Dearest brother, it seems that you are right about many of the aspects of this world. I hope this validation of your beliefs impels you toward health and happiness rather than shocks you toward morbidity. Perhaps letting that secret society you are a member of know about this would be the correct first step. How would mankind deal with this knowledge?
Sincerely,
John
The effect of this letter upon Ernest was galvanizing. The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor taught that humans were under the influence of another species, a sort of galactic overlord that helped steer human evolution. The Brotherhood claimed to be in contact with these Beings, who were said to live in the Himalayas. Ernest was thrilled; he began drafting letters. What if astral communication wasn’t the most efficient way of contacting these space brothers? What if airships could simply dock at their cloud cities? His brother would be seen as a hero, and that secret role of leadership that the Brotherhood always claimed to have held would become something manifest rather than secret. What if he profited by this news and didn’t have to scrounge for tips by complimenting overweight matrons and vain business tycoons? By the time he read the second letter, he was already naming colleges after himself.
Dear Ernest,
I suspect this letter will find you after some accident has found me. Budge wrote me confessing that he has known for years that all four national dirigible companies know and are in league with the “Fungal Fliers.” It seems that in exchange for a certain number of human lives a year, the Fliers give out technology. The difference engine, the X-ray, pneumatic limbs, dirigibles, cure of cancers, wireless lighting, machine guns, have all been exchanges. But Budge says that these items are designed to make great wars possible. He says weapons far worse than these have been given to the great powers, and that Nyarlathotep is playing a game. Each of the four great powers has been given a different sort of weapon harsh enough to end life as we know it. He thinks the British have a terrible bomb, the French have some airborne plague, and the Russians have the ability to summon horrible creatures from the past. He does not know what the Germans have, although he suspects it could be a fairy tale sort of horror—an army of trolls or werewolves. Nyarlemheb, another of the god’s names, means “Churning Darkness Is in Jubilation.” The creature lives off of chaos and misery. His servants have less abstract needs. They need metals from Earth, and He won’t stir up the final battle until their needs are met. Each of the great powers knows this, yet each believes that their own weapon will cause them to win the final battle. Budge says the god’s needs are not the simple bloody sacrifices, but the pent-up desires, fears, and hatreds. He points to the killing of the Sioux by Custer’s airborne and the germ-driven Herero and Namaqua genocide of the early 1890s as trial runs. He says similar but unreported incidents have happened in the Khirgiz region of central Asia. He hopes that the truth will filter out into the world. He warns against occult groups that claim to be in contact with hidden masters such as Blavatsky’s mahatmas or the Vril Society. These groups are actually putting in place the equivalent of feeding stations to tap into the coming despair of all humanity.
He says that the huge investments the great powers made in Egyptology after the Napoleonic wars was a scramble to find devices that could be used to contact the floating cities. The fungal fliers are nearly finished mining the earth, and they intend to pass it off to their Master. Budge thinks perhaps a few men in each country could avert the madness of mutually assured destruction. I have my doubts. Part of me wishes simply to run and spend my last years in a grass shack in Hawaii with a simple brown maiden who speaks no English, but part of me wishes to be in the fight. You must make your own decision as to fleeing or fighting. I leave it to you to seek after the special glasses aboard the dirigible you work in. Go see. Decide. Tell others or hide away. Knowing what I know, I have been unable to avoid the temptation of telling you, and I know that I have given you a burden that you did not deserve. Had I not looked upon the floating city, I would not have believed it. Ironically, this cancer of my psyche feeds the very entity I wish to fight.
Written in love and fear,
John
This could not be so. All the things John had written about were signs of progress. They were real discoveries of human ingenuity. Everyone knew that the golden age of man was about to begin. John had been duped. Some paranoid man in Cairo had shared his fears. The lightning that struck the
Empress Victoria
was an unfortunate accident. He would forget all this. He would burn the letters.
