Concourse

There is, I do not know, but I must, somehow. If I could express to you that horrible dread I felt at the concourse of those ancient sorcerers. I was traveling by way of the mind, you see. There is a wonderful freedom in shedding one’s corporeal form, but danger, too, exposure. To most of the waking world, I am completely invisible, passing unseen through the cabinets of powers you fear, and to the rest of the sleeping world, at large, we leave each other alone to his own exploration. These were something else, of a different and older understanding. There was a hint, I think, of the middle east about them, something of sand and desert and things long preserved and forgotten.

I found a current, I think that is the best way to describe it, or a magnetism. It felt weak, but it was new to me; I let it carry me, and it got stronger. Soon, I was rushing, I knew not where—far away from my body—and helpless. Giving in just a little, and suddenly, I couldn’t escape. Over seas and strange lands, past lights, pale, dead lights that yearned for darkness, I flew; then it was headfirst into the sands, and deeply I dove until I passed into a hall, a sunken temple somewhere out there carved with strange reliefs and monstrous grotesqueries—all of hunting. The men, if the simple bipeds painted upon the walls were indeed men, ran after the nameless monsters that were carved in such detail. Regular in their placement, irregular in their shape and kind, as I passed down the hall, I found the pattern: at set intervals, some new monster’s likeness was cut and shaped—I recognized perhaps one dragon in all, but the rest were new and strange to me—each one’s face snarling with an expression of intermingled pain and rage. That was what had been done in stone along this ancient and time buried byway. Someone had, at some point afterward, painted, then, between the reliefs, figures of hunters, dark, shadowy men with spears.

Down this pathway I went, culling my fears, for I could tell that this place, wherever I had come, was long dead. Yet fear persisted, no matter how I reasoned with it, and my soul longed to wake, to come back to my home and the little garden where my body lay in the summer’s warmth. Then in the darkness under the desert, I came to the walkway’s end where a great wall of onyx rose with the dimpled marks of strange writing all along its face. I was helpless at the translation, if indeed my guess is right as to those marks being some series of hieroglyphs, but I wondered at the paths. It ran in columns to the extreme sides, right and left, but the central marks curved and swirled around one bestial face that was all the more unnerving for the subtle hints of humanity the artist had placed there. Like some sort of werewolf, a transition between beast and man, snarled.

Through its open mouth, one could see into the next chamber a table round which were the knotted and twisted forms of dried out corpses. Some wore shrouds, others had not even skin upon their bones but only a matrix of dust. I knew, as I peered through that little opening, that some sort of communion was held by these revenants; something more than corpses sat around that table, and something more than silence was kept in that forgotten burial chamber that the ancient sands now covered.

Then, one of these forgotten sorcerers looked at me, its eyes blazing under the shroud, and I knew its hunger, its desire, for a soul, to reenter time, to once again have some influence in a world that had forgotten its crimes. Crimes! What an understatement. A crime against criminals. No, not of the burglar or rapist or mere murderer, none of the worst stains we know of in our day besmirched him, for such crimes would be human and almost light against the darkness of his being. There was such blackness of sin upon these corpses that I felt them avatars, somehow, of demons long imprisoned, the last little fingerhold of some sort of Hell man had thankfully forgotten or never known till now.

Yet, his cold desire was arrested. He had no power to affect things beyond the onyx wall. In that way, he was more than dead. Even the very truly dead have had some influence you can still feel as they rest. These things were holes. Their shriveled forms were the focal points of dreadful chasms, vacuums which, if that stopper is ever pulled, could swallow the whole world in a vortex of…but words fail.

He did not speak with me, but he communed. Our concourse, he promised me the world, but I would not bring my soul any nearer. You, my friend, sit in your war councils and deliberate on how to defeat the Germans or whoever we’re fighting this time. I think you might have felt that. The evil you know, the atrocities and villainies of our enemies, easily quashed for the simple price of your soul. Really, you might find yourself saying, what is my soul when so many are at risk? But you would destroy yourself and bring in a worse invasion. You would paint yourself a martyr, I think, as you dragged the world into darkness.

I, and those like me, not so very attached to the world; I do not know how to make the world any better. I think you do. But I can see easily how the world might be destroyed, destroyed in a breath, one syllable, a simple, “Yes” would do it.