He Who Walks in Shadow

• Prologue
  
• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Chapter 10
  
• Chapter 11
  
• Chapter 12
  
• Chapter 13
  
• Chapter 14
  
• Chapter 15
  
• Chapter 16
  
• Chapter 17
  
• Chapter 18
  
• Chapter 19
  
• Chapter 20
  
• Chapter 21
  
• Chapter 22
  
• Chapter 23
  
• Chapter 24
  
• Chapter 25
  
• Chapter 26
  
• Chapter 27
  
• Chapter 28
  
• Chapter 29
  
• Chapter 30
  
• Chapter 31
  
• Chapter 32
  
• Chapter 33
  
• Chapter 34
  
• Chapter 35
  
• Chapter 36
  
• Chapter 37
  
• Chapter 38
  
• Chapter 39
  
• Chapter 40
  
• Chapter 41
  
• Chapter 42
  
• Chapter 43
  
• Epilogue
  

He Who Walks

in

Shadow

By

Brett J. Talley

JournalStone

San Francisco

Copyright © 2015 by Brett J. Talley

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN:     978-1-942712-26-8    (sc)

ISBN:     978-1-942712-27-5    (hc)

ISBN:    978-1-942712-28-2    (ebook)

JournalStone rev. date:  May 22, 2015

Library of Congress Control Number:  2015936226

Printed in the United States of America

Cover Art & Design:  Becca Klein

Edited by:    Michael R. Colling
s

For Annie

He Who Walks in Shadow

Incendium Maleficarum
, First Gate, First Key

In the beginning was the darkness, and the Earth was without form, and void.

In the abyss shone black suns of ancient days, Stygian orbs that ruled over ebon seas of endless infinity. The Great Old Ones were born of that emptiness, they who yet walk in foul and lonely places, who still call forth from the wilds of the world. From the maddened heights of the greatest mountains, to the roiling caverns of the deepest seas. In shadow-bound tombs, and empty passageways of lost antiquity. But they did not always haunt only the darkest watches of the night.

In the long ago they came to this world, spawn of shadow, when the stars wheeled round right. They seized it as their own, the realm on which they would build their glory. Upon its planes did rise great cities of titanic stone, cyclopean capitals of mind-breaking vastness. Carven by no hand of man, for humanity was but a whisper on cold winds that float back and forth upon the line of time. In unchallenged glory they ruled, for he who was lord upon them all needed but stretch forth his hand and whate’er he wished would be laid to waste.

The wisdom of the world—as it perceives itself now, at least—would call it mad, what they were and how they exercised dominion. But in an insane world, all shall dwell in madness.

So it might have been for all time. Forever might that shadow have fallen, a shade that covered the land and sea for all the sunless nights of black eternity.

But as with all nights, there came the dawn.

The darkness cannot comprehend the light, no more than it can abide it. It was but a single spark, a tiny, flickering flame. Yet it burst forth like the thunder that rides upon lightning. Then the Great Old Ones knew fear, as they had always known hatred, but it was upon a new enemy that their burning scorn was cast.

For there was one race whom the light favored. A slave race, a breed of mindless creatures which the darkness carved from the mud and gave form for its own amusement. As meaningless to it as an insect. As unimportant as the lowest beast.

And unto this forgotten creation—unto man—the light bestowed but a single gift. Knowledge of itself, and the spirit that comes with it.

Thus mankind came to know the light, though with that knowledge arose the memory of the darkness. And of that shadowed remembrance, mankind feared.

For as surely as the sun rises, it must also fall. As surely as one age ends, another must begin—an ever turning back to that which came before. To that which should not be. For in all truth is this—that is not dead which can eternal lie.

And the darkness does not forget.

Journal of Carter Weston

February 19, 1932

There is a legend from the long ago, passed down through the ages on whispered words and shuddered sayings, written of in arcane and forbidden tomes, locked away in the dusty halls of abandoned libraries. It is history to some, myth to others, though the latter are never fulsome in their conviction. It speaks of the coming of a man from the east, if man he was, from behind the lake of Hali and the jeweled cities of Carcosa.

The wind rushed before his footsteps, while the sound of discordant piping floated in his wake. The vermin teemed around him, and the pestilence gathered at his feet. He wore the yellow robe of a king, but no king of this earth was he. For his raiment was tattered and stained with blood and mud and the tears of the damned. But his face was princely—the visage of command, the countenance of one to be followed, as a mystic might imagine the pharaohs of old. And with him always the book, the great crimson tome that bore the name of
Incendium Maleficarum.