But he couldn’t burn the letters. Every night as he brought rich desserts to richer humans in the
Balmoral
he heard how a new invention had turned up here, a new sort of engine there. The turn of the century was approaching, and everyone spoke of a New World Order or a New Age.
Then the dreams started. He dreamed of British dirigibles dropping bombs on Rome, Berlin, Moscow. He dreamed of Russian airships deploying a living light that mesmerized the enemy, who would simply and happily watch its rainbow flickers while dying of thirst and starvation. He dreamed of the French spreading a powder in the air that called up the Black Death in New York and San Francisco. He spoke less. He got fewer tips. His skin color grew pallid. He wrote his superiors in the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and asked them how they knew the aliens they sought to contact were benign.
His Praemonstrator in the Brotherhood wrote him back and suggested that he was developing male hysteria, and that he should seek a job on the ground. No doubt the rarefied air, plus the gravitational stress of flying in the opposite direction from the Earth’s rotation, was affecting him badly.
Ernest resolved to search the captain’s quarters. He began by exercising more and eating better. He told his superiors in the Brotherhood that his doubts had passed. He became charming. He started stealing desserts from the kitchen to give to the cleaning crew that took care of the captain’s quarters. Ernest found out that the captain did have a small safe in his room. He never opened it. The captain had even told his orderly that the safe contained “papers” that could only be inspected by a vice president of the company.
Ernest began to suggest that the small safe contained gold or diamonds or something else small and very valuable. Surely it would be easy enough to open it when the captain was not around—perhaps the day before they were due to dock in Paris. There were
places
to sell things in Paris. The theft could happen and the captain would never know. He didn’t open the small safe anyway. At first the orderly disbelieved. Why should there be something very valuable that the captain had no access to? But Ernest asked the opposing question—why so much security for “papers”? Surely the item was something the captain could use in an emergency to buy the ship’s freedom. It was a big and bold lie, but Ernest had read adventure novels all his life. He raised the threat of the Yellow Peril—what would happen if they crashed in China? How could safety be bought for the rich men and women on board from a Chinese warlord? This could be believed. The orderly knew no money would be spared to save him, but vast money would be moved to save the rich from inscrutable Oriental torture.
Ernest came up with a perfect plan. The orderly would simply act as guard one night when the captain was away. Ernest would open the safe by removing it from the wall with a saw. He would open the back of the safe with a diamond drill borrowed from the machine shop. He would take the valuables out and then replace the safe. Unless the captain inspected the safe closely, it would go undetected for weeks. They could sell the diamonds or rubies or platinum to a French fence and be on their way to the good life before anyone was the wiser.
The night came. The captain had taken an interest in a beautiful blonde American and was visiting her in her quarters. The orderly kept watch. The tiny hand-held saw, made from one of the new metals discovered last year, cut through the aluminum wall that held the safe like a hot knife through butter. Ernest MacVeigh lifted the safe out and applied the drill to the back. It seemed to take forever; each moment he was expecting the captain to show up. Who knows? Maybe the captain would be intrigued enough by the tale at least to find out what was in the safe. How could he live with such a grueling mystery? In the objective world it took less than twenty minutes to make a hole large enough to draw the goggles from the safe. My God, John was right. Ernest put the safe back into the wall. Only the smallest of cracks showed that the safe was no longer a permanent fixture. He slipped the goggles into his pocket and began the second half of his scheme. He walked out of the captain’s quarters and told the orderly that the safe had been empty. The orderly immediately suspected that Ernest was cheating him. Ernest challenged him to search him. The orderly did so. He found the goggles in Ernest’s pants pocket, but goggles are clearly not an item of life-changing value. Ernest repocketed them. The orderly began cursing and pummeling Ernest. As expected, the noise attracted other workers. The crazed orderly was quickly subdued. He couldn’t very well say that he had been part of a plot to steal from the captain. In less than twelve hours the orderly was fired and left in Paris.
