H.P. LOVECRAFT
SHORT STORIES
THE LURKING FEAR
I. The Shadow On The Chimney
There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted
mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear. I was not alone,
for foolhardiness was not then mixed with that love of the grotesque and the
terrible which has made my career a series of quests for strange horrors in
literature and in life. With me were two faithful and muscular men for
whom I had sent when the time came; men long associated with me in my
ghastly explorations because of their peculiar fitness.
We had started quietly from the village because of the reporters who
still lingered about after the eldritch panic of a month before - the
nightmare creeping death. Later, I thought, they might aid me; but I did not
want them then. Would to God I had let them share the search, that I might
not have had to bear the secret alone so long; to bear it alone for fear the
world would call me mad or go mad itself at the demon implications of the
thing. Now that I am telling it anyway, lest the brooding make me a maniac,
I wish I had never concealed it. For I, and I only, know what manner of fear
lurked on that spectral and desolate mountain.
In a small motor-car we covered the miles of primeval forest and hill
until the wooded ascent checked it. The country bore an aspect more than
usually sinister as we viewed it by night and without the accustomed
crowds of investigators, so that we were often tempted to use the acetylene
headlight despite the attention it might attract. It was not a wholesome
landscape after dark, and I believe I would have noticed its morbidity even
had I been ignorant of the terror that stalked there. Of wild creatures there
were none-they are wise when death leers close. The ancient lightningscarred trees seemed unnaturally large and twisted, and the other
vegetation unnaturally thick and feverish, while curious mounds and
hummocks in the weedy, fulgurite-pitted earth reminded me of snakes and
dead men's skulls swelled to gigantic proportions.
Fear had lurked on Tempest Mountain for more than a century. This I
learned at once from newspaper accounts of the catastrophe which first
brought the region to the world's notice. The place is a remote, lonely
elevation in that part of the Catskills where Dutch civilization once feebly
and transiently penetrated, leaving behind as it receded only a few mined
mansions and a degenerate squatter population inhabiting pitiful hamlets
on isolated slopes. Normal beings seldom visited the locality till the state
police were formed, and even now only infrequent troopers patrol it. The
fear, however, is an old tradition throughout the neighboring villages; since
it is a prime topic in the simple discourse of the poor mongrels who
sometimes leave their valleys to trade handwoven baskets for such primitive
necessities as they cannot shoot, raise, or make.
The lurking fear dwelt in the shunned and deserted Martense mansion,
which crowned the high but gradual eminence whose liability to frequent
thunderstorms gave it the name of Tempest Mountain. For over a hundred
years the antique, grove-circled stone house had been the subject of stories
incredibly wild and monstrously hideous; stories of a silent colossal
creeping death which stalked abroad in summer. With whimpering
insistence the squatters told tales of a demon which seized lone wayfarers
after dark, either carrying them off or leaving them in a frightful state of
gnawed dismemberment; while sometimes they whispered of blood trails
toward the distant mansion. Some said the thunder called the lurking fear
out of its habitation, while others said the thunder was its voice.
No one outside the backwoods had believed these varying and
conflicting stories, with their incoherent, extravagant descriptions of the
hall-glimpsed fiend; yet not a farmer or villager doubted that the Martense
mansion was ghoulishly haunted. Local history forbade such a doubt,
although no ghostly evidence was ever found by such investigators as had
visited the building after some especially vivid tale of the squatters.
Grandmothers told strange myths of the Martense spectre; myths
concerning the Martense family itself, its queer hereditary dissimilarity of
eyes, its long, unnatural annals, and the murder which had cursed it.
The terror which brought me to the scene was a sudden and
portentous confirmation of the mountaineers' wildest legends. One summer
night, after a thunderstorm of unprecedented violence, the countryside was
aroused by a squatter stampede which no mere delusion could create. The
pitiful throngs of natives shrieked and whined of the unnamable horror
which had descended upon them, and they were not doubted. They had not
seen it, but had heard such cries from one of their hamlets that they knew
a creeping death had come.
In the morning citizens and state troopers followed the shuddering
mountaineers to the place where they said the death had come. Death was
indeed there. The ground under one of the squatter's villages had caved in
after a lightning stroke, destroying several of the malodorous shanties; but
upon this property damage was superimposed an organic devastation which
paled it to insignificance. Of a possible seventy-five natives who had
inhabited this spot, not one living specimen was visible. The disordered
earth was covered with blood and human debris bespeaking too vividly the
ravages of demon teeth and talons; yet no visible trail led away from the
carnage. That some hideous animal must be the cause, everyone quickly
agreed; nor did any tongue now revive the charge that such cryptic deaths
formed merely the sordid murders common in decadent communities. That
charge was revived only when about twenty-five of the estimated population
were found missing from the dead; and even then it was hard to explain the
murder of fifty by half that number. But the fact remained that on a
summer night a bolt had come out of the heavens and left a dead village
whose corpses were horribly mangled, chewed, and clawed.
The excited countryside immediately connected the horror with the
haunted Martense mansion, though the localities were over three miles
apart. The troopers were more skeptical; including the mansion only
casually in their investigations, and dropping it altogether when they found
it thoroughly deserted. Country and village people, however I canvassed the
place with infinite care; overturning everything in the house, sounding
ponds and brooks, beating down bushes, and ransacking the nearby
forests. All was in vain; the death that had come had left no trace save
destruction itself.
By the second day of the search the affair was fully treated by the
newspapers, whose reporters overran Tempest Mountain. They described it
in much detail, and with many interviews to elucidate the horror's history
as told by local grandams. I followed the accounts languidly at first, for I am
a connoisseur in horrors; but after a week I detected an atmosphere which
stirred me oddly, so that on August 5th, 1921, I registered among the
reporters who crowded the hotel at Lefferts Corners, nearest village to
Tempest Mountain and acknowledged headquarters of the searchers. Three
weeks more, and the dispersal of the reporters left me free to begin a
terrible exploration based on the minute inquiries and surveying with which
I had meanwhile busied myself.
So on this summer night, while distant thunder rumbled, I left a silent
motor-car and tramped with two armed companions up the last moundcovered reaches of Tempest Mountain, casting the beams of an electric
torch on the spectral grey walls that began to appear through giant oaks
ahead. In this morbid night solitude and feeble shifting illumination, the
vast boxlike pile displayed obscure hints of terror which day could not
uncover; yet I did not hesitate, since I had come with fierce resolution to
test an idea. I believed that the thunder called the death-demon out of some
fearsome secret place; and be that demon solid entity or vaporous
pestilence, I meant to see it.
I had thoroughly searched the ruin before, hence knew my plan well;
choosing as the seat of my vigil the old room of Jan Martense, whose
murder looms so great in the rural legends. I felt subtly that the apartment
of this ancient victim was best for my purposes. The chamber, measuring
about twenty feet square, contained like the other rooms some rubbish
which had once been furniture. It lay on the second story, on the southeast
corner of the house, and had an immense east window and narrow south
window, both devoid of panes or shutters. Opposite the large window was
an enormous Dutch fireplace with scriptural tiles representing the prodigal
son, and opposite the narrow window was a spacious bed built into the
wall.
As the tree-muffled thunder grew louder, I arranged my plan's details.
First I fastened side by side to the ledge of the large window three rope
ladders which I had brought with me. I knew they reached a suitable spot
on the grass outside, for I had tested them. Then the three of us dragged
from another room a wide four-poster bedstead, crowding it laterally against
the window. Having strewn it with fir boughs, all now rested on it with
drawn automatics, two relaxing while the third watched. From whatever
direction the demon might come, our potential escape was provided. If it
came from within the house, we had the window ladders; if from outside the
door and the stairs. We did not think, judging from precedent, that it would
pursue us far even at worst.
I watched from midnight to one o'clock, when in spite of the sinister
house, the unprotected window, and the approaching thunder and
lightning, I felt singularly drowsy. I was between my two companions,
George Bennett being toward the window and William Tobey toward the
fireplace. Bennett was asleep, having apparently felt the same anomalous
drowsiness which affected me, so I designated Tobey for the next watch
although even he was nodding. It is curious how intently I had been
watching the fireplace.
The increasing thunder must have affected my dreams, for in the brief
time I slept there came to me apocalyptic visions. Once I partly awaked,
probably because the sleeper toward the window had restlessly flung an
arm across my chest. I was not sufficiently awake to see whether Tobey was
attending to his duties as sentinel, but felt a distinct anxiety on that score.
Never before had the presence of evil so poignantly oppressed me. Later I
must have dropped asleep again, for it was out of a phantasmal chaos that
my mind leaped when the night grew hideous with shrieks beyond anything
in my former experience or imagination.
In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed
hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion. I awoke to red
madness and the mockery of diabolism, as farther and farther down
inconceivable vistas that phobic and crystalline anguish retreated and
reverberated. There was no light, but I knew from the empty space at my
right that Tobey was gone, God alone knew whither. Across my chest still
lay the heavy arm of the sleeper at my left.
Then came the devastating stroke of lightning which shook the whole
mountain, lit the darkest crypts of the hoary grove, and splintered the
patriarch of the twisted trees. In the demon flash of a monstrous fireball the
sleeper started up suddenly while the glare from beyond the window threw
his shadow vividly upon the chimney above the fireplace from which my
eyes had never strayed. That I am still alive and sane, is a marvel I cannot
fathom. I cannot fathom it, for the shadow on that chimney was not that of
George Bennett or of any other human creature, but a blasphemous
abnormality from hell's nethermost craters; a nameless, shapeless
abomination which no mind could fully grasp and no pen even partly
describe. In another second I was alone in the accursed mansion, shivering
and gibbering. George Bennett and William Tobey had left no trace, not
even of a struggle. They were never heard of again.
II. A Passer In The Storm
For days after that hideous experience in the forest-swathed mansion I
lay nervously exhausted in my hotel room at Lefferts Corners. I do not
remember exactly how I managed to reach the motor-car, start it, and slip
unobserved back to the village; for I retain no distinct impression save of
wild-armed titan trees, demoniac mutterings of thunder, and Charonian
shadows athwart the low mounds that dotted and streaked the region.
As I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brain-blasting
shadow, I knew that I had at last pried out one of earth's supreme horrors one of those nameless blights of outer voids whose faint demon scratchings
we sometimes hear on the farthest rim of space, yet from which our own
finite vision has given us a merciful immunity. The shadow I had seen, I
hardly dared to analyse or identify. Something had lain between me and the
window that night, but I shuddered whenever I could not cast off the
instinct to classify it. If it had only snarled, or bayed, or laughed titteringlyeven that would have relieved the abysmal hideousness. But it was so
silent. It had rested a heavy arm or foreleg on my chest...
Obviously it was organic, or had once been organic... Jan Martense,
whose room I had invaded, was buried in the grave-yard near the
mansion... I must find Bennett and Tobey, if they lived... why had it picked
them, and left me for the last?... Drowsiness is so stifling, and dreams are
so horrible...
In a short time I realised that I must tell my story to someone or break
down completely. I had already decided not to abandon the quest for the
lurking fear, for in my rash ignorance it seemed to me that uncertainty was
worse than enlightenment, however terrible the latter might prove to be.
Accordingly I resolved in my mind the best course to pursue; whom to
select for my confidences, and how to track down the thing which had
obliterated two men and cast a nightmare shadow.
My chief acquaintances at Lefferts Corners had been the affable
reporters, of whom several had still remained to collect final echoes of the
tragedy. It was from these that I determined to choose a colleague, and the
more I reflected the more my preference inclined toward one Arthur
Munroe, a dark, lean man of about thirty-five, whose education, taste,
intelligence, and temperament all seemed to mark him as one not bound to
conventional ideas and experiences.
On an afternoon in early September, Arthur Munroe listened to my
story. I saw from the beginning that he was both interested and
sympathetic, and when I had finished he analysed and discussed the thing
with the greatest shrewdness and judgement. His advice, moreover, was
eminently practical; for he recommended a postponement of operations at
the Martense mansion until we might become fortified with more detailed
historical and geographical data. On his initiative we combed the
countryside for information regarding the terrible Martense family, and
discovered a man who possessed a marvelously illuminating ancestral
diary. We also talked at length with such of the mountain mongrels as had
not fled from the terror and confusion to remoter slopes, and slope again
scanned for dens and caves, but all without result. And yet, as I have said,
vague new fears hovered menacingly over us; as if giant bat-winged
gryphons looked on transcosmic gulfs.
As the afternoon advanced, it became increasingly difficult to see; and
we heard the rumble of a thunderstorm gathering over Tempest Mountain.
This sound in such a locality naturally stirred us, though less than it would
have done at night. As it was, we hoped desperately that the storm would
last until well after dark; and with that hope turned from our aimless
hillside searching toward the nearest inhabited hamlet to gather a body of
squatters as helpers in the investigation. Timid as they were, a few of the
younger men were sufficiently inspired by our protective leadership to
promise such help.
We had hardly more than turned, however, when there descended
such a blinding sheet of torrential rain that shelter became imperative. The
extreme, almost nocturnal darkness of the sky caused us to stumble badly,
but guided by the frequent flashes of lightning and by our minute
knowledge of the hamlet we soon reached the least porous cabin of the lot;
an heterogeneous combination of logs and boards whose still existing door
and single tiny window both faced Maple Hill. Barring the door after us
against the fury of the wind and rain, we put in place the crude window
shutter which our frequent searches had taught us where to find. It was
dismal sitting there on rickety boxes in the pitchy darkness, but we smoked
pipes and occasionally flashed our pocket lamps about. Now and then we
could see the lightning through cracks in the wall; the afternoon was so
incredibly dark that each flash was extremely vivid.
The stormy vigil reminded me shudderingly of my ghastly night on
Tempest Mountain. My mind turned to that odd question which had kept
recurring ever since the nightmare thing had happened; and again I
wondered why the demon, approaching the three watchers either from the
window or the interior, had begun with the men on each side and left the
middle man till the last, when the titan fireball had scared it away. Why had
it not taken its victims in natural order, with myself second, from whichever
direction it had approached? With what manner of far-reaching tentacles
did it prey? Or did it know that I was the leader, and saved me for a fate
worse than that of my companions?
In the midst of these reflections, as if dramatically arranged to
intensify them, there fell nearby a terrific bolt of lightning followed by the
sound of sliding earth. At the same time the wolfish wind rose to demoniac
crescendos of ululation. We were sure that the one tree on Maple Hill had
been struck again, and Munroe rose from his box and went to the tiny
window to ascertain the damage. When he took down the shutter the wind,
and rain howled deafeningly in, so that I could not hear what he said; but I
waited while he leaned out and tried to fathom Nature's pandemonium.
Gradually a calming of the wind and dispersal of the unusual darkness
told of the storm's passing. I had hoped it would last into the night to help
our quest, but a furtive sunbeam from a knothole behind me removed the
likelihood of such a thing. Suggesting to Munroe that we had better get
some light even if more showers came, I unbarred and opened the crude
door. The ground outside was a singular mass of mud and pools, with fresh
heaps of earth from the slight landslide; but I saw nothing to justify the
interest which kept my companion silently leaning out the window.
Crossing to where he leaned, I touched his shoulder; but he did not move.
Then, as I playfully shook him and turned him around, I felt the strangling
tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts
and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time.
For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed
and gouged head there was no longer a face.
