Burton opened his eyes, sighed, and lay down on the bed, staring up at the cracked plaster ceiling. He let his mind wander, idly imagining that he was staring at an endless desert of ceaselessly waving dunes. He could almost feel the hot, dry air whipping the folds of his jebba. His eyes closed, and then—
—He was staring at an immense black pyramid rising out of the desert, his mount—a fine Arabian—reeling from the towering edifice emerging from the shifting sands. Burton pulled back hard on the reins, urging the horse as far away from the disturbance as he could. But the pyramid that rose before him was vast. It shone like polished onyx, and he knew no ancient Egyptian had built this. The monument had lain under the sands for far longer than any Egyptian—any human—civilization had existed. Every inch of its mirrored surface declared its vast antiquity, and when Burton looked hard enough he could discern faint, grotesque shapes inside it, like flies trapped in amber. Was this a tomb? No. It was a prison.
Burton spurred his horse to turn and sent it galloping away up a steep-angled dune, his heart hammering in his chest, sweat dotting his tan brow.
“Listen,” said a voice coming from somewhere nearby. Burton stopped his horse’s progress and turned about, looking for a source.
“Listen,” it said again, and Burton realized it was coming from all around him. It was the wind. It was the soft pounding of his horse’s hooves on the hot sand. It was the dry rattle of the pyramid as it shook itself loose of centuries of sand and time.
“Listen,” the wind voice said a third time, and Burton listened.
“You are the key.”
“What?” Burton heard his dream-self ask.
“The Dream Key,” the voice answered. “The Key of Dreams.”
Burton awoke sweating as Miss Angell came up with a tray of food and coffee.
“Are you going to sleep all day, Captain?” she said. “It’s almost noon.”
“Bismillah,” Burton swore. He felt as if he had closed his eyes just moments before.
“Don’t go using those heathen epithets around me. Now eat your breakfast before it gets cold.” Miss Angell sat the tray on his lap and calmly left the room.
Burton stared down at it, blinking, the warm smells making him nauseous rather than hungry. He lifted the tray and set it on his bedside table. He couldn’t think about food just now. The vestiges of the dream, if dream it had been, were still with him. He looked out the window, where a thick fog roiled. He imagined dark, inhuman shapes in it, feelers and tentacles reaching toward the glass. He shuddered as a terrible coldness settled somewhere deep within him. He felt un-moored from this life, his mind drifting away from his body. He squeezed his eyes shut and saw with his mind’s eye the black pyramid rising from the shifting sands. The Dream Key. He was the Dream Key. What did that mean? Drifting in his vision now was a shining key. It was overly large and ornate, gleaming a bright, cold silver. He wrapped his right hand around it, and its cold seeped into his skin, down to his very finger bones. It did not grow warm to his touch. In it he felt pulsating energy. He heard a multitude of voices, not all of them human, issuing from it.
Next, he saw a pair of dark eyes burning through him, familiar. He realized with a start that they were his own, looking out at him from inside another face. Black jewels gleamed upon this Other’s brow like spider’s eyes.
When Burton opened his eyes, he was sitting up in his bed, right hand outstretched, fingers balled into a fist so tightly his knuckles were white. “Blast it all,” he swore, releasing his grip. There was no key in his hand, but he could still feel its weight, its coldness there on his palm. He wiped his hand on the front of his jebba and doubted his sanity.
“I am the Dream Key. Bismillah. What does that mean?”
10. There Were Shoggoths in My Basement
It had been seven days since the meteorite robbery, and no arrests had been made, by order of Mycroft Holmes. More police had gone missing, and there were reports of “odd, slithering slime moving of its own accord” reported all over the city. It seemed everyone had a sense of creeping dread that no one could explain, especially Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, who seldom ventured out and only peeked occasionally from his study window just to make sure the city he knew was still there. Today he stared out on a decimated metropolis. The buildings and row houses opposite his home were utterly destroyed, the ruins leaning in toward one another like broken teeth. In the distance a large dome-shaped contraption walked carefully through the wreckage on long tripod legs, metallic tentacles flailing. The whole thing gleamed like brass in the sun.
“Time for tea,” said Miss Angell as she entered the room with a silver tray laden with steaming tea and biscuits.
Burton sat and stared as his housekeeper began preparing his afternoon tea, oblivious to the nightmare tableau evident through the window.
“You really should get out and take in some fresh air,” she said. “You haven’t even visited your club in a week.”
Burton said nothing as she dropped a sugar cube into his tea. “There you are,” she said. “Drink up. It will do you some good. I know you’re worried about your friend Mr. Swinburne, but he’ll recover his wits.”
She smiled at him and left the room. Burton watched her go, then turned back to the window, where a normal London afternoon once again presented itself. The buildings across the way were whole, and there was no sign of the tripod contraption. Burton sighed and sipped his tea, wondering what sanity-blasting new vista next awaited him. He had long since given up on his sanity and was now simply waiting for the men in white coats to come and seize him.
At night the dreams assailed him, strange visions with familiar faces in new roles. In one, he fought John Hanning Speke in a sword duel, the two of them dancing about an assemblage of vast basalt ruins, Burton parrying as Speke lunged for him around the black cyclopean masonry.
“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind,” Speke said.
In another, he captained an airship under siege by some blasphemously hideous, winged creatures with long barbed tails and faceless heads capped with inward curving horns. “Night gaunts!” someone near him shouted as a series of shots rang out.
In yet another, he wasn’t himself at all. He wasn’t even human, but a massive insect-like creature enshrouded by a golden carapace. He and his kind chittered wordlessly, their many legs moving across smooth blocks that shown like polished hematite. Burton and the others surrounded a towering figure, vaguely humanoid in outline, covered in what looked like a burial shroud. It stood upright inside a great circle of green flame, and Burton and the others bowed toward it, as in supplication. Burton’s mind wanted him to scream, but he dared not. He felt as if he were hiding inside this insect thing’s body, and if he gave away his presence, the others would turn on him, devouring his chitinous flesh.
It went on that way, night after night, and Burton was no closer to figuring out what the mysterious yet familiar voice wanted him to do. He only got the sense that he was somehow important to whatever was about to take place regarding he Awakened, along with the unsettling feeling that he wasn’t alone, that there were these mysterious Others watching him from afar. Not malevolent toward him, like the Elder Things that groped toward them with gruesome appendages from the Beyond, but not comforting either.
Burton attempted meditation to steady his mind, but these sessions too were interrupted by eerie sensations of being someone else and somewhere else. He felt once again the presence of some intrusive Other, much as the Lurker on the Threshold had haunted him during his last adventure, the other Burton from the stream of Time that had been disrupted by their journey into the past aboard Nemo’s Nautilus. But this was different. Burton could not see him from the corner of his eye. This was not a feeling like things had fractured, but an intrusion from an entirely new plane of existence, and the rational part of Burton’s mind wanted to run from it, to deny it and go about his business. But he could not, for when he closed his eyes the dreams assailed him with how solidified and real they felt. As tangible as the reality he journeyed through in his waking hours.