Our meal, the ghoul equivalent of lunch, lasted for the better part of an hour but everyone was exhausted when it was over. After all, we’d barely gotten any sleep the night before and had spent the resulting morning in a state of heightened wakefulness. Everyone looked ready to crash except me.
I didn’t feel like I needed to sleep anymore. I hoped I still did because without the opportunity to slumber, I wasn’t sure I could keep what little remained of my fragile humanity. For all that poets talked about sleep being akin to death, it was rest that allowed us to appreciate life.
Admittedly, I wasn’t too keen to go to sleep while the Faceless Ones were nearby. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure they were involved in the attack on Insmaw. All I knew was that one chose to assault us with a bunch of Reanimated, and that Whateley seemed to think they were involved with this Great Enemy or were the ones he was referring to. Even more so than the Keeper, they might hold insights into where Whateley and the Tower of Zhaal summoning point might be.
Hell, I was more than a little curious how the Keeper had known that was what we were after in the first place.
After we finished, a trio of shoggoths led us to our stone rooms. They had stone beds with feather pillows but no blankets, crystal lamps, and a curious blocky geometric pattern to all the furnishings. Everything was square, made of rectangles, or octagonal. Given the importance of the octagons to the Elder Things, I’m not sure why that was, I wondered if the interior design reflected the Keeper’s influence.
All of our rooms were adjoining and there were no doors or curtains between them. Ghouls did not have the same requirements for privacy humans did. This was strange, because there were doors to functional rooms like the dining hall or kitchen. They also had public bathrooms, which I suspected might irritate some of our group. Unfortunately, the absence of doors meant that if the Faceless Ones wanted to kill us in our sleep, then they would have an easy time of it. They weren’t staying anywhere near us per a ghoul I chatted up, so there was that at least.
While Mercury and the others were settling in (in some cases, using the furniture to barricade the doorways), I decided to pay a visit to Martha. She was staying a number of rooms down and I passed by my group, two humans having sex who didn’t seem to mind my passing through, and a ghoul who was eating a fresh corpse with several sharp utensils. The latter almost caused me to vomit but I managed to control the urge.
Martha had already changed into a diaphanous white nightgown, which seemed to accent her already eerie but beautiful features. While the only vampires I’d ever encountered were wizards like August who used human blood and organs to extend their life, I couldn’t help but be reminded of them when thinking of my former bride. Which was amusing given I was the monster.
“Did you know H.G. Wells was friends with a ghoul?” Martha said, referencing one of the Pre-Rising authors whose works survived in the Remnant’s library. She was pulling out a hair brush from her bag.
I wondered at her choice of topic. “And how do you know that?”
“I met him while acquainting myself with this group. He claimed they’d been close friends and he’d revealed his true nature to him. Sadly, this seems to have gone over like a ton of cement and resulted in him writing a fanciful warning against them in The Time Machine.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You’re claiming the ghouls are the inspiration for Morlocks?”
“They are an advanced underground civilization of creatures that feed on humans.”
It sounded like a made-up story to me, but I didn’t care. Fiction wasn’t what I’d come here to talk about. Still, I decided to indulge her while I came up with a way to discuss my situation. “I always felt the Time Traveler was unfair to the Morlock species.”
Martha gave a half-smile. “I’ve always felt you’ve had a disturbing kinship with the monsters. The ghouls are enemies, John. All nonhumans are humanity’s enemies. In the end, there can be but one race that dominates the world.”
“Humans live above ground, Deep Ones in the ocean, and ghouls live underground. shoggoths can live anywhere. I’m not seeing a lot of overlap.”
“So, you’re saying we should all sit around the campfire and play nice?” Martha scoffed, sounding almost offended.
“I’m saying that people have always glorified war and conflict but it’s a more expensive proposition than peace,” I said, sighing. “Given the status of the rest of the world, you might want to advise the new president to rethink any strategy that relies on the premise of driving out the other species, most of which have been here longer than humanity.”
Martha focused her gaze on me. “Is that why I shouldn’t consider you an enemy?”
Ah. She knew. “My body has changed. My mind has not.”
