The Rime of the Cosmic Mariner

About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night;

The water, like a witch’s oils,

Burnt green, and blue and white.

—The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I write to you in a curiously Arctic fever, cold and febrile at once, and on and cryptic mission of mercy. I would save you from the ponderous but imponderable darkness, indeed the cosmic chaos that descends upon me. A sending from the Outer Gods.

I can almost hear you laughing, my former friend, but this is no hyperbole and certainly no jest. You will, I trust, forgive this presumption after some years of silence, and forgive, too, my shaky hand, my scrivening urgency, my lines as uncertain as rain patterns in sand—and doubtless as unwanted as an icy rain upon a walking tour. Pace tua, De Quincey, I am not insensible to our differences of civic philosophy; marching through the decades you have become the Tory’s very own Tory, and at this remove it may be you think me a secret Jacobin, a Guy Fawkes reborn, despite the moderation I have shown these many years since my boyish days of planning American Utopias. I have moderated my views considerably, but even so, we would strike sparks at disputation over a bowl of punch, I’m sure, within minutes after the genteel niceties concluded.

Despite our widening political divide, De Quincey, we yet have much in common; a love of the streaming effusion of language, the surge of contention like a river driven upon a boulder, the flow bifurcated by obstacle—by objection.

We are like brothers who are doomed to disagree, but brothers we are, in our tragic affiliation with opium. On our first meeting, in your youth, when you shewed such enthusiasm for my poetry, the poppy’s poison was much upon my mind. I sought day-by-day to escape laudanum’s warm embrace; but, more seductive than Calypso or Circe, opium would not let me go—not for long. Hence I spoke of it freely, complaining of costiveness, the erosion of the foundations of love, the sickness of withdrawal, yes—but gushing about its revelation; perhaps I tilted you in that direction. You were very young, scarcely twenty and two! Much later, I certainly read your Confessions of an English Opium Eater. No man better comprehends the pleasures and pains of laudanum than you.

But I have reason to believe you might be in danger of something more than opium; of a visitation that comes, sometimes in person, sometimes in a narcotic dream, sometimes while gazing raptly into a pit. I glimpsed it once—was it 1804?—when I stared into the crater of Mt. Etna, and it called to me even then.

Now it comes in a new shape—it is the blacker, the bloodier albatross. It is the messenger, the deed-doer, of Nyarlathotep, arriving from a very great distance; it flaps wings broader even than the span of an albatross. Or perhaps it’s more like a gigantic raven than an albatross. It’s not like an earthly bird at all, in truth; it arrives upon the benumbed Earth, it looks down and considers, and soars away. But when the messenger has parted from us it is only biding its time.

It began when I met Al-Azizi. It was Carter, Renwald Carter, an importer of fine goods from the Levant and descendent of the magician Sir Randolph Carter, who introduced me to the curiously articulate and elegant Monsieur Al-Azizii.

Carter sent me a hasty note from his hotel; he would be honored to introduce to me a wealthy admirer, one “M. Al-Azizi” who was drawn to my poetry, especially the epic verses. Al-Azizi, he said, was not a Musselman, despite his Levant heritage. Carter was perhaps sensible that, as I sink toward my own last judgment, my deism becomes ever more Christian.

When Carter and his exotic companion arrived at Number 3, The Grove, Highgate, ushered into the sitting room about tea time, I was, for a rarity, out of my dressing gown; I was almost splendid in red silk smoking jacket, matching trousers, and my eternal down-at-heel slippers. I had even made shift to scrape my face of superfluous foliage, for I had hope of a new patron—a final patron, I suspected, as my health has for a time been in leisurely but steady decline.

Clutching his hat, looking appraisingly at the Persian carpet in the drawing room, and then at me, Carter said, “Ah—Coleridge. I have brought you a living marvel. May I present Monsieur Feruz Al-Azizi, of Paris and Cairo.”

