The Weird of Hali, page 14
“If you know the intellectual history of the ancient world, you can trace the way those ideas spread over the centuries after that. Eventually, the movement became large enough to attract certain allies from elsewhere, and lay plans that came to fruition a little more than two thousand years ago. You’ve heard of Alexander the Great, but you don’t know the real motive behind his wars of conquest, or why he took a cadre of philosophers with him all the way across south Asia—that’s all been suppressed. The point of the whole exercise was to seize control of certain very ancient holy places, far older than humanity, centers of the voorish currents within the Earth, so certain things—terrible things—could be done there at the right moments.”
“When the stars were right?” Owen guessed.
Nyarlathotep shook his head sharply. “When the stars were very, very wrong. The desecration of the holy places changed the voor of the Earth in certain ways, weakened the powers of magic and the Great Old Ones, and gave to the initiates who did the deed—to them, and to their heirs—powers that the sages and sorcerers of the elder races couldn’t match, and the Great Old Ones themselves couldn’t overturn, not until the cycles of the stars ran their course. All so they could pursue their dream of a perfectly rational world, freed from the natural order, without any interference they couldn’t brush aside for the window of time they’d bought by their acts of desecration.
“And that’s what they did, with results anyone else could have predicted. Civilizations crashed into ruin, wars over pointless abstractions swept the face of the world, whole countries were reduced to lifeless deserts, and yet they never learned the lesson of those disasters. The only possibility they were willing to consider was that they hadn’t gone far enough, hadn’t done enough to force the world to obey them and their idea of reason.
“Of course one of the things that wouldn’t obey them was the rest of humanity. They tried any number of gambits to people to follow their kind of order instead of the crawling chaos, the living order of nature. They decided that they needed to stop human beings from perceiving voor and experiencing the natural order directly, and so they tried to breed that sense out of humanity—that’s why, for so many years, people who showed any talent for sensing voor got walled up in monasteries or nunneries, where they couldn’t have children and pass on their genes. When that didn’t do the trick, they tried to exterminate the genes in question by way of the witch burnings, and more recently by insisting that perceiving voor is evidence of mental illness, so they could drug into oblivion anyone who admits to experiencing it.”
“You make it sound as though the ability to sense voor is—” Owen fumbled for a word. “Biological.”
“It is, in part. How much do you know about the pineal gland?”
“Almost nothing.”
“It has much the same structure as one of your eyes, but it’s not adapted to light.” Owen gave him a questioning look, and he went on. “It sees voor. In the elder races, and in humans in past ages, it was well developed. In most humans now, much less so. There are exercises that can restore it to its proper function, and we teach those. Simply being in the presence of one of the Great Old Ones will do the trick over time, too, but we’ve got another strategy as well.”
“Interbreeding?” Owen guessed, thinking of Laura.
“Exactly. Three of the six elder races are related to humans closely enough to be interfertile, and the crossbreeds have much more pineal function than most humans do these days. Then there are the children of the Great Old Ones—we can take on the necessary biochemistry when that’s useful, and mate with humans, and the children have the voor-sense to a degree that even the other elder races don’t. Laura Marsh is a good example; she’ll almost certainly become the next Grand Priestess of the Esoteric Order of Dagon here in Innsmouth. She’s got a great deal of work ahead of her, but she’s got the potential.”
“But the other side,” said Owen. “What are they? An order, or—”
“Yes, though, they work through a constantly shifting network of front groups—these days, most of them in universities, big corporations, and government bureaucracies. The group at Miskatonic University, the one you brushed against, is a typical front. Its members call it the Inner Circle; they’ve got one adept, initiates of various levels, and a negation team—those are their paramilitary units, like the one that tried to stop us on the road here. The there are a great many others who think they’re part of the Inner Circle and are simply its dupes.”
“The Inner Circle,” Owen said. “But the order itself has a different name?”
“The Radiance,” said Nyarlathotep.
Owen took that in.
“That’s the most recent name,” the Old One went on. “They’ve had many others. The original name was Dumu-ne Zalaga—that’s Sumerian; it would be ‘Children of Light’ in English. All their names are along those lines, because that’s the cold heart of their ideology: they’re the enlightened ones, the guardians of the radiance of reason, and everyone else—the Old Ones, the elder races, other humans, anyone who disagrees with them or their plans for whatever reason—wallows in darkness.”
“So—” Owen began, and stopped. “The Illuminati,” he ventured.
“That was one of their names, yes.”
He considered the Old One for a long moment. “And they’re still chasing this failed dream of theirs, after three thousand years.”
“But they don’t think it’s failed,” Nyarlathotep said at once. “That’s exactly it. The vision of a world made perfectly ordered, perfectly rational, perfectly obedient to the human will—to their will—it hovers in front of them like a mirage, always just one more step further than they’ve gone yet. They think of the grandeur of the conception, all the hopes that have gathered around it, all the sacrifices that have been made for it: how could they turn back?
