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.
Never in my travels had I seen eyes comparable to her light yellow iris. One found oneself staring for too long into her eyes as they seemed to swirl and roil, as if a sandstorm raged through them.
The night passed as if in a dream. Wine flowed, food was brought, and I can remember being in deep conversation with her, but can remember nothing of what was said. Looking back I can't be sure if the others even spoke at all.
We were outside my cabin; I did not know how we had arrived from one place to another, yet soon she was pushing me roughly onto my bunk.
She wrestled inside my trousers and took my manhood in her hands, and I remember it to be the most amazing sensation of my life as she worked me to full mast. Her every touch burnt like a desert wind as she explored my body.
Somewhere her elegant gown had been removed, and she knelt astride me naked and unashamed. Her body flowed like a dunescape.
The dark mounds of her breasts swept down to a soft, curved sweep of abdomen, and the silk skin of her thighs felt scorchingly hot, trapping me.
Her own hips rolled rhythmically and grinded my erection against my abdomen, the wetness of her quenching the thirst of my desire.
She pulled me into her in a cascade of ecstasy.
One would expect sounds of her pleasure, but they took the form of soft incantations in a language I hadn't recognised.
When I finally opened my eyes, it was as if we lay in a bedouin tent. The rattle of the rain on the porthole was replaced by the howling of a sandstorm.
Colours swirled in my head as she bucked and writhed atop me; the usually pleasurable feeling of sex was a perversion that felt as if it drained life from me. And still she mumbled her pleasure in a repetitive murmur.
My addled brain could not have been able to comprehend the strangeness of it, and I must have passed out, for I awoke on the bunk alone.
A feeling of suspicion gripped me, and a search revealed the Necronomicon to be missing.It was then that the commotion caused by the strange light had excited the ship, and I'd dressed quickly and ran to the deck, trailing sand from my hair.
After I had sighted the impossible titan off the starboard bough, we had, all of us, been fighting for our lives upon the tossing ship. It was then I spied my lover on the prow and fought my way to her.
She had held the Necronomicon, and she shouted unintelligibly into the screaming storm.
I managed to snatch it from her, and in our brief struggle for the manuscript, she had fallen overboard and slipped silently into the fury of the Atlantic, leaving the book in my possession.
She visited me in my dreams still. She spoke to me in the desert. She whispered seductions and promises. She foretold great earth-shaking prophecies; she danced in the desert wind and told me of her plans, yet upon waking, the memories of them fell from my mind as grains of sand through my fingers.
I had delivered the manuscript, without further delays, to the professor's Edinburgh residence.
And not a week later, he was missing. As was the Necronomicon.