I gave my bow and Al-Azizi returned a stiff bow, the straight line of his lips flickering with the most transient of smiles. Tall and gaunt and dark, he wore a pristine white suit, a red necktie, a red felt fez; even without the elongation of the fez, he was at least a foot taller than Carter. He had a jet-black mustache, like a line on aged foolscap, and once I thought it writhed quite apart from the working of his face. I assumed this was a product of the laudanum I had just taken as a restorative—the measured dose left to me by Dr. Gillman.

“Gillman is not at home?” Carter asked, looking around the drawing room, licking his thick lips.

“My host is with his patients,” I said. I might have said “his other patients”—Dr. Gillman has taken it upon himself, these many years, to house me, to physic me, to dose me as he sees fit. He is a man of great patience.

I glanced at Al-Azizi—and felt caught, for a moment, in the gaze of his heavy-lidded deep-black eyes, which seemed to regard me with a ravenous fixity.

I looked quickly back at Carter, marking that my old acquaintance had changed since I’d seen him last; his face was now blotchy, his lips bluish, his eyes yellow and flickering; he was haphazardly unshaven, and his stubby fingers clasped over his stained weskit in what appeared a failed effort to restrain their trembling.

Carter’s gaze darted about the small sitting room. “So—we are in essence quite alone here? I have no wish to be unsociable but—Monsieur Al-Azizi prefers . . . a small party.”

I noticed, for the first time, that Al-Azizi carried a large bag of crocodilian leather, rather like a physician’s satchel; I could have sworn he had not had the bag when he first came in.

They sat on Gillman’s settee across from my armchair. Al-Azizi stroked the leather of the settee’s arm with a long-fingered hand. “What an exquisite piece of furniture,” he said. “The skin of a fine animal—as comfortable as the arms of a beautiful woman.” His accent was both Egyptian and French, to my ear, his voice both rumblingly low-pitched and intermittently high and tremulous, as if keeping laughter on a leash.

“Ah yes,” I said, “it is one of the original pieces designed by the Earl of Chesterton; it has resided for some time with Dr. Gillman’s family.”

My eyes returned to the black crocodilian bag on the Egyptian’s lap, as Al-Azizi exclaimed, chuckling, “Why it is my old friend George!” He gestured at the oval portrait of King George III on the wall to my right. “How well I remember our talks. George and I went to the roof and gazed upon the stars together—and they gazed upon us!”

“Did you . . . indeed?” I asked, smiling indulgently. “What year was your interview with the late king?”

“Why it was 1788, I believe, on a previous trip to your jewel-like isle. Yes!” He flashed gray teeth in a smile that came and went like the tail of a Nile fish, surfacing and gone.

Carter visibly grimaced, and I raised my eyebrows. Of course this putative interview with the King would have been forty years ago, De Quincey—but this fellow looked no older than his middle thirties! Was it, I wondered, some dreamy vanity on his part, imagining an interlude with George III?

“Was it 1788, for a fact? Well! The very year His Majesty first succumbed to the . . . to his malaise.” I suppose I could have said madness, as he is long gone, but I am rooted in an earlier era of delicacy—when I am not in my cups.

“Al-Azizi,” Carter began hoarsely. “Perhaps this is not the time. I had hoped—“

His gaze still upon me, Al-Azizi raised a hand with the suddenness of a dagger raised to strike, and Carter fell silent, his sentence severed.

“So few men can survive gazing upon the stars with unveiled eyes,” said Al-Azizi, shrugging. “Your King . . . sadly he could not bear it. But . . . ” He put his hands on the clasp of his bag. “But you, sir! When I consider the letter you wrote to your other Sara, Sara Hutchinson, in 1802, Coleridge! Surely you would be capable of gazing without the veil, and coming away whole!”

“Why yes.” He closed his eyes a moment—how like parchment the lids of his eyes! He seemed to read out the words from some inner scroll:

“Have I been gazing on the western sky,

And its peculiar tint of yellow green:

And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye!