III. What The Red Glare Meant
On the tempest-racked night of November 8, 1921, with a lantern
which cast charnel shadows, I stood digging alone and idiotically in the
grave of Jan Martense. I had begun to dig in the afternoon, because a
thunderstorm was brewing, and now that it was dark and the storm had
burst above the maniacally thick foliage I was glad.
I believe that my mind was partly unhinged by events since August
5th; the demon shadow in the mansion, the general strain and
disappointment, and the thing that occurred at the hamlet in an October
storm. After that thing I had dug a grave for one whose death I could not
understand. I knew that others could not understand either, so let them
think Arthur Munroe had wandered away. They searched, but found
nothing. The squatters might have understood, hut I dared not frighten
them more. I myself seemed strangely callous. That shock at the mansion
had done something to my brain, and I could think only of the quest for a
horror now grown to cataclysmic stature in my imagination; a quest which
the fate of Arthur Munroe made me vow to keep silent and solitary.
The scene of my excavations would alone have been enough to unnerve
any ordinary man. Baleful primal trees of unholy size, age, and
grotesqueness leered above me like the pillars of some hellish Druidic
temple; muffling the thunder, hushing the clawing wind, and admitting but
little rain. Beyond the scarred trunks in the background, illumined by faint
flashes of filtered lightning, rose the damp ivied stones of the deserted
mansion, while somewhat nearer was the abandoned Dutch garden whose
walks and beds were polluted by a white, fungous, foetid, over-nourished
vegetation that never saw full daylight. And nearest of all was the
graveyard, where deformed trees tossed insane branches as their roots
displaced unhallowed slabs and sucked venom from what lay below. Now
and then, beneath the brown pall of leaves that rotted and festered in the
antediluvian forest darkness, I could trace the sinister outlines of some of
those low mounds which characterized the lightning-pierced region.
History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had
after everything else ended in mocking Satanism. I now believed that the
lurking fear was no material being, but a wolf-fanged ghost that rode the
midnight lightning. And I believed, because of the masses of local tradition I
had unearthed in search with Arthur Munroe, that the ghost was that of
Jan Martense, who died in 1762. This is why I was digging idiotically in his
grave.
The Martense mansion was built in 1670 by Gerrit Martense, a wealthy
New-Amsterdam merchant who disliked the changing order under British
rule, and had constructed this magnificent domicile on a remote woodland
summit whose untrodden solitude and unusual scenery pleased him. The
only substantial disappointment encountered in this site was that which
concerned the prevalence of violent thunderstorms in summer. When
selecting the hill and building his mansion, Mynheer Martense had laid
these frequent natural outbursts to some peculiarity of the year; but in time
he perceived that the locality was especially liable to such phenomena. At
length, having found these storms injurious to his head, he fitted up a
cellar into which he could retreat from their wildest pandemonium.
Of Gerrit Martense's descendants less is known than of himself; since
they were all reared in hatred of the English civilisation, and trained to
shun such of the colonists as accepted it. Their life was exceedingly
secluded, and people declared that their isolation had made them heavy of
speech and comprehension. In appearance all were marked by a peculiar
inherited dissimilarity of eyes; one generally being blue and the other
brown. Their social contacts grew fewer and fewer, till at last they took to
intermarrying with the numerous menial class about the estate. Many of
the crowded family degenerated, moved across the valley, and merged with
the mongrel population which was later to produce the pitiful squatters.
The rest had stuck sullenly to their ancestral mansion, becoming more and
more clannish and taciturn, yet developing a nervous responsiveness to the
frequent thunderstorms.
Most of this information reached the outside world through young Jan
Martense, who from some kind of restlessness joined the colonial army
when news of the Albany Convention reached Tempest Mountain. He was
the first of Gerrit's descendants to see much of the world; and when he
returned in 1760 after six years of campaigning, he was hated as an
outsider by his father, uncles, and brothers, in spite of his dissimilar
Martense eyes. No longer could he share the peculiarities and prejudices of
the Martenses, while the very mountain thunderstorms failed to intoxicate
him as they had before. Instead, his surroundings depressed him; and he
frequently wrote to a friend in Albany of plans to leave the paternal roof.
In the spring of 1763 Jonathan Gifford, the Albany friend of Jan
Martense, became worried by his correspondent's silence; especially in view
of the conditions and quarrels at the Martense mansion. Determined to visit
Jan in person, he went into the mountains on horseback. His diary states
that he reached Tempest Mountain on September 20, finding the mansion
in great decrepitude. The sullen, odd-eyed Martenses, whose unclean
animal aspect shocked him, told him in broken gutterals that Jan was
dead. He had, they insisted, been struck by lightning the autumn before;
and now lay buried behind the neglected sunken gardens. They showed the
visitor the grave, barren and devoid of markers. Something in the
Martenses' manner gave Gifford a feeling of repulsion and suspicion, and a
week later he returned with spade and mattock to explore the sepulchral
spot. He found what he expected - a skull crushed cruelly as if by savage
blows - so returning to Albany he openly charged the Martenses with the
murder of their kinsman.
Legal evidence was lacking, but the story spread rapidly round the
countryside; and from that time the Martenses were ostracised by the
world. No one would deal with them, and their distant manor was shunned
as an accursed place. Somehow they managed to live on independently by
the product of their estate, for occasional lights glimpsed from far-away hills
attested their continued presence. These lights were seen as late as 1810,
but toward the last they became very infrequent.
Meanwhile there grew up about the mansion and the mountain a body
of diabolic legendry. The place was avoided with doubled assiduousness,
and invested with every whispered myth tradition could supply. It remained
unvisited till 1816, when the continued absence of lights was noticed by the
squatters. At that time a party made investigations, finding the house
deserted and partly in ruins.
There were no skeletons about, so that departure rather than death
was inferred. The clan seemed to have left several years before, and
improvised penthouses showed how numerous it had grown prior to its
migration. Its cultural level had fallen very low, as proved by decaying
furniture and scattered silverware which must have been long abandoned
when its owners left. But though the dreaded Martenses were gone, the fear
of the haunted house continued; and grew very acute when new and
strange stories arose among the mountain decadents. There it stood;
deserted, feared, and linked with the vengeful ghost of Jan Martense. There
it still stood on the night I dug in Jan Martense's grave.
I have described my protracted digging as idiotic, and such it indeed
was in object and method. The coffin of Jan Martense had soon been
unearthed-it now held only dust and nitre - but in my fury to exhume his
ghost I delved irrationally and clumsily down beneath where he had lain.
God knows what I expected to find-I only felt that I was digging in the grave
of a man whose ghost stalked by night.
It is impossible to say what monstrous depth I had attained when my
spade, and soon my feet, broke through the ground beneath. The event,
under the circumstances, was tremendous; for in the existence of a
subterranean space here, my mad theories had terrible confirmation. My
slight fall had extinguished the lantern, but I produced an electric pocket
lamp and viewed the small horizontal tunnel which led away indefinitely in
both directions. It was amply large enough for a man to wriggle through;
and though no sane person would have tried at that time, I forgot danger,
reason, and cleanliness in my single-minded fever to unearth the lurking
fear. Choosing the direction toward the house, I scrambled recklessly into
the narrow burrow; squirming ahead blindly and rapidly, and flashing but
seldom the lamp I kept before me.
What language can describe the spectacle of a man lost in infinitely
abysmal earth; pawing, twisting, wheezing; scrambling madly through
sunken -convolutions of immemorial blackness without an idea of time,
safety, direction, or definite object? There is something hideous in it, but
that is what I did. I did it for so long that life faded to a far memory, and I
became one with the moles and grubs of nighted depths. Indeed, it was only
by accident that after interminable writhings I jarred my forgotten electric
lamp alight, so that it shone eerily along the burrow of caked loam that
stretched and curved ahead.
I had been scrambling in this way for some time, so that my battery
had burned very low, when the passage suddenly inclined sharply upward,
altering my mode of progress. And as I raised my glance it was without
preparation that I saw glistening in the distance two demoniac reflections of
my expiring lamp; two reflections glowing with a baneful and unmistakable
effulgence, and provoking maddeningly nebulous memories. I stopped
automatically, though lacking the brain to retreat. The eyes approached, yet
of the thing that bore them I could distinguish only a claw. But what a claw!
Then far overhead I heard a faint crashing which I recognized. It was the
wild thunder of the mountain, raised to hysteric fury - I must have been
crawling upward for some time, so that the surface was now quite near.
And as the muffled thunder clattered, those eyes still stared with vacuous
viciousness.
Thank God I did not then know what it was, else I should have died.
But I was saved by the very thunder that had summoned it, for after a
hideous wait there burst from the unseen outside sky one of those frequent
mountainward bolts whose aftermath I had noticed here and there as
gashes of disturbed earth and fulgurites of various sizes. With Cyclopean
rage it tore through the soil above that damnable pit, blinding and
deafening me, yet not wholly reducing me to a coma. In the chaos of sliding,
shifting earth I clawed and floundered helplessly till the rain on my head
steadied me and I saw that I had come to the surface in a familiar spot; a
steep unforested place on the southwest slope of the mountain. Recurrent
sheet lightnings illumed the tumbled ground and the remains of the curious
low hummock which had stretched down from the wooded higher slope, but
there was nothing in the chaos to show my place of egress from the lethal
catacomb. My brain was as great a chaos as the earth, and as a distant red
glare burst on the landscape from the south I hardly realised the horror I
had been through.
But when two days later the squatters told me what the red glare
meant, I felt more horror than that which the mould-burrow and the claw
and eyes had given; more horror because of the overwhelming implications.
In a hamlet twenty miles away an orgy of fear had followed the bolt which
brought me above ground, and a nameless thing had dropped from an
overhanging tree into a weak-roofed cabin. It had done a deed, but the
squatters had fired the cabin in frenzy before it could escape. It had been
doing that deed at the very moment the earth caved in on the thing with the
claw and eyes.
IV. The Horror In The Eyes
There can be nothing normal in the mind of one who, knowing what I
knew of the horrors of Tempest Mountain, would seek alone for the fear
that lurked there. That at least two of the fear's embodiments were
destroyed, formed but a slight guarantee of mental and physical safety in
this Acheron of multiform diabolism; yet I continued my quest with even
greater zeal as events and revelations became more monstrous. When, two
days after my frightful crawl through that crypt of the eyes and claw, I
learned that a thing had malignly hovered twenty miles away at the same
instant the eyes were glaring at me, I experienced virtual convulsions of
fright. But that fright was so mixed with wonder and alluring
grotesqueness, that it was almost a pleasant sensation. Sometimes, in the
throes of a nightmare when unseen powers whirl one over the roofs of
strange dead cities toward the grinning chasm of Nis, it is a relief and even
a delight to shriek wildly and throw oneself voluntarily along with the
hideous vortex of dream-doom into whatever bottomless gulf may yawn.
And so it was with the walking nightmare of Tempest Mountain; the
discovery that two monsters had haunted the spot gave me ultimately a
mad craving to plunge into the very earth of the accursed region, and with
bare hands dig out the death that leered from every inch of the poisonous
soil.
As soon as possible I visited the grave of Jan Martense and dug vainly
where I had dug before. Some extensive cave-in had obliterated all trace of
the underground passage, while the rain had washed so much earth back
into the excavation that I could not tell how deeply I had dug that other
day. I likewise made a difficult trip to the distant hamlet where the deathcreature had been burnt, and was little repaid for my trouble. In the ashes
of the fateful cabin I found several bones, but apparently none of the
monster's. The squatters said the thing had had only one victim; but in this
I judged them inaccurate, since besides the complete skull of a human
being, there was another bony fragment which seemed certainly to have
belonged to a human skull at some time. Though the rapid drop of the
monster had been seen, no one could say just what the creature was like;
those who had glimpsed it called it simply a devil. Examining the great tree
where it had lurked, I could discern no distinctive marks. I tried to find
some trail into the black forest, but on this occasion could not stand the
sight of those morbidly large boles, or of those vast serpent-like roots that
twisted so malevolently before they sank into the earth.
My next step was to reexamine with microscopic care the deserted
hamlet where death had come most abundantly, and where Arthur Munroe
had seen something he never lived to describe. Though my vain previous
searches had been exceedingly minute, I now had new data to test; for my
horrible grave-crawl convinced me that at least one of the phases of the
monstrosity had been an underground creature. This time, on the 14th of
November, my quest concerned itself mostly with the slopes of Cone
Mountain and Maple Hill where they overlook the unfortunate hamlet, and I
gave particular attention to the loose earth of the landslide region on the
latter eminence.
The afternoon of my search brought nothing to light, and dusk came
as I stood on Maple Hill looking down at the hamlet and across the valley to
Tempest Mountain. There had been a gorgeous sunset, and now the moon
came up, nearly full and shedding a silver flood over the plain, the distant
mountainside, and the curious low mounds that rose here and there. It was
a peaceful Arcadian scene, but knowing what it hid I hated it. I hated the
mocking moon, the hypocritical plain, the festering mountain, and those
sinister mounds. Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome
contagion, and inspired by a noxious alliance with distorted hidden powers.
Presently, as I gazed abstractedly at the moonlit panorama, my eye
became attracted by something singular in the nature and arrangement of a
certain topographical element. Without having any exact knowledge of
geology, I had from the first been interested in the odd mounds and
hummocks of the region. I had noticed that they were pretty widely
distributed around Tempest Mountain, though less numerous on the plain
than near the hilltop itself, where prehistoric glaciation had doubtless
found feebler opposition to its striking and fantastic caprices. Now, in the
light of that low moon which cast long weird shadows, it struck me forcibly
that the various points and lines of the mound system had a peculiar
relation to the summit of Tempest Mountain. That summit was undeniably
a centre from which the lines or rows of points radiated indefinitely and
irregularly, as if the unwholesome Martense mansion had thrown visible
tentacles of terror. The idea of such tentacles gave me an unexplained thrill,
and I stopped to analyse my reason for believing these mounds glacial
phenomena.
The more I analysed the less I believed, and against my newly opened
mind there began to beat grotesque and horrible analogies based on
superficial aspects and upon my experience beneath the earth. Before I
knew it I was uttering frenzied and disjointed words to myself; "My God!...
Molehills... the damned place must be honeycombed... how many... that
night at the mansion... they took Bennett and Tobey first... on each side of
us..." Then I was digging frantically into the mound which had stretched
nearest me; digging desperately, shiveringly, but almost jubilantly; digging
and at last shrieking aloud with some unplaced emotion as I came upon a
tunnel or burrow just like the one through which I had crawled on the other
demoniac night.
After that I recall running, spade in hand; a hideous run across moonlitten, mound-marked meadows and through diseased, precipitous abysses
of haunted hillside forest; leaping screaming, panting, bounding toward the
terrible Martense mansion. I recall digging unreasonably in all parts of the
brier-choked cellar; digging to find the core and centre of that malignant
universe of mounds. And then I recall how I laughed when I stumbled on
the passageway; the hole at the base of the old chimney, where the thick
weeds grew and cast queer shadows in the light of the lone candle I had
happened to have with me. What still remained down in that hell-hive,
lurking and waiting for the thunder to arouse it, I did not know. Two had
been killed; perhaps that had finished it. But still there remained that
burning determination to reach the innermost secret of the fear, which I
had once more come to deem definite, material, and organic.
