Chapter Text
Charlie turfed himself off the boat in Luxor, bag in hand, sweating through his shirt, his hat, his trousers, and somehow even his shoes.
Christ, he thought, what a country. He was this close to becoming God’s own hypocrite and wishing for a Massachusetts winter.
But sincerely this time: what a country. Egypt wore its skeleton proudly, and anyone with eyes would agree that its skeleton was impressive. On the brief stop in Cairo, Charlie’d been able to see distant pyramids from the otherwise modern city streets. Here in Luxor they put even more of a middle finger up to modernity. Buildings of stone and tile and coloured paint jutted up like a guy lifting his chin, literally and figuratively a thousand miles away from the fussy wooden buildings of Arkham. The crumbling walls and pillars of an ancient temple were, Charlie guessed, probably older than his entire family line, and here they sat in spitting distance as if that was no big deal. Hawkers shouted people down, workers and visitors ran around like geese, and skinny palm trees challenged obelisks to reach to the sky. He liked it.
He wasn’t here to like it.
Among the people on the dock was an Egyptian boy holding a sign that read: NATHANIEL SCHWARTZ. Charlie walked towards it. As soon as he’d stepped off the Nile steamer, it was into the role of Nathaniel Schwartz. The real Nathaniel was, unless this was Charlie’s unlucky day, still in Arkham; dealing with him had been Roland’s job.
The boy said: “Mr. Schwartz?” and then, when Charlie nodded: “I take you to Mr. Flanagan.” His English was pretty good, which was lucky, because Charlie’s Arabic sure wasn’t.
Charlie gave the kid a winning smile. God, this was such a fucking one-in-a-million long shot. Fate of the world nothing, he had no idea how he’d let Roland talk him into this. “Well, what are we waiting for,” he said, perfectly at ease, and let the kid lead the way.
He didn’t stop grinning the whole walk. Jesus, he didn’t even speak the language. He had a phrasebook and enough vocabulary to carry a conversation with a local three-year-old if somebody happened to put one in front of him. That’d surely convince a bunch of cultist archaeologists that he was who he was pretending to be.
The kid led him through the gasping heat to a white-faced hotel. It was flat, square, and punctuated by small wooden balconies with teardrop lattices. The heat wanted to follow them inside, but only about half of it got through the door.
It was a series of impressions, he’d later realise, that he moved through like they were a carnival ride. The heat, the kid, the architecture, the stress. Most of the time he wasn’t sure that he actually did any steering. But that was later. In the moment, it all seemed to hang together pretty well.
Introductions whirlwinded by. The boy was gone and Charlie was sitting in the hotel lounge with the slightly-too-bright-eyed Irvin Flanagan, and his patron Lord Avery, and the photographer, and a silent man named Masud who was assisting with the dig in some unspecific way. Unobtrusively, all wore the same symbol — on a tie pin, on a string of something like prayer beads, as a subtle tattoo.
There was something about cults, Charlie thought, that gave otherwise-canny people an irresistible desire to cheekily advertise themselves. Back in Arkham, where cults sprung up like dandelions, a regular case of ghouls or ghosts had more than once turned into a cult case, simply because a suspect involved had the cult’s merchandise all over his person or home.
Charlie’s symbol was on a bland, ill-fitting signet ring. It was the quietest piece of jewellery to ever make him feel like he was shouting.
The drinks were good. The atmosphere seemed relaxed. Charlie didn’t trust it, but kept that quiet: he was good at seeming as well.
“Never caught what happened to the last guy,” he said casually. “Only that you had an urgent call out for whoever could pack their bag fast enough. What, he get kicked by a camel?”
Lord Avery looked amused. Masud was watching Charlie like a probation officer, and it was making him sweat worse than the heat did. The photographer chewed his lip in a way that was interestingly nervous. But Flanagan, the man of the moment, leaned forward, smiling like he was glad Charlie had asked.
“Sir! Please. I know you suspect it was a little more than that.”
The bluntness threw him, but he rallied and shrugged like a man whose continued life wasn’t on the line. “Nah. I ain’t about to speculate, sir. Seems like that’d be pretty rude after you invited me over here and all.”
Flanagan seemed to accept that response, but the catlike smile kept hovering on his lips. “He isn’t dead, Mr. Schwartz, if that’s what you’d like to know.”
“No?”
“He had an unfortunate — and preventable — accident.”
