James Chambers
I am the last. I will tell the audient void.
The surrounding gloom opens its multitude of eyes to watch, tilts its shadowed ears to hear. Unseen pipers fill the air with faint melodies that follow no earthly scale, while maddened, many-armed drummers rattle and tap the tempo from a place beyond space and time... time… time… the time… each note a second, each bar a minute, each movement an hour, a day, a month, a year, a millennium, an epoch, counting down the dreamer’s slumber to the awakening of the nuclear chaos at the center of the universe. Do those around me hear the music’s pitch and timbre and tempo?
Flutes and pipes whistle, shriek, and sob a primordial lullaby to the rhythm of countless drummers and demon dancers tapping their hideous feet, clapping the time with their monstrous hands. These invisible things I have heard, oh, how I have heard them filling my skull, resonating in my brain, trapped inside me since the day I walked out of the city, alone, the last, the last, the last…
I am the last. I will tell the audient void.
Do they yet hear the music? Do they see beyond the darkness-draped stage to the dancing abominations it conceals? I hope to spare this city the fate of my own. Around me, people shuffle and shift in their seats. They whisper and point, laugh, cough, and sigh with anticipation, innocents gathered before an altar of slaughter not for the slaying of their bodies, but of their minds and souls, of that integral component of men and women that when lost shows only in their eyes… eyes emptied of humanity, eyes that have glimpsed other worlds where reality lays bare in all its grotesque and vast excesses, like the eyes of the people of my lost city.
Ah, a skip in the rhythm! The tempo rises.
The shrillest of the demoniac flutes wails. It pierces me, dizzies me, sickens me.
A signal from beyond this world that the show is about to begin.
I would swear myself to my mission upon the memories of those most dear to me if I only could remember them. Had I a wife in the old city? Children? Siblings? Parents, surely, as all humans do, but their faces, names, tempers live nowhere in my mind, erased by the same sights and expositions about to unfold in this darkened theater. I would warn these watchers who fill the air around me with the earthy scents of their breath and sweat. I would chase them to the street, but none would believe me.
Far better to rob the pharaoh of his uraeus, extinguish the flame from his brow, and sever the head of chaos’s wandering dream here where it crawls upon the earth.
I slide my hand into my coat pocket and grip my revolver, seeking reassurance in the cold solidity of its iron and the potentiality in its ammunition. Hope springs from the tiny explosions they contain.
***
Ensconced gaslights flickered then dimmed before a crackling streak of electricity shot from the stage to the balcony of the Old Pharoah’s Odeon, drawing gasps and muted shrieks as it sizzled over the audience’s heads. Morris Garvey’s hair stood on end. Betsy Carpenter clutched his arm and pressed herself against him for reassurance. The pair sat third-row, center, with a clear view of the stage, which descended into impenetrable blackness in the aftermath of the blast. As their eyes recovered from the shock of brilliance, a troublesome hum filled the theater—a deep, pulsating thrum that rattled Morris’s nerves and made his teeth vibrate.
A towering figure emerged from the stage dark as if from blackness itself. He stood on the edge of a spotlight beam, his features hidden in shadows.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome!” The man’s accented voice spoke of forgotten, exotic lands and ancient sensibilities. “My name is Nyarlathotep. I have come to New Alexandria to spread wisdom recovered from the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, to share messages from voices beyond this world, and to open your minds to cosmic vistas outside human experience. I applaud your curiosity and your courage. The secrets I shall reveal this evening may shake the very foundations of your beliefs. The portents and prophesies I display may change you forever. Those gathered here tonight shall witness wonders beyond your most fevered imaginings. When you leave you will tell the people of this city, so that they too may come and look upon my miracles. Open your eyes, now, and see.”
The spotlight blanked out. A resounding clink, as of a massive lock falling into place, drummed the air. Center stage, a great glass globe, larger than a cask, ignited with miniature lightning. Streaks and ribbons of white and purple energy stormed within it and shot sparks swimming into the air around it, creating a crackling, amethyst aura. Into this light stepped Nyarlathotep, revealing himself in full.
