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see-arcane · 2 years ago

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Death May Die

In Transylvania, an ancient book calls up a familiar face.

In the office of Hawkins and Harker, two men are found dead.

In dimensions far apart and horribly near, Jonathan Harker finds himself put to strange and sinister new work.

All the while, something shadows him through the worlds. It is old. It is cold. And it expects its due.

For those not in the know, this is a sizable ‘what-if?’ scenario based loosely on the premise of The League of Extraordinary Gentlefolk comic-in-progress putting its roots down on Tumblr, a glorious public domain mega crossover and antidote to Alan Moore’s unpleasant take on the idea. Shout out to the amazing @mayhemchicken-artblog for all the fantastic work already put into the project.

Ao3 link here

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

and with strange aeons, even death may die.

They waited for night before bringing out the book. It only seemed appropriate. He had needed to pay the local idiots twice the worth of their guidance to the spot, and another doubling to ensure they stayed on site while the ritual was performed. They thought it was to serve as a guard. Against wolves? Against the strangers who had first chased them down that fateful sunset two years prior and hacked their undead quarry into base elements? Q supposed these were reasonable enough excuses and so let them carry on believing them. It wouldn’t matter what they believed soon.

Q, as he was known in his less than legitimate dealings—which were his most frequent and personally lucrative ones—had been livid for the past two years. Which was a risky thing for his heart, his doctors told him. Q was reaching the far end of his life, his health balanced precariously on everything from peak cuisine to the most high-end of modern medicines. But he would be a liar if he said he had not dabbled in more esoteric treatments. Possibilities, rather. He had had none of his own success with the cures he sought, only played witness. Vulture. The pleading Dickensian waif pressed against the window of the one candy shop his wealth could not buy from.

Eternity. O God, O Devil, O profanities in-between, eternity was real. It was in reach. And, by certain fantastic avenues, it could be applied to the flesh. That was Q’s chief concern above all else. He had come into many a harvested proof of eternity for the soul and of the myriad dumping grounds into which it might fly once the carcass died around it. Even before this grand hunt of his began, Q had known he was a man with a dearth of conscience. It seemed a superfluous thing in his life. Life had never bothered to prove him wrong for thinking so. The holy houses’ various Scriptures were all so much mist and pleading to be believed. It was all well and good that their flocks bought the lie of reward for the suffering and retribution to the glutted; the meek could go on pretending they would inherit the Earth until the day they rotted away in their squalor.

Q and his fellow betters were always happy to toast them and their virtue from their perches encased in filigree and acreage. At least, he had been. Back when he was young. Even when he was silvering. But circumstances had changed. Time had happened and Death was whetting a blade at his doorstep. And, for better or worse, certain uncanny revelations that went beyond the scope of any faith stamped in sacred script or tablet had reached his eyes, and mind, and the shuddering kernel of his heart.

Possibility hovered just out of reach. Safety from time, from the nothings and the worse-than-nothings after his living time ran out. Damn it all, he had been so close with Dr. Black and the experiment inflicted on his wife. Good dear Agnes Black, who had been prey to the soul extraction. The opal prison of spirit, a dazzling crystal chamber of inmost light... So he had been informed.

When Q had returned from Paris on his latest errand, only to discover from Mr. Davies that the imbecilic Travers had been scammed by some pretender with the secret code for exchange, that the imprisoned soul had been stolen again in almost the same heartbeat as the hired help had robbed Dr. Black, he had been angry. When he discovered that Dr. Black himself had died from a shock at the robbery, leaving the secret of extraction a mystery once more, he had been enraged past the point of words. Enough to strain his heart to the edge of safety.

Sighing, he had needed to tranquilize himself. It had been a small balm to see how Travers died. Likewise his pet idiot Sam. They got around to the latter’s errand woman too, once the man had squealed that she had thrown away the code paper. It was something, he supposed. Though it would have been better if his experts had been able to harvest anything worthwhile from them. The brighter minds in his employ kept insisting that such boons as organ transplants would come into the field someday; oh, it would have been lovely to have a few spare hearts to play with. Better still if he might have that deranged miracle man, the very Victor Frankenstein of medical legend, on call. But no. Not possible as yet, Mr. Q, not yet.

And yet, all that may only have been a prelude to bring him here. To the benighted wilds of Transylvania, and to the bloodstained bastard offshoot of Lazarus that might yet be plied for aid. The legends went that the figure he sought had learned his arts and won his vicious immortality from study in the mythic Scholomance. A rare tutelage, a dangerous one, with its infernal lessons being the fruit of years. Years Q did not have. But his visit to Paris had suggested there were other routes to pursue.

Routes that required certain reading. Specifically, reading that Q had also dropped a fair sum to have performed on this night, using a certain tome of unique repute. Mr. Davies stood behind the professor as the man recited; an additional insurance should the fellow have a sudden attack of stage fright or morals. Thankfully, the nebbish gentleman seemed prepared to put his underappreciated profession to use for its own sake, with or without the fattening of his bank account.

The rite was read. The night sky rumbled and groaned though there were no clouds. Q saw the stars had changed out of their proper constellations from one blink to the next and that the moon had been stained as if with disease. Around him, the locals murmured and chafed. He knew from their leader that the scene of that distant November dusk had been enough to put at least half his men off a return for any fee; they had been paid by a monster to do a monster’s bidding. They would not gamble twice.

“I pay better than any monster,” Q had assured, “and the only goal I have in mind is an experiment. No harrowing chases at my age. Should the experiment fail, and it very well might, the worst you and yours shall suffer for your pay is a great deal of boredom in the dark and a few pelts if the wolves get pesky.” He had not told them what would happen if the experiment was successful. Perhaps those few who came out had guessed at half of it. Perhaps they even thought themselves safe, being in the aegis of a former master. Perhaps they just could not afford to turn the money away regardless.

The latter were always Q’s favorites among hirelings. Inevitably the most expendable and dependable help in a single package, bless them.

They made noise as the atmosphere began to curdle. The professor sweated despite the cold, babbling on and on in that brittle tongue as if his own tongue no longer belonged to him enough to stop. Even Mr. Davies, a man as emotive as a statue even in his grimmest work, swallowed thickly in the bonfire’s light. The air itself bunched and writhed around them in protest. It lent an odd quality to the men’s shift from mere anxious talk to outright screams. A din that turned up to a shrieking choir as the bonfire blew out. All that was left to them was the noxious glow of the moon.

Yet that was all Q needed. Even with the creep of cataracts and the night’s own over-dense dark, he could see. All of them could.

What they saw was a thin man of extraordinarily bloodless pallor. He stood with his back to them, his hair a black cascade. When he turned his head, Q saw a single lantern-bright eye find his own. A peephole into Hell. Below that, the white shine of a grin with sabers for teeth.

It was him.

Finally.

“Count Dracula?” Q ventured.

The figure did not answer. Only smiled wider.

“I have heard a great many things of what you accomplished over the course of generations. It saddened me to learn of your loss. My native England would have flourished under such influence as yours, as it may still. I have endeavored, at great expense, to retrieve you from the outer spaces where such powerful souls as yours reside. I’ve no doubt that to you it was only the briefest respite, and I thank you most sincerely for answering our summons.”

The figure examined his nails. Their points caught on the moonlight.

“To be frank, Count, I am in need of your tutelage. Your wisdom. I would seek to do as you do, to exist as you exist. I have sources who name you as one of those rarities among the undead who retained his intellect and will despite the change. This I would—,”

“Are these meant to be for me?” The clawed hand had gestured airily at the gawping guides.

“Yes,” Q said aloud. “I expected you would be thirsty upon return.”

This received a hum of meager acknowledgment. A rosy flare of the eyes. Q braced to see the work of his teeth, the siphoning of life in action.

While he did see the latter, the former played no part.

It was a sight to behold, even in that lunar half-light. There was no avoiding the the red shine as the blood wept and drooled and sweated from the screaming mass of Q’s guides. Their leader garbled something wetly at him—Q, not the Thing ordering his veins to empty themselves through his skin—and tried to raise his pistol. Mr. Davies put a hole through his head first. For the first time since the man joined Q’s employ, Mr. Davies seemed at the edge of attempting mercy, for the muzzle of his gun almost drifted to the heads of the others writhing and crawling on the ground. Q waved him down. Their guest was clearly enjoying himself.

Really, it was somewhat entertaining. The insects upon the lowest rung of the ladder, flopped on stomachs and backs, twitching like beetles fresh from a lost battle with a bootheel. Their blood did not drip down, but rose up in slow glistening loops and arches on the air. Ruby ribbons. They drifted on some unseen river up toward the sharp smile of the harvester, close, closer, closest…

“On second thought, I’m not all that peckish. Never mind.” With a gesture, the blood stopped its migration and landed like a sudden coagulating rain upon the dirt. Its former owners were speckled with the spray. “Let us skip the morsels and the poor attempt at a grovel. You have never asked for anything in your life, and so have no talent for a convincing imitation. Such is the cost of only ever having to buy or steal what you want in the stuttering gold-congested heartbeat you call a life. You do not want lessons. You want a shortcut to immortality. This I can give you.”

The grin widened again. Horribly. Q had been given to understand that a vampire of any strain was prone to over-wide smiles, sometimes of a bestial shape. Count Dracula, he had heard, often wore the toothy rictus of a bat or wolf. This grimace was not that. It looked, if anything, like an amateur sculptor’s rendition of rigor mortis combined with the worst of those freakish creatures dredged up from the lowest shadows of the ocean. The sight of it made his skin want to peel like bad wallpaper and his eyes to crawl away to be spared the proximity.

Quite inexplicably, Q felt certain this Dracula could make such happen.

“However, I require a menial favor of my own. Not these table scraps,” he nodded at the human detritus at their feet, “but a more gourmet offering.”

“Such as what? Name your fare and I shall acquire it.”

“No, you shall not. You couldn’t if you tried. You’ve many a fine dog at your disposal, this one included,” he inclined his head toward Mr. Davies, who managed to appear a shade greener in the dark. “But the individual I have in mind would leave them headless in an instant. Not necessarily by such polite means as a blade. No, we shall go to him. Of you, I ask only the infant task of being present. I would like him to know exactly what has happened since he and his companion swung down their steel.” He gave a small laugh. Q thought he felt something die in both ears. “I am so dearly looking forward to his face. Ah, and before I forget.”

The blazing eyes turned upon the professor. He still clutched the book in both shaking hands. A whiff of ammonia wafted from below his belt.

“You mispronounced fhtagn,” the grin intoned.

“O-Oh?”

“Yes. Wrong intonation on the ta. Just thought you should know.”

“I’m sorry! I’m so terribly sorry—!”

A white hand waved.

“No harm done. Even the cultists a hundred generations deep mispronounce half their empty rites. It is not their fault their makers failed to design them with the appropriate vocalizing necessities. You only have one tongue, one throat, two lungs. But even such grating lilts as yours and theirs can buzz in distant ears.” A great sigh was heaved. “It does the job. As for that,” he leveled a sharp nail at the book, “keep it closed and keep it close. Just because you open the way for a specific guest does not mean others will not seek an opportunity to slip through. Most not nearly so cordial as myself.”

The professor clapped the ancient tome shut as if hit with an electric current and, despite the clear shudder it gave him, hugged the volume close. His eyes darted frantically about the night as if there might already be some tagalong to the Count skulking in the shadows. Mr. Davies did likewise. Q even caught himself at it.

“Just a precaution, my friends. Always wise to be wary under such stars as these. But come, we delay our transaction. Immortality waits at the other end of a final errand in your England. It will require only the smallest effort, just as infinity shall be a mere nothing to me.”

Q did his utmost not to notice the copper odor thickening the air, likewise the almost voyeuristic cast of the moon as it hovered behind the voivode’s looming head. He was alright. Of course he was alright. This smiling horror would have unmade him in an instant if he wished; if he could. The crucifix at Q’s throat and the garlic blossoms lining his coat were as good as armor. Yes. Yes.

“Yes?” he asked, proud at the steadiness of his voice. “What effort is that?”

“You have an appointment to make concerning the acquiring of new real estate.” A forest of teeth bristled as the lips peeled up in an even deeper sickle smile. “One you will make with the firm of Hawkins and Harker.”

Harker. The name echoed in Q’s recollection. A name that had come up more than once as his men went digging. One the ravished lady, the other the pawn husband who had chased Dracula back to his land and—

“If it’s a matter of recompense for your,” Q gestured at his own throat, “premature exit, I have resources that can see to the matter most expediently. Within a week, I can have Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris in a windowless room to be addressed as you see fit. Likewise Mrs. Harker. Give me a fortnight, and I shall have the entire cadre at your feet.”

At this, Count Dracula’s expression did not alter. Only his eyes flickered, though not with red. It was a color without name. A color that seared and flamed with a heat and hate worse than Hell and further than Heaven. It even seemed to boil the Count’s pupils, for, in the space of a moment, they seemed to…

“If I wish for you to decide what I want, Lord Oliver Quentin Brighton, I will surely inform you. In the meantime, you will make your appointment with Hawkins and Harker.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“Of course.” The eyes were merely red. The pupils were merely pupils. “It is new to you, isn’t it? Acquiescence. But it is only natural for you small kings among men. No matter. Let us be gone and leave the wolves to their late supper.”

“Your coffin,” Mr. Davies croaked, his eyes not quite rising to meet Dracula’s. “We have a coffin filled with earth waiting with the horses.”

“How thoughtful. But I shall not need it. Death has provided more than rest enough. It is a wonder anyone fears it as they do.” Dracula turned from them, the anatomy of his face realigning into a configuration that was nearly wistful. “Death is rest. Death is respite. Death is an end and a close and a one-way threshold to what comes next.” The wistfulness crimped under another put-upon sigh as he faced Q a last time. “But even death may die. Come, little man. Let us go kill yours.”

Jonathan Harker was fairly certain his eyes were ready to fall out of his head. He was not certain whether this would be a loss or a gain for him. If nothing else, it would mean not having to scour yet another page of yet another sheaf of yet another wad of potentially vital—or just as potentially trivial—news reports and dusty arcana surrounding the overlap between ancient powers and modern bouts of uncanny happenings of late. These quarries were of the sort that made the miseries surrounding Dracula’s activity seem like a mere hiccough compared to the more odious work of these weightier horrors.

When had that happened, by the way?

Certainly the League had been no stranger to supernatural threats since its inception. Likewise for the various disconnected heroes, victims, and individuals carrying both banners who confronted human and inhuman perils alike. Prying into the histories of specific locations revealed cases of sporadic events that mirrored the attacks and accidents of the present day, though those older cases were given greater due than the contemporary instances; scientific explanations appeared to melt away so much of superstition that it worked in favor of the truly paranormal.

Hysteria! Bad dreams! Anxiety! Poor diet! And, of course, that easy and all-encompassing blanket: Madness!

Jack and Van Helsing were both of the bittersweet opinion that the latter was responsible for the seeming uptick in overt supernatural evils flexing their muscles. So much had been disproven that the bogeymen were shielded by disbelief until it was too late to admit the stranger truth. Jonathan hadn’t much room to disagree with them, considering how well denial had played into that first fateful stay in Transylvania. By the time he’d broken through to acceptance of the impossible reality, he was already a prisoner.

But then, Holmes had made his own fair point: It was just as likely that events and entities, be they weird or wondrous, had always been happening, but this budding age of information and interconnection now shined a far broader light upon the shadows in which they dwelled. More lines could be drawn between A and B, X and Y, and the result simply illustrated phenomena that had been present all along. In this, Jonathan could also find decent footing.

Except…

If these miracles and threats have always been here, even in a fraction of the occurrences we have met, how is it they could have slipped into obscurity at all? How could we mislabel any of them as superstition rather than hold to them as fact as time and progress marched on? How, unless they were rare enough once upon a time, enough to be shrugged off as mere fantasy, only for them to raise their heads in greater number today? For all that we’ve done, all we’ve accomplished, does it not seem that there are more and more extraordinary things in need of our attention recently? Things of increasing potency, increasing pressure and power. As if we were all frogs in the same pot with the heat turning up and up as we prove ourselves too sturdy to be cooked in lesser temperatures.

There is more happening today than there was before. I know it. I feel it. It itches in the cold corners of me that whisper and chafe and tug me after the scent of some fresh Thing in need of hunting. And I think it is going to kill me. I don’t know what, I don’t know how. But I am sure of it. Something extraordinary will happen soon. And I will die to it.

Today.

“No, you will not,” he half-yawned to himself. “You’re just tired. That is the whole of it.” He ground the heels of both palms against his eyes, trying to crush the fatigue heat out of them. “You haven’t been this bad since—,”

Tonight is mine. Tomorrow is yours!

He bit his tongue to the edge of bleeding. Bit and bit and did not think of—

Awake, awake, the sound of her screams in your ears, fell asleep, stayed asleep, your idiot brain pinned under the monster’s thumb while he was there, in your bed, in her throat—

“Stop. Just stop. Not here.”

His teeth did not unlock to say this. No more than his voice rose above a whisper. It had been all he could do not to simply throw his last client’s paperwork in his pinched face rather than locking into his default charm to win the prickly fellow back into the dealing. Despite having a small and highly capable legion at Hawkins and Harker’s disposal, it was not unheard of to have those of the upper echelons insist on dealing directly with the head of the firm, as if this would somehow imbue their potential properties with greater value. A feat that may have been more doable if it were not for Jonathan splitting himself down the middle to juggle the firm and his work with Mina and the League.

That, if nothing else, was proof enough that the situation was starting to bloat.

What had begun as a comparatively leisurely balance of his working worlds was now a precarious act that risked his livelihood and those of his employees on one end and actual lives on the other. And that went without mentioning the strain of the performance for Mina. It was already hell enough for her and Irene to maintain the cogs that made the League tick. If she knew exactly how close to collapse he was at any given moment in these last few months, her own focus would shatter like glass.

