In the tunnels, blackness. No sound save for the dripping of water, the distant roar of the fans that never stop turning, the intermittent rumble of trains passing through in tunnels nearer the surface. Down here there is only blackness, and the slow drip as unseen water patiently works its way through cracks in the concrete, stretching milky fingers of newborn stone down from ceilings, rotting away the man-made rock, fraction by fraction over the years. The creatures that use these tunnels have no need of light to see by. It is dark everywhere but in one chamber, and in that one chamber the light never goes out.
In its glass prison, the dancing point of blue-white brilliance is surrounded by a cold blue glow that turns red into black, burning on and on in the relentless dark. The steady atonal humming that accompanies the light does not change with its flickering intensity.
Inside the blue glow, inside the hum, past the silver trickle of condensing mercury on the glass walls of the bulb, an entity watches, and considers.
It is not an entity that had been present when this installation was built. In fact, it has only been here, in this physical metal-and-glass stronghold, for a matter of months, finding it peculiarly comfortable as a dwelling place. Before that it had ridden through the centuries in many kinds of vessels: weapons, jewels, living creatures, the minds of men. Twined with their thoughts, their ideas, their dreams, unnoticed and unremarked, it watched in the darkness behind their eyes. From time to time it has spoken to them from the mouths of oracles, or been the voice of gods and idols in their heads; sometimes it has merely whispered words to them in the long watches of the night, and planted seeds that bore strange fruit.
It has been around for a very long time, this formless, bodiless entity. It is as old as creation itself—an overlooked fragment of existence, like the scraps on a cutting-room floor—and it has slept from time to time, from age to age, but it is awake once more.
Awake and hungry.
Its purpose is and always has been to consume, to devour; and all the mischief it has made in all the ages of civilization, and before civilization itself, is merely to generate hate and fear to feed its unending hunger. It has turned the course of history to its own desires, fomenting unrest, provoking conflict, steering what might have been peaceful agreements toward aggression, over and over again.
It was in the adder that stung King Arthur’s knight at Camlann, starting the last battle. It rode in the hearts and minds of those who set fire to the Library of Alexandria. When the Mongols took Baghdad in 1258 and the waters of the Tigris ran black with ink from ruined books and red with blood from ruined men, ninety thousand dead, it feasted. But it can focus its attention far more tightly, and some of its favorite feedings have been spiced by the intense fear that springs up surrounding the work of a single human’s hands; the spell cast over a town, a city, by a series of high-profile and mysterious deaths. There is a certain satisfaction it finds in such careful and delicate work.
And the web of threads it has woven through this city, through hearts and minds and the dark holes under the earth, through faith and fervor, is almost complete. Perhaps it is time for the end of this game, for it to take its meal.
The belief of these zealous little god-botherers whose ready-made cult it has settled into, as a king might assume a captured throne, has been surprisingly rich and nourishing. It had found them ideally suited to its purposes: a group of men only just formed into a tiny sect intent on following the example of a long-lost secret society. They had been quite ordinary, if intense in their devotions to a particular view of God.
The entity has enjoyed them immensely from the beginning, their fervent belief tasting rare and delicious. At first it had merely watched; then it began influencing these believers, settling into their hearts and minds, lending them the slightest edge of its (vast, unmeasured) strength—and rendering them no longer entirely human in the process. Now their belief has metastasized from devotion into blank-eyed madness, which it enjoys for its own piquancy; but it is the formless terror, the gathering fear that its creatures have induced in the city above that the entity truly desires. The generalized fear brought about by the killings, and the bright, delicious spikes of it each time someone has found themselves being watched—being followed—by two pinpoints of blue light. The deaths are delightful; the fear is much, much better. It had intended to draw this out a little longer, but perhaps the time has ripened long enough.
It is not only the killings of ordinary people that have stirred up the city to its current rich and wonderful concentration of dread. On its own that would have been reward enough for all the thing’s efforts; but here and now it has been able to taste a rarer and more potent vintage. The terror of the living is delicious. The terror of the dead, however, is exquisite.
When it had first settled into place and was beginning to choose its tools, it had not thought to bother with the effort and concentration required to engage the city’s small group of monsters. There were always monsters; there always had been. Mostly it was simply too much work to manipulate them, to play upon their minds the way it played upon the briefer, brighter minds surrounding them; but this time it had hit upon a little band of tools that were in a peculiarly appropriate position to make that leap. It is quite proud. Armed with their pretty poisoned ritual toys, they have done a remarkable job so far both in directly engaging the monsters and in persecuting the humans they apparently valued, and the heady savor of supernatural fear is profoundly satisfying to experience—goes, in fact, much further toward sating the entity’s unending hunger than anything has done in a very, very long time.
When the entity’s chief servant had discovered that the excommunicate still lived, that the monster-doctor woman he had failed to kill had somehow brought what was left of their outcast brother to a place of safety, he had been furious, incandescent with hatred, blazing with the most delicious determination to rectify this wrong.