Near seven-feet tall, gaunt and bony, his complexion olive dark, the sharp geometry of his features reminded Morris of pharaohs in hieroglyphs and statues he had seen in the great tombs and pyramids of Egypt. A platinum uraeus glittered above his forehead, sweeping back hair black as the night sky. His robes, woven with some special silk and dye, scintillated in the globe’s flicker-flick light. The sight of him filled Morris with unwelcome coldness. More than anyone else in the audience, except perhaps Betsy, who held her breath as tightly as she clutched Morris’s hand, he understood the mechanisms of electricity. The founder of New Alexandria’s biggest business, Machinations Sundry, inventor of the steam-powered chimney sweep and many other revolutionary steam-powered devices, Morris did not fall easily under the sway of parlor-tricks and theatrics. He had seen his hometown, New Alexandria, through more than a few crises that had steeled his nerves. Yet he found himself forced to concede the man’s showmanship and talent, which placed an icy knot of dread inside him, unnerved by the performer’s utter control of the forces he deployed and his mastery of his audience, who sat in total, rapt silence.
Nyarlathotep raised one dark, knobby arm and waved his fingers. Tiny lances of lightning danced from the globe to his blackened fingertips. Nyarlathotep smiled, and in the strange light, his teeth glowed, and currents raced across his long, wrinkled lips. Coruscations filled his eyes with riotous, swirling flashes.
Had the performer mesmerized them all by some secret means?
No, Morris thought.
His head remained clear, and he felt no resistance when he twisted in his seat to glimpse the audience behind him. Men and women in their best evening attire sat at perfect attention, light dancing across their fascinated faces. Perhaps the only one among them distracted, Morris missed Nyarlathotep’s next words, and when he righted himself, he faced a stage now exposed and lit by a panoply of sparking, buzzing electrical devices choreographed around a climbing arc device, a Jacob’s Ladder, nearly as tall as its master. He worked them like a maestro, gesturing and adjusting dials, flipping switches, as he danced from machine to machine and played them in a visual symphony, a virtuoso of natural forces, light and sparks flashing at his fingertips in perfect time—until a sphere materialized in the air above him.
Morris spied no obvious means to produce the effect. The blank sphere simply hung there as though conjured by the power of Nyarlathotep’s machines. Then it widened. Its perimeter rippled with electrical force, while the inner disc paled to a grainy mist contained by the shock-white outer ring, which coruscated around it like a ticking dial. Within the disc appeared a shape, a living thing of hirsute limbs, chitinous joints, and arachnid eyes. Citrine ichor dripped from its mandibles. Then it scurried across the face of the light and vanished.
The best industrial designer at Machinations Sundry, Betsy studied the demonstration with the same analytical eye as Morris, and yet even she whispered in awe, “My God, Morris, what was that awful thing? How is he doing this?” Her short, fast breaths tickled his neck, transmitting her excitement and heightening his own rising anxiety. This surpassed even the marvels of the cinématographe and the kinetograph. Morris had no answer. He only squeezed Betsy’s hand tighter and redoubled his exertions to decipher the onstage theatrics.
A landscape appeared in the pale disc, now grown twice the size of a wagon wheel. Stone ruins took focus. They prodded up from desolate ground littered with the ashen remains of plants and trees. Among the stones, which echoed some grand, fallen architecture, hooded figures walked an unseen path on the blasted earth. Nyarlathotep’s machines gave them buzzing voices, chanting in ancient tongues. The sky above them cracked apart, illuminating them for a moment in crimson light, enough for Morris to spy the scaled texture of inhuman hands protruding from their robes. The scene vanished, replaced by the vision of a city of wood and paper buildings where a giant, dark bird crossed the sky moments before light flashed then coalesced into a mushroom of violent smoke and flame ravenous to devour the world.
The succeeding visions revealed monstrous, yellow faces peering from grimy, broken tenement windows. The drained and empty-eyed faces of people surrendered to terrifying secrets that liberated them from their humanity. The skyline of a city Morris faintly recognized appeared. Two ruined towers striking upward into the greenish night provided background to columns of people plodding from its streets onto the open land beyond, draped in a greenish, unnatural snow, gathered in great drifts along the edge of a yawning gulf into which the people disappeared, step by step, marching to the beat of unknown drums, the monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes, a rhythm, time, and count beyond human music. The image shifted skyward, soared through the night, beyond Earth itself, toward some dark, pulsing heart of the universe where the music intensified, and black figures danced and frolicked, visible only where they blacked out distant stars, circling, circling around the suggestion of some vast, slumbering, inhuman monstrosity…
Morris clamped his eyes shut and planted his hands over his ears.