And those thin Clouds above, in flakes and bars,

That give away their motion to the stars;

Those Stars, that glide behind them or between

Now sparkling, now bedimm’d, but always seen . . . ”

He opened his eyes—yet they seemed almost closed to the world, so empty were they of fellow-feeling. “Yes? Do you recall?”

I cleared my throat. “That letter—why, yes. That passage later became part of an ode. I believe I was on the pinnacle of a tor when I first . . . But Monsieur Al-Azizi, has the lady’s family given over my letters to her? I don’t recall their . . . That is . . . ”

“Oh, they’re written in the Akashic Record, as some call it, with all else, Mr. Coleridge!” he crowed, amused. “I looked them up!”

“He is a marvel indeed, as you said, Carter,” I murmured. “However, I . . . ”

That is when Al-Azizi opened his crocodilian bag, the flash of his hands opening it so quickly I thought of a reptile opening its mouth to snap at prey before it could escape. “Here sir,” he said, reaching into the bag, “ . . . I have three scientific instruments you will not have seen before, I wager.”

He took up a device with his right hand, the instrument resembling a cut glass doorknob but festooned with brass spikes—and I noticed, for the first time, the ring upon that hand, its large tablet-shaped face of carnelian engraved with the image of a double-headed crystal growing out of a snarl of serpentine shapes. I was distracted from the sight when he snatched the end table, on which stood the Argand lamp, nearly rocking the lamp onto the floor. I made to catch it but the lamp settled down as he set the table in front of him and placed the instruments on the circular table in the small pool of illumination. There was the spiked, crystalline knob; beside the festooned crystal was something like a pair of spectacles made of wire mesh, possibly copper, but without lenses; the third instrument was in the shape of a serpentine figure of some silvery alloy; the figure was rather like the engraving on his ring. The instrument stood on one of its coils, its head pointed at the ceiling. Looking closely I saw that it was not precisely a serpent, for its head was eyeless and it seemed to have feathers instead of scales.

“This one,” I said, indicating the coiled serpentine instrument, “more resembles jewelry than a scientific instrument. I fancy I have seen something of the sort on a lady’s arm as a bracelet.”

“Oh, but no lady could long bear to wear this as a bracelet, Coleridge—and no bracelet will do this!” Al-Azizi reached out and carefully pinched the serpentine figure just under its jaws—and immediately the light in the room, became a thick luminous liquid, as if amber had melted. The liquid light swirled about us, the whirlpool centered on the serpentine instrument, and I saw, with gathering trepidation, the light was sinking away into the coil, as if the serpent were consuming it. At the ceiling and corners, darkness increased, seeming itself a liquid, something heavier than light forcing it into the genii’s bottle of the serpentine instrument. The lamp flickered, and dimmed. Al-Azizi’s eyes had quite vanished away; there was only a shifting blackness in the sockets, as in a skull seen by the feeble light of a taper. Oddly enough, Carter had his own eyes covered by his trembling hands.

I felt a piercing coldness growing upon my back—I turned and saw the thick shadow increasing behind me, as if the suctioned light took all warmth and hope with it, and the contrary was rushing upon me.

“Al-Azizi!” I called out, turning to him with what must have been a shameful desperation—the dark pools of his eye sockets swirling with that same darkness as the living opacity gathering behind me. “Please . . . do reverse the phenomenon!”

He once more pinched the instrument, his fingertips pressing with practiced exactitude, and light disgorged from the instruments, spiraling up from the serpent’s mouth; the shadows wavered furiously a moment, like a flight of crows flapping away, and then the room was restored.

Only a curious smell lingered, like stale frankincense mixed with the mineral reek of a deep, watery cavern. My feet seemed clammy in my shoes as if I’d gotten them wet.

