Oh, didn't I mention? That sea dog had sobered up by the time we got back to him, and he was kind enough to help us get to Cairo, Egypt! Yes, that Cairo, Egypt. We're traveling there now, in fact, along the balmy banks of the Nile where ancient secrets have trodden and still hide. It's been a dream come true for this girl; ever since I first began helping out with Miss Atwater's artifact appraisal work I've wanted to visit Egypt's historical monuments, to tread the sands of its deserts and trek the Valley of the Kings, to climb atop its pyramids at Giza and see what only the gods were meant to bear witness to... I'm a bit of an Egyptophile, I'm afraid, and adventure... well, it runs in my blood. My father helped out in a Miskatonic University expedition in the 1900's, you know, but even still... I don't think he's ever had quite the kind of adventure we've been having thus far.
You see, I've been... troubled by some of what I have experienced as of late. I've seen horrible things, and I have a feeling I'll only be seeing more... and they're beginning to creep into my nightmares. There was a police auction we attended, at Clayton and Ewan's insistence, after dealing with Misr House; the bobbies needed to sell off the late Edward Gavigan's acquisitions somehow. One of particular interest to Ewan was the most bizarre statue I have ever seen - a faceless pharaoh with multiple arms, encrusted with rubies and inlaid in gold. What struck me as odd was the man who approached him afterwards, a man with a scar over one eye and a set of Texan boots, eyes ringed with dark circles and shifting nervously in his sockets. Something about the man made Ted's lip curl in disgust when he noticed him... did he know the guy?
"Who is that?" I asked, curious about the bounty hunter's behavior.
"Walter Kimble," Ted replied in a snarl. "Slipperier snake you'll never meet, sweetheart. He stole that there idol Ewan's after... what is he even doing here?"
Curiosity piqued, I listened in to the ensuing conversation between Ewan and Kimble.
"Listen, you want this idol, it's yours. Take it. I don't want it."
"Yeah? How'd I ken it's real? These real rubies? Real gold?"
"Look, you want proof? I'll give you proof."
Kimble then drew a switchblade over the gold and ruby inlay on the statue, scratching the gold and barely nicking the ruby. Oh yes, it was real alright, and Ewan was ecstatic to have it. But something Kimble said gave me pause, something which still makes me wonder about the man's mental state.
"Like I said, pardner, you can have it. Hundred Quid, or whatever the hell y'all use for currency here."
"Hunned Quid? Yer off yer rocker, mate! This fing's worth at least 1,000!"
"Look, I dun care how much y'think the damn thing's worth, just take it. It's yer problem now, bud."
With that, Walter Kimble vanished into the crowd, and I lost sight of him, so I went over to Clayton. He was betting on a crudely carved wooden figure of some three-legged creature, which he excitedly said was African in origin. Something to do with that "Bloody Tongue" being he brought up before? It certainly looked like it had a long tongue of some sort or another for its head, or perhaps a tentacle, like a strange sea creature...
I didn't say much when Clayton or Ewan bought their bizarre treasures, and didn't think the auction itself was that strange, until I noticed the man in the corner, watching us. He had very dark eyes, almost shadow-dark eyes... and he was dark-skinned, like ebony. He made me nervous, and even more so when his eyes met mine, void-black and piercing, almost seeing through me, like I didn't exist. But it was his smile, his shade of a smirk of a smile, that really set my teeth on edge. It was like he knew something, something awful, some private joke. He was gone as soon as I pointed him out to the group, and at that point the auctioneer came to us. He set us all on edge too, the creep, and I swear he was eyeing me up with the sleaziest look any man had ever given me. Seemed way too interested in Clayton's find, too, and it made us all uncomfortable, so we all quickly decided to take our leave.
We didn't think much of it at first, but maybe we should have considered it. Then again, hindsight is 20/20... You see, that very night was when the dreams began for me, dreams I later learned that everyone had been having, dreams that chilled my core. The same dreams, night after night, haunting all of us equally. I will try to recall what I can of it, but it's difficult and travel lag is making it hard for me to focus.
I had received a letter from an old friend in the dream, someone I knew dearly from America, whom I hadn't seen in years since I first came to London to study. The letter seemed absolutely normal, until I reached the bottom and a ticket fluttered from the envelope, to some sort of magic show or another. Then I read further, and a particular bit of it struck me as different from any my friend would ever had written.
"I have seen the most incredible show - simply mind-expanding - and do hope you will find it as intriguing as I have. I'm sure you have seen the posters. All they say, all they claim, is true. Should he so happen to come to your town, friend, you must not fail to see Nyarlathotep."
The message ended there, and the vague twinge of concern gripped me, concern and a desire to know. Curse that desire to know... if I were a lucid dreamer, I'd have left right then and there, tearing the letter and the ticket up. But instead, the dream played out, and I attended the show under the dark of the new moon.
The crowd gathered in the auditorium was astonishing, a massive amount of people spreading rumors about the performance. They said he could walk into the cages of tigers at the zoo, and they would lick his hands and no harm came to him. They said he had a device like a great dish that, when projected at the skies, could hear sounds from the stars. They said he had a device like a strange sort of tablet with a projector screen built into it, and he could touch the screen and cause actions upon the screen to happen. That last one I found particularly hard to believe - who ever heard of a screen where, just by touching it, you could affect the film playing? It seemed like something from a science fiction novel. But I acquiesced, and took my seat with the others in the auditorium, and the dream slowly turned to nightmarish proportions before I knew what was happening.