Betsy pressed her face to his shoulder.
“Hang on,” he said, his jaw tight. “It can’t last much longer.”
The pair pressed together while gasping, gurgling sounds rose from the audience. A woman moaned. A man sobbed. Someone shrieked, cut off in an instant by unknown means. The electric droning that filled the auditorium reached such a feverish intensity that Morris’s ears grew hot from it—
—and in a moment of thunder, it ended.
“False prophet!” a man screamed into the stunning quiet.
A second clap of thunder, now recognizable as a gunshot, followed the declaration.
Then another. Its crack reverberated with the force of a collapsing building.
Screams of fear and shock rose from the audience.
Morris opened his eyes as he pushed Betsy down in her seat for cover.
Two rows behind him a pale man with wild, uncombed hair and deep rings under his eyes, aimed a revolver at the stage and fired a fourth shot. Nyarlathotep jerked as another hole appeared in his robe. Rage twisted his face in a furious grimace. He lashed out with one arm, sending an electrical blast at his attacker, who fired once more before the bolt struck him. The last round hit Nyarlathotep on the chest, punching him backward, and, finally, shattering his conjured illusions. The pale disc vanished. The machines died and darkened. Nyarlathotep toppled backward, a giant plunging into an ocean of night.
The gunman screamed and twitched in place for several seconds before he collapsed.
The houselights flared. Bystanders seized the dropped revolver and pinned the shooter to a seat. In moments, New Alexandria Police Department officers hurried in from the lobby, summoned by theater staff. They urged everyone to remain calm and stay in their seats.
Two men, announcing themselves as doctors, leapt onstage to help Nyarlathotep, but he waved them away, snapping sparks from his fingers to drive them back when they refused, then with a swirl of his now-tattered robe, he vanished.
***
“He won’t give us his name. All he says is he is the last,” Inspector Daniel Matheson said.
“The last what?” Morris said.
“I was hoping you and Ms. Carpenter might shed some light on that given you witnessed this whole rodeo.” Matheson tipped his bowler to Betsy. “Much obliged to you, ma’am, for answering my call at this late hour.”
“It’s no trouble, Inspector.” Betsy shuddered. “It’s not as if I was going to get any sleep.”
“No, I suppose a lot of folks are going to struggle with insomnia tonight.”
“How can I help you, Daniel?” Morris said.
“Don’t let me down. You never have before when weirdness rears its ugly head, don’t start now. Tell me, how’d this Nyarlathotep fellow put on his show? What even was his show? The statements from the audience sound, well, they sound like everyone went to a different barn dance and some left their wits at their last camp. I want to understand what all took place on that stage tonight. I want to know what our would-be assassin is ranting about because all I can rustle out of him is a lot of nonsense.”
“Would-be assassin? Then Nyarlathotep survived?” asked Betsy.
“Yup. Shot five times but refused medical attention. He would only jaw with me through the cracked door of his dressing room. Claimed he takes precautions before each performance because his displays affect the mind so profoundly. He wouldn’t tell me what they were. Reckon he wears some kind of leather or silk anti-ballistic vest. You’d never catch me relying on one, but some folks do.”
“A plausible theory, but I fear that’s not the answer, Dan.”
“Why not, Morris?”
“I can explain confidently about half of what we witnessed in that theater. I’m familiar with the means and mechanisms of electricity. What I can’t account for are the sensory effects of Nyarlathotep’s demonstrations. I can’t explain how he projected such stunning, horrible visions into the air, seemingly onto a disc of controlled electricity—or what those scenes mean. It was like looking through a hole in the world at other worlds that don’t yet exist, or maybe existed a long time ago, or perhaps will never exist. Betsy and I looked away before the sensations could overwhelm us. Others watched everything until the gunshots interrupted. Their lack of our knowledge of the mechanical aspects of the performance made them more susceptible to its effects.”
“Can you two give me a statement that makes some sense?”
“We’ll do our best, but first, perhaps, I should talk with the gunman.”
Matheson led Morris into the depths of New Alexandria Police Department headquarters, to a row of holding cells, empty except for one, where the haggard gunman sat on a bare cot. He flashed Morris an expression of sullen contempt. Ground-in stains spotted his threadbare suit. His salt-and-pepper hair stuck out in rough tangles rising from patches matted to his scalp.