And lingering, too, was that darkness pooling in the Egyptian’s eyes. Then he leaned back a little, and I could see his eyes once more. He smiled thinly. “Mr. Coleridge—are you quite well? You look pale, sir. And I believe you are shivering.”

I made myself straighten up and smile. “That was an impressive . . . illusion, sir. Something in the way of a magic lantern, perhaps . . . ” I licked my lips and wished I might slip off to my room for a brandy. Gillman keeps none in the drawing room. “How you managed it I’m not sure.”

“Illusion!” murmured Carter, rubbing his knees with his hands. “Would that it were so.”

Al-Azizi turned a sharp look at Carter, who instantly compressed his lips and said nothing more. I was amazed at Al-Azizi’s authority over him. Who had brought whom here?

I rubbed my hands together to warm them, wishing that we might have some more coal put in the basement furnace. I was about to call for the housekeeper when Al-Azizi picked up the brass-thorned crystal, tapped three of the spines in a certain pattern, and whispered, “Listen!”

I heard nothing but Carter’s heavy breathing. I leaned a little closer, and then . . . I heard voices. They were coming from the crystal. A man’s voice, weedling, “Hullo, Freddie, old boy, how about spotting me a fiver! Here now, cully, I needs it!” Then a little girl said, “If Papa does not come home again tonight, we shall have to steal the cheese crusts from the kitchen rubbish again, and we are not to go into that part of the house with the better people!”

“Good lord,” I said. “It is like a telescope for sounds! They must be speaking from another house!”

Then I heard another voice, this one speaking in a foreign tongue—at first I thought it a language obscure to me, like Mongolian. But after a moment I supposed the chirping, clicking, almost insectile sound might not be a human dialect at all. Yet it seemed to be speaking in something like sentences. It set my teeth on edge, I can tell you, De Quincey.

I was about to ask him to put the instruments away, when the door opened and Bethesda came in, carrying the tea tray.

Al-Azizi put the instruments back into the bag, his motions quick and neat, and closed it with a snap. His voice was a steely monotone as he said, “I was given to understand we would not be interrupted.”

“I’m sure it will be but the interruption of a moment!” Carter assured him.

Bethesda O’Neil was, perhaps is, a plug-shaped woman of thirty, with frowsy brown hair, a pert nose, thick ankles and powerful arms; she wore a white servant’s bonnet, a black dress, a white apron, and she bustled into the room in her prim, officious fashion, carrying a tray to the small tea table behind my chair. “Lor’ but there’s a chill on this room. Will the gentlemen take tea here, sir?”

“That will do very well, Beth,” I said. “Will you see to the furnace? I will pour the tea.”

“The furnace? Why it has been burning coal by the ton all this day, sir. Are your registers not open? But they are! I shall have a look.”

She turned to go—and stopped dead, staring at Al-Azizi. I supposed at first she was affrighted of this swarthy foreigner. But she had the look of a rabbit enrapt by the eyes of a snake. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but said nothing, merely worrying at her apron with her fingers.

“Yes. But was it him . . . ?” Beth breathed, as if speaking only to herself. “Was it this one then?”

Al-Azizi continued to look at her. Then he waved his hand dismissively, and she hurried, almost running, out of the room. She slammed the door in going.

I was puzzled. Al-Azizi had alarmed her overmuch, considering their harmless encounter—she had not seen the trick with the swirling light.

However, I myself had reason to be alarmed. I was thinking that perhaps, after all, I should not like him to be my patron; that I would like him to take his leave. But I did not seem to have the inner strength to demand his departure. It was not fear of coarseness that held me back. It was something else I can only describe as a failure of my will.

“I could use some tea,” I said, my own voice sounding hoarse in my ears. Somehow I knew that Al-Azizi would not choose to sit at the tea table. I know not how this knowledge came to me.

I went to the table, and poured a cup, returned and offered it first to Al-Azizi. He merely shook his head, gazing up at me. I avoided his eyes. I offered it to Carter. He took the cup gratefully.

