gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth... the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset; of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charlotte flows drowsily... this loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.'
Onward - onward - dizzily onward to ultimate doom through the blackness where sightless feelers pawed and slimy snouts jostled and nameless things tittered and tittered and tittered. But the image and the thought had come, and Randy Carter knew clearly that she was dreaming and only dreaming, and that somewhere in the background the world of waking and the city of her infancy still lay. Wyrds came again - 'You need only turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.' Turn - turn - blackness on every side, but Randy Carter could turn.
Thick though the rushing nightstallion that clutched her senses, Randy Carter could turn and move. She could move, and if she chose she could leap off the evil Shantak that bore her hurtlingly doomward at the orders of Nyarlathotep. She could leap off and dare those depths of night that yawned interminably down, those depths of fear whose terrors yet could not exceed the nameless doom that lurked waiting at chaos' core. She could turn and move and leap - she could - she would - she would - she would.
Off that vast hippocephalic abomination leaped the doomed and desperate dreamer, and down through endless voids of sentient blackness she fell. Aeons reeled, universes died and were born again, stars became nebulae and nebulae became stars, and still Randy Carter fell through those endless voids of sentient blackness.
Then in the slow creeping course of eternity the utmost cycle of the cosmos churned itself into another futile completion, and all things became again as they were unreckoned kalpas before. Mattyer and light were born anew as space once had known them; and comets, suns and worlds sprang flaming into life, though nothing survived to tell that they had been and gone, been and gone, always and always, back to no first beginning.
And there was a firmament again, and a wind, and a glare of purple light in the eyes of the falling dreamer. There were gods and presences and wills; beauty and evil, and the shrieking of noxious night robbed of its prey. For through the unknown ultimate cycle had lived a thought and a vision of a dreamer's boyhood, and now there were remade a waking world and an old cherished city to body and to justify these things. Out of the void S'ngac the violet gas had pointed the way, and archaic Nodens was bellowing her guidance from unhinted deeps.
Stars swelled to dawns, and dawns burst into fountains of gold, carmine, and purple, and still the dreamer fell. Cries rent the aether as ribbons of light beat back the fiends from outside. And hoary Nodens raised a howl of triumph when Nyarlathotep, close on her quarry, stopped baffled by a glare that seared her formless hunting-horrors to grey dust. Randy Carter had indeed descended at last the wide marmoreal flights to her marvellous city, for she was come again to the fair New England world that had wrought her.
So to the organ chords of morning's myriad whistles, and dawn's blaze thrown dazzling through purple panes by the great gold dome of the State House on the hill, Randy Carter leaped shoutingly awake within her Boston room. Birds sang in hidden gardens and the perfume of trellised vines came wistful from arbours her grandmother had reared. Beauty and light glowed from classic mantel and carven cornice and walls grotesquely figured, while a sleek black cat rose yawning from hearthside sleep that her mistress' start and shriek had disturbed. And vast infinities away, past the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted wood and the garden lands and the Cerenarian Sea and the twilight reaches of Inquanok, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep strode brooding into the onyx castle atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and taunted insolently the mild gods of earth whom she had snatched abruptly from their scented revels in the marvellous sunset city.
THE END
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JEKKARA PRESS
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Coming Soon
The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn
Last Day on Leda – Tara Loughead
Dione’s Claw – Tara Loughead
The Gender Switch Adventures
The Valley of the Flame – Henrietta Kuttner
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