Charlie held Flanagan’s gaze, blinked once, and tried to figure out how direct of a threat that was supposed to be. It didn’t sound like Flanagan knew he was a liar. It sounded more like he was supposed to be generally put in his place. Not an expedition that welcomed questions, got it. He could make it look like he respected that.
“Alright,” Charlie said.
He let his eyebrows move to appear a little intimidated, giving Flanagan what he seemed to be looking for. It was easy to do, what with him being a little intimidated.
He didn’t push for more. Pushing for information was currency, and he had little to spend and a lot to spend it on. He had to intercept this artefact, this stone; that meant knowing where it was, and where it was going, and who he had to bribe or blackmail to change that. The specific fate of the guy who had this position before him wasn’t irrelevant, but it wasn’t at the top of his priorities either.
Nathaniel Schwartz, esotericist and student of hieroglyphics, with a cultist’s robe in his closet and a ticket to Egypt in his wallet, was not the perfect disguise. But it was the disguise that had been available to him. And so, straight away, he’d entered a period of his life that felt like falling down the stairs while running as fast as he could to keep up with the fall.
Picture the scene: it was weeks ago, before Charlie took a train to New York harbour and a boat across the ocean. He’d put on a coat with deep pockets, and he’d visited the Miskatonic University library, in the full and deliberate knowledge that it was not a lending library. By now they must’ve missed the translation of Grammaire Egyptienne that had somehow slipped and fallen into his possession. Roland, proud upholder of the law that he was, had impressed the fact on him that there were bigger things at stake than petty larceny.
The lying had been easy, but Charlie’d imagined eyes on his back the whole way out. The last time he’d thieved, he was a boy pocketing a few cigarettes out of the pack he was sent to buy for any one of a succession of fathers. How times change.
It was already out of his head.
Afterwards, he’d caught a grubby tramp steamer that had meandered, in no particular hurry, across the considerable breadth of the Atlantic Ocean. The berth where Charlie lived on board was cramped and had no privacy; it reminded him of sailing to France in 1917, only without the shared sense of misplaced excitement.
He’d spent the weeks-long journey chewing a succession of pencils down to nubs, staring at pictures of cows and wheat and whips, trying to memorise enough of it that he could put on a good show if he ever had to read the goddamn things. The second steamer he’d caught to bear him up the Nile was smaller, and nicer, and had a lot more to do in the evenings, but Charlie still bent over that book every day like a student before his final exam.
Like that student, he didn’t much like his chances of passing. He was hilariously unready, and if someone looked closely at his papers or realised he couldn’t actually translate, they’d probably kill him horribly. But, c’est la fucking vie! It wasn’t life without risk, as Roland liked to say.
Easy for him to say, Charlie thought.
“Well, ain’t this nice,” he said brightly, while the four men stared at him like a sweaty firing squad. Jeez, with friends like these, Schwartz sure didn’t need enemies. “When are we headed out?”
“That depends,” said Flanagan. He settled back on his cushioned chair. “When will your partner be joining us?”
Charlie said: “Huh?”
“Your partner,” said Flanagan, smoothly. Charlie spent a moment hiding his panic, wondering if Schwartz had an accomplice who was supposed to be here. Was Charlie about to get fingered as an impostor before he even made it to the dig site? There hadn’t been any indication of a—
“Mr. Cummings,” said Flanagan. “I’m very interested to meet him.”
Charlie nearly said huh? again, and then nearly said Roland?, and then stopped himself from saying oh fuck by the skin of his teeth.
How? How the hell did this guy know that name? More to the point, why would he know that name and still meet Charlie for drinks and a chat instead of shooting him in the street? Well. There were lots of reasons, and Charlie suddenly wished, badly, that he hadn’t accepted a drink. There was always something in the fucking drink.
“Don’t think I know a Mr. Cummings,” he said, falsifying innocent confusion. He’d gotten extremely aware of the hotel lounge’s exits. “Even if I did, you fellas laid down the law in your telegrams. No-one hears about this, no-one follows.”
The four men’s eyes bored into him.
Flanagan smiled, then glanced down and sipped his drink. Charlie recognised the sort of apologetic smile that he himself might give someone when he wasn't really sorry. His stomach wobbled nervously and he almost gave in to the urge to get up and bolt, as if one man not looking directly at him gave him that opening, as if the cultists wouldn’t be armed, as if there wouldn’t be guards somewhere.
Okay, buddy, he thought. Be cool. If they knew he was screwing them, there’d already be guns on him where he sat, and he was as good as dead already. Getting excited wouldn’t change that, one way or the other.
