Here were two identical incidents, tens of thousands of miles apart. My own readings in the weird could allow of only one answer to those twin disasters, yet the mystery lay in why these things had chosen this especial time to attack. If these two events were unrelated, then it was the most fabulous coincidence ever to come within the scope of my knowledge.
Coler was still rapidly running, and I had trouble in keeping up with him. We had now reached the outskirts of Brichester, but long before this I knew that our eventual destination must be Sentinel Hill. The incredible determination of Coler was what most impressed me: although I knew something of great consequence was involved, I could hardly envision that it was so great as to impel the man into this maniac haste with, further, the deadly rifle at his side. Could the possession of a mere block of crystal, anomalous and supermundane though it may have been, be of such earth-shaking importance? What awful power and significance lay in its weirdly glowing interior? What implications of future devastation could it hold? That the answer was as titanic as it was complex seemed evident, and I can truthfully say that even the wildest arabesques of my imagination did not encompass what I eventually learned was the truth.
We finally reached Sentinel Hill, and, hiding behind a thick copse of trees, I saw again a sight which had to me become monstrously familiar: the infernal congregation was there again, and this time a few of them carried torches to give the whole scene an unhallowed illumination. They were gathered in a close circle around the flat stone at the top of the hill, those with torches standing while the others knelt. The elderly priest also stood, and walked, his back to us, slowly toward the stone. He then reached out his arms and put something on it.
The crystal now lay in the center of the stone.
We could see even from where we were that the glowing had only grown in size, seeming to be close to twice as large as when I had seen it last. There now fell over all a great and deathly silence, yet in the air there was such a tension and apprehension as might make one think that Nature was holding her breath in the expectation of some ineffably towering cataclysm.
The priest now raised both his hands to the sky in a supplicating gesture. Just as he was about to speak Coler fired his rifle.
The priest fell dead to the ground without uttering.
Silence died as quickly, as the other members of the band now began clamoring at the abrupt interruption of their ceremony and looked about to find its cause. They did not have to look far, for Coler now sprang from his place of concealment and ran toward the hill, gun in hand, urging me to follow.
We were madmen to throw ourselves in the midst of that depraved band of blasphemers, yet necessity of the most terrific sort drove us on. We were two against twenty, but we, too, seemed suddenly filled with a bestial madness that made us claw and tear our way through, Coler intermittently firing his rifle in someone’s face or stomach. And when I grabbed the crystal and tucked it under my arm, there came over me an even greater rage at these grotesque perversions of all that is sane and normal, these handfuls of lunatic scoundrels whose desire of absolute decimation was born only of their failure to co-exist with a race who had so surpassed them in mental and spiritual progression that they no longer deserved the appellation of human but became a species apart in their odious and lurid decadence.
I kicked, I scratched, I maimed, and, using my head as a battering ram, thrust my body through the crowd, twisting and writhing away from them as they turned to wrestle the crystal away. I soon found myself in the open, Coler at my side, and we began sprinting away with a velocity we had never before known; and when we turned around to measure the extent of our escape from pursuit, we saw the score of fanatics now a considerable distance behind us, but still giving chase, leaping and tripping over one another, foaming at the mouth in multiple apexes of fury, arms outstretched as if itching not only to win back their other-worldly prize but to rend us apart for having so foiled the consummation of their ritual. But because we also possessed a thankful modicum of insanity, we pressed ourselves on almost beyond the farthest reaches of human capacity, racing through Brichester, Temphill, and finally to Severnford without allowing ourselves one minor yet irrevocably fatal pause.
But we were not finished yet. When we reached Coler’s manor, we stepped not inside but into his car, and drove off to a destination which only he knew. Some minutes later, we pulled to the side of the road and approached what seemed to be an abandoned mine shaft to our right. Coler took the crystal from me and plunged it into the deepest and darkest pit he could find, emitting a heavy sigh of relief after doing so. I recall that though we stayed there for perhaps a full minute, we never heard the crystal reach the bottom.
We had just succeeded in saving mankind—for now.
I had to wait until the next morning to learn the answer. Our exhaustion had reached such lengths that almost immediately upon seating ourselves in some chairs in Coler’s home, we dropped off into a heavy, dreamless, and undisturbed sleep, not waking until it was almost noon. The actions of the preceding night and the long rest had stimulated our appetites, and when our breakfast was prepared we abandoned any pretensions of dignity and attacked the meal like savages. It was some considerable time before we reached anything close to satiation, and when we did Coler led me back to the library, where finally he could reveal to me a truth which he had himself known for less than twenty-four hours.
He began by saying: “You know as well as I, Collins, how we got involved in this business: I accidentally dug up the crystal in Arabia, brought it back with me, tried unsuccessfully to ascertain its use and manufacture, and then noticed how it began glowing, first minutely, then with greater and greater strength. We began looking through my ancient texts to find some sort of reference to the thing, but came up with nothing. Then Meredith came with his Kurkur Fragment from Egypt, and asked me to try to solve it. I did exactly that. It was really very simple: Meredith had himself suggested the answer that it might be a mixture of two languages, which it was—Sanscrit letters forming words roughly akin to these in the R’lyeh Text.
“Now there came those strange meetings on top of Sentinel Hill by those occultists of Brichester. They were up to something, to be sure; but their doing nothing serious the first time seemed to suggest some curious expectancy, and it was of course proved by that incredible effort to rob the crystal two nights ago. It was obvious that they wanted the crystal, but what we could not understand was why.
“I found the answer, as I told you, in the Kurkur Fragment. But before I tell you that, let me show you something else.”
He went to his desk and picked up a packet of about a dozen newspaper clippings, all from various London newspapers of the past few days.
He continued, as he handed them to me: “While you were at Oxford, Collins, I telephoned to London and asked to have recent issues of the Times, the Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph brought to me. (I was not fool enough to go myself and leave the crystal unguarded.) Read the articles: their significance is obvious enough.”
And it was. I read of curious deaths and disappearances in the Australian desert, in the heights of the Himalayas, and in the frozen wastes of Antarctica. I read of an uprising of dolphins in California; I read of the recommencement of human sacrifices in Manitoba; I read of unheard-of excitement amongst primitive tribes in the depths of the African desert, in Panama, in south France, in the Yucatan peninsula, in southern Louisiana, in Polynesia; I read of ships sighting bizarre objects in the Pacific Ocean, in the north Atlantic, in the Gulf of Mexico. It was incredible, the worse because I sensed what was causing it.