by James Stoddard
He woke with a gasp. He was lying at the bottom of the
deep crater where he and his subordinates had taken refuge. Corporal
Stephens was sitting by the telephone, and Ridley was asleep.
Hodgson rose and pulled himself to the crater's lip.
The east glowed with a pre-dawn light. Through his field-glasses, he
saw the Germans had broken through the British lines, and rather than
engaging the English to either side, were marching furiously toward
Hodgson's position.
There could be no doubt; the house was seeking him,
using the unsuspecting Germans, manipulating them in a charge that made
no strategic sense.
"Corporal," Hodgson said, "I want you to relay the
following to Captain Carver: Turn all guns on section Seventy-four and
maintain fire. Tell him it is of the ultimate urgency if we want to
halt the enemy advance."
The corporal came up beside Hodgson and stared onto the
field. His brow furrowed. "Sir, we'd be aiming far beyond the enemy
artillery."
"I am aware of that, and of other information you do not
know. Relay the message at once."
"Yes, sir."
Carver will think me
mad, Hodgson thought. Even
though he can't see the enemy, he will know how far off the sector is.
But will he do it? And will shelling have any effect on the immaterial
house?
An explosion ripped the earth a hundred yards from
where he crouched, and he dropped back into the crater. The enemy guns
were seeking him again. More explosions rocked to either side of him.
He would not be able to stay here long.
The British artillery came alive. Shells roared over
Will's head. He clambered back up to the crater's mouth. Good old Carver! I should have known I
could count on him.
He looked back toward where the British artillery lay
hidden behind rows of hills, and a cheer escaped his lips. There,
riding high in the sky above Carver's guns, hung the White Circle,
grown huge, glowing in the morning light. And he knew the English
bombardment would not be in vain. Shells were already striking the
house; several landed in its upper stories, rending it, sending wood
and glass splintering across the battlefield.
"What is it, sir?" Ridley called.
Hodgson dropped to the bottom of the crater, hopeful
for the first time in days. But before he could give an answer, a
German shell struck at the back edge of their sanctuary.
The blast threw Will off his feet, and everything went
black.
-----------------------------------------------------------
For an instant, he was back aboard the Sangier, and he felt the wind upon
his face and heard the mast creaking beneath the stars, but the vision
faded as quickly as it began, and he was again atop the machine within
the Great Rift.
The White Circle spun rapidly above the paver,
coruscating golden flames tinged with sparks of green, looking unreal
in the twilight. It turned its gaze to Hodgson, its many eyes piercing
as knives, and he recoiled beneath their sharpness.
Tendrils extended from the circle, aimed toward the
house, a command to go on.
"Why?" Hodgson demanded, feeling a rising anger.
When the circle did not respond, Hodgson said, in a
faltering voice. "I want to know. Did I
make all this?" He raised his hands to indicate everything around them.
A thought entered his mind, like someone speaking,
though the White Circle did not speak. You did not.
"Then why?" Hodgson's voice poured out his anguish. "Why
did you give me the visions? Why did I have to go through all of it?"
The circle thrust its tendrils forward again toward the
house, yet still Will refused to move. He had been a pawn from the
beginning. And they had abandoned Colleen, forced him to abandon her,
when she needed him most.
The circle spoke again. Will you trust me?
He looked into its terrible eyes. They were deep wells,
unfathomable.
"Why didn't you help her?"
Will you trust me?
Pepper whined and nuzzled his nose against Will's arm,
trying to make him move the machine forward. It occurred to him that
the dog had also been touched long ago by the circle, and that touch
had saved Pepper's life.
"I will trust you," he said at last. "For the sake of
England."
He gave the command, and the paver moved forward,
pouring the road inch by inch.
But as he neared the house, its door abruptly burst
open; and his face grew deathly white, for within lay only darkness and
Silence, limitless power and infinite hate far greater in degree than
that of the Swine-Things or the pirate phantoms. And not even the White
Circle could stand against it.