“Ridiculous,” Martha said, snorting. “Our bodies influence our mind. We’re products of chemicals generating electricity.”
“Says the woman who would be burnt at the stake anywhere but New Arkham and a handful of other places,” I said, crossing my arms. “And could survive her body’s death by seizing someone else’s form.”
Martha batted her eyelashes. “That was actually a decent rebuttal. Your debate skills have improved. I would have divorced you sooner if you’d been this good earlier.”
“You didn’t divorce me until you were forced to by the Council of Leaders. Which, I suppose, I should be grateful for.” I gave a half-smile. “Needless to say, I’ve been undergoing quite a few changes. For the time being, at least, I still seem to be me.”
“Yes, for the time being,” Martha said, sitting down on the edge of her stone bed. “Now, what’s all this nonsense of you being on a mission for the Yithians?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I have time.”
But the world didn’t. Still, Martha might prove useful and it’d be good to get an outsider’s perspective on all this madness. “Alright, here’s the story…”
About twenty-minutes later, Martha was staring at me. “John, if you weren’t such an awful liar, I’d say you made that all up.”
“I am not an awful liar,” I said, offended. “You’re just psychic.”
“Both can be true,” Martha said, sighing. “Your situation does, however, put me in a difficult position.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean to say the Faceless Ones and New Arkham have been cooperating to try and release the Unimaginable Horror.”
I blinked. I raised a finger and opened my mouth. I closed my mouth. “What?”
“They came to us with an offer about eight months ago,” Martha said, brushing her hair. “While we couldn’t communicate it to our citizenry lest they revolt, it was an opportunity too good to miss.”
I was silent for almost a minute.
Martha blinked. “John, I can’t read your mind anymore so….”
I took a few breaths then put my hands together. “I’m at a loss for words as to what possible motivation releasing a living destroyer of planets could serve.”
I would assume she was either insane or an idiot, but my ex-wife was more intelligent and pragmatic than I was. Martha was a consummate survivor so, unless she had changed drastically in the past year, I had to assume there was a reason for her insane action.
“Victory,” Martha said, shrugging. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
“Over?”
“Everyone,” Martha said, putting away her brush. “The Earth is a wretched ball of dust inhabited by endless hordes of monsters, mutants, and horrors. The Yithians successfully bound a Great Old One by themselves, millions of years ago. It’s something we’ve never seen before, a Great Old One in captivity.”
“Which you intend to end,” I said, following her logic.
“Obviously, we don’t intend to release it all at once,” Martha said, taking a ‘what kind of fool do you take me for’ tone. “If we can study the creature and make use of the Yithians’ technology, we might be able to deploy it as a weapon against the individuals preventing humanity from returning to its rightful place.”
“That’s madness,” I said, unable to find any other word for it.
“Doctor Ward’s notes implied he would have been able to summon Cthulhu and bind him at the Black Cathedral,” Martha said, gesturing to her bag. “I believe something similar can be achieved with the Unimaginable Horror at the Tower of Zhaal. The Faceless Ones are not fools; they want to awaken this being for its own reasons but we will be the ones in charge.”
“Alan Ward was insane.” I said, walking to her bag. “He murdered hundreds of children out of the belief he could bind their souls to a magical dreamland.”
Martha ignored my point. “Alan Ward was the greatest necromancer this world has ever seen. The most powerful wizard in humanity’s history. He had the knowledge of over a thousand lifetimes, ranging back to the ancient days of Stygia’s sorcerer kings to witch-cults of Salem. Whether called Thoth-Amon, Gilles de Rais, Joseph Curwen, Charles Dexter Ward, or Atticus Coleridge, he was always a man to terrify lesser mortals.”
“Monsters, the vast majority of them,” I said, picking up a thick leather-bound tome.
On the front, emblazoned in silver letters, were the words: Advanced Ritual Magic by Professor Alan Ward. It was an innocuous title for a man who’d plotted nothing less than the extermination of all humans but his magic-created master race. Then again, Ward had always played the part of an academic while living the life of a warlord. I was neither a wizard nor mathematician, both of which would be required to understand the complicated diagrams and handwritten notes inside the text. This was but one of the books I remembered Doctor Ward consulting during my studies with him. The New Arkham military must have recovered it after the Dunwych raided the Black Cathedral.