Ernest wore the goggles every chance he could. For months he saw nothing. Perhaps John had been crazy; perhaps reading about John’s madness had merely infected his brain. Hysteria could be catching, according to alienists. Then one moonlit night as the
Balmoral
sailed over New York, he saw a floating city. Ernest watched through the thick quartz of an observation porthole in the lower decks. John had wisely not tried to describe the floating madness. The city bristled with waving spires of living metal in a thousand colors of gray and a dozen colors that Ernest could not name. Parts of the fliers, themselves a horrible mixture of lobster, beetle, and slimy fungus, were welded into some of the walls. The city had angular mouths with triple rows of obsidian teeth that bit at the fliers. It had exposed wiring and gears and vents that released steam, and mechanical eyes and organic eyes. It had gutters running with pulsing green fluid that bore tiny red flowers. It had living, slow-moving statues of creatures untouched by the sane symmetries of Earth. It had glaring searchlights that flashed unknown messages to the cosmos. Human parts had been welded into the living walls as well, and Ernest knew this had something to do with the myth of the twelve men and women sacrificed to the minotaur in his labyrinth—and he knew if he understood exactly he would go painfully mad. The shape of the city was a Symbol, a Hieroglyph. It would make any true sentient creature have certain thoughts, and Ernest realized that the divided brain of humans, the brain of yes and no, was NOT a brain of a truly sentient creature. Ada Lovelace’s difference engine was a sort of joke on humans—a bad binary brain to simulate bad binary consciousness. The human brain with its Evil/Good, Love/Hate, Right/Left was bad mock-up of the real brains of the crustacean Outer Ones: it was a useful device for making fear and anxiety—and his last clear thought before he tore the goggles from his face was that if humans ever became thinking creatures and correlated the contents of their mind, the pains of hell would not be myth.
Ernest fell against the observation porthole. John must have managed because he was smarter. He had always been the stronger one. Mother’s favorite. Simple truths like the latter can keep intact minds that look upon things not meant for humans. They found him in the hallway as the
Balmoral
floated above the stockyards of Chicago. Ernest kept saying, “It’s all stockyards. Everything is stockyards.” They put him off the ship, and the kindly officials of the city of big shoulders put him in an asylum.
For the first years he could not talk. He kept a pair of unusual goggles with him all the time; finally an official from the British Dirigible Company came and retrieved the glasses. When 1900 came and the great war had not come, Ernest began talking about hysteria and anxiety and the shape of human brains. When the Russians put a man on the moon in 1901, he predicted the end of the world—but everyone was making that prediction. By 1903 so many people had a paralyzing madness because of the rate of change of life and warfare capacities that Ernest wasn’t considered special enough to be kept in an asylum. There were now seven great powers instead of four—China, Turkey, and America had joined the club with the power to end organic life on this planet. Each of them had their own terror weapon. There were skirmishes. French germ warfare versus Chinese mechanical men in Vietnam. German trolls overran Greenland and renamed it Mhu Thulan.
He took up his old job of being a waiter at a rundown cafe near Hull House. He visited mom in Kansas and his uncles in Texas. He got used to the killing summer and the sharp winds off Lake Michigan in winter. He tried to write down some of the revelations that crowded his brain when he had looked upon the floating city of the fungal fliers—and with an irony he was sane enough to appreciate, he crafted them into pulp stories. He could spot, here and there, others who knew. It didn’t matter; these fragments of truth made for more fear as well. Everything he could do served the Churning Darkness, everything anyone could do served this Force. Millions of years of breeding made the fake brains that humans have; he couldn’t change that. Laws of society and the rules of civilization laid down in the dark dynasties of shadowy Khem made humans the cattle of the gods.
In his last year, 1913, when the British placed a military base on Venus, Ernest took to spending all his free moments in the stockyards. He would talk freely to his fellow cattle. He sang to them often—especially William Blake’s hymn “Jerusalem.” He thought for a long time that the fliers would kill him, but he had not been a threat like John. The world was far too rotten with nervousness and hysteria to note yet another fool blaming it on the powers of air and darkness. Just another cow walking up the chute to the slaughter . . .