Ian MacLeod - The Golden Keeper

Here in Naples after the first work on this villa had been done, I summoned my sister and a fair scattering of other guests, including men whom I deemed would make eager suitors now that our family’s wealth was no longer in doubt. In truth, though, when I saw her face, sad and long and flat, it seemed to me that the poor creature had grown more sullen than ever. The occasion went as all the others had done, which is to say pointlessly and expensively, as I lay at table and watched the people move and unfold like shadows and tried to catch the buzzing of their words. Like the other occasions, I knew that it would end early, with poor excuses, uneasy laughter, glances back from my departing guests. My sister, almost as bored with it all as I was, must have wandered off between one of the many courses, for suddenly the air from the unimproved passages beyond this villa’s newly lighted hall was torn by a blood-chilling shriek. To this day, I do not know what she imagined she saw upon the dais where my father had once sat, and it seems unlikely, in the gibbering incontinent state in which I found her and that to this day she remains in, that she will ever be able to explain what fancy has riven her mind. She dwells now in a place where, if you pay enough, her kind are looked after. There, she is changed and fed like an infant, and her hands are kept bound and bandaged to thwart the attempts she has made to take out her eyes.

Still, I am proud of the way that work has proceeded at this villa, even if it seems I am to be the last in my family’s line unless I take the step of adopting an heir. In the daytime, when the sun is brightest and there is less need for the lamps that I otherwise keep about me, I welcome the sounds and sights of people working, even if the refurbishing of this villa has been a matter of much argument and debate.

These last few days, in fact, following a protracted argument between myself and a foreman about a new window, all work has ceased. It was plain to me that his joinery was out of true, and that whole aspects of the room were finished shoddily at odd degrees. The man and his assistants still had the temerity to claim that all was as it should be; he even produced a rule and set it against the wood and plaster to prove his point, although the thing was clearly as crooked as he was. Thus, and with all my slaves and servants recently gone, I find myself alone.

Naples itself and this coast and countryside have declined in the time since my childhood. An ominous black pall hangs over Vesuvius. The air often stinks. The markets are full of cheap goods and sour produce; once fine streets have become rows of hovels and the harbor reeks of dead fish. I sometimes fear that all our Empire may be declining. There are risings of peasants and shepherds in Gaul, usurpations in Britain, German invasions along the Danube and Rhine. There is even talk that Rome may one day cease to be the capital of our Empire—although, despite the strange things I have heard of and seen, that is one outcome I will never believe.

Alone as I find myself in this villa with you, my reader, my last and trusted friend, it might be imagined that I am prey to robbers. Yet only two nights ago, after the leaving of my last few servants, a body was found not far away in the woods. It belonged to a notorious thief, and was roughly beheaded and coated in a foul slime. So it seems to me, my reader, that in some way, I am still protected, although as I wander the deep lanes whilst Vesuvius growls and rumbles and black flakes of its soot drift like snow upon the air, the people shun me and call in their children at my approach, and close the shutters of their homes.

It is near now to the height of another summer. I go out but little anyway, as the lanes are intolerably filled with the sharp stench of strawberries. In truth, now that I could afford to eat and drink whatever trifles I please to, I find that my taste in food has become bland. My previous cook, before he left, made me many loaves of unrisen cornbread which, stale though they are, I had been eating, and, since they ran out, have made do with the dough he left uncooked in his hurry to leave. Even on such poor rations, I fear that I may be gaining some of my father’s girth.

Each night, I light as many lanterns as I can—and try to restrain myself from drinking their oil. In the few times that sleep comes upon me, I wish that it had not, for I find myself within the presence of the thing that was once my grandmother again, although it seems to me now that she was always thus—a black assortment of angles—and that the things of which she speaks in that buzzing voice are all that she has ever told me. For I know now, although I would give much of my gold not to, of Nyarlathotep, of Great Cthulhu, and Shub-Niggurath, the black goat of the woods—of beings beyond all darkness.

Last night, I tried to break the spell by speaking back to her.

“What do you want?” I asked—then added a half-remembered phrase that came back to me. “Are you the Golden Keeper?”

She chuckled at that, and the sound thinned and faded into a thousand echoes. “What I keep is not gold. And it is not my task to keep it.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing.”

“There must be something—”

“—I give that you may give,” she says before her voice trails off into inhuman buzzing. Then she lifts something from within the twisting folds of her robes, although it takes a long time for it to emerge, and her arms are like the tearing and stretching of something ancient and rotten. But I recognize it when she holds it out for me. For the thing is black. Multifaceted.

“Here,” she says, and, although the stone is already mine, I reach out to take it.

It shifts within my hand as it begins—segment on unfolding segment, as if from the workings of a hidden mechanism—to open. Something smooth and living slides out from it across my fingers. A shining worm of sorts, mucus-coated and somehow larger than the stone within which it was contained. It is truly ghastly to look at, and I watch in horror as it begins to burrow into my hand.

I opened my eyes then, and the room was filled with a sound that I imagined for a moment was nothing more than my own screaming. I stumbled out from my bed, drawn and repulsed by a mad endless piping as Odysseus must once have been by the sirens who lured sailors to the rocks on these very shores. I stumbled naked along dark swirling corridors, no longer knowing what I was escaping or seeking, until I found myself standing out in the well courtyard beneath a sky lit and blackened by Vesuvius’s fitful glow. It seemed to me that the piping here was strong enough to burst my ears, and that I knew at once where it came from. Still possessed by the logic of a dream, I drew back the grating of the well.

Perhaps I truly was dreaming, for there can be no rational meaning to what I saw when I looked down. For a moment, the well seemed truly bottomless, filled with stars. Then there came a liquid click, and a sense of something rising. If I could describe the thing at all, I would say that it was made of bubbling, shifting matter. As to its true shape, it had none— or many; for as it rose toward me with impossible speed, piping and shrieking, I imagined that it re-made itself into a mockery of many forms. I saw dog-headed Anubis, I saw Medusa, bearded Jove, a horned bull, and the livid, bloated face of my father. Then, I stumbled back, swooning in the terrible blast of air. And I remained that way for much of night, crouched shivering by the well as Vesuvius smoked and shook and glowing flakes of ash burned at my flesh, almost urging the thing that I had glimpsed to finish its ascent. Yet nothing happened, and as dawn grew, the piping slowly faded.

I am no longer sure what happened last night; and how much of what I saw was due to some fevered condition, or the effects of sleepwalking. This day, since I could summon no workmen to do the task for me, I have busied myself with laying the grate back over the well, and weighing it down with stone blocks and what pieces of furniture I could manage to drag unaided into the courtyard. It was harsh work, made more difficult by the problems I found in negotiating their shapes around the incredibly odd angles and openings of corridors and doors.