From the east he appeared, and like John of old, he preached the coming of another epoch of this earth. But no salvation was to be had through him. At least, not for mankind. He was a harbinger of the end of one age—and the beginning of another. The departure of mankind and the return of something more ancient. For on the wings of those he heralded rode death, and hell followed.

Onward he traveled, as the black tentacles of plague wrapped around his feet and spread from every town and city that his gaze fell upon, from every place in which he preached his sermon of the end times. The men and women and children died by the millions from that Black Death. They fell and they cursed the coming of the traveler, for to look upon him was to see the face of darkness, to taste madness and insanity.

Yet not all marked his coming with the evil eye. The most ancient cults, the nameless faiths whose adherents had howled the oldest rites into the wild winds on darkened mountain tops and in forgotten, ruined temples, they had long sought his coming. Their voices echoed across desolate plains and through unnamed valleys with one word, a name—
Nyarlathotep
!

For two years, that name was feared across Europe, and many died with the whisper of it on their last breath. Then, nothing. The ancient rites ceased. The vermin fled. The plague receded like a waning tide. As mysterious as his arrival, so too was the reason for his departure—so close to the end times, so close to opening the gate to worlds unseen and unimagined.

In legend and myth, much is false. But truth can be discerned, if the careful reader knows where to look. Within the tattered pages of a book that has no name, I discovered a story—to my knowledge singular in its telling—that holds a kernel of truth. It told of a simple farmer—of ancient stock of Greek or Roman or even Egyptian lineage—who came down from the mountains of shadowed Wallachia to face the child of Azathoth, the harbinger of that whence Cthulhu first came. But the farmer did not contend with Nyarlathotep alone. He brought with him a jewel, an object of unknown composition and origin, a crystalline tetrahedron, whose triangular facets seemed to shimmer with unnatural light. The writer of this tale held that it was the Oculus of legend, the Oracle of Truth, the Eye of God. The records are strangely silent as to what transpired on that blasted heath, all those centuries ago. All that can be said is that Nyarlathotep receded and the
Incendium Maleficarum
vanished once again beneath the shroud of history, while the fate of the farmer—and the Oculus—remains to this day a mystery.

An interesting side-show of history the story might have remained, were it not for the dark murmurings that swept across Europe on the eve of the Great War, the whispers of a preacher of the end times, wrapped in yellow garb, who spoke of the coming of a great darkness. That darkness fell upon us all with that conflict and the plague of influenza that erupted from it.

But I fear that this tribulation was but a prologue, the gloaming of a blacker night than we have seen since the Lord called forth for light in the first days. I will face this roiling chaos, as I have faced it before, but I fear that this challenge is greater than any I have yet seen.

And I do not know if I can defeat it alone.

A forward for the interested reader, [Manuscript name TK]

A friend of mine—the oldest and finest of the men to whom I choose to give that title—once told me that when great or grave things happen, it is incumbent upon those of us who bore witness to their passing to record them for posterity so that other, future generations might learn from our mistakes and revel in our triumphs. Carter Weston was wise, but I do wonder if he knew that it would be his name that graced the pages of such recordings and that it would be his story that would inspire others to contend with the evil of this world—and the evil that lies beyond.

I remember well the moment I met Carter. It was a seemingly innocuous occasion, one of a hundred such introductions during our first few days at Miskatonic University, a place that would come to dominate both our lives as students and our adult undertakings. But I marked that incident, for some sense, something beyond the five commonly understood, told me that our meeting was auspicious. How right I was.

Life seldom continues along the path we intend, and one curve in the road leads invariably to another. So it was with Carter. He, the rare skeptic to grace the hallowed halls of Miskatonic, left, as they all do, a true believer. But his baptism into the faith of the cosmic and unutterable secrets of our world was truly by fire. For it was Carter who was chosen in the winter of our penultimate year of study to seek out a rare and powerful tome, a grimoire of horrible antiquity—
Incendium Maleficarum
, The Witches’ Fire. It was Carter who was given this task by Dr. Atley Thayerson, a devotee of certain nameless cults, who masqueraded as a defender of the light.