Morris introduced himself. “I’d like to help you,” he said, but the man ignored him. “Do you know who I am?”
The man only snorted.
“All right, then, what’s your name?” Morris asked.
The man sniffled and dragged the back of his hand across his runny nose.
“Tell me why you tried to kill Nyarlathotep.”
At this, the man jolted upright. All color drained from his face. Shock and anguish widened his eyes. “Try, you say? Try? Then I failed? And he still lives?”
“Yes. Apparently unharmed too.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” the man said. He rocked himself and shook his head. “I am the last. I will tell the audient void. I am the last. I am the last. I must be the last.”
“The last what?” Morris said.
The man ceased speaking, then lifted his head to meet Morris’s gaze. “The last of the great, old, terrible city of unnumbered crimes. The last to leave its weed-cracked alleys and ruined towers. The last to speak to the audient void. I am the one left behind to expose the true message of the dark messenger.”
“The terrible old city,” Morris said, low-voiced, apprehensive.
“You know it?” asked Matheson.
“Maybe,” said Morris.
He spoke the name of a port city to the north, long derelict and shunned, a place he knew by reputation, though several times his travels had brought him near enough to view its corrupted skyline and the jagged steeples and broken towers that defined it. At the city’s name, the man leapt from his cot, thrust his arms through the space between his cell bars, and grasped Morris by the coat, yanking him against the iron cell door with extraordinary strength.
“Don’t say it! For the love of all that is human, don’t! I can’t bear to hear it!” he cried.
Matheson thrust his nightstick into the man’s belly, knocking the wind out of him and breaking his grip on Morris. “Back off, now, partner. Stay back if you know what’s good for you.”
“I am the last,” the man whimpered. “I will tell the audient void—but, for pity’s sake, why won’t they listen?” He fell to his cot, curled into a ball, and wept.
Morris met Matheson’s befuddled stare.
“We’d best talk a bit, Dan,” he said. “This could be serious.”
***
“You know I’m not superstitious, but even I don’t like to say the name of that place,” Morris sat in a chair facing Matheson’s desk. Betsy sat in its twin. Matheson occupied a rolling, leather high-backed chair opposite them behind his desk. “If someone has brought what happened there to New Alexandria, we may have little time to avert catastrophe.”
“What in tarnation happened there? A plague?” Matheson said.
“That’s one theory,” Morris said, “Most investigators favor mass delusion. The place bore a foul reputation for years. A political machine built on extortion and intimidation rotted the civil government from within. Murder investigations routinely ran cold within hours. Compromises in construction of the natural gas system caused leaks that affected people’s mental faculties then culminated in a subterranean fire that still burns today for all anyone knows, filling the metropolis with an unhealthy and unseasonable miasma of heat. People stopped moving there. Those who visited on business made sure to leave before sunset, driven out by screams that resounded through the streets beginning at twilight and continuing until dawn. People stopped leaving too—as if some force bound them to the place. Until one early winter night some years ago when every last citizen vanished, apparently having marched into the sea. No one knows for certain because no bodies ever surfaced or washed ashore, but that’s the theory that best fits the facts. The times I passed the place by rail or coach, the sight of it filled me with such antipathy and dread, like gazing at one’s own corpse, that I slept poorly for weeks and still wake from the occasional nightmare of it.”
“That’s one doozy of a yarn,” Matheson said.
“Morris,” Betsy said, “what if this man only believes he came from this city?”
“I’d like to think that if not for rumors of the mysterious Egyptian wizard who set up shop there and gave dazzling performances of electricity and instruments of glass and steel in the weeks before the people disappeared.”
“You mean Nyarlathotep,” Matheson said.
“I’m not sure. I never knew his name before tonight.” Morris rubbed his forehead and sighed. “His show has been selling out the Old Pharoah’s Odeon every night for two weeks now. If a mass delusion claimed the people of that abandoned city and Nyarlathotep had a hand in spreading it, how many people must he contaminate with his ideas and illusions before the good people of New Alexandria reach their tipping point into madness? The clock, as they say, may very well be ticking.”
Matheson stood behind his desk. “I reckon, then, we ought to pay a visit to this electric wizard.”
