He Who Walks in Shadow Read Online Free

thrusting the manuscript into my hands, “I can’t believe I’m doing this. When do we leave? And where are we going?”
    “Berlin,” I answered. “Our search begins there.”
     

 

Chapter 5
     
    Diary of Rachel Jones
    July 22, 1933
     
    For the past six months, I’ve been coming to terms with the death of my father. It’s an event every daughter—every child—dreads, but it is something that we all face. But I’ve been preparing for longer than most.
    Some might call my father a fanatic, a crusader. To me he was always just a good man, doing the best he could to light the darkness so that his daughter might live in peace. Many times, he would wake me in the middle of the night to tell me that he and Henry had to leave. That he was needed somewhere in the world, that some wrong needed righting. He never said it, but I knew there was a chance he wouldn’t come back, and I knew those late night visits were his way of saying goodbye.
    Forever.
    It was only later in life that I realized what exactly it was that he did. He was like Moses of old, standing at the edge of the Red Sea, holding back Pharaoh’s armies with her waters, telling those who would do his people harm that they would come this far, but no farther.
    But my father stood against something far worse than men and their ambitions. The tide he faced was one of swirling chaos. His tools—the ancient legends and texts that often contained as much folklore as fact. And yet he always came home from these adventures. He was always there for me. Until the day he wasn’t.
    I was sad, of course. Devastated, even. But I’m ashamed to say I felt some relief, too. The knock on the door I had always feared, the message of condolence I had always dreaded, it had finally came. At least now it was over. So I avoided Henry, even as I knew what he wanted to tell me, what he believed. That my father—somehow, some way—was alive. As absurd as that was. As impossible as it was to believe.
    Then I read the manuscript.
    I do not doubt for a moment that anyone else who read through those pages would have called them madness, the ravings of a man teetering on the edge, one who had finally gone over. Stories of demons, dark gods, and unnamed cults. Of sunken cities and the rising of great Cthulhu. Yes, madness. Unless you had lived my life. Unless you had seen what I had seen. Oh, there can be no question—my childhood prepared me well for today.
    Is my father alive? I honestly don’t know. It seems to me that it is more likely that he is dead, killed by this Zann for the book which evil men have always coveted, Incendium Maleficarum . But whatever the case may be, my father dedicated his life to a cause, to a war that has been raging for millennia. Another battle has begun in that war, and whether we fight for my father’s freedom or in his memory, we will go on.
    I am, after all, my father’s daughter.
     

 

Chapter 6
     
    Journal of Henry Armitage
    July 23, 1933
     
    Today we leave for Germany. I am excited, but apprehensive as well. Carter has been missing for six months, and even I must admit that the chances we will find him, and find him alive, are slim.
    Of course, there is something else that weighs on my mind, something that I have tried not to think on, that I’ve tried to push away. I wish I could deny it, I wish I did not feel this way, but I am reminded of another trip overseas, some thirteen years ago, one I wrote about in a book that I never dared to publish and probably never will. Of all the star-crossed voyages Carter and I have made, none has ended in greater heartbreak than that one. For it changed the course of all our lives.
    And if history repeats? If Rachel faces tragedy and death once again, perhaps her own?
    How will I live with myself?
     
    Excerpt from Memoirs of a Crusader , Dr. Henry Armitage, “The Tunguska Folly of 1919,” (unpublished)
     
    Rachel was born at the turn of the century, only a few years after Carter’s marriage