The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels (6 page)

“Excellent,” said Anthony. “Nothing can warm a man more, in the absence of tangible heat, than the labor of cutting through sophistry. Sit down, my enemy, I beg you. Let’s make ourselves as comfortable as we can, given the hardness of the ground and the aching within.”

“Oh no,” the Devil said, seeming to grow larger as the night advanced, and now unfurling wings like those of a gigantic eagle. “I can do better than that, my friend, by way of distracting us from our mutual plight.”

Anthony had observed that the Devil, in what he took to be the dark angel’s natural form, was not well-adapted for sitting. His goatish limbs were not articulated like a humans; even squatting must be awkward for him. Anthony had not expected compliance when he made his teasing offer—but neither had he expected to be carried away.

The Devil did not grow claws to match his wings; indeed, the wings themselves refused to coalesce into avian feathers, but continued to grow and to change, as if they were intent on attaining the pure insubstantiality of shadow. By night, it seemed, the Ape of God and the Adversary of Humankind had more freedom to formulate himself as he wished—and what he wished to be, it seemed, was a vast cloud of negation.

Anthony felt himself caught up by that cloud, but he was not grabbed or clutched, merely elevated towards the sky. The cloud was beneath him and all around him, but it was perfectly transparent—more perfectly transparent, in fact, than a pool of pure water or the unstirred desert air.

Anthony tried to resist the sensation that he could see more clearly through the cloud of absence than he had ever been able to see before, but his eyes were unusually reluctant to take aboard his conviction and he had to fight to secure the dictatorship of his faith.

He saw the walls of the fort shrink beneath him, until the ruin was a mere blur on the desert’s face. Then he saw the coastline of North Africa, where the ocean was separated from the arid wilderness by a mere ribbon of fertile ground. Then he watched the curve of the horizon extend into the arc of a circle, and he saw the sun that had set a little while before rise again in the west, as the edge of the world could no longer hide it.

“You cannot trouble me with that,” he told the Devil. “I know that the world is round.”

The Devil no longer had eyes to reflect his anguish, nor a leathery tongue with which to form his lies, but he was not voiceless. He spoke within Anthony’s head, like an echo of a thought.

“Fear not, my friend,” the voice said, softer now than before. “I have brought air enough to sustain us for the whole night long—and if, by chance, you would like to slake your thirsts, I have water and blood enough to bring you to the very brink of satisfaction.”

“I have drunk my fill of the Lord’s good water,” Anthony told him, “and human blood I will never drink, no matter how my Devilled thirst might increase. I can suffer any affliction, knowing that my Lord loves me and that my immortal soul is safe for all eternity.” While he spoke, Anthony observed that the world as spinning on its axis, and moving through space as if to describe a circle of its own around the sun. The moon and the world were engaged in a curious dance, but the sun—whose disk seemed no bigger than the moon’s, when seen from the land of Egypt—seemed to have become far more massive as the cloud moved towards it.

“Were you expecting a sequence of crystal spheres?” the Devil whispered from his hidden corner of Anthony’s consciousness. “Were you unmoved by my promise of air because you never believed in the possibility of a void? Did you think that you could breathe the quintessential ether as you moved through the hierarchy of the planets towards the ultimate realm of the fixed stars?”

“There is but one Lord,” Anthony replied, “and I am content to breathe in accordance with His providence.”

“Alas, you’ll have to breathe in accordance with my providence, for a little while,” said the Adversary of Humankind. “There is neither air nor ether outside this nimbus. Can you see that the world is but one of the planetary family, toiling around the central sun? Do you see how small a world it is, by comparison with mighty Jupiter? Can you see that Jupiter and Saturn have major satellites as big as worlds themselves, and hosts of minor ones? Do you see how the space between Mars and Jupiter is strewn with planetoids? Can you see the halo from which comets come, beyond the orbits of worlds unseen from Earth, unnamed as yet by curious astronomers?” Anthony, who was familiar with the story of Er, as told in Plato’s
Republic,
looked for the Spindle of Necessity and listened for the siren song of the music of the spheres, but he was not disappointed by their absence.

“I am riding in a cloud formed by the Master of Illusion,” he said, not speaking aloud but confident that the Devil, cornered within him, could hear him perfectly well. “You cannot frighten me with empty space and lonely worlds. If the Earth is indeed a solitary wanderer in an infinite void, I shall feel my kinship with its rocks and deserts more keenly than before.”

“The Master of Illusion is sight constrained by faith,” the Devil told him. “I am an Iconoclast, committed to breaking the idols that filter the evidence of your Earthbound eyes. I do not seek to frighten you but to awaken you. Do you see the stars, now that we are moving through their realm? Can you see that they are not fixed at all, but moving in their own paces about the chaos at the heart of the Milky Way? Do you see the nebulae that lie without the sidereal system? Can you discern the stars that comprise them—systems like the Milky Way, more numerous by far than the stars they each contain?”

“It is a pretty conceit,” Anthony admitted. “Evidence, I trust, of your sense of humor rather than your sickness of mind.”

“It is the truth,” said the voice within him.

“If it were real,” Anthony retorted, “it would not be equal to the millionth part of the greater truth, which is faith in the Lord and His covenant with humankind.” He knew, however, that while the Devil was lurking inside him, borrowing the voice of his own thoughts, he had no means of concealing the force of his realization that perhaps this was the truth, and that the world really might be no more than a mediocre rock dutifully circling a mediocre star in a mediocre galaxy in a universe so vast that no power of sight could plumb its depths nor any power of mind calculate its destiny.