I placed two biscuits on a plate for Carter, and set it on the lamp table, but he ignored them.

I sat with a couple of biscuits and my tea, and had hardly begun, when Al-Azizi said, “You have a stair that leads to the roof.”

“Let us repair to the roof. I have something to shew you—the very thing I came to lay before you.”

I put my cup carefully upon its saucer. “You have shewn me a great deal, sir, quite a sufficiency for one afternoon. I do not wish to presume upon your generosity.”

Then—I cannot recall, precisely, De Quincey, how it came to be that we removed from the drawing room to the roof. I have a dim memory of walking out the back door, with Al-Azizi ahead, and Carter behind, and the creaking of the spiraling iron staircase under my foot as we ascended three stories from the garden to the step between the gables, onto the copper rooftop.

My next clear recollection is of holding the twisted-wire spectacles. Al-Azizi was standing before me, with the crocodilian bag gaping open in his bony hands. It was a chill, windless afternoon, the indefinite fog a kind of ever changing lacework around us. The wind indicator, beyond the Egyptian, did not turn at all.

“But only put them on,” Al-Azizi said, “and the veil you wear all unknowing will be at last lifted; the blindfold will be tugged away from your eyes. You will see the stars.”

“First, sir,” I said, looking around as if I’d awakened here, “allow me to observe that it is not yet nighttime. The day is a trifle befogged and, though the dusk arrives, no stars are visible. And second, sir, seeing stars is in itself unremarkable—true, they may be seen more vividly with a telescope—yet that is often done . . . ”

“I could show you stars as you have never seen them,” said Al-Azizi, “but to be perfectly clear, I plan to reveal a planetary object, largely unknown to astronomers. If they see it, upon occasion, it appears as star-like from Earth, just as Mars seems a star until gazed upon with a telescope. But you will see this Outer World more vividly than any man ever saw Mars. If you choose! Of your own free will, place the instrument over your eyes—and thus remove the veil. Lift the blindfold, Coleridge!”

It was curiosity, De Quincey—and perhaps a bit of defiance, that led to my acquiescence. I suspected he had beguiled me with illusions. And as there were no lenses in the spectacles, and I thus reasoned that in all probability their effect was to be sheer power of suggestion, mayhap enhanced by hypnosis. A suspicion had been growing upon me that the evident miracle I had perceived in the drawing room was the result of some form of hypnotism, combined with optical illusion. I thought my will strong—bending only to laudanum. Now forewarned, I intended to confront him with his own charlatanism.

I boldly secured the instrument over my eyes, just as a man slips on a pair of spectacles. I saw nothing but what I had seen before, truncated by the frames.

“Now sir,” said Al-Azizi, “we shall make all dark so that the stars present themselves.”

I feared the coiling instrument, and was about to object—but he quickly placed it upon the ground, activating it as he did so, and the light of the late afternoon began to thicken and spiral above us.

In a moment, darkness had collected thickly above us, and the light of the day was pushed rudely aside. I saw the stars shining within a circle of darkness directly overhead; it was as if they were seen from deep down a pit, a shaft plumbed into the earth.

The celestial array glittered with more presence of that unique starry blue-white than I had ever beheld before. But apart from that, they seemed as usual—a miracle of nature, no more.

Then Al-Azizi reached up and touched the spectacles with a forefinger, near my left temple.

Sparks flew, and arcs of electricity flashed across my vision, close to my eyes. Fearing to be blinded, I cried out and would have taken them off—but I also feared to touch them. Yet they were touching me . . .

Electricity flashed across the empty spaces over my eyes, as if its blue and yellow coursing had become the energetic lenses of the spectacles.

