The Martian Falcon (Lovecraft & Fort) (17 page)

Presently, he came upon a chapter whose title made him pause. The title was
The Life of the Universe
. He began to read the chapter.

These things I have seen when the breath of the Herb wanders through my veins. Take a handful of sand, glittering and golden. Cast it where you please, like a child at play by an innocent sea; count the grains, hold that vast number in your mind, and know that it is but a fraction of the worlds that contain life throughout the eternal cosmos. Some of these great beings have trod the stars and grown weary with the treading; and some have found knowledge of Them, and with it a fear that seizes the heart and robs them of the illusion of peace with which the rest soothe their sorrows. Bathing in Iumma’s silken rays, the Grey Sisters burn space itself with the power of their thoughts. The Priestess sings within Schedar’s emerald tresses songs only Carcosa understands. On sands charred black by the Dying Fire, the Seer gives wing to his inner eye, and divines the eye of chaos. And away in the deep gulfs, in the black vaults of the eternal night, far beyond the great globe of the shining Nucleus, the Vehm Brother wanders among unknown stars, and listens to the murmur of the trembling void.

Nor is it to be thought that the earth is the only child of our own sun to harbour life, for just as our own world is home to forms countless and varied, so does the gulf beyond swarm with living things of every shape imaginable, and some that would smite the consciousness were they to be seen with the living eyes of man. The Mi-Go live upon the farthest outpost, on the ice-world of Yuggoth which rolls in eternal darkness out on the rim. The giant worlds of gas with their crowns of ice are fathers to many moons, and the minds that inhabit those moons are as different to ours as ours are to the creatures of the ocean floors. The life of our system of worlds crowds upon us, yet we know it not; the history of that life is as a book that has never been opened, whose very existence is unsuspected by the common run of man. Yet does that life creep and think and feel; yet does it look to the stars and tremble at what blasphemes and bubbles beyond the vault of Heaven. In ages long past, the red warrior who stalks the sky with his sword and the head of a slain enemy was home to creatures not unlike ourselves. Of the history of this world, called by its people Vattan, I have seen much in dreams. It was once like the earth, with forests and oceans and great cities, and its people were cousins to the Atlans who dwelt on Earth in dim, distant epochs. Indeed, they were of the same race, the Vattanians having chosen Earth’s sister world, the fourth from the Sun, as their home.

O’Malley stopped reading and turned on his chair to face Pius. ‘The Atlans colonised Mars as well as Earth,’ he said.

Pius nodded. ‘The red warrior with a sword in one hand and the severed head of an enemy in the other: that was how the ancient Islamic astronomers described Mars. But that should not be surprising to us: after all, the Atlans came from the dark depths of space in the night of prehistory. There is no reason why they should only have colonised Earth. In those far-off epochs, Mars also was a green and habitable world.’

O’Malley nodded, turned back to the
Necronomicon
and continued reading.

Lovely was Vattan, before the god-king Haq ul’Suun smote it with the darkness of his hubris. For Haq ul’Suun sought to harness the power of the Outer Ones by means of forbidden and unnatural science. And when the Outer One came, it was as a flood of death and annihilation, a scourge from the spaces
between
that engulfed Vattan in a single day. And the very Sun itself became diseased, and trembled with its illness, and the Atlans saw what had happened to their cousins in the void, and they too trembled and began to make their plans to forsake this system of worlds forever; for no more could they dwell in peace, no more could their nights be spent in quiet slumber, for the nightmares would not let them be. The knowledge of what had been brought forth would not let them rest!

And Haq ul’Suun was punished by the very priests who had once bowed before him. With what little time remained before screaming annihilation took them, they seized their god-king and imprisoned his soul within the carven image of a great bird that was their symbol for justice, there to rage silently for all eternity, while the Outer One sated itself upon the life of Vattan, and then descended to the centre of that unhappy world, there to slumber, for its connection to the mind of Haq ul’Suun could not be broken while the mind of Haq ul’Suun lived. And should the mind of Haq ul’Suun ever be freed from its prison, the Outer One will rouse itself from its aeon-long sleep, and walk again between the worlds, destroying, feeding. And its harbinger will be Nyarlathotep, who of all the Outer Gods walks freely upon the earth, eternal corrupter of mankind, whose presence shall ye know by the Crystal Mask that covers his face.

