The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. Brian Stableford
“I want to know what is within myself—what the Lord might communicate to me if only I may hear him.”
The travelers were not Christians, but they understood his notion of the Lord better than a Roman would have done. “This is the desert,” the leader of the band told him. “Here, the voices of the djinn are louder than the voice of God. Solitude leads to madness.”
“The Devil will undoubtedly tempt me,” Anthony admitted. “I am ready for that.” He did not tell them that the thirst was already building within him for something richer by far than water or wine, nor what effort it required to resist the urge to cut his visitors’ throats and suck the wounds till he could such no more.
He had always thought that solitude was the best thing for a man of his sort. The fact that the company of living human beings would henceforth be an endless torment of unacknowledgeable desire only served to confirm his judgment.
The travelers went on their way on the thirty-first day after Anthony had endured the vampire’s bite; after that he was alone until the evening of the fortieth day, when he woke from a doze at sunset to find a simulacrum of Christ offering him a cup.
“This is my blood,” said the apparent Christ. “Drink of it, and be saved.”
“I have been expecting you, Satan,” Anthony replied. “I knew that you would seize upon my new weakness. Why else would you have sent the demon to suck the fluid from me?”
“This is my blood,” the false Christ repeated. “It is my gift, and the way to salvation.”
“You are the Devil,” Anthony retorted, “and you have no gift to offer but eternal damnation.” He got up and went to the well, setting Satan firmly behind him. He lowered the bucket and brought it up again.
He drank—but he was still thirsty, and he knew that the darker thirst would not be assuaged by water.
Anthony did not doubt that the fluid in the Devil’s cup really was blood, nor that it would answer his terrible need, but he had not come to Pispir in search of satiation—quite the reverse, in fact. He did not drink water to salve his thirst, but only because he would die without it; had he been able to drink and keep his thirst he would have done so. To be able to drink and still have thirst of a sort to test him was a privilege of sorts.
When he turned around again, determined to see things in the light of his faith, the Devil was cloven-hoofed and shaggy-legged, with horns set atop his brow. Satan did not seem comfortable in this form, for his eyes seemed pained and his gaze as roaming restlessly, but Anthony assumed that this was because honesty was a sore trial to a creature of his sort.
“You are foolish to insist on seeing me thus,” the Devil complained, casting aside the cup, from which nothing spilled as it rolled over the sand-dusted flagstones bordering the well. “I am neither the Great God Pan, nor the Father of Lies, nor a prideful angel cast out of Heaven. I will admit to being a temptation personified, but mine is the temptation of knowledge and progress. I am one who can and will reveal secrets, if you will only consent to listen.”
“I will not,” Anthony told his adversary. “I am deaf to all but the word of the Lord, and knowledge of the Lord is the only wisdom I seek.”
“I did not send the vampire to bite you,” the Devil insisted, his agonized eyes looking upwards as if to welcome the deeper blue that was consuming the sky from the east. “That is not my way of working—but if I were of a mind to create such creatures, I would shape them as seductive women, whose bite would be a glorious indulgence and a pleasure unmatchable. The wretched parasite that attacked you was one of nature’s sports. If God were responsible for such monstrosities—and I cannot believe that He is—they would be evidence of His sickness or His sense of humor.”
“Have you come to debate with me, then?” Anthony asked. “I do not mind in the least, for the nights are long at this time of year, and often surprisingly cold. It will be a futile occupation, though, from your own point of view. There are many souls in the world, alas, that might be won with far less trouble than mine.”
“This is not a contest,” the Devil said, seeming a little more at ease now that the evening star was shining brightly and the atmospheric dust in the west had taken on the color of blood. “There was no war in Heaven, and there is no war on Earth for the souls of humankind. You conceive of yourself as a battleground in which a higher self of faith of virtue, aided by a guardian angel, is ceaselessly at war with a lower self of insatiable appetite and uncontrollable passion, provoked by mischievous imps, but all of that is mere illusion. If solitude really allowed you to look into yourself more clearly, you would know that you are less divided than you imagine, and that the world is not as you imagine it to be.”
“Excellent,” said Anthony. “Nothing can warm a man more, in the absence of tangible heat, than the labor of cutting through sophistry. Sit down, my enemy, I beg you. Let’s make ourselves as comfortable as we can, given the hardness of the ground and the aching within.”
“Oh no,” the Devil said, seeming to grow larger as the night advanced, and now unfurling wings like those of a gigantic eagle. “I can do better than that, my friend, by way of distracting us from our mutual plight.”
Anthony had observed that the Devil, in what he took to be the dark angel’s natural form, was not well-adapted for sitting. His goatish limbs were not articulated like a humans; even squatting must be awkward for him. Anthony had not expected compliance when he made his teasing offer—but neither had he expected to be carried away.
The Devil did not grow claws to match his wings; indeed, the wings themselves refused to coalesce into avian feathers, but continued to grow and to change, as if they were intent on attaining the pure insubstantiality of shadow. By night, it seemed, the Ape of God and the Adversary of Humankind had more freedom to formulate himself as he wished—and what he wished to be, it seemed, was a vast cloud of negation.
Anthony felt himself caught up by that cloud, but he was not grabbed or clutched, merely elevated towards the sky. The cloud was beneath him and all around him, but it was perfectly transparent—more perfectly transparent, in fact, than a pool of pure water or the unstirred desert air.
Anthony tried to resist the sensation that he could see more clearly through the cloud of absence than he had ever been able to see before, but his eyes were unusually reluctant to take aboard his conviction and he had to fight to secure the dictatorship of his faith.
He saw the walls of the fort shrink beneath him, until the ruin was a mere blur on the desert’s face. Then he saw the coastline of North Africa, where the ocean was separated from the arid wilderness by a mere ribbon of fertile ground. Then he watched the curve of the horizon extend into the arc of a circle, and he saw the sun that had set a little while before rise again in the west, as the edge of the world could no longer hide it.
“You cannot trouble me with that,” he told the Devil. “I know that the world is round.”
The Devil no longer had eyes to reflect his anguish, nor a leathery tongue with which to form his lies, but he was not voiceless. He spoke within Anthony’s head, like an echo of a thought.
“Fear not, my friend,” the voice said, softer now than before. “I have brought air enough to sustain us for the whole night long—and if, by chance, you would like to slake your thirsts, I have water and blood enough to bring you to the very brink of satisfaction.”
“I have drunk my fill of the Lord’s good water,” Anthony told him, “and human blood I will never drink, no matter how my Devilled thirst might increase. I can suffer any affliction, knowing that my Lord loves me and that my immortal soul is safe for all eternity.” While he spoke, Anthony observed that the world as spinning on its axis, and moving through space as if to describe a circle of its own around the sun. The moon and the world were engaged in a curious dance, but the sun—whose disk seemed no bigger than the moon’s, when seen from the land of Egypt—seemed to have become far more massive as the cloud moved towards it.
“Were you expecting