Falling Idols

staring dimly from across the room. His mouth hung frozen half-open in perpetual surprise, and by now the skin of the head was waxy and pale.

“I thought you would be pleased,” explained Nomad, in loss and sorrow and the pain of lifetimes of broken promises.

He shuffled a few more steps to sag to the floor, before the hearth, and when Giselle moved to help him he seemed to plead with his eyes, No, I am beyond your help forever, and she could only gaze upon him in tears. His rude clothing was splotched with blood, surely not all his own, but then, surely some of it had to be. How many wounds could such a formidable body withstand? How many bullets, how many blows, how many piercing slivers from the heart of a grenade?

From the floor, he looked over to Father Guillaume, who sat in his chair, shocked into silence by a revulsion beyond even his own comprehension. Had Judas looked this way, Giselle wondered, in realizing the enormity of his crime?

“I have a soul,” said Nomad, in blood and quiet dignity, and she then wondered how long he had been outside to listen. “I do. I can feel it, and I know that is what it is, because nothing else could ache so deeply. Though I may not have been born with a soul, I know that I have built one of my own over time. With every year I live … with every deed, with every sorrow and indignity and wound I suffer, with every humiliation and hour of loneliness … I know I build that soul a little more. These things that tear human hearts to pieces? These are my bricks, and my mortar.”

Father Guillaume managed to find his voice after all. “You take much for granted.”

Nomad seemed almost to laugh. “And you do not?”

And thus Giselle wondered: Did she, as well?

For a while Nomad turned his head to gaze into the fireplace, where the fresh log was beginning to blaze anew. “I planned once to kill myself. On the frozen north seas, I left my creator behind in the bed where he died, and I told the captain of that vessel that my only intention was to then build my own funeral pyre, and climb atop it, and let the winds take my ashes to the sea. What a fine dream that was…

“But as I made my way south again, another dream took hold, and on that day when snow and ice were behind me, and wood to burn before me, I knew I could not. Because of my incomplete soul.”

He stood, a long and painful process, and left the comforts of the hearth.

“Every day I build that soul a little more. And whether it takes another year, or ten, or a thousand, only then will I consent to die. So that I can stand whole before whatever God there may be … and demand of Him one thing: ‘Why?’”

Giselle bit her lip and drew blood. Better this pain than that of having nothing to say to him, no balm to soothe either an anguished brow or soul. With eyes shut, she felt his vast presence pass her side, then pause, as a huge, callused palm caressed her cheek with such tenderness it belied the fury of the night.

“I remember something from a poem,” he said. “A poem about love, and simple pleasures. I remember but a few words … ’a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thee.’ I once dared hope that even these simple things would not be beyond me, if only for a day.” He withdrew his hand and reserved his last baleful look for Father Guillaume. “Only poets tell no lies.”

Giselle lowered her head to the tabletop as she listened to the thud of the door and the scrape of his unsteady feet across flagstones as he was lost to the mist, the smoke, and the everlasting dawn.

A spellbound wretch

In his futile gropings,

In order to flee a serpent-filled place,

Looking for light and a key;

One damned descending without lamp,

On the edge of an abyss whose stench

Betrays the wet depths

Of endless stairways with no rail…

— Baudelaire

Blind Idiot Lovecraft

It is true that our conjurings have wreaked much havoc upon the autumnal hills surrounding Arkham, yet I hope to show by this testimony that fault lies not with us alone, but with malefactors who hungered for profit at the expense of learning.

Through my student years I had lived quite peaceably in my tiny garret, under the rafters of a Georgian house that squatted atop the hummock of Howard’s Hill like a troglodyte upon a chamber pot. My northern window commanded a view so splendid that during those hours I was not immersing myself in dog-eared sheafs teeming with the unsettling lore of the region’s hillfolk, whose family trees did so scarcely deviate beyond their mouldering trunks that both their eyes often made homes within the same socket, I would find myself brooding for hours over a cityscape bristling with eldritch spires and cruel gambrels, and cramped with slouching hovels and streets whose spectral denizens scurried from shadow to shadow … until I had utterly lost track of whatever thoughts filled my head when I’d first sat down for a quick breath of fresh air.

In time I realized that my reveries were not unnoticed, and I, the watcher in the window, had become the watched. The man who was to lead me to insanity’s brink made frequent trips through the street below, pushing his wheeled cart like a raw-boned, ill-suited Sisyphus, a peddler of crustaceans of decidedly peculiar anatomies. His passing stares grew more bold, lingering day by day until I called down to him, demanding to know that which he found so fascinating. Imagine, then, my vexation to hear him call back that he thought I would make a fine apprentice crab-monger, as I appeared to have ample time on my hands and, as I’d yet to tumble from my window, sufficient dexterity to suit the demands of the cart. My hasty refusal was as swiftly regretted, when examination of my wallet reminded me that I had never worked a day in my scholarly life and, more mysteriously, could not account for the origins of those few meager dollars I did possess.

When finally I caught up to him, he, with a temper as crusty as the shells of his wares, docked me a day’s wages for insolence.

How much better for me — for Arkham itself — had I given in to my umbrage, taking my solipsistic leave then