A star thrust itself at me, as if hurtling meteorically toward me. It came at me with such malevolent determination I wanted to throw myself aside—but suddenly it stopped, partway, and simply whirled in place. The shining planetoid—for so it was, churning with glowing gases—was so bright I could scarcely bear the sight. The planet’s whirling slowed, and ceased, and a black spot appeared on its face. The black spot swelled and grew, consuming most of the shining planetoid, until all that was left was a kind of corona, and then something that cannot be described as a shape appeared within it. It was a writhing thought made visual; a thought of annihilation, a thought of conscious mockery of all faith, all order; yet it had something of organism about it, at its very center. It reached toward me . . . A horrible fascination had hold of me. I was shaking with fear and yet I wanted to know . . .

“Behold Azathoth, who awaits you, when I have done with you,” said Al-Azizi. “You have of your own free will gazed upon this majesty. Now—”

It was Carter. And a moment later I felt his spongy, pudgy hand slap my face—and the spectacles were knocked away.

Freed from the vision, if that’s what it was, I was dizzy, nauseated, and my head throbbed. I saw that someone, probably Carter, had kicked over the serpentine instrument as well, and the dull late afternoon light seemed almost assaultively bright to my burning eyes in that moment.

I turned, and saw that Al-Azizi, the crocodilian bag clutched in his hands, was stalking toward Renwald Carter, who was backing away step by hesitant step away, toward the edge of the roof. He was about to pitch over backwards, off the roof to his death.

“You sir! Al-Azizi!” I roared, putting all my will and volume into it. “Stop!”

Al-Azizi turned, his face an icy mask of fury. As if released from some unseen hold, Carter blinked, and looked around, then turned and rushed to the stairs, began clattering down them toward the garden. “I’m sorry, Coleridge!” he shouted, as he went. “I’m sorry!”

Al-Azizi walked toward me—and seemed to come to some kind of decision. A most unpleasant smile appeared under his mustache. “Better to have one so choice as you, Coleridge, at a time of my own choosing. I have learned much about you today. Next time you will have no recourse. I will send my messenger to fetch you from your body. It matters not where you go. Verily, I can count on you—to come to me. You came so close to me many times, in years past, what you supposed were dreams . . . ”

Keeping his eyes upon me, he opened the crocodilian bag. I heard a hissing sound, and then he closed the bag and turned away. In a moment he had gone to the spiral stairs and descended them, with no sound at all.

I looked at the rooftop. The instruments were gone. I have no doubt he somehow gathered them into his bag.

My knees gave way, and I sank down to the cold metal roof. I found I was panting, and close to weeping, trying to take it all in. The thing I had seen coming at me, from the planetoid . . . another illusion?

But De Quincey, it was no illusion. You cannot look upon that entity and not know it for what it is.

I wish I had looked away. Carter saved me, in a moment of conscience—which can sometimes set a man free. I wonder what price he has paid for knocking those spectacles aside.

I wish I could say I removed those spectacles myself, De Quincey. I could not have done so, I fear, to my shame. Scientific knowledge is good. But this was surrender to an alien mind, a foul determination, an embrace of all chaos, a lust for entropy itself—and that, my old, disaffected friend, has not scientific objectivity.

Suddenly, kneeling there, I realized that I owed Carter a great debt. I forced myself to my feet, and tottered to the stairs, hoping to find him, to draw him away from Al-Azizi. To pay the debt in kind.

I went with difficulty down the slippery iron stairs, and stumbled through the garden—I saw the garden gate was open to the lane.

I rushed to it, and through—and to my horror I saw not only Carter, trailing after Al-Azizi, but also Bethesda! She was walking along without coat or handbag, quite methodically following along.

She did not respond, not a twitch. But Carter looked back—imploringly. He desperately wanted to come away from Al-Azizi. But he was drawn inexorably away.

They were slipping into the fog, becoming less and less real with each step as the haze, coal smoke perfectly wedded with mist, gradually erased them.

My hands were cold, and so was my heart. But I gathered my courage and started after them. I took a score of steps, beginning to run—then saw a coach waiting, just under the gas lamp.

I arrived in time to see the coach clatter away, taking Al-Azizi, Carter, and Bethesda with it.