But on the slim, slim, slim chance that they only had an inkling of the truth, and were testing him—
Slim chances hadn’t killed him yet. He looked from one man to another cluelessly, as if he’d never heard the name Roland Cummings in his life, endeavouring to suggest that they were the ones who had to explain themselves.
Flanagan sighed, sounding disappointed.
“My mistake,” he murmured. “I must have been thinking of somebody else. Well, then. Shall we?”
He absently waved a hand. Time leapt forward, abrupt and sickening, as if he’d flipped forward through a book whose story they already knew. Charlie’s mind lurched, then landed, then wondered why it felt like it had fallen.
They were on the road to the Valley of the Kings.
Flanagan and his money man Avery rode in the motor-car, newspapers flapping nonstop in front of their faces. For everyone less important, the journey was a long and dusty donkey ride. There was just enough time for Charlie to blink and get his bearings again, feeling that he’d somehow lost them. He needed to stay on-task. He needed to keep making in-roads — maybe, hopefully — with the local labourers, their little clumsy English finding middle ground with his little clumsy Arabic. They rode behind the motor-car in sparse clusters, dressed for the heat in loose white robes, each man's skin almost perfectly black from the sun. Charlie himself was working on more of a boiled lobster look.
Then the moments tripped forward again, searching impatiently. Now they were at the tomb, an unassuming hole in the bleached desert rocks. Now they were inside, breathing air that was freezing and thick, following brand new trails through ancient dust. Charlie was awed by the intricate paintings that surrounded them, feeling as if he’d walked right into the pages of the Grammaire Egyptienne, but that moment rushed by like the others and was gone. Now a team of workers had rigged the interior with electricity, hammering lights and long thick wires into the ancient carven walls. Now the lights were buzzing, illuminating passageways that might not have been seen since the time of Moses.
Now they were even further in, and even further down, and Charlie stood with Lord Avery in a small chamber beyond the main bustle of activity. He held a flickering torch. The electricity wasn’t strung this far inside, yet.
“...to show you,” Lord Avery was in the middle of saying. Charlie nodded and tried to keep up. He felt dizzy, like the chamber didn’t have enough air. He couldn't afford to keep losing his footing like this.
They were alone. Flanagan was with the photographer and several mundane treasures outside. The guards, he knew, would be outside too, watching for trouble from the shade. The sharp noises of the labourers’ picks echoed in the passage outside. He had, he realised, been handed an opportunity.
Avery’s money, moving about in huge and mysterious sums, was one of the clues that had ultimately led Charlie here. What he needed to know was hidden somewhere in this wealthy bastard’s head. The question was how to get it out.
“Something new got dug up?” he guessed.
Avery smiled as if sharing a joke with himself. “Almost entirely the opposite, actually. Mr. Schwartz, tell me what you make of this.”
He raised an arm, waved it at the torch-lit wall in a slow half-circle. It was a wall of posing, stylised figures and ancient writing, once brightly painted, now faded with time.
He could handle that. The previous hieroglyphist — the one who actually was a hieroglyphist — had done most of the heavy lifting as regarded translations. And there were fewer traps and riddles in the tomb than adventure magazines might have led him to expect. Supplemented with a little fast talk and imagination, Charlie's homework on the boat had held up so far.
“Lemme take a look,” he said thoughtfully, and he strolled forward, buying time.
On the wall, a naked, swan-necked figure raised its hands to the sky. Around it were other figures: smaller, as if seen from further away, but posed identically in worship or ecstasy. Thoth, with the body of a man and the head of an ibis, stood taller than any of them; he was pouring water from a very narrow vessel, or maybe squeezing a very long string of toothpaste from a tube. The orb at the top of the painting could’ve been the sun, or it could’ve been the exact occult stone they’d put so much work into stopping a cult from finding. Probably it was the first one of both of those.
Charlie moved on to the hieroglyphs themselves, which were daubed around the sun in blue and gold, and pretended to read them.
Ankh, bird with a hat, two suns rising between the hills. “Yeah,” said Charlie, feigning utter confidence, “so what you got here is a kinda prayer to Ra. It’s asking him to light the way into the afterlife for the poor bastard buried here.”
Twisted rope, jumping arm, trodden-on letter C, one sun rising between the hills.
