Meeting the Wolf

I seem no longer capable of sleep. The electrical current appears to be all I require in the way of sustenance now. Though, since my meeting with Jason Moriarty, I seem to need a continuous supply of it. I feel, as I told Gloriana and Miss Paine yesterday, like a battery that can no longer hold a charge. Still, I am much improved from yesterday and will soon venture out again, hoping that I can locate the others and begin to devise some plan of action.

Much of yesterday was spent in the company of Miss Beq Janus at her house in the Canal District, attempting to answer as many of her questions as possible. It was a long and frustrating conversation, and, soon, we seemed to have reached a sort of cul de sac. Even now, far more at peace with the facts of my non-biological Nature than I was before my departure on the 31st, it is not easy to be seen as cold and distant, as only an unfeeling machine. I am not unfeeling, but I do understand why I may appear that way, even to those few people I have permitted near me. I am not human. And I do not act or respond as a human might, except by tremendous force of will and deception.

I should set down at least the barest bones of my meeting with Moriarty, if I am to bother setting down here anything at all.

Artemisia is one of the few I can reach with my mind, and while I was still mentally conversing with Miss Janus, shortly before dawn, Miss Paine called out to me. I do not think the call was even conscious, for she lay in a drugged stupor, dozing on one of the squalid pallets in the opium den behind the Imperial Theatre. I rushed to her, sparing only a few words of explanation to Beq as I took my leave. I entered the shadowy, acrid opium den to find Moriarty standing over Miss Paine, leering hungrily down at her. He appeared to me as a teen-ager or a young man of unremarkable countenance. He carried a jeweled cane, and his clothes were dirty and threadbare. Indeed, there was an air of dishevelment all about him. More than that, there was an air of insanity, and I immediately sensed some great power in back of him, some force like none I have ever before felt, nor here nor in any other world. He turned towards me, and in an instant was in my mind. There was no keeping him out, no profit in resisting.

Smiling, nodding to Miss Paine, he said to me, "She rests so sweet. You do best to keep your friends at bay if no harm is to come to her. I just want to talk to you, creature to creature."

When I asked outright if he were making a threat, the man replied, "Rather a plea for you to hear me out." To which I replied, "I am listening. Do not automatically consider me a foe, Mr. Moriarty."

He continued, "I sense you are different. I sense something old in you," and so I assured him that he must have keen senses, indeed. "I have been awakened," he said. "I know who it is that's beyond the veil, and you also know. Why don't you join me, and we can welcome the new dawn."

"Would it be that simple?" I countered. Truthfully, and somewhat to my surprise, my chief concern at this juncture was Miss Paine's safety. I heard Beq just outside the opium den, and struggling to keep my thoughts to her segregated from Moriarty's probing consciousness, I asked her to please be ready to enter and get Artemisia to safety, as I would attempt to lure Moriarty towards the stairs and to the landing above.

"Oh, yes," Moriarty replied, "glorious and raw, powerful and true."

"How much time do we have to talk?" I asked, and at once he inquired what need had one such as I to bother with the captivity of time. "The Old Ones have waited beyond time itself, and soon time will have no meaning anymore." I assured him that the form he saw before him, my physical self, was quite entirely subject to time. "You will not have to wait long, my dear," he promised. "You will soon be released."

By this point we had gained the stairs, I believe. I expressed feigned curiousity and dismay, that he could know so much of me, of my desires, but already he had begun to speak of other matters.

"Professor Eliot was like a father to me," he said. "He gave me abilities to see things no one else could see. To do what no one else could do. He created me, a conduit to the Old Ones. But I do not believe he realised my potential. Or the potential of his work. He did not understand what was at stake, and in his ignorance he shut down the project. And they tried to destroy any evidence of his work, including me."

And then he confessed to me having murdered Alexander Eliot. "I had to," he declared angrily. "He was ruining it all! I know where the three parts are."

Having at last reached the second story of the building, I called for Beq to go to Miss Paine, and soon the both of them were safe and clear of Moriarty.

"The parts," he continued, "I will retrieve them, and we will watch the veil be torn from off this world."

"Together?" I asked him. "You and I?" And he replied, "Of course. It's only a matter of days now. But, blood must be spilled one last time."

He stepped past me then, exiting onto the bridge of weathered planks the orphans have placed between that building and the adjacent structure to the north. Standing there, as the first light of dawn broke over the city, I watched as he transformed from the shape of a man into that monstrous and all too familiar hybrid of man and wolf. A great black brue, not so unlike the beast Lucius Sin once was. With a guttural cry, the monster leapt to the cobblestones below, and, stunned, sickened my the sensation of his mind upon my own, I was helpless to do anything but watch his retreat towards the eastern canal.

Somehow, I found my way back to the Museum, and there yet another horror was to be endured. It is nothing I can write of now, for the effort of making this entry has entirely exhausted me, and I fear I must rest once more. But I pray that the fiend sensed no deceit in me, that he believes I spoke true, that I am in league with him, working towards the same diabolical ends. Somehow, I must continue to elude the suspicions of this town, and of its police, and also elude the others who may hunt me — the 13 Club, the Vangreed Soc., and the Freemasons — and find some way of heading off the disaster that must now be very near at hand.