A man stepped onto the stage, an exact living replica of the statue I had seen in Gavigan's basement at Misr House. He was handsome, tall, built thin, with features not quite Egyptian and not quite European. His eyes were coal black, and rimmed round with kohl as a sort of pharaoh-like stage makeup. He wore a red suit and black tie, his stride was purposeful, and his voice... his voice was like clear bells, commanding attention, drawing eyes to him. He had some odd glass sphere he was fiddling with, and how it seemed to dance along his fingertips like an orb of light... He mesmerized, and spoke to us of grand revelations and strange designs, of dark worlds and pasts we could not imagine. He said his projector was an invention that could see the future as well as the past. We all were entranced. We were entranced as he turned his grand device on, and motioned to the screen with a flourish. We were entranced as the projector whirred, and we watched a film of life proceeding in reverse, as real as you or I, as real as a view from a window, but in black and white. The universe decayed before our very eyes. And then... then, the film proceeded forward. We saw our street outside, real as could be. We saw cars we didn't comprehend, rounded and near-flat with foreign-looking names and license plates. We saw riots. We saw wars using weapons that could level whole cities. We saw ourselves, screaming in the streets and tearing our own eyes and intestines out, going utterly mad...
I couldn't take anymore of the horror, and screamed at him to end it. I forget what exactly I said, but it must have angered Nyarlathotep greatly, because he threw us from the auditorium, dark eyes glinting with disgust at us all. I still remember the anger in his commanding, almost fatherly voice as we left, and I still recall his words...
"A charlatan, am I...? I shall show you trickery. You will all see as soon as you step outside, yes, then you will know... it's too late for any of you now, anyway..."
I scoffed, I'll admit... but the scoff died as I left the building, and the blazing moonlight shone green upon a scene of desolation and ruin. The street we had come to know so well looked as if a bomb had gone off, and the eerie greenish light did nothing short of make everything glower like a radioactive residual stain on the earth. The sound of strange piping came to us, soft and disconcerting in the distance, and all else was silent. Alone... we were the last men and women on earth alive. Nobody was around to see us. To notice. To help us. And slowly, one by one... we all realized we had seen this scene of destruction before. We had just seen it five minutes ago, in the theater, in flickering detail upon the projector screen...
Despair does not begin to cover the feeling that the crowd underwent. That my friends, near me and with me as if they had always been there, collapsed into. Then, utter chaos. Chaos and madness. One man began laughing, laughing unstably, and I tried to calm him. I grabbed him, yelled at him to snap out of it, but he would not. And then more followed suit, everyone laughing, some screaming, and one by one beginning to mutilate themselves, claw their eyes from their sockets, tear their organs from their bodies. They'd gone insane, completely mad, and slowly they began to vanish. Some perished where they sat, others left in smooth single file lines, still others stumbled crying and laughing into alleys and vanished, and soon only I was left as the single sane person standing, fear drilling through me and rooting me to the spot...
"Do you believe me now, Sarah?" A voice clear as bells asked, commanding and fatherly, and I whirled on my heels to face the speaker. It was him, Nyarlathotep, the speaker... no, the messenger. His back was to me as he surveyed the carnage before him, and I found courage to speak from somewhere within myself.
"... You... you did this," I stammered, and he didn't move. I proceeded forward, intent on knowing his game, intent on stopping him for good.
"Yes... I did. A shame, really... that so many of your kind cannot handle the truth when it is shown them."
"You're a monster..."
"No, I am something you cannot possibly begin to comprehend..."
He turned, and his eyes locked with mine. He was the same, but different. So different. Horribly so. His face and form was the same, but his eyes were not. They were two pitch orbs in his sockets, like voids, and filled with swirling stars and galaxies and nameless vastness. It was as if the entire universe, and myself with it, were somewhere in those vast, godlike eyes. It hit me then, the realization. This was the Black Pharaoh we had been chasing. He was the Bloody Tongue God. He was the Bloated Goddess those Chinese cultists we'd dealt with on the ship followed. He was the Thousand-Formed God with Many Eyes. He was all these and more, so many more, and he read me like a book.
"You are a player in a Great Game, Sarah," Nyarlathotep murmured, the voice at odds with the danger I felt.
"Why?" I asked, trying to choke tears of horror down and failing miserably. "Why do this? I-I... I don't understand..."
His mouth crept from a quizzical smirk into a true smile, a smile of sharp and shark-like teeth. I had never felt so small, so lost, so vastly unimportant... so useless and pointlessly extant. So endangered...
"All in good time, dear," he purred, the edges of a laugh in his voice. "All in good time..."
His black eyes locked mine in a way that only made his words sharper and more sickeningly sweet... and that was when I woke in a cold sweat, shaken, pale... terrified. Had... had that really happened? It all felt so real... as if it were a waking nightmare.
You see now why I had to write it down, else I fear I would not have been able to sleep again. I confirmed with others, and they too had the same nightmare... except for Clayton. Clayton slept like a baby. Clayton said he had the best sleep in ages.
Well, screw you too, Clayton.
There's still another half a week until we get to our destination, and already I am excited, but nervous. I hope to God that Cairo is calmer than London was... but between you, me, and the fence-post, I'm terrified that it won't be.
- Sarah McCain, Traveling Adventuress (March 6th, 1928)