I wasn't always this nervous, I know. There's plenty of reason, heaven knows, and I believe I'm lucky to be sane at all. Others have asked to hear this story, you know. They say they want to know the truth; what happened that day. How it all came crashing down. But when I tell them they become frightened. Do you know why?

People don't want to know the truth. They prefer living on placid islands of ignorance surrounded by tumultuous seas of dark knowledge. They think they're safe on those islands, but they're not. Oh, no, they aren't safe at all. I should know. I was like them.

You still want to hear it? If you must hear it, you must. Do not say, later, that I did not warn you.

I joined the Order of the Brotherhood of Our Lady¹ because my father had, just as his before him. It was an honourable way to serve King, Country, and Church. Which Church, you ask? Ah, that is a very astute question. The Order had long ago separated from the Roman church. Long before Luther nailed his thoughts to a door and started the revolution. Yes, the masters of the Order were privy to many secrets, and when we said 'Our Lady' we didn't, necessarily, mean the Virgin Mary. The Divine Lady takes many forms, not all of them feminine. Sometimes she is the Faceless Goddess, sometimes she is the Black Pharoah, some times she is the Mighty Bull, and other times she is, yes, the Virgin. But we pledged our service to her in all her forms.

I hoped one day to enter the higher circles of power, but on that day I was merely a Companion, not even a full-fledged Knight, as yet. Though one hardly ever reaches that station at such a young age as 29.

The war was on. My unit had originally been scheduled for the second wave. I would have rather been in the initial attack, of course, but the Captain-General said we had more important work to do.

Unfortunately by that day, it was becoming rapidly apparent there would be no important work. The King was meeting with our enemies and discussing terms of peace! Simply because Austria, Bavaria, and Wurttemberg had come in on the side of France? We had beaten them four years before, in a matter of weeks--I saw no reason why we could not do so again!

Yes, I understand that the Russians and the British were also poised to intervene. Let them, I say. We would have slaughtered them all in their turn! We had weapons they had not even dreamed of.

There was a rumor that two of the Great Guns had been disabled--one destroyed before it had even reached the field of battle. But the Great Guns were not our only secret weapon. We had harnessed the power of Thor's Hammer, and could carry it in a holster. Rumour was that an even greater weapon was poised to destroy the entire city of Paris in the blink of an eye. And after that, the weapon could be turned as easily upon Munich or Vienna or Moscow or London. We would have marched across Europe as conquering gods, and our enemies would have been as dust beneath our feet!

That day we proceeded without duties, but without the usual joy such work brought. I still held out hope that fighting would start anew--that the peace discussions were merely a matter of strategic maneuvering. The Captain-General had returned to the headquarters a few days before. There was secretic activities going on in the main temple building. Some plan was in motion. Perhaps the war was not yet lost.

An alarm sounded at the main gate. I looked that way and could see fighting atop the north tower. Two men were floating in the air, one of them riding a jet of fire. The other was clinging to a rope which dangled from the first man. This second one was in the uniform of the British Navy. The first man was not dressed in any uniform I recognized. One of the other men nearer to the tower called out, "Das Rakete Wunder!"² And I remembered reading that the American Outlaw was living in London, now. How very like the British to employ a common criminal.

Our commander called out for us to muster weapons and prepare a counter offensive.

That was when the fire fell from heaven.

A streak for fiery death plummeted from the western sky and crashed into the temple, shattering the stone walls as if they were glass. The flaming thing had roared like a beast from hell. Smoke and brimstone poured from the hole in the side of the temple. I was suddenly reminded of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I think now it must have been a prophetic thought--it is said that my grandmother's mother's sister had the gift of prophesy, and they say such gifts sometimes run in families. We were surely as doomed as the inhabitants of those ancient cities, though we didn't yet realize it.

Our commander split our company, ordering one group to seize the gate towers, and the others to the temple. As he was giving us our instructions, he was struck by a bullet fired from the tower. He fell down dead.

The sargeant rallied us into the two parties and sent us on our way. I was in the group going to the temple. One in four of our number didn't make it as far as the old lecture hall, so deadly were the marksmen who had taken control of the tower. I was knocked off my feet, my uniform badly scorched from the explosion of a rocket that struck one of my companions.

When we reached the temple, it was chaos. The Captain-General and the other senior officers had been in the temple, conducting a ritual. Many of them had been killed, presumably by the fire from heaven. There were a number of heretics in the sanctuary, and fierce fighting had broken out. I recognized der irische Atlas³ among the heathens. There was also a Turk, an Indian or Turkish girl, and several Englishman. Two of the Englishers were clearly warlocks, in the midst of casting a spell. The others we firing weapons or fighting our officers hand-to-hand.