Not that she did not already suspect something, of course. Whatever psychic awareness now roosted in her mind after Dracula’s attack—a power that even Clarimonde suggested might have been jostled loose rather than simply implanted and left as a souvenir—had flowered tremendously. With practice, intuition had extended to such a powerful certainty that she could pinpoint every member of the League within a mile. Jonathan, she said, could now be detected anyplace in the world. Such had been proven on a recent adventure that had placed them at opposite ends of the world. To chip away at her nervousness, Mina had used her journal to record the rough global coordinates she’d assumed Jonathan to be in alongside Fogg’s terse company on any given date, and both had been shocked to find her readings exact in every case.

“Better call up Nemo,” Griffin had hummed. “See if he can’t repeat the underwater trick with a deep enough trench.”

It was a poor joke on more than one count. Especially as, not long afterwards, the Nautilus had brushed terribly, unthinkably close to its own deep-sea peril. Worse than the malformed sea creatures. Worse than the aquatic folk they had met off America’s eastern coast. So awful, in fact, that Nemo had seen fit to dock the Nautilus in the secure shore Art had arranged, the better to let himself and his men find refuge on dry land for a spell. The very first threads of silver had cut through the Captain’s hair. Aronnax had handed Van Helsing his latest journal with three conditions:

“Read it. Record what you need. Then kindly burn it.”

Nemo’s input had been colder still:

“It is older than the sea, whatever it is. It was never native to the ocean, or Earth itself. I refuse to believe it. Dead for now. But not forever.” His eyes, bloodshot obsidian, had rolled to meet Jonathan’s. They seemed to hunt for answers there. “It thought that at us while we walked in those giants’ halls. Dreamed it at us. And it dreamed you too. Something you’re meant to do.”

“What?” Jonathan remembered asking. He couldn’t remember if he had been shaken by the notion or by the fact that he hadn’t felt shaken. Only tired. Expectant.

“There were no words in it, only an intention. Something in the tone of,” Nemo had frowned, “‘Take a message.’ I don’t understand it. It seemed too blunt, too mundane in the thick of all the nightmare that saturated that place. Yet all the men felt the same when I asked them of it. Those who could bring themselves to speak.”

That was two weeks ago. An experience added to a pile that had been sectioned off to contain the sundry ancient menaces that had been unearthed in northern England and Wales. The death of Francis Leicester, despite occurring in London, had led them northward to such horrors as the resurrection and revenge of the demigoddess Helen Vaughn, to the Little People and the vanishing of Professor Gregg, the ethnologist whose absent body had been blamed by a lawyer on a mere misadventure in a river, to the white figures who danced and bled hungry magic in the hills, to the Great God Pan and his satyr-scratching at the walls of reality.

On a limestone boulder, their most recent finding was sent to them by Gregg’s former governess and secretary, Miss Lally, alongside a concerned party, Mr. Phillips. The latter had gone inspecting the area the lauded Professor Gregg had vanished in—for Miss Lally would not bring herself or Gregg’s freshly orphaned twins back there for any ransom—and discovered some odd writing upon a limestone boulder, etched in red earth. He’d copied it, given it to Miss Lally, and the resulting message had been decoded by way of a black stone seal unearthed in Babylon. She had sent the message their way:

‘The hills fold. The soul bends. Pale man of death will hear the message.’

Which all went without mentioning the more infectious mess of The King in Yellow. What had begun as a single ominous volume bound in snakeskin presenting itself as a one-of-a-kind volume full of reality-denting power was now, inexplicably, appearing in high-end bookshops and the murmurs of the theatergoing crowds as an inorganic urban legend. Something that rubbed shoulders with the Scottish Play’s rule in terms of bad luck, but worse. Jonathan and Mina had seen a paperback of it looking at them through a window less than a week ago. And then Lord Henry Wotton had picked it up on a dare.

Dorian Gray had caught him doing it. He’d seen Wotton’s eyes skim dully over the ‘pedestrian’ masquerade scene’s opening act. Gray had tried to get the book away from him, to stop him reaching the second act. Wotton had laughed and let him burn the thing, promising he’d not touch the accursed volume now. After all, a book penned by the Devil should at least be more thrilling than the average gothic terror and the first act had thoroughly disappointed him…

“I should have known,” Gray had moaned as, in some secret room, his portrait wailed and tore at itself in the canvas, “I should have known he’d get another copy. Of course he wanted to prove himself better than the story. Everyone knows it now. Everyone knows it does not strike until you read the second act, that’s the rumor in every snug from the highest end to the lowest pub, and he just couldn’t—couldn’t help himself—,” And he had wept in full, tearing at himself without leaving a mark.

Lord Wotton presumably bought his new copy and read that infamous second act. Whatever it was. There was no way to tell from the man himself. Jack had heard from his former staff that what was left of him had not changed since his family placed him under the asylum’s care, for better or worse. Only that he continued to talk or scream or plead or patter with party guests that were not there, and occasionally had to be stopped from ‘unmasking’ himself by clawing his face.

“I say, mine appears to have been pasted on,” he was reported to say, “Does anyone have a letter-opener?” Then, as late as last week, “Oh, and His Tattered Majesty deigned to pass on that he is quite busy at the moment. Tell Dorian to tell his pallid solicitor friend to take a message.”

Naturally, all eyes had started gravitating Jonathan’s way. Concerned gazes, wondering gazes, gazes that conspired about how to politely insist he perhaps take an extended vacation from the outside world and have a good long stay in the League’s densely warded walls. Jonathan had bitten his tongue before he could mutter a word about the sadly dubbed, ‘Wallpaper Women,’ who had, paradoxically, been victims of a sort of yellow—or was it Yellow?—wallpaper in a bedroom of a country home where a throng of wife after wife was kept shut up and immobile ‘for their own good.’ The diary entries of the latest victim had gone into harrowing detail of where she and her predecessors might have gone after the room had its full effect.

A diary they had found just prior to unearthing a loose board under the bolted bed, pressed up against the wall where the hideous paper had never been clawed.

An edition of The King in Yellow had been there. Not snakeskin, not the paperback that would not even be on shelves yet. But a hardcover whose pages were worn with reading and re-reading by some unknown hand. The name scratched inside read, Hildred Castaigne. Below that was a bookseller’s stamp, declaring it had been sold in an American shop.

In the year 1919.

If some force is out there making plans around me at this scale, I don’t see any way of guarding against it. This is not the fodder of penny dreadfuls. Not cutthroats and tyrants, vampires and werewolves. There is only so much we can prepare for or fight against. I feel now what I first felt in that damned castle. Powerless. Even with all I have done since, all I have gained, I feel it. I know it. Whatever means to happen will happen to me. Sitting in our headquarters waiting for it to come is only painting a target on everyone else.

None of which he said aloud.

All of which Mina had read in his face as if he had written it there in crayon. He’d tried to smile and she could not mirror it.

“Just a while longer,” she had whispered into his neck. In bed, they had folded around each other like two hands gripping. Her warm, him cold. Even now. So, so cold. “Tell them you’re ill, tell them it’s an emergency. Holt and the rest can manage well enough.”

“They have been managing for almost a month. Robert is a talent and a godsend, but he and my former fellows can’t cover for my absence indefinitely. It is not enough to our bigger clients that good work is done. If rumor comes along to stain a reputation—say, to do with the flighty new boy who Hawkins left his business and estate to, followed immediately by his dying—,”

“You are not a new boy. You’ve been steering the firm for two years now.”

“Which is ‘new’ to anyone over forty years of age. I have been able to keep several plates spinning for a while now. But I cannot ignore that particular plate any longer than this current stint. Not if I don’t want to step on important toes and leave us and my employees holding the bill. It was miracle enough that I happened to catch on to that trouble with the ‘Lady Ducayne’ business. Saved us a lost client and a few lives in the same breath. But that isn’t the sort of coincidence that crops up regularly.”

“Does Hawkins’ legacy matter more to you than your own life?”

“Mina.”

“Does it matter more than not leaving me a widow before we’ve had even half a decade to wear our rings?”

“Mina.”

“Jonathan. Please.”

“I cannot hide in here forever. Life won’t allow for that, no matter how mundane or monstrous. I have to.” He’d breathed into her hair. “You know I have to.”

“Then I should be with you. I never did get to play secretary to you.”

A writhing chill had moved in his bones at that.

“We are a bit too late on that track, I’m afraid. The position is taken.” Then, lower. “And the League needs you more.”

“Do not say that. Do not talk to me about need.” Her hand had trembled where she gripped him. His did likewise. “For God’s sake, Jonathan, it’s just a job! Retire early, take up a new vocation, become a travelogue writer, do something, anything that does not—that doesn’t—,”

“Put me at risk? I have been at risk since the night Dracula thrust me into his caleche. Risk has never left me. It has been walking side by side with me every day and every night by dint of what we do here. How we help the world and safeguard it from being devoured. That won’t change if I’m here or if I’m in my neglected office.”

Or, he did not say and failed not to think, becoming the unofficial hunting dog and part-time psychopomp of our merry band. Death and I have been holding hands since I first picked up the kukri. Now it won’t let go even when the blade is sheathed. It is here, now, in our room, Mina. It is everywhere I am and it speaks. Constantly. Sometimes a whisper. Sometimes a howl. But it speaks to me. It steers me. It wears my skin like a glove. Only in times of need; that I will not deny. But it does all these things—and it has not been wrong once.

I doubt it is wrong now. About me. About how much time is left.

And Mina, Mina, I do not want to bring my end knocking at this chamber door. Not where it might touch you. Not where you would have to see it happen.

So here he was, in his office instead. He would not have dared to stay inside if he had felt that warning prickle upon seeing any of his employees. Their…what was it? Life clock? Corporeal limit? Whatever it was that dictated the approach of a life’s end, it had not appeared to flare out at him in any of the familiar faces. Not even good Robert Holt’s wan countenance showed a trace of danger. This, when it had taken three of the doctors in their menagerie to help resuscitate the bedraggled man after his own hellish stint with a supernatural master.

He had stayed with the Harkers for the better part of a year before they walked him back through the minutiae of acquiring his own flat again. Helped in no small part by his already having a job waiting for him at Hawkins and Harker. Between this and how soundly the so-called ‘Beetle’ had been addressed with the aid of Clarimonde and a steady grisly application of cold steel, Robert Holt had already more than sworn a knight’s loyalty to the League’s secrets and more than a relative’s love to the Harkers themselves. A fact compounded by what both Jonathan and Mina had divulged of their own experiences—an account that had pried open the full deluge from Robert’s miserable tongue and ended in a catharsis salted with tears.

All of which was to say that Jonathan found himself immediately relieved to see that Robert’s life looked hale and long before him. In turn, Robert lit up upon seeing Jonathan like a lantern erupting into a campfire.

“Jonathan,” he’d begun. Aware of the many heads turning, he’d coughed and began again with, “Mr. Harker, good morning! How was your trip?”

“Longer than I’d have liked it to be,” he said in full earnest. “But there are some clients more demanding than others.”

“Harker, you have a small army to do your runaround work for you these days. You keep doing the grunt work and sweeping dust off your desk and you’ll go out like a candle.”

This came from Mr. Bentley, who had, in fact, recently announced he was making a change of occupation to start up his own firm. He’d been a solicitor for far longer under Hawkins and had seen the ‘writing on the wall,’ so to speak, in terms of nepotism; even if it was between a man and a boy who was son in everything but blood. Jonathan had never been able to tell if the man’s ribbing was in true mirth or a manner of bitter coping with the clerk-turned-solicitor; one who had made up for Peter Hawkins’ kindness twice over in his adamant work. And then, after the misery of the Transylvanian client had come and gone, there was the gift-wrapped firm and Hawkins’ own keenly timed natural death—as if the old man had been holding out just long enough to pass the barely-revived successor his keys in apology and farewell—Jonathan the Clerk was suddenly Mr. Harker the Employer.

No, Jonathan did not quite blame him if he was sour or not. Robert, knowing what he did, had a few hackles up already. These hackles came down when Bentley got a better look at his almost-ex-employer in full, and all the smiles, reinforced or otherwise, melted away into something very near to worry.

“God’s sake, where did this last one drag you off to? Back to Transylvania?”

Jonathan bit his inner cheek as even more heads craned around. Worse, Robert was scrutinizing him up close. The word ‘Transylvania’ had become a prickly word about the office ever since Jonathan’s initial return to the country. Rumors simmered in whispers and theories whenever they thought he couldn’t hear them. Usually in a concerned spirit as much as a baffled one. ‘Halfdead Harker’ was one of the favored epithets. One fellow, thoroughly drowned in eggnog around December of last year, had asked him outright if he was a vampire. Laughing. Jonathan had laughed back, telling him he certainly hoped not, or else he would have to quit the restaurants altogether. Ha ha.

But he had been careless in certain moments. Too much strength shown, hands too freezing in their grip, eyes too bright and devoid of blinking. And, of course, there was his habit of the kukri. Always, always on his hip. That, his odd turns of health, and the unmissable change to hair and eyes all added up to some kind of oddity. But this was all a chaser to the initial surprise of his returning state. Silver-white streaks in the brunet mop, shadows branded in bloodshot eyes, and seemingly half his personality blasted out of his skull during some nameless nightmare spent in foreign forests and the care of a nuns’ hospital. Wary looks had found him at every corner as he clawed his way out of shock to go over the paperwork and preparation needed to be a partner…followed by suddenly becoming sole head and owner of the firm.

Being that his eyes worked excessively well of late, Jonathan had not been able to avoid his own telling look in the mirror. No matter how he practiced his smiles, how clean he was shaven, how smart the suit, he looked like Hell’s own errand boy. Again. Pretending he did not know this, he rubbed his searing eyes and ignored the sensation of a clock tick-tick-ticking down in his head, and muttered something hasty about:

“Ah, nothing so dire this time. Only I fear I haven’t been sleeping well.”

Or at all.

“But no rest for the wicked,” he’d attempted to laugh, feet already sidling him toward the office door. “The Sandman will simply have to make his appointment after Lord Brighton’s.” With that, he scurried out of range of any further looks or questions. He almost bolted the door. Instead, he made his usual cursory check—the frame and molding’s varied sigils and holy symbols still had their places etched stealthily into the woodwork. The mirror still hung at head-height by the door. Good. Good, good, good.

He arranged his desk so that Lord Brighton’s papers were set to one side, the few things he’d taken from the League to peruse—he may as well see if there was something more he could do if this seeming countdown proved to be a mere bout of paranoia—set to another, and the day’s newspaper on top of both. Impulse had drawn him to the day’s print, then ordered him to flip to the obituaries.

Derleth, Howard, passed at age 52. Admired professor of ethnologic and linguistic studies of America’s Miskatonic University,—

A prickle of recognition goaded him into circling the university’s name in pen. Beside it, he scratched a note: Possible coincidence, but mention to others.

—was found dead in his rooms at the Lillup Hotel, having apparently died in his sleep. He leaves behind many fond students and faculty.

That’s a lie.

How did he know?

Because you are what you are. For what little time is left to be such.

“What I am is tired and busy. No more, no less.”

It was less than convincing as a mantra, yet he stuck to it. At least until his eyes began to glaze over. Until the clock tolled louder, louder, louder in his head and his chest and that alien cellar that had carved itself out in his soul. Text swam and Charon held vigil at a river and he was so cold he could not feel it and oh, he wished he had left Mina more than a letter this morning, had kissed her cheek and lips another minute before he slunk away from her with all the guilt of a cheat, too afraid to wake her and be caught in her words and her love to leave, and couldn’t it all just stop for a moment, just a heartbeat to let him sleep and breathe and live as more than a cog crushed in the machinery of too many industrious works of men and monsters and madness beyond both, please, please, please—

There was a knock at the door.

“Mr. Harker?”

“You can come in, Robert,” he said as he shuffled the League’s heap of leads into a locked drawer. “And Jonathan’s still fine in here.”

You call this fine?

Robert ducked into the room looking like the picture of worry. He shut the door behind him and he too seemed to ponder sliding the bolt home. Instead he searched Jonathan’s face.

“I understand if you cannot give details. But has your,” his pitch lowered, “other vocation been wearing you down? Because you look…”

“Dead?” He watched Robert purse his lips. “I know. Thankfully, I’m not there yet. Too much to do. But since we’re on the topic—,”

“We aren’t—,”

“—you do know what arrangements have been made in the event that circumstances arise that might remove me from the picture? I know there is not as much history in place between us as others in our unique circles, comparatively speaking. But more than enough has happened in our short time together to make it…make it prudent that…”

His lips twitched up in what tried to be a grin and only managed a grimace.

“Jonathan, please, has something happened? Why are you talking like this?” He could hear as much plea in the other man’s voice to not hear the answer as much as to learn it. Mr. Holt’s life had been a deeply unhappy one with almost more losses than mere indignities. “Are you..?”

Tick. Tick. Tick.

“Have you been studying for the exam?” he got out steadily enough. “If you’re stuck on anything, remember not to be shy about going to Norton or Utterson. They seem the types to have more developed methods than my burn-at-both-ends regimen.”

“I—yes, I’ve been practicing.” Robert was at the desk now. “Jonathan. Has something happened?”

Not yet. Give it a quarter of an hour if this infernal internal clock has its way.

“No. Just keeping prepared. Making sure everything is up to date.”

“Yes, you mentioned as much before. Back when you made the second trip to Transylvania.” Jonathan had been fiddling with a pen. The pen nearly cracked. He set it down on the desk and folded his hands so he had something to grip without it breaking. “I’ll—I’ll go to the others if you won’t say. If they remain hushed, I’ll understand it’s a larger secret, and that I won’t pry at. I know enough to understand that even my nightmare was a frail thing compared to other horrors you’ve tromped through. But if I go to—to Utterson, or the Nortons, or to Mina,” Jonathan clutched his hands so hard the knuckles creaked, “and find they are just as in the dark, then I and everyone else will know you are hiding something. Some potentially fatal pain.” Robert’s pitch lowered again. “And I was given to understand that such things were barred from the League and its friends.”