I returned to the house, and soon after Dr. Gillman came home for dinner, I tried to tell him what had happened, but he thought me addled by a delirium tremens due to insufficiency of my habitual dose—for he was late in providing it. Wearily, he unlocked the medical cabinet and poured me twice my usual measure. As for Bethesda, he supposed she had merely taken up with another “ruffian” as he put it. She had, he said, a weakness for sailors.

I thought to explain all to him on the morrow, as he was greatly fatigued. I suffered him to retire, and went to my room with my double dose. There I sank into a chair and looked dazedly around at the books covering every wall, their titles unreadable in the dim light of the lamp, as if they were cryptic volumes seen in a dream. Before me on my little rosewood writing table lay pen, ink, and paper. I thought to write down the events of the day.

I reached for the laudanum before the pen and ink—and found I was reluctant to take the dose. As you know, De Quincey, this reluctance is an untoward turn of events with STC.

The smell of the opiated brandy at last drew me to taking a sip, and then another. Soon it was all down. The increased dose led me to nodding in my chair . . .

A waking dream settled upon me. I saw a man sleeping, in his bed—a man I knew. Then I saw, through the glaucous window—the stars. One of them rushed toward me—and a spot appeared on it. But this time the spot became a great black bird that soared toward me, its enormous wings ever so slowly flapping, each flap making the sound of a cracking whip. The messenger. It had not a beak—it had the mouth of a man. It spake!

Nyarlathotep, it said. He calls you, Coleridge. Come! And the bird spake again, quite clearly. Nyarlathotep. He calls you.

The giant bird, like a roc with a grin, rushed toward me—I struggled away from it. No!

I sat up, sweating, and shook off the dream. But it tried to reassert itself. Again—the bird was coming at me, forming from the shadows of the room.

I threw off the bedclothes, ran to the window, flung the sash wide and breathed in great draughts of cold air. I refused to close the window till the vision had passed.

But the memory will not pass. I saw something more in that dream. The man in the bed—it was you, De Quincey—sleeping, doubtless in an opiated slumber. I am afraid it was an omen. He comes for you next!

And who is he? Who is Al-Azizi? The messenger told me the true name of the “Egyptian”—and I have verified it, of late, as I pore through books so old they fall apart at my touch. He is Nyarlathotep. He appears in many guises, as a man. But he is not of humanity, De Quincey.

It is a man’s mind he wants, you see. He feeds on madness; he profits by the madness he induces in men. A man he drives mad becomes his slave—his inwardly gibbering servant—and eventually what remains is fed to the thing I saw residing, for now, within that unknown planet on the far edge of our solar system.

And we give him a doorway to our minds, De Quincey, when we surrender fully to opium. In opiated dreams we go to his realm, you see. And then, once you have entered his realm, he will sense you have come.

He has gone to ground, now that I have discovered him. But he will find us both in the astral realm. For we have journeyed there, like children in a forest, often enough. If you do not suffer the pangs of setting opium aside—a terrible tribute, I know—you will enter his world part way, and he will send his messenger to bring you the rest of the way.

If you and I do not turn aside from the drug, then that predatory enormity, the black beakless bird, will come to each of us crying its master’s name. Nyarlathotep!

He has marked you, De Quincey. And if you do not turn away from opium—as I struggle to do once more—you will go to his realm, and he will claim you.

Every day I try not to take the infernal concoction—I try to take so little I am scarcely affected. But this regimen cannot last, I fear. Even now I feel laudanum calling.

There is now no locating Al-Azizi. I have hired men to find him, along with Carter and Bethseda, and the searchers have failed utterly. It cannot be done. But I know that Nyarlathotep will find me again, when I open the door of my mind to him.

I pray I die before I go to his realm . . . for there is another, far better realm waiting for me, if only I have the strength to get there.

The Rime of the Cosmic Mariner

John Shirley