HE had returned to the West only a few short years ago now, feeling the desperate need to think upon all he had heard, upon the responsibilities that now rested upon his shoulders. Those devoted to him as their priest-king, indeed as their living god, dared not question his departure, though they cannot have been very enthusiastic about it. For all they knew, he might have sensed the call to go forth into the world again, even as former avatars had done in times past, to prepare things for the final advent of Chaos when mad auroras should roll forth and blast all things with merciless, wasting light.
As I should imagine it, the very sophistication of the vessel, an educated man of the West, which made this incarnation of the tulku so very potent, also made it less predictable, less manageable than previous pontiffs, who had all been ignorant Asians born and raised in the back of beyond, dwellers in a virtual stone age bereft of culture or human contact.
We are all of us, to an unsettlingly large extent, creatures of peer opinion. The world we live in is like an atmosphere we breathe, and it is notoriously difficult not to do as the Romans do when in Rome. Thus Dr. Harker’s confusions and nagging doubts, once he returned westward, quickly blossomed into a crisis of indecision in which his loyalties to rival pictures of reality nearly tore him asunder. He tried to control his thoughts through the preparation of the scholarly monograph which I had been hired to put into final shape. His urgent wish to consult texts like the Necronomicon and the translated R'lyeb Text was really a last-ditch effort to disconfirm his own beliefs and experiences as illusions and delusions. Perhaps he had been brainwashed by the cult. He now hoped so! Better that than that the insane things he had come to believe should prove true!
But prove true they did. He had hoped that the utterances he had once thought bits of the uncouth tongue of R'lyeh would turn out to have nothing in common with what appeared to be a tangible relic of that language, translated by an objective third party. The terrible truth was that some of the same phrases he remembered hearing (and saying!) were there, and were defined exactly as he had come to understand them. There was no chance now that it was not true.
As for me, I must admit I found myself one step behind the elderly clergyman. I felt very afraid that the noose of the truth was closing about my neck as well. I desperately hoped that of which at any other time I should have felt unquestionably certain: that the man before me, plainly suffering from delirium, was raving insane. But I, too, realized it was too late for that, too late for sanity.
I NOW knew well enough the nature of the affliction that was fast ravaging the physical form of Dr. Harker. He was not after all degenerating.
He was transforming, transfiguring into the likeness of the Apostle of the Last Hour, Nyarlathotep. When that transformation was complete, that hour would have struck. The Kaliyuga was at an end. Whether the apostle emerged on this side of the world or that made little difference. Once he had sloughed off the last clinging vestige of his host Enos Harker, a human being with a human conscience, the last hopes of preventing his apocalyptic mission would vanish, too.
Silent until this point, I stammered a question to my employer, though to think of him in such terms now seemed frivolous. How could he be so strangely calm? Had he simply resigned himself to his fate? And to the grim fate to be meted out to all mankind? Or was there some last shred of hope that he had thus far kept from me?
“It may be. It may be. Earlier this evening I had a visitor. It was his coming that made me delay so long to call you here to my side. He is a man who is knowledgeable in these matters, in some ways more knowledgeable than myself despite all I have seen. He is the Swami Sunand Chandraputra, or at least that is what he requests to be called. He understands the situation quite well. He left me this.”
The bandaged, paw-like protuberance held forth an abnormally large key of tarnished and elaborately carved silver. “With this, I may venture to escape. I cannot save my life. My fate was sealed the moment I partook of the blasphemous sacrament. But it may be possible to go where the emergence of the Thing inside me will do no harm. I shall take hold of the Key, and I shall enter a state of dream more real than the illusion we now share. There I shall pass through a door, the mountain portal of Sarkomand. The Tcho-Tcho devils will be waiting for me and will try to bar the way. But if I may hold firmly to this, that they are but the groundless phantoms of my own mind, then I may win through. What will happen then. I do not know. But the way back for the avatar will be long, too long for him, having assumed the cumbersome mantle of gross flesh. Listen! The time is at hand! His dreams begin to impinge on the waking world!"
I had been vacantly aware of some increasing reverberation for some minutes, but it had not yet obtruded upon my conscious mind. Now the sound, if hard to put into words, was plainly to be heard. There seemed to be a slow and steady tread as of great steps, the steps of Leviathan shaking the earth, though I felt no physical tremor. They resounded from deep below the ground, as if from some unsuspected caverns under the earth. As the minutes passed, the echoing steps seemed to rise gradually along the bending curve of the firmament till they were close to reaching the zenith. I sat thus, my eyes fixed upon nothing in particular, waiting, listening. I jumped as the mantel clock sounded midnight. I turned to look co Dr. Harker, I suppose for some signal of guidance, only to find an empty bed.
Not entirely empty. A key, of blackened silver and of outlandish proportions, pressed its bulk into the disheveled bed sheets. Instinctively I grasped it, turned, and made for the door. I paused not, nor entered my room again to retrieve any of my few belongings, but headed inland with all the desperate speed I could muster. I had little thought of what might happen next, only that I must flee like Lot from Sodom.
I must have found my way back to my old lodgings on Parker Street, where the landlady, hearing my frantic knocking, gave me admittance. I can remember little of what passed that night or the next day, nor was I a witness of what happened at Cairn’s Point, of whatever could have happened there. As I have said, the district is largely deserted, and that is merciful, in light of what finally transpired. A derelict who chanced to be staggering down the streetcar tracks toward the beach related how he had seen first a strange flash of bluish light erupting from the top of what I am sure was Dr. Harker’s rented cabin, as if it were a lighthouse on the shore. Then there was a widening flash in which there appeared to be a knot of several figures struggling in shadowed silhouette, one larger than the rest. The authorities put that part of it down to alcoholic delusions. Nor even they can deny that something turned the whole of the beach into a great sheet of glass.
Whatever agency, whatever force, was responsible, something the chemists at Miskatonic are still debating, it also reduced the beach house of Enos Harker to a thin layer of wind-scattered soot. No search has been conducted for the missing Dr. Harker, since his infirmity was well known, and Dr. Sprague has assured the police that he could have been nowhere but in bed when disaster struck. The drifting ashes must therefore include his own.
However, I know better, and I am not alone. Dr. Sprague, not for the first time, seems to know more than he is willing to say, and Dr. Llanfer seems not to be alarmed, but rather almost relieved, as if a drama had reached its denouement. All the others are naturally upset at nor being able to file away a mystery they cannot solve. The greater mystery is that of which they have no inkling, that of the strange doom of Enos Harker.