“See, you got the priestesses here, sending up the benedictions to him. Like a hawk towards the rising sun.” Yeah, that sounded good. “Mighta been something said at the funeral, put down here as well to really preserve the power of it. Thoth is called out by name, here, to…”
Fuck, what did Thoth do again?
“…To pour water on the feather of Anubis, so that the deceased who lies here has a really good shot of not getting his heart snapped up before he can make it into the good bit of the afterlife.”
Avery was smiling pleasantly at him, hands clasped casually behind his back. He waited for Charlie to finish. Then he said:
“You’re… what’s the phrase… blagging it, aren’t you, Mr. Schwartz?”
Fuck, thought Charlie loudly.
"Sorry, Lord Avery?" he said, as if clueless.
"Oh, you know, old boy. Faking, lying, making it up. Flim-flamming."
He said it perfectly pleasantly, but Charlie felt himself steeling for an attack.
"Don't think I know what you—"
"Ten armed men are in the passage outside — yes, armed, unless you suppose that your flesh would repel a pick-axe." Avery watched Charlie's face with every sign of enjoyment. "All of them work for me. A hue and cry would bring twenty more, as well as the guards. The doors would be closed on you."
He shrugged with his hands. "And what a terrible accident it would be if, when rigging the electric lighting, a careless worker caused the wall to cave in while you were inside. It might take days and days to dig you out. Days and days in the dark, hungrier and thirstier all the time, with the air growing thin."
He'd been caught. He didn't know how, but he was fucked.
Charlie's eyes snapped to the doorway behind Avery, and then back to the man's smiling face. Could he make it to that door? Sure. Could he make it to the entrance of the tomb, and then back to Luxor on foot, by himself? Unlikely. Could he talk his way out of this?
Maybe.
"The last guy, your old hieroglyphist. He have an accident like that?"
"Oh yes. In a chamber very like this one."
A crime the whole dig team would've had to have been in on. Fuck, that didn't make Charlie's odds look good.
"What happened?" Charlie asked, buying time to think. The aristocrat oozed smugness, and Charlie got the impression of someone ready and willing to boast. The impression proved correct, but the time bought didn't make things better.
"It was three full days later," said Avery, relishing every word, "when we retrieved him. Three days and nights of picks striking on rock; I doubt the poor fellow could even escape into sleep for that entire time. Three days without food or water, light or company. Three days cowering under the painted eyes of the gods."
The sound of pickaxes hushed. Charlie looked at the doorway again, and saw that it was blocked by staring workers, all listening to Avery's story, all watching him. A strange kind of suppressed panic started to infect his muscles, the way it used to when an attack on the enemy trenches was imminent.
“Sadly,” said Avery, “by the time we reached him, he was quite insane. He attacked and tried to murder the first worker who broke through to his prison. Such a shame. I do hope that such a tragedy will not be repeated.”
Christ, Charlie hated him. Hated his cult, hated his project, hated the smug, coy way he delivered his threats.
“What do you want?” Charlie said bluntly.
For a moment, Avery wore a moue of annoyance, as if Charlie had flubbed his line. Then he smiled beatifically again. The crowd at the door had grown, blotting out the passageway beyond.
“Your partner,” he said, making sure Charlie knew he was lowering himself to cut to the chase. “Roland Cummings. Oh, don’t make that face: of course I know who he is. What you will tell me is what he has been up to while you've been worming your way into our graces over here."
They knew. The cult knew. Roland, Delphine, Sarah. No, he thought, as if his objection would make a single slip of a difference.
“I don’t know,” said Charlie, hollowly. It was mostly true. Not wholly. “We ain’t been in contact.”
“Please, Mr. Dowd. You two must have made plans.”
It was the first time he’d heard his own name in over a year, and it hit his ears like ice water. Trying his luck by dashing into the crowd of labourers seemed like a better and better idea. He shook his head.
“Nothing.” He’d say nothing that would lead them to Arkham. Nothing that would lead them to the family. They had a name, but that might be all they had. He hoped to God that was all they had. Saving Charlie’s own skin probably wasn’t an option, and it definitely wasn’t a priority, and those twin pieces of knowledge gave him his wind back. Fuck this guy. “I got no idea what he’s been up to. You think he let me in on the plans? Nah, I’m just the dogsbody.”
As if in anger, the ceiling of the chamber collapsed.
Charlie was driven down into the earth, panicked and confused. He struggled to draw breath as solid stone pressed on his face. Then he burst out of bed in a hot, curtained room, clawing the blankets away from his mouth. The blankets — a dream?