“They are. But we aren’t in the League right now. And, supposing something was wrong, something I would not, could not share, do you doubt I’d have good reason to withhold it, Robert? Really, I might not even have a secret, fatal or otherwise. I could be imagining the whole thing. If I am, then I will gladly share the matter over lunch. If not?” Jonathan shrugged. “Then it will be a secret well-kept.”

“Jonathan—,”

“I believe Lord Brighton has just arrived.” This was as much intuition as distraction. He had the sense that strangers had entered the building a moment before some small murmur of greeting began its tremble through the space outside the office. “Would you show him in, please, Robert?”

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Robert Holt regarded him with a look that might have passed for stern if it was not so wounded by premonition. Jonathan tasted sickness at seeing it.

“…You will not be rid of me or this subject today.”

Jonathan did not correct him. Only waited until the door was between them again before he brought his clasped hands and his own temple together in the first true prayer he’d made since he began falsifying his deific pleas in that wretched traveler’s journal after that bloody October night.

God. If You give me nothing else in this life, give me peace. If what I feel today, now, is true, and this is when I end, take care of them all. They have given too much and saved too many for them to go without blessing. Protect them. Let them prosper. Let the devils worse than men or Hell can make be turned back into the shadows so that they may rest. My God, my true God, I do not even know if You are what answered me in those first horrid hours when life took its surreal turn. Did You save me? Did You burn the vampire’s hand and my love’s innocent brow? Did You make me this cold and killing Thing when I swore my soul as the bargain for Dracula’s end? Are You what whispers to me? I do not know. Perhaps I never will.

I will suffer that ignorance gladly in life and death if only You will do right by those I love. Mina, my Mina, she deserves it if no other.

Please.

Knock-knock.

“Lord Brighton and company to see you, Mr. Harker.” Robert’s voice, flattened into workplace cordiality. Jonathan scrubbed his face with both palms and sat up straight, smile pinned in place.

“Come in.”

The door opened. Three men walked in. With each face, Jonathan Harker became privy to a new certainty.

The first man was dressed as a gentleman of burgeoning middle age. He had the deaths of many a man, woman, and the occasional child stained in his palms and crusted under his nails. His latest was Professor Derleth, who had died in bed, but in no way asleep.

The second man was a richly wrapped specimen of elderly leather and ravenous eyes. In a hand heavy with jeweled and signet rings, he clutched a wrapped item, the size of a large book. It struck at some secret sense in Jonathan and appeared to dent the air around it like the point of a dull knife dimpling a throat.

The third man was not a man. It had never even been human, despite the face it wore. A face that smiled out at him from a familiar fanged mouth.

And from the mirror upon the wall.

“Make a move or raise your voice, and everyone in this building will suffer the consequences before you can brandish any weapon,” said the old man he took to be Lord Brighton. His murderer shut the door behind them all. Bolted it. “Do you doubt that, Mr. Harker?”

As the question hit the air, so did a sudden and horrendous ripple of awareness. A possibility that flickered on the edge of his consciousness like a candle guttering, unsure if it would be doused or not. The candle was the lives of every person in the building. And, he was sickened to feel, the hazier lives of those in the buildings bookending their own. He kept his hands on the desk and himself in his chair. Ice and bile slid down his throat.

“No,” Jonathan heard himself say. His attention hadn’t departed from the Thing wearing Count Dracula’s face. Nor had it looked away from him. Purest delight radiated from it—him?—and irrevocably stained the emotion with the filter of the unthinkable mind producing it. In the mirror, the red eyes burned away into a new color. The pupils boiled until they showed three lobes each.

“Good. This business should conclude readily enough. Or, if the account I received proves even half true, the Count may take his time.” Lord Brighton ran his thumb along the spine of the wrapped parcel. Black velvet. “Apologies for the—,”

“No.” Jonathan spoke toward Brighton, but still his eyes did not move from the face of ‘Dracula.’ He realized with mounting alarm that he couldn’t, even when he tried. “No, we turned Dracula to dust.”

“And we put that dust back together. It was quite a simple maneuver, really.” The black velvet wrapping was peeled away with a showman’s eagerness. Something of pride was stitched through the overall miasma of anticipation coming off the old man. “Once you start reading the process walks you along itself.”

The velvet was tossed aside. From the corner of his frozen eye, Jonathan saw the book and felt a nauseous epiphany turn over in him. No, it was not The King in Yellow. But this tome had appeared more than once in the League’s more recent researches. Enough that Quincey had suggested a group make the trip to the grim little corner of Massachusetts where the Miskatonic University was supposed to have an unabridged copy of the blighted book in its library. There was little doubt now that the campus’ volume had been borrowed by its recently departed faculty member. Nor would it likely return to those shelves again.

The Necronomicon stared at him as plainly as the smiling Thing idling in the corner. If with less interest.

Inside him, time was ticking faster. Faster. Faster.

Against all hope, he had to ask, “You used that to call him here?”

“To call him to the killing ground where you so rudely ended a long and miraculous career of life beyond the shackles of nature? Yes.”

‘Dracula’ paused the stare to roll his eyes. In the mirror, he had far more than two to do so with. Albeit with far less skin.

“Shall I guess that the goal was a tradeoff for your own immortality?” The proud look curdled at the edges. “Don’t take offense. I’ve seen too many of you not to recognize the type by now. Nine out of ten self-serving idiots chasing the supernatural are doing it to give themselves a longer life span, or power, or both.” Because he hadn’t looked away, because he could not look away, he addressed the summoned party. “Is that what you promised him?”

The sharp teeth bared another giddy inch.

“Yes. A promise I shall keep in exchange for all his arduous labor. It is the least I can do after he has brought me here to my good friend, so that we might finally catch up on lost time.”

“I must give you credit,” Jonathan managed around the boulder of dread growing in his chest. “You do a fine impression.”

“As fine as it needs to be.” The grin grew again. It showed too much. Something slithered behind the prison bars of spindle teeth. “At least for your sake.”

“I’m going.” This came from the man who had been silent since entering the room. A greenish hue traced the lines of a face that seemed wholly unused to anything resembling discomfort. Jonathan realized he’d kept his head ducked the entire time, refusing to risk looking at the Thing in Dracula’s skin. “Do what you’re going to do, but I’m not staying. I’m not.” He turned to the door.

“Davies,” said Brighton.

Mr. Davies’ hand was on the knob. He fumbled a sweating moment with it, having forgotten about the bolt.

“Davies—,” Brighton grated again, then stopped.

A white hand was suddenly resting on Mr. Davies’ shoulder. The man froze as if nails were driven through both feet. Still, he knew better than to look.

“It’s quite fine,” said Dracula’s voice. “But I must tell you something before you go.” Jonathan watched the lips move as if mouthing something in mute pantomime. He heard nothing, but felt as if something were crawling just beneath the level of his senses, an insectile squirming that trundled over him in a wide and pointless detour before turning to burrow into Mr. Davies’ skull. Even with his back to him, Jonathan could tell the final fibers of nerve had rotted away like old silk. Davies’ head trembled on the thick neck, shaking in frantic negation.

“No. Please, no. I-I wasn’t part of this. I was never part of this!”

“Oh, but you were. You are. It is an unseemly thing to disregard the people who get the job done for their master. Besides, it is as little to me as your vocation has been to you. Even if it has always operated in the opposite direction. No need for thanks.” The abomination in the mirror laughed with every mouth it had. “You are most welcome.”

Mr. Davies made a small high noise in reply, scrabbling at the lock with sweat-greased fingers. He’d barely undone the bolt before he froze again. This time with a spasming shudder. Alarm shot up Jonathan’s spine and reflex made him try to stand—only to find himself locked down in his chair. There was not even the nicety of a strained muscle allowed. In every inch, every nerve and bone, he was as set and immobile as a doll. A doll with a mechanism inside. Tick, tick, ticking.

Nearly there. Nearly done.

Mr. Davies jerked and twisted as rosy foam gurgled and bled up from his mouth. His hands clawed at throat and chest while the whites of his eyes showed all the way around, rolling frantically to Lord Brighton. Lord Brighton furrowed his brow in either confusion or irritation as the man buckled to his knees. An entire disappointed moue formed as Mr. Davies wasted the last of his energy on reaching for his employer’s trouser leg. Lord Brighton stepped nimbly back as the hand fell limp.

Then Mr. Davies was dead. Cooling and drooling into the rug.

No. No, that’s wrong. His life is still present. It’s stretching out and away into the future. He must be having a fit. He should come out of it…

Yet Mr. Davies continued to cool. All semblance of life and its animal spark was already faded out of his eyes. The latter had rolled up to gawp at Jonathan in that final spasm. Blind, they still seemed to see. Dead, the man still seemed to plead.

There is no ‘seem.’ He’s there. You know he’s there.

Jonathan did. Jonathan could still do nothing. Just sit and stare and wait.

Say something! Call for someone! You can still talk!

And what could he say? What would shouting to the sane world outside the room do except to turn a potential massacre into certainty?

“Well, that is a pity,” Lord Brighton huffed. “But I suppose I wouldn’t have required his services beyond nudging the more menial pen pushers and porters going forward. On that note, Count, I feel it is prudent that we turn to business. There is only so much time before some pest at the door comes in to nag Mr. Harker about some trivial matter and there is mess enough to consider with Mr. Davies—,”

“You truly cannot help yourself, can you?” Dracula’s voice hummed. His eyes, in his head and in the glass and in the shadows growing dense as ink about the room, crept on Jonathan like centipedes. “You see how he can’t, don’t you? Who was that fellow in the ramble that would-be detective fed you? The storyteller was Dyson, who took the telling from a sad rag of a man named Selby—there was something about a hand in red chalk…”

“Sir Thomas Vivian,” Jonathan murmured. Tick. Tick. Tick. Down to heartbeats now. Make them last. “The royal family doctor who tried to kill his friend over buried treasure in the hills.”

“Ah, yes. How did it go?” The voice of Count Dracula changed abruptly to an unknown middle-aged timbre, one of affected upper class tone: “‘Let us talk of business matters, Selby.’” The following laugh was the Count’s, likewise the voice after it, though both were laced with something new. Something that crawled. “He was rich as sin as well. Too dense to consider anything but getting more gold, accursed and inhumanly wrought as it was. Went for his poor companion’s throat without half a thought, not thinking for an instant about the flint blade his friend had just revealed as his proof of discovery. Oh, greed. It does something to the intellect as much as the soul, I think. That and too much inbreeding among certain branches of nobility. It eats a hole through the already pitiful granule your sad lot call a brain. All they can fathom is themselves. The only importance of the future is how much more gratification might exist for them there. Tedious in the extreme and gluttonous to the point of idiocy.”

At all this, Lord Brighton had managed to grow some irate roses in his shriveled face. His leathern fingers gripped the Necronomicon tighter.

“Not so idiotic that I cannot undo what’s been done, Count. Derleth gave us that much.”

“Before you murdered him,” Jonathan put in. “Right? You couldn’t risk him returning the borrowed book. There is a chance he told you the truth, supposing he didn’t suspect your intentions. There is twice as much chance he fed you a lie as he put the obvious together, leaving behind a spring trap to bring some worse horror on your head. Or the head of whatever sacrificial reader you might try to bribe or coerce into action. But neither option matters. You already damned yourself and everyone else the moment you opened the door to him. Whatever he is.”

Lord Brighton turned his frown on Jonathan.

“What are you on about?”

“He is not Count Dracula.” He fought his voice as he said it, urging it not to shake here, at the last moment. Fought harder not to believe the words that would leave him now, true as they and all their portents were: “He’s a god.”

A knot of fear and revulsion twisted in his stomach as the room’s air flexed. Bristling the way a cat will when it’s pleased. Jonathan tasted his heart and his breakfast rising up when this was joined by a final laugh. Every light in the office and the sunlight in the window stained at the noise.

“That I am. But let us not torment the poor supporting maggot any longer. He does not care for such things either way. All he wants is his candy and all I want is to stop having him in the room. So.” The god that was not Dracula stood from his seat—

Tick-tick-tick—

—and turned a bored smile on Lord Brighton. His roses had wilted again to something clammier.

“When you appear to Ellison down the line, do give him my best wishes. As best you can, anyway. It shall be hard enough work attempting to scream.”

“Wh—,” was as far as Lord Oliver Quentin Brighton got before he vanished. The god sighed in Dracula’s voice, the very essence of relief.

“Finally.”

“Where is he?” Jonathan asked, not wanting to know. But he wanted the next moment to happen even less.

Tickticktick.

“Do you recall the account of the Dreamlands? The little escapade Miss Pleasance and some gaggle of others passed through once upon a time?”

“Yes.” The word barely rose above a whisper. His attention was stuck on the alteration of the god’s eyes. All pretense of simple red had burned away from them. They did not blink as he strolled around the desk and bent down to Jonathan’s shoulder.

“The underside of that. He will live there now, solid and eternal. Well, I say solid,” Jonathan winced as a claw like an obsidian spade grew from the white hand’s thumbnail and slit first his tie, then his shirt collar open, “but he’s more on the viscid side.” In a sing-song lilt, he elaborated, “A great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. He will leave a moist trail when he moves. Blotches of diseased, evil gray will come and go on his surface, as though light is being beamed from within.”

Ticktickticktickticktick—

“Why?”

The shirt collar was folded down and away.

“Why what?”

“Why are you doing this? Why are you wearing him?”

“I figured you would appreciate a familiar face over one of my others. A personal touch, you know. Even this is for quaintness’ sake. I can feel your memories as they turn over in there.” The spade nail tapped Jonathan’s brow. “A little picture book flipping through its pages. It was this side of the throat he went for, yes?”

“Don’t—,”

But the teeth were already in his neck. Where he had not felt Dracula’s bite when it found him that night in June, this one came with a feeling worse than pain. The theft of blood seemed only cursory while something else, far deeper and more integral than flesh, screeched and thrashed against invasion. Jonathan thought dismally of a blind and groping hive sinking into the folds of his mind, building colonies and turning over the paraphernalia of his life with awful feelers. He would rather take Dracula a hundred times over. A thousand.

Instead he could only sit and bleed and choke—and worse. Think of Mina. His mind fled to her as it always did in its worst throes. The eternal safety blanket, clung to whenever some bleak end seemed near, good-bye, good-bye, hide in her, say farewell, last thought, last want, last prayer.

Mina-love-you-Mina-so-sorry-Mina-God-God-God-let-her-know-that-let-her-be-safe-be-happy-God-please-Mina—

“I’m right here, Jonathan, I heard you the first time.” The mouth had come away from his throat, now glazed in red. A tongue like the hide of a lamprey licked the dribble away. “The true first time. Not your desperate little session before the door opened. No. We go such a long way back. Even before the night you swore your soul to send your little bogeyman to Hell.” As Dracula’s face began to contort into a grotesque parody, Jonathan felt a burst of sensory recall—a forest in the dark, the cackle-chase of mist that meant to fall on him with thirsty teeth, pain and hunger and fever and a sunrise that was an infinity away—and remembered, against all desire, the particulars of the denser nightmare that followed.

For it had followed a prayer. Rather, a trade disguised as a prayer. The words were lost to him, but the intent was there. The want.

Help. (Me.) Help. (Mina.) Help. (Victims.) Help, help, help. (And I will give all I can and all I am, whatever that is worth to You. Please.) Help.

“I heard. I answered. And our departed matchmaker’s playing with forces older than the universe has made for a most convenient reunion. Better still, a chance to check off one of infinite chores, and collect what is owed.” Jonathan watched and choked on a mounting scream as the god undid his own shirt before driving the spade claw into his breast. The skin split open, but the ichor that poured from it was not blood. What should had been a wound changed instantaneously into a breathing maw. Teeth chittered. Pieces squirmed. The ichor, a tar that slithered and bubbled as if alive—for it was—peered with eyeless eagerness at Jonathan’s mouth. “Best of all, we can address the missed opportunities of the past. It was all petty good fun when he saw to your woman first. But I think we both know who was still at the top of his list for this.” A hand that was no longer a hand clamped onto the back of Jonathan’s head. “Say ah.”

He bit back against the command. Even against the howl that clawed against the back of his teeth. It did not help.

Tick.

The ichor found its way between pursed lips. Muscle worse than a tongue worked open his jaw. Jonathan did not drink so much as drown in the flood that crawled its way to mouth and throat and all the roads of flesh beyond. His one solace was the fact of his dying. The room faded as he did. Away, away, until all but he and the god remained. As even this winked out, the god was present enough to make his laugh heard.

Tick.

“Jonathan Harker. My friend, my fodder. You should know better than most—death is not the end. It never has been. Death is where we start.”

The world and the vampire decomposed into an endless crawling black. It sprawled. It swirled. It was a single three-lobed pupil set against the cosmic inferno of an iris with no edges at all. Jonathan Harker knew himself for less than a mote before its vision. The fragment of an atom. Yet it saw him just the same.

“Come,” said a voice with no mouth. “We have so much to do.”

The pupil swallowed him.

Tick.

And he was gone.

At least until he woke in the castle. Not that he would understand it was a castle upon opening his eyes. There was too much space and what angles were perceivable in the ugly stone hurt to look at too long. He might have been in some titanic cavern mouth near the sea. Brine and alien odors burned his nose. Somewhere, things swam and gibbered and croaked their fealty or fear. Likely both.

But somewhere far closer, a mountain turned over in his sea-salted sleep.

Close enough that the turning trembled the enormous cathedral of rock and rattled the air with the thought-hum of drowsing.

Not drowsing. Dead.

