I waved to him but he did not reciprocate. His first words to me were, “Tonight is the last, J.P.” His tone was one of resignation, even melancholia. “The others and I had a meeting this afternoon and we just can’t do it anymore. If tonight’s probing fails, if we don’t get a response, we’d like your permission to move on.”

“Move on to where, exactly?” I asked him, hoping he would see that one city is just as doomed as the next. I then enforced the point that my work was not yet done. Maximilian, visibly deflated, flicked his still-fuming cigar onto the littered asphalt. He looked soundlessly skyward. Perhaps for him the clouded constellations offered instruction; I know little of the mechanics of his Observations.

“Let’s go,” he said coldly before striding back into the Observatory.

The others were seated around the musty cube of a room. The woman quietly sobbed while mindlessly spinning the gold band on her finger.

I moved to one of the grubby plastic lawn chairs that were splayed crescent-wise before the hanging bed sheet that doubled as a curtain.

Maximilian disappeared behind this crude drapery. His and the other shadows beyond it began to move.

I heard muttering, then the sound of someone screaming.

The sheet was peeled back, revealing a man; gaunt and naked and quaking. He was seated in a chair made of metal. There were wires taped onto his brow. His limbs were tethered with leather belts.

Maximilian gave no word of explanation, but our familiarity with the ritual meant none was required.

He roughly pried the man’s jaws apart in order to administer the tangerine-coloured liquid he regularly prepares in small batches. In no time the lashed man’s screaming ebbed, allowing Maximilian time to check the wires. In a few moments the man’s eyes became like saucers as the lysergic medication took hold.

Maximilian switched on the antiquated television set that he’d wired up to the man’s head.

The images on the screen were hazy with snow, but were unquestionably those of some subnatural state, a place replete with monsters; squirming things, things akin to plucked birds or stillborn infants, things that were withered or bloated or mere hissing fog. They swam upon the screen, all these abominations, churning upon & within the fabulous unshaped Dark.

The lines began to form; a topography of sorts. Waves of ugly dull light, like a phosphorescent sludge, passed across the monitor.

I rose from my chair in order to better study the screen, to better scry the horrors.

We were searching for you, Professor, peering like seafaring folk looking into a fog, squinting for the signal fires on the shore. After all, where else might you have gone but beneath the surface?

But you were not there. We found no sign of you inside that foamy Hell.