My task was to educate him, and show him many wonders, because I had been through all this before.
Meanwhile, I saw myself in enough mirrors that I learned to trim my beard properly as it filled in.
But even if I was Big Thomas I was still a junior member of our brotherhood, fit only to teach the boy, fit only to place him in the glass coffin where he would sleep and dream us all and the house into being.
I remembered all that, and the others, who came out of the shadows, remembered me, because time does indeed play tricks, and is indeed like a house of mirrors, and I/we/they looked on with expectation as the whole cycle turned on itself, like a worm swallowing its tail, or like a Moebius strip going on and on forever…
But for what purpose? You may well ask. I tell you that I learned this much, from the others, from my older selves, that the purpose of this magical, half-living house with infinite rooms, which swung through eternity like a watch on a chain…watch the watch, watch the watch…have you gone under yet? You are in my power…
Not exploration, not any quest for scientific knowledge, or even conquest, but, in a word, worship.
Now the house was always filled with spirits and presences, with things that fluttered like moths in the darkness between the stars. Now my otherselves educated me, and took me up into endless towers that even I had never known existed, through rooms of strange gravities, where universes intersected, past windows that looked out on unfamiliar suns or worlds. Sometimes we conversed with monstrosities we had summoned up out of the abyss. Sometimes, either as their allies or their foes, we fought in strange wars.
I learned the secrets of the black worlds, which roll sunless in the eternal dark, where sentient fungi dream in glowing gardens, and know the secret name of Chaos.
Now the great powers gathered around us. To them, Earth was but a speck. To them, I was but a speck, but to them too I was like a tiny cog in a vast machine, which may seem too small to notice, but which, for the time being, is necessary.
We came together for a kind of sabbat, there, in the upper rooms of the house; and there was among us one from outside, whose skin was like flowing, living, black metal, and whose eyes and face were terrible to look upon. He was the mighty and dreadful messenger of our lord and master.
Yes. If the house-which-is-not-a-house swings through all of eternity like a watch on a chain, then what hand holds the chain? That is the primal potency at the center of time, whose true name cannot be spoken or written, but which is hidden behind the name of Azathoth.
That which we worshipped. That by whose whim we — and the entire universe — had been brought into existence, for all he might blow our dust away in another instant, should another whim come upon him.
Now after many transformations and transfigurations and changes, there was one among us, at the ultimate end of the chain of being of ourselves, who might perhaps be worthy to make his way up the chain on which our pendulum was suspended, and finally emerge at the center of Chaos, and there fall down in obeisance before the ultimate, mindless god.
So the Black Man of our sabbat, the mighty messenger, fetched one of our number, an old, wild-haired, wild-eyed fellow, and took him by the hand, and led him up that infinite spiral staircase to the ultimate portal, a round glass eye, there to draw back the curtain that covers it and gaze directly into the face of Azathoth on his demon throne.
We all cried out in awe, and spoke the secret words of praise in languages never spoken upon the Earth.
But that’s not what happened. They didn’t go up, at least not all the way. Maybe our fellow was not ready, despite all his learning and power. Maybe he had not entirely sloughed off his humanity, and so was burdened by hope or conscience. Or maybe his mind just snapped like a weak reed.
In any case, it was he who broke away and ran down through the house, screaming like a madman, out the front door and onto a hillside in 1964 where he tried unsuccessfully to dissuade a certain twelve-year-old boy from continuing the direction in which he and his brother had been going. When this happened, all of us scattered in terror and consternation, certain that the wrath of the Messenger would fall upon us. But we needn’t have worried, for those who were able to look say the expression on his face was one of satisfaction, as if he knew an important lesson had been completed.
V
I have spent some time in this madhouse, yes. When I ran screaming down the hillside, after the older boy hit me over the head several times with a branch, after I ran out into the highway in a frenzy and was clipped by a truck, I was taken to a hospital first, then elsewhere when I tried to tell them that I was Thomas Brooks, who had vanished so long ago on that hillside. But of course it wasn’t a long time ago. It was 1964 and Tommy Brooks, aged twelve, wasn’t even missing yet, though he would be in a few days. When he disappeared the police became very interested in what I had to say, but they and the doctors got nothing out of me that they could understand or believe.
I have not drawn back the ultimate curtain. I have not looked upon the face of Azathoth. But I know how it ends. Memory moves both ways in time too. So I, and my other selves, remember both what was and what is to come. I remember that, much bedraggled, my feet bleeding because I’d lost my slippers in the underbrush, I made my way back to the place of that uncompleted sabbat, and I climbed the tower, up the turning staircase through the worlds and universes. I stood before the ultimate portal, though I did not draw back the curtain. The time was not yet. But soon. I know how it all ends because I found there on the floor the corpse of a wild-haired old man in a tattered robe. His eyes had been seared, as if he had been blasted by what he had looked upon, but I recognized his face and it was my own.
Might I, like the moth which is trapped between two points in time in that brief interval in which it is alive, turn back from my own terminal point, before the curtains are drawn back and my eyes are blasted?
I don’t think so.
But what if I do not worship? What if instead I hurl defiance and curses into the face of Idiot Chaos. What then?
It’s probably not that simple.
About the Authors
JAMES CHAMBERS received the Bram Stoker Award® for the graphic novel, Kolchak the Night Stalker: The Forgotten Lore of Edgar Allan Poe and is a four-time Bram Stoker Award nominee. He is the author of the short story collections On the Night Border and On the Hierophant Road, which received a starred review from Booklist, which called it “…satisfyingly unsettling”; and the novella collection, The Engines of Sacrifice, described as “…chillingly evocative…” in a Publisher’s Weekly starred review. He has written the novellas, Three Chords of Chaos, Kolchak and the Night Stalkers: The Faceless God, and many others. He edited and co-edited the Bram Stoker Award-nominated anthologies, Under Twin Suns: Alternate Histories of the Yellow Sign and A New York State of Fright, as well as Even in the Grave, an anthology of ghost stories.