Neil Gaiman & Caitlin R. Kiernan & Laird Barron Read Online Free PDF

day to night, wondering if the Miwok had deserted him. Wondering if the quest had been a fool’s errand from the very start, and he’d wasted so many years of his life, and so much of his inheritance, chasing connections and truths that only existed because he wished to see them. By dark, the light shone up through the hole like the chartreuse glare through the grate of an unearthly furnace, taunting or reassuring but beckoning him forward. Promising there was more to come.
    “What is it you think you will find?” the old priest had asked after he’d handed over the book. “More to the point, what is it you think will find you ?”
    Not a question he could answer then and not one he could answer sitting there with the roar of the surf in his ears and the stars speckling the sky overhead. The question that Ellen had asked him again and again, and always he’d found some way to deflect her asking. But he knew the answer, sewn up somewhere deep within his soul, even if he’d never been able to find the words. Proof that the world did not end at his fingertips or with the unreliable data of his eyes and ears or the lies and half-truths men had written down in science and history books, that everything he’d ever seen was merely a tattered curtain waiting to be drawn back so that some more indisputable light might, at last, shine through.
    “Is that what you were seeking, Mr. Dandridge?” and Machen had turned quickly, his heart pounding as he reached for the pistol at his hip, only to find the old Indian watching him from the tall, rustling grass a few feet away. “Is this the end of your journey?” and the guide pointed at the hole.
    “I thought you were afraid to come here?” Machen asked, annoyed at the interruption, sitting back down beside the hole, looking again into the unsteady yellow-green light spilling out of the earth.
    “I was,” the Miwok replied. “But the ghost of my grandfather came to me and told me he was ashamed of me, that I was a coward for allowing you to come to this evil place alone. He has promised to protect me from the demons.”
    “The ghost of your grandfather?” Machen laughed and shook his head, then dropped another pebble into the hole.
    “Yes. He is watching us both now, but he also wishes we would leave soon. I can show you the way back to the trail.”
    The key I have accepted full in the knowledge of its weight.
    “You’re a brave man,” Machen said. “Or another lunatic.”
    “All brave men are lunatics,” the Indian said and glanced nervously at the hole, the starry indigo sky, the cliff and the invisible ocean, each in its turn. “Sane men do not go looking for their deaths.”
    “Is that all I’ve found here? My death?”
    There was a long moment of anxious silence from the guide, broken only by the ceaseless interwoven roar of the waves and the wind, and then he took a step back away from the hole, deeper into the sheltering pampas grass.
    “I cannot say what you have found in this place, Mr. Dandridge. My grandfather says I should not speak its name.”
    “Is that so? Well, then,” and Machen stood, rubbing his aching eyes and brushed the dust from his pants. “You show me the way back and forget you ever brought me out here. Tell your grandfather’s poor ghost that I will not hold you responsible for whatever it is I’m meant to find at the bottom of that pit.”
    “My grandfather hears you,” the Miwok said. “He says you are a brave man and a lunatic, and that I should kill you now, before you do the things you will do in the days to come. Before you set the world against itself.”
    Machen drew his Colt, cocked the hammer with his thumb, and stood staring into the gloom at the Indian.
    “But I will not kill you,” the Miwok said. “That is my choice, and I have chosen not to take your life. But I will pray it is not a decision I will regret later. We should go now.”
    “After you,” Machen said, smiling through the quaver in his voice that