The door opened violently. Flanagan was there, holding a rifle: the same rifle he carried on the morning that he confronted Charlie about the stone not reaching its intended destination. He wore the same look of frightened rage that he had towards the end of that conversation, when suspicion had tipped over into realisation.
Charlie didn't wait to find out how the encounter would go a second time. He sprang out of bed, and he ran.
The rifle fired, so loud that it stopped the world for a moment, and the pillow exploded behind him. He raced out onto the balcony, bare feet burning up and eyes half-closed against the sun. He jumped, and as he hit the flat roof below, he rolled.
Another crack from the rifle. Plaster and brick flew up around him: close, too fucking close. Charlie jumped and hauled himself up to a second balcony, at an angle from his bedroom window; Flanagan would have to jump down and chase him if he wanted another clear shot.
He struggled inside. His feet left thin red marks on the floor: the explosion of brick had cut them. He ignored it for now. Something familiar had gripped him: not quite panic, and not quite calm, but a thing almost perfectly in between that knew how to survive.
Inside was — inside was —
Stone walls, freezing air, stern painted figures. The tomb. He was back in the tomb. The doorway back to the balcony was now a black portal, unlit and uninviting.
Another crack, and the stone figure burst, peppering his face with shrapnel — with stone — with —
He ran again.
Flanagan's voice shouted after him, incoherent and furious. The two men's heavy running footsteps echoed overwhelmingly. Charlie ducked around a corner and faced a staircase, and started to take it two steps at a time, hoping, praying that it would somehow lead him out to the desert.
The stairs rose endlessly. He had to stop before they did, bent over, hands braced on the steps in front, wheezing and coughing like he was twelve and just smoked his first cigarette. His legs felt paralysed. He made fists, hit his chest, forced himself to breathe and then to breathe slower. He wasn't going to fucking die here, not because he couldn't take a goddamn staircase.
But the faint whistle of air in his throat was the only thing he could hear now. Flanagan's shouts, at some point in Charlie's mad scramble to escape, had faded. Behind him was only darkness, and ahead was a pale fog that turned the steps into grey silhouettes. Did that mean he was getting close to the surface? The desert shouldn't be foggy, but then again this was a foreign land, and Charlie had a vague idea that some places had a wet season. He wouldn't have thought a desert could be cold, either, until his first night in Egypt.
He didn't know a lot about deserts, but he knew about distance, and he knew for a fact that he should have climbed as far as the surface by now.
Charlie stared into the fog, but it was stubborn and opaque. It might conceal anything. He hesitated, and looked back over his shoulder.
"Well, I ain't fucking going down," he muttered, and he climbed carefully forward.
It was a slow, blind climb. Now and then he put his hand on the chiselled wall to orient himself. Eventually, when he reached out, the wall was no longer there. He stared at the drifting fog inches from his face, and reached out, expecting to find a landing or a doorway; instead he found nothing but void on either side of him. With a lurch of vertigo, he snatched his hand back.
He had no idea where the hell he was now, or what the hell was going on. But there was no way to go except forward, and so forward was where he urged himself.
Machine-guns were scarier. Eternity was scarier. None of it had gotten him yet. What was the worst that could happen?
"Mr. Dowd?"
He startled, but years of experience kept the startle hidden inside him. What he'd heard was an urgent whisper. He stopped walking and listened. It had been deadened by the fog, but it was maybe a woman's voice, somewhere close by in the blank white cloud ahead. Who the hell could that be?
"Mr. Dowd! Charlie!"
"Hello?" His own voice sounded hardly any stronger than hers.
"Oh," said the woman's voice, and it cracked, overcome with relief. And he recognised it. Jesus Christ, he recognised it. "Thank God. Thank God, it is you."
Delphine.
Jesus, It was — either he was going mad, or this was Roland's wife. Roland’s dead wife. At once Charlie remembered: he’d made it back to Arkham from Egypt, he’d found the family gone, he’d heard the rumours. The fucked-up, impossible rumours. This was the dead woman who'd offered Charlie her roof and table, never mind that the times had made it sparse. He was struck dumb, remembering. How could he have not remembered that?
Delphine drew a heavy breath. It sounded as if she was fighting tears.
Charlie pushed himself forward a step, trying to make her out — was that a silhouette ahead, or just the eddying movements of the mist and his own imagination? Another step, and another, as he strained to see. Maybe it was in vain; maybe she was no longer something that could be seen with human eyes. A ghost, an echo, a projection. It seemed perfectly possible given everything he'd learned in the last few years.
