Ian MacLeod - The Golden Keeper

As I look out now, near to sunset as Vesuvius rumbles threateningly and brings early darkness across half the sky, it seems to me that the familiar and beloved landscape of my childhood memories formed by the intersections of sea and hills shifts and breaks like panes of ice upon a lake. But for the fact that they were moving, I would take the figures I can see crossing a distant field to be the limbs of twisted, blackened trees. And earlier, as I rested from the task of dragging a large and recently purchased mirror out into the well courtyard, I saw another odd effect. Leaning against the wall for support as the corridor ahead of me seemed to twist downward, I looked at myself in the polished brass. The mirror’s inner surface flared out, and my face, admittedly broader and paler now, became not so much that of my father, as of that terrible distortion of him which I saw coming up from the well. And then began the maddening piping that has been with me ever since.

Now that the sun has set on this dense and windless night, and with the mouth of the well surely covered by enough weight to muffle any sound, the piping grows louder still. Entwined within it is the muttering of some mad incantation that I recognize now comes from my own throat.

I hear it speak of the Great Gate of the Stars, and of the living seed that is and always was the Golden Keeper.

The shrieking now is incredibly loud—triumphant, even, as the ground shakes beneath me and the walls begin to shift. Perhaps, after all the years of threats and mutterings since the time of Herculaneum and Pompeii, Vesuvius is preparing to erupt. No doubt, if that is all this is, the women will be wailing, offering the blood of lambs on the hot smoking slopes above their dwellings. But to me, it all seems far closer than that. Closer even than the well or even the sliding walls of this room. I feel a stronger presence, as if the very ground beneath me were about to crack.

My head swirls so much with this chaos, dearest reader, that I fear you and I must soon part, for I can barely write these words. Stopping my ears does nothing but increase the terrible sound, this sense of something within me rising. I would also bind my eyes, were it not for what I see in the greater dark, which is now so vivid that I can scarcely bear to blink. I would but speak to you now, reader, but each breath is agony, and with the parting of my lips the piping grows yet wilder and guttural words spill out. I tried to call upon Vesta, protector of households, that strong and humble symbol of goodness and light. But the sound came out as mad shrieking, and I could barely close my jaw as my chin was jerked back and my throat widened on a stream of darkness and foul air. Even now, with my chin tightly bound and my mouth filled with the gold discs and papyrus that are all I now have about me, the sound grows in power.

I will wait for what this night brings me, and distract myself meanwhile by ordering these scraps of my writing before they are spoiled by the dark fluid that now bubbles from my lips. Perhaps my father was right, and I will never understand the meaning of the rituals I have been performing, nor yet the purpose of the Golden Keeper. Perhaps our lives really are without purpose. But, in that, at least, I fear that I may yet prove him wrong. Meanwhile go in peace, reader, and know that I am Fabius Lucius Maximus, a trained accountant of high Roman blood who has done service to the Empire in both Egypt and Sicily. Truly, I am a murderer also, and I fear that I have treated many of those I came across harshly. But all I ever wished for was decency and comfort. I trust that, after all we have shared, you will understand all of this, gentle reader, and strive not to condemn me.