Nightwalk 2 Page 29

  “So you still haven’t told Mom about it?”

  “Not a chance. It would only worry her, and… well…”

  “And?”

  “…and then I would have to explain the gun.”

  “Good point, don’t worry Mom,” she nodded in sober agreement. “But you still have it, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. And the backpack, too?”

  “Yeah,” I confessed. “I’ve already replaced everything in it. Added a couple of things as well.”

  She considered that a second, her eyes now somber. Then she turned and looked at me.

  “You think he may come back, don’t you. You’re worried you’re going to see him again.”

  Bingo. But that was my business.

  “Probably not,” I shrugged. “It’s just a case of me being my usual paranoid self. After all, the only reason he used me was because I happened to be there that night, and in a position to reach the guy in time. And the further Coventry Woods sinks into the past, the less anybody can do with it, so I doubt there would ever be a reason to return. I imagine he can find other people for things he might want done unconnected to that.”

  “So you think it’s over?”

  I never want to lie to Casey, so I made a show of giving that one some thought as I tried to decide if this would count as a lie or not. I knew the question had been coming, and I had been weighing different answers all day.

  “Yeah, I think it’s over,” I said. “I think we’ve seen the last of the man in white.”

  I guess it’s not really a lie if you desperately hope it’s true and have no evidence to the contrary.

  But counter to that hope, I also harbored a secret fear. A terrible one. And that secret, terrible fear had a name…

  ###

  Nyarlathotep.

  It didn’t take me long to stumble across it.

  I remembered how the man in white had called himself “the Black Pharaoh”, and had wasted little time in firing up my old computer and diving into some research. A visit to an Egyptology site revealed there had been many black Pharaohs, but none were specifically referred to as The Black Pharaoh. But when I plugged the term into my search engine and added “crawling chaos”, it was the first name that popped up.

  It only took clicking on the first few links to realize I had discovered the right path. As it turned out, I needed to read more classic science fiction.

  Nyarlathotep —sometimes known as The Black Pharaoh, The Haunter in the Dark, or The Crawling Chaos, among a host of other names— was a character created by an early twentieth century author named Howard Phillips Lovecraft. And the man in white had mentioned being acquainted with an author in the past.

  Now let me state for the record, I had heard of HP Lovecraft before. I even had a vague idea of some monster named Cthulhu who is associated with him. But he wrote in an entirely different genre than mine… and since he was an early author of the genre, he never made it into the small pile of science fiction or horror books that I had read.

  Needless to say, I bought his biography along with a compendium of all his works and spent a week digging through them. The end of that exercise left me confused, alarmed, and despite all the things I had witnessed and been through, the feeling that I was even further over my head than I previously thought.

  I now have no doubt the man in white and Lovecraft must have met and conversed in some fashion. The resemblance between him and the characters in the stories Nyarlathotep and at the end of Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath are simply too close to be mere coincidence. Not to mention, several of the monsters in his stories were uncomfortably familiar to me.

  The “goatman” Tommy killed was a dead ringer for one of Lovecraft’s Men of Leng. The scavengers in Howard Circle two years ago were eerily similar to the ghouls in The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath…and while that same story never describes the Cats of Saturn mentioned in its pages, it was the name given by the man in white to the beasts that attacked us at Darla’s house. Hell, he had even named the creature in the duck pond a shoggoth, and it also matched the monster in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness.

  Although the details and settings in his stories were obviously fictional, some of the monsters he used were creatures he somehow had experience with. But how? These were creatures from different dimensions.

  The only possible answer was the man in white.

  The being Lovecraft called Nyarlathotep.

  Yet there is where I encountered the first problem. Lovecraft had stated in a letter to an acquaintance that he came up with the concept for Nyarlathotep in a dream. He never once tried to portray him as anything other than a fictional character. Yet I felt certain the Nyarlathotep in his writing and the man in white were one and the same. So how could that be?

  Did the man in white visit him in dreams? Lovecraft did write of traveling to other realms in dreams in his fiction. I’m also certain it is easily within the abilities of the man in white to visit and control a man’s dreams if he so wished. Hell, the first time I met him I was in the process of dying from a brain injury…and nobody else saw him but me.

  Or did HP Lovecraft suddenly find himself in a relationship with a being he had no way of explaining to anybody else? I know my few attempts to do so were not exactly met with open acceptance. I’m still not sure if Darla completely believed that part of my story. Even Casey had been flatly dismissive of his existence until she met him herself.

  Either way, I guess the important thing was what Lovecraft wrote about him.

  He referred to Nyarlathotep as the mighty messenger of beings called Elder Gods, yet leaving it unclear if he was truly a servant of theirs or a power in his own right. He considered Nyarlathotep a figure of horror, a malevolent bringer of doom, and quite possibly the future architect of mankind’s extinction. He calls him a being with a thousand forms, which pretty much jibes with what the man in white told me himself. Besides, I’ve seen a couple of those other forms.

  So where does that leave me? Where does that leave us all?

  I’m forced to conclude the man in white is indeed Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep. And while I think Lovecraft’s somewhat Victorian outlook on some matters shaded his perception of the entity, I’m pretty sure I find him just as frightening.

  If what I understand is true, he has dropped in and out of our world at different points of the entire breadth of human history. He has been worshipped as a god and feared as a devil. And whenever he has walked among us, whether openly or in the shadows, blood and horror soon followed. I somehow doubt it was a coincidence that he must have had his “friendship” with Lovecraft right between the two most terrible wars this planet has ever seen.

  And now he has returned.

  The first time he said his attention had been caught by Chandra’s device. I actually kind of believe that. Especially since Chandra’s little horror show apparently caught the attention of another being… an entity that fits what little description there is of one of those Elder Gods Lovecraft gloomed over.

  Yet this second time he had intervened to thwart the plans of that Elder God.

  Why?

  The only thing he had intimated was that her attempt on our world ran counter to his interests. Then he had almost immediately changed the subject and dumped me back home.

  The only conclusion I can draw is he has interests here. And after having time to contemplate and build my own impression of the entity, I think he’s playing some kind of game.

  Even if it saved our world, I can draw scant comfort from that. We live in strange and troubled times… exactly the kind of times he has manifested in over the past. Whether he causes them, or is attracted by them, I do not know. I only know he is here.

  But there is nothing I can do about it. No means by which I can give credible warning. Hell, any attempt on my part to tell the truth, and how I discovered it, would only end with me dead or sharing a cell with the unfortunate Paul Maris. To make matters worse, Casey and E
d would likely suffer, too.

  So all I can do is wait, and hope. Hope that I’m wrong. Hope that Lovecraft was wrong. Or perhaps hope I’m now a used and forgotten tool in a chest that I’m sure contains many others.

  I truly doubt the last one. The man in white strikes me as a stickler for detail, and not the type to forget anything.

  At least I no longer fear the dark. Nor do I have any more nightmares of mute faces staring at me from the blackness. That is all done. The past no longer inspires any terrors in me.

  Now I fear for the future.

  I have seen what we may be facing, and we are not ready.

  About the Author

  D. Nathan Hilliard writes horror and fantasy from his desk in Spring, TX. He draws his inspiration from a wealth of experiences growing up in small towns, a childhood addiction to the Saturday Afternoon Matinee, and a life-long love of the written word.

  He currently has two other horror novels, Spiderstalk and Dead Stop, available at Amazon.com…along with two collections of short stories and one dark fantasy novel, The Ways of Khrem.

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