“The materials inside are capable of controlling the Unimaginable Horror,” Martha said, quite proud of herself. “The Faceless Ones agree and we’ve combined our resources for this endeavor.”
“So, Marcus Whateley wants to release it to kill it and you want to release it to control it. Where’s the option to keep the damn thing where it is?” It meant Marcus was willing to lie to me just like my Miskatonic employers. That meant I was back to relying on myself and Mercury alone.
Martha shook her head. “You have no vision, John.”
“Oppenheimer had a vision. Sadly, it was about something which came close to matching the destructive power of the Great Old Ones.”
Studying the markings throughout the book, I found myself surprised that they made sense. Not on any conscious level, and I doubted I could ever have turned what I read into something resembling spellwork, but on an instinctual one? It was like remembering you knew a foreign language. The material within was child’s play to the causal calculations and mental training of the Kastro’vaal’s children. Which, given the Kastro’vaal weren’t anywhere near as powerful as the Old Ones, helped form my next conclusion. Studying it for several more moments, Martha watching me the entire time, I closed it. “It won’t work.”
“John, I don’t think you’re qualified—”
“The central binding ritual uses an infinite angle star which draws the power necessary to control the Great Old One from a star in the Andromeda universe. This act kills the star but provides the user with a temporary psychic boost which is relayed through several dozen other summoned entities who are burned up in the process but serve as psychic computers. It’s a bizarre bit of jury-rigged magic designed to compensate for the fact human beings, under no circumstances, should be piloting around Great Old Ones any more than ants should be driving human beings. It’s an act of amazing genius, this book, and so far, beyond what I know of regular sorcery, you could study this for a century and make incalculable advances in several disciplines but—”
“But—”
I sighed, realizing an almost hilarious fact relayed to me across time by Nyarlathotep. “The spell calls upon the power of dozens of gods and Great Old Ones to work its magic. Including the Unspeakable One by his unspeakable true name Hastur. The Unspeakable One is Yog-Sothoth. Which isn’t all that unspeakable. It was just a poetic flourish by Eibon. This book is not what you think it is.”
Martha stared at me, her eyes slowly registering the horror of this fact. “You mean—”
“This book is filled with several thousand years of calculations, some of which were made on quantum computers before the Rising which we only have the results of. All of it done with diagrams and spells designed to project the true names and imagery into your mind because we don’t have the capacity to convey them with words. Yet, it’s built on a flawed premise. It’s like a perfect calculation of the Earth’s weight if the world was flat.” I paused for dramatic effect. “It’s worthless.”
I wanted to laugh. All of Alan Ward’s mystical might and knowledge was filtered through the context of being one small speck of a man on one tiny bit of dust in the universe. Science could provide us with amazing answers about the universe but one needed a humility about studies. Every new piece of knowledge changed everything one knew, like a set of dominos. They had based their entire plan on the writings of a madman and an untrustworthy demigod.
“By Bast and Hypnos,” Martha muttered, speaking of the pagan deities she’d started worshiping out of a belief they’d provide her things.
I took a deep breath. “Let me guess; there’s no way we can convince the Faceless Ones not to release the Unimaginable Horror.”
“It’s too late, John. They started the summoning days ago.”
“Of fucking course.”
I was starting to see why the Yithians believed our group had the chance of preventing the end of everything. Not only were we filled with scientists, warriors, and sorcerers capable of fighting everything thrown at us, but my unique relationship with Nyarlathotep as well as Martha was paying dividends.
Fate was playing a role here. Unfortunately, it looked like it was that of court jester. Would Nyarlathotep manipulate all these events just to see us fail and die?
Yes, yes he would.
I stared at her. “Where is the Tower of Zhaal being summoned?”
Martha looked down at the ground. “I don’t know. This meeting was a cover for receiving updates. We passed along the information in that book months ago. I was supposed to go with them and relay the Unimaginable Horror’s location days from now when it was about to finished. Then we could use the book—”
“It doesn’t matter now. Find out where the summoning is or we’re all going to die.”