He could hear her, at least. And whatever the fuck that meant, he held on to it.
"Mrs. Cummings," he said, trying to solidify the fact. "I can't get eyes on you. Where are you?"
Help me, he didn't say, though he wanted to. I'll help you, he didn't say, because he didn't know if that was still possible.
He climbed another step, careful of the void on either side, his eyes wide and fixed on the pale wall of mist. Were there things in the dark that could imitate a person? Maybe. He and Roland had seen a lot of strange things in a short amount of time since the War. But was that more likely than the idea that a murdered woman might come back as a ghost?
"I'm dead," she said, her voice low and sorrowful. A line of cold speared down Charlie's back. "But my spirit is trapped somewhere between the worlds, only able to speak to you through dreams."
Through dreams. That explained why he felt so upside-down and turned around. The explanation gave him a queasy feeling.
"I," said Charlie, and he found his throat was dry. He swallowed. Three more steps flew by under his nervous feet. "I been trying to find out what happened to you. To all three of you. Since I got back from abroad. I…"
He never saw her body. It had already been picked up by the police, the trail long cold. But the rumours. She didn't deserve what happened to her — if the universe gave a god damn what was deserved, or good, it wouldn't have happened to her.
"I'm sorry I wasn't there," he muttered. "I don't know. Maybe I coulda done something."
For several moments, there was silence. No reply, only deadening fog and the quiet impact of his own footsteps on sagging stone steps.
Then she said, in a sad whisper: "No. He would have killed you too."
"Who?"
"My husband. Roland."
Charlie nearly missed a step. No. No, no, no.
He would have known how to handle it if she'd said it was a cultist looking to silence them. Or if it was someone Roland had helped put away in the past, back seeking revenge. Even if it was a random burglary that escalated to gruesome murder. He would have been distraught, angry, guilty, wanted to find the guy who did it, but it would have been something that could fit into his worldview.
This? The idea that Roland murdered Delphine? It was like he'd turned his ankle on the stairs and fallen into the void.
"What?" he said, as if pretending he hadn't heard her would change the meaning of her words. Were there things in the dark that could imitate a person? Maybe, but was that more likely than the idea that he didn't know Roland nearly as well as he thought?
"He murdered Sarah, too," said the sad voice of Delphine Cummings. "My poor Sarah."
Charlie stopped climbing.
Roland was violent, sometimes. Unpredictable, sometimes. A cold-blooded murderer? Not of his whole family; not of his daughter. Not unless he had put untold hours of acting, of seemingly off-guard moments, into fooling Charlie as to how he felt towards them. This didn't just not fit Charlie's worldview: it was repelled by it. What the hell kind of boot to the neck would make Roland do that? What the fuck was going on?
"Why?" he asked urgently.
"I wish I knew," Delphine mourned. Her voice was still just ahead of him, exactly as far ahead of him as she had been when she first spoke. Drawing him forward and upward. "He didn't tell you anything? Anything about his plans?"
Deja vu, said a nasty little voice in Charlie's ear. He'd had other dreams before this. Dreams with different askers but the same question. Dreams that made him sleepwalk, that left him trying to find his way back from unfamiliar corners of the city.
Instinctively, he lied. He was no longer quite sure who was ahead of him in the fog.
"Nothing at all."
"Please," she said, so very broken and helpless. "I will suffer this half-death, passed but unable to pass on, until he meets justice. I know he told you things, things he kept from his family. Please."
Nothing ventured, Charlie thought, and he plunged abruptly forward, climbing fast and blind. Maybe he would catch her — whatever she was — before she could drift away again. Maybe he'd fall and wake up. Either was better than being led around by the fucking nose, night after night, like something had squirmed into him in Roland's office and wouldn't get out—
"Who are you?" he muttered, between sharp breaths of exertion. "Who the goddamn hell are you really?"
His foot went into thin air. He fell forward with a shout. Not into void — onto stone. It knocked the air out of his chest, and jarred his arms all the way from his elbows to his hands, but he scrambled to his feet and this time he shouted. "Who the goddamn hell are you?"
It was wheezed, a poor excuse for a shout, but it echoed. The fog was starting to thin. He rubbed his elbows nervously and stared around at what seemed to be a cleared space, cold and windy, flagged with stone. There was no figure, ghostly or otherwise, to be seen. His shoe dragged on the corner of something, and he realised that the stone flags were hewn with symbols. Curling lines and pictograms. Whatever they were, he could say as an educated expert that they sure weren't fucking hieroglyphs.