One would have thought that the Irish Atlas would be the most dangerous of that number, but no, it was the girl, for just as we entered the hall, I saw her stabbing the Captain-General, savagely again and again, with some primitive stone knife. She was covered in his blood, and seemed to revel in it. Just then, the warlocks must have completed their spell, because in a clap of thunder, a group of witches materialized. I didn't get a good look at them at the time, because one of them rushed at us, screaming in fury and waving her swords at us. She was as fierce as a fury, cutting through the officers like a scythe through wheat.

We tried to defend ourselves, but one of the Englishman was armed with a Thor-gun, not to mention the havoc the fury created. Time seemed no longer to be moving in an orderly fashion. It was only later that I understood we had fallen under a spell. I remember as I lay in my sick bed the following weeks, being asked why so many of us dropped our guns. I didn't understand the question. For weeks I couldn't understand what the word "gun" meant. It was as if the entire concept of a "gun" and all associated with it had been plucked from my mind. It must have happened as we entered the temple, because I remember thinking about and understanding guns before we entered. I remembered clutching mine as I ran across the open ground. But when time slowed, I ceased understanding what they were. My only thought was to avoid the fury and her blood-stained swords.

I did not succeed. I was lucky, the man in front of me was cut open like a pig in a slaughterhouse. I received less serious wounds--a cut to my right arm as I tried to fend her off, and another across my thigh. I fell to the floor among the remains of my companions. I could hear the sounds of continued combat--screams, explosions, shattered bones, broken dreams.

I did not see the Black Pharoah rise. Perhaps that was the ritual the Captain-General had been performing. Or perhaps one of the other officers had recited the spell before dying. He stood in the center of the temple. In form he was the pinnacle of masculine perfection. In color he was blacker the the darkest night, dark and lustrous as if carved from obsidian. The air itself seemed drained of light as he passed. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse of the divine, I cared no longer that I lay bleeding or that my companions were dead.

And then they set upon the Black Pharoah, laying their filthy hands on him as if he were a mortal. The Irish Atlas and the Indian girl. They both glowed as if they burned with an inner fire. I had seen such a thing before. Obviously they had given themselves over to demons, allowing the spawn of hell to take their bodies to use as they wished. To my dismay, they knocked him to the ground and threw him against--no through--the wall. They followed him outside side, plotting death and destruction.

It was then that I got my first good look at the witches. One was raven-haired and great with child, though her eyes were cold and calculating and showed not a hint of mother love. The other two each had hair bright as copper. One was only a bit older, the other a bit younger, than the raven-haired one. They called out the the Englishmen in voices like harpies, ordering them about. I did not understand their words clearly, but I believe they spoke of more spells. The youngish one, her hair flying about her head in a wild, tangled mass like some creature from the depths of the forest, rushed up to one of the Englishmen and yelled at him. The older one was moving from one body to the next, no doubt performing some dark ritual to ensure our souls never ascended to the heavens. I still have dreams about her, hovering over me. Sometimes, in the dream, she sings to me. Other times, she lays her hands on me and speaks in strange tongues.

More of the heathens arrived, coming into the temple from the vestibule door. Two men carried a third, wounded and barely able to walk, between them. A woman, a child, a dog, and a wolf accompanied them. The woman seemed to argue with a witches a moment, and then followed them out into the north gardens. The other heathens and Englishmen followed them. I was left alone in the temple, lying among the dead. I am not ashamed to admit I was ready to die. Gods walked the earth, and heathen magicks were more powerful than the god I had devoted my life to serving.

I don't know how I came to be outside. Maybe I was carried. Maybe, in my delirium, I crawled, drawn by some horrific fascination, like a moth to a flame. However it came to pass, I was outside of the temple when the Black Pharoah, grown taller than the steeple of the temple, wrestled with the Irish Atlas, who had somehow grown equally immense. The earth shook under their titanic struggle. But the most horrifying thing of all was much closer to where I leaned against the rubble.

One of the Englishmen and the Indian girl were locked in an unholy embrace. Drenched in blood and bathed in eldritch fire, they clung to each other... how I wish I cold forget that scene. Death would be a boon, indeed, if it would blot that horrible memory from my soul. Their act seemed to open some kind of mystic portal. A prismatic distortion surround them and it--an immense opening that was somehow diagonal to all else. And from the portal a being rose. I can't describe it. It was the opposite of the Black Pharoah in many ways. It's darkness and chill almost material. It burst forth like smoke, as if escaped an aeons-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it crawled forth.

