“Something like a shadow,” Meredith says, taking her right eye from the telescope and looking across the room at her brother, who isn’t sitting in the chair across from Machen.
“It’s not a shadow,” Avery doesn’t tell her, and goes back to the things he has to write down in his journals before there’s no time left.
On the island, the gate tears itself open, the dragon’s eye, angel eye, and the unspeakable face of the gargantuan sleeper in an unnamed, sunken city, tearing itself wide to see if she’s the one it’s called down or if it’s some other. The summoned or the trespasser. The invited or the interloper. And Machen knows from the way the air has begun to shimmer and sing that the sleeper doesn’t like what it sees.
“I stand at the gate and hold the key,” she says. “You know my name, and I have come to hold the line. I have come only that you might not pass.”
“Don’t look, Merry. Close your eyes,” and Machen holds his daughter close to him as the air stops singing, as it begins to sizzle and pop and burn.
The waves against the shore.
The dragon’s tail across the sky.
The empty boat pulled down into the shimmering pool.
Something glimpsed through a telescope.
The ribsy, omnivorous dogs of war.
And then Machen woke in his bed, a storm lashing fiercely at the windows, the lightning exploding out there like mortar shells, and the distant thump, thump, thump of his lost son from the attic. He didn’t close his eyes again, but lay very still, sweating and listening to the rain and the thumping, until the sun rose somewhere behind the clouds to turn the black to cheerless, leaden grey.
August 1889
After his travels, after Baghdad and the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, after the hidden mosque in Reza’lyah and the peculiar artifacts he’d collected on the southernmost shore of Lake Urmia, Machen Dandridge went west to California. In the summer of 1889, he married Ellen Douglas-Winslow, black-sheep daughter of a fine old Boston family, and together they traveled by train, the smoking iron horses and steel rails that his own father had made his fortune from, riding all the way to the bustling squalor and Nob Hill sanctuaries of San Francisco. For a time they took up residence in a modest house on Russian Hill, while Machen taught his wife the things that he’d learned in the East—archaeology and astrology, Hebrew and Islamic mysticism, the Talmud and Qur’an, the secrets of the terrible black book that had been given to him by a blind and leprous mullah. Ellen had disgraced her family at an early age by claiming the abilities of a medium and then backing up her claims with extravagant séances and spectacular ectoplasmic displays. Machen found in her an eager pupil.
“Why would he have given the book to you?” Ellen asked skeptically, the first time Machen had shown it to her, the first time he’d taken it from its iron and leather case in her presence. “If it’s what you say it is, why would he have given it to anyone?”
“Because, my dear, I had a pistol pressed against his skull,” Machen had replied, unwrapping the book, slowly peeling back the layers of lambskin it was wrapped in. “That and knowledge he’d been searching for his entire life. Trust me. It was a fair trade.”
And just as the book had led him back from Asia to America and on to California, the brittle, parchment compass of its pages had shown him the way north along the coast to the high cliffs north of Anchor Bay. That first trip, he left Ellen behind, traveling with only the company of a Miwok Indian guide who claimed knowledge of “a hole in the world.” But when they finally left the shelter of the redwood forest and stood at the edge of a vast and undulating sea of pampas grass stretching away towards the Pacific, the Miwok had refused to go any farther. No amount of money or talk could persuade him to approach the cliffs waiting beyond the grass, and so Machen continued on alone.
Beneath the hot summer sun, the low, rolling hills seemed to go on forever. The gulls and a pair of red-tailed hawks screamed at him like harpies warning him away, screeching threats or alarum from the endless cornflower sky. But he found it, finally, the “hole in the world,” right where the Miwok guide had said that he would, maybe fifty yards from the cliffs.
From what he’d taught himself of geology, Machen guessed it to be the collapsed roof of a cavern, an opening no more than five or six feet across, granting access to an almost vertical chimney eroded through tilted beds of limestone and shale and probably connecting to the sea somewhere in the darkness below. He dropped a large pebble into the hole and listened and counted as it fell, ticking off the seconds until it splashed faintly, confirming his belief that the cavern was connected to the sea. A musty, briny smell wafted up from the hole, uninviting, sickly, and though there was climbing equipment in his pack, and he was competent with ropes and knots and had, more than once, descended treacherous, crumbling shafts into ancient tombs and wells, Machen Dandridge only stood there at the entrance, dropping stones and listening to the eventual splashes. He stared into the hole and, after a while, could discern a faint but unmistakable light, not the fading sunlight getting in from some cleft in the cliff face, but light like a glass of absinthe, the sort of light he’d imagined abyssal creatures that never saw the sun might make to shine their way through the murk.
It wasn’t what he’d expected, from what was written in the black book, no towering gate of horn and ivory, no arch of gold and silver guarded by angels or demons or beings men had never fashioned names for, just this unassuming hole in the ground. He sat in the grass, watching the sunset burning day to night, wondering if the Miwok had deserted him. Wondering if the quest had been a fool’s errand from the very start, and he’d wasted so many years of his life, and so much of his inheritance, chasing connections and truths that only existed because he wished to see them. By dark, the light shone up through the hole like the chartreuse glare through the grate of an unearthly furnace, taunting or reassuring but beckoning him forward. Promising there was more to come.
“What is it you think you will find?” the old priest had asked after he’d handed over the book. “More to the point, what is it you think will find you?”
Not a question he could answer then and not one he could answer sitting there with the roar of the surf in his ears and the stars speckling the sky overhead. The question that Ellen had asked him again and again, and always he’d found some way to deflect her asking. But he knew the answer, sewn up somewhere deep within his soul, even if he’d never been able to find the words. Proof that the world did not end at his fingertips or with the unreliable data of his eyes and ears or the lies and half-truths men had written down in science and history books, that everything he’d ever seen was merely a tattered curtain waiting to be drawn back so that some more indisputable light might, at last, shine through.
“Is that what you were seeking, Mr. Dandridge?” and Machen had turned quickly, his heart pounding as he reached for the pistol at his hip, only to find the old Indian watching him from the tall, rustling grass a few feet away. “Is this the end of your journey?” and the guide pointed at the hole.
“I thought you were afraid to come here?” Machen asked, annoyed at the interruption, sitting back down beside the hole, looking again into the unsteady yellow-green light spilling out of the earth.
“I was,” the Miwok replied. “But the ghost of my grandfather came to me and told me he was ashamed of me, that I was a coward for allowing you to come to this evil place alone. He has promised to protect me from the demons.”
“The ghost of your grandfather?” Machen laughed and shook his head, then dropped another pebble into the hole.
“Yes. He is watching us both now, but he also wishes we would leave soon. I can show you the way back to the trail.”