More men were skulking around the pier and on the deck of the black galleon. Some of them were masked, two more were dressed in the rich raiment festooned with myriad tokens that indicated clergy, but the bulk of the figures wore sailing garb and appeared to be the crew of the dark vessel.

  The wooden crate containing my laboratory was dutifully offloaded from the back of the lorry, and lifted up the sagging gangplank by a number of masked servants, to presumably be secured in the hold below. Then, I too was led onto the ship.

  The two vehicles with which we had driven to the dock were seemingly abandoned, for every man present boarded the galleon, and the gangplank pulled up behind us.

  I was allowed to stay on deck and observe the crew go about their work as they prepared the ship for departure. Evidently the mute, masked slaves were not trained in the operation of a sailing vessel, for only three were present, and they were regulated to the menial task of deck swabbing; the rest had disappeared below.

  I marvelled for a time at the speed and efficiency at which the sailors worked in the pre-dawn light, and admired the dexterity of the men as they climbed the black mast, tied off rope, and secured the lines. Before long we had heave-hoed and were sailing down the river towards Narragansett Bay at a respectable clip.

  Mustering my courage, I went up to the Priestess to inquire about our intended destination, and braced myself for the worst, that perhaps we were sailing towards shadow-veiled Innsmouth, or the dread isle of Wigh, rumoured to lay off the coast in international waters.

  I happened to look ahead to the bow of the ship and saw what I took at first to be a hallucination or trick of the light: by strange angle and degree, the horizon was growing ever more distant.

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  The earth had fallen away, as a river to a waterfall, and as I ran to the front of the ship, I discovered we were sailing through the night sky. Our galleon had not lifted into the air as might a bird or aircraft, but rather we had kept our bearing and the earth had instead curved away from us.

  I realized I was witnessing the folding of space, along dark meridians and non-euclidean angles, as described in some of the more outlandish and esoteric pages of the Necronomicon. Up until that moment I still hadn’t fully reckoned with the grim reality of the tome, and had regarded its maddening passages with a detached curiosity, and had never truly reckoned with the ghoulish reality of its more eldritch claims.

  My god, how simple and naive I had been!

  The black galleon proceeded towards outer space, and then into a profound, creeping darkness where neither star nor sun could be seen. Meanwhile the crew busied themselves on deck, working with a nervous intensity as if in preparation for a storm or sea swell. All loose cargo was secured, and the wheel was lashed to the hull, fixing our course.

  The Priestess beckoned to me and the crew and I descended below deck, and all hatches were battened down, then double and triple checked. Not one porthole or ingress was overlooked, the entirety of the galleon was locked up tighter than a drum.

  It was then I recalled several dark passages in the Necronomicon referring to the abyssal spawn of the mad gods, who wiggled and groped blindly in the dark corners of reality, and danced eternally to the vacuous fluting of the amorphous choir. Passages I thought had been purely metaphorical, or filled with poetic imagery, were, in hideous truth, quite literal.

  A deafening silence ran through the hold where I and the others now huddled. No man stirred or spoke, and every ear was fixed towards the hull and the outside of the ship in dreadful concentration.

  I asked my hostess, as it were, what was the matter, and she said, with a seeming half-smile, “we are now passing through death to the other side of life.”