Jonathan Harker shuddered like a struck tuning fork under the weight of this groggy clarification. It was helped only slightly by the fact that he still hadn’t turned his head to try and look upon the monolith in the dark. There was not nearly enough gloom to hide the sight of him—for it was a him, and he was another god—and the gradual adjustment of his eyes to the greenish moonlight dribbling in past the towers and edges of a Cyclopean city beyond the castle only improved his sight for the worst. It traced more and more detail in the black, making him want to squeeze his eyes shut and scurry back to the brief oblivion he'd left behind.

Look.

No, he thought. Then, to test if his mouth still worked:

“No.”

You will look or I will consume you and let you spend the next millennium as a cyst in my third stomach.

Jonathan turned over on his side and looked. He was heartened somewhat. Compared to the thing that had worn Dracula’s husk, it was a far duller mental agony to look on this new-ancient member of a pantheon he had no desire to name. This god had forsaken the looming post of his perch-throne to rest upon the floor and his bed of sponge and slime. Jonathan thought abstractly of the cephalopods Nemo and Aronnax were wont to describe with dual awe and respect. The head, which was the size of a town square, reminded him of a bloated octopus whose eyes had drifted slightly to face forward in an unpleasantly humanoid glower. Growing from that was a likewise distended body that mirrored something of a gargoyle, complete with the shrugged and folded wings that draped like a membranous blanket over one side.

One of the tentacles that made up the face’s lower half uncurled to point down at him.

You are Jonathan Harker.

“Yes. Is it safe to—to know your name, sir?”

No. It is Cthulhu.

The name squirmed uncomfortably until it was rooted permanently in his mind. Then it fell asleep.

“Am I dead?”

Yes. To die is to dream and you are in mine.

“Why?”

To take a message.

“What message? Who for?”

Cthulhu told him. There were no words, yet the dictation was taken in full and excruciating detail. Jonathan thought his head, dead as it was, might still pop with collecting the full weight of it. By the time the god was finished, Jonathan Harker was bent double on the slick floor, willing his brain not to drip out of his ears. He willed harder that the presence groping idly through his skull would recede. It had already delivered the message and was now loitering in the cramped labyrinth of his mind the way a body will putter around in the workplace rather than returning straight to a task at counter or desk. Suckers were prying up the boards of his childhood and claws scratched the paint off his adolescence so freshly and strangely budding to adulthood. He almost screamed aloud as boneless limbs peeled open the chronology of his life and turned over the howling core-light of the soul.

The god hummed. The god retracted himself, leaving Jonathan wheezing and weeping on the grime of the stone floor. The god’s glare did not so much soften as adjust some minute increment further from aggravation. The god watched as Jonathan stumbled up first to his knees, then his feet, his hands only just loosening the hopeless cradle they’d made for his pale brow.

That is all there is of importance.

“Alright—,” the word choked him. How strange to think he could choke while dead. “Alright. I-I’ll just—yes. Must go. Now.”

Yes. Gods be with you, Jonathan Harker.

“Thank you?”

Do not. It is only fact.

So it was.

In the time to come, beyond R’lyeh and its dead waters, past the Dreamlands and its edgeless borders, in the mystic dark that was the truer space under the skin of Panicked forests, hills, and caves, throughout the black-starred kingdoms tattered and Yellow, and in chthonic and cosmic dimensions yet further, Jonathan Harker would find himself in the company of many gods. They and their adjacent wonders and horrors.

The first, the last, the worst, and the most constant of which being the vampiric mimic who was waiting for him at the black-green ridge of the city and the start of the teeming obsidian ocean. He still smiled with Dracula’s lips, though the shine of his eyes was the obscener truth; fluid and flaming.

In one of his hands was an elaborately bound itinerary book. A pen that appeared to be a tiny calcified alien figure balanced daintily in the other.

“What was the message?”

“You—,”

Killed me, stole me—

“—heard him too.” He tasted the truth as he said it. He tasted more of loathing, but that was tamped back down and away.

“Yes. But I am asking you what he said.”

“It wasn’t all for you.”

“I’d expect not. For a career slugabed, he always has some complaint to make concerning something disturbing his nap and the nap he dreams about within it. The stars are not right for me to be asking him what time he means to herald anything more harrowing than a few creatives’ sea-salted nightmares, he says. The maggots on land are seeding progeny who will one day use their boats and drills to hunt for oils and aggravate him as an upstairs neighbor’s stomping and banging will, he says. Dagon’s grandchildren keep swimming up to knock at the castle and paddle away laughing, he says. Always something and always with a wide range of parties to deliver complaints to. For my part, I only care what idle chat was directed at me. The rest,” he flapped the hand with the pen in Jonathan’s direction, “well, that is for you to see about. So. What did he have to say to me, my friend?”

“There weren’t any words. Not to any of it.”

“Mmhmm?” The tone of a governess encouraging a toddler through his ABCs.

“He says one of your sons has been weaving in and out of here and Earth’s waters. The one like a sea serpent, born in your time haunting the Vikings. While teething, the venom was enough to make him rot and shed two sets of limbs before he ripped out one of the fangs and stabbed him with it. Both appear put out, but he wants you to set your son elsewhere.”

Sighing, the god in the vampire skin scratched something down in his book.

“Well, that is a good mark for you and a tedious one for me. The entitled slab of gelatin doesn’t recognize play when it swims up and bites him. My spawn is an endlessly growing boy, after all. Do tell him I’ll see what I can do about relocation as soon as he sees about throwing his poor pet cultists a little scrap or two of acknowledgment. He’s been ignoring them the past few centuries and the dithery pests are starting to pull at my apron strings.”

“What—,”

“You will want to take note.” Jonathan Harker found himself holding his own ledger and pen. “The pages are infinite, but I assure you, this will fast seem insignificant to all the dictation it must hold up to. I would recommend one of the crystal lenses the architects are playing with in the Land of Muse, but I wouldn’t want to overwhelm you. Oh. And you will need something better than this.”

Between one instant and the next, Jonathan’s kukri vanished from his hip and appeared in the god’s hand. He watched as the steel was sunk into the god’s trunk, failing to pierce through to the other side. When the blade was unsheathed, the metal pulsed blackly for a long beat—at least until the steel drank in whatever stain it was.

“I am inside you as deep as a god can go. Well.” He rolled his shoulders in a shrug that revealed the edges of his hair to be alive with tendrils. They appeared to make faces at him. “Very nearly. It is my mark and it will be satisfactory enough to most, though there are bound to be nuisances that shall need sterner addressing than courteous mien and a poke with the pen. There is experience enough to see you through either dealing.” He whirled his hand and the kukri was sheathed again. It hung heavier on Jonathan’s hip and seemed almost magnetized to him. Less a weapon than a limb. It was unpleasantly pleasant. “I do not doubt that you will manage.”

“Manage what? Why am I here? Why did you—,”

The god’s borrowed face split open on a grin that threatened to shuck the whole disguise like pale leather.

“Kill you? Amusement was part of it, I confess. A large part. But it was also the simplest way to set you upon the next step of your illustrious career path. Before you claim shock or make false cries of modesty, know that I know you. All of what you have been and done, what you will be and do. Time is so much putty—and vapor and river and ice, as well. To say nothing of the unvarnished bauble of your spirit. You positively blister the eye with your extremes. When you are good, you are very, very good. But when you are mad you are perfect. For our needs, at least.” The monstrous leer reset into human parameters. He snapped his book shut and let it dissolve into smoke. “That said, I did hear all Cthulhu had to say to you. You comprehended what he divulged and did not buckle under the weight of his intent. Just afraid enough to savor, but professional enough to maintain yourself. Earth has been good practice on that front.

“But now you are here to pay what is owed. What luck that all I ask is that you do what comes naturally. Accommodation, solicitation, and the solving of troubles that, frankly, I do not feel like troubling myself with. Bringing messages hither and thither, seeing that issues are addressed as civilly or viscerally as they require. I shall check in with you and your progress as you toddle on…”

Jonathan was only half-listening. Supreme revulsion had forced his attention to split between the false Dracula and any direction that did not contain him. This led to his gaze snagging on another figure. It drifted slowly atop the water, stamping the waves to stillness as the ebon of its low boat glided near R’lyeh’s edge. What teeming things had raised their heads in curiosity now ducked away, hiding lambent lidless eyes in the depths. The boatman, if that was what it was, cut just as recognizable a silhouette as the god nattering before him.

Tall, slim, hooded. Hands of bone upon the single oar.

Cold radiated from them like heat came off the sun.

“Ah, but I’m rambling! Come, I will not be responsible for ruining your punctual streak. You cut the Transylvanian wilderness down to a mere jog on corporeal terrain. We must do better here.”

Before Jonathan could tell him to wait—indeed, before he could convince himself that any plea would pause or salvage anything now—the god waved his hand and they were both gone from the un-sunken city. Now they stood in the benighted maw of a hollow that crossed soils with that of a place in Wales, not too distant from land with names like ‘Grey Hills’ and ‘Caermaen.’ Pallid shapes slithered and walked and trilled and sang and danced and unspooled. They remembered him far more fondly than Jonathan recalled them and their insistent welcome. Likewise for the horned god that allowed themselves to be called Pan, watching with eyes made of bough and stone and phantasm.

Waiting.

“Oh, they have missed you. Dear Dr. Raymond would squeal to stand where you do now.”

Dr. Raymond would scream if he stood in front of me, muttered a kneejerk hate in him. Or Van Helsing, for that matter. It was too close a thing with Seward and that damned ‘surgery.’ Far, far too close. Should never have let him slip away…

“You say I’m here to take messages. To—to solve the troubles of gods and their acolytes.”

“Ah, see? There you go being polite. You may call them what they are. Sycophants, lickspittles, accidents made with the local mortal meat, occasional deific dandruff…”

“Whatever you may call them, I am meant to,” Jonathan gestured helplessly with the strange notebook, “what? Play secretary? Attendant?”

“Messenger.” The voice rippled and sent the pale denizens in the gloom scurrying back. Jonathan still shivered as he had while alive, back when he felt the slime-glazed flick of some extended limb recoil from where it had grazed the back of his head. Perhaps it was the same member of the so-called ‘Little People’ he had to wrestle himself from before he could be dragged underground to stay. “Only a messenger, Jonathan Harker, just as I am the Messenger. A message can be delivered in many ways and the problems encased in them can be addressed with as much variety. Or, if you are simply not in the mood, as I so frequently am not, you can leave it to their judgment. True, their judgment usually comes with a significant body count, but only with such lives that are scarcely a blink in the great temporal scheme of things.”

“Cthulhu, he mentioned��he gave me things to tell people I can no longer reach. Not like this.”

“I know. They are negligible. Which is really just another word for mortal. They shall get around to dying in their own time and you can share your intel then. Unless,” the mask of Dracula melted like tallow, the features eagerly warping into truer shapes, “you wish to have them sent ahead early. Perhaps they shall find their way here. If you like, I can open the way to your widow in just a—,”

“No!” The old pain of misery simmered in him, but thinly. Just as the tears that stung his eyes were dulled. They were not real. They were not part of anything living, but a memory of living. The breath that hitched in him was there only out of habit. “No. Please, no. I’ll do it.”

“Jonathan, you would do it if I tipped an entire continent down my gullet and used England to pick my teeth. The courtesy of familiar company is only that. I’ve no need for threats with you.” He pointed at Jonathan’s middle. A horrendous writhing twitched to life in him and teased at the phantom of bones in his spectral anatomy. Puppet strings rooted within rather than to the clumsy exterior of joints. “Dracula is in Hell. You sent him there with your own blessed hand. You are most welcome. Now get to work.”

In Pan’s domain, Jonathan Harker turned to face the Little and the White and the Demi People of this and many gods of Nature and Supernature, his book in hand. The People had much to say. As with the dreaming god of the sea, he wondered at how they expected him to deliver half their insistent sibilant notes in his condition, but considering how they reckoned time and their own loose grip upon humanity’s reality, they must have imagined he would wait until all the relevant parties had passed away for him to share their topics of discussion. Perhaps he would.

Meanwhile, he took note of what things might be carried to other entities presumably in reach. There was some dispute of territory with the gnoles aboveground and another with the ghouls below it.

True ghouls. Tunneling. Teeth full of death snapping at those below. Flesh rots and flesh dies. Growing back from the dying annoys us.

“There are worse things,” he murmured aloud. Inwardly:

Assault. Abduction. Sending your admirer with a medical license to spike the chemical suppliers with your ritual powders to turn victims into monsters against their will.

The doctor Arthur Raymond had no orders, the Great God Pan rumbled in his head. Only a fantasy.

“And the rest? What reason do you have for attacking and stealing people as you do in the living world?”

This world lives too. This world is lonesome. My Mary is here. Mine. Our Helen comes and goes, as you saw. Dies and lives as spring will do. The man Villiers learned the hard way. She wants, she wants. She only went through her lovers to find one who would stay after she showed them the truth. After she gave them a night of changing as our flesh changes. None died by her hand, but by theirs. They would not stay for her after. Few do. They do not understand. You do not understand.

“I understand that you never ask. You take. You violate. There is no life or will or want in the world that you and yours consider equal or greater than your own. For all your uncanny makeup, all your madness and marvels, your habits seem no different from any other empire or rapist, apart from the nuance of more surreal consequences.”

Such is Nature. Such is Supernature.

“If a dog can understand ‘yes and no,’ so should a god.”

You’re wasting breath you don’t have. Go.

Jonathan closed the book and turned to climb up out of the hollow. He tried not to notice the brushing of wondering digits on his head and back and legs. One hand went to the kukri. The digits retreated.

You will see to the gnoles. You will see to the ghouls. There will be retribution otherwise.

“I will do what I can.” Whatever that would be.

And the others. Those upon Earth. You will tell them what needs knowing.

…If I can. The Dreamlands seem the only course.

Mina flickered in his mind again. Her face distraught. He hoped she would dream where he could find her—but the hope was thin.

Jonathan stepped up and away, following the instinct-pull of a messenger’s route that towed him toward the groves of the gnoles. To work, to work.

In a black-green sea, the figure upon the low slim boat turned the oar in their skeletal hands. Patient, if irate. A scale-girt face peeked up at them. Cataracts glazed the fish eyes. Memories of manhood and dry land had not been drowned in all the centuries between now and the shore. Please, could they..?

The figure pointed at the spot between the wide-spaced eyes.

A moment later, the corpse floated. A moment after that, kinsmen swam up to collect and consume him goodbye.

The figure threw two coins into the waves and pushed the oar once more.

This took hours.

This took days.

This took months.

This took years.

This took all time and none at all.

But in practical terms, this all took just long enough for Robert Holt to worry. To wonder at the shout of a stranger and the scrabbling at Jonathan Harker’s office doorknob from the inside. To call through the door and hear no answer. To finally, miserably, open the door.

And scream.

In the time it took for Mr. Bentley and a throng of younger fellows to come running, Jonathan Harker had already met with the gnoles, delivered and received messages of matching bile, and began making suggestions. If the matter was one of territory and trees, could they not solve the matter by way of a neutrally impervious border? No one side could snatch forest from the other if there was a genius loci between them. Death was, if not a harrowing deterrent for the parties involved, a sure irritant. To die and undie was a loathsome process. Sowing one of the more viciously solitary land spirits along the terrain of dispute would ward off the encroaching Folk on either side the way the presence of a buzzing hornet nest attached to a fence would steer away wanderers on Earth.

There was much chittering and trilling and grudging hisses from them as much as Pan’s myriad Folk. It was as close to an acquiescing tone as either party could manage.

By the time Mr. Bentley and the rest reached the office and found Robert trying to find a pulse or a breath on Mr. Harker’s corpse, as well as Lord Brighton’s companion dead on the rug, Jonathan Harker had spent two years learning how to sow a genius loci himself, as neither side—including the one with a god—deigned to lay it in place themselves. The result was an entity that passed for a brambleberry shrub. A thing of fruit and blossoms and thorns and faces glowering from its leaves. As an experiment, one of the White People and one of the gnoles dared to pluck berries from their respective sides; this, after two other volunteers had to be whipped and thorned and blood-siphoned to bone as a distraction.

Screams, contortions, and an explosive growth of new prickly shrubs from their flesh ensued. Their soul-bodies limped hurriedly away from the roots, and did their best to join their fellows in cheering over the success as they reconstituted. Jonathan Harker made a note of this and then followed his feet to the ghouls. A far easier reception, as he had acquired some good feeling from his work with Aurelia and her matrons. They even had a manifesto describing their reasoning ready and waiting for him on a scroll:

BUNCH OF CHEATERS DOWN THERE. WE SMELL DEAD FLESH? WE’RE COMING TO DINNER. THEY WANT TO DIG INTO OUR CATACOMBS? THEY CAN BE DINNER. SIMPLE AS THAT.

“That is fairly simple. I can tell them so, but I doubt that will settle the trouble itself. I take it they started it?”

“That they did,” one of the more human-shaped members gurgled. “Get in everywhere like weeds. Tried to conscript old Erichtho herself with that potion of theirs. She quaffed and killed it. Filled the guilty party with extinct insect eggs from half-past the dinosaurs and resurrected them all at once. Had us a good laugh. But they are grabby buggers whereas we take what comes natural. Always more life, so there’s always more dead. Circle of supper. We’d keep ourselves to ourselves if it weren’t for them nosing into our crypts looking for more pits. That’s both here and in the meaty corporeal demesne, for your record. Greedy pricks.”

The ghoul spat gristle while her companions gibbered and snarled in agreement. Jonathan took note.

“Would it help if they detoured to more,” he gestured lightly at the surrounding emptied caskets and their half-eaten contents, “livelier ground?”