O’Malley gasped and stopped reading. ‘Crystal Mask,’ he whispered. ‘Is he…?’

‘What is it, Cormack?’ asked Pius.

O’Malley didn’t answer; instead, he bent again over the book and continued reading.

Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, the Living Mist, the Dweller in Darkness, the Mighty Messenger; it is he who will awaken the sleeper at the centre of Vattan, for the sleeper is the merest fragment of his father, the amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity – the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes. The sleeper at the centre of Vattan is not Azathoth himself, but his merest breath, the most fleeting glance from the idiot god at the centre of infinity, which seeped into the ordered universe at the behest of the fool Haq ul’Suun.
Iä! Yog-Sothoth! Iä! Hastur! Iä! Cthulhu!
Azathoth has breathed upon us! Azathoth has looked upon us! And his breath and his gaze are at the centre of Vattan, waiting, waiting! Do not let him emerge again! Do not free the mind of Haq ul’Suun!
Do you hear me, O’Malley?

With a cry of terror and confusion, O’Malley jumped to his feet and backed quickly away from the table, his eyes fixed upon the book.

Pius took him by the shoulders and span him around. ‘What is it? Tell me, Cormack.’

O’Malley shook his head, unable to believe what he had seen. ‘My name,’ he whispered, and then in a loud cry: ‘My name! For the love of God, my name! Written there in the
Necronomicon
! How is it possible?’

Pius went to the table and looked at the passage O’Malley had just read. Then he turned and said: ‘Come here.’

O’Malley shook his head and backed away still further. ‘I can’t. I won’t!’

‘Trust me, Cormack,’ said Pius in his strong, gentle voice. ‘Come and look.’

With immense reluctance, O’Malley edged towards the table. Pius pointed to the passage, which read:

Azathoth has breathed upon us! Azathoth has looked upon us! And his breath and his gaze are at the centre of Vattan, waiting, waiting! But the world is safe as long as the mind of Haq ul’Suun remains imprisoned, for he brought forth the breath and gaze of Azathoth, and while the mind is confined, so too shall be the breath and the gaze.

‘I… I don’t understand,’ said O’Malley. ‘That’s not what I read. I swear upon my soul… that’s not what I read.’

Pius regarded his friend in silence for a long moment, and then closed the book, replaced it in the cabinet and locked the doors. ‘Let us discuss this in my office,’ he said.

*

Ten minutes later, O’Malley was sitting on the comfortable leather couch in Pius’s private office, holding a balloon glass one-third full of Delamain
Reserve de la Famille
cognac, one of the finest in the world. At any other time, he would have teased his old friend for such an indulgence – but at this moment he was more grateful for it than he could put into words.

He took a gulp of the exquisite cognac and said: ‘What happened to me down there, Ambrogio?’

Pope Pius leaned back in his chair and looked at the crucifix on the wall above his large, ornate oak desk. The sounds of the city crept in through the slightly-open window, soothing in their normality.

‘I have heard of this happening to people who read the book. It seems to… speak to them somehow. I don’t know how or why, but I would say that it’s a measure of the evil that is inherent in it.’

‘Can an object be inherently evil?’ asked O’Malley. ‘Can a
text
be inherently evil? I mean… the very letters themselves, the ink of which they’re formed, the paper on which they’re printed?’

‘The insidious nature of the
Necronomicon
goes beyond the words it contains,’ Pius replied. ‘That’s why the surviving copies are kept strictly and securely under lock and key. I believe it carries evil within every fibre of every page; I believe it is suffused with it, like a sponge soaked with water. The book carries the stench of Hell, Cormack, and you have just caught a sniff of it. Before our meeting is over, we shall pray together.’

‘Sanguine was telling the truth,’ O’Malley muttered. ‘A terrible scourge from the depths of space, he said…’

‘A place
beyond
space,’ Pius corrected.

‘And the Martian who brought ruin upon his world, the god-king Haq ul’Suun… he was punished with eternal imprisonment within the carven image of a bird, the symbol of their justice.’

