The carriage had rattled over the old, overgrown mud track, as steam rose off the shiny black coats of the horses pulling it.
The drizzle had waned, and now I could see the halo of purple light that hung in the sky over the old monastery, giving its crumbling walls an eerie glow.
Exactly the same purple light that had descended on the RMS Earlswood on the journey here from New York.
The unholy light that had preceded the near sinking of the ship, myself, and the Necronomicon I was bringing to the professor in Edinburgh.
I had not slept soundly since that night. The image of the gargantuan silhouette I had seen lit up against the lightning had oozed into my every dream from that day to this.
Like a scar on my consciousness, it disfigured my every waking thought.
Bigger than the massive buildings that had started clawing into the sky in the city I had departed, the black shape that had violated the horizon was no more an hallucination than the collapsed monastery in front of me now.
The immense, rain-shrouded colossus simply wasn't possible.
Then the ship had listed so dramatically that I had been sure that that night was to have been my last.
Yet we'd arrived in Southampton alive enough. But I couldn't shake the sick feeling of seeing the impossible, unexplainable, great dent in the steel of the hull.
We came to a stop a good distance from the monastery.
"I say, driver, why have we stopped?" I enquired.
"Tis the horse's Dr. Maxwell; they'll go no further."
The whinnying of the agitated horses confirmed the driver's conviction.
"There's an ill feel in the wind, sir, an ill feel indeed."
The driver was correct again, for as I stepped from the carriage and shrugged on my long stockman's coat, I felt the static in the air. There was an uneasy charge building in the atmosphere.
Could the professor, mad as he undoubtedly was, have spoken a version of the truth?
Did the nonsense of the Necronomicon actually hold power in this place?
We were in a new world of science and order, but nothing could explain the events of the last few months.
But books of ancient magic passed down from the Gods before time? Surely not.
In what mind could the notions of dark Gods and magic incantations hold sway?
But then I remembered all I'd seen, and the way my dreams had twisted my sense of reality. I wondered if my mind was even my own anymore in the first case.
Before the professor had disappeared, he'd spoken of this very place. An ancient monastery built on top of a much older religious site, all the way out here on the northernmost coast of Scotland.
He'd asserted that the first time the site had been used for worship, it was when men still shot arrows with flint tips.
In his excavations, he had found stone tools and mammoth bones that suggest the area was settled more than twenty thousand years ago as a place of deep magic and the worship of an ancient deity he named as "C'thulu".
But an interesting archaeological theory had been completely corrupted by his madness. Over dinner he had raved about the transformation of the inhabitants, the reforming of flesh to better call on their Old Gods. A perversion of nature that let one communicate with 'The Old Ones'.
The professor had dedicated his life to research that would back up his wild assertions. Research that had eventually led to my employment to sail to the Americas and acquire the partial manuscript he called the Necronomicon.
I had travelled to Mexico to obtain it and returned via the Miskatonic University in Arkham to verify its authenticity. The professors of that place had been astounded by my find. Of the five known copies in existence, all were in the Greek translation. Never before had one found a copy, partial or not, in Latin. So to find one in South America, of all places, suggested a long and storied history.
From there I had never again felt secure, or indeed in full control of my mental faculties.
I had felt followed and hunted, even before the attack in New York and the fraught journey home across the Atlantic.
I had been glad of my experience in the second Afghanistan war and the part I played in the fierce fighting against Ayub Khan's rebellion, for if I had not known what it was to fight for one's life, to kill or be killed, I doubt it I would have survived the ambush in the alleys of New York.
But no training or experience had prepared me for the subtler attack on the ship.
When your enemy comes in the shape of a raven-haired, golden-skinned temptress in a plunging gown, man's defences are rounded.
I remember seeing her board, and even though veiled and surrounded my attendees, her ethereal grace had captivated me.
It wasn't until the night of the captain's dinner had I seen her again.
An oncoming storm had unsettled the ocean. Six of us had been invited to dine with the captain.
Every man in the room had been struck dumb as she had sat at the captain's table.
Unusually tall for a woman, easily matching my own six feet, she had a dark, middle eastern complexion scarred by blood red lips and studded with eyes the colour of desert sands.