This was what the old gods intended, to transport the
House of Silence from millions of years in the past to the Great Bight
and establish their dominance long before humanity was ready to face
them. It would taint all life in the Great Rift, bending it to its
ends, bringing a swift finish to the human race. Nothing could stop it,
and Hodgson hung his head. This was what he had always dreaded: his
dreams of Kraighten House, the Ghost Pirates, and the darkness of the
Night Land, all given form.
There came a flash of light, and the vision faded.
He was back in Belgium, lying on the ground after the
shell's impact. He rose and staggered forward, trying to push the smoke
from his eyes. Ridley lay dead, eyes wide to the sky. Another man - it
had to be Stephens - lay face-down, unmoving.
He climbed to the top of the crater, feeling
surprisingly light and strong. He rubbed his eyes, uncertain what he
was seeing. The house stood radiating sheer evil, while the shells fell
all around it, and in the morning light its walls were the color of
green jade. But behind him to the south, thousands of soldiers came
rushing across the battlefield toward the German lines.
Reinforcements! Something inside him said he had to be
part of that charge, that belligerent rush against the seen and the
unseen foe. His men were beyond his help, and he needed to reach the
house, to do whatever he could against it. He seized his rifle and
sprinted across the battlefield, filled with a strange, unaccountable
exhilaration.
He joined the charge slightly in advance of the other
soldiers, practically leading them. They rushed across the broken
plain, shouting unintelligibly at first, a cry that changed into a
long, wailing shout: For England!"
Their bayonets fixed, their rifles blazing, they hurled
themselves against the Germans. To Hodgson's surprise - for the huns had
never lacked bravery - the enemy threw down their guns and fled on every
side.
The soldiers crossed the plain unopposed, and the house
stood before them, a gargantuan, gaping edifice. British shells were
landing all around them now, striking at the manor.
With the shouting of the men and his own blood pounding
through his temples, he did not at first hear the slow silencing of the
barrage. But gradually he became aware of his boots striking something
harder than bare earth. He was running on a gray surface, and the air
was tinged with crimson. He was back in the Rift and the army with him,
racing on the road he had fashioned for their passage.
He glanced at the man to his left. It was Ridley.
Without slowing his pace, the private gave him a grim salute. Will
looked to his right and saw a French soldier whose death had been
etched forever into his memory, and behind him a North Hampton lad he
had seen perish at Ypres. He gaped back down the road, and there was an
endless line, thousands of the dead of Flanders fields. There were
German soldiers there too, once foes now friends in the fight, marching
against the final enemies of the Earth.
They approached the White Circle and Pepper upon the
machine; and Will was surprised at not seeing himself at the helm. Yet
there was no time for speculation, for out of that gaping doorway the
house reached its invisible tendrils, attempting to pull the army into
its endless Silence, to smother the soldiers in its Emptiness. Will
gave a choking cry.
At first, the sheer terror of the house quailed all of
them, for it pressed upon them with its dark will, and had its power
not been diffused over so many, they would have been destroyed. Yet,
even as it sought to entrap them, the White Circle moved to a position
above the soldiers' heads, a cascading luminance shining from it,
bathing each of the Allies in its radiance; and all of them, including
Hodgson, became pinpoints of light as bright as the circle itself,
every man feeding off its energy, given strength and resolve from it.
For a moment, washed in that tremendous glow, Hodgson was possessed by
a terrible ecstasy of love and light and of power to perform justice.
We must reach the machine, the circle's command rang
through their minds.
Their individual forms blurred into one; the soldiers
moved toward the foe, an arrow, a spear aimed at the heart of the
house, every man singing a song of Humanity.
The army met the awful hush projecting from the house,
and all sound died, tumbling into a stillness that was more than the
absence of sound, but Silence Incarnate, the Silence that existed
before ever the worlds were made, the ultimate desolation, and within
its terrible emptiness, nothing could exist. Will thought he was being
torn apart, broken down, atom by atom. He looked at his hands and they
were disintegrating; he could see his blood pulsing through his veins,
could feel his frame crumbling. The men around him were dissolving,
turning to meat and bone. He screamed a silent scream, not a cry of
fear, but of defiance. If he would die, he would die for Colleen and
Bessie, for England and the whole world. And he and those around him
would take the house with them if they could; would show the uncaring
universe that men could strike back.