My indecisive speculation whether to explore the passage alone and
immediately with my pocket-light or to try to assemble a band of squatters
for the quest, was interrupted after a time by a sudden rush of wind from
the outside which blew out the candle and left me in stark blackness. The
moon no longer shone through the chinks and apertures above me, and
with a sense of fateful alarm I heard the sinister and significant rumble of
approaching thunder. A confusion of associated ideas possessed my brain,
leading me to grope back toward the farthest corner of the cellar. My eyes,
however, never turned away from the horrible opening at the base of the
chimney; and I began to get glimpses of the crumbling bricks and
unhealthy weeds as faint glows of lightning penetrated the weeds outside
and illumined the chinks in the upper wall. Every second I was consumed
with a mixture of fear and curiosity. What would the storm call forth-or was
there anything left for it to call? Guided by a lightning flash I settled myself
down behind a dense clump of vegetation, through which I could see the
opening without being seen.
If heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness the
sight that I saw, and let me live my last years in peace. I cannot sleep at
night now, and have to take opiates when it thunders. The thing came
abruptly and unannounced; a demon, ratlike scurrying from pits remote
and unimaginable, a hellish panting and stifled grunting, and then from
that opening beneath the chimney a burst of multitudinous and leprous life
- a loathsome night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly
hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity.
Seething, stewing, surging, bubbling like serpents' slime it rolled up and
out of that yawning hole, spreading like a septic contagion and streaming
from the cellar at every point of egress - streaming out to scatter through
the accursed midnight forests and strew fear, madness, and death.
God knows how many there were - there must have been thousands.
To see the stream of them in that faint intermittent lightning was shocking.
When they had thinned out enough to be glimpsed as separate organisms, I
saw that they were dwarfed, deformed hairy devils or apes-monstrous and
diabolic caricatures of the monkey tribe. They were so hideously silent;
there was hardly a squeal when one of the last stragglers turned with the
skill of long practice to make a meal in accustomed fashion on a weaker
companion. 0thers snapped up what it left and ate with slavering relish.
Then, in spite of my daze of fright and disgust, my morbid curiosity
triumphed; and as the last of the monstrosities oozed up alone from that
nether world of unknown nightmare, I drew my automatic pistol and shot it
under cover of the thunder.
Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness
chasing one another through endless, ensanguined condors of purple
fulgurous sky... formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a
ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous over-nourished oaks
with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth
verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping
from underground nuclei of polypous perversion... insane lightning over
malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with fungous vegetation...
Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me unconscious to places
where men dwell; to the peaceful village that slept under the calm stars of
clearing skies.
I had recovered enough in a week to send to Albany for a gang of men
to blow up the Martense mansion and the entire top of Tempest Mountain
with dynamite, stop up all the discoverable mound-burrows, and destroy
certain over-nourished trees whose very existence seemed an insult to
sanity. I could sleep a little after they had done this, but true rest will never
come as long as I remember that nameless secret of the lurking fear. The
thing will haunt me, for who can say the extermination is complete, and
that analogous phenomena do not exist all over the world? Who can, with
my knowledge, think of the earth's unknown caverns without a nightmare
dread of future possibilities? I cannot see a well or a subway entrance
without shuddering... why cannot the doctors give me something to make
me sleep, or truly calm my brain when it thunders?
What I saw in the glow of flashlight after I shot the unspeakable
straggling object was so simple that almost a minute elapsed before I
understood and went delirious. The object was nauseous; a filthy whitish
gorilla thing with sharp yellow fangs and matted fur. It was the ultimate
product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome of isolated
spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and below the
ground; the embodiment of all the snarling and chaos and grinning fear
that lurk behind life. It had looked at me as it died, and its eyes had the
same odd quality that marked those other eyes which had stared at me
underground and excited cloudy recollections. One eye was blue, the other
brown. They were the dissimilar Martense eyes of the old legends, and I
knew in one inundating cataclysm of voiceless horror what had become of
that vanished family; the terrible and thunder-crazed house of Martense.
THE QUEST OF IRANON
Into the granite city of Teloth wandered the youth, vine-crowned, his
yellow hair glistening with myrrh and his purple robe torn with briers of the
mountain Sidrak that lies across the antique bridge of stone. The men of
Teloth are dark and stern, and dwell in square houses, and with frowns
they asked the stranger whence he had come and what were his name and
fortune. So the youth answered:
"I am Iranon, and come from Aira, a far city that I recall only dimly but
seek to find again. I am a singer of songs that I learned in the far city, and
my calling is to make beauty with the things remembered of childhood. My
wealth is in little memories and dreams, and in hopes that I sing in gardens
when the moon is tender and the west wind stirs the lotus-buds."
When the men of Teloth heard these things they whispered to one
another; for though in the granite city there is no laughter or song, the
stern men sometimes look to the Karthian hills in the spring and think of
the lutes of distant Oonai whereof travellers have told. And thinking thus,
they bade the stranger stay and sing in the square before the Tower of Mlin,
though they liked not the colour of his tattered robe, nor the myrrh in his
hair, nor his chaplet of vine-leaves, nor the youth in his golden voice. At
evening Iranon sang, and while he sang an old man prayed and a blind man
said he saw a nimbus over the singer's head. But most of the men of Teloth
yawned, and some laughed and some went to sleep; for Iranon told nothing
useful, singing only his memories, his dreams, and his hopes.
"I remember the twilight, the moon, and soft songs, and the window
where I was rocked to sleep. And through the window was the street where
the golden lights came, and where the shadows danced on houses of
marble. I remember the square of moonlight on the floor, that was not like
any other light, and the visions that danced on the moonbeams when my
mother sang to me. And too, I remember the sun of morning bright above
the many-coloured hills in summer, and the sweetness of flowers borne on
the south wind that made the trees sing.
"Oh Aira, city of marble and beryl, how many are thy beauties! How I
loved the warm and fragrant groves across the hyline Nithra, and the falls of
the tiny Kra that flowed though the verdant valley! In those groves and in
the vale the children wove wreathes for one another, and at dusk I dreamed
strange dreams under the yath-trees on the mountain as I saw below me
the lights of the city, and the curving Nithra reflecting a ribbon of stars.
"And in the city were the palaces of veined and tinted marble, with
golden domes and painted walls, and green gardens with cerulean pools
and crystal fountains. Often I played in the gardens and waded in the pools,
and lay and dreamed among the pale flowers under the trees. And
sometimes at sunset i would climb the long hilly street to the citadel and
the open place, and look down upon Aira, the magic city of marble and
beryl, splendid in a robe of golden flame.
"Long have I missed thee, Aira, for i was but young when we went into
exile; but my father was thy King and I shall come again to thee, for it is so
decreed of Fate. All through seven lands have I sought thee, and some day
shall I reign over thy groves and gardens, thy streets and palaces, and sing
to men who shall know whereof I sing, and laugh not nor turn away. For I
am Iranon, who was a Prince in Aira."
That night the men of Teloth lodged the stranger in a stable, and in the
morning an archon came to him and told him to go to the shop of Athok the
cobbler, and be apprenticed to him.
"But I am Iranon, a singer of songs, " he said, "and have no heart for
the cobbler's trade."
"All in Teloth must toil," replied the archon, "for that is the law." Then
said Iranon:
"Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if ye
toil only that ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you? Ye toil to
live, but is not life made of beauty and song? And if ye suffer no singers
among you, where shall be the fruits of your toil? Toil without song is like a
weary journey without an end. Were not death more pleasing?" But the
archon was sullen and did not understand, and rebuked the stranger.
"Thou art a strange youth, and I like not thy face or thy voice. The
words thou speakest are blasphemy, for the gods of Teloth have said that
toil is good. Our gods have promised us a haven of light beyond death,
where shall be rest without end, and crystal coldness amidst which none
shall vex his mind with thought or his eyes with beauty. Go thou then to
Athok the cobbler or be gone out of the city by sunset. All here must serve,
and song is folly."
So Iranon went out of the stable and walked over the narrow stone
streets between the gloomy square house of granite, seeking something
green, for all was of stone. On the faces of men were frowns, but by the
stone embankment along the sluggish river Zuro sat a young boy with sad
eyes gazing into the waters to spy green budding branches washed down
from the hills by the freshets. And the boy said to him:
"Art thou not indeed he of whom the archons tell, who seekest a far
city in a fair land? I am Romnod, and borne of the blood of Teloth, but am
not olf in the ways of the granite city, and yearn daily for the warm groves
and the distant lands of beauty and song. Beyond the Karthian hills lieth
Oonai, the city of lutes and dancing, which men whisper of and say is both
lovely and terrible.Thither would I go were I old enough to find the way, and
thither shouldst thou go and thou wouldst sing and have men listen to
thee. Let us leave the city of Teloth and fare together among the hills of
spring. Thou shalt shew me the ways of travel and I will attend thy songs at
evening when the stars one by one bring dreams to the minds of dreamers.
And peradventure it may be that Oonai the city of lutes and dancing is even
the fair Aira thou seekest, for it is told that thou hast not known Aira since
the old days, and a name often changeth. Let us go to Oonai, O Iranon of
the golden head, where men shall know our longings and welcome us as
brothers, nor even laugh or frown at what we say." And Iranon answered:
"Be it so, small one; if any in this stone place yearn for beauty he must
seek the mountains and beyond, and I would not leave thee to pine by the
sluggish Zuro. But think not that delight and understanding dwell just
across the Karthian hills, or in any spot thou canst find in a day's, or a
year's, or a lustrum's journey. Behold, when I was small like thee I dwelt in
the valley of Narthos by the frigid Xari, where none would listen to my
dreams; and I told myself that when older i would go to Sinara on the
southern slope, and sing to smiling dromedary-men in the marketplace. But
when I went to Sinara i found the dromedary-men all drunken and ribald,
and saw that their songs were not as mine, so I travelled in a barge down
the Xari to onyx-walled Jaren. And the soldiers at Jaren laughed at me and
drave me out, so that I wandered to many cities. I have seen Stethelos that
is below the great cataract, and have gazed on the marsh where Sarnath
once stood. I have been to thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding
river Ai, and have dwelt long in Olathoe in the land of Lomar. But though i
have had listeners sometimes, they have ever been few. and I know that
welcome shall wait me only in Aira, the city of marble and beryl where my
father once ruled as King. So for Aira shall we seek, though it were well to
visit distant and lute-blessed oonai across the Karthianhills, which may
indeed be Aira, though i think not. Aira's beauty is past imagining, and
none can tell of it without rapture, whilist of Oonai the camel-drivers
whisper leeringly."
At the sunset Iranon and small Romnod went forth from Teloth, and
for long wandered amidst the green hills and cool forests. The way was
rough and obscure, and never did they seem nearer to oonai the city of
lutes and dancing; but in the dusk as the stars came out Iranon would sing
of Aira and its beauties and Romnod would listen, so that they were both
happy after a fashion. They ate plentifully of fruit and red berries, and
marked not the passing of time, but many years must have slipped away.
Small Romnod was now not so small, and spoke deeply instead of shrilly,
though Iranon was always the same, and decked his golden hair with vines
and fragrant resins found in the woods. So it came to pass that Romnod
seemed older than Iranon, though he had been very small when Iranon had
found him watching for green budding branches in Teloth beside the
sluggish stone-banked Zuro.
Then one night when the moon was full the travellers came to a
mountain crest and looked down upon the myriad light of Oonai. Peasants
had told them they were near, and Iranon knew that this was not his native
city of Aira. The lights of Oonai were not like those of Aira; for they were
harsh and glaring, while the lights of Aira shine as softly and magically as
shone the moonlight on the floor by the window where Iranon's mother once
rocked him to sleep with song. But Oonai was a city of lutes and dancing,
so Iranon and Romnod went down the steep slope that they might find men
to whom sings and dreams would bring pleasure. And when they were come
into the town they found rose-wreathed revellers bound from house to
house and leaning from windows and balconies, who listened to the songs
of Iranon and tossed him flowers and applauded when he was done. Then
for a moment did Iranon believe he had found those who thought and felt
even as he, though the town was not a hundredth as fair as Aira.
When dawn came Iranon looked about with dismay, for the domes of
Oonai were not golden in the sun, but grey and dismal. And the men of
Oonai were pale with revelling, and dull with wine, and unlike the radient
men of Aira. But because the people had thrown him blossoms and
acclaimed his sings Iranon stayed on, and with him Romnod, who liked the
revelry of the town and wore in his dark hair roses and myrtle. Often at
night Iranon sang to the revellers, but he was always as before, crowned
only in the vine of the mountains and remembering the marble streets of
Aira and the hyaline Nithra. In the frescoed halls of the Monarch did he
sing, upon a crystal dais raised over a floor that was a mirror, and as he
sang, he brought pictures to his hearers till the floor seemed to reflect old,
beautiful, and half-remembered things instead of the wine-reddened
feasters who pelted him with roses. And the King bade him put away his
tattered purple, and clothed him in satin and cloth-of-gold, with rings of
green jade and bracelets of tinted ivory, and lodged him in a gilded and
tapestried chamber on a bed of sweet carven wood with canopies and
coverlets of flower-embroidered silk. Thus dwelt Iranon in Oonai, the city of
lutes and dancing.
It is not known how long Iranon tarried in Oonai, but one day the King
brought to the palace some wild whirling dancers from the Liranian desert,
and dusky flute-players from Drinen in the East, and after that the revellers
threw their roses not so much at Iranon as at the dancers and flute-players.
And day by day that Romnod who had been a small boy in granite Teloth
grew coarser and redder with wine, till he dreamed less and less, amd
listened with less delight to the songs of Iranon. But though Iranon was sad
he ceased not to sing, and at evening told again of his dreams of Aira, the
city of marble and beryl. Then one night the reddened and fattened Romnod
snorted heavily amidst the poppied silks of his banquet-couch and died
writhing, whilst Iranon, pale and slender, sang to himself in a far corner.
And when Iranon had wept over the grave of Romnod and strewn it with
green branches, such as Romnod used to love, he put aside his silks and
gauds and went forgotten out of Oonai the city of lutes and dancing clad
only in the ragged purple in which he had come, and garlanded with fresh
vines from the mountains.
Into the sunset wandered Iranon, seeking still for his native land and
for men who would understand his songs and dreams. In all the cities of
Cydathria and in the lands beyond the Bnazie desert gay-faced children
laughed at his olden songs and tattered robe of purple; but Iranon stayed
ever young, and wore wreathes upon his golden head whilst he sang of Aira,
delight of the past and hope of the future.
So came he one night to the squallid cot of an antique shepherd, bent
and dirty, who kept flocks on a stony slope above a quicksand marsh. To
this man Iranon spoke, as to so many others:
"Canst thou tell me where I may find Aira, the city of marble and beryl,
where flows the hyaline nithra and where the falls of the tiny Kra sing to the
verdant valleys and hills forested with yath trees?" and the shepherd,
hearing, looked long and strangely at Iranon, as if recalling something very
far away in time, and noted each line of the stranger's face, and his golden
hair, and his crown of vine-leaves. But he was old, and shook his head as
he replied:
"O stranger, i have indeed heard the name of Aira, and the other
names thou hast spoken, but they come to me from afar down the waste of
long years.I heard them in my youth from the lips of a playmate, a beggar's
boy given to strange dreams, who would weave long tales about the moon
and the flowers and the west wind. We used to laugh at him, for we knew
him from his birth though he thought himself a King's son. He was comely,
even as thou, but full of folly and strangeness; and he ranaway when small
to find those who would listen gladly to his songs and dreams. How often
hath he sung to me of lands that never were, and things that never can be!