***
The Old Pharoah’s Odeon sat closed and dark, not surprising for the late hour, but Inspector Matheson refused to let it deter him. Locating a door with a lock in desperate need of repair, he jimmied it and let them in via a backstage entrance. Silence filled the air. Their soft footsteps echoed.
“Is anyone here? This is Inspector Daniel Matheson of the New Alexandria Police,” Matheson called out. “Hello?”
No one answered. The three exchanged glances then spread out to look around. Betsy slid through an opening in the curtains onto the stage. “Morris, come here,” she called.
They gathered by the tall climbing arc device, where Betsy crouched, pointing to the wires that ran from the base of the mechanism. They snaked out perhaps eighteen inches from the steel foot and lay loose on the boards, their frayed copper windings licking out from crumbling insulation.
“It’s not the only one,” she said.
Rising and walking to several other devices, she indicated similar wires that connected to nothing. She removed a plate from the base of a spinning disk that, during the show, had created a pinwheel of brilliant sparks, and revealed an empty machine box.
“I don’t get it,” Matheson said.
“There’s no mechanism,” said Morris.
“I see that,” Matheson said. “I thought electricity required a power source. A battery or a generator. Even if these were connected to one, where are the moving parts?”
“I don’t get it either, Inspector. Betsy and I saw these devices in full operation only a few hours ago, sparking, whirring, humming with undeniable energy.”
“Props,” Betsy said. “They’re only props. He did the tricks another way. With lights and mirrors or lantern projections. Sleight of hand on a grand scale.”
Morris shook his head. “What we saw and heard went far beyond that, Betsy.” She frowned and lowered her eyes. Morris gripped her shoulder, reassuring her. “Don’t take it so hard. I can’t explain it either. Nyarlathotep is a genuine wizard of some kind, whether its electricity or stagecraft.”
“Hush, there, you hear that?” Matheson said.
They held their breath and listened. A whisper of flutes haunted the stage. Matheson raised one finger to his lips, then crept backstage with all the stealth his stocky frame allowed, passed the ropes and levers that controlled the curtain riggings, and tracked down a narrow, lopsided corridor The fluting grew louder with every step. Shriller, too. It drilled Morris’s ears with the persistence of uncontrolled tinnitus.
Betsy grimaced and pressed the heels of her hands to her ears.
“That music is sickening,” she said.
They came to the doors of two dressing rooms, one bore a star in faded gold paint.
Sweat beaded Matheson’s brow as he knocked on it, and Morris knew the music put it there. It made his guts churn the way the deep, penetrating hum of certain massive machinery sometimes roiled his innards. At the first crack of Matheson’s knuckles, the music ceased. The door, ajar, creaked inward on its own—
—then Betsy screamed.
A coruscating electric light filled Morris’s vision. It flowed out from the dressing room like liquid. Every hair on his body rose to flagpole attention. His mouth filled with a coppery taste and turned dry as sandpaper. The floor beneath his feet seemed to soften, or maybe his legs went rubbery, he couldn’t tell, but the world spiraled and rippled in disorienting waves. His awareness seemed to part from his body as if he rose toward the ceiling and looked down on himself; on Betsy, who dropped and placed her head on the floor, arms clutched over it as if willing herself to turn to stone against the overwhelming sound and light; on Matheson, face pale as fresh paper, one hand firm against the wall to brace him, the other clutching his bowler to his head, his eyes clamped shut. How long this lasted, Morris couldn’t measure. Time stretched then lost its elasticity then retracted then hastened, slowed, hastened, and ticked, ticked, ticked, measured in the tempo of the ghastly music of flutes and drums resurgent from within a dressing room far too small to contain the infinite crowd of musicians required to raise such cacophony. Morris’s body pulsed to the music’s time. His heart beat in sync with it, and his awareness snapped back into his physical form as if retracted by a coil. The wooden walls and floors vanished, becoming an abyss with no boundary through which he plummeted toward a dense and secret core, where the music originated, following the metronome pump of an infinite beating heart—the heart of a thing beyond his power to conceptualize or identify, a thing bathed in sound, soothed and calmed by the noxious composition.
The dressing room door slammed shut.
