It is 1888 and London has become a charnel house. Progress hangs in the air, its black atmosphere spewed forth from the factories along the banks of the Thames.

The masters are calling. There time is now, they whisper to me through their obsidian agents, tall lean men in overcoats, long sinewy pipes dangling from their mouths, burrowing into the folds of their coats.

Let me tell you who my masters are. Forty thousand years ago, they traveled to our humble planet through a dimensional rift. They swarmed across the planet like hungry locusts, devouring the neanderthal man. They took the neanderthal women and raped them in granite castles built on isolated islands spread across the still roiling waters of the Pacific Ocean. They sired many offspring. They armed their offspring with metal tools and began to subjugate the entire planet. The earth became a farm and we the masters' property.

The masters have many names. Gruad, the first ruler of Atlantis, a cruel subhuman beast who reveled in torture. There are tales, murmured among the wise, the fearful, the insane, of young hairless men thrown into brass boxes and boiled over an open fire, of hairless virgins violated with metal objects then torn in half by rampaging stallions, of infants drowned in urine.

There were the Lloigor, the silent inhabitants of Lemuria. Builders of great edifices, silent monuments to their incredible power. The Lloigor crept across the Asian mainland like a plague, silent, infecting helpless human populations, then returning to Lemuria with cargo holds full of brainless slaves to assist in the continual construction of their monuments.

Thirty-five thousand years later, it all came to a cataclysmic end. Some say it was a flood which swept across the earth, the result of a wrathful god desparately attempting to save his treasured creations. Others say the masters became weak and polluted due to their weakness for inter-dimensional miscegenation.

The truth lies in the Gobi Desert. At around 1,500 B.C., a catastrophe of ATOMIC nature decimated the Thule civilization, descendants of an original master. Whoever brought about this catastrophe sent a clear message to the marauding masters. Leave or face similar disasters. The masters returned to their dimension, but in their hearts they longed to return. They longed to rejoin with their bastard offspring. In their absence, their children continued the legacy of the masters in a manner which would have surprised even the most jaded of masters.

The masters can only return in a wash of blood, in a tide of corpses. The masters black agents whisper to me that I am the catalyst. That with every whore I slaughter, the masters will come closer to embracing me in their bosoms. The agents tell me that thirty years from now, the masters will be perched upon the precipice between dimensions yet again.

The streets are silent this time of night. The superstitious, cowardly people of the East End are avoiding the fog covered streets, the spectral sheens of the gaslight lamps. I walk along the cobblestone avenues. My leather shoes click against the stones like an adding machine tallying the dead and the departed. Tonight, I am searching for my third whore.

The masters sent their envoys to my flat earlier today. There was a knock on my door and then the envoys were inside my flat. They wore black leather masks, long dark coats. Pipes dangled from their mouths. They wrestled me to the ground. I choked back a scream, but their hands were down my throat. From the eye sockets of their leather masks, a black bile dripped down into my open mouth. The two envoys held me in an embrace, pushed their bodies against mine. I closed my eyes and then they were gone.

Now I walk the streets doing my masters bidding. I will etch a sigil of blood on the streets of London.

Someone's following me. I can't see him, but I can feel him. A large presence shifting in and out of the shadows. Are the masters' envoys looking out for me? No, this presence is not that of the masters. It's the enemy. The enemy who's desire it is to prevent the masters from returning to our world. I look over my shoulder, duck my head down between the collar of my coat, dart into an alleyway. The presence moves through the thick fog. The presence silently passes within inches of my face then disappears. It is a black presence.

Master, I scream. I stretch out my hand.

And piercing through the image of the master superimposed over the bright light, a sudden blooming flower of fire. I clutch my stomach, my breathing coming in ragged gasps. The bright light subsides and I am left once again in the dark bedroom.

But I am not alone. Standing by the doorway, I see a hulking figure of a man in a black coat. His jet black skin almost seems to absorb the weak light of the candle. His scalp is completely shaved. He stares at me with marble white eyes. At the end of his outstretched hand he holds a revolver. The revolver is smoking.

Tell your masters that their time will never come, he tells me in a deep voice laced with a French accent. There are forces at work which will never allow them to return.

He leaves me to die, but I am able crawl out of the bedroom and into the night street. I drag my dying body to London Bridge and I throw myself off the edge. As the icy waters of the Thames engulf me, I dream of returning to the arms of my skeletal masters.

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