Shadows Out of Time

Now he understood why the cars had looked strange. Now he understood why the plan forming in his mind wasn’t going to work. The idea was to find a pay phone and call home. For one thing, he didn’t have any money. In the pocket of that pair of jeans he couldn’t wear anymore, back at the house, was a certain amount of 1964 change, which he supposed would still work, if he had it. Without it, he might still convince the operator to let him make a collect call…what then? Were his parents still alive? His brother Clifford would be forty-seven.

By the time he got back to the house, after another long and painful hike, he was sobbing and bedraggled. He’d lost his slippers somewhere, probably climbing the hill, and his feet were bleeding. Big Thomas was waiting for him at the top of the stairs and took him gently into his arms. But he did not offer comfort. He merely held him firmly and the look on his face was one of satisfaction, as if an important lesson had been completed.

IV

Now I have to take over the narrative. I told you this isn’t some cute-kid story, no magical coming-of-age sort of crap. Not so simple.

First person from now on. No sense pretending this happened afar, to someone else.

Some while after the aforesaid, I was looking at myself in a mirror in the bathroom — yes, the house had that sort of convenience, albeit the toilet worked with a chain and an overhead tank and the bathtub had clawed feet — but I digress. I stared into the mirror and saw that I was beginning to grow a dark beard, just like…you are ahead of me. I am ahead of me. I am he and he is we and we are I and all of us are the same, and my name is not Tommy or Thomas or even Big Thomas, but Legion, for we are many.

It was I who found the boy in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, still equipped with knapsack and butterfly net, asleep at the top of the stairs. I took him to breakfast. I knew how he felt because I remembered feeling it. I amazed him with the resurrected moth because I remembered being amazed. I knew that he would dream of that moth, and identify with it, and imagine himself flying up, up through the dark house forever, in terror and growing despair, but never quite giving up on the hope that he might find a speck of light and a way out.

My task was to educate him, and show him many wonders, because I had been through all this before.

Meanwhile, I saw myself in enough mirrors that I learned to trim my beard properly as it filled in.

But even if I was Big Thomas I was still a junior member of our brotherhood, fit only to teach the boy, fit only to place him in the glass coffin where he would sleep and dream us all and the house into being.

I remembered all that, and the others, who came out of the shadows, remembered me, because time does indeed play tricks, and is indeed like a house of mirrors, and I/we/they looked on with expectation as the whole cycle turned on itself, like a worm swallowing its tail, or like a Moebius strip going on and on forever…

But for what purpose? You may well ask. I tell you that I learned this much, from the others, from my older selves, that the purpose of this magical, half-living house with infinite rooms, which swung through eternity like a watch on a chain…watch the watch, watch the watch…have you gone under yet? You are in my power…

Not exploration, not any quest for scientific knowledge, or even conquest, but, in a word, worship.

Now the house was always filled with spirits and presences, with things that fluttered like moths in the darkness between the stars. Now my otherselves educated me, and took me up into endless towers that even I had never known existed, through rooms of strange gravities, where universes intersected, past windows that looked out on unfamiliar suns or worlds. Sometimes we conversed with monstrosities we had summoned up out of the abyss. Sometimes, either as their allies or their foes, we fought in strange wars.

I learned the secrets of the black worlds, which roll sunless in the eternal dark, where sentient fungi dream in glowing gardens, and know the secret name of Chaos.

Now the great powers gathered around us. To them, Earth was but a speck. To them, I was but a speck, but to them too I was like a tiny cog in a vast machine, which may seem too small to notice, but which, for the time being, is necessary.

We came together for a kind of sabbat, there, in the upper rooms of the house; and there was among us one from outside, whose skin was like flowing, living, black metal, and whose eyes and face were terrible to look upon. He was the mighty and dreadful messenger of our lord and master.

Yes. If the house-which-is-not-a-house swings through all of eternity like a watch on a chain, then what hand holds the chain? That is the primal potency at the center of time, whose true name cannot be spoken or written, but which is hidden behind the name of Azathoth.