Curiously enough, however, the Devil did not appear to be privy to that unvoiced thought, formulated more by dread than doubt. “It was not always thus,” the Devil said. “In the beginning, it was very tiny—but that was fourteen thousand million years ago; it is expanding still, and has a far greater span before it, until the last fugitive stars expend the last of their waning light, and darkness falls upon lifelessness forever.”

“The Lord said ‘Let there be light’,” Anthony reminded the Adversary. “He did not say ‘Let there be light forever’—but what does it matter, since our souls are safe in his care?”

“
Our
souls?” countered the Devil.

“Human souls,” Anthony corrected himself. “Those human souls, at least, which contrive to stay out of your dark clutches.”

The cloud seemed to come to a halt then, in an abyss of space that suddenly seem vertiginous in every direction, where whole systems of stars were reduced to mere points of tentative light. “This is not so awesome,” whispered the Devil, “compared with the emptiness inside an atom, where matter dissolves into animate mathematical entity and uncertainty refuses the definition of solidity. I wish I could show you that, but a human mind’s eye is incapable of such imagination. Trust me when I tell you that there is void within as well as without, and that substance is rarer than you could ever comprehend.”

“There is no void where the Lord is,” Anthony replied, “and the Lord is everywhere—except, I must suppose, in the depths of your rebellious heart, from which He has been rudely cast out.”

As he spoke, though, the hermit became more sharply aware of his thirst for blood: the curse that the Devil had inflicted upon him in order to increase his vulnerability to unreason.

Anthony struggled to keep his next thought unvoiced, but in the end he decided that he had no need to hide from the Devil, while he was still committed to the Lord. “I am a vampire now,” he said, without waiting for any reply to his previous observation, “but I am no more a sinner than I was before. I thirst, but I trust in the Lord to deliver me from evil. I will not drink of human blood, no matter how intense my thirst becomes. If my life is to be a trial by ordeal, then I shall be vindicated.”

“And if you should live forever, unable to die?” the Devil murmured. “What then, my friend? What if your thirst should become as infinite as the abysm of space, never ceasing to increase?”

“Eventually,” Anthony reminded him, “the last star will expend the last of its light, and darkness will fall forever. I shall be safe in the bosom of the Lord.”

The cloud condensed around him then, and moved through him, as if it were turning him inside out or drawing him into a fourth dimension undiscernible by human eyes—but then the dark abyss of intergalactic space was replaced by the familiar gloom of night on Earth. Anthony found himself on the edge of a cliff not far from his fort, kneeling on the bare rock and looking out over the desert dunes.

Anthony bowed his head, and was about to thank the Lord for his deliverance, when he caught sight of a moon-shadow from the corner of his eye. It appeared to be the shadow of a human being, but Anthony knew better than to trust the appearance.

He turned to look at the Devil, who now wore the appearance of an Alexandrian philosopher—an Epicurean, Anthony supposed, rather than a neo-Platonist.

“What now?” the hermit said, glad to be able to speak the words aloud, although his tongue felt thick and the inside of his mouth was parched. “Have you no one else to tempt and torment? I have seen your emptiness, and yet am full. I will no more drink of horror and despair than of human blood. I must suppose that I am a vampire now, but I still have my faith. I shall never be a minion of the Prince of Demons.”

“This is not a contest,” the Devil said, again. “I have nothing to gain or lose by tempting you. I do not need and do not want your soul, your heart or your affection.”

“And yet, you seem to have a thirst of some sort,” Anthony observed. “Perhaps you are a vampire too, avid for human blood in spite of your best intentions.”

“There is a thirst,” the Devil admitted, “and it might be mine. Have you ever met the Sphinx, my friend, in your lonely fort? Has she ever asked you her riddle? Her true riddle, I mean; not the one contrived by Sophocles.”

“I have never met a Sphinx,” Anthony said, rising to his feet and brushing the dust from the hem of his ragged coat, “but if I ever did, I would know you in that guise, and I would answer you then as I answer you now: I trust in the Lord, and Jesus Christ is my savior. I fear no possible consequence of that declaration.”

“And yet there are heretics already within the Christian company,” the Devil said. “There is division, disharmony and distrust even among those who worship the One God and accept the same savior. If you could see the future...but I dare say that you would see it as selectively as you see the present, filtered by the lens of faith. They will call you saint if you preach in Alexandria and write letters to the Emperor Constantine when you are done here. You will be the stuff of legend, and I shall not be entirely blameless in that, should I fail in my endeavor—but the vampire’s bite is your secret and mine, and will remain so. History always has its secrets, and a world like yours has more than its share, since it uses writing so sparingly.” Anthony could look into the Devil’s eyes again now, and could see that they were as restless as they had been before, although their pain seemed to have been dulled. He saw the Devil lick his lips, as if to moisten them against the dry and bitter wind that blew from the dunes.

“The scriptures are a gift from the Lord,” Anthony said, although he knew that no defense was necessary. “The commandments are preserved there, as they need to be now that the Ark of the Covenant is lost.”

“Writing is an awkward instrument,” the Devil remarked. “Without measurement and calculation, linear reasoning and syntactical complexity, science is impossible—but the learning of letters and numbers requires specialist teachers, and the custodians of culture inevitably become jealous of the privilege the control, establishing themselves as arbiters of faith. Their empire is fragile, though; once a man is taught to read, he is better equipped to think...and to doubt.”

Anthony’s eyes were scanning the eastern horizon, searching for the twilight that would precede the dawn, but there was no sign of it. There must still be several hours of night remaining. He licked his own lips, thirsty now for more than blood.

“I want to show you the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle,” the Devil said, softly. “The riddle of life and death, of growth and ageing, of competition and selection. I cannot force you to read its significance, but I shall write it in your eyes regardless.”