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I have no desire to remember or write down these events, but I know no other way to honor my friend's memory than by imitating, however poorly, his commitment to exactitude in observation and report.
Our acquaintance, I confess with some regret, had to a degree lapsed during the time before the events I must narrate. I had been distracted by personal affairs that seem now small beyond belief — skirmishes of bedroom and bridge table that for me were poor substitutes of the adventure I had come to relish so much — while, I suspect, his own work had risen to a pitch where even our reserved friendship would have proven a hindrance to his tireless activity.
How far he had been pushing himself was plainly obvious the moment I saw him. He was waiting for me in my rooms at the -'s Club, unannounced and probably without the knowledge of the Club's authorities, sitting on my favorite chair with an expression as close to exhausted as I had ever seen on his face.
"I see cards have not been kind to you of late," said my friend as greeting, his eyes closed.
I had long accustomed myself to his curt habits of expression, and, as usual, he was not mistaken. I had entered the room, in fact, distracted by considerations of whether it would be better to leave London for a short while, or if the situation warranted a more soldierly approach. Assisting or at least witnessing my friend's work had provided a channel to my natural energies that, absent both his company and the older one of war, had nudged me towards even older habits of youth.
"They certainly have not," I acknowledged, not bothering to either hide or express my pleasure at seeing him, mixed with a sudden wave of concern. "Are you unwell? Should I call the Club's doctor?"
"Bah!" he said, dismissing the whole medical profession with a single gesture. "My physiological condition is irrelevant." Then he opened his eyes and I saw in them two things, unmistakable to somebody who, although untrained in the ways of detection, knew him perhaps better than any man but for his brother - the unnamed man who, from the depths of the Black Office he was either unwilling or forbidden to leave, ran the Queen's Most Secret Service.
First, that he had been partaking of the dangerous brain-enhancing concoctions he had begun experimenting with on the wake of his first real encounter with the Restorationist he simply called his Opponent - the only person he ever gave that courtesy. It was my unspoken belief that he had found himself, for once in his life, intellectually outmatched if ever to the slightest degree, a situation he considered entirely unacceptable.
And secondly, that, whatever danger he had put his life in through his chemicals and whatever he had been doing during the previous months, he considered it more than a fair trade.
"I have him," he said with a thin smile that bode ill to the only person the phrase could have referred to. "It has been a most extraordinary battle, one that, except for the Royal and State secrets involved, would be profitably studied in the annals of intellectual warfare. He has been devious, yes, brilliant, and tireless, but I rose to even higher peaks, and I now have such a full knowledge of his network and plans that I am but moments away from destroying the whole Restorationist movement in New Albion at the same time I assure the capture and destruction of its only mind of importance."
He closed his eyes again. "As we speak, the good Inspector Lestrade is making the final arrangements for his physical capture. I gave him clear instructions, and on this matter I have been entrusted with the Queen's full authority. My opponent will not survive the next hour."
I kept silent, impressed once again by the abilities and courage of my friend.
"As for your unexpressed question," he continued, "it was necessary for my gambit for the Restorationists to believe I am hiding from an assassination attempt I am supposed not to know it's a gambit of their own. I hope you don't object to the presumption that they will find it reasonable for me in such a hypothetical circumstance to seek your help."
It was a good, and perhaps not coincidental, thing that he had his eyes closed, for the emotion in my face would have been unmistakable to a much less keen observer than him.
"Not at all," I replied in passably nonchalant tones.
"Excellent!" he said. "Now, I suspect the Club's boy is bringing us a note from Lestrade."
A knock on my door followed his words to the second, but the sudden coldness in his eyes as he read the message told me it did not bear the news he had expected.
"Could Lestrade... No, he's a moron, but not a Restorationist. Still, he'd be less dangerous if he were one!" The rare emotional outburst passed, he looked at me with a tired but resolute expression. "Lestrade has botched his task badly enough that the Restorationist network has been destroyed, but my opponent has escaped." He frowned, looking to the floor. "Unless..."
"But isn't the destruction of the Restoratonist network a huge victory?"
"The Restoratonist movement is of no consequence," he replied, not even raising his eyes or stopping, I would have bet, his train of thought. "They are but humans, and rather poor humans at that. They would not have been able to bring down the feeble human government they dream of, much less the Queen's. No, the Restorationist movement was dangerous because of him, and his danger remains almost unabated. Perhaps increased."
"A desperate man."