Charlie Dowd, said a deep, awful voice.
It resonated between his ears like a migraine and kicked his thoughts out from underneath him. It was carried on a chorus of whispers which touched and pulled at his nerves with their familiarity. It was coming from above him. He looked up.
And up.
And up.
The thing above him was tattered and monstrous. It descended slowly, as if it weighed nothing at all; the first of its long, coiling limbs already touched the ground, but its head was still a mile or more above. The air left Charlie's lungs in panicked spurts and his feet shuffled uselessly backwards. It had appeared suddenly, but now it was all he could see, and he could have run for an hour without ever leaving its shadow. Its fingers were longer than Charlie was tall. One of its hands could have closed entirely around him without effort. Charlie had the distinct sensation that something in his mind was sliding sideways and falling off a cliff.
Maybe everyone was right, he thought, awed and terrified. Maybe there was a God, and this was it.
The thing was a sick shade of yellow that bled out into the air around it, dancing like seaweed in a tide — or, no, rather the thing's pelt, or robe, or skin was torn and billowing. Dizzyingly high above was an impassive mask. Was it more birdlike, or more insectlike? Charlie found that he couldn't remember how either a bird or an insect looked. The thing in front of him filled and overflowed any capacity for knowing, pressed against the backs of his eyes, came back up his throat like golden bile.
You know what I want, the god intoned.
He didn't know. He had no idea of anything. He tried to speak and could only come up with disconnected words.
In answer to something — perhaps a word, perhaps a look on his face — the thing said: Yes. I am magnificent. He felt its proud approval as a manic high. He felt as if his mind was dust, and the thing had pursed its hidden lips and blown. He'd never heard its voice before today, he was certain of that — but it felt familiar, somewhere in the unevolved part of his brain that remembered when humans were nothing but rats hiding from predators.
I am the King in Yellow.
He'd most recently felt that fear when he caught himself sleepwalking, something he never used to do even after the War. When his dreams populated with people who knew — or who wanted very badly to know — Roland Cummings.
I've brought you to the Dreamlands.
The thing — the King in Yellow — moved impossibly closer, caging him in tatters that might have been writhing flesh. Each strand was three times the thickness of Charlie's body, and yet they moved so deliberately, so delicately. The King's voice was sinister and overwhelming.
At my whim, it can be a place of ecstasy or agony. And one way or another you will give me what I want. Know that you won't wake up this time, Charlie. You're far away from home.
He was far away. It was what they would say about the dead. Further away than in Arkham or Egypt or even France. The dust of his wits billowed: he was lost. He was no longer with us. He was dearly beloved and sadly missed. He could feel, physically on his skin, the loose choirboy's vestments he’d used to wear while he listened to those words again and again. Dust to dust.
"I've gone to sleep." He found his tongue and grinned, relieved that it finally made sense. He could see it: it was what they'd say. Did his family get to bury him, then? They deserved that at least.
Yes, said the King, drawing out the word in sibilant encouragement.
"Perchance to dream. Passed— passed into higher service."
To my service.
"So long to this too too solid flesh! To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die—"
Abruptly, the cage drew in to squeeze the words out of his lungs.
Give up the hope of escaping through death!
"Reunited in the Lord," he wheezed, and maybe later there'd come the hurt of a promise broken, but now he was insensate and had no idea what he was saying.
Only the King still held his attention. The King, growling so deeply that Charlie's body shook. The King hissing threats, angered by whatever idiot thing Charlie had said in return. He thought he saw hands, huge and clawed, descending towards him. He thought he heard the whispering again, noose-like, tightening on his mind and his limbs, and he thought he felt the King's grip loosen.
And then he stopped thinking. All that he wanted to do for some time was to walk, following a trail of yellow flowers that opened in his proximity and closed in his wake. Awareness, thank God, didn't follow him.
When he came back to himself, he was sitting in a shaft of reddish sunlight. All else around him was obscured by shadow; the air was so stale and so thick that he could only be indoors or underground. There was a trail in the dust beside him. He must have been shifting where he sat, trying to stay in the light as it moved across the floor.
Around him was the dim impression of walls, high and carved and malicious.
Charlie let the shaft of light drift slowly away from him, and tried with all his ingenuity to wake up.