He Who Walks in Shadow (3 page)

Rachel coughed out a little laugh and wiped her hands on a dish towel. “Well, I always disliked the sensationalism, but when it was directed at my father I came to despise it. Besides, my editor didn’t care for women in the newsroom.”

I walked around the island to face her, taking her hand in mine. “Rachel, you know that I would have been there today if I believed your father were dead. If I didn’t know he was alive.”

Rachel closed her eyes tight, and I feared my words had given her great pain. “You’ve said that before,” she said softly, “but I’ve seen no evidence to believe it’s true.”

“Only because you haven’t given me the chance to show you. There are things you need to hear, proof you need to see. But you will have to have faith.”

She cocked her head to the side, and I winced at the look she gave me. “Oh, Henry, you’ve always been like family to me, the uncle I never had,” she said. “But you and my father… For you two, everything was always a mystery. There was always something deeper than the mundane. Something beyond the ordinary. You couldn’t just take things at face value. Sometimes there’s nothing more to the matter than what we see.”

“Even if that’s true, even if normally that were the case, can’t you understand that this is different? Your father didn’t just walk out and leave. You can’t believe that.”

“God, Henry,” she said, and her voice was thick with frustration as she rubbed the bridge of her nose, “if I learned one thing from my father it is to never rule anything out. That there is nothing in this world that’s so insane that it can’t be believed. Can you honestly tell me that you know for sure he didn’t just decide to leave? Take that book of his and just disappear? Maybe his mind finally snapped. Maybe he had a stroke and forgot who he was. Wandered into the woods and fell off of one of those blind cliffs just outside of town. Drowned in those god-awful swamps. Swept out to sea by the Miskatonic. How do you know he’s still out there?”

“He didn’t just disappear. He left a message. He left a clue for us.”

“You mean the manuscript?”

“Yes! Did you read it?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t. The executors had it. They told me it was all made up. And if my father did go mad and walk out and abandon us, I didn’t want to see the evidence of it.”

“Well, I did read it, and it is not insanity. It is an accurate record of the things we faced. The things we fought. I know that for a fact because I was there. And even more importantly, that manuscript tells about a meeting your father had mere days before his disappearance. A meeting with a man—a German—Erich Zann. He is the key. If we find this man, we find your father.”

“We?”

“Yes, Rachel. I am going after Carter. I owe it to him, and I know he would do the same for me. But I’m old, and I’m weak. I can’t find him alone. If I am going to see this through, I need your help.”

“You want me to just to forget everything and go with you?”

“There’s nothing tying you here.”

She flinched, and I felt my heart drop as a wave of emotion passed over her face. What I had said was true, but that didn’t make it any easier for her, and it didn’t make the past any less painful. There was a reason she was alone in that house, with no family beyond Carter, and perhaps me, to consider. “I’m sorry, Rachel. I spoke hastily. I didn’t mean any harm.”

“No,” she said, holding up a hand to stop me, as I had seen her father do a hundred times before, “no, you’re right. You only told the truth. I think I’ll take that drink now.”

She turned and removed a decanter from a high shelf, pouring a draught of dark brown liquid. She looked at me and I nodded, so she poured a second.

“Rachel, I know the last few years have been difficult. I know that you never really forgave your father…”

Rachel spun on me in an instant. “That’s not true,” she said, pointing an accusing finger and cutting me off in mid-sentence. An awkward and uneasy silence followed. She picked up the second glass of brandy and handed it to me. “And you should know it’s not true. Growing up with my father wasn’t easy, but it taught me to be harder than most people. I never blamed him when you two went off for months at a time. I knew that it was part of his work, and I knew how important that work was. And I knew he loved me.”

“But what happened to William, that was…”

“No different,” she said, her voice quivering. “William was no man’s fool. He knew the risks, and he accepted them freely. I accepted them, too. No, Henry. I never blamed my father for what happened. But he blamed himself. If there’s been distance between us these past few years, it was his own guilt that made it, and it was his own guilt that kept it.”

We stood in silence, the ghosts of the past thick around us. I downed my drink and opened my briefcase. I removed a ream of paper and placed it on the kitchen counter.

“So that’s it, then?”

“That’s it. Just read it, Rachel. That’s all I ask. And if after you’ve read it you still think your father simply disappeared into the snows, then so be it. I just want you to give me this one chance. Will you do that at least, for an old friend?”

Rachel smiled again, and this time I sensed it was sincere. “For you,” she said, taking my hand, “and for my father, anything.”

And so we left it.

* * *

July 22, 1933

I had been awake barely a half hour this morning when there was a knock on my door. I opened it to find Rachel, the same wild look in her eyes that I had seen on occasion in her father’s.

“All right,” she said, thrusting the manuscript into my hands, “I can’t believe I’m doing this. When do we leave? And where are we going?”

“Berlin,” I answered. “Our search begins there.”

Diary of Rachel Jones

July 22, 1933

For the past six months, I’ve been coming to terms with the death of my father. It’s an event every daughter—every child—dreads, but it is something that we all face. But I’ve been preparing for longer than most.

Some might call my father a fanatic, a crusader. To me he was always just a good man, doing the best he could to light the darkness so that his daughter might live in peace. Many times, he would wake me in the middle of the night to tell me that he and Henry had to leave. That he was needed somewhere in the world, that some wrong needed righting. He never said it, but I knew there was a chance he wouldn’t come back, and I knew those late night visits were his way of saying goodbye.

Forever.

It was only later in life that I realized what exactly it was that he did. He was like Moses of old, standing at the edge of the Red Sea, holding back Pharaoh’s armies with her waters, telling those who would do his people harm that they would come this far, but no farther.