Reality crashed back into place, leaving Morris short of breath. Matheson’s arm folded, and he toppled against the wall to keep his balance. Betsy cowered on the floor. Nyarlathotep stood in front of the door, towering, dark-skinned, slender, draped in a black robe of no material Morris knew.
He said, “You don’t belong here. The theater is closed.”
Flustered, Matheson gasped several times and waved a hand as he regained his composure.
“Now you hold on there a second, fella,” he said. “We’re here on official business. You’re part of an active investigation, and I want some answers.”
Morris knelt beside Betsy then helped her to her feet. He expected the worst when he looked upon her face, shock, terror, or despair, but instead he found it filled with fury and determination. She regarded Nyarlathotep with dreadful anger.
“Now is not the time, Inspector,” the tall man said. “Come back in the morning.”
He took two steps forward, his stride forcing them all to retreat halfway down the corridor. His pace quickened as he drove them back the way they’d come, directed them toward the backstage door, all of them too disoriented and weakened to protest, until he opened the door and, with a sweeping gesture that sent his robe swirling from his arms, ushered them out. Morris spied the delicate flicker of electrical sparks in the cloth before the door slammed shut. The lock mechanism sizzled and glowed, and when Matheson tried to open it again, he found it fused and immovable.
“What the hell just happened?” Matheson said. “Tell me, Morris, please, tell me what the hell was that?”
Morris met the inspector’s eyes, then Betsy’s still full of rage.
“I’m afraid I can’t, but… maybe our nameless friend in a holding cell can.”
***
“Help me kill him, and I’ll tell you all I know,” Nameless said.
Matheson laughed. “Out of the question, you maniac.”
Nameless retreated from the bars of his cell and settled on his bunk. “Then your city will fall to his influence like mine did. It’s only a matter of time.”
“What happened in your city?” Morris asked. “I’ve heard rumors and speculation, but what are the facts? Can you tell us that much?”
“I am the last. I will tell the audient void,” Nameless said. A tense quiet followed, then he stood again and pointed at Betsy. “He almost took it away from you. I can see it in your eyes. He almost got yours, but you resisted. You felt it, though, didn’t you? The loss it would mean. The void it would leave in you.”
“What’s he yakking about?” Matheson said.
“I can’t explain it,” Betsy said, “but it’s true. I sensed a part of me being drawn out like sawdust into a vacuum. I knew if it left me, I would never be the same again. I don’t know what it means or how it could happen, but I experienced it.”
“Like your humanity being yanked out of your body?” Morris said.
“Yes.”
“You both felt that back at the theater? I just felt sick and sweaty like I’d eaten too many chili peppers,” Matheson said. “How d’you reckon that?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Nameless said. “He focused his efforts on those who pose the greatest threat to him as well as those who offer him the most to gain. Imagine, two of the city’s best and brightest subjugated to him, spreading his message to others. He started like that in my city, with invitation-only previews of his show for people in authority, people with social influence. Once he won them over, others all but offered themselves up to him. It was the fashionable thing to do, after all, see the great show, how shocking could it be? The people in my city had seen it all, hadn’t they? It came easy to him there. It was already a corrupt and dehumanized place.”
“Mumbo-jumbo aside, what the hell does he want out of all this?” Matheson said. “Sold out shows? Command performances for royalty? What makes this guy more than PT Barnum with crazy fireworks and bad music?”
“PT Barnum is human,” Nameless said.
The words hung in the air, leaden and startling even though Morris had already reached the same conclusion. Some things had to reveal themselves on their own to be fully accepted, though, and so he’d waited for the discussion to lead there naturally. Matheson turned to him with a look that said: Can you believe this guy? Help me out here with this insanity. But Morris’s expression only confirmed the man’s words. Deflated, Matheson pushed his bowler back on his head and rubbed his scalp.
“He took five rounds and walked away unharmed,” Morris said.
“He produced that lightning show without any working machines,” Betsy said.
“Well, then.” Matheson ground his teeth as he thought. He pulled a keyring from his pocket and unlocked the holding cell. “I guess it wouldn’t be murder if we send an inhuman varmint to Boot Hill before he messes more with my adopted hometown—but we only get lethal if there’s no alternative.”