“But all the while, without their ever quite noticing it, they’ve changed—or their goals have, which amounts to the same thing. At first they wanted to understand nature—provided, of course, that nature let them understand it in the terms they wanted. When that didn’t work out, the dream of understanding nature shifted slowly into the craving to dominate nature, to bully her and turn her into humanity’s obedient slave. And when that failed, as of course it had to, the craving to dominate turned into a rage to punish, to poison, to ruin. So first they insisted that Man was the measure of all things, until they found out that all things weren’t sized to fit a human measure; then they proclaimed Man the lord of creation, until they couldn’t ignore the fact that creation wasn’t interested in the least in acknowledging humanity’s supposed lordship; and then—about five centuries ago, now—the rhetoric shifted to Man the conqueror of nature. You don’t conquer something unless it’s your enemy, and if you can’t conquer it, sooner or later you decide to destroy it instead. That’s where they are now.”
Owen gave him a long dismayed look, and then turned away. Something on the beach in front of him, right at the upper reach of the waves, caught a glint of the sun. After a moment, he recognized it. He got up, walked down to the water, picked it up: a piece of plastic made to hold a six-pack.
He turned back to Nyarlathotep, holding the thing up. “What you’re telling me,” he said in an unsteady voice, “is that this sort of thing is—intentional. All the pollution, the destruction, the species dying out, the rest of it, was planned.” With a short harsh laugh: “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”
“Essentially, yes.”
Owen stared at him for a moment, then shook sea water off the tangled plastic, crumpled it savagely and stuffed it into a pocket. “Can they actually do it? Kill the Earth?”
“They think they can.”
“And all the talk about colonizing space—”
Nyarlathotep shook his head, dismissing the idea. “They know better than that. Human beings can’t live in space any more than fish can dance on mountaintops. The radiation, the long-term effects of weightlessness, a whole flurry of other things—a few years, maybe a decade at most, and a human body in space simply shuts down. There are intelligent beings who live in space, but their biochemistry isn’t anything like yours.”
He leaned forward, abruptly serious. “No, the point of the talk about space colonies is to encourage people to look forward to the thought of living in a lifeless, artificial environment, supported by machines rather than the cycles of nature. It’s the same reason they’ve been pushing all those government regulations to keep parents from letting their children play outside. As the Earth’s surface becomes uninhabitable, they plan to retreat to shelters deep underground, where they think they can finally achieve their utopia of perfect reason.”
“There’s no way they could get seven billion people underground.”
“Of course not.”
Owen turned away abruptly. He could too easily imagine, could not stop himself from imagining, a dead sea streaked with oil forever throwing scraps of plastic onto a dead shore, a dead land covered with ruins and bones reaching into the barren distance under a dead and poisoned sky.
“Fortunately,” Nyarlathotep said behind him, “they aren’t unopposed.”
The Old One’s voice had changed somehow. Owen turned back to face him. The lean figure in black was still sitting on the driftwood log, but something seemed to hover in the air above him, towering up past the old ruined buildings of the Innsmouth waterfront, past the billowing clouds, past the sky itself. Owen sensed, or seemed to sense, a presence that enfolded the solar system, a mind and will that spanned space, memories that swept back without a break to the sun’s first kindling. An instant later, all of it had vanished, and he was looking at a tall lean man in a black coat who considered him with a wry smile.
Owen, shaken, tried to find words for the questions he wanted to ask. “The Great Old Ones,” he said finally. “How many are there?”
“In the cosmos as a whole, unimaginably many. Here on Earth? A few hundred. There was—a choice, of sorts, when things went the way they did, when the holy places were desecrated and the Radiance began to clutch this world in its fist. To stand apart from the Earth or stand with it, to remain free from its burdens or to accept a certain mode of embodiment here, along with the limits embodiment brings with it. Some few of us, mostly those who’d been here for a long time already, chose the latter—until the stars are right.”
“But if you’ve been here more than three thousand years,” said Owen slowly, “people must have known—oh. Of course.”
Nyarlathotep leaned back, smiled, said nothing.
“Of course,” Owen repeated. “You’re—you’re Anubis, aren’t you? You’re Hermes the soul-shepherd, the Black Man of the witches, the crossroads devil the old bluesmen used to sing about. You’re the dark messenger who shows up all through the world’s mythologies. And—” He was staring now. “And Shub-Ne’hurrath is Astarte, Danu, the Magna Mater. The King in Yellow, Cthulhu—you’re the old gods and goddesses of nature.”
“That’s correct,” said Nyarlathotep.
Owen stood there staring for another long moment, and then went over to the driftwood log and sat down next to the Old One, shaking his head.
The waves hissed and foamed on the beach before them. “Laura was right,” Nyarlathotep said after a time.
Owen glanced at him, startled.
“She told me you were taking all this remarkably well.”
