I waited for Johnny to come back. Waited to be pulled low so I could be raised up.
I was ready now. Sometimes the waters rippled and bubbled around me, releasing odd vapors into the air. Sometimes I called Johnny’s name, but it didn’t do me any good.
Maybe I’d waited too long and the gate to K’n-yan was closed forever. Maybe I would never walk the glimmering streets of Tsath, where statues of the toad-god stood like stone behemoths above luminous ramparts.
Now they worship even stranger gods…
When the sun came up, I swam to the pond’s edge and fell asleep. I woke up and walked back to my folks’ house to write all of this down on paper. People were bound to wonder about me like they wondered about Old Man Carter, and I wanted to explain things myself. I didn’t show what I wrote to anyone yet. I knew better. They’d use it as evidence to lock me in a crazy-house.
Two nights later Ma died in her sleep. We buried her on the hill behind the house, and my father stopped talking to me. We drank together, but we didn’t talk. My sister moved out of the house to live with a young man she’d been courting for a while. There was nothing else she could do for Pa and me.
Pa was still snoring when I got up this morning. I spent the last of my army pay on a case of good whiskey and left it for him on the dining room table. Then I hobbled over to the old Carter place and took a swim in the pond. Now and then deep rumblings came from below the water. I imagined scaly things swimming up from the sunless ocean with tongues extended like octopus tentacles, pulling me down, deep into the world below the world, where glorious Tsath awaited my service. Where Johnny’s bones rambled along golden beaches gathering the detritus of mystery and carrying it back to enrich the treasure vaults of the Masters.
I floated on the black water, reflected constellations swimming about me.
Still Johnny hasn’t come for me. Neither has Old Man Carter. I should have taken Johnny’s invitation on that cold rainy night so many years ago.
Now I have to do things the hard way. I found a big rock in the pasture, as heavy a stone as I could carry. It didn’t take long to weave some reeds into a sturdy rope. I tied one end to the rock and the other about my waist.
As soon as I finish writing this, I’ll wade through the mud to the center and let the stone carry me down…down into the swirling depths of Carter’s well…down into the rushing chaos of that nameless river…beyond that into the currents of the sunless ocean…and ultimately to the glittering shore of the toad-god’s kingdom. When I close my eyes, I see the crystalline towers of Tsath rising toward a stalactite sky, where flocks of serpent-bats glide like sparrows. I see myself marching along the jeweled strand, once again part of a unit with a purpose. Fleshless and deathless beings with no more blood or tears to spill.
One of them is my best friend.
Whoever finds this notebook has a choice. You can believe everything I’ve written, if you have a mind to. Or you can toss it into the fireplace like a worthless old pulp and watch it burn. Some folks just can’t abide the truth. Especially when it’s ugly. But for others the truth is all they have, no matter how bitter, strange, or unbelievable it might be.
The black toads gather around me, croaking their ancient songs.
They know what’s coming next.
See you soon, Johnny.
The Lord of Endings
I found the old hermit sitting like a stone in the desert. His skin was gray as granite, pitted by the timeless winds. His ramshackle hut stood between two boulders deep into the great, dry plain where the pale-skinned invaders never go. I drank the last of my water the day before, and I was thirsty. The old man gave me wellwater and dried lizard flesh. He seemed to know why I had come.
As I rested in the shadow of the boulders, he brought me a small vial carved of black stone, perhaps basalt. A curiously shaped pebble served as a cork, and the symbols of a language I had never seen wound across the container’s smooth surface. I gave thanks to the Great God, but the old man did not seem to like that. He covered my mouth with his gnarled, dusty hand and whispered a single word in my ear. A word that I had never heard before, yet one whose meaning I understood. It was the secret name of that which I sought.
Weariness overcame me, and I fell asleep in the lee of the big rock. When I awoke the moon had risen, and the old man was gone, his hut abandoned. I think he wondered deeper into the desert. But he had left a canteen of water for me, and it sustained me until I made it back to the outskirts of town.
The pale devils in their green-and-brown uniforms stared suspiciously at me as I passed, shifting the weight of their machine guns on their shoulders. How I hated them. They were from a land far away, where green things grew everywhere and water flowed so freely that they wasted it. They were the conquerors of my land, the unworthy inheritors of our empire of sand and sun. How ironic that they could never survive more than a few days in the desert, never understand the rules of life here among the people born to this harsh and beautiful land. Yet they came years ago with their bombs and their guns and their bone-crushing machines. With their shackles of steel on our wrists, they call themselves liberators. Pale devils.
When I reached the small, filthy room that I called my own, I ate sparingly and washed the desert from my skin. Then I opened the stone vial that the hermit had given me. I sniffed at its open mouth, smelling strange, faraway odors. A sweet decay filled my nostrils like the thick smoke that pours from a bombed-out apartment building. Then, without another thought, I drank the tasteless fluid within, pouring the last of its oily drops down my throat. A great wave of fatigue swept across me, and I lay down on the worn cot that served as my bed. The room began to spin, and I smelled the distant odors again. I fell deep into slumber.
I opened my eyes in a flame-lit cavern, surrounded by walls of gleaming subterranean rock. Figures of gods and monsters spilled across the cavern, visions of an ancient world carved by ancient hands. Twin braziers of dancing flame hung from golden chains, and at my feet lay the moldering skeletons of two men, their beards and hair still growing from desiccated flesh. Their robes had once been rich, the color of silver and gold, now faded to the shade of dust. One of the dead men held a jeweled scimitar in his bony fingers. I would need it more than he, so I pried it free and took his leathern scabbard as well.
The old man’s potion had worked exactly as I had been told it would. I stood at the threshold of a strange and wonderful place. Beyond a broken set of sphinx-carved doors, a stairway wound downward into darkness. Without a torch, I followed the stairs deeper into the dreaming realm, aware that it was not my physical body that descended, but a living manifestation of my very soul. My skin tingled with excitement in the dream, and perhaps it tingled as well where my body lay on that cot in the distant waking world. If this much were true, perhaps the rest of it would be. Perhaps the one I needed to find lay somewhere at the bottom of these winding steps.
Passing through another shattered gate, I emerged in a twilight realm of waste and shadows. The husks of trees lay about me like the bones of fallen giants. A sweet-smelling wind blew across the remains of a once-mighty forest. Something had crushed this wilderness, and a sea of rotting leaves spread across the devastation like a brown blanket. Here was the source of the strange odors I had smelled from the stone viaclass="underline" the decaying remnants of a land ripe with death-colored fungi. The full moon floated above like a golden sphere, obscured by vapors of green and violet and scarlet, the shifting auroras of an unearthly sky. Alien constellations glittered, and a stray comet passed across the inky vault, a streak of burning sapphire.