In their desperation, their song became one song,
unheard at first, then gradually rising until it burst forth, breaking
the Silence:
Take up our quarrel with the foe;
To you from failing hands
we throw
The torch; be yours to
hold it high.
If ye break faith with us
who die
And beneath the power of that song, the soldier's forms
grew whole again, and they were once more an arrow against their enemy.
Along that shaft of light they reached the paving machine and swarmed
around it, shaken but unbowed in the very shadow of the great eaves.
Gasping and drained, some scarcely able to keep their feet, they
managed a rough cheer, and Hodgson cheered with them.
But the White Circle's thoughts echoed like iron across
the plain. There is no time! The road
must be finished, the Road Maker
protected. Will you sacrifice more than blood?
A cry of assent erupted from the soldiers, and the
tendrils from the White Circle touched Hodgson's head, as it had
touched him so many years before.
Will's vision shifted and Time became tangible. It was
disorienting, for he looked through Space and through Time as if it
were a continuous line. He glanced behind him, and saw the Road
extending back along the canyon floor and backward through Time, so he
saw The Quiet City, and the Quiet City being built, and the empty plain
before its building. The farther he looked, the more his vision
telescoped, allowing him to see clearly. And the Road went on, back to
Ypres, so he knew that even as the house was a Doorway for the Forces
of Evil, he had become a Portal for the army of Flanders. And beyond
that, he saw his journey to Belgium, and his journey through life, and
even farther back in Time, sailors fighting phantoms on a ship at sea,
and mariners lost in an island of seaweed, and even farther back, to
Kraighten House standing beside a great chasm; and beyond that, the
manor through all the ages, and the dark gods who possessed it looking
on.
He turned the other way, and saw how the Road led to
the porch of the house that stood in the Rift. And he knew it must be
finished, that Time might follow its original course. And he realized
with a shock he was ordained for that moment; that he was Road Maker,
and Paver of the Way, and the Seeker of the Path, and that the course
of his life had been down but a single road. He realized that the
Forces of Good had used the Passage created by the house, following the
Road through Time, exploiting that which had been created for evil in
order to thwart Evil's intent.
Though he was so weary he could scarcely put one foot
before the other, he staggered back up the steps of the machine, and as
he did so, the army hurried to place itself between him and the House
of Silence, pitting their spirits against its own. A wall of white
light, the strength of their combined wills, rose between them and it.
And the White Circle spun above the wall, adding its own strength to
it, its rotations so rapid they gave a deep roaring.
With Pepper licking his hand, Will cut a wide swath
around the house, pouring the road, yard upon yard in the endless
twilight, following the vision that showed where it must run.
But the House of Silence would not be so easily
vanquished. It extended its will toward Hodgson, trying to reach him
with all its dark intellect. And ever the soldiers and the Barrier of
Light stood between him and destruction. Yet the house tested the
strength of the blockade, reaching through its weakest points and
licking the men like a consuming flame, covering them in its Silence,
pulling them through the Barrier, bringing them clattering over its
porch, across its threshold, and into the darkness of its great open
doorway. One by one they went, entering into the Silence which is more
than silence, into the dread maw of unquenchable evil. And as they
entered, their voices fell silent, dying in the air like poppies before
the frost.
Hodgson could do nothing but keep to his task. With
every inch of the road he laid, he saw Time quiver and change, the
permutations narrowing, strange futures falling and fading into the
Never-Have-Been, as the new chronal lines created by the
materialization of the house collapsed and disappeared.
He passed into the shadow of the Great Bight, still
pouring the road.
As more and more of the soldiers were swept away by the
House of Silence, he felt its malignant will pressing through the
Barrier of Protection, drawing ever closer to him. He heard it calling,
ordering him to stop the machine. He lowered his head and pressed
forward, weeping as he went, trying not to hear the dying cries of his
comrades. But even as they perished, they sang a valiant song, their
voices filling the vast canyon, echoing off the walls and rising up
through all the leagues to the dead surface of the world, a final hymn
to the glory of all the lost civilizations of the earth:
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark;
for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as
you jabbed and killed
I parried; but my hands
were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . .
At last, when the power of the house beat upon Will's
brow until he thought he would be utterly destroyed, he saw, just
ahead, a final future of a world of endless darkness lit by strange
fires, and of a Great Pyramid standing in the midst of the plain. And
he reached the Road's end, to where the Road must end, at the top of
the Great Slope that would someday lead down into darkness. The machine
emitted a final burst of material, and, devitalized at last, fell
quiescent. Hodgson could go no farther.
There came a stirring in the air, and looking up he
saw, for the briefest moment, the old gods glaring down, and felt the
malice of their frustrated wills. Then the air cleared; the terrible
pressure from the house ceased; and the gods were gone. Though they
would someday return to reclaim it, their terrible presence had
deserted the house for a time, leaving it no longer the House of
Silence, but only the shell of Kraighten Manor.
He stepped down from the machine. Three-quarters of the
army of the dead were gone, devastated by the assault. Those who
survived saluted as one man, and began winking out, leaving the mortal
plain for the last time, their final duty done.
Within minutes, all had departed save a few score.
These drew together, facing Hodgson and the White Circle. And from
their midst stepped Colleen.
Tears welled in Hodgson's eyes. He took her hands. "I
never thought to see you again. I couldn't get back to you. I wanted
to, but - "
"You would have died before your time if you had. It was
a terrible ordeal; but the White Circle protected my soul from
destruction, and I was not left alone."
"But. . . Bessie. I promised - "
"I'm sorry, Will." She kept her eyes fixed steadily on
his own. "Some promises cannot be kept."
"Then what was the point of my confession?"
"In the Great Pyramid, before anyone enters the Night
Land, he undergoes the Rite of Preparation, to prepare his body and
soul for combat. Your time with her, your voyage aboard the Sangier. .
. these were necessary."
Will found he could not speak.
The White Circle's thoughts rumbled through the air.
You fought well. By
foiling the assault, we have gained millions of
years for the human race. But there is always more to be done.
The circle emitted a great light that bathed the entire
company. Beneath its glow, the soldiers, including Hodgson and Colleen,
grew tall and thin and regal as kings, glowing white with a holy light.
The light died, save where it haloed Hodgson, and the
White Circle said, You will lead
these, the best of the brave, to
protect the Future. And you will have an old name that is new, and will
hereafter be called "Hope," for you will bring hope in the coming
darkness.
And Hodgson truly knew, for the first time, that though
there was great evil in the world, there were Forces of Good to oppose
them, to insure that humanity would live out its time to the end.
Though the Forces of Evil would ultimately prevail, leaving this
universe a dark husk, they would not entirely have their way. And of
that which lay Beyond this universe, might the Forces of Good not at
last win through?
Colleen gently squeezed his hand. "We've work to do, my
love. The work of Eternity."
-----------------------------------------------------------
Captain Carver stood stone-faced, listening to Corporal
Stephens.
"I had just moved back to the telephone, sir. There was
a blast close-by, and the lieutenant and Ridley were thrown back. There
was nothing to be done for either of them."
Carver nodded his head. "Did he say anything at the
end?"
"He was mumbling something, sir, about the dark land and
the silent house, I think it was. It didn't make any sense. He was a
brave man. One of the bravest I've seen."
"He was certainly that. If he hadn't had us retrain the
guns, the Germans would have broken through. He may have saved the army
and the war. We won't meet his like again."
"No, sir."
The corporal left and Carver stared across the
battlefield. It was November 17, 1918, and in the fields of Belgium,
William Hope Hodgson lay dead, cut down by a German shell.
But millions of years in the future, when the sun is no
more, white warriors walk the Great Road and the desert places of the
Night Land, defenders against the Forces of Evil. And among them are
two who always travel together, and legends say they are sometimes seen
holding hands. And there is ever with them a creature in the form of a
great hound, who never leaves their side.
© James Stoddard 11 Nov 2011
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