The Horror of the War

The Last Interview

Matters came to a head with a curious case I as if accepted upon return to Miskatonic as the purveyor of a free psychiatric clinic there. No outside observers or private patients bombarded me with chthonic revelations or even portents, this time; rather, I stumbled upon a tape-recorder for what was itemized as some ninth session in a series of interviews.

What was so strange was that the interviewer seemed to be interviewing himself.

He identified as Doctor Samuel Langsborough, of Nova Scotia, Canada. He had descended to the Union for educational purposes and set up shop, as it were, at Miskatonic. I had never heard of him, but he had heard of me, and for some reason been compelled to deposit this dissociated record of dialogue with the self, in my quarters.

"It is May 26th, 1964. I am also near the outside condition, as we speak I am, I mean. I am speaking clearly. It is May 25th, 1964. I am also on Miskatonic campus grounds. I repeat: I am speaking clearly.

"Tell me, Doctor Salles, what do you see outside? What is the condition outside?

"It's hell, Doctor Langsborough." I stifled only the second laugh I ever felt threatened by during this entire ordeal involving Haleman and his occult meaning in my life. I couldn't imagine how the professor had gotten himself into such a disordered state of mind. I hoped that "Salles" was not some else-repressed figure of mystical feminism, coming forth with no conceivable justice to berate Langsborough's masculinity in some innominately mother-goddess subconscious ritualism. "There are a lot of them here. The walls are shifting, not just in terms of sound but light. There's a very large mass offset below; the currents in the rock left by its tectonic movements sound like..."

The tape-recorder burst into static for a moment before somehow conveying, within the white noise that rapidly faded back into the doctor's mumbling, an antiquated tonality of continental dimensions and demonic characteristics. I had no idea how long this anomaly in the recording lasted since it arrested my attention as if portending eternity on the one hand, yet immediately I knew that I could not really remember a gap between the static blare and the resumption of the interviewer/interviewee's narration or dissociation.

"... not identical to the sound on the plateau, in Leng---neither sound, that is. And, I should say, not yet; it seems that when one looks at certain stars at certain times, the notes coincide. Some synesthetic effect... Three members of the Anthroposophical Society detected it during certain hyper-kabbalistic investigations in the German hinterlands, and all ended up murdered by Thulean neo-Nazis else-concealed in that nation's modernity."

How had Langsborough known to send such a recording to me? It was proving things... Things I hadn't wanted to believe proved, even now...

"I repeat, this is May 26th, 1961. It is, I repeat, May 25th, 1962. I am speaking clearly. Do you see anything over there, Doctor Salles? I can't see anything. How far outside are you?

"I'm very far outside, Doctor Langsborough. Very far. I don't think an Andromedan would feel at home in these parts. I respect you for providing me with time to explain the situation to you. As it is, there is too much to do anything about right now, especially over here. The numbers for things that we're working with are incredible. I counted to fifty-six billion in an hour once. The quantity of serum alone has been estimated to be three million gas-giant planets of average diameter in comparative extent.

"Honestly I can't stop counting. I'm trying to get to seventy-trillion total..."

For three minutes the tape-recorder spewed such screaming as I never would have guessed to be inspired by something a man could live through. But it was in words of bloodied experience, a lisp of ichorous spittle, that the subject and object of the interview next spoke. "I... re... peat... It is my firm conviction that it is not March 16th, 298,106... Doct... or... Salles... I repeat that it is not the Fifth Century XU. What does... it look like... down there?