I thought the earth had shook before, as the Black Pharoah struggled with the giant, but now I realized that previous disturbance was a slight tremble, only. Now the earth shook to its core, as if mountains, hundred of mountains, walked like men upon it's surface.

The thing cannot be described. There are no human words for such heights of perversity, for such a loathsome... shape. She, for there is no question that the charnel, blood-covered thing that lumbered toward the Black Pharoah was female, grasped the Black Pharoah by the neck, lifted him into the sky, and strangled him. I saw the death throes wrack the body of my god... of one of my goddess' incarnations... however you want to say it. It died. And as it died, I saw another great opening in the universe, different than the one the Thing had come through... older, wider, deeper, and even more horrifying than the other aperture. She shoved his body into the hole, then grasping the edges of the opening, pulling them together as if closing a curtain. I felt a spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, as if I was being taking a dizzying ride between the reeling stars. The hold world seemed to plunge from the pit to the heavens and back again.

The gods vanished. Suddenly the yard was full of merely mortal corpses, walking wounded, and the victorious heathens. The child came running out of the temple, followed by the Englishwoman I had seen him with before. They were both shouting. Something about running away. The Turk conjured two demonic chariots. Two of the Englishmen had found carriages, somewhere. They rushed away, quick as the wind.

I stumbled along, uncertain of where I was going. I had looked upon all the horror the universe has to hold. What danger could possibly compare to the mind-shattering fear I already possessed?

The fire came again, this time from below. Brimstone and smoke and fire and death. The sound was like a solid thing, knocking me off my feet. I closed my eyes, and still could not shut out the burning light of that horrible fire. It broke stone and brick. It shattered the earth. It destroyed all that lay within the walls of the Grand Hall of our Order. It consumed everything within, yet left everything without unharmed, unmelted, unburnt.

Often I ask myself if the others could be write. Is it a pure phantasm? Did I imagine it all after receiving and ordinary wound from an ordinary weapon, lying there in the early morning sun, delirious? But the Grand Hall was destroyed. Others who are still deemed sane saw giants walk the earth that day. A great crator lay within the old walls of the place for many years after. And from time to time there comes before me, once more, the hideously vivid vision of the heathens standing triumphant over the ruins of hall, and of the Thing they called forth from the hidden depths. I cannot think of that day without shuddering at those nameless heathens and their dark gods. I can't help imagining them worshipping their ancient idols and carving their secrets into the flesh of their enemies.

I dream--no, they are not dreams, they are nightmares--of a day when they will come again, and finish what they started. I survived, by some freak chance. Surely they can not let that stand. The end is near. Sometimes I hear a noise at the door. Oh, God! The window! There's something at the window!

Notes:

1. Also known as the Teutonic Order or the Teutonic Knights (usually, hospitale sancte Marie Theutonicorum Jerosolimitanum - the Hospital of St. Mary of the Germans of Jerusalem or der orden des Düschen huses - the order of the German houses, in the sources) was one of the three major knightly or military orders that originated and evolved during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

2. Dr. Jebediah Wilson, also known as Kid Rocket, had been the star of only two modestly successful books publish in German beforeAugust, 1870: Das Rakete Wunder in der Senke des Todes (a translation of "Kid Rocket's Death Valley Adventure," originally published by George Ritchie & Sons, New York, 1867) and Das Rakete Wunder kämpft die Wüste Gruppe (a translation of "Blood on the Burning Sands, or Kid Rocket's Desert Adventure," George Ritchie & Sons, New York, 1866).

3. Mr. Seamus O'Flaherty, also known as Atlas O'Flaherty, also known as The Irish Atlas, did not appear under that name in a German publication until after the events of August 1870, when Das Rakete Wunder trifft den irischen Atlas! (translated from "Kid Rocket Meets Atlas O'Flaherty" published in the London Illustrated Weekly, June, 1870) was reprinted simultaneously in Bavaria and Prussia in January 1871. And it was not until Das Rakete Wunder kämpft die Weltanarchist Liga (a translation of the French publication Le Merveil de Fusée combat la Ligue d'Anarchiste du Monde, which was in turn translated from Murder and Brimstone: a New Kid Rocket Adventure, Weekly Companion, May-July, 1870) that the "irischen Atlas" became one of the most popular characters in German boy's adventure fiction. It is therefore unlikely that any of the occupants of the Teutonic Knight's compound actually identified Mr. O'Flaherty by this pseudonym on the day in question.

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