He was the one who told me what had happened in the village during the year I was in the attic. Something about a teacher who’d come from outside, and tried to change things, and who died. I thought it was funny. Jerry thought it was sad. Well, he as younger than me. I think that despite everything, he didn’t get it. There is no morality. Nothing is right or wrong.
Nevertheless, he was my friend, even if he did betray me at the end, if that’s what he did.
It was at the Leaf-Falling Time, yet again. Such things happen at particular times, because the cycles turn and the gates open.
I was in the attic. I wasn’t confined there anymore, but I had grown to like it. It was only because my senses had begun to change, to become more acute, that I heard a very soft footstep on the stairs. Jerry, when he’s barefoot like that can be almost totally silent, but I knew it was him, and it was. He had been swimming in the earth. Despite the cold of the season he only wore a pair of filthy denim cut-offs. He was covered with mud, but his face was streaked with tears.
He stood at the top of the attic stairs, looked at me, and said softly, “I know what you did.”
And before I could make any argument about leaves and tides and there being no morality, something clumped and scraped and grabbed Jerry by the hair from behind and threw him, yelping and banging, down the stairs.
Joram. I suppose while Jerry was swimming around among the graves, he’d met my late brother, and Joram demanded to be taken to visit dear older brother Tommy, and now that this was accomplished he’d tossed Jerry aside like an empty candy wrapper. I only had to contend with Joram. You don’t grow older when you’re dead, so he was still ten years old, but he’d changed. He wore only shreds of the sheet he’d been buried in, and he moved strangely because his bones were still broken, and his face was terribly pale, his eyes very strange, his fingers long and thin like sharpened sticks.
He screamed at me, not in words, but chittering, and I understood how much he hated me, how much he resented that I had stolen his role in the future among the stars.
There’s no morality. No right and wrong. We do what we do.
He lunged for me, shrieking. His mouth was distorted, almost like an insect’s. I could see that his teeth were sharp points. His fingernails were like knives.
But I skittered aside. Since I had very strong arms, and there was only half of me left, my body was light, and I’d learned to move like the half-man, Johnny Eck, in that movie Freaks. (Brother Azrael had a secret TV and VCR hidden in the back room of his store. He’d showed it to me.) There were hoops of rope strung all over the attic rafters, and I grabbed hold of them, and swung out of reach, then moved like a monkey in treetops while Joram hissed and shrieked and crashed into furniture and shelves and storage boxes. I made it past him and down the stairs. I skittered right over Jerry, who was still lying there, stunned. Joram came after me.
That was when I heard real screaming, human screaming, from downstairs in the parlor. Two voices, a grown man and a woman, in utmost agony. My parents. But by the time I got to them it was too late. Zenas was there, all awash in blood, looming over them, gobbling. He had killed and partially eaten both of them. There was blood all over the walls and ceiling.
Joram was there. He shouted something to Zenas, who looked up, then began to follow me.
I scrambled out the front door and across the lawn, with Joram and Zenas both in close pursuit.
And came face to face with Elder Abraham and Brother Azrael in their ceremonial robes, both of them holding burning staves. Behind them the people of the village were gathered, costumed, not for Halloween festivities, though it was Halloween, but for something a lot more serious. They all wore masks, some like skulls, some like beasts, some like nothing that had ever walked the earth.
Zenas caught hold of me and lifted me up, and began to strip away the flesh from my back and shoulders, but Elder Abraham struck him with his staff, and he exploded into a cloud of blood and bones and flesh. Then Brother Azrael struck Joram, and he was gone too.
The Elder explained that some who go into the darkness and are changed and come back are failures, or of limited use.
But it would not be so for me.
Though I was hurt and bleeding, someone bore me up, and I was carried at the head of a procession, alongside the Elder and the Brother, with all the people behind us, singing. We filed through the Bone Forest. We went past the standing stones beyond it, into the woods again, on for miles, our way lit by the burning staves. The light reflected off eyes in the forest. I don’t think it was wolves, but we were followed. I was even aware that Jerry was with us for a while, his arms crossed across his bare chest against the cold, limping from where he’d banged his knees on the stairs, trying to keep up.
When we came to the great tree, and the Elder bade me climb, Jerry didn’t try to follow me. He was of the earth. He was never a very good climber anyway. Besides, he wasn’t supposed to. This climb was for me alone. It was my fate or my destiny, if you want to call it that.
Elder Abraham spoke to me, in my mind, in the chittering, clicking language of Those of the Air, not using human words at all any longer. He didn’t need to.
All these changes, he said, all these sufferings and sacrifices, are stages in your transformation, for only those who are transformed, one way or another, have any place in the world that is to come. You have climbed, step by step, up a ladder, never faltering in your course, and that is good. You are the one who will climb on our behalf into the realm of the gods, and learn their secrets, and come back to us when it is the season, as their messenger. For this you must leave your humanity behind. All of it. Shed hate and fear and hope and love like old clothes.
So I climbed, easily seizing one branch after another, swinging like a monkey.
The air began to fill with presences, with buzzing, flapping wings. Uncle Alazar was there. He bade me come to him, and I let go of the last branch, and allowed myself to fall.
But this time he and his companions bore me up, out of the tree. For an instant I could see the dark hills, and the fields, and the few lights of Chorazin in the distance, but then I was surrounded by the stars of space, and I lost all sense of time in that cold, dark voyage. The black planets loomed before me, Yuggoth, and more distant Shaggai, and others without names, beyond the Rim. We swooped low through an endless valley lined with frozen gods, those that slept and waited and dreamed while the cycles turned. Their immense shapes were like nothing that ever walked the earth, or ever will until the end. They spoke to me, inside my head, in muted thunder, and I learned their ways.
Again space opened up, and we were falling, swirling around and around into a great whirlpool of the void, for a thousand years, I think, or a million, or for all of time, while in the far distance and faintly I heard the throbbing, pulsating drumming that is the voice of ultimate chaos, which is called Azathoth.