“Oh, detours have naught to do with it. They have plenty of ground to play with in the liminal domains. Trouble is they think everything subterranean is theirs to call. It’ll be quite a time once those subway trains come into fashion, I guarantee that. Bastards won’t even leave a footbridge alone if they see some pretty young thing trip-tapping on their lonesome. They can go on forever, so they won’t steer away from the latest fancy unless something’s there to slap their hand. Tentacle. Whatever. Us giving them a little dose of necrosis to go with their regrowth act is us giving them that slap.”

“I just had to deal with a similar issue with the gnoles. Apparently, they were the encroaching party in that one. There’s too much real estate squabbling aboveground even for Pan’s People to lay claim to all of it without trouble. Is there anyone else with investment in underground territory? A neutral party that might be worth deferring to or..?”

The ghoul’s lips quivered up and back from a doggish grin.

“Aye. An older sort. Was kicking long before Their Horned Majesty of Stolen Milkmaids and Herded Shepherds was ever seeding satyrs around Greece or the Isles. Poked his head up a while back to jab that dreary American’s dreams for a poem, I think, but he ducked on down again. He has his work to do, same as Pan and their gardening and mystic maintenance, but doesn’t go around using it as an excuse to be an eldritch ass. Get him involved and I reckon the Folk will find themselves quite disinterested in expanding into occupied real estate. Only trouble is getting him to squirm up and into our mess. Busy fellow, he is.”

“Who is he?”

The ghouls told him. Jonathan managed to not make a face. Then asked for directions.

Four years passed. Robert Holt shook and held Jonathan Harker’s corpse, while Mr. Bentley sent two coworkers flying out to get a doctor and the police, as, with the timing known only to a nightmare, Mina Harker came rushing into the building, something was wrong, wrong, wrong, she had dreamt it asleep and felt it awake, and where was he, please, please, where was Jonathan?

As it turned out, Jonathan Harker was following the cathedral dimensions of the tunnels left behind by a Conqueror of great and grisly pedigree. It took some time to find him, as he was a fellow constantly on the move, and when he was found it took almost as long to clamber up to his front end. Already being dead, Jonathan had no trouble holding an audience with him. There was no life or meat on him to bother with, or so the Conqueror wordlessly informed him.

It was a more cordial meeting than Jonathan might have expected. Something to do with his work in Transylvania. The erasure of Dracula had put himself and Quincey Morris in some good graces for those of the Conqueror’s like. Likewise his choice of patron. What was it he needed, young man?

Jonathan explained. The Conqueror detoured.

It transpired that new routes were established which crossed ghoulish and Sidhe territories alike. Among several others. These routes were unique in that they were stamped with the passing of that oldest, the most unassuming, the most all-consuming of reapers, the Worm. Eater of plant and animal and god, fertilizer of life. Yes, it was preferred that the consumed be decaying before it passed into the unfathomable maw, but not a strict requirement. Certainly not for those who rejuvenated and resurrected themselves willy-nilly to begin with.

Which was to say, if any Folk thought it worth the gamble, they could try and breach other underworlds’ domains for conscription if they liked—but only if they were prepared to risk going whole and alive into the gullet for the next thirty years only to be excreted as sentient soil. Flowers would ensue. Likewise for the ghouls.

The Folk sulked away from the tunnels. The ghouls toasted each other with goblets of bodily swills and embalming fluid. Jonathan declined his own.

“Suit yourself, lad. What is it your sort take, anyway?”

“My sort?”

“By way of pay, that is. The running bit is that its coins on the eyes, but that’s just a matter of travel. Or does your boss handle all that?”

“What do you—,”

He was gone.

“—mean?”

The catacombs of the ghouls had given way to, of all places, a theater. On stage was a slim and handsome young man. Between blinks he was either black or a man-shaped chasm with a grin of lunatic stars. His eyes gave him away as the Messenger. He was idly breaking down a number of scientific apparatuses and loading them into cases that evaporated as they were packed.

“They are a surprisingly companionable group, as carrion collectors go,” he said as he fiddled with a device that spewed a crystal-clear light projection of an apocalyptic vista upon the wall behind him. “Very community-minded. I imagine they assumed I was not giving you your due.” The projection switched off as the depicted city caught ablaze and the last living citizens wailed and charred and changed in its green light. “I am many things, but cheap is never one of them. Especially not when a maggot does more than simply entertain. You, Jonathan Harker, have the honor of being promoted to caterpillar. Congratulations. Sadly, you missed the audience.”

Jonathan took a reflexive step back as the god stepped off the stage and his foot landed on a discarded pamphlet. In a print he did not recognize, on paper that did not yet exist, the font declared:

SEE THE FUTURE LAID BARE! SCIENCES THAT REVEAL THE BONES OF SPACE AND TIME! HE TOURS FROM FURTHEST EGYPT TO NEAREST METROPOLIS! COME AND BEHOLD THE WONDERS OF NYARLATHOTEP!

The city named for the event was one nestled in what the Americans had dubbed New England. The date was set in November of 1920.

“Oh, never mind that. This little show wasn’t for your Earth. Not even the display outdoors.” The Messenger shrugged into a smart traveling suit whose make seemed tailored to a different era and strolled up and past Jonathan in the aisle. The horrid rooted grasp in his core yanked Jonathan along until he matched the god’s stride. “There are so many parallel playgrounds to visit, you see. For this one,” the doors of the building swung open on the benighted desolation of city and street and sanity where growths groaned, cement mouths wailed with shrieks and laughter, and a gulf in the countryside yawned all the way to the throbbing nucleus of the universe, “I turned the clock forward on my latest spectators. Can you guess what they called me? Among the other epithets that jump to mind upon seeing too much melanin and intelligence in the same place, that is.”

“Pharaoh.” The word came to mind and mouth on impulse. In that moment it seemed as obvious to him as math. The Messenger affected a preening stance.

“On occasion I am.” The handsome young man suddenly dissolved into a more familiar frame. Jonathan tried to put more distance between himself and the returned guise, but Dracula’s hand sank like a claw into his shoulder. “Though I am happy to change costumes for company’s sake. No, the name was an insult and the insult was an unforgivable one, for it was not even true. I will suffer many cries of hate and horror if they are earned, but this! They called me a fraud! A toymaker playing with static electricity and film tricks! It could not stand. So I sent them to this future, where they could be introduced to the truth of my predictions. Which, I will confess, were rigged—they were promises more than anything. Less an oracle huffing vapor than an architect revealing his blueprints. Mind your step.”

Jonathan jumped as a hand—what used to be a hand—scrabbled for his ankle. It grew out of a length of tendon and sinew that was once an arm, but was now a mere umbilical stretching from the fungal heap attached to one of many blasted ruins. The eyes in that mass were many and pleading. He thought inexplicably of Mr. Davies. The kukri itched at his hip and cold twitched in his hands. He had to do something. He needed to—

“Ah-ah,” he was tugged back in line by gut and grip, “leave them be. They are not your concern.”

It is. It must be someone’s.

“Why would you do this? What point is there to inflicting all this?”

The Dracula mask turned grave as the eyes burned.

“Would you believe it was by necessity?”

“No. No, I would not. You are too powerful to have any true need for preying on innocents of any world in this way.” Jonathan swallowed dryly. Again, so odd in a throat that had no need for it. “You did this because you wanted to.”

“Not just me. Cthulhu and the broader brigade of the Old, the Great, and the Outer gods have their stamp on all of this too. As they will in other dimensions. As they already have in other worlds. But you are not far from the truth. Now comes the next question: Why do you want to do this, gods? A query as old as worship itself.”

“And what is the answer?”

“What do you expect it is?”

“Because you can. Because no one can stop a god but a god.”

“If you want the maudlin take, I suppose that would suffice. But it is too blunt, and more, you do not believe it yourself. Not completely. You were made, Jonathan Harker. All civilizations in all worlds in all layers of reality. And while the joy of creating a toy simply to break it has a brute pleasure in it, that defeats the purpose of sowing entities with the eternity of a soul. A mind. The truth is, it gets terribly lonesome and annoying with only other gods about. It’s always the same dull un-faces and same aggravating dramas running their gamut over the eons and it grows so tedious you could just detonate the entire idiot universe out of boredom. Which has happened more than once.” En sotto voce, he added, “Azathoth had not carved me out of himself to be his imaginary friend yet and so was prone to the odd cataclysmic tantrum whenever the Drummers and Pipers’ mad songs failed to soothe him. Between myself and all you new mites scurrying about and providing enrichment for the immortal crowds, this rendition of Existence has been the longest one running.

“Which is all to say that gods do what we do, from menace to miracles, so that we do not go insane and smash the whole thing.” Jonathan tried to crumple into himself as the Messenger traced his neck with the vampire’s nail. “Our sincerest thanks for enriching eternity for us. Of course, all of that could be a lie. I do not defraud, but I can lie. So perhaps it’s all just a matter of we in the deific menagerie pouring water on anthills for a laugh. Who can say?”

Jonathan neither knew nor much cared in the moment. Not for the first time in the years spent in this new state, he tried to wake up. Desperately, fervently, willing Mina to shake him awake or for some final rattling shock to jolt him back into his drowsing body. He could almost see himself prone on his office desk, Mina and Robert and fretting professional faces huddled around him, trying to solve the question of his absence from the cold flesh.

If this is a dream, it is not a living man’s. Do not bait yourself. You are here. You know it.

Yes, he knew it. But was it too much to imagine he wasn’t? To pretend there was some exit, some merciful end to—

What is that.

Something was coming up the derelict road. It stalked on two legs, strolling at a stolid march through the mire of horrors. Above, six arms flowered from the trunk of the body, carving through the living and unliving detritus with strange appendages that seemed like blades at a distance. All was unmade where it walked, all died and sighed. And above the arms, a stare. Cold. Cold.

Hello, Jonathan thought with a curious flatness, do I know you?

“But here I am dawdling. You have done such a fine job and you are due for recompense. Here.” Jonathan sputtered a moment as something clasped over his face and knotted itself at the back of his head. A mask of yellowed ivory. “You’ll want something removable where we’re going. Even dead, I imagine trying to peel your face would sting somewhat.”

The god was closer now and the proportions revealed to be even more gargantuan than expected. Cthulhu’s mountainous bulk was dwarfed to a pebble beside a single leg. One of the hands that was a blade receded into itself to produce genuine digits. It bent down as if to crush Jonathan in a fist.

“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” the Messenger intoned. They vanished from the spot as the massive hand came down. The god sighed. Stalked. Carved. Whittling at patience like a frail and flaking wood.

On the living Earth, bodies had been removed from the premises of Hawkins and Harker. With little wheedling and much weeping, Lestrade had tilted things enough to allow Mina Harker and her glassy-eyed companions to take the cadaver of Jonathan Harker away. If not to the Harker estate.

Within a ballroom, in the midst of a masquerade that had seen a thousand midnights and still had not ended, Jonathan Harker removed his mask to behold the shrieking Yellow splendor of the Palace of Hastur. If only briefly. The Messenger had not lingered to ward off the swarm of guests, some human, most in a state of transition to Carcosan native, some entirely indecipherable in terms of species, but all gilded in their finery. Some where so committed to the pageantry that their costumes were grafted to and through themselves.

One guest winnowed through the herd to rescue him from a dance with a partner whose arachnid legs glittered in either brilliant chitin or molten gold shells and whose manifold mouth seemed intent on trying to fit both around and inside his own. The guest straightened the black-gold brooch at his throat before snatching Jonathan away with an inescapable flourish.

“Mr. Harker!” laughed a voice through the Yellow-red spill of peeled lips. “How stunning to find you gracing such circles as these—pardon, dear Lady, but I simply must borrow him; His Tattered Majesty calls, many thanks—I had not expected you to be on such a guest list. Not after that little tiff with Miss Pleasance and your fellows. Perhaps your being one of those addicts of the Bard has won pardon enough. I will not lie and say I saw old William about, but I might say I saw Marlowe, just as I might say they are in talks for a sequel to Doctor Faustus to make up for Goethe’s nauseating rendition…”

As the faceless guest hauled him out of the ballroom and into further phantasmagoric halls that coiled and sprawled like an architectural damask pattern, Jonathan’s eye fell upon the clutching hand. Over the silk glove’s ring finger was a wedding band of simple gold that now blazed Yellow. But on the forefinger was a signet ring with the letter W encrusted in ornamentation. As he recognized it, the recollection of the wetly rasping voice dawned on him.

“Lord Wotton?”

“I was, I am, I fear I shall be forever. But at least the fear is well-written here. None of that blubbering twaddle I get from my neighbors in the asylum. All their madness is terribly mediocre. The mere misfiring of this lobe or an overload of that chemical. The King, at least, lends some artistry to it. I only wish he would stop fussing with the Second Act and move on to a new work. We are a busy cast of props and each time he rewrites the scene, we must have another midnight unmasking. Which would not be so awful—there is the most marvelous conversation to be had and I have no qualms about an endless party—but no one has a mask they can spare. I arrived without one and so must always shed more of what’s above the neck. Even once I hit bone and brain and the jelly of eyes, unmask, unmask. Do you suppose I can still talk without a head? I’m sure I can, I shall. Gods know there was living proof enough in England that one might talk extensively without ownership of a brain. If anything, it only improves one’s standing in Parliament.”

Wotton laughed at that. A noise that pierced at the last ragged note.

“So I must assume. I don’t see myself holding the ears of anyone beyond the Lake of Hali or Purfleet’s medical swaddling anytime soon. How would I know what goes on in Parliament? That silly trinket of a youth…oh, what was it? Dorian? Dorian. He comes by now and then. He never talks of Parliament. Truly, he’s become such a dreary lad. But at least he wears despair prettier than I ever shall.”

“Wotton—,”

“Don’t let him read it, Mr. Harker. I get the feeling he may do something rash—there are more mirrors in his head than thoughts and more a parrot in his throat than his own words, so I fear he may pick the thing up just to follow after me. Ah, but he did warn me, didn’t he? And the silly boy believed me when I said I would not try again. Perhaps it is better to be a mirror than whatever I was before the play. Not a good thing. That is his rule about it, did you know?”

“Wotton, wait—,”

Up the stairs, past chambers that stared out over a land steeped in toxic hues of poison frog and stinging wasp. Dull sun and duller moon drifted in lazy orbits like searching vultures.

“Oh, the Wallpaper Women, they were mere refugees. Never touched a page but for that first girl locked in the room. She found it waiting under the floorboards for her. Wanted to be an actress, so it’s said, and she would even have taken Cassilda’s fate over her own mundane Purgatory. The book’s paper stained the wall’s paper and the way was opened for all the Cassildas and Camillas to follow. In another Earth, he even spared a girl from the suicide of the Pallid Mask. He even brought her pets back to life after her cad lover dumped them in it. Oh, he plagued an entire world, a warped reflection of our meager mud ball, and hunted the secret sinners in all their corners. Some sinned great and some sinned mild. But they were found and were damned with the evil stepsisters’ plight. They had birds eat their eyes and glass carve their feet for their domestic evils.

“But the tyrants, the traitors, the cowards, the cads, we are gathered here to play our bit parts. The justice of the fairy tale. The dramatic catharsis of the stage. It is why I can never stop talking. No matter what I have or haven’t to say.”

“Wotton.”

“Yes?”

They had come to a stop on a high corridor whose black marble shined with faces. Jonathan pressed his mask into Wotton’s empty hand.

“Keep it.”

“…Thank you. Now, the King is waiting. Supposedly to deliver a message, but I suspect he wants another pair of eyes to sear with a read-through. I shall leave you to it. And Mr. Harker?”

“Yes?”

Lord Henry Wotton, eternal attendee of the masquerade paused before hiding the raw meat of his face with the ivory. The naked eyes finally met Jonathan’s.

“Dorian did not tell you all that I said. I have no hope in that cell, you know. No more than I do here. But each time my mind flits back to that room, to Earth and flesh and the flicker-flints of sanity, it reminds me what is to become of me for good. A man on another Earth, Castaigne, his madness ate him to death. He told me so as he wept and groveled in a crown he made of bone and silverware. I know what my ending is, but the sane spells…those are wretched. They grow briefer and briefer and the relief of them is torture, for I know how soon I will be back here to unmask again. I told Dorian then, I tell you now. See me dead back there, if you can. Tap Dr. Seward and his lancet for it. Godalming or the American if you must absolutely scrape the bottom of the barrel. But…

“But I would feel more relieved if it was you. Finality seems more in your purview. Anyway.” He tied on the mask. “It is nearly midnight. I must be off.”

He disappeared down the stairwell just as an ornate door of gold and black stone swung silently open. Jonathan stepped inside. The first thing he heard was the sound of keys click-hammering away with a speed that rivalled his memory of Mina’s whirlwind typing. It was not the sound of a typewriter, however. The noise was a far gentler tap-tap-tap with no slide and snap as the finished sheet spat its way out of the device. Tap-tap-tap-tap. Pause. Click. Click. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. Click. Tap-tap.

“In here, Mr. Harker. Or do you prefer Jonathan?”

Jonathan followed the voice—a man’s, mellow but focused—through a looming wilderness of books and bound manuscripts and shelves that reached up into a lightless ceiling so high it might have melted up into a night sky. He found his way through by following an ochre glow whose source rested in an illumination veined through the walls of what seemed to be a decadent designer’s iteration of a writer’s cluttered office.

The King in Yellow sat bent at a desk, the wisps of his fingers flying over the low flat keys of some wafer-thin creation of crystal lens and golden frame. Words grew into paragraphs on a never-ending scroll within the glass as a strange ornate box to the desk’s side opened its mouth on a hinge and grew what looked like a book page by page within its patient cover-to-be.

“I can go by Hastur if you like. Or Ambrose. Sometimes I’m even a Charlotte. I’m only a Howard when I’m feeling particularly gruesome. I’ll not wheedle you for a Your Tattered Majesty or suchlike. Henry cannot help himself with his bitter-edged flattery and flattering bitterness. It’s taken him nearly a hundred years to get around to developing a sincere thought. Quite proud of him, honestly. Thought it would take at least two centuries minimum. Coffee?”

