But he does sit down on the sofa indicated, with Tillinghast beside him, because they have their little secret.
Eric can only stare at this gaunt, hawk-nosed, half-balding, but wild haired man who bears hardly the slightest resemblance to the fascinating, overpowering, and slightly terrifying Robert Tillinghast he had met when he was eighteen and Tillinghast was twenty, but then Tillinghast reaches over and grabs him by the scruff of the neck the way you would a cat, and twists his head toward the screen and says, “Now be a good boy, and watch.”
Tillinghast had always done that in the old days, because he was taller, had a longer reach, and was stronger. He’d treated Eric like a child, called him his “good boy,” but was not the sort of person, back then, any more than he seems to be one now, inclined to take no for an answer.
“Now look at this,” Tillinghast says, as he picks up the control and switches the scenes. It’s not a live broadcast, obviously, because nothing is being broadcast anymore. It’s something he must have saved off cable in the past few days.
There are scenes of religious ceremonies all over the world, a candle-lit procession up the side of a mountain in the Andes, great crowds of saffron-robed monks bowing down in front of a pagoda in Thailand, another candle-lit affair, but with people waving American flags and crosses and preachers screaming hellfire over a PA system, somewhere in a middle of a field in the Midwest, and then Tillinghast interrupts and says, “This one’s really good.”
St. Peter’s Square, Rome. Night. Lots of floodlights. Cut to: inside the great basilica, the Pope himself conducting mass, surrounded by dozens of cardinals. Cut to: outside, in the square, the packed crowd (thousands of candles like flickering fireflies). His Holiness and the cardinals loom above the huddled masses, projected on two enormous screens for the benefit of those who couldn’t fit inside the basilica. The Pope raises his hands and calls out to God to rescue the faithful in this time of greatest need, and he calls on the multitudes to renew their faith in Christ and look to the scriptures for some hope in the days to come — only by then the multitudes aren’t paying much attention because St. Peter’s Square has broken out in a bedlam of panic and carnage as something black and oily and huge starts pouring out of the sky, splattering across the floodlit dome like an immense, palpitating stain, pouring onto the crowd below.
“Shoggoths,” says Robert Tillinghast, chuckling softly. “It’s raining shoggoths in Rome. I don’t think there’s anything about that in Revelations.”
He spits in disgust and contempt.
Eric can’t think of what to say in response. He’s exhausted, drained, disoriented. It’s almost as if he hears someone else muttering, with his voice, “What happened in Mecca?”
“Pretty much the same,” is the answer. “Nobody knows, really. Mecca’s not there any more.”
The scene cuts to actual US Navy footage of the rising of the lost island of R’lyeh in the South Pacific. Something like green smoke pours out of crevices between the impossible angles of buildings the eye cannot quite bring into focus, and there is a hint of a massive shape rising up, writhing and wriggling, a cloudy outline of hunched shoulders; then wings spread wide, the screen goes blank, and Robert Tillinghast, in his best Porky Pig voice, cackles, “Th-th-that’s all folks!”
Eric places his elbows on his knees, holds his head in his hands, and begins to sob, not even consciously thinking of the deaths of his wife and his daughters, or of the end of the world, but merely because the tears just flow of their own accord. Only after a while, with great effort he is finally able to gasp, “Would you kindly tell me what the fuck your point is?”
Now Tillinghast puts his hand on Eric’s shoulder gently, as if to comfort him.
“My point is that it’s all ghost dancing.”
“Ghost dancing?”
“Yeah. You know how, at the end of the nineteenth century, when the American Indians — or do I mean Native Americans? — no need to be politically correct any more — knew they had lost everything to the white man, they started a new religion that held that if everybody put on their ghost shirts and did the magical ghost dance, then bullets would bounce off them, the white men would go away, the buffalo would return, and everything would be just peachy. That’s what people do, at the end, when they have no realistic hope left. They lapse into fantasy. That’s what’s going on right now. The ghost shirts and ghost dances didn’t do a whole lot of good against the Gatling guns at Wounded Knee. You saw what happened to the Pope. The spheres are conjoined. The gateways are open. The Old Ones return. That’s it. Ding! Game over.”
Eric just stares at him, and Tillinghast continues.
“Now I imagine you are exhausted, and have been under a great deal of stress, and you could use a good hot meal and a comfortable bath and a good night’s sleep before we calmly discuss our future plans, or even why I brought you here — ”
“Yeah,” Eric says. “I really could.”
But suddenly Tillinghast leaps to his feet, grabs him by the scruff of the neck and hauls him off the sofa. “Well, that’s entirely too bad, because the evening’s festivities won’t wait, and have been delayed as long as possible so that you could arrive. So, I’m sorry, but we have to go right now.”
Eric is too befuddled to resist as he finds himself hustled over to a closet and handed a robe of some kind, which, as he unfolds it, he recognizes. Black, hooded, embroidered, covered with sigils and signs copied from the pages of the Necronomicon. He struggles to put it on, over his clothes, remembering that in the old days it was customary to be naked underneath one of these things; but, as he hesitates, Tillinghast assures him that tonight such details are not going to matter.
Robed, the two of them take in hand ancient, golden lanterns of bizarre design, which allegedly came from beneath the sea, and, lighting the little candles within with an ordinary cigarette lighter, they proceed out of the house, across the porch, down a flight of wooden stairs, and then along a path along the edge of the lawn, downhill, toward the bay.
From somewhere up ahead he can hear chanting, and it occurs to Eric Shaw that on such a night as this — as dark as this anyway, overcast, starless — way back when, when the two of them were young, before their parting of the ways when he supposedly turned from the sinister life’s course he had found himself upon, moved to New Jersey and become a respectable illustrator of children’s books, most of which seemed to have something to do with happy bunny-rabbits — on such a night as this, one Cindy Higgins had, as it was whispered at the time, come to an exceedingly nasty end. The police never solved the case. Afterwards, Eric and Robert had parted, Eric to supposed respectability, Robert to his celebrated, scandal-ridden career as a poet and artist and alleged cult-leader of truly remarkable extravagance and rumored depravity.
All this comes rushing back to Eric now, the traumatically repressed details, the veils of hidden memories torn back, as he realizes that he is now on the very same beach, in the very same spot, where the aforesaid Cindy Higgins, who hadn’t been his first girlfriend from Maine vacations when he was a kid, but his first girlfriend’s younger sister’s best friend, whom he had lured into the orbit of Robert Tillinghast and his cronies with the promise of a really good time, had met her hideous fate, very much in the manner that the girl who is there now seems about to meet hers.