaume stood. It was obvious what he intended. He was armed, as were we all, and perhaps if he had some cover he could hold them off long enough to give us some time to find a defensive position of our own. But it was a long five feet.

“There was a time I thought you could be saved, Erich,” I said to Zann, wanting any edge to keep his attention, even though what I said was very true. “When I thought there was some good left inside of you after all. But whatever was there is gone. Replaced with madness.”

Guillaume took another step to the left.

Zann’s face twisted in anger. “Mad? I am not mad, Carter. I stand at the crossroads of time and humanity’s existence. And I hold in my hand the life of all things, including you and your friends.”

Zann never took his eyes off of me, but the hand holding the gun swept to the side and there was the
pop pop
of a pistol blast. The first shot caught Guillaume in the arm; the second his chest. A scream rent the air and drowned out the fading thunder of the gunshots—the sound of a heart breaking.

Rachel and Margot both reacted at nearly the same time. Both tried to run to Guillaume’s side. Henry, God bless him, grabbed Rachel, and despite her tears and her screams and her struggles he did not let her go. But there was no one for Margot. All she had was now laying on the ground, bleeding to death.

She stumbled to where Guillaume had fallen. If the Germans wished to shoot her, she did not care. At least she would die with the man she loved.

“You see, Carter. There truly is nothing you have that I cannot take. And that includes your very lives. I am in control now. Even Nyarlathotep himself would not dare to stand against me.”

What happened next must have taken only a few moments, but as I watched, time seemed to stop altogether, as if we now stood in a place so far outside this good world that the laws of God and of man no longer applied.

Margot sobbed over Guillaume, and as the life fled from his body and the light from his eyes, he struggled to pass unto her his last words. They came in the form of a question.

“Would you do anything for me?”

The poor girl wept so fiercely she could barely answer. “Yes,” she said finally. “I would do anything for you. I would give my life if it could bring back yours.”

Then Guillaume smiled, but to my eyes it was more like a sneer, his teeth coated in his own blood, that dying light in his eyes suddenly roaring. The hand that Margot had been clasping was in an instant at her throat, and in the other, a blade.

“Of you,” he said, “they will write songs the sound of which will drive men mad.”

Before she could scream, he had slit her throat, the blood spewing forth and bathing him in its spray. No one moved, all of us, even Zann and his men, transfixed by what we saw.

A rushing, mighty wind fell upon us. One by one, the torches flared and then were extinguished, until all was but smoke and darkness. And yet, we were not blinded, the entirety of that great space bathed in a preternatural glow that hurt my eyes to even look upon. It was a light that was not of this world, one that was never meant to shine upon the paths of men.

The wind swirled about us, carrying the smoke of the dead torches into a column of whirling vapor that surrounded Guillaume. A cry echoed in the distance, and to a man we all clutched our ears in agony at that sound, the sound of slaughter, of pain, and of death.

The scream was cut off in an instant, sliced away like butter before a blade. Silence fell. The fog cleared.

He
stood before us.

There are no words in this language or any of those of this earth to describe what we saw in those moments, none that do him justice at least. He was present before us, and yet not. He seemed to shift in and out of existence, as if he was both here and in some other place beyond. He towered over us, thin and gaunt and powerful, garbed in a yellow robe that flowed like smoke off of his shoulders and down his body.

Nyarlathotep had returned.

Journal of Henry Armitage

July 28, 1933

At the last moment, I grabbed Rachel. I didn’t even think about it. I just did it. I heard the shots, I saw her move, and I grabbed her and held on, deaf to her pleas and her tears. Thank God my nerve held.

I had not trusted Guillaume, not in the beginning. But I had come to think of him as one of us, and I knew that Carter saw in him a potential protégé, one to take up the torch that he would one day lay down. Oh, the bitter irony. Oh, the cruel fate. Yet there was no time for such sympathies or considerations. The wonder of what we were seeing overwhelmed all that.

I suppose I had witnessed many things in my years with Carter Weston, things that would have tested the nerves of less experienced men. But I had never seen anything like this, nor had I expected to. A god, rapped in dark majesty, clothed in the body of a man—for I had no illusions that this was his true form. He stood, and we stared. None moved. None breathed. Then the silence was pierced by a gun shot.

It was one of the Germans, one whose fear I suppose had finally ebbed enough for action. But only a small one. He had fired but one shot at the great colossus of a man who stood before him. Nyarlathotep—for I had no doubt that it was he—actually grinned. Then he stretched out his hand. What happened next bordered on disappointing. There was no flash of light. No explosion of fire. No demons swooping down from the swirling purple darkness above us. The German simply fell down in a crumpling heap, dead.

“We shall have no more of that,” said Nyarlathotep. He turned where he stood, surveying the scene, his eyes passing over us all, and my soul turned to brittle ice when they fell upon me.

“So you have all come. How wonderful to have you all here. Those who would rule me,” he said, bowing ever so slightly in the direction of Zann before turning to Carter, “and those who would banish me. Ah, Carter Weston, how I have longed for this day. To see the crusader face-to-face again. There are few who have stood against us, fewer still who survived with their lives and minds intact. And yet here you are. I underestimated you before, in the cold waste. I will not be so foolish again.”

His eyes passed from Carter to me, but it was not me that he saw. Rachel struggled against me again, and I released her.

“I can smell your anger, your hate,” he said. “In the midst of so much fear, it burns like the heart of a star. Such a strange thing, this Guillaume. His love for poor Margot was intense, and hers for him. And yet so easily he turned to you. Oh, you can rest assured in this, little one—I remained below the surface, only acting when need be. Perhaps I nudged him a bit, but he very much betrayed this child for you. I wonder, in your simple mind, how that makes you feel. To be the thief of something so precious. But do not weep for her. She was destined, you see? Destined to a higher purpose. I have removed her from a world of pain and betrayal. Your kind flower but for a season; she will live forever in me.”

He stepped forward, and the air seemed to shimmer around him, the ground quake at the touch of his feet. “Of course, your anger is far more personal, is it not? You do not rage for her, it is not for her death that you would seek revenge. It is for your own foolishness, your own petty shortcomings. How quickly this boy beguiled you. It was the eyes, was it not? Yes, I changed them for you. I wanted them to remind you of another. I was inside of him too, though I must say, taking him was nowhere near as pleasurable.”

“You bastard!” Rachel spat, as if she were speaking to a common tramp and not one who walked the earth before man was even imagined. “This isn’t over. Not yet. Not here.”

The lord of darkness turned back to Weston. “Her father’s daughter, I see. So quaint. So charming. So simple-minded. Do you think, because I take this form, and because I speak your tongue, that we are somehow equals? Child, when this world was a ball of fire and smoke, I was. I have walked half the galaxy in a stride. Before He, whose name I shall not utter here, called light into being, I clothed myself in the darkness of the ancients. I bathed in the primordial deep; I swam in the wine-dark abyss. Before all you know was created, I am. You curse me and you hate me. And yet, who else of my kind will stand before you? You call to your God. Does he answer back? Does he even know that you are here? For I can tell you this, the gods that stand in the outer chaos, that await the end of all things, they do not see you, and they do not hear you, and they do not care whether you live or you die. Only I, Nyarlathotep, move amongst you. Only I care for you. For I do care. I love you. I love you all.”