Jonathan noticed for the first time that he did smell caffeine cutting through the air. The only blend he’d ever tried was one that Quincey had insisted was the most palatable out of all the, ‘downright depressing,’ offerings London had in supply at any café or shop, apparently paling compared to the cups he had ground himself back in Texas. He followed his nose to a petite but handsome machine with a crystal pitcher full of coffee whose scent was nearly perfume in how it prickled. As he watched, the King in Yellow willed it to pour into a weathered mug, followed by a dollop of pearlescent cream and a sprinkle of white powder—

“Not that nutcase Pan’s dust, I assure you. Even if it didn’t give me transfiguring indigestion, it doesn’t even have the excuse of a decent flavor. That was just a pinch of sweetener. Jar’s by the machine.” The mug drifted to the waiting palm of a spidery over-knuckled hand. From there, a gnarled slit opened in the ivory horror of the King’s face and nursed the brown brew. “Ah. Should have added caramel. But I save that for after I finish a chapter. Take a seat, take a seat.”

Warily, Jonathan found a clear space on a nearby couch. He sat amid more books, more papers. On the nearest sheet:

'Good stranger,' I continued, 'I am ill and lost. Direct me, I beseech you, to Carcosa.'

The man broke into a barbarous chant in an unknown tongue, passing on and away.

An owl on the branch of a decayed tree hooted dismally and was answered by another in the distance. Looking upward, I saw through a sudden rift in the clouds Aldebaran and the Hyades! In all this there was a hint of night -- the lynx, the man with the torch, the owl. Yet I saw -- I saw even the stars in absence of the darkness. I saw, but was apparently not seen nor heard. Under what awful spell did I exist?

I seated myself at the root of a great tree, seriously to consider what it were best to do. That I was mad I could no longer doubt, yet recognized a ground of doubt in the conviction. Of fever I had no trace. I had, withal, a sense of exhilaration and vigor altogether unknown to me -- a feeling of mental and physical exaltation. My senses seemed all alert; I could feel the air as a ponderous substance; I could hear the silence.

A great root of the giant tree against whose trunk I leaned as I sat held enclosed in its grasp a slab of stone, a part of which protruded into a recess formed by another root. The stone was thus partly protected from the weather, though greatly decomposed. Its edges were worn round, its corners eaten away, its surface deeply furrowed and scaled. Glittering particles of mica were visible in the earth about it-vestiges of its decomposition. This stone had apparently marked the grave out of which the tree had sprung ages ago. The tree's exacting roots had robbed the grave and made the stone a prisoner.

A sudden wind pushed some dry leaves and twigs from the uppermost face of the stone; I saw the low-relief letters of an inscription and bent to read it. God in heaven! my name in full! -- the date of my birth! -- the date of my death!

“An early draft, but one of my better ones, I think. Working on something a little riskier for the next world. Grim and sweet at once. A bit of detective theme, a good dose of eldritch horror, but with less of that suffocating purple prose. A bit more wit, more soul. Arthur seems a good name. Arthur and John. What do you think?”

“I think I’m quite confused,” Jonathan admitted. “And I will have to pass on the coffee. The dead don’t drink. At least I haven’t yet and it’s been…” He tried to think. To count. “I really cannot say how many years.”

“Ha. ‘The dead don’t drink,’ he says. Amazing you can say so with a straight face when your entire origin story centered around some terribly thirsty corpses. Even the lack of, quote, ‘true,’ corporeality is no reason to cut yourself off. What do you think the folks of the Elysian Fields are doing with those ambrosial gardens? The heavens, the nirvanas, the realms of fantasy and reward unending, all have made accommodations for the act of consumption. It is one of the delights of life and, being a delight, it is not barred from a soul unpinned from its world. And while this is no such paradise, the act of percolating a drink the dead can imbibe is less than child’s play.” The King’s voice dropped to a stage whisper, “Nyarlathotep does so love to peacock about how he’s one of the older kids, how he’s Azathoth’s favorite, the Messenger and Soul of the Gods, the Crawling Chaos, and so forth.

“He is all those things, sure. But he’s also, if you will pardon the jargon of the future, full of shit.” The King took a sip. “There’s tea as well, if you prefer…Mr. Harker? Or Jonathan?”

“Jonathan.”

He moved to get up for a cup, but the King’s hand went click, a new crystal scroll appeared in the lens, the keys tap-tap-tapped and Jonathan was suddenly holding his favorite cup from the cabinet he and Mina had brought from their little apartment to the house Peter Hawkins had left them. Scuffed and shabby, but theirs, like all the cups and plates they had found in secondhand shops together. It was even the blend Mina made for them on Sundays. Holding its heat, smelling the leaves, brought hot needles back to eyes and heart in a way he hadn’t felt in—

Minutes. Years. Lifetimes.

—so, so long.

“I feel I am becoming static. I keep asking the same questions, but I must ask again, just in case an answer happens. What is this? All of this?”

“Yes, you have asked before. It’s a lucid thing to do. Not many of the dead, the dreaming, and the in-between will bother with it. The mind sleeks itself down to fit the logic of the domain. The only whats and hows and whys that occur to them are in reaction to the stimuli of their narrative. None of your existential pinhole-poking. The Messenger can get away with tapdancing around honest answers because he is, you will have noticed, an immensely overpowered snot. Which does track with him being one of the most humanoid of his crowd. He’ll call it ‘dumbing himself down’ for the Earthly brain. Meanwhile the most intelligent conversation he’s had in the past five millennia has been listening to Kadath’s Dream Gods chatting about their vacation to hallucinatorily pretty faux New England. Even the shoggoths have more on the brain than the rest of the geriatric pantheon. They think like fungi and only really get somewhere interesting when they playact like the mortals.”

Another sip. Tap-tap-tap-tap…

One hand typed all the while as the King said, “Which is all very fascinating in the abstract, but not the answer to your questions. The trouble is, I cannot be too blatant. That would ruin what’s coming and it hardly needs any help. Already this plot you’ve been punted into is haphazard and frayed and, frankly, borderline amateurish. There’s a reason Old Crawly did not orchestrate Randolph’s little dream quest in the next reality over so much as watch him putter along at random to Kadath before doing the divine equivalent of tying his shoelaces together to see if he’d trip and fall into unending terror and lunacy at the heart of Azathoth. But then Mr. Carter went and woke up. Prank foiled.

“Sadly, it’s not so simple for you. Being dead isn’t even the worst of it. He actually has something of a plan for you. Nothing so grandiose and clogged with a nesting doll of wiles and prophecy so much as seeing an opportunity to run with. One he has been running with since he filled you with his poison. He’s been having fun with it. With you. With the game of keep-away. But soon he will come down to the climax; that is, turning the game fully to a con. When that time comes, you must keep certain things in mind. Take note.”

The King in Yellow held up one wispy digit after the other, ticking points off.

“One, it feels like ages since it mattered, but recall you are a solicitor by trade. Fine print and property law will remain bafflingly pertinent even now, for he will try to get you to sign. It is his only way to give his claim legitimacy.

“Two, the messages you assumed you could not deliver, you can. Not only by death, and not only by whispering through the Dreamlands. Do not forget—ignorance was and remains your worst enemy. You could have slain Dracula in his castle if you had known all the factors; your instincts and your God nearly got you there, but for the trick of the basilisk stare and the swarming minions. What you believe is possible is your limit. Discover what lies beyond those assumptions, and far more doors will open to you.

“Three, your God is not of Abraham. Nor of Alhazred. While there is fair claim for a custody battle with Eros, for your tithes are many to Love, even that is not your God. They have blessed you many times and you have done your duty by them in due fashion. That you are as you are now is testing their patience down to its last infinitesimal thread. Which the Messenger knows.

“Four, and this is most vital—,”

A cool fingerless grip locked around Jonathan’s throat and hauled him backward in a strangled tumble. Couch and Carcosa, cup and King disappeared as he was hooked through and away to a place that had existed on many Earths and none—one of several lies made to Euclidean space.

Jonathan fell in a sprawl upon sand that lurched and lived against its will under frantic constellations. When he looked up, he saw a black pyramid whose blocks were carved from cosmic abyss. It scarcely held his attention. Not compared to the shape that trundled on its spiny legs and turned his mind over in the teeth of its three-lobed eye like a child gnawing a candy.

“I do hope you did not take him seriously. He was meant to tell you something important, not improvise some piddling addition to his script.” Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, sighed and half the stars guttered like candles. “There is simply no trusting a writer.”

In the headquarters of the League, Jonathan Harker’s corpse was arranged on a table beneath a lamp. His snowy head rested on a pillow rather than a block, the eyes and mouth examined cautiously. Robert Holt’s description of the men who arrived prior, only one of whom remained by dint of being dead, was worrisome.

“I couldn’t tell how many men were with Lord Brighton,” he did not catch how both Dr. Jekyll and Griffin bristled at the name, “one man or two. I thought I must have imagined the third.” He described the third man as he’d seemed before he’d been mistaken for a shadow. Mina had to fight not to scream or be sick. Art dropped into his chair as if punched. Quincey let Jack grip his hand with his own trembling fingers until he ached. Van Helsing looked miserably to the ceiling and began whispering as many curses as prayers in every language he knew.

This, in conjunction with Jekyll and Griffin’s murmured suspicions of Brighton, or ‘Q,’ as the supposed alias was—the stuff of barroom twaddle and urban legend that higher circles would not quite dare to breathe aloud where the high-class walls had ears—made many more hearts freeze. And then there was the newspaper, marked by Jonathan’s pen. The dead Professor Derleth, Miskatonic University, one of the few known homes of a copy of the Necronomicon.

“But why would anyone want to bring the Count back? If they knew why he was slain, what he was…”

“Lord Brighton was half dust last time he was seen in public,” Dorian croaked from his corner. “Even Henry avoided the man. Said he felt too much like Brighton was daydreaming of ways to siphon the life out of him like one might suck the juice from an orange.”

“If not a vampire, then he was certainly a man who wished to be,” Holmes said half to the room and half to the air. His hawkish gaze had yet to move from Jonathan Harker’s head. “However he found out about Dracula, it perhaps more inspired than worried him. Money can only comfort so long before the Ferryman comes to call and he needs but the cheapest fare to do his job. Mere tuppence. But assuming Brighton was successful in bringing the Count back, it would explain nothing of what was found in the office. Or not found. No Lord Brighton. No Necronomicon.”

“But plus a dead henchman with not a mark on his neck and—and Jonathan with,” Jack’s gorge rose, rose, balanced at the back of his throat, “with the wrong kind of mark.”

“It is true,” Van Helsing said in a dead tone that fought to be doctorial. “Dracula, even being animal-crude, he did not leave a bite so strange upon the neck, only little spots such as a pinprick leaves. These punctures too are small, but far, far too many. It looks to my eye like the leech or his cousin the lamprey took their drink.”

“A nested mouth. Yes.” Holmes gnawed and puffed at his pipe. “Mr. Morris, you say there were such maws to be found lurking in your adventure in Louisiana?”

“I did. There were. Though I wouldn’t call those lot vampires. Not undead, just folks with the same condition as those poor Innsmouth locals. They couldn’t have done that,” he said softly in the table’s direction. “They need the water. I’m more curious about the black stain on his tongue.” In his chair, Holmes straightened up an inch. Only Watson and Irene noticed. “Supposing he—supposing something made him…” He floundered a moment.

“Supposing this third man, Dracula or not, did to him what was done to me? The exchange of blood?” Mina’s voice cut the air like a knife. It barely raised. It was barely a voice at all. Which made sense, she supposed. She did not feel she was entirely in the room at present. Too much of her mind had fled howling from the tangible world as her mind tried, in its constant habit, to search for Jonathan’s presence. Not here, naturally. Not in that dead flesh. Not on Earth. Out, away, beyond. But there were so many directions. So much wilderness of other planes to hunt.

No. She would not find him.

No. She would not stop.

“Mina, perhaps you shouldn’t be—,”

“You fear him getting up as much as staying on the slab, don’t you? You fear worse than that, supposing this Dracula was not Dracula at all.” All watched as her hand folded into the limp digits of her husband’s. Fresh tears threatened as she realized it was not cold, but merely the temperature of the room. Tepid. “The Necronomicon does have a nasty habit of bearing especially horrendous fruit.”

“Mina—,”

“You will not put a stake in his heart. Nor will you sever him.”

“No one is suggesting…” but Watson went silent as Holmes laid a hand on his arm. In the same moment the doctor caught the many gazes that dropped and darted. “It is too soon to consider such measures, is it not? We’ve yet to even examine him in full.”

“It can certainly be no worse than the Leicester case,” Jekyll said through a shudder. “Nor that of Ms. Vaughn. But Morris is right. That black stain is too much a tell. Perhaps some manner of poison?”

“No,” Irene hummed from where she’d been pacing. She had unearthed a folder that had turned bloated with research. The label K.i.Y. and adjacent was scratched at its top. “Not poison. Anything good enough to masquerade as Dracula, and keep Jonathan in his chair without getting the blade out, and got their teeth into him? That’s too much power to bother with something so mundane as poison. Whatever it had him choke down, it was meant to do something more creative than murder.”

“What of the dead man on the rug, then?” Robert Holt croaked. He was on his third tumbler and not a drop had served to dent the wretchedness in his head or his eyes. “Joseph Davies. He was a bit green at his edges when I saw him go in, but nothing suggested he wasn’t hale as a horse. This thing playing Dracula, did it not do the same to him?”

“No, Mr. Holt. There was no fit for Jonathan, no foaming. Different methods were applied for each man. Davies was a mere afterthought. I would wager even Lord Brighton was but a means to an end. This entity, our Dracula-in-potentia—he wanted Jonathan for something.” Irene looked aside at the man on the table and the woman holding his hand. Her voice softened. “But then left him behind.”

“No. No, that isn’t it.” Mina’s throat strained. “There’s nothing here. That is the strangest thing in this. If this were some elaborate way of providing a-a host for some demon or monstrous progeny, an eldritch infection or the like, that would make more sense. I’d know if there was something else in here.” Her thumb rubbed the weathered gold of his wedding band. “Some usurping force or other. I’d know if he was stuck somewhere inside. But there’s really, truly nothing. It’s as if—as if he were shoved out of himself and the space he left behind was filled up with plaster. No possession. Just a blockade.” She brought the lukewarm hand up to her lips. “It does not even feel like a death. More like—like a crude joke. O-Or a robbery. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Her voice hitched until it cracked. A sound like glass splintering.

“I am so tired. So, so tired of this same joke, over and over. He cannot be stolen from me again. Not again. Not like this.”

Quiet thickened for a long spell. In it, Holmes still did not look away from Jonathan Harker’s head. Finally, he took himself fully to the table and stared down at the pale young man’s mouth. He scrutinized it as if it were some living culprit. Or else sheltering it.

“Sherlock?” from Irene. “What is it?”

“The stain. It’s wrong.”

“Wrong..?” from Watson.

“It hadn’t occurred to me until you mentioned it, Mr. Morris. You said, ‘the black stain on his tongue.’ You only saw him as he was brought in, as most everyone here did. Looking at him now,” the whole room bristled as he pulled on his leather gloves and pried the jaws open, “yes, his tongue is stained. But only his tongue.” His line of sight moved to first Robert, then Mina. “Which is wrong.”

For a moment, both wondered at him. But they looked again at Jonathan’s face, frozen in dread as it was. It was hard work tearing their eyes away from his, but when they did, they peered as one at his mouth. Revelation sliced through heart and stomach at once.

“Oh, God. It changed,” Robert spoke so low he barely heard himself.

“What? What has changed?” came the murmur from the room at large.

“The stain,” Mina breathed, her hand now quivering around the corpse’s. “It isn’t what it was when I first saw it. Robert?”

“It changed,” he repeated. “It’s nowhere near what it was when I got the door open.”

“I’m not following,” Jekyll put in, frowning over the dead man more closely.

“Likewise,” from Griffin.

“Only the tongue is stained now,” Holmes said. This time his eyes fell solely on Robert. “But what did he look like when you found him, Mr. Holt?”

“It was a mess,” Robert said, now outright gawping at Jonathan’s clean face. “A great oily spatter across his mouth and chin. Some had even dripped down his neck.”

“And you, Mina? You got there before I or Lestrade’s men reached the spot.”

“His lips. Just his lips, teeth, and tongue were blackened.” Mina swallowed around a hot pain. “I remember thinking it looked like the stain a child gets after sucking on some colorful sweet.”

“Indeed. And now all that is left is the blotch on his tongue.” Holmes’ eyes seemed to flash as he pulled the jaw open wider. “There is not even a drop left upon the gums. This mess has been draining so steadily, so stealthily, that it was almost imperceptible that it was retreating into him at all. Hiding away and hoping no grieving witness would take note. This stuff,” he said, glowering at the blackness in Jonathan Harker’s throat, “is an accomplice in and of itself. Alive enough to work on behalf of the initial attacker. If we can get it out…”

But there was already a small legion of doctors rushing the cabinets. Jack fished out a surgical hook with a long black handle. Aiming it handle side down, he positioned himself opposite Holmes. Holmes was just as hastily shouldered aside by Watson, his own gloved hands taking up the task of holding the mouth open.

“Keep him steady,” Jack said without looking up.

“Go on,” Watson nodded.

The handle descended toward the uvula. Yet before it could even graze the throat, Mina’s head snapped up. Her line of sight faced the western wall. Toward the library.

“Mina? What is it?”

“There’s something—,”

But her words were lost in the sound of the crash. And the laughter.

Back in the ink-dark desert, the Crawling Chaos was doing his best to turn Jonathan Harker’s soul inside out and into exciting new shapes. The god had insisted as best he could over the man’s screams that it was really Hastur who should be blamed. Guile was always the greater thrill than brute force. Not that it took an iota of force to play with Jonathan as he was now. Just a little light incentive for him to disregard the King in Yellow’s poor advice and take a wiser course once he allowed Mr. Harker to have eyes and hands and the ability to use them properly.

