He Who Walks in Shadow by Brett J. Talley Read Free Book Online

could not help but feel that something more had descended. Words have power in this world, and at the mention of the Ankara, the air had changed around us. But Carter did not seem to notice. He sat there, smoking his cigar, staring into space as if he were looking into the past.
    “The scroll is known,” he continued, “as the Bel Xul. Within its pages are recorded the visions of an Ankaran holy man, who the Sumerians knew only as Nabu Sebet Babi, the Seer of the Seven Gates. It was said that he received secret knowledge of the time before time, when the moon had not yet found its place in the heavens, and no sun had ever dawned upon the earth. Within these visions Nabu Sebet Babi witnessed impossible visions across infinite vistas of time and space. And within those vistas he looked upon an age of earth’s history before the coming of man, when, as the Bible records, ‘the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.’ But that does not mean the world was empty.”
    I nodded as he spoke. The truth of his words I had seen with mine own eyes decades earlier when one of the older masters of this world had risen from the deep. Were it not for the sacrifice of a brave and honorable man, a sea captain named Jonathan Gray, the world might have ended then and there, all those years before.
    “The Bel Xul is thus in keeping with much we have seen in our travels, and it reflects the legends of other long dead cultures that speak of the elder gods, those ancient forms that ruled primordial earth. The Old Ones, who built the titanic cities of Ib and R’lyeh and Tikalt and that nameless necropolis that lies beneath the sands of Arabia. In fact, the Bel Xul may well be the primogenitor of these legends, the seed by which a thousand different mythos came into being.”
    “But what,” I said, leaning in close to Carter, “does this have to do with what happened in Siberia?”
    Carter looked down at the letter he had received from Denikin, rereading its key passages. “The Bel Xul is voluminous,” he said, still scanning the missive, “but the good professor has directed us to one passage. The Old Ones, of course, are unimaginable to us, and attempts to conceptualize them are as if one were to stare into the unreverberate blackness of the abyss—impenetrable. That is their nature.
    “But there is one,” he said, holding up a finger, “whose relationship to mankind is entirely different. When the Old Ones were overthrown, when light came to this world and they were cast into outer darkness, there was one who remained, who still walked the earth and sowed destruction and confusion in his midst.
    “He is the harbinger, the messenger, he who stands in between. A god to the legendary Mi-Go, a demon to early man. He wears a thousand masks, or so they say, and thus is known by many names. He is the crawling chaos, the ‘Black Man’ of the ancient witch cults, the haunter of the dark. But one name, taken when he walked along the River Nile in the city of Shem in the Old Kingdom, he wears as his own. And that name,” Carter said, the light of the fire reflected in his eyes, “the one that has come to us across the darkness of forty-seven centuries, is Nyarlathotep.”
    He leaned back in his chair, relighting the cigar that had gone dead in the telling of his story. The name of Nyarlathotep was well known to me, as were the tales of his wanderings across the earth. And black stories they were. It was said that he possessed power over the mind of man and that he could, merely with his words, sway the masses. He had the ability to possess and control the powerful—kings, emperors, popes—leading entire kingdoms to death and destruction. Disease followed in his wake, and there was no land that his feet fell upon that was spared an ill fate. Even William, who was but a neophyte in his knowledge of the true nature of the world around us, had heard that accursed name.
    “And that is why we are on this