***
After leaving New Alexandria Police Headquarters, they detoured to the Machinations Sundry workshop, where the morning shift coming on eyed Morris and Betsy in their rumpled evening clothes and wondered. For an hour, Matheson and Nameless waited while Betsy and Morris tinkered in Morris’s personal workshop until they emerged with a rough-forged assembly of brass and steel, clinging to Morris’s back on leather straps. A pipe rose from the mechanism two feet above Morris’s head, ending in a fluted horn encased in a perforated cap of bronze.
“What is that contraption?” Matheson said.
“Something I’ve been field-testing for the New Alexandria Fire Department. It’s meant for mounting on machinery, but in a pinch, I guess the human machine is as good as any,” Morris said.
“What’s it do?”
“Maybe nothing, Dan. It’s only an idea I’ve got, but it’s all we have for the moment.”
They found the Old Pharaoh’s Odeon as closed and still as the last time they’d visited. Matheson knocked at the front door. They waited, but no one answered.
“Let’s get some men out here and break the door down,” Betsy said. “Shouldn’t we rouse a posse or something? Isn’t that what they do in Texas, Dan?”
Matheson raised an eyebrow at her. “This ain’t Texas. With what we’re contemplating the fewer eyes the better. Human or not—and I ain’t decided on that question, yet—this fella looks like a man, and that’s going to raise questions if we take any sort of permanent-type action.”
“The fewer people exposed to him, the better. We must contain the mental contamination he breeds. Reaching weak minds will only make him stronger,” Nameless said. “Show me the door you used to enter last night.”
As Matheson led the group through an alley to the rear of the theater, he said, “I still don’t see what he gets out of all this. No one goes around ruining cities for fun, do they?”
“He is the messenger of the Old Ones. In places outside of time and space, in cities sunken at the bottom of the ocean, at the heart of the universe, they sleep, and sleeping they dream, but one day when the stars are right they’ll awaken,” Nameless said. “It is written in the Necronomicon that with strange aeons even death may die. When the stars are right, the clock of the cosmos will chime their return. Each city and soul Nyarlathotep takes under his influence speeds the pendulum toward the time when the Old Ones will reclaim what they once possessed. First our minds, next the Earth, the outer planets, then other worlds and times unknown to us—before ultimately, the nuclear chaos at the heart of the universe, Azathoth, who slumbers to the demoniac music of countless dreadful beasts who drum and pipe and dance for him to the measure of all time, ceases to dream reality. Each note of his servants’ music ticks another moment toward that day, and the faster their tempo, the sooner it comes.”
Matheson stopped dead in his tracks, whirled, then grabbed Nameless by his dirty suitcoat. “Are you pulling my leg? This is insanity. Nonsense. Bull-pucky. Morris, Betsy, tell me this can’t be true.”
“I don’t want it to be true,” Morris said, “but I’ve heard of the Necronomicon, attributed to the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, around 730 A.D. Anna Rigel, the Queen of New Alexandria’s witches, speaks of the tome with fear, and you know there is almost nothing in this world that truly frightens that woman. Betsy and I witnessed Nyarlathotep’s power last night. And… I’ve seen the lost city. From a distance, true, but its atmosphere of dread was unmistakable. Can we risk what happened there happening here? Do you want to watch one cold night as all of New Alexandria marches hollow-eyed into the sea?”
Matheson shook his head. “It’s too incredible, too… outlandish.” He released Nameless. “Guess I’m having second thoughts about premeditated murder if this hombre turns out to be more smoke and mirrors than monster. Can you promise he isn’t?”
Morris parted his lips to speak. An ear-shattering burst of sound stilled his words before they left his mouth. Noise cascaded around them, filling the alley, shaking dust and debris loose from brick and wood walls. A thousand, a million, even more flutes shrilled clashing notes into the air, accompanied by seemingly infinite drumbeats and footfalls, all wrapped in the crackling hiss of electricity unfettered. The back door of the theater flew open, slamming against the wall before cracking from its hinges and falling to the alley stones. Nyarlathotep emerged to his full, intimidating height. Morning light only deepened the shadows of his complexion and robes. Darkness writhed at his feet as if he stood upon a nest of squirming snakes and cockroaches.
“Welcome. Please, come in, come in, and see what I’ve prepared for you. The time is now,” he said.