“True, I do not have the cloven hooves on or the guise of a Franciscan friar, but the Book of Azathoth can be signed with or without pageantry. I granted Gilman a little trans-dimensional tour and all it got anyone for their trouble was a sore throat for Keziah and a hearty meal for Brown Jenkin. Decent playthings all. But this?”

Nyarlathotep tweezed the kukri from its sheath, the metal’s shine still warped into an ugly iridescence with the polish of his veins. He ran it through Jonathan Harker’s stomach for the first cry. Twisted it for the second. Then stuck him to one of the enormous building blocks of the pyramid like a beetle. Jonathan willed his hands to be hands again, willed them to pull at the handle with the struggling fibers of his strength, but the blade would not move. It was not his.

“This is an investment. One I would have been so happy to lay out in pleasanter terms. But the King has gone and soured any words a Pharaoh might have offered. I felt your suspicious little wheels turning and smoking up here.”

Jonathan howled again as the ichor fired its roots up and into the phantom bowl of his skull, filling his mind with knives and salt.

“Yes, I am upset as well. But if nothing else, the Count’s treatment proved how precarious it is to let the game of cordiality play past pretense. You were a slippery thing when given a moment’s chance upon the corporeal Earth. I’ve no doubt you would have wriggled away from even my grasp, given the chance. It is one of three things you do so well, Jonathan Harker. Escape. Persuade. Pursue. All in service to some Good beyond yourself. It is a most admirable disposition and better still for your actually having the skill to make it matter. But to the point.”

The giant and its distended sin of anatomy disappeared. The Pharaoh now perched airily upon the block below the one Jonathan dangled from. Prismatic robes billowed like wings from him and the obscenities of his eyes stood out all the brighter in the handsome face. Again he held the strange book he had cradled at R’lyeh, along with its calcified pen. He flipped idly through the pages until he came upon a section of paper darker than the rest. Veins pulsed in each heavy sheet. The names upon them were few compared to the thick portion before it. Those contained generations of multiple eras on multiple worlds in multiple dimensions. The one the Pharaoh held up for Jonathan to see already had his name in it, though not printed in his hand.

All the names in all the languages he could and could not fathom above it had been written in that style—it was only the phrase beside each that had any variety. They belonged to the owners of the names.

“We are due to make things official. It is all well and good to collect grovelers and kissers of robes for their own sake, but it is quite another to gain someone for the retinue who is good for more than being a sentient bauble. And you, Mr. Harker, have performed splendidly throughout the interview.” At the word, Jonathan’s own donated ledger manifested in the air. Pages packed with itineraries and messages shared with myriad Powers, flipping through the years-that-were-not. It vanished just as neatly. “While I cannot offer you anything so low as a law firm, I shall give you something far more precious.

“You shall live again, Jonathan Harker. You will walk in your Earthly flesh, whole and unharmed—the token you swallowed has kept your husk preserved against all decay and destruction. So it always shall. More, you will be able to stroll through all worlds, all membranes of reality, without the trouble of projection or translocation. You will go as gods go, in service to what the gods require. You shall keep those Powers who paw at the Earth in a complacent state, lest they give in to tantrum at last and make a ruin of your planet. And, naturally, you will see her again. All your little skittering hive will be in reach once more. What messages you have gathered for them can be passed on before you pass out of their lives. Which will be best, given your situation. It is always a distressing time when an endless thing loves that which ends.

“Perhaps you could look up Ms. Vaughn the next time she reforms. I’m given to understand she’s one of Pan’s more charming spawn and you will be too durable to off yourself once she shows you what’s under the skin. Opportunities abound. But that’s all to come. First, you must sign beside your name. Three little lines. Iä Azathoth. Iä Nyarlathotep. Then, in whatever tongue you please…” The Pharaoh pried one of Jonathan’s shaking grips from the kukri’s handle and slipped the pen into it. “…I am as God’s hand. Though I should like you to be more than that in time. Hastur did not lie when he said I suffer from a dearth of good company.” Jonathan watched as the Pharaoh shifted to the Count. He wore his noble’s cloak rather than the London tailoring, his white hair flowed rather than the black, and his bloodless face turned back to the skeletal gauntness of that early thirst. “I am in hopes I shall see more of you in—,”

You will see nothing.

The thought came to Jonathan only after his fist had locked about the pen and driven it straight through the god’s borrowed red eye. The pupil bloomed at once into its three-lobed truth as new ichor poured and squirmed and glowered upon the pallid cheek. The god clicked his tongue.

“I see you need more time to consider the proper course. It hurts my heart to know it. A few of them, even.” The pen was plucked free as the vampiric maw began to grow. Too clear a view of the churning and pulsing of the god’s innards appeared in the gullet. “You shall roost in the chambers of the third one. A cozy niche beside a valve where you can think on your actions. We shall try this again in a century.”

But as the mouth yawned, the pyramid trembled. All the sands shook with it. The arid warmth that had filled the air now descended into a cutting cold. Overhead, the stars that had once guttered went out entirely. Yet Jonathan Harker could see.

See the god wearing the vampire frown.

See the healing wound of the eye suddenly blossom again, bleeding godly gore and gristle as a man might.

See the rot that turned the aristocratic hide to spongy decay.

See the silhouette of a hand big enough to balance a schooner on its thumb clamp around the side of the pyramid, followed by the head of its owner. A head crowned with a striped nemes, that reeked of flowers and spice and carrion. A head that belonged to a jackal. A head whose growl shivered the desert again. Jonathan had been hearing the black sand’s whispered wailing up until then—when the thunder of the growl ended, there was only silence. The god beside him reassembled his borrowed face enough to grouse.

“Ah,” said the Messenger, scratching at his decomposition with the fervor of one clawing away an eruption of acne. “You.”

“Me.”

“In my defense, you were hardly putting him to full use andrrggghhl,” as he spoke, Dracula’s throat split and his chest dribbled. Even his forehead split and oozed. Necrosis and ash ate through him. The god balanced his dying head on his shoulders and sighed wetly.

“What was that? I cannot hear you over the sound of your chicanery.”

The god wearing Anubis snapped his fingers. It produced both a thunderclap and Jonathan Harker, still impaled, dropped into his palm. He froze as Anubis pinched the kukri from out of his middle. Cold flooded into the wound as Nyarlathotep’s intrusion bled out, freezing, hissing, and flaking away on the frigid wind. Even the grim shine of the kukri shrilled and shuddered away, the ichor fleeing its metal host like condensation. Anubis shook the grimy frost loose and willed it to its home in Jonathan’s sheath.

“It is trouble enough to clean up the mess you and yours leave in play. I draw the line at poaching.”

“Borrowing,” said the Pharaoh. The Count had rotted off of him, though he still had to pick at remaining viscera. “Expanding his prospects, as it were. Opening the door to more creative endeavors than you and your sickles.”

“By robbing him, pantomiming the role of his patron, and cheating him out of his earned eternity. By trying to cheat me. Had you already gotten to the drivel about how very ancient and endless and Before and After the Outer Gods and their descendants are? Or were you saving that for the honeymoon?”

“We are the Before and the After and Existence itself,” Nyarlathotep intoned. “Unlike you. Even Death may die. This you know.”

“Yes, you slithering ponce, of course I do. I’ve been doing the metaphysic equivalent of changing you and yours’ nappies since the first time Azathoth had a fit. You cannot fathom the mess there would be without an End to go with your destructions and disfigurements. And that's not even counting the Cataclysms you are all too far up your own cosmic crevasses to have been aware of in this and neighboring Existences. Ones where you do exist and ones where you—bliss of blisses—do not. At least not as anything more than paper. If it were not for the logistical wreckage to follow, I would scrap this entire universe for the relief of not picking up after you.”

“As if you could.”

The jackal lips leered.

“As if I haven’t. You do love the confidence of thinking yourself forever, don’t you, Crawling Chaos? Out of them all, I think you are the most able to be satisfied at yourself. Creeping through neighbor realities, practicing your pranks on mirrored worlds across time and space. Earth is always a favorite, blithe little blue marble that it is. On his, that world’s Hildred Castaigne and his compatriots from a quaint cult in America are about to make a fine mess; one I’ve no doubt you planned to keep him from until the revelation came too late. Always a fine tactic, that—remove all ties but yours. But you conspired for this with the same ignorance you conspire everything.

“The ignorance of one who mistakes himself for singular. Unique. Irreplaceable and infinite. You, Soul of the Gods, are so thick you even believe Pan and Hastur are younger than you. Than Azathoth. Than me, as I exist in this script. All because you are too proud to read all that is written. It’s not all invention, you know. Some is merely taking dictation. You have not even crossed paths with the Messenger whose Tablets lay in wait for Mark Ebor. Do ask the King in Yellow for his shelf marked ‘Blackwood’ if you feel especially daring. Use the Black Seal of Ixaxar to read what the Peoples Below have written of history before Earth grew around them.

“Or throw yourself in Leng and putrefy awhile. I do not much care. But whatever you do, past, present, and future, in all the realities you can and cannot fathom? Know that the next time you try to pickpocket what is mine, I will eat through a thousand of your faces and as many of your toy-worlds. Know that I will whisper a secret from Hastur’s drafts that will kill your delusions with the march of a starving maggot and leave you hiding and soiling yourself in your tendrils with all your precious pretensions Ended without hope of resurrection. Know that for all the deaths and undeaths and deaths-that-die by your tinkering, eternity does not exist. I will be there, waiting. Beyond the last of the scripts. The last apokálypsis. The End. Know that, Nyarlathotep. And know one thing more, above all else.”

Jonathan Harker watched as Anubis unfolded into something else. Something no human hand or eye or word could ever fully illustrate, no matter how many ages and god-faces they had tried to sketch it with.

Yes, it was Anubis. It was also Osiris. It was Yama and Shiva, Hel and Níðhöggr, Thanatos and Charon, Ereshkigal and Nergal, Māra and Morana, Arawn and Morrígan, and a hundred more besides.

It was the Death as greater-than-dreamt, greater-than-feared, greater-than-prayed by every world known, unknown, unborn, undead within the slim infinity of a single multiverse.

It was cold.

It was the End.

“DEATH MAY DIE. BUT I AM NEVER CHEATED.”

The toll of the voice was too much. Oblivion came. Jonathan Harker went.

Gone to rest.

“Sorry, son. I would let you drowse until the sun burns out if I did not think you’d hate yourself for it after. Even with such elastic time as we have here, even if I told you there was more than enough to make the save, you would hate yourself for dallying. Alive or dead, you grudge yourself any time to rest.”

Jonathan swam up to the voice with a spasm. Papers flew, books toppled, a pen clattered away. A hand padded with age and calluses settled on his shoulder. Cold, familiar. Good.

“Easy. No exams here. Nor any godly grunt work. That was what he was after you for, you know. He wanted all the play on Earth for himself while you took the errands. Doubt if he’ll admit it anytime this millennium, but you did a fairer job of it than he would have. You are a more than worthy worker, lad. I’m sure you’ve heard so before and ignored it—but don’t deny it now.”

Jonathan looked up and knew at once that he was not seeing or hearing the true Peter Hawkins. No more than he was sitting at his old clerk’s desk outside the man’s office with the late spring light turning the afternoon air to amber and gold. It did not stop his tears.

“He—it—y-you said someone named Castaigne was coming after the League? Wotton said he was in the ballroom…” Hawkins-who-wasn’t waved his hand at that.

“Same and different. The madman in the King’s masquerade was plotting fratricide long before the play got to him, and he did that plotting in an America that does not exist in your Earth. Pray it never does. The Castaigne at the League’s doorstep is another Hildred—your Hildred—and he has made friends with some misled admirers of the drowsy fellow in the ocean. The one who gave you that first Earthly memo to deliver, you’ll recall.” A fond exasperation came into the lined face; the look Jonathan had been met with a dozen times in as many days when Hawkins had caught him working and studying on half a night’s sleep. “I shall save you the pleading. We’ve been done with that since you cracked the old leech upside the head with a spade. I do not much like a cheater, nor do I abide by the ruin they leave behind them. Death shall die for you yet, son. Only walk with me on your way back. We’ve a shortcut.”

Jonathan took the hand that was Hawkins’ and staggered up from the desk. He followed the old man out the door and into—well. There were not words enough for the place any more than its Owner. But it was the place of After. The place of Endings and Beginnings. Crossroads and Crossrivers. Jonathan could not help his stare and was grateful for the first time in ages that he need not blink.

“Is he here somewhere? The real Peter Hawkins?”

“Him. Lucy. Some sailors. A fresh and frantic Transylvanian sent here by the poor mercy of a bullet; he would have a message for you too, regarding his men left to the wolves and the wild. Nyarlathotep bled them, but like the deplorable Mr. Davies, he never finishes his work in full. Those he ‘kills’ he obstructs. Locks them inside their own rot to make the suffering last even down into dust. Or at least until I or some volunteer come along with charity in hand. In your case, he did the reverse. Locked you out of the house and dragged you off before I could catch up to you. A natural death, your rightful death, that’d snap you straight to one of my faces and places. But not his work. Damned cheat.”

They were passing out of Death and into Dream. Jonathan felt the change like a shift in weather even before the scenery altered. Paranoia blossomed.

“We can skip this part if you like. Leave Q to go on suffering karma’s overdue quid pro quo for another hundred and nine years. Ellison could wring gallons of inspiration from this particular crevice of horror, but the short story will get to the point neatly enough. Ah, disregard the steel pillar. That’s for another Earth that even the Elder Things won’t touch.”

Jonathan began to read the flaring writing on the steel—

(HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE.)

—and swiftly ducked his head. The steel, which, of course, was not just steel, glared after him as he went, sullen at his flesh-free form. Jonathan had no meat or bone to play with and so the thing of Hate merely thought sulking sadism after him.

They came upon something worse, if only for how much pity it inspired. That and repulsion.

“Lord Brighton is quite alive and quite aware. He can be nothing else. The immortality of an especially durable and despairing jellyfish. And because he was made so whilst still holding a certain ancient volume of ill repute in his hands, it never left the things those hands became. You see?”

Jonathan saw. Regrettably. The Necronomicon was grafted into the gelatin of the semi-fluid limbs. What might have been Lord Brighton’s face bubbled and moaned at them. An attempt to run ended only in a shuffle and splatter against the metal floor. A splatter that lived and lived and lived.

“You have Death in you, Jonathan. True Death. The deal we made was not in words, but in oath. In exchange. Even your vow to Mina was a half-made thing beside it. If she had turned, you would have shielded her. Been turned. Subjected yourself to whatever Hell she was slated for—and whatever slaying your friends might bring. Or else fallen upon your kukri. I have seen the Earths where this happened. I have been Godfather Death to you in so many lives, so many ends, so many starts. I confess that this you—here, now—is the one I have grown to admire most. You do not suffer villains. But you refuse to be callous to innocents, be they human or horror.

“You do not just cull. You protect. You help. You hunt. You love. And you do not cheat. The only trouble is that you also do not rest.”

“There was hardly room or time enough to rest,” Jonathan said, trying not to watch how Lord Brighton quivered himself upright. “You must know that. The League is inundated with strange new cases, threats that could swallow the world.”

“You have heard the messages of the gods. The ones you mean to pass on. You know something of the reality already—why the uncanny upsurge now? Why not ages ago, when man was weak and ignorant of all but Nature? The gods and monsters have not changed. They quibble more with each other than spare a glance for humanity. So. If they have not changed their habits, who has?”

Jonathan knew.

“Your habits need a change as well, for the record. Death is not just the cessation of life, after all. You can put an End to far more diverse things if you put your mind and my hand to it. And once you do, don’t go inventing new chores to soak up your time. Take a break before you break yourself, young man.” Peter Hawkins’ eyes burned hollowly. “Unless you want another out-of-body experience.”

“Ah…”

“Just a joke, son. You’ll get around to dying properly sooner or later. Everyone does. But know that my ears will be plugged and my door will be locked to any Harkers of any generation wheedling me about psychopompous work to do. In the meantime, soul form or not, I suggest you roll up your sleeves.”

Jonathan did. It scarcely helped with the Necronomicon’s retrieval. Touching the kukri served to freeze and flake away the residue from his hands. Whatever flickering blotches Lord Brighton had for eyes winked out as the steel swung down and cleaved an Ending through all the muck he had become. The steel beam of Hate sizzled so vivid a red that it colored their entire corner of Nightmare. Someplace near, a great clock tolled twelve in gothic chimes.

“And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. Which is better than far too many alternatives. Now, steady with the blade. Shall I do it for you?”

“No,” Jonathan said, levelling the point carefully. “No, I can manage. Only, can you tell them…tell Hawkins, tell Lucy, my—my parents, tell the mother in the courtyard, tell them I—,”

“They know, son. The dead know all they need and all they want. And they know you’ll do fine. I’ll be seeing you. Though hopefully not too soon.”

With that, Jonathan Harker drove the kukri, clean and cold and full of Ending, through his chest.

In the League’s library, chaos reigned. It was Yellow and scaled, full of theatre and madness, and all the eldritch trimmings. A collaboration had formed, supposedly led by Hildred Castaigne, supposedly followed by the Cult of Cthulhu. The Yellow Sign waved, the carved figure was raised, and the snakeskin volume of The King in Yellow was in their grasp, freshly stolen from its keep. Now they demanded the Necronomicon. The dreams had led them; the mingling of prophecies that would unfold into the new world they and their gods would own once apocalypse came to pass. The League would turn the tome over, or they would detonate the explosives already planted around the building’s exterior. Enough to level the lot.

On discovering the League did not have said Necronomicon to give, there was as much scoffing as anger.

