With your one free hand, you slip the amulet out into the open air and hold it aloft.
The workers' dull gazes seem to settle on it. They hesitate.
You gaze into the darkness behind the Stone Man's eyes.
"I know what you are, Stone Man!" you shout. "A star-boil, a beggar, and a wretch! Abdul Al-hazred wrote of you when he spoke of 'them who trail behind in the slime of the crawling chaos'! You are the thing Father Harry's people bound to a cross! You did not see your enemy's greatest weapon, even as it entered your chambers! You are not Nyarlathotep but his shadow!"
James is staring at you. His face contorts.
One of the workers takes a step forward.
Whipple's hand moves in a blur. A crack of smoke, and the man's head bursts. He topples. The torch tumbles down by the corpse's feet.
You raise the amulet up, towards the unseen sky above the encompassing stone.
"Old Hag!" you yell. "I know what you are, and I know whom you serve! The host has invited you in, and you must come! Now is the dusk of the shooting star and the dawn of the rising sea! Bring the shapeless mass! Bring Him in His terror and His infinite fury! Bring the tide to wash away the stone! Bring the gibbering fiend to tear back the silver mask! This is the meeting-place, and the time is now! Yi-nash-Yog-Sothoth-he-lglb-fi-throdag-Yah!"
James is screeching,
"Stop him! End this blasphemy!"
and as the workers stretch their hands out towards you, Whipple firing his last two shots into their number, bringing down another in an explosion of blood, you feel something in the texture of the cavern shift. A weird, uncanny distortion in the air.
All at once, the torches extinguish, as if snuffed out by an unseen hand. But there's still light. Too much light; a pale, eerie green that does not seem to come from anywhere in the cave.
The Stone Man takes a step forward.
And another.
And the mask slips from his face. You stare, just for a second, at what's beneath. Nothingness. A void that presses back, into the very nature of the air around you, pushing reality back, to the things that lie beyond-
You rip your gaze away.
Meg Polack is standing over his shoulder.
She makes a cursory gesture to you, as if to say, without a great deal of concern for what happens to you,
'Run'.
Tendrils of smoke, of something more solid, more physical than smoke, are coiling about the Stone Man's face. The stone itself begins to tremble.
You turn, and run. A worker's hands catch out at the back of your jacket for a moment, and then are dragged back. Inhuman, high-pitched shrieks fill the air. The acrid stench of Nyarlathotep's creatures fumes outwards.
A single, frenzied cry - YOG-SOTHOTH! YOG-SHOTHOTH!
Ahead of you, Whipple stumbles up the steps; you do the same, tripping and falling for a moment against the stone. The amulet slips out of your grasp.
James vaults over you.
You snatch out, grabbing his leg with your one free hand, and pull him down. He topples, cracking his head.
"Priest," you shout, "your god is no god at all! The Old Hag was right to deny him!"
He turns. His forehead is bloodied. One eye is closed. And it's James Hurley, your old friend, the man with whom you played chess on the grassy quadrangles of Miskatonic on sunny days - the man who comforted you when your engagement was cut off.
"Stephen," he whimpers, "Stephen, it's gone. The fiend has left me. The things...the things it made me do..."
Slowly, painfully, your broken hand snakes across through the material of the sling, and catches hold of the butt of your revolver.
You say, through gritted teeth,
"James is gone. He's dead. You took my friend, you bastard-"
His face alters; turns murderous. With a mad, desperate laugh, he raises his foot to kick out at you.
You lift the revolver out of your jacket, your twisted arm trembling and screaming. Your finger squeezes at the trigger.
From this distance, even you can't miss.
*
As dawn rises, a man clutching a broken arm is helped up from the rope ladder onto the battlements of the old fort. The assembled villagers gaze at him, dully.
Shortly afterwards, another man, middle-aged, with the beard of an industrialist, clambers up. With some difficulty, he and the man with the broken arm haul the ladder up. Very slowly, with the greatest of care. The villagers do not help them.
On the end, carried in a crude cloth hammock, is the body of a beautiful black-haired woman. The two men lay her out, on the ground.
Father Harry steps forward from out of the crowd.
"The goddess blessed you," he says. "The Stone Man is taken. The war between the sea and the land is over. We led you well."
Stephen Buch ignores him.
"Hurley," Father Harry insists, "would have used your knowledge of the Old ways. He and his Stone Man would have raised the crawling chaos - the true Nyarlathotep. You have won a great victory for your race."
Stephen gazes into the man's sunken eyes.
"Where will you go?" he asks.
Harry shrugs.
"Back into the sea," he says. "Until it's time for us to rise again."
*
Twelve years later.
Two old men and a young boy walk out across the sunny Arkham grass. The boy skips and dances with the unreasoning delight of the young; the two old men take their time, carefully skirting the moss-covered graves. They have become accustomed, each in their own way, to a life of neglect - days of quiet mockery, concern, and accusations of lunacy or conmanship, and nights lit up by fits of trembling madness. When they close their eyes, they see the twisted symbols of the Dunhill temple. Once or twice, in the worst of their fevers, their imaginations have even led them to picture the shapeless form that rose up behind the Stone Man - the dread visage of Yog-Shoggoth.
The boy, whose name is Howard Lovecraft, plucks out a daisy from the grass and hands it to his grandfather. He's never truly understood the bogey tales the old man tells him - but even while the details seem strange, even horrifying, the outlandishness of it all excites him rather than makes him afraid. When he dreams, he dreams of these fantastic creatures, these old gods and terrible things that fall to earth on the backs of shooting stars, these ancient texts and forbidden spells...and he delights in all of it, to the extent that his interest worries his dutiful parents.
Whipple leads him gently to the old meeting-place in the graveyard. Scarlet roses grow and flourish up out of the single gravestone, with its single occupant, that marks out the lives of two very different people.
Stephen stops, and gazes down at the inscription.
JEZEBEL MARY KLINE AND JAMES EDWARD HURLEY
MAY THEY WHO GAZED TOO LONG INTO DARKNESS DISCOVER LIGHT.
THE END.
Should've put it in quotes, I guess.