‘The Martian Falcon,’ said Pius. ‘It would seem that in his efforts to harness the power of the Outer Gods, Haq ul’Suun opened the way to allow the merest breath, the merest glance of Azathoth to enter our universe from its domain at the centre of infinity.’

O’Malley shook his head in misery. ‘I’d hoped Azathoth was nothing more than an obscene myth… can it be that the thing really exists?’

Pius sighed. ‘Some believe that Azathoth is simply a name given to an abstract concept.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked O’Malley.

‘Theoretical physics suggests that what we perceive as the three-dimensional universe is actually the surface of a sphere – a hypersphere I believe is the mathematical term – extending through an additional dimension. It’s a strange concept which does not sit easily in the human mind: three-dimensional space curving back on itself through a fourth dimension… but if it’s true, then the question arises of what lies at the centre of the sphere.’

‘The centre of the universal hypersphere,’ said O’Malley. ‘The centre of infinity… Azathoth… the nuclear chaos… the idiot god.’ He shook his head and buried his face in his hands. ‘Blasphemy! It can’t be true!’

Pius stood up and went to sit beside O’Malley. He placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. ‘There is much we don’t know of God’s plan,’ he said. ‘All we can do is continue to strive towards a completion of what we believe to be His work.’

‘Do you believe it?’ asked O’Malley.

‘Do I believe in Azathoth?’ Pius paused. ‘I believe in the existence of cosmic evil, as you do yourself – we have seen enough of it ourselves, after all.’

‘But the forbidden texts imply that Azathoth is at the very foundation of the universe – the demiurge of the Gnostics, the malignant creator of us all.’

‘That, of course, I do
not
believe,’ said Pius. ‘But we may be assured that cosmic evil
can
visit itself upon the earth, and that some evils are so powerful that their perceptions, their very
senses
, can take on partially independent life. It seems that that is what happened on Mars five million years ago. I believe that was what Alhazred meant when he wrote that Azathoth’s gaze is at the centre of the planet.’

‘And if Haq ul’Suun’s soul is ever released from the Martian Falcon,’ said O’Malley, ‘the sympathetic ties binding it to slumber will be broken, and it will be free to emerge again to walk among the planets… and that’s exactly what Crystalman wants…’

Pius nodded. ‘For it would seem that Crystalman is Nyarlathotep – or at least an avatar of Nyarlathotep… the wearer of the Crystal Mask, the tormentor of mankind. I think you’re right, Cormack: if Crystalman has the Martian Falcon, it must be his intention to release the soul of Haq ul’Suun, to free him from his eternal prison, and in so doing break the bonds that hold the breath and gaze of Azathoth in their own confinement at the centre of Mars.’

‘The question is: how will he do it?’ asked O’Malley. ‘Is there a process to be followed? Something he must do to the Falcon? And if so, how long will it take?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know the answers to those questions,’ Pius replied. ‘But the fact that it hasn’t happened yet implies that it will take some time… or perhaps there is something necessary to the completion of the process, some object or component, which Crystalman does not yet have. Either way, I suspect that time is not on our side.’

‘May God preserve and protect us,’ said O’Malley. ‘But what about Johnny Sanguine? What does
he
really want with the Falcon?’

‘I think we may dismiss Johnny Sanguine as what he was – or still is: a gangster, a deluded, self-interested fool. It’s my belief that he assumes the Falcon contains the power necessary to restore him to his half-life, to escape the punishment that awaits him. His evil soul is at least strong enough to remain on Earth for that long. I think it’s most likely that he believes his vampiric body will be restored by the power within the Falcon.’

‘Big mistake!’ O’Malley muttered.

‘Yes, but if he can be made to see his error, he may prove a powerful ally…’

O’Malley gave his friend an appalled glance. ‘An
ally
? That fiend?’

‘Sanguine lied to you when he said he had to retrieve the Falcon to redeem his soul in the eyes of the Almighty. But that lie may yet be transformed into truth before all this is over. If he can be persuaded to help you to save the Earth from the scourge of Azathoth, he may yet be redeemed… and isn’t that your calling?’

O’Malley thought about this, and presently he nodded.

‘Now,’ said Pius, ‘let us pray.’