Of Aira did he speak much; of Aira and the river Nithra, and the falls of the
tiny Kra. There would he ever say he once dwelt as a Prince, though here we
knew him from his birth.Nor was there ever a marble city of Aira, or those
who could delight in strange songs, save in the dreams of mine old
playmate Iranon who is gone."
And in the twilight, as the stars came out one by one and the moon
cast on the marsh a radiance like that which a child sees quivering on the
floor as he is rocked to sleep at evening, there walked into the lethal
quicksands a very old man in tattered purple, crowned with whithered vineleaves and gazing ahead as if upon the golden domes of a fair city where
dreams are understood. That night something of youth and beauty died in
the elder world.
DREAMS IN THE WITCHHOUSE
Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the
dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the
brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy,
unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with
flgures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His
ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and
he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to
seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city
outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the
creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him
a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with
unexplained sound - and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises
he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises
which he suspected were lurking behind them.
He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its
clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid
from the King's men in the dark, olden years of the Province. Nor was any
spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room
which harboured him - for it was this house and this room which had
likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the
last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692 - the gaoler had gone
mad and babbled of a small white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of
Keziah's cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and
angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.
Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean
calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain, and when
one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of
multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and
the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly
free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after
he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his
mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air
of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors at
Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down his
course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from consulting
the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and
key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions came late
in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded
Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the
suppressed Unaussprechlicken Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his
abstract formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions
known and unknown.
He knew his room was in the old Witch-House - that, indeed, was why
he had taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah
Mason's trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court of
Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told
Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out
directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and
had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain
midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill
and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black
Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had
drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.
Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer
thrill on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than two
hundred and thirty-five years. When he heard the hushed Arkham whispers
about Keziah's persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets,
about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and
other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and
Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house's attic just after
those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing
which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people
curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live in the place at
any cost. A room was easy to secure, for the house was unpopular, hard to
rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told
what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building
where some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old
woman of the Seventeenth Century an insight into mathematical depths
perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg,
Einstein, and de Sitter.
He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at
every accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week
managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to have
practised her spells. It had been vacant from the first - for no one had ever
been willing to stay there long - but the Polish landlord had grown wary
about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about the
time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the sombre halls and
chambers, no small furry thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him,
and no record of the witch's incantations rewarded his constant search.
Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved
musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned
and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows.
Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint
suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might
not - at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in
the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the mossgrown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and
immemorial.
Gilman's room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north
wall slating perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the
low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside from an
obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there was no
access - nor any appearance of a former avenue of access - to the space
which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer
wall on the house's north side, though a view from the exterior showed
where a window had heen boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above
the ceiling - which must have had a slanting floor - was likewise
inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cob-webbed level loft
above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly and
heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden
pegs common in Colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however,
could induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two
closed spaces.
As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of
his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical
significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their pnrpose. Old
Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room
with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed
to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His
interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the
slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces
concerned the side he was on.
The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For
some time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman's room had been
having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter
advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at the
corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About
this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him
considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being
very acute. But the exaggerated sense of bearing was scarcely less
annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable
cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other
sounds - perhaps from regions beyond life - trembling on the very brink of
audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions
were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but
deliberate. When it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed
with a sort of dry rattling; and when it came from the century-closed loft
above the slanting ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting
some horror which only bided its time before descending to engulf him
utterly.
The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman fell that
they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore.
He had been thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae
told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, and about the
possibility that old Keziah Mason - guided by some influence past all
conjecture - had actually found the gate to those regions. The yellowed
country records containing her testimony and that of her accusers were so
damnably suggestive of things beyond human experience - and the
descriptions of the darting little furry object which served as her familiar
were so painfully realistic despite their incredible details.
That object - no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the
townspeople "Brown Jenkins - seemed to have been the fruit of a
remarkable case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than
eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours, too,
with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said it
had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded
face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took
messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch's
blood, which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome
titter, and it could speak all languages. Of all the bizarre monstrosities in
Gilman's dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic and nausea than
this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his
vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking
mind had deduced from the ancient records and the modern whispers.
Gilman's dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless
abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and baffingly disordered sound;
abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to
his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb,
fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion
partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not
well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by
some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical
organization and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and
obliquely projected - though not without a certain grotesque relationship to
his normal proportions and properties.
The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with
indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which
appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic
objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he
could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or
suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories
into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to
involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and
basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects
slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of
the other categories.
All the objects - organic and inorganic alike - were totally beyond
description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the
inorganic matter to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and
Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups
of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate arabesques
roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was
unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic
entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous
fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved,
he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a
further mystery - the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of
empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking,
roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all
analysis as to pitch, timbre or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with
vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic
alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some
unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure,
relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.
But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown
Jenkin. That shocking little horror was reserved for certain lighter, sharper
dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into the fullest depths of
sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when a faint
lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the centuried room, showing
in a violet mist the convergence of angled planes which had seized his brain
so insidiously. The horror would appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the
corner and patter toward him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil
expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face; but mercifully, this dream
always melted away before the object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had
hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth; Gilman tried to stop up the rat-hole
every day, but each night the real tenants of the partitions would gnaw
away the obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he had the landlord nail a
tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed a fresh hole, in making which
they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little fragment of bone.
Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not
pass the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every
moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and
Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost
ground before the end of the term.
It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary
dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be
companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble
a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could account
for, but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had
twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned
wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated
stare of the beldame had set him almost shivering - especially the first time
when an overgrown rat darting across the shadowed mouth of a
neighbouring alley had made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now,
he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordered
dreams. That the influence of the old house was unwholesome he could not
deny, but traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued
that the fever alone was responsible for his nightly fantasies, and that when
the touch abated he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those
visions, however, were of absorbing vividness and convincingness, and
whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of having undergone much
more than he remembered. He was hideously sure that in unrecalled
dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that
they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third
being of greater potency.
Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics,
though the other stndies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an
intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor
Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems
which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a
discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical
points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and
various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the transgalactic
gulfs themselves - or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively
conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time
continuum. Gilman's handling of this theme filled everyone with
admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an
increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary
eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober
theory that a man might - given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond
all likelihood of human acquirement - step deliberately from the earth to
any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specifc
points in the cosmic pattern.
Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage
out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back
to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite
remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in
many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional
space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of
the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional
space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be
able to live on certain others - even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to
similar dimensional phases of other space-time continua - though of course
there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though
mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.
It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm
could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of
additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions - be they within or outside
the given space-time continuum - and that the converse would be likewise
true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain
that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional
plane to the next higher one would not be destructive of biological integrity
as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for
this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by
his clearness on other complex points. Professor Upham especially liked his
demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of
magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity - human
or pre-human - whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater
than ours.
Around 1 April Gilman worried cosiderably because his slow fever did
not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow lodgers said
about his sleep-walking. It seened that he was often absent from his bed
and that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night was
remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of hearing
the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he must have been
mistaken in this, since shoes as well as other apparel were always precisely
in place in the morning. One could develop all sorts of aural delusions in
this morbid old house - for did not Gilman himself, even in daylight, now
feel certain that noises other than rat-scratching came from the black voids
beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling? His pathologically
sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed
loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such things was agonizingly
realistic.
However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for
twice at night his room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing
in place. Of this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellowstudent whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid and unpopular
house. Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had come up for
help on a differential equation, only to find Gilman absent. It had been
rather presumptuous of him to open the unlocked door after knocking had
failed to rouse a response, but he had needed the help very badly and
thought that his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake. On neither
occasion, though, had Gilman been there; and when told of the matter he
wondered where he could have been wandering, barefoot and with only his
night clothes on. He resolved to investigate the matter if reports of his sleepwalking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the floor of the
corridor to see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only
conceivable egress, for there was no possible foothold outside the narrow
window.
As April advanced, Gilman's fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by
the whining prayers of a superstitious loom-fixer named Joe Mazurewicz
who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling
stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry sharp-fanged, nuzzling
thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver
crucifix - given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus'
Church - could bring him relief. Now he was praying because the Witches'
Sabbath was drawing near. May Eve was Walpurgis Night, when hell's
blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for
nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad lime in Arkham, even
though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall
Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad doings,
and a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such things,
for his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her
grandmother. It was wise to pray and count one's beads at this season. For
three months Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe's room, nor
near Paul Choynski's room, nor anywhere else - and it meant no good when
they held off like that. They must be up to something.
Gilman dropped in at the doctor's office on the sixteenth of the month,
and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had
feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to see a
nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the still
more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his
activities before, would have made him take a rest - an impossible thing
now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was certainly
near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth dimension,
and who could say how much farther he might go?
But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of
his strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of immininence come
from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy,
imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too,
there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuading him
to do something terrible which he could not do. How about the
somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was
that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle
through the confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and full
wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless
perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and
sometimes he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague
shrieking or roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.
The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter
preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and
Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her
bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her
shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression
on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he
awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He
must meet the Black Man and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at
the centre of ultimate chaos. That was what she said. He must sign the
book of Azathoth in his own blood and take a new secret name now that his
independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her
and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin
flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name "Azathoth" in
the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for
description.
The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where
the downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallize at a
point closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was a little
nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too was
always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs glistened
shockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome
tittering struck more and more into Gilman's head, and he could remember
in the morning how it had pronounced the words "Azathoth" and
"Nyarlathotep".
In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and
Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth
dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly
irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our
own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own
dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less
irrelevantly moving things - a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately
spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown
colours and rapidly shifting surface angles - seemed to take notice of him
and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan
prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters and quasi-buildings; and all
the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if
approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.
During the night of 19-20 April the new development occurred. Gilman
was half involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubblemass and the small polyhedron floating ahead when he noticed the
peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring
prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss and standing
tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light. He
was barefooted and in his nightclothes. and when he tried to walk
discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet. A swirling vapour hid
everything but the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and he shrank
from the thought of the sounds, that might surge out of that vapour.
Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him - the old
woman and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees and
managed to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin
pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoid forepaw which it
raised with evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not originate,
Gilman dragged himself forward along a course determined by the angle of
the old woman's arms and the direction of the small monstrosity's paw, and
before he had shuffled three steps he was back in the twilight abysses.
Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he fell dizzily and
interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily angled garret of the
eldritch old house.
He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his
classes. Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly
irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a certain vacant spot on
the floor. As the day advanced, the focus of his unseeing eyes changed
position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare at vacancy.
About two o'clock he went out for lunch and as he threaded the narrow
lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the southeast. Only an
effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street, and after the meal he felt
the unknown pull still more strongly.
He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all - perhaps there
was a connection with his somnambulism - but meanwhile he might at
least try to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still
manage to walk away from the pull, so with great resolution he headed
against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison Street. By
the time he had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a cold
perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed upstream at
the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancient standing stones
brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.
Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on
that desolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the
strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself so disastrously
into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving, too, as if some other
living thing were crawling close to the ground. When the old woman began
to turn toward him he fled precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of
the town's labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he
felt that a monstrous and invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare
of that bent, ancient figure in brown.
The southeastwards pull still held, and only with tremendous
resolution could Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety
stairs. For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes shifting gradually
westward. About six o'clock his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers
of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in desperation he seized his hat
and walked out into the sunset-golden streets, letting the now directly
southward pull carry him where it might. An hour later darkness found him
in the open fields beyond Hangman's Brook, with the glimmering spring
stars shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to
leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realized just where the source
of the pull lay.
It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him
and was calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra
and Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever since
he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been underfoot, and
now it was roughly south but stealing toward the west. What was the
meaning of this new thing? Was he going mad? How long would it last?
Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged himself back to
the sinister old house.
Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious
and reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the
witch-light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before - and it was
Patriots' Day in Massachusetts - and had come home after midnight.
Looking up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that Gilman's
window was dark, but then he had seen the faint violet glow within. He
wanted to warn the gentleman about that glow, for everybody in Arkham
knew it was Keziah's witch-light which played near Brown Jenkin and the
ghost of the old crone herself. He had not mentioned this before, but now he
must tell about it because it meant that Keziah and her long-toothed
familiar were haunting the young gentleman. Sometimes he and Paul
Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw that light seeping
out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman's room, but they
had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would be better for the
gentleman to take another room and get a crucifix from some good priest
like Father Iwanicki.
As the man rambled on, Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his
throat. He knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home
the night before; yet the mention of a violet light in the garret window was of
frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort which always played
about the old woman and the small furry thing in those lighter, sharper
dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and the thought
that a wakeful second person could see the dream-luminance was utterly
beyond sane harborage. Yet where had the fellow got such an odd notion?
Had he himself talked as well as walked around the house in his sleep? No,
Joe said, he had not - but he must check up on this. Perhaps Frank Elwood
could tell him something, though he hated to ask.
Fever - wild dreams - somnambulism - illusions of sounds - a pull
toward a point in the sky - and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He
must stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When
he climbed to the second storey he paused at Elwood's door but saw that
the other youth was out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room
and sat down in the dark. His gaze was still pulled to the southward, but he
also found himself listening intently for some sound in the closed loft above,
and half imagining that an evil violet light seeped down through an
infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting ceiling.
That night as Gilman slept, the violet light broke upon him with
heightened intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing, getting closer
than ever before, mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish gestures.
He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses, though the
pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopic little
polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then came the shift as vast
converging planes of a slippery-looking substance loomed above and below
him - a shift which ended in a flash of delirium and a blaze of unknown,
alien light in which yellow, carmine, and indigo were madly and inextricably
blended.
He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a
boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes,
minarets, horizontal disks poised on pinnacles, and numberless forms of
still greater wildness - some of stone and some of metal - which glittered
gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a poly-chromatic sky.
Looking upward he saw three stupendous disks of flame, each of a different
hue, and at a different height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of
low mountains. Behind him tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as
he could see. The city below stretched away to the limits of vision, and he
hoped that no sound would well up from it.
The pavement from which he easily raised himself was a veined
polished stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in
bizarre-angled shapes which struck himm as less asymmetrical than based
on some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The
balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while along
the rail were ranged at short intervals little figures of grotesque design and
exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole balustrade, seemed to be made
of some sort of shining metal whose colour could not be guessed in the
chaos of mixed effulgences, and their nature utterly defied conjecture. They
represented some ridged barrel-shaped objects with thin horizontal arms
radiating spoke-like from a central ring and with vertical knobs or bulbs
projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs was
the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged
around it like the arms of a starfish - nearly horizontal, but curving slightly
away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to the
long railing with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been
broken off and were missing. The figures were about four and a half inches
in height, while the spiky arms gave them a maximum diameter of about
two and a half inches.
When Gilman stood up, the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly
alone, and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily down
at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet below. As he
listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical pipings covering
a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and he
wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned him
giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to the pavement had he not
clutched instinctively at the lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell on one
of the projecting figures, the touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was
too much, however, for the exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky
figure snapped off under his grasp. Still half dazed, he continued to clutch
it as his other hand seized a vacant space on the smooth railing.