"Yes. But if he escaped my trap then he was aware of it - Lestrade cannot have been that much more inadequate than I had accounted for in my planning. Which means he wanted something, and traded the Restorationist group for it."
I waited, expectant, as he stood in the utter stillness that characterized his demeanor when he was exploiting at its utmost his vast intellectual power.
He did not swear, but I was certain another man would have. Then, with a sudden outburst of energy, he had me call the Club's boy and sent him with a dozen hastily written messages to different people.
Then he turned around to look at me again. "I believe that right before you saw me you were considering a brief sojourn outside the metropolis. Would the Cantons of Old Switzerland suffice?"
"Eminently!," I replied. "But... with him still loose?"
"There are seven different possible objectives he could have achieved tonight by sacrifice of the Restorationist movement. The replies to those messages will tell me which one, but I will act under the hypothesis that he chose the most dangerous one, and that means going to the Cantons at once. Your company, and if you have them at hand your guns, would not be amiss."
I smiled at the much-missed call of righteous adventure. "We'll be hunting him, then?"
He nodded, not sharing my joy, although, I flatter myself, not unhappy that I would be once more at his side. "If he's doing what I would do in his place, if by some poisonous madness I rebelled against our betters, that's where he's going."
I felt my neck hairs rise at the idea of my friend as an enemy of the country, not to say of the world's rightful order. If our opponent was enacting the same plan he would have, then it was twice as dangerous as anything I could have imagined.
He put a finger over his lips. "We'll discuss it further later. For now, grab at once your guns and the bare essentials for travel. We are hours behind the only man in the world I would not give a minute's advantage to."
This I did, and, as we entered the black unmarked cab somehow waiting for us as we left the Club, so began what seemed like a mad impossible rush on cab, train, boat - every method of travel between New Albion and Europe's so-called Mountains of Madness put itself at the disposal of my friend, whose authority seemed to be backed not just by Albion's royal house but, I fancied, those of the Continent as well. Trains waited for us and then sped almost to the point of catastrophe, every customs officer and local authority doing their utmost to not just not delay our passage, but make it as quick as possible. The dutiful fear in their faces mirrored my own, less visible but deeper because better informed.
At a late point in our trip (I did not know at the moment how late, and my heart breaks to think that my friend already did) my curiosity got the better of me. "If you know he's going to the Pit" — and the messages that have caught up with us during our relentlessly organized rush had made his hypothesis both explicit and proven — "why not send word ahead for the Cantons Guards to deal with him?" I had considered myself no mean soldier, yet even at my boisterous prime I had known the Guards a different sort. They belonged to blood lines bred specifically as the Royal Houses' shared weapon, centuries of careful work to obtain almost-human soldiers whose skill and ruthlessness assured that the mere rumour of their deployment could quell a rebellion. They were seldom moved out of the Cantons, of course; their main responsibility was to protect the Pit. Very few knew what the Pit was outside the higher Royal echelons, the Guards, and their most favored agents. I did not doubt that my friend knew, and I would have asserted with confidence that he knew about them more than any other human. Whatever it was, it was such that it merited both the Guards' defense and our opponents' attack, at the cost of his entire network.
My friend shook his head. "I have already done it. Perhaps they will delay him a little, but he's a single man — two if, as I suspect, the Limping Doctor is still with him — and the Guards are trained to fight anarchists and mobs, not somebody like him. No, it's upon us."
His faith, the fact that he said "us" and not "me," filled me with such quiet pride that I did not trust myself to say anything else on the matter. Soon anyway the train took us to a small but exquisitely appointed station clearly for the exclusive use of the Guards. A dozen of them, fearsome in their black armor and otherworldly weapons, escorted us to a fast carriage that, driven by horses unlike any I had ever seen, took us through the comfortingly red-tinted night to a mountain marked in no map, and there to a temple defended at all times by a hundred Guards, and there, guided by my friend, to a hidden door the Guards themselves had not known of, but that my friend had found during research forbidden on pains much worse than death unless by the explicit order of the Queen.
We found the door open and the hidden Guards supposed to ambush our opponents in the gruesome contortions of painful death. I did not need my friend's skills to know they had been poisoned, as impossible as that was said to be.
Without breaking his stride, entirely unsurprised as far as I could tell, my friend led me and two Guards to a narrow stair fixed to the walls of a long pit that fell, it seemed, down to the bowels of the Hollow Earth.
"This does not lead to the underground ocean," said my friend as he descended the stairs, mindful of the awful events the location unavoidably reminded me of. "It is a much worse place."