But my father stood against something far worse than men and their ambitions. The tide he faced was one of swirling chaos. His tools—the ancient legends and texts that often contained as much folklore as fact. And yet he always came home from these adventures. He was always there for me. Until the day he wasn’t.

I was sad, of course. Devastated, even. But I’m ashamed to say I felt some relief, too. The knock on the door I had always feared, the message of condolence I had always dreaded, it had finally came. At least now it was over. So I avoided Henry, even as I knew what he wanted to tell me, what he believed. That my father—somehow, some way—was alive. As absurd as that was. As impossible as it was to believe.

Then I read the manuscript.

I do not doubt for a moment that anyone else who read through those pages would have called them madness, the ravings of a man teetering on the edge, one who had finally gone over. Stories of demons, dark gods, and unnamed cults. Of sunken cities and the rising of great Cthulhu. Yes, madness. Unless you had lived my life. Unless you had seen what I had seen. Oh, there can be no question—my childhood prepared me well for today.

Is my father alive? I honestly don’t know. It seems to me that it is more likely that he is dead, killed by this Zann for the book which evil men have always coveted,
Incendium Maleficarum
. But whatever the case may be, my father dedicated his life to a cause, to a war that has been raging for millennia. Another battle has begun in that war, and whether we fight for my father’s freedom or in his memory, we will go on.

I am, after all, my father’s daughter.

Journal of Henry Armitage

July 23, 1933

Today we leave for Germany. I am excited, but apprehensive as well. Carter has been missing for six months, and even I must admit that the chances we will find him, and find him alive, are slim.

Of course, there is something else that weighs on my mind, something that I have tried not to think on, that I’ve tried to push away. I wish I could deny it, I wish I did not feel this way, but I am reminded of another trip overseas, some thirteen years ago, one I wrote about in a book that I never dared to publish and probably never will. Of all the star-crossed voyages Carter and I have made, none has ended in greater heartbreak than that one. For it changed the course of all our lives.

And if history repeats? If Rachel faces tragedy and death once again, perhaps her own?

How will I live with myself?

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

Rachel was born at the turn of the century, only a few years after Carter’s marriage to Anna Stanton, a wonderful girl who was the daughter of Professor Thaddeus Stanton. Rachel’s birth was cloaked in sadness, as her mother did not survive the ordeal. It was Carter’s aunt, Mrs. Gertrude Partridge, who served in her stead and guided Rachel into womanhood. And Mrs. Partridge suffered for her kindness.

Although she had never known her, Rachel was the image of her mother in body and soul. She had the streak of rebellion that had marked Anna, and Carter encouraged her at every turn, much to the madam Partridge’s eternal disapproval and dismay. But it served the girl well, and when she came of age she followed her father’s footsteps to Miskatonic which, in keeping with its unorthodox ways, had recently begun to accept women.

It was there that she met William.

William Jones was one of the brightest men to come through the ancient gates of Miskatonic, and Carter and I battled over him for much of his tenure at the university. Carter could barely contain his delight when he seemed to have won him from me, though I had the last laugh when we learned that it was Carter’s assets not as a professor but rather as a father that drew the young man to his side. Rachel and Will were married in the winter of 1918. She was 18 years old.

For a year, they were happy, and William worked at the side of Carter and myself, ostensibly as a graduate student. But on a particularly dark October night, Carter invited Will and me to his study for brandy and a cigar. It was there we informed William of our true purpose and the nature of our off-duty activities; the rumors that floated about Miskatonic were true. Forces moved in the earth, whose purpose was the end of mankind and the return of something older, something ancient, something primeval. And whether those forces were the embodiment of evil or simply so vast in their consciousness as to rate man no more than a pest to be exterminated, there could be little doubt that cohabitation on this planet was not an option. Thus, the war we fought was for the very existence of our species.

It is perhaps remarkable that William accepted this news so readily, but I suppose that years of study at our feet had prepared him for the strange and the uncanny. He joined us willingly. The die was cast, and it wasn’t long before fate had its way.

The letter came in October of 1919. It was addressed to Carter from a Professor Anton Denikin of the University of Moscow, though at that time he bore the title of General. I have included it, in its entirety, below:

September 10, 1919

Brother Weston, my dear compatriot,

My how the years have flown, my friend. It seems only yesterday that we made plans to rendezvous at the University of Moscow and talk of our mutual interest in the forgotten corners of the world. I long for the days before the war. It has taken much from us; it will only take more.

I write to you from Kharkov on the southern front of our war against the Bolshevik. My men have fought valiantly, but I fear we have pushed as far towards Moscow as our limited supplies will allow. I am afraid that I will never again see that city, never again walk her streets or rest within her great cathedrals, not as a free man at least. It is upon that realization that I write you now.

As I am sure you remember, six years ago, in happier times, I spoke to you of strange tidings from the east. Long had I pondered the bizarre events on the Siberian frontier in 1908 when—as the peasants who lived to tell the tale reported—a great fire fell from the sky, night became as day, and the forest was laid waste for hundreds of miles. It piqued my curiosity, but it was another story that turned my blood cold and inspired me to extend an invitation to you then to visit me in Moscow and embark on an expedition to the area.

It was said that from the fires that burned the river Tunguska in those days emerged an object, extracted from the smoking crater that was dug out of the frozen swamps in that barren land. A jewel, one unlike any the men and women of the steppe had ever seen. Travelers through that region described a diamond pyramid, one whose pure, unbroken facets were carved with a perfection that bespoke techniques no earthly hand possesses. Within those facets seemed to burn a thin flame, a flickering red spark that glowed at the heart of the gem. You know of what I speak. The Eye of God has returned, in falling fire and consuming flame as was prophesied in certain ancient books that I will not mention here but that you know all too well. And those same books tell us that the Oculus will only appear when
his
return is imminent.