But now his over-sensitive ears caught something behind him, and he
looked back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without
apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old
woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent
him unconscious; for they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped
precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves
by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms.
Gilman awoke in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a
smarting sensation in his face, hands and feet. Springing to the floor, he
washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary for him to get
out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know where he wished
to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice his classes. The odd
pull toward that spot in the sky between Hydra and Argo had abated, but
another of even greater strength had taken its place. Now he felt that he
must go north - infinitely north. He dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a
view of the desolate island in the Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody
Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chained
to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue sky.
After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that
he was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of
salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth - that ancient,
half-deserted town which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to
visit. Though the northward pull had not diminished, he resisted it as he
had resisted the other pull, and finally found that he could almost balance
the one against the other. Plodding back to town and getting some coffee at
a soda fountain, he dragged himself into the public library and browsed
aimlessly among the lighter magazines. Once he met some friends who
remarked how oddly sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of his
walk. At three o'clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting
meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he
killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over
and over again without paying any attention to it.
About nine at night he drifted homeward and shuffled into the ancient
house. Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman
hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to see if Elwood
was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that the shock
came. At once he saw there was something on the table which did not
belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its side for it could not stand up alone - was the exotic spiky figure which in his
monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade. No detail was
missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped center, the thin radiating arms, the
knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving starfish-arms
spreading from those knobs - all were there. In the electric light the colour
seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green; and Gilman could
see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended in a
jagged break, corresponding to its former point of attachment to the dreamrailing.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from
screaming aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear.
Still dazed, he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to
Landlord Dombrowski's quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious
loom-fixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman did not
mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No, he
had not seen that thing before and did not know anything about it. But his
wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the beds when she fixed
the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her, and she
waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found it in the young
gentleman's bed - on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to her,
but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his room books and curios and pictures and markings on paper. She certainly knew
nothing about it.
So Gilman climbed upstairs again in mental turmoil, convinced that he
was either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible
extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places. Where had he got
this outré thing? He did not recall seeing it in any museum in Arkham. It
must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of it as he snatched it in
his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of the balustraded
terrace. Next day he would make some very guarded inquiries - and
perhaps see the nerve specialist.
Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he
went upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour
which he had borrowed - with a frank admission as to its purpose - from
the landlord. He had stopped at Elwood's door on the way, but had found
all dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing on the table,
and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without pausing
to undress. From the closed loft above the slating ceiling he thought he
heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was too disorganized even to
mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting very strong again,
though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the sky.
In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged,
furry thing came again and with a greater distinctness than on any former
occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he felt the crone's
withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty
space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight
amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But that
moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless little
space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his head,
and with a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on that floor were
low cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and disintegration, and
in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently fastened in place.
Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops of the
cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart
of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor
fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a
second's dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry thing
with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
The evilly-grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table
stood a figure he had never seen before - a tall, lean man of dead black
colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid features: wholly devoid
of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of
some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the
table and bench, but he must have been shod, since there was a clicking
whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and bore no trace of
expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed to a book of
prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame thrust a
huge grey quill into Gilman's right hand. Over everything was a pall of
intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when the furry thing
ran up the dreamer's clothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm,
finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As the blood
spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
He awaked on the morning of the twenty-second with a pain in his left
wrist, and saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections
were very confused, but the scene with the black man in the unknown
space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving
rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the
flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of the
loutish fellow who roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had not
been sleep-walking this time. But something would have to be done about
those rats. He would speak to the landlord about them. Again he tried to
stop up the hole at the base of the slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick
which seemed of about the right size. His ears were ringing horribly, as if
with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard in dreams.
As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had
dreamed after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite
would crystallize in his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to
the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so
violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestions
of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond
them - abysses in which all fixed suggestions were absent. He had been
taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always
dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of mist in this
farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead - a
larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations
of form - and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line,
but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which
obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable
cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a
monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an
unseen flute - but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last
conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless
entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a black throne at the
centre of Chaos.
When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight,
and Gilman puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred
to him that there was no blood on the bedspread where he had lain - which
was very curious in view of the amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been
sleep-walking within his room, and had the rat bitten him as he sat in some
chair or paused in some less rational position? He looked in every corner for
brownish drops or stains, but did not find any. He had better, he thought,
spinkle flour within the room as well as outside the door - though after all
no further proof of his sleep-walking was needed. He knew he did walk and
the thing to do now was to stop it. He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This
morning the strange pulls from space seemed lessened, though they were
replaced by another sensation even more inexplicable. It was a vague,
insistent impulse to fly away from his present situation, but held not a hint
of the specific direction in which he wished to fly. As he picked up the
strange spiky image on the table he thought the older northward pull grew
a trifle stronger; but even so, it was wholly overruled by the newer and more
bewildering urge.
He took the spiky image down to Elwood's room, steeling himself
against the whines of the loom-fixer which welled up from the ground floor.
Elwood was in, thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about. There was
time for a little conversation before leaving for breakfast and college, so
Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent dreams and fears.
His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be
done. He was shocked by his guest's drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed
the queer, abnormal-looking sunburn which others had remarked during
the past week.
There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen
Gilman on any sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious
image could be. He had, though, heard the French-Canadian who lodged
just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling
each other how badly they dreaded the coming of Walpurgis Night, now only
a few days off; and were exchanging pitying comments about the poor,
doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow under Gilman's room, had
spoken of nocturnal footsteps shod and unshod, and of the violet light he
saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peer through Gilman's
keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had
glimpsed that light through the cracks around the door. There had been
soft talking, too - and as he began to describe it his voice had sunk to an
inaudible whisper.
Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures
gossiping, but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman's
late hours and somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by the
nearness of traditionally-feared May Eve on the other hand. That Gilman
talked in his sleep was plain, and it was obviously from Desrochers' keyhole
listenings that the delusive notion of the violet dream-light had got abroad.
These simple people were quick to imagine they had seen any odd thing
they had heard about. As for a plan of action - Gilman had better move
down to Elwood's room and avoid sleeping alone. Elwood would, if awake,
rouse him whenever he began to talk or rise in his sleep. Very soon, too, he
must see the specialist. Meanwhile they would take the spiky image around
to the various museums and to certain professors; seeking identification
and slating that it had been found in a public rubbish-can. Also,
Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats in the walls.
Braced up by Elwood's companionship, Gilman attended classes that
day. Strange urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with
considerable success. During a free period he showed the queer image to
several professors, all of whom were intensely interested, though none of
them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That night he slept on
a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to the second-storey
room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free from disquieting
dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and the whines of the loom-fixer
were an unnerving influence.
During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity
from morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, showed no tendency to
talk or rise in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison
everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk among the
superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly excited.
Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and finally forced
one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good Father Iwanicki.
Desrochers, too, had something to say; in fact, he insisted that cautious
steps had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first and
second nights of Gilinan's absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he heard
sounds in the halls and on the stairs at night, and claimed that his door
had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown
Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naïve reports could
mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a
knob on his host's dresser.
For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an
effort to identify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In
every quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the
thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small
radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis. Professor
Ellery found platinum, iron and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed
with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic
weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did
they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit
the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic system.
The mystery remains unsolved to this day, though the image is on
exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.
On the morning of April twenty-seventh a fresh rat-bole appeared in
the room where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during
the day. The poison was not having much effect, for scratchings and
scurryings in the walls were virtually undiminished.
Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did
not wish to go to sleep in a room alone - especially since he thought he had
glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose image had
become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who she was,
and what had been near her rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap at the
mouth of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed to notice him and leer
evilly at him - though perhaps this was merely his imagination.
The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep
like logs when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the
mathematical studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully
engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancient magic
and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah
Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for
thinking she might have stumbled on strange and significant information.
The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and
handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten eons; and it was by no
means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing
through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasizes the uselessness of
material barriers in halting a witch's notions, and who can say what
underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?
Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from
mathematical research alone, was still to be seen. Suceess, Gilman added,
might lead to dangerous and unthinkable situations, for who could foretell
the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension?
On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could
not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such a
belt one might preserve one's life and age indefinitely; never suffering
organic metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts incurred
during visits to one's own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass
into a timeless dimension and emerge at some remote period of the earth's
history as young as before.
Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly
conjecture with any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and
ambiguous, and in historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps
seem complicated by strange and terrible alliances with beings and
messengers from outside. There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or
messenger of hidden and terrible powers - the "Black Man" of the witchcult, and the "Nyarlathotep" of the Necronomicon. There was, too, the
baffling problem of the lesser messengers or intermediaries - the quasianimals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches' familiars. As
Gilman and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue further, they heard Joe
Mazurewicz reel into the house half drunk, and shuddered at the desperate
wildness of his whining prayers.
That night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had
heard a scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that
someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the
small furry thing advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The
beldame's face was alight with inhuman exultation, and the little yellowtoothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the heavily-sleeping
form of Elwood on the other couch across the room. A paralysis of fear
stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before, the hideous crone seized
Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space.
Again the infinitude of the shrieking abysses flashed past him, but in
another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of
foetid odors with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every
hand.
Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in
the other dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning
and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind of
affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the
deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to
which the black man silently pointed. Into this the grinning crone started,
dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeves. There were evil-smelling
staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the old woman seemed
to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door leading off a landing. The
crone fumbled with the latch and pushed the door open, motioning to
Gilman to wait, and disappearing inside the black aperture.
The youth's over-sensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and
presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form
which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight of
this form, and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to
cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase and into the
mud outside, halting only when seized and choked by the waiting black
man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the
fanged, rat-like abnormality.
On the morning of the twenty-ninth Gilman awaked into a maelstrom
of horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly
wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting wall and
ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching
inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with growing
fright that his feet and pajama bottoms were brown with caked mud. For
the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at least
that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in
slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints,
but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The more
Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to
those he could recognize as his there were some smaller, almost round
markings - such as the legs of a large chair or a table might make, except
that most of them tended to be divided into halves. There were also some
curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again.
Utter bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered
to the door and saw that there were no muddy prints outside. The more he
remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt, and it added to
his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors
below.
Descending to Elwood's room he roused his still-sleeping host and
began telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of
what might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he
got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how the
muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret
chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid
marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He put his hands
up to them, but found that they did not even approximately fit. While they
were talking, Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard a terrific
clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there had been no one on
the stairs after midnight, though just before midnight he had heard faint
footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did not like. It
was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman
had better be sure to wear the circifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even
the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in
the house - especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly
unable to fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and
expectancy had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some
annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the University spa, picking up a
paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he never ate that
dessert; for an item on the paper's first page left him limp, wild-eyed, and
able only to pay his check and stagger back to Elwood's room.
There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne's
Gangway, and the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named
Anastasia Wolejko had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it
appeared, had feared the event for some time; but the reasons she assigned
for her fear were so grotesque that no one took them seriously. She had,
she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place now and then ever since early
in March, and knew from its grimaces and titterings that little Ladislas
must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis Night. She
had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room and try to
protect the child, but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the police, for
they never believed such things. Children had been taken that way every
year ever since she could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would
not help because he wanted the child out of the way.
But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a
pair of revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just
after midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both vowed they
had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark passageway.
There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old woman in rags,
and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old woman had been
dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a tame rat was
rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.
Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood - who had
meanwhile seen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them found him thus when he came home. This time neither could doubt but
that something hideously serious was closing in around them. Between the
phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a
monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallizing, and only
stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments. Gilman
must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when all the papers
were full of this kidnapping business.
Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a
moment both Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the
wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in
his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside
our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where - if anywhere had he been on those nights of demoniac alienage? The roaring twilight
abysses - the green hillside - the blistering terrace - the pulls from the stars
- the ultimate black vortex - the black man - the muddy alley and the stairs
- the old witch and the fanged, furry horror - the bubble-congeries and the
little polyhedron - the strange sunburn - the wrist-wound - the unexplained
image - the muddy feet - the throat marks - the tales and fears of the
superstitious foreigners - what did all this mean? To what extent could the
laws of sanity apply to such a case?
There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they
both cut classes and drowsed. This was April thirtieth, and with the dusk
would come the hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and the
superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o'clock and said
people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis revels would be held
in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in
a place queerly devoid of all plant-life. Some of them had even told the
police and advised them to look there for the missing Wolejko child, but
they did not believe anything would be done. Joe insisted that the poor
young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman put it on
and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.
Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the
praying of the loom-fixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded,
his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle,
dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome
recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled up,
and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the
blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time
and space we comprehend.
Presently he realized what he was listening for - the hellish chant of
the celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much about
what they expected? How did he know the time when Nahab and her acolyte
were due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the black cock and
the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and tried to call
out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat. He was not his
own master. Had he signed the black man's book after all?
Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne
notes. Over miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he recognized
them none the less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers must be starting
in. How could he keep himself from going? What was it that had enmeshed
him? Mathematics - folklore - the house - old Keziah - Brown Jenkin ... and
now he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in the wall near his couch.
Above the distant chanting and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came
another sound - a stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He
hoped the electric lights would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded
little face in the rat-hole - the accursed little face which he at last realized
bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance to old Keziah's - and heard the
faint fumbling at the door.
The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself
helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead
raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron and all through the churning
void there was a heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern
which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He
seemed to know what was coming - the monstrons burst of Walpurgisrhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all the primal,
ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of
matter and sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that
penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give hideous significance
throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.
But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violetlitten peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books,
the bench and table, the queer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side.
On the table lay a small white figure - an infant boy, unclothed and
unconscious - while on the other side stood the monstrous, leering old
woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a
queerly proportioned pale metal bowl covered with curiously chased designs
and having delicate lateral handles in her left. She was intoning some
croaking ritual in a language which Gilman could not understand, but
which seemed like something guardedly quoted in the Necronomicon.
As the scene grew clearer he saw the ancient crone bend forward and
extend the empty bowl across the table - and unable to control his own
emotions, he reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing as he
did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting form of
Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulf on
his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position
while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above the small white victim as
high as her right hand could reach. The fanged, furry thing began tittering a
continuation of the unknown ritual, while the witch croaked loathsome
responses. Gilman felt a gnawing poignant abhorrence shoot through his
mental and emotional paralysis, and the light metal bowl shook in his
grasp. A second later the downward motion of the knife broke the spell
conpletely, and he dropped the bowl with a resounding bell-like clangour
while his hands darted out frantically to stop the monstrous deed.
In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the
table and wrenched the knife from the old woman's claws; sending it
clattering over the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant,
however, matters were reversed; for those murderous claws had locked
themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled face was
twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix grinding
into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the sight of the object itself
would affect the evil creature. Her strength was altogether superhuman, but
as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his shirt and drew out
the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.
At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip
relaxed long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled
the steel-like claws from his neck, and would have dragged the beldame
over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received a fresh access of
strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, and his
own hands reached out for the creature's throat. Before she saw what he
was doing he had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a
moment later he had tightened it enough to cut off her breath. During her
last struggle he felt something bite at his ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin
had come to her aid. With one savage kick he sent the morbidity over the
edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on some level far below.
Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let
her rest on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw
on the table a sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his reason.
Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny hands of demoniac
dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and his efforts
had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from doing to the
victim's chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had done to a wrist and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full beside the small lifeless body.
In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish alien-rhythmed chant
of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man
must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics,
and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to
guide him back to the normal world alone and unaided for the first time. He
felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but
whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-stooped
egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft
bring him merely into a dream-house - an abnormal projection of the actual
place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream
and reality in all his experiences.
The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the
Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear
that hitherto-veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now
he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too
well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds
to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat
were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could
endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he
could trust his instincts to take him back to the right part of space. How
could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far
planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters
somewhere beyond the galaxy or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate
void of Chaos where reigns the mindless demon-sultan Azathoth?
Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in
utter blackness. The witch - old Keziah - Nahab - that must have meant her
death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of
Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder
whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz - the prayers against the
Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek - worlds
of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream - Iä! ShubNiggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young...
They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly-angled old garret room
long before dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski
and Dombrowski and Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened the
soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with open, staring
eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks of
murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His
clothing was badly rumpled and Joe's crucifix was missing, Elwood
trembled, afraid even to speculate what new form his friend's sleep-walking
had taken. Mazurewicz seemed half dazed because of a "sign" he said he
had had in response to his prayers, and he crossed himself frantically when
the squealing and whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the slanting
partition.
When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood's room they
sent for Doctor Malkowski - a local practitioner who would repeat no tales
where they might prove embarrassing - and he gave Gilman two hypodermic
injections which caused him to relax in something like natural drowsiness.
During the day the patient regained consciousness at times and whispered
his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and at its
very start brought out a fresh and disconcerting fact.
Gilman - whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal
sensitiveness - was now stone-deaf. Doctor Malkowski, summoned again in
haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the impact
of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception or
endurance. How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours
without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest
physician could say.
Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy
communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole
chaotic business, and decided it would be better if they thought as little as
possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient
and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke
of a police raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill
just before dawn, and mentioned that the white stone there was an object of
age-long superstitious regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the
scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it
was stated that no trace of the missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been
found.
The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it,
and was forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the
resulting nervous breakdown. He had thought he heard rats in the partition
all the evening, but paid little attention to them. Then, long after both he
and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped up,
turned on the lights and rushed over to his guest's couch. The occupant
was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some
torment beyond description. He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a
great stain was beginning to appear on the blankets.
Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and
writhing subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers,
Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway,
and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for Doctor Malkowaki.
Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from
beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a
fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and began to pull down
those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.
It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed
Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body - something
had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski, frantic at the failure of his ratpoisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of his lease and within a week had
moved with all his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient house in Walnut
Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for
the brooding loom-fixer would never stay sober, and was constantly whining
and muttering about spectral and terrible things.
It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the
crimson rat-tracks which led from Gilman's couch to the near-by hole. On
the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened
between the carpet's edge and the baseboard. There Mazurewicz had found
something monstrous - or thought he had, for no one else could quite agree
with him despite the undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on the
flooring were certainly vastly unlike the average prints of a rat but even
Choynski and Desrochers would not admit that they were like the prints of
four tiny human hands.
The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the
pall of its final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on
account of its old reputation and because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps
the ex-landlord's rat-poison had worked after all, for not long after his
departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officials
traced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside the eastern garret
room, and agreed that the number of dead rats must be enormous. They
decided, however, that it was not worth their while to hew open and
disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, and the
locality was not one which encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed, there
were always vague local tales of unexplained stenches upstairs in the
Witch-House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass. The neighbours
acquiesced in the inertia - but the foetor none the less formed an additional
count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as a
habitation by the building inspector.
Gilman's dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been
explained. Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes
almost maddening, came back to college the next autumn and was
graduated in the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the town
much disminished, and it is indeed a fact that - notwithstanding certain
reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted house which lasted almost as
long as that edifice itself - no fresh appearances either of Old Keziah or of
Brown Jenkin have been muttered of since Gilman's death. It is rather
fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year when certain
events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of course
he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold torments of black
and bewildered speculation; but even that was not as bad as actual
nearness and several possible sights would have been.
In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the
vacant Witch-House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, mossgrown shingles, and rotting planks and timbers crashed down into the loft
and broke through the floor beneath. The whole attic storey was choked
with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess
before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step
came in the following December, and it was when Gilman's old room was
cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.
Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting
ceiling were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the
police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several professors
from the university. There were bones - badly crushed and splintered, but
clearly recognizable as human - whose manifestly modern date conflicted
puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking place,
the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all
human access. The coroner's physician decided that some belonged to a
small child, while certain others - found mixed with shreds of rotten
brownish cloth - belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced
years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught
in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a
fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection.
Other objects found included the mangled fragments of many books
and papers, together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration
of still older books and papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with
black magic in its most advanced and horrible forms; and the evidently
recent date of certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the
modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity
of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose
conditions and watermarks suggest age differences of at least one hundred
and fifty to two hundred years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all
is the variety of utterly inexplicable objects - objects whose shapes,
materials, types of workmanship, and purposes baffle all conjecture - found
scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. One of
these things - which excited several Miskatonie professors profoundly is a
badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which
Gilman gave to the college museum, save that it is large, wrought of some
peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly angled
pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the
bizarre designs chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side
bore ominous brownish stains when found. Foreigners and credulous
grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with
broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe
Maturewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before.
Some believe this crucifix was dragged up to the sealed loft by rats, while
others think it must have been on the floor in some corner of Gilman's old
room at the time. Still others, including Joe himself, have theories too wild
and fantastic for sober credence.
When the slanting wall of Gilman's room was torn out, the once-sealed
triangular space between that partition and the house's north wall was
found to contain much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size,
than the room itself, though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which
paralyzed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable
ossuary of the bones of small children - some fairly modern, but others
extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote that crumbling
was almost complete. On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size,
obvious antiquity, and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design - above which
the debris was piled.
In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a
cluster of cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined
to cause more bafflement, veiled fright, and openly superstitious talk in
Arkham than anything else discovered in the haunted and accursed
building.
This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge diseased rat,
whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of
singular reticence among the members of Miskatonic's department of
comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked out,
but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long,
brownish hairs with which it was associated.
The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile
characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat, while the
small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness,
appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded
parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when
they came upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St.
Stanislaus' Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they
would never hear again.
THE SILVER KEY
When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.
Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly
excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely,
unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened
upon him he felt those liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he
was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sail up the river Oukranos
past the gilded spires of Thran, or his elephant caravans tramp through
perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory
columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon.
He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many
people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical
relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts
and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is
only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference
betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and
no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears
a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and
had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his
simple fancies were inane and childish, and even more absurd because
their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the
blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from
something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes
or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the
darkness.
They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained
the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When
he complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where magic
moulded all the little vivid fragments and prized associations of his mind
into vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight, they turned
him instead toward the new-found prodigies of science, bidding him find
wonder in the atom's vortex and mystery in the sky's dimensions. And when
he had failed to find these boons in things whose laws are known and
measurable, they told him he lacked imagination, and was immature
because he preferred dream-illusions to the illusions of our physical
creation.
So Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that the
common events and emotions of earthy minds were more important than
the fantasies of rare and delicate souls. He did not dissent when they told
him that the animal pain of a stuck pig or dyspeptic ploughman in real life
is a greater thing than the peerless beauty of Narath with its hundred
carven gates and domes of chalcedony, which he dimly remembered from
his dreams; and under their guidance he cultivated a painstaking sense of
pity and tragedy.
Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle,
and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real
impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he
would have recourse to the polite laughter they had taught him to use
against the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw that the
daily life of our world is every inch as extravagant and artificial, and far less
worthy of respect because of its poverty in beauty and its silly reluctance to
admit its own lack of reason and purpose. In this way he became a kind of
humorist, for he did not see that even humour is empty in a mindless
universe devoid of any true standard of consistency or inconsistency.
In the first days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle churchly
faith endeared to him by the naive trust of his fathers, for thence stretched
mystic avenues which seemed to promise escape from life. Only on closer
view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy
triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth which
reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its professors; or
feel to the full the awkwardness with which it sought to keep alive as literal
fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal race confronting the
unknown. It wearied Carter to see how solemnly people tried to make
earthly reality out of old myths which every step of their boasted science
confuted, and this misplaced seriousness killed the attachment he might
have kept for the ancient creeds had they been content to offer the
sonorous rites and emotional outlets in their true guise of ethereal fantasy.
But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths,
he found them even more ugly than those who had not. They did not know
that beauty lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no standard
amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the dreams and the
feelings which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres out
of the rest of chaos. They did not see that good and evil and beauty and
ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in
their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose
finer details are different for every race and culture. Instead, they either
denied these things altogether or transferred them to the crude, vague
instincts which they shared with the beasts and peasants; so that their
lives were dragged malodorously out in pain, ugliness, and disproportion,
yet filled with a ludicrous pride at having escaped from something no more
unsound than that which still held them. They had traded the false gods of
fear and blind piety for those of license and anarchy.
Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their
cheapness and squalor sickened a spirit loving beauty alone while his
reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with which their champions tried to gild
brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idols they had discarded.
He saw that most of them, in common with their cast-off priestcraft, could
not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart from that which
men dream into it; and could not lay aside the crude notion of ethics and
obligations beyond those of beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its
unconsciousness and impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific
discoveries. Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice,
freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old way with the
old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that that lore and those ways were the
sole makers of their present thoughts and judgments, and the sole guides
and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed aims or stable
points of reference. Having lost these artificial settings, their lives grew void
of direction and dramatic interest; till at length they strove to drown their
ennui in bustle and pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric
display and animal sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or
grew nauseous through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness, and
found fault with the social order. Never could they realize that their brute
foundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of their elders,
and that the satisfaction of one moment is the bane of the next. Calm,
lasting beauty comes only in a dream, and this solace the world had thrown
away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood
and innocence.
Amidst this chaos of hollowness and unrest Carter tried to live as
befitted a man of keen thought and good heritage. With his dreams fading
under the ridicule of the age he could not believe in anything, but the love
of harmony kept him close to the ways of his race and station. He walked
impassive through the cities of men, and sighed because no vista seemed
fully real; because every flash of yellow sunlight on tall roofs and every
glimpse of balustraded plazas in the first lamps of evening served only to
remind him of dreams he had once known, and to make him homesick for
ethereal lands he no longer knew how to find. Travel was only a mockery;
and even the Great War stirred him but little, though he served from the
first in the Foreign Legion of France. For a while he sought friends, but
soon grew weary of the crudeness of their emotions, and the sameness and
earthiness of their visions. He felt vaguely glad that all his relatives were
distant and out of touch with him, for they would not have understood his
mental life. That is, none but his grandfather and great-uncle Christopher
could, and they were long dead.
Then he began once more the writing of books, which he had left off
when dreams first failed him. But here, too, was there no satisfaction or
fulfillment; for the touch of earth was upon his mind, and he could not
think of lovely things as he had done of yore. Ironic humor dragged down all
the twilight minarets he reared, and the earthy fear of improbability blasted
all the delicate and amazing flowers in his faery gardens. The convention of
assumed pity spilt mawkishness on his characters, while the myth of an
important reality and significant human events and emotions debased all
his high fantasy into thin-veiled allegory and cheap social satire. His new
novels were successful as his old ones had never been; and because he
knew how empty they must be to please an empty herd, he burned them
and ceased his writing. They were very graceful novels, in which he
urbanely laughed at the dreams he lightly sketched; but he saw that their
sophistication had sapped all their life away.
It was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in
the notions of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the
commonplace. Most of these, however, soon showed their poverty and
barrenness; and he saw that the popular doctrines of occultism are as dry
and inflexible as those of science, yet without even the slender palliative of
truth to redeem them. Gross stupidity, falsehood, and muddled thinking
are not dream; and form no escape from life to a mind trained above their
own level. So Carter bought stranger books and sought out deeper and
more terrible men of fantastic erudition; delving into arcana of
consciousness that few have trod, and learning things about the secret pits
of life, legend, and immemorial antiquity which disturbed him ever
afterward. He decided to live on a rarer plane, and furnished his Boston
home to suit his changing moods; one room for each, hung in appropriate
colours, furnished with befitting books and objects, and provided with
sources of the proper sensations of light, heat, sound, taste, and odour.
Once he heard of a man in the south, who was shunned and feared for
the blasphemous things he read in prehistoric books and clay tablets
smuggled from India and Arabia. Him he visited, living with him and
sharing his studies for seven years, till horror overtook them one midnight
in an unknown and archaic graveyard, and only one emerged where two
had entered. Then he went back to Arkham, the terrible witch-haunted old
town of his forefathers in New England, and had experiences in the dark,
amidst the hoary willows and tottering gambrel roofs, which made him seal
forever certain pages in the diary of a wild-minded ancestor. But these
horrors took him only to the edge of reality, and were not of the true dream
country he had known in youth; so that at fifty he despaired of any rest or
contentment in a world grown too busy for beauty and too shrewd for
dreams.
Having perceived at last the hollowness and futility of real things,
Carter spent his days in retirement, and in wistful disjointed memories of
his dream-filled youth. He thought it rather silly that he bothered to keep
on living at all, and got from a South American acquaintance a very curious
liquid to take him to oblivion without suffering. Inertia and force of habit,
however, caused him to defer action; and he lingered indecisively among
thoughts of old times, taking down the strange hangings from his walls and
refitting the house as it was in his early boyhood - purple panes, Victorian
furniture, and all.
With the passage of time he became almost glad he had lingered, for
his relics of youth and his cleavage from the world made life and
sophistication seem very distant and unreal; so much so that a touch of
magic and expectancy stole back into his nightly slumbers. For years those
slumbers had known only such twisted reflections of every-day things as
the commonest slumbers know, but now there returned a flicker of
something stranger and wilder; something of vaguely awesome imminence
which took the form of tensely clear pictures from his childhood days, and
made him think of little inconsequential things he had long forgotten. He
would often awake calling for his mother and grandfather, both in their
graves a quarter of a century.
Then one night his grandfather reminded him of the key. The grey old
scholar, as vivid as in life, spoke long and earnestly of their ancient line,
and of the strange visions of the delicate and sensitive men who composed
it. He spoke of the flame-eyed Crusader who learnt wild secrets of the
Saracens that held him captive; and of the first Sir Randolph Carter who
studied magic when Elizabeth was queen. He spoke, too, of that Edmund
Carter who had just escaped hanging in the Salem witchcraft, and who had
placed in an antique box a great silver key handed down from his ancestors.
Before Carter awaked, the gentle visitant had told him where to find that
box; that carved oak box of archaic wonder whose grotesque lid no hand
had raised for two centuries.
In the dust and shadows of the great attic he found it, remote and
forgotten at the back of a drawer in a tall chest. It was about a foot square,
and its Gothic carvings were so fearful that he did not marvel no person
since Edmund Carter had dared to open it. It gave forth no noise when
shaken, but was mystic with the scent of unremembered spices. That it
held a key was indeed only a dim legend, and Randolph Carter's father had
never known such a box existed. It was bound in rusty iron, and no means
was provided for working the formidable lock. Carter vaguely understood
that he would find within it some key to the lost gate of dreams, but of
where and how to use it his grandfather had told him nothing.
