In the dull red glow of the burning oil he could make out the Padre muttering the Lord’s Prayer under his breath, his fingers moving feverishly over the rosary in his hands.
Jeffries, beginning to feel uncommonly hot, pulled at his collar and found his fingers numbed. He struggled to control them as he fumbled clumsily at his shirt buttons, the simplicity of their mechanism outwitting him. His skin began to prickle unpleasantly and it was with a vague sense of detachment that he watched the Padre gazing ahead, slack-jawed, before slumping over. Jeffries, in a gargantuan effort of will, focused on the little rivulet of saliva that dribbled slowly from the chaplain’s mouth, soaking into the earthen floor. He felt sweat trickle down his face and collect uncomfortably in his moustache. As the very air around him seemed to bleed shapeless colours into the world, spreading and blotting out the scene in front of him, he relaxed, giving himself over entirely to the alien fumes.
THE GAS CLOUD enveloped him. Sick and green and heavy it shifted sinuously around his body. His breathing was hard and laboured. He clawed at his gas helmet only to find the mask had become one with his face, his eyepieces become round dark eyes, the breathing tube a proboscis, his tunic a shiny carapace. His insistent buzz was lost amid the continual thunderous rumbling drum of the artillery barrage that modulated to become the slow sonorous chant of unseen male voices gradually becoming more urgent, more abandoned.
The gas drew back like an outrushing tide leaving him beached at the door of the London Presbytery. The heavy ornate oak door stood ajar. The sound of a rich, sardonic laugh drew him inside. He knew that laugh, knew the supercilious grin and the piercing eyes. He made his way across the tiled floor of the entrance hall toward the door to the inner sanctum. There he was, ‘The Great Beast’ himself, Crowley, fornicating with his mistress within his ritual circle. His mundane angelic transcriptions served him no purpose. Magickally impotent he could not take the leap that was needed to broach the spheres. Sex was not the answer. And now Jeffries knew it. Red Magick was the answer, the way…
“You were wrong!” he cried. “Wrong, you horny old bastard!” his voice shattering the vision in front of him He found himself in a woodland and saw a great beast, slavering, its phallus protruding lasciviously from its sheath. He watched as a large snake writhed through the grass beneath the soft underbelly of the beast, where it struck, sinking its fangs into the flesh. The beast howled in pain and fear and bolted, unaware that the venom would nevertheless do its work. First blood to the Great Snake. The snake began to shed it skin and a naked man crawled out wet with viscera, clutching an onyx stone carved with a sigil. The sigil began to glow red and expand.
Jeffries stepped through it onto the cool moonlit lawns of Lambton Grange that rang with thrill-seeking drunken giggles. He looked up at the once familiar stars that augured such a propitious moment, felt again the adrenaline surge, the confluence of fear and excitement. He recognised the ritually inscribed circle, the fug of incense, the lost Enochian codex in his hands, the drug-addled groans of the two barely conscious sacrificial virgins — no chance of an Abrahamic reprieve for them here. He stepped inside the moment to relive it again.
The words, the words he had spent months learning tumbling now out of his lips. Their blood, their life force, charging the cone of energy, powering the evocation. Once again, he felt the penumbra of Croatoan’s shadow creep towards him before the very little power he had harnessed waned. He howled, both in frustration and triumph. He felt the power, proof that his Grand Working was sound.
Betrayal. The sound of barking pushed him on as he found himself running, a wanted man. Shedding skin after skin, the Great Snake changed and grew. The outbreak of the Great War galvanised his purpose. What greater cauldron of blood sacrifice could there be? Wholesale slaughter, the extinguished lives going to waste. If only one could channel it. And so his great working took shape. On the field of battle, charged by the blood of thousands, he would evoke the Old One once more. He looked up to see the shells and Very lights and saw, instead, the eyes of the arachnid being he intuited to be GarSuleth, at the centre of a star-bejewelled web. He began to relax and feel calm, then content as he accepted the being above him, welcoming it.
A mine went up, blasting thousands of tons of dirt and soil into the air, ripping apart the web and banishing its occupant to the cold dark shadows of space. The giant earthen plume took the form of a huge, terrible being, squatting on its haunches, skin like onyx, the surface of which cracked and split to reveal a burning core from which rivulets of blood flowed, hissing and steaming like lava as it oozed out across the foreign world on which he now stood.
“Croatoan,” he gasped.
JEFFRIES CAME ROUND to the sound of retching across the chamber as the Padre vomited. Feeling light-headed and nauseous, Jeffries levered himself upright. His eyes met those of the Padre. They were wide with fear and doubt. Jeffries watched him snivel. Whatever he had seen had shaken him. Wiping the snot from his nose and the drool from his mouth he grinned at the broken Padre, whose chest was now heaving spasmodically, wracked with sobs.
The burner had been extinguished and Chandar stood over them, studying their faces expectantly. “The Kirijjandat is complete,” the creature said. “How do you feel?”
Jeffries felt a calmness and certainty. Whatever doubts he might have had had been assuaged. He looked up at Chandar and smiled contentedly. He eased himself to his feet and stretched his cramped limbs. If they thought, after this rite of passage, that he would be more compliant to the will of GarSuleth they were wrong. He had passed through and not only was his conscience unaffected by the visions that had assailed him, but his convictions remained steadfast and his faith in his own actions had been reaffirmed. Most importantly, he felt vindicated by his final vision of Croatoan and, unfortunately for the Khungarrii, gloriously unrepentant.
“How do I feel? Never better, old chap. Never better.”
THE PARTY HAD been marching for several hours now. The air was thick with cloying forest scents and the acrid smell of exhaust fumes from the grumbling tank ahead. Atkins was sweating in the oppressive heat. His uniform was beginning to chafe and his boots rub so he was thankful when, at last, the trees thinned and opened out into a stretch of heath land. The forest, they found, was not continuous but here and there were changes in terrain. A large outcrop of rounded boulders, yellow-grey in colour, worn and pitted by the weather and stained with a peculiar indigo-coloured moss dominated the heath to the left of the trail. Either side was a mass of tangled tendrils some several feet high, looking like overgrown brambles.
They walked slowly along the trail. If this world had taught them anything, it was caution. Frequent use of the track had kept the indigo-hued vegetation cropped close but anything could be hidden within the rest. They reached the centre of the heath without incident, the outcrop of boulders to their left.
Atkins thought he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. But it was only the vibrations caused by the tank setting small pebbles skittering down the outcrop.