“They are fools all. Ignorant to their own prize. Bring out the Initiate! The Hand of the Messenger! We know he was taken to his rites this day!”

Before anyone could ask for clarification, their guests erupted in a joint thrill as both their demands entered the room.

Jonathan Harker walked in and the temperature dropped twenty degrees.

He held the Necronomicon in one hand. His kukri in the other. His mouth was a bitter line that wished to deliver its first message. This he gave to the nearest empty vase. Said message came in the form of a black and rotting bile, freshly evicted from his stomach and throat in a hideous stream. It smoked and gurgled and died in the vessel.

The League gaped. The cult seemed nonplussed. Castaigne seemed only to be searching for a token of the Yellow Sign to prove a connection with his own faction.

Jonathan delivered the next message.

“Your dreams are not a lie,” he said. “They are accidents. Cthulhu does exist. He does not care what you do in his honor. He will do you no favors either way. He will not even do you any fears, because he is not a herald. A day will come, billions of years from now, when we are all dust, that the sun will burn out on its own. The Earth will freeze. Cthulhu will rise. Only then will he fly out, rekindle that star, and begin growing a garden. Until then, all he wishes is to sleep. All the visions you think are his declarations are only his dreams. Not orders. Not promises. Just dreams.”

He looked to Hildred Castaigne who retreated another step in addition to the several he had already taken back.

“The King in Yellow, both the play and its playwright, operate in terms of story, theatre, and extremity. He does not spread the books. Publishing houses and rumor and the lure of old sins are all that move the play. No one is a character in it except in the madness it might inflict. You are not in its cast. You are a victim because you wished to make a victim of your brother out of deadly jealousy that existed long before you thumbed through the play. He is no prince of Carcosa, nor are you.”

He addressed the visitors as a whole.

“The otherworldly has always existed. Even before humanity wrote myths. Even before humanity existed. Certainly before Earth in any iteration. They have not changed. Humanity has. We have grown and we have spread, and there are too many of us who go looking for the divine and the profane only to intrude or bribe or bridle, hoping to profit from gods and monsters at the cost of others. You, and so many cousins to your thinking, are why supernatural menace has been on the rise. There is no prophecy to blame, no special alignment of planets and stars—just an army of gluttons and trespassers tramping through the uncanny looking for treasure.

“It must end.”

If not how the fellows in charge of the detonators—technological marvels operating by radio wave—were expecting. These had already been disarmed. He had scented the lethality-in-waiting planted around the stonework. It had taken barely a jog and a cut apiece to ruin the fine and fatal work.

It took even less to see to the interior. He made it simple.

“I would like for some of you to live. There’s no point in sharing a message with dead men. At least not when they can’t get back up and talk again. On the other hand, you all have murder crusted under your nails. Innocent lives sacrificed to appease gods who never wanted or asked for your worship. Their dreams are ones of horror, so you assumed horror would win their good graces and boons. So, here is what will happen. You are all going to leave. In that, you have an option. You can leave by way of the police. Trials will happen. Cells will follow. Your compatriots may receive what intel I have given, or you may sit and stew on it, or you may just head to the gallows and be done with wondering.

“Or,” the bitter line of his mouth curled into an even worse smile. It had the curve of a scythe. “A special treat. A new trick I learned in crossing back here. How would you like to meet your idols in person? I can get you to them. It’s such a short walk. The only trouble is, again, worshipper or no, they will have no inclination to treat you any different from the rest of the mortal mites. But you can meet them. Right now.”

Jonathan pointed back to the lightless hall from whence he’d come with the edge of the kukri blade. It seemed darker beyond that threshold even as they looked. Cold leaked from it. The frigid breeze of Sheol. The endless night over the Styx.

“However you go, wherever you go, one thing is to be guaranteed. None of you are going to kill again. Not for a dream or a whim or a godly bribe. Because I will know. I will find you. And you will only get to die if I am feeling forgiving.”

The lamplight seemed to dim a shade. In that gloom, Jonathan Harker’s eyes became bright as fresh-struck obols.

“What will it be?”

The police found a band of fifteen intruders waiting bound and bug-eyed at what was known to the sort of circles who gossiped about such things as, ‘The Storyteller Club.’ The title was a public creation, so-named because of the endless outlandish rumors tied to the supposed members and their doings. It was a place known almost entirely for the stories people invented about it.

Some joked that it was nothing more than some toff’s little getaway from the manse to hang about with his friends away from prying staff’s eyes. Some said the place was clogged with secret codenames and nefarious-to-scandalous dealings. Some said it was some private theatre or other, if some of the more outlandish characters were even half-right in their description. Some said it was all royals inside, or all vagabonds, or all spies, or the highest of society that even Her Majesty wasn’t in-the-know enough to visit. But the most agreed upon ‘facts’ of the Storyteller Club were that strange things always tended to happen in its vicinity and that entry to the building was excruciatingly exclusive.

Gentry and nouveau riche alike had made their attempts—Out of curiosity! For a lark!—and been universally turned away practically at the door. Lestrade and his men, it seemed, had the rare honor of being allowed the foyer, if only to collect the fresh harvest of intruders, all of whom they would find with warrants for arrest on multiple murder charges overseas, now with such petty aims as would-be burglary and a failed bombing on their hands.

“Well, suppose that’s madmen for you, isn’t it, Holmes? How is, ah,” Lestrade had gestured awkwardly about his own head, “the young man who coughed up the poison?” Said poison was still clotted and smoldering in the vase. Two very unhappy policemen had triple-wrapped it in linen and spared some clean gauze to go over their mouths and noses. It was a mutual agreement that a scientist or two could have a peek at it before it would be unceremoniously ‘lost in a small fire.’

“Mr. Harker is doing much better now that he hasn’t been left in so poor a condition he could be taken for dead. Mrs. Harker feels much the same.”

It was quite some work getting husband and wife to unlock from each other long enough to answer any questions. Even then they would not unfasten enough to release one another’s hand.

“It was all quite bizarre, Inspector. As soon as the door was shut, Lord Brighton had his man aim his pistol between my eyes. Being that a knife is no match for a bullet, I stayed where I was while Lord Brighton talked. He kept saying something about how I knew his ‘secret name’ was Q and all this surreal talk of killing death and fealty to what I assume were gods he’d either invented or dug up in a history text. Somehow I had figured into his ideas as a sacrifice of some kind. He told me my options were to drink that awful swill or be shot dead. I drank and became as good as dead anyway. As to my neck?” He rubbed the scabbing wound unhappily. “I could not say. My mind quite shut down after swallowing the muck. Were there any strange animals found?”

“None but the bastard at your doorway and the lord who’s got away. Near as we can figure, Lord Brighton took a ‘no witnesses’ approach to whatever mad hobby he was playing out. Once the doctors finish analyzing what’s left of Mr. Davies—a fellow with his own proud resumé of bloody business—I’ll eat my hat if they don’t come up with a less artful toxin in his system. Seems you got the exclusive treatment and he got the bum’s rush. None of your workers saw anyone pass out the door either, so the hounds will be at work trying to trace the codger from your office window. No luck yet. Even these lot you corralled, they haven’t said word one about Brighton, though they’ve plenty of unholy chatter on their past arrest records.”

“Well,” Jonathan shrugged, “perhaps it’s a holiday for them. A fine day for sacrificing. There may be something about it in here.” His free hand settled unhappily on the cover of the Necronomicon. “Though I think it would be better for your sleep if you didn’t. It’s one rare volume we are sorry to have borrowed from Professor Derleth.”

“In hindsight,” Mina frowned, “perhaps it was that very thing that marked you, darling. We are collectors and scribblers of esoteric works here. Professor Derleth deigned to lend us this while he was on holiday. We were due to return it before he left, but now it seems…”

“Oh, hell,” Lestrade pinched at his nose and shook his head. “Has this whole circus been over some lunatic bookworms’ squabble while hunting down a collector’s edition?

“We really couldn’t say, Inspector. Only that this and a copy of The King in Yellow we had under lock and key was also targeted. We’ve never cracked the cover, thank goodness, so we cannot say if it’s a real edition or just a prop. But superstition and a rare find deserved a spot in our collection; if not our reading circulation. Somehow word must have gotten out.”

“Reading circulation?”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Norton chimed in. “We’re something of a book club in here.”

“History hobbyists as well,” from Professor Van Helsing.

“Conservationists,” from Mr. Morris and the much-improved Mr. Holt.

“Sometimes,” Dr. Seward hummed, “they even let us doctors hide under words like, ‘debate’ and ‘discussion’ when we’re having a proper row.”

“A dialogue,” Dr. Jekyll corrected.

“I just come here when someone brings around a new pet,” Lord Godalming shrugged.

“They make an excellent resource, this lot,” Holmes hummed around his pipe. “If not for scholarly bric-a-brac, then for the blessed relief Watson and I can find away from the doldrums that pass between cases. Well. Until recently. It seems too many a rumor have run rampant about this place and we’ve been built up in the imagination as a site worth harassing with obscure pantheons. I suppose we’ll have some Maenads knocking at the door next.”

“Well, it’d go a fair way to help your lot’s case if they knew you were just a gaggle of academics shutting yourself in a box to natter over Dickinson and Darwin. God’s sake.” Lestrade scrubbed a hand over his face a last time and seemed to wish his other hand held a stein. “Right. Mr. Harker? We’d appreciate your tagging along as proof to our mortician that you’re livelier than advertised. We’ll need to halt the march of your death certificate before it can reach newsprint.”

Both Harkers, and Holmes, and Watson, and damn near half the members of the Storyteller Club—soon to leak out to the public ear as, ha!, the Storybook Club—invited themselves along. Jonathan Harker proved himself to be sufficiently alive, but with insufficient circulation and, to judge by a half-second examination of his eyes, operating on incredibly insufficient sleep.

“I know. I would have worked myself to death eventually if I hadn’t been forced to drink myself there today. I mean to take a proper holiday after taking a very long nap. But before I go—,”

“I’m not the medical man to talk to about a prescription.”

“No, not that. I should like to see someone you have here. I was told I should take a second look at him to see if it might jog any memory from before,” he cleared his throat, “everything. If perhaps I or the others were being followed.”

Joseph Davies was on the slab waiting. The carving had already begun. Pieces examined in tandem with the bloody foam of the mouth. No matter how many times the eyelids were pulled shut, they fluttered open. Blind, they still saw. Dead, the man still pleaded.

The mortician curled his lip at the sight of him.

“I’ve mopped up more than a fair share of souls this bastard sent me. I hope they’re all lined up waiting to give back what he gave them in Hell.”

“He does deserve Hell.” Jonathan scarcely noticed how the mortician shivered beside him, gooseflesh and the hair on his nape standing out all at once. He laid a cool hand upon the table. Its cold spread from him to its cargo. “But not this one.”

The eyes saw no more. The dead man did not plead.

Later, the mortician would see two coins left behind on the slab.

Pennies.

Lord Henry Wotton had a new visitor shadowing Dorian Gray. Jonathan Harker was given leave to inspect the padded interior of the cell and he came to a stop near a high corner. There was a small, nearly imperceptible slit in the padding. From it, he worked a gorgeous, yet somehow unpleasant brooch of black gem and gold sigil. A Yellow Sign, even. He made a note to deposit it in the nearest graveyard.

“My, my. However did that get up there?”

“Wotton.”

“Harker. Is this when you evict me from the party? I am curious how you’ll manage with these witnesses and no dashing blade at your hip. I suppose you might do it with your hands.”

“Yes, with my hands.” So saying, Dorian, Jack, and a number of anxious attendants watched on as he laid an icy palm against Wotton’s brow. The air crisped as he pantomimed sliding off a masquerade disguise. “It’s not just the end of the party, Lord Wotton. The story is over, the curtain has fallen.” A strange light came and went in Jonathan’s eyes as he whispered, “The End.”

“Oh, but wouldn’t that be so neat? So easy? If you…if it would just…just end and…” Muscles twitched and ticked and loosened in his face, the default sardonic smile finally going lax. A glassy shine polished the bloodshot and half-jaundiced eyes. “Oh. Oh, God. He isn’t there. None of it is there.” The noise that followed could not be separated between laughter or sobbing. There would be time enough for him differentiate them once he was on the other side of the asylum walls. It goes without guessing that Wotton no longer frequented society circles afterward, nor did he have a cent to spare for theatrical endeavors.

It was said, however, that he made a sizable annual donation to the mysterious-to-mundane function of the Storybook, née, Storyteller Club.

“No,” he would be quoted sometime later. “I am not trying to bribe my way into their ranks. Rather, I am paying them to keep themselves and their work as far from myself and the public as possible.”

Transylvania saw another visit. A remote corner of old memories. Jonathan found the remains of every man that had been scattered by elements and animals with the ease of a bloodhound. These they buried, but not before Jonathan had laid a cold palm on each of them. The wind sounded like sighs.

In Wales, the people of Caermaen and the Grey Hills who had been fighting unsuccessfully to forestall the purchase and development of their verdant old acres and stones, found themselves with unexpected champions flocking from the same English corners that had wanted to tear the turf up and crowd more cities in. The emptied pockets of lords, doctors, world renowned professors, and a trio of volunteer solicitors who possessed all the wit and will of the Devil himself descended like locusts upon the would-be land barons and their shoddy contracts.

Before the season was out, the buyers were booted and the entire undeveloped terrain was cordoned off as a protected nature reserve, not to be encroached upon by any form of human expansion. A change that was made clear almost to the point of seeming excessive to the locals.

If only to reach the ears underground as well as above.

The night before they left, Jonathan Harker went to the wardrobe of his room at the inn, and found a surprise waiting. One he very cautiously, very quietly, invited his companions to see before they saw about removal. Jack Seward had to sit down for a long while. Van Helsing sat with him.

Dr. Arthur Raymond, amateur lobotomist to his adoptive daughter and innumerable other girls, source of the alchemical White Powder lacing spree in the Burbage chemical supplier chain, self-styled worshipper of Pan and his Peoples, and the man who had almost sliced a sliver of bone and brain out of Jack Seward’s skull to fill it with that same ancient drug as an experiment, was left beside Jonathan Harker’s shoes in the wardrobe. At least, the doctor above the neck.

His face was locked in a rictus of terror. It held in place especially well with the stone jar full of reconstituted White Powder jamming his jaw open until it broke. The eyes were no longer eyes so much as black-green pus. The language of Ixaxar, the Black Seal, was used to carve a red message across the man’s temple. The translation:

DOCTOR SAW THE GOD HE SHOWED TO MANY.

HE SEES FOREVER.

WORK DONE. NOISE GONE. GO DEEP NOW.

THANKS GIVEN TO PALE MAN OF DEATH.

DREAM GOOD.

The head was burned. The White Powder with it.

Soon the world quieted its supernal rumbles. The League collectively relaxed by several increments. The Nautilus even went back to deeper seas and discovered, improbably, that the sunken city they had visited had flickered out of existence once more, like the vapor of a dream. Notably, this was after Captain Nemo began a sea monstrous campaign against the fellows working to build the first oil drilling structure off the coast of California. A similar industrial endeavor was foiled by, just as absurd in the newspapers’ opinion, a horde of fish people dismantling the operation in the night.

Odd times abounded. But not as worrisomely odd as they had been.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Harker slept in for the first time since he woke from his drugged fog in the care of the nuns. He did so with relish. He did so with vigor. He did so with Mina Harker watching for the first sign of nightmare, of his breath gone too still, of anything and everything else that might try to shatter the vision of peace drooling into the pillow beside her. Nothing did. She watched him anyway.

It had been her longest running hobby since they first made the leap of settling into the same bed. Doubly so when the worst of Dracula’s menace was thrust on them. But the habit never went away even in tranquil hours. A silver-white curl fell over his face. She tucked it away behind his ear and then let her palm rest on his cheek. Cool, but not cold. How odd that it reassured her now. He had apologized to her for his condition in a dozen ways despite her insistence that it did not matter. His temperature only plummeted when he was ‘at work.’ He certainly thawed a great deal during play, as their holiday had illustrated on more than one night. Afternoon. Once or twice after tea.

“It’s another sign of you now,” she’d told him. “It proves you’re in there.”

He always found it hard to believe her. She always found it easy to prove. So it went. So it would go for as long as they could fight for it. Griffin had muttered in passing that he could no longer tell if Jonathan was the most or least lucky man alive. Even the ‘alive’ part seemed always to be in limbo.

The hand not on Jonathan’s cheek moved down to her stomach and she smiled.

I beg to differ, Dr. Griffin.

“Mina?” The voice fell dreamily out of him. His hand floated up to cover her own, sandwiching her warmth in his skin.

“I’m here.”

“Good. Good,” he murmured to the pillow. “Quin seer loosey…”

“What?” she laughed. “Jonathan, are you awake or not?”

“No.” He blinked at her and scrubbed his mouth clean. “Yes. I think. Sorry, I was talking with someone.”

He did do that on occasion now. Fell asleep and kept in some kind of action. Walking and talking. Sometimes they were only dreams. Sometimes the dreams were more. But even in sleep, the young man refused to be still. Even if he did rest.

“Who with?”

“Mutual friend. I’ve had my suspicions for a while, and I wanted to see if she might have inside information. She did.”

“What did she say?”

“She sends oceans of love and millions of kisses.” Jonathan laid her hand against his lips. “And she insists that our first choice for names should be Quincey or Lucy.”

Somewhere, someone writes a world. Another. A hundred. The faces in them are old and new and forever and fresh.

They are made of pencil and paper, button and screen.

They are heroes and villains and gods and monsters and character and friend and fiend and fantastic all over.

They will live.

They will die.

Death will die, now and then, and bring them back for another story, for better or worse.

But here and now—a now that can last as long we like, for time passes differently in the dream of our world—they are happy. They love and are loved. And all that is weird and wonderful awaits them.

-FIN-

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