An old servant forced the carven lid, shaking as he did so at the
hideous faces leering from the blackened wood, and at some unplaced
familiarity. Inside, wrapped in a discoloured parchment, was a huge key of
tarnished silver covered with cryptical arabesques; but of any legible
explanation there was none. The parchment was voluminous, and held only
the strange hieroglyphs of an unknown tongue written with an antique
reed. Carter recognized the characters as those he had seen on a certain
papyrus scroll belonging to that terrible scholar of the South who had
vanished one midmght in a nameless cemetery. The man had always
shivered when he read this scroll, and Carter shivered now.
But he cleaned the key, and kept it by him nightly in its aromatic box
of ancient oak. His dreams were meanwhile increasing in vividness, and
though showing him none of the strange cities and incredible gardens of the
old days, were assuming a definite cast whose purpose could not be
mistaken. They were calling him back along the years, and with the mingled
wills of all his fathers were pulling him toward some hidden and ancestral
source. Then he knew he must go into the past and merge himself with old
things, and day after day he thought of the hills to the north where haunted
Arkham and the rushing Miskatonic and the lonely rustic homestead of his
people lay.
In the brooding fire of autumn Carter took the old remembered way
past graceful lines of rolling hill and stone-walled meadow, distant vale and
hanging woodland, curving road and nestling farmstead, and the crystal
windings of the Miskatonic, crossed here and there by rustic bridges of
wood or stone. At one bend he saw the group of giant elms among which an
ancestor had oddly vanished a century and a half before, and shuddered as
the wind blew meaningly through them. Then there was the crumbling
farmhouse of old Goody Fowler the witch, with its little evil windows and
great roof sloping nearly to the ground on the north side. He speeded up his
car as he passed it, and did not slacken till he had mounted the hill where
his mother and her fathers before her were born, and where the old white
house still looked proudly across the road at the breathlessly lovely
panorama of rocky slope and verdant valley, with the distant spires of
Kingsport on the horizon, and hints of the archaic, dream-laden sea in the
farthest background.
Then came the steeper slope that held the old Carter place he had not
seen in over forty years. Afternoon was far gone when he reached the foot,
and at the bend half way up he paused to scan the outspread countryside
golden and glorified in the slanting floods of magic poured out by a western
sun. All the strangeness and expectancy of his recent dreams seemed
present in this hushed and unearthly landscape, and he thought of the
unknown solitudes of other planets as his eyes traced out the velvet and
deserted lawns shining undulant between their tumbled walls, and clumps
of faery forest setting off far lines of purple hills beyond hills, and the
spectral wooded valley dipping down in shadow to dank hollows where
trickling waters crooned and gurgled among swollen and distorted roots.
Something made him feel that motors did not belong in the realm he
was seeking, so he left his car at the edge of the forest, and putting the
great key in his coat pocket walked on up the hill. Woods now engulfed him
utterly, though he knew the house was on a high knoll that cleared the
trees except to the north. He wondered how it would look, for it had been
left vacant and untended through his neglect since the death of his strange
great-uncle Christopher thirty years before. In his boyhood he had revelled
through long visits there, and had found weird marvels in the woods beyond
the orchard.
Shadows thickened around him, for the night was near. Once a gap in
the trees opened up to the right, so that he saw off across leagues of twilight
meadow and spied the old Congregational steeple on Central Hill in
Kingsport; pink with the last flush of day, the panes of the little round
windows blazing with reflected fire. Then, when he was in deep shadow
again, he recalled with a start that the glimpse must have come from
childish memory alone, since the old white church had long been torn down
to make room for the Congregational Hospital. He had read of it with
interest, for the paper had told about some strange burrows or passages
found in the rocky hill beneath.
Through his puzzlement a voice piped, and he started again at its
familiarity after long years. Old Benijah Corey had been his Uncle
Christopher's hired man, and was aged even in those far-off times of his
boyhood visits. Now he must be well over a hundred, but that piping voice
could come from no one else. He could distinguish no words, yet the tone
was haunting and unmistakable. To think that "Old Benijy" should still be
alive!
"Mister Randy! Mister Randy! Wharbe ye? D'ye want to skeer yer Aunt
Marthy plumb to death? Hain't she tuld ye to keep nigh the place in the
arternoon an' git back afur dark? Randy! Ran... dee!... He's the beatin'est
boy fer runnin' off in the woods I ever see; haff the time a-settin' moonin'
raound that snake-den in the upper timberlot! ... Hey yew, Ran ... dee!"
Randolph Carter stopped in the pitch darkness and rubbed his hand
across his eyes. Something was queer. He had been somewhere he ought
not to be; had strayed very far away to places where he had not belonged,
and was now inexcusably late. He had not noticed the time on the
Kingsport steeple, though he could easily have made it out with his pocket
telescope; but he knew his lateness was something very strange and
unprecedented. He was not sure he had his little telescope with him, and
put his hand in his blouse pocket to see. No, it was not there, but there was
the big silver key he had found in a box somewhere. Uncle Chris had told
him something odd once about an old unopened box with a key in it, but
Aunt Martha had stopped the story abruptly, saying it was no kind of thing
to tell a child whose head was already too full of queer fancies. He tried to
recall just where he had found the key, but something seemed very
confused. He guessed it was in the attic at home in Boston, and dimly
remembered bribing Parks with half his week's allowance to help him open
the box and keep quiet about it; but when he remembered this, the face of
Parks came up very strangely, as if the wrinkles of long years had fallen
upon the brisk little Cockney.
"Ran ... dee! Ran ... dee! Hi! Hi! Randy!"
A swaying lantern came around the black bend, and old Benijah
pounced on the silent and bewildered form of the pilgrim.
"Durn ye, boy, so thar ye be! Ain't ye got a tongue in yer head, that ye
can't answer a body! I ben callin' this haff hour, an' ye must a heerd me
long ago! Dun't ye know yer Aunt Marthy's all a-fidget over yer bein' off
arter dark? Wait till I tell yer Uncle Chris when he gits hum! Ye'd orta know
these here woods ain't no fitten place to be traipsin' this hour! They's things
abroad what dun't do nobody no good, as my gran'-sir knowed afur me.
Come, Mister Randy, or Hannah wunt keep supper no longer!"
So Randolph Carter was marched up the road where wondering stars
glimmered through high autumn boughs. And dogs barked as the yellow
light of small-paned windows shone out at the farther turn, and the
Pleiades twinkled across the open knoll where a great gambrel roof stood
black against the dim west. Aunt Martha was in the doorway, and did not
scold too hard when Benijah shoved the truant in. She knew Uncle Chris
well enough to expect such things of the Carter blood. Randolph did not
show his key, but ate his supper in silence and protested only when
bedtime came. He sometimes dreamed better when awake, and he wanted
to use that key.
In the morning Randolph was up early, and would have run off to the
upper timberlot if Uncle Chris had not caught him and forced him into his
chair by the breakfast table. He looked impatiently around the low-pitched
room with the rag carpet and exposed beams and corner-posts, and smiled
only when the orchard boughs scratched at the leaded panes of the rear
window. The trees and the hills were close to him, and formed the gates of
that timeless realm which was his true country.
Then, when he was free, he felt in his blouse pocket for the key; and
being reassured, skipped off across the orchard to the rise beyond, where
the wooded hill climbed again to heights above even the treeless knoll. The
floor of the forest was mossy and mysterious, and great lichened rocks rose
vaguely here and there in the dim light like Druid monoliths among the
swollen and twisted trunks of a sacred grove. Once in his ascent Randolph
crossed a rushing stream whose falls a little way off sang runic incantations
to the lurking fauns and aegipans and dryads.
Then he came to the strange cave in the forest slope, the dreaded
"snake-den" which country folk shunned, and away from which Benijah
had warned him again and again. It was deep; far deeper than anyone but
Randolph suspected, for the boy had found a fissure in the farthermost
black corner that led to a loftier grotto beyond - a haunting sepulchral place
whose granite walls held a curious illusion of conscious artifice. On this
occasion he crawled in as usual, lighting his way with matches filched from
the sitting-room matchsafe, and edging through the final crevice with an
eagerness hard to explain even to himself. He could not tell why he
approached the farther wall so confidently, or why he instinctively drew
forth the great silver key as he did so. But on he went, and when he danced
back to the house that night he offered no excuses for his lateness, nor
heeded in the least the reproofs he gained for ignoring the noon-tide dinnerhorn altogether.
Now it is agreed by all the distant relatives of Randolph Carter that
something occurred to heighten his imagination in his tenth year. His
cousin, Ernest B. Aspinwall, Esq., of Chicago, is fully ten years his senior;
and distinctly recalls a change in the boy after the autumn of 1883.
Randolph had looked on scenes of fantasy that few others can ever have
beheld, and stranger still were some of the qualities which he showed in
relation to very mundane things. He seemed, in fine, to have picked up an
odd gift of prophecy; and reacted unusually to things which, though at the
time without meaning, were later found to justify the singular impressions.
In subsequent decades as new inventions, new names, and new events
appeared one by one in the book of history, people would now and then
recall wonderingly how Carter had years before let fall some careless word
of undoubted connection with what was then far in the future. He did not
himself understand these words, or know why certain things made him feel
certain emotions; but fancied that some unremembered dream must be
responsible. It was as early as 1897 that he turned pale when some
traveller mentioned the French town of Belloy-en-Santerre, and friends
remembered it when he was almost mortally wounded there in 1916, while
serving with the Foreign Legion in the Great War.
Carter's relatives talk much of these things because he has lately
disappeared. His little old servant Parks, who for years bore patiently with
his vagaries, last saw him on the morning he drove off alone in his car with
a key he had recently found. Parks had helped him get the key from the old
box containing it, and had felt strangely affected by the grotesque carvings
on the box, and by some other odd quality he could not name. When Carter
left, he had said he was going to visit his old ancestral country around
Arkham.
Half way up Elm Mountain, on the way to the ruins of the old Carter
place, they found his motor set carefully by the roadside; and in it was a
box of fragrant wood with carvings that frightened the countrymen who
stumbled on it. The box held only a queer parchment whose characters no
linguist or palaeographer has been able to decipher or identify. Rain had
long effaced any possible footprints, though Boston investigators had
something to say about evidences of disturbances among the fallen timbers
of the Carter place. It was, they averred, as though someone had groped
about the ruins at no distant period. A common white handkerchief found
among forest rocks on the hillside beyond cannot be identified as belonging
to the missing man.
There is talk of apportioning Randolph Carter's estate among his heirs,
but I shall stand firmly against this course because I do not believe he is
dead. There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a
dreamer can divine; and from what I know of Carter I think he has merely
found a way to traverse these mazes. Whether or not he will ever come
back, I cannot say. He wanted the lands of dream he had lost, and yearned
for the days of his childhood. Then he found a key, and I somehow believe
he was able to use it to strange advantage.
I shall ask him when I see him, for I expect to meet him shortly in a
certain dream-city we both used to haunt. It is rumoured in Ulthar, beyond
the River Skai, that a new king reigns on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, that
fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass overlooking the
twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build their singular
labyrinths, and I believe I know how to interpret this rumour. Certainly, I
look forward impatiently to the sight of that great silver key, for in its
cryptical arabesques there may stand symbolised all the aims and
mysteries of a blindly impersonal cosmos.
THE TREE
On a verdant slope of Mount Maenalus, in Arcadia, there stands an
olive grove about the ruins of a villa. Close by is a tomb, once beautiful with
the sublimest sculptures, but now fallen into as great decay as the house.
At one end of that tomb, its curious roots displacing the time-stained blocks
of Panhellic marble, grows an unnaturally large olive tree of oddly repellent
shape; so like to some grotesque man, or death-distorted body of a man,
that the country folk fear to pass it at night when the moon shines faintly
through the crooked boughs. Mount Maenalus is a chosen haunt of dreaded
Pan, whose queer companions are many, and simple swains believe that the
tree must have some hideous kinship to these weird Panisci; but an old
bee-keeper who lives in the neighboring cottage told me a different story.
Many years ago, when the hillside villa was new and resplendent, there
dwelt within it the two sculptors Kalos and Musides. From Lydia to Neapolis
the beauty of their work was praised, and none dared say that the one
excelled the other in skill. The Hermes of Kalos stood in a marble shrine in
Corinth, and the Pallas of Musides surmounted a pillar in Athens near the
Parthenon. All men paid homage to Kalos and Musides, and marvelled that
no shadow of artistic jealousy cooled the warmth of their brotherly
friendship.
But though Kalos and Musides dwelt in unbroken harmony, their
natures were not alike. Whilst Musides revelled by night amidst the urban
gaieties of Tegea, Saios would remain at home; stealing away from the sight
of his slaves into the cool recesses of the olive grove. There he would
meditate upon the visions that filled his mind, and there devise the forms of
beauty which later became immortal in breathing marble. Idle folk, indeed,
said that Kalos conversed with the spirits of the grove, and that his statues
were but images of the fauns and dryads he met there for he patterned his
work after no living model.
So famous were Kalos and Musides, that none wondered when the
Tyrant of Syracuse sent to them deputies to speak of the costly statue of
Tyche which he had planned for his city. Of great size and cunning
workmanship must the statue be, for it was to form a wonder of nations
and a goal of travellers. Exalted beyond thought would be he whose work
should gain acceptance, and for this honor Kalos and Musides were invited
to compete. Their brotherly love was well known, and the crafty Tyrant
surmised that each, instead of concealing his work from the other, would
offer aid and advice; this charity producing two images of unheard of
beauty, the lovelier of which would eclipse even the dreams of poets.
With joy the sculptors hailed the Tyrant's offer, so that in the days that
followed their slaves heard the ceaseless blows of chisels. Not from each
other did Kalos and Musides conceal their work, but the sight was for them
alone. Saving theirs, no eyes beheld the two divine figures released by
skillful blows from the rough blocks that had imprisoned them since the
world began.
At night, as of yore, Musides sought the banquet halls of Tegea whilst
Kalos wandered alone in the olive Grove. But as time passed, men observed
a want of gaiety in the once sparkling Musides. It was strange, they said
amongst themselves that depression should thus seize one with so great a
chance to win art's loftiest reward. Many months passed yet in the sour face
of Musides came nothing of the sharp expectancy which the situation
should arouse.
Then one day Musides spoke of the illness of Kalos, after which none
marvelled again at his sadness, since the sculptors' attachment was known
to be deep and sacred. Subsequently many went to visit Kalos, and indeed
noticed the pallor of his face; but there was about him a happy serenity
which made his glance more magical than the glance of Musides who was
clearly distracted with anxiety and who pushed aside all the slaves in his
eagerness to feed and wait upon his friend with his own hands. Hidden
behind heavy curtains stood the two unfinished figures of Tyche, little
touched of late by the sick man and his faithful attendant.
As Kalos grew inexplicably weaker and weaker despite the
ministrations of puzzled physicians and of his assiduous friend, he desired
to be carried often to the grove which he so loved. There he would ask to be
left alone, as if wishing to speak with unseen things. Musides ever granted
his requests, though his eyes filled with visible tears at the thought that
Kalos should care more for the fauns and the dryads than for him. At last
the end drew near, and Kalos discoursed of things beyond this life.