After a moment, Owen started to laugh. “I think I’ve just used up my lifetime supply of oh my God,” he said. “I’ve slept in a heap of leaves by the white stone of Arkham while men who were looking for me went right on by. I’ve walked on a path made of moonlight. I’ve watched you have conversations with ravens and bats, make a live bird out of marsh plants, and call dogs out of nowhere—not just any dogs, either, the spookiest animals I’ve ever seen. I’ve stayed for a week now with a delightful young woman who has tentacles in place of legs. I’ve had someone use a machine to put nasty thoughts into my mind, and the only things that keep those at bay are a spell cast by that young woman and an amulet I got from a witch. And now it turns out that I’m hanging out with the Devil or with Hermanubis, take your pick, and most of what I thought I knew about human history is a lie cooked up by psychopaths.”
“Do you doubt that?” asked Nyarlathotep.
“No. That’s just it. Those things actually happened to me—and the fact that they happened at all means that I’ve been fed a lifetime of lies.” He drew in a long deep breath of the sea air. “I’m surprised you haven’t tried to go public with all of this.”
“It’s been tried,” said the Old One. “You’ve heard of the poet Justin Geoffrey, I imagine.”
“Of course.”
“He wrote quite a bit about all this in The People of the Monolith and some of his other poems, and was drafting a prose book on the subject. The Radiance did what it usually does in cases like that—they got a doctor to certify him insane, threw him into an out-of-the-way asylum they controlled, and had one of the staff give him a fatal overdose before we could find him and rescue him. When you read that this or that student of ancient lore died in a madhouse, that’s usually what happened.”
Owen took that in. “So what—” He stopped, then went on slowly: “What should I do?”
“That’s a question I can’t answer,” said Nyarlathotep. “I told you early on that sooner or later you’d have to choose sides, and you’ve made that choice. There’s another choice ahead of you, though. Of the people who know what’s actually going on, there are those who help in various ways but stay out of the fighting, and then there are those who take part in the struggle. You could do either—and you’ll have to decide before much more time passes.”
BEHIND OWEN, THE door clicked shut, leaving him to the solitude of the little hotel room. He walked over to the chair, slumped into it, sat there looking at nothing for a long moment. In the dimly lit stillness around him, images of things Nyarlathotep had mentioned in their talk on the beach—the Great Old Ones, the elder races, the Radiance—seemed to hover, watching him.
The Old One had dropped him off at the hotel and left at once on some errand he hadn’t explained. Laura was gone as well—up at the Esoteric Order of Dagon lodge hall, or so Mrs. Eliot had explained—and so he ate dinner with the housekeeper, asked her questions about Innsmouth that he hoped were harmless, tried to make sense of the answers. Once dinner was over, the housekeeper returned to her chores and Owen found his way to his room. Questions that were far from harmless tumbled over each other in his thoughts.
Too many of them revolved around what would become of him now that that door back to Arkham and the life he’d been leading was closed for good, but there was more to his discomfort than that, more than he could name just then. Above all, though, was the question Nyarlathotep had raised there at the end. Was it his job, would it become his job, to join the struggle against the Radiance—and what might that demand of him?
The gap between his past and whatever future might be waiting for him was difficult enough to deal with all by itself. Day after day, he’d caught himself over and over again, thinking that this thing would make a good addition to his thesis or that thing ought to be discussed with Miriam Akeley, and then stopped short and had to remind himself that his thesis, his assistantship and everything that went with it had gone tumbling off into the past once and for all. The pursuer who’d chased him across campus, the shoeprints circling the white stone in the ravine, the men with guns who’d come piling out of the SUVs on the Ipswich road: even if all the rest was nightmare and illusion, those remained, cold warnings of just how real the threat was that blocked the way back to his former life. What life might be available to him now that he’d passed through that barrier wasn’t a question he knew how to answer just then.
He rubbed his eyes and raised his head from his hands, and only then noticed the book on the desk in front of him: a thin volume in a blank green library binding.
He opened it to the title page, and found:
A PRINCESS OF Y’HA-NTHLEI
by Laura Marsh
Owen considered the book for a long moment before turning the page. Laura must have left it there for him to read, he guessed, but how to make sense of that action was as much a mystery to him as any of Innsmouth’s other riddles. Finally, he turned on the desk lamp, sat back in the chair, and turned to the first page of the tale.
Most of the page was an ink drawing of a barefoot, curly-haired child in summer clothes standing on a beach, looking out toward the broad sweep of the sea and the billowing clouds above it. Below the drawing was typed:
Once upon a time there was a little girl named Melanie who lived in a town by the seashore. Her mother was one of the undersea people, and her father was one of the shore people. She lived with her father, but she knew that someday she would visit Y’ha-nthlei, the city of the undersea people far away beneath the waves.
He turned the page and let himself be drawn into Melanie’s adventures, as she learned the ways of the sea on her journey underwater to Y’ha-nthlei. It wasn’t a work of great literature by any measure, just an engaging story for children past the beginning-reader stage, pleasantly told and illustrated with lively drawings. The prose had a storyteller’s rhythm, and he found he could easily imagine a younger Laura Marsh recounting Melanie’s adventures to a rapt circle of schoolchildren like the ones he’d seen at the Innsmouth library. Did some of the children have tentacles? It seemed likely enough; certainly most of them had parents or relatives among the Deep Ones, or so Laura had said.