In its own strange way, it made me feel better. There was one place in the world I was honest enough to acknowledge to myself I feared, the place of my torture and of the wound in my shoulder by the insane god that the Queen's touch had restored, but any other horror, no matter how dark, I was ready to face at my friend's side.
Minutes later, or years later, or a week before... At some time we arrived at the bottom of the pit, and I realized I had no memory of how. The guards that had entered with us were nowhere to be seen. The bottom of the Pit was an incredibly smooth black mirror bounded only by the stone walls of the well. On it stood my friend and I, the men I had first heard of as the Tall Man and the Limping Doctor, and the corpses of the guards I assumed had been the last line of defense of that strange place.
Now it fell to us, and although I knew not what we were defending or what from, I had guns on me and men, dangerous and vile but men nonetheless, in front of me.
"I see you have warded the Colonel as well," said the tall man. "I had thought it likely but not entirely certain. It speaks well of your humanity. A pity you are less loyal to the rest of the species."
My friend shrugged. "I am loyal to an order that is logical and self-sustainable. But we both know neither one can be convinced by the other, or we would already have."
The tall man nodded. As for me, I was locking eyes with the Limping Doctor, who was also armed. I was sure I was the better shot, but would it suffice against his relentless darkness? It was clear that he was as ready to kill and die for his friend as I was for mine.
My friend took out of his pocket a package that had been given to him midway through our trip by an exhausted and puzzled officer of the Royal Palace. Opening it, he picked a round piece of stone polished as if by time itself. There were marks on it I was sure I could not have read even if they had stood still.
"The Baghdad Fragment," acknowledged the tall man. "The Queen must really be scared if it has authorized its release to a human."
"She knows the depths of what you are attempting to do. You cannot succeed - and now you literally cannot. With the fragment once again in the Pit, you cannot close it, and if you cannot close it you can't change time." My friend seemed to almost relax now. "We can proceed to try and kill each other now, but history is safe. The Old Ones will always have come."
The tall man didn't seem fazed. "Yes, they do have an impressive ability to manipulate the warp and weft of time and space. I have advanced somewhat on my study of this aspect of physics since you rejected my hypothesis so forcefully."
"Inspired nonsense, I believe I called it at the time."
"And worse. But I will concede that it was ultimately a dead-end for my goals. Our oppressors have millions of years' of technological advantage on us, and probably benefit from differences in physical laws between our realms. It was, indirectly, your remarks what led me to a different path."
The tall man took from a bag by his side something that looked like a book wrapped in ancient linen.
"I picked this up from the Invisible Library on my way here."
"Yes, I know. The Necronomicon. It's why I'm here. You gambled I wouldn't be given the Fragment, and you lost."
"No, Professor." I could have sworn my friend paled, but it could have been a trick of the unnatural light. "I gambled that you would think I had stolen it so you would bring the Fragment to the Pit. I did steal these books from the Library, but they are books I hid inside it a month ago."
The tall man unwrapped the package revealing two books. One seemed oddly commonplace, like something one could buy in any bookshop in London. The other was stranger in format and cover but still recognizably a cheap tale.
My friend began to tell me to shoot the tall man. I was raising my gun even before he had begun to make a sound.
The Limping Doctor was somehow faster. The wound wasn't mortal, but what did it matter?
I saw from the mirror-like floor as my friend ran towards the tall friend, both struggling with their hands around the book, the Limping Doctor chanting something I couldn't recognize, until it seemed like they were struggling within the floor, and then the four of us were in it, flat and infinite and...
I woke up as if from a nightmare, in my familiar bed in my rooms at the Club. But I have to write these words with curtains tightly closed, for the white light from the moon is a beacon of unreality. The chair I'm sitting on is real, and so is the gun next to me I'd try to kill myself with if I were a different sort of man, or if I didn't know it would make no difference.
As we fell through the floor of the Pit, infinitely thin and taking an infinite time, I knew the contents of the books. My writing of this story isn't in either book, but I'm sure I'm in the world described, somehow created, by one of them. A world where the Old Ones never came to us, where my friend is a criminal and the tall man, in an insane reversion of roles, the consulting detective. He trapped the four of us in one fiction, and the Old Ones in another, and, perforce, left behind a reality with neither: the nightmarish intent of the Restorationists fulfilled at both end and beginning.
Unless he miscalculated and he simply broke reality for everybody, not one reality but three fictions. I wouldn't care either way - except for this world's twisted parody of my friend, I've lost what little of reality I cared for. But, for the sake of revenge, I can hope.