Musides, weeping, promised him a sepulchre more lovely than the tomb of
Mausolus; but Kalos bade him speak no more of marble glories. Only one
wish now haunted the mind of the dying man; that twigs from certain olive
trees in the grove be buried by his resting place-close to his head. And one
night, sitting alone in the darkness of the olive grove, Kalos died. Beautiful
beyond words was the marble sepulchre which stricken Musides carved for
his beloved friend. None but Kalos himself could have fashioned such
basreliefs, wherein were displayed all the splendours of Elysium. Nor did
Musides fail to bury close to Kalos' head the olive twigs from the grove.
As the first violence of Musides' grief gave place to resignation, he
labored with diligence upon his figure of Tyche. All honour was now his,
since the Tyrant of Syracuse would have the work of none save him or
Kalos. His task proved a vent for his emotion and he toiled more steadily
each day, shunning the gaieties he once had relished. Meanwhile his
evenings were spent beside the tomb of his friend, where a young olive tree
had sprung up near the sleeper's head. So swift was the growth of this tree,
and so strange was its form, that all who beheld it exclaimed in surprise;
and Musides seemed at once fascinated and repelled.
Three years after the death of Kalos, Musides despatched a messenger
to the Tyrant, and it was whispered in the agora at Tegea that the mighty
statue was finished. By this time the tree by the tomb had attained amazing
proportions, exceeding all other trees of its kind, and sending out a
singularly heavy branch above the apartment in which Musides labored. As
many visitors came to view the prodigious tree, as to admire the art of the
sculptor, so that Musides was seldom alone. But he did not mind his
multitude of guests; indeed, he seemed to dread being alone now that his
absorbing work was done. The bleak mountain wind, sighing through the
olive grove and the tomb-tree, had an uncanny way of forming vaguely
articulate sounds.
The sky was dark on the evening that the Tyrant's emissaries came to
Tegea. It was definitely known that they had come to bear away the great
image of Tyche and bring eternal honour to Musides, so their reception by
the proxenoi was of great warmth. As the night wore on a violent storm of
wind broke over the crest of Maenalus, and the men from far Syracuse were
glad that they rested snugly in the town. They talked of their illustrious
Tyrant, and of the splendour of his capital and exulted in the glory of the
statue which Musides had wrought for him. And then the men of Tegea
spoke of the goodness of Musides, and of his heavy grief for his friend and
how not even the coming laurels of art could console him in the absence of
Kalos, who might have worn those laurels instead. Of the tree which grew
by the tomb, near the head of Kalos, they also spoke. The wind shrieked
more horribly, and both the Syracusans and the Arcadians prayed to Aiolos.
In the sunshine of the morning the proxenoi led the Tyrant's
messengers up the slope to the abode of the sculptor, but the night wind
had done strange things. Slaves' cries ascended from a scene of desolation,
and no more amidst the olive grove rose the gleaming colonnades of that
vast hall wherein Musides had dreamed and toiled. Lone and shaken
mourned the humble courts and the lower walls, for upon the sumptuous
greater peri-style had fallen squarely the heavy overhanging bough of the
strange new tree, reducing the stately poem in marble with odd
completeness to a mound of unsightly ruins. Strangers and Tegeans stood
aghast, looking from the wreckage to the great, sinister tree whose aspect
was so weirdly human and whose roots reached so queerly into the
sculptured sepulchre of Kalos. And their fear and dismay increased when
they searched the fallen apartment, for of the gentle Musides, and of the
marvellously fashioned image of Tyche, no trace could be discovered.
Amidst such stupendous ruin only chaos dwelt, and the representatives of
two cities left disappointed; Syracusans that they had no statue to bear
home, Tegeans that they had no artist to crown. However, the Syracusans
obtained after a while a very splendid statue in Athens, and the Tegeans
consoled themselves by erecting in the agora a marble temple
commemorating the gifts, virtues, and brotherly piety of Musides.
But the olive grove still stands, as does the tree growing out of the
tomb of Kalos, and the old bee-keeper told me that sometimes the boughs
whisper to one another in the night wind, saying over and over again. "Oida!
Oida! -I know! I know!"
THE WHITE SHIP
I am Basil Elton, keeper of the North Point light that my father and
grandfather kept before me. Far from the shore stands the gray lighthouse,
above sunken slimy rocks that are seen when the tide is low, but unseen
when the tide is high. Past that beacon for a century have swept the
majestic barques of the seven seas. In the days of my grandfather there
were many; in the days of my father not so many; and now there are so few
that I sometimes feel strangely alone, as though I were the last man on our
planet.
From far shores came those white-sailed argosies of old; from far
Eastern shores where warm suns shine and sweet odors linger about
strange gardens and gay temples. The old captains of the sea came often to
my grandfather and told him of these things which in turn he told to my
father, and my father told to me in the long autumn evenings when the
wind howled eerily from the East. And I have read more of these things, and
of many things besides, in the books men gave me when I was young and
filled with wonder.
But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is
the secret lore of ocean. Blue, green, gray, white or black; smooth, ruffled,
or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days have I watched it and
listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little
tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more
friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant
in space and time. Sometimes at twilight the gray vapors of the horizon
have parted to grant me glimpses of the ways beyond; and sometimes at
night the deep waters of the sea have grown clear and phosphorescent, to
grant me glimpses of the ways beneath. And these glimpses have been as
often of the ways that were and the ways that might be, as of the ways that
are; for ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the
memories and the dreams of Time.
Out of the South it was that the White Ship used to come when the
moon was full and high in the heavens. Out of the South it would glide very
smoothly and silently over the sea. And whether the sea was rough or calm,
and whether the wind was friendly or adverse, it would always glide
smoothly and silently, its sails distant and its long strange tiers of oars
moving rhythmically. One night I spied upon the deck a man, bearded and
robed, and he seemed to beckon me to embark for far unknown shores.
Many times afterward I saw him under the full moon, and never did he
beckon me.
Very brightly did the moon shine on the night I answered the call, and
I walked out over the waters to the White Ship on a bridge of moonbeams.
The man who had beckoned now spoke a welcome to me in a soft language I
seemed to know well, and the hours were filled with soft songs of the
oarsmen as we glided away into a mysterious South, golden with the glow of
that full, mellow moon.
And when the day dawned, rosy and effulgent, I beheld the green shore
of far lands, bright and beautiful, and to me unknown. Up from the sea rose
lordly terraces of verdure, tree-studded, and shewing here and there the
gleaming white roofs and colonnades of strange temples. As we drew nearer
the green shore the bearded man told me of that land, the land of Zar,
where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once
and then are forgotten. And when I looked upon the terraces again I saw
that what he said was true, for among the sights before me were many
things I had once seen through the mists beyond the horizon and in the
phosphorescent depths of ocean. There too were forms and fantasies more
splendid than any I had ever known; the visions of young poets who died in
want before the world could learn of what they had seen and dreamed. But
we did not set foot upon the sloping meadows of Zar, for it is told that he
who treads them may nevermore return to his native shore.
As the White Ship sailed silently away from the templed terraces of
Zar, we beheld on the distant horizon ahead the spires of a mighty city; and
the bearded man said to me, “This is Thalarion, the City of a Thousand
Wonders, wherein reside all those mysteries that man has striven in vain to
fathom.” And I looked again, at closer range, and saw that the city was
greater than any city I had known or dreamed of before. Into the sky the
spires of its temples reached, so that no man might behold their peaks; and
far back beyond the horizon stretched the grim, gray walls, over which one
might spy only a few roofs, weird and ominous, yet adorned with rich friezes
and alluring sculptures.
I yearned mightily to enter this fascinating yet repellent city, and
besought the bearded man to land me at the stone pier by the huge carven
gate Akariel; but he gently denied my wish, saying, “Into Thalarion, the City
of a Thousand Wonders, many have passed but none returned. Therein
walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men, and the streets
are white with the unburied bones of those who have looked upon the
eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city.” So the White Ship sailed on past
the walls of Thalarion, and followed for many days a southward-flying bird,
whose glossy plumage matched the sky out of which it had appeared.
Then came we to a pleasant coast gay with blossoms of every hue,
where as far inland as we could see basked lovely groves and radiant arbors
beneath a meridian sun. From bowers beyond our view came bursts of song
and snatches of lyric harmony, interspersed with faint laughter so delicious
that I urged the rowers onward in my eagerness to reach the scene. And the
bearded man spoke no word, but watched me as we approached the lilylined shore. Suddenly a wind blowing from over the flowery meadows and
leafy woods brought a scent at which I trembled. The wind grew stronger,
and the air was filled with the lethal, charnel odor of plague-stricken towns
and uncovered cemeteries. And as we sailed madly away from that
damnable coast the bearded man spoke at last, saying, "This is Xura, the
Land of Pleasures Unattained.”
So once more the White Ship followed the bird of heaven, over warm
blessed seas fanned by caressing, aromatic breezes. Day after day and night
after night did we sail, and when the moon was full we would listen to soft
songs of the oarsmen, sweet as on that distant night when we sailed away
from my far native land. And it was by moonlight that we anchored at last
in the harbor of Sona-Nyl, which is guarded by twin headlands of crystal
that rise from the sea and meet in a resplendent arch. This is the Land of
Fancy, and we walked to the verdant shore upon a golden bridge of
moonbeams.
In the Land of Sona-Nyl there is neither time nor space, neither
suffering nor death; and there I dwelt for many aeons. Green are the groves
and pastures, bright and fragrant the flowers, blue and musical the
streams, clear and cool the fountains, and stately and gorgeous the
temples, castles, and cities of Sona-Nyl. Of that land there is no bound, for
beyond each vista of beauty rises another more beautiful. Over the
countryside and amidst the splendor of cities can move at will the happy
folk, of whom all are gifted with unmarred grace and unalloyed happiness.
For the aeons that I dwelt there I wandered blissfully through gardens
where quaint pagodas peep from pleasing clumps of bushes, and where the
white walks are bordered with delicate blossoms. I climbed gentle hills from
whose summits I could see entrancing panoramas of loveliness, with
steepled towns nestling in verdant valleys, and with the golden domes of
gigantic cities glittering on the infinitely distant horizon. And I viewed by
moonlight the sparkling sea, the crystal headlands, and the placid harbor
wherein lay anchored the White Ship.
It was against the full moon one night in the immemorial year of Tharp
that I saw outlined the beckoning form of the celestial bird, and felt the first
stirrings of unrest. Then I spoke with the bearded man, and told him of my
new yearnings to depart for remote Cathuria, which no man hath seen, but
which all believe to lie beyond the basalt pillars of the West. It is the Land of
Hope, and in it shine the perfect ideals of all that we know elsewhere; or at
least so men relate. But the bearded man said to me, “Beware of those
perilous seas wherein men say Cathuria lies. In Sona-Nyl there is no pain
or death, but who can tell what lies beyond the basalt pillars of the West?”
Nonetheless at the next full moon I boarded the White Ship, and with the
reluctant bearded man left the happy harbor for untraveled seas.
And the bird of heaven flew before, and led us toward the basalt pillars
of the West, but this time the oarsmen sang no soft songs under the full
moon. In my mind I would often picture the unknown Land of Cathuria
with its splendid groves and palaces, and would wonder what new delights
there awaited me. “Cathuria,” I would say to myself, “is the abode of Gods
and the land of unnumbered cities of gold. Its forests are of aloe and
sandalwood, even as the fragrant groves of Camorin, and among the trees
flutter gay birds sweet with song.
On the green and flowery mountains of Cathuria stand temples of pink
marble, rich with carven and painted glories, and having in their courtyards
cool fountains of silver, where purr with ravishing music the scented waters
that come from the grotto-born river Narg. And the cities of Cathuria are
cinctured with golden walls, and their pavements also are of gold. In the
gardens of these cities are strange orchids, and perfumed lakes whose beds
are of coral and amber. At night the streets and the gardens are lit with gay
lanthorns fashioned from the three-colored shell of the tortoise, and here
resound the soft notes of the singer and the lutanist. And the houses of the
cities of Cathuria are all palaces, each built over a fragrant canal bearing
the waters of the sacred Narg. Of marble and porphyry are the houses, and
roofed with glittering gold that reflects the rays of the sun and enhances the
splendor of the cities as blissful Gods view them from the distant peaks.
Fairest of all is the palace of the great monarch Dorieb, whom some
say to be a demi-God and others a God. High is the palace of Dorieb, and
many are the turrets of marble upon its walls. In its wide halls many
multitudes assemble, and here hang the trophies of the ages. And the roof
is of pure gold, set upon tall pillars of ruby and azure, and having such
carven figures of Gods and heroes that he who looks up to those heights
seems to gaze upon the living Olympus. And the floor of the palace is of
glass, under which flow the cunningly lighted waters of the Narg, gay with
gaudy fish not known beyond the bounds of lovely Cathuria.”
Thus would I speak to myself of Cathuria, but ever would the bearded
man warn me to turn back to the happy shore of Sona-Nyl; for Sona-Nyl is
known of men, while none hath ever beheld Cathuria.
And on the thirty-first day that we followed the bird, we beheld the
basalt pillars of the West. Shrouded in mist they were, so that no man
might peer beyond them or see their summits-- which indeed some say
reach even to the heavens. And the bearded man again implored me to turn
back, but I heeded him not; for from the mists beyond the basalt pillars I
fancied there came the notes of singers and lutanists; sweeter than the
sweetest songs of Sona-Nyl, and sounding mine own praises; the praises of
me, who had voyaged far from the full moon and dwelt in the Land of
Fancy. So to the sound of melody the White Ship sailed into the mist
betwixt the basalt pillars of the West. And when the music ceased and the
mist lifted, we beheld not the Land of Cathuria, but a swift-rushing
resistless sea, over which our helpless barque was borne toward some
unknown goal. Soon to our ears came the distant thunder of falling waters,
and to our eyes appeared on the far horizon ahead the titanic spray of a
monstrous cataract, wherein the oceans of the world drop down to abysmal
nothingness.
Then did the bearded man say to me, with tears on his cheek, "We
have rejected the beautiful Land of Sona-Nyl, which we may never behold
again. The Gods are greater than men, and they have conquered." And I
closed my eyes before the crash that I knew would come, shutting out the
sight of the celestial bird which flapped its mocking blue wings over the
brink of the torrent.
Out of that crash came darkness, and I heard the shrieking of men
and of things which were not men. From the East tempestuous winds
arose, and chilled me as I crouched on the slab of damp stone which had
risen beneath my feet. Then as I heard another crash I opened my eyes and
beheld myself upon the platform of that lighthouse whence I had sailed so
many aeons ago. In the darkness below there loomed the vast blurred
outlines of a vessel breaking up on the cruel rocks, and as I glanced out
over the waste I saw that the light had failed for the first time since my
grandfather had assumed its care.
And in the later watches of the night, when I went within the tower, I
saw on the wall a calendar which still remained as when I had left it at the
hour I sailed away. With the dawn I descended the tower and looked for
wreckage upon the rocks, but what I found was only this: a strange dead
bird whose hue was as of the azure sky, and a single shattered spar, of a
whiteness greater than that of the wave-tips or of the mountain snow.
And thereafter the ocean told me its secrets no more; and though
many times since has the moon shone full and high in the heavens, the
White Ship from the South came never again.