Unable to do otherwise, they entered. The door vanished behind them, replaced by a solid wall as if it had never existed. Nyarlathotep pulled back a curtain and ushered them to the stage. Morris tried to stand his ground, lock his feet in place, but the rhythm of the demoniac music forced movement into his bones and muscles as if it combined with the ambient electricity to stimulate his body against his will. The pale disc of electricity rotated above the stage. All Nyarlathotep’s devices leapt with flashes and sparks of light and energy as if animated by the same irresistible power that carried Morris to center stage.
The quartet took equidistant positions beneath the electro-disc, puppets whose strings dangled from Nyarlathotep’s sinister fingers. Shapes formed in the charged air. Visions of abominable musicians and dancers, so hideous Morris could only perceive them as glimpses of body parts—mouths, hands, feet, and other appendages beyond anything human. His brain struggled to make sense of the perversity flooding it even as he fought to hold onto what Nyarlathotep tried to pry out of him. His awareness began to drift, to rise. He clutched onto it with all his willpower, clung to his body.
“Betsy, now, please, if you can, do it now,” Morris said.
Betsy took three steps toward him then stopped as if paralyzed. “I’m trying, Morris. It’s so hard to move.”
The maelstrom of sound and light cycloned around them.
“Whatever that thing does, now’s the time,” Matheson shouted.
Nameless moved then, seemingly less controlled than the others, perhaps from his longer exposure to the powers in motion or to his seasoned acceptance of the madness. He seized the tall climbing arc device, the Jacob’s Ladder, at its base, raised it, and thrust it into Nyarlathotep’s face. Electric ladder rungs lanced the dark man’s flesh. Showers of electrical sparks ignited and fell on the stage. Locked into place by the circuit he created, Nameless quivered and twitched in his threadbare suit as smoke rose from his body. Tongues of fire licked at the mechanism. Electricity coursed into Nyarlathotep’s uraeus until it seemed as if the snake’s mouth spit fiery venom. Nyarlathotep staggered, startled, even as Nameless’s teeth brightened with electric light and gray wisps trickled from his lips.
***
I am the last. I will tell the audient void.
I will tell. I will… Karolina, my wife! Muriel, my daughter! Oh, how I have missed the memory of you. But I must tell. I must. I must.
I am the last. I will tell the audient void.
I am the… I am… Richard.
Richard!
Oh, I am complete again!
***
Freed for a moment, Betsy rushed to Morris’s side and fired the miniaturized steam engine in the device on his back. Pressure built, and the bronze cup atop the fluted horn whirled. From his pocket, Morris withdrew the control mechanism wired to the engine and pushed a button. A howling whistle blasted from atop the fluted horn. The bronze cap oscillated, warping the sound, which rose and fell in pitch and volume. Designed to be heard through stone walls, through several floors of a building, the warning siren tore a sonic rip in the audible electric cloud pouring through the electro-disc. The rhythm of those inhuman players faltered. Their music struck even more sour notes. Morris worked the controller, pressing its buttons, turning its dial, sending disruptive peals of random sound in chaos time into the electro-disc, forcing sound waves into conflict, pushing back on the mad music from the heart of the universe until the sizzling lines around its circumference flickered and broke.
The disc snapped shut. The music from beyond ceased.
Betsy and Matheson dropped to their knees, hands clamped to their ears, screaming without voices, their words erased by the wailing of the siren until Morris switched off the steam flowing up the pipe and silenced it.
“Are you okay?” he said.
He shouted without meaning to, all sense of volume gone. So did Betsy and Matheson when they replied. Thick silence filled the theater. How much genuine, how much the result of the assault on Morris’s ears, he couldn’t say.
Nameless lay on the stage, face blackened and blistered, smoke wafting from his head with the awful odor of burning hair. His hands remained clutched around the climbing arc where his fingers had fused to its metal. At the end with which he struck Nyarlathotep there remained only a deep, dark stain seared into the wood of the stage, and no sign at all of the tall man.
“Did we kill him?” Matheson said.
“I don’t know,” Morris said. “Maybe we only sent him back somewhere.”
“To the dreaming thing?” Betsy said. “To… Azathoth?”
“I… don’t know,” Morris said.
“Wherever he went, I hope we never see him again,” Matheson said.
“You and me both, Inspector,” said Betsy.
“Me, too, but, even the poorest clock sometimes strikes the right time, and the universe is one enormous mechanism. How much could we have disrupted or delayed it with our little cry against its encroachment? I fear only time will tell.”