He fumblingly laid on the table, with his large, white-mittened hand, a heavy key of tarnished silver -- nearly five inches long, of unknown and utterly exotic workmanship, and covered from end to end with hieroglyphs of the most bizarre description. De Marigny and Phillips gasped.
"That"s it!" cried de Marigny. "The camera doesn"t lie I couldn"t be mistaken!"
But Aspinwall had already launched a reply.
"Fools! What does it prove? If that"s really the key that belonged to my cousin, it"s up to this foreigner -- this d.a.m.ned n.i.g.g.e.r -- to explain how he got it! Randolph Carter vanished with the key four years ago. How do we know he wasn"t robbed and murdered? He was half crazy himself, and in touch with still crazier people."
"Look here, you n.i.g.g.e.r -- where did you get that key? Did you kill Randolph Carter?"
The Swami"s features, abnormally placid, did not change; but the remote, irisless black eyes behind them blazed dangerously. He spoke with great difficulty.
"Please control yourself, Mr. Aspinwall. There is another form of poof that I could give, but its effect upon everybody would not be pleasant. Let us be reasonable. Here are some papers obviously written since 1930, and in the unmistakable style of Randolph Carter."
He clumsily drew a long envelope from inside his loose coat and handed it to the sputtering attorney as de Marigny and Phillips watched with chaotic thoughts and a dawning feeling of supernal wonder.
"Of course the handwriting is almost illegible -- but remember that Randolph Carter now has no hands well adapted to forming human script."
Aspinwall looked threw the papers hurriedly, and was visibly perplexed, but he did not change his demeanor. The room was tense with excitement and nameless dread and the alien rhythm of the coffin-shaped clock had an utterly diabolic sound to de Marigny and Phillips, though the lawyer seemed affected not at all.
Aspinwall spoke again. "These look like clever forgeries. If they aren"t, they may mean that Randolph Carter has been brought under the control of people with no good purpose.
There"s only one thing to do -- have this faker arrested. De Marigny, will you telephone for the police?"
"Let us wait," answered their host. "I do not think this case calls for the police. I have a certain idea. Mr. Aspinwall, this gentleman is a mystic of real attainments. He says he is in the confidence of Randolph Carter. Will it satisfy you if he can answer certain questions which could be answered only by one in such confidence? I know Carter, and can ask such questions. Let me get a book which I think will make a good test."
He turned toward the door to the library, Phillips dazedly following in a kind of automatic way. Aspinwall remained where he was, studying closely the Hindoo who confronted him with abnormally impa.s.sive face. Suddenly, as Chandraputra clumsily restored the silver key to his pocket the lawyer emitted a guttural shout.
"Hey, by Heaven I"ve got it! This rascal is disguise. I don"t believe he"s an East Indian at all. That face-it isn"t a face, but a mask! I guess his story put that into my head, but it"s true. It never moves, and that turban and beard hide the edges. This fellow"s a common crook! He isn"t even a foreigner -- I"ve been watching his language. He"s a Yankee of some sort. And look at those mittens -- he knows his fingerprints could be spotted. d.a.m.n you, I"ll pull that thing off --"
"Stop!" The hoa.r.s.e, oddly alien voice of the Swami held a tone beyond all mere earthly fight "I told you there was another form of proof which I could give if necessary, and I warned you not to provoke me to it. This red-faced old meddler is right I"m not really an East Indian. This face is a mask, and what it covers is not human. You others have guessed -- I felt that minutes ago. It wouldn"t be pleasant if I took that mask off -- let it alone, Ernest I may as well tell you that I am Randolph Carter."
No one moved. Aspinwall snorted and made vague motions. De Marigny and Phillips, across the room, watched the workings of the red face and studied the back of the turbaned figure that confronted him. The clock"s abnormal ticking was hidious and the tripod fumes and swaying aras danced a dance of death. The half-choking lawyer broke the silence.
"No you don"t, you crook -- you can"t scare me! You"ve reasons of your own for not wanting that mask off. Maybe we"d know who you ate. Off with it -- "
As he reached forward, the Swami seized his hand with one of his own clumsily mittned members, evoking a curious cry of mixed pain and surprise. De Marigny started toward the two, but paused confused as the pseudo-Hindoo"s shout of protest changed to a wholly inexplicable rattling and buzzing sound. Aspinwall"s red face was furious, and with his free hand he made another lunge at his opponent"s bushy beard. This time he succeeded in getting a hold, and at his frantic tug the whole waxen visage came loose from the turban and clung to the lawyer"s apoplectic fist.
As it did so, Aspinwall uttered a frightful gurgling cry, and Phillips and de Maigny saw his face convulsed with a wilder, deep and more hideous epilepsy of stark panic than ever they had seen on human countenance before. The pseudo-Swami had meanwhile released his other hand and was standing as if dazed, making buzzing noises of a most abnormal quality. Then the turbaned figure slumped oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock that ticked out its cosmic and abnormal rhythm. His now uncovered face was turned away, and de Marigny and Phillips could not see what the lawyer"s act had disclosure. Then their attention was turned to Aspinwall, who was sinking ponderously to the floor. The spell was broken when they reached the old man he was dead.
Turning quickly to the shuffling Swami"s receding back, de Marigny saw one of the great white mittens drop listlessly off a dangling aarm. The fumes of the olibanum were thick, and all that could be glimpsed of the revealed hand was something long and black.. Be fore the Creole could reach the retreating figure, old Mr. Phillips laid a hand on his shoulder.
"Don"t!" he whispered, "We don"t know what we"re up against. That other facet, you know -- Zkauba, the wizard of Yaddith . . . "
The turbaned figure had now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw though the dense fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling made a queer, clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped case and pulled the door shut after it.
De Marigny could no longer be restrained, but when he reached and opened the clock it was empty. The abnormal ticking went on, beating out the dark, cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical gate-openings. On the floor the great white mitten, and the dead man with a bearded mask clutched in his hand, had nothing further to reveal.
A year pa.s.sed, and nothing has been heard of Randolph Carter. His estate is still unsettled. The Boston address from which one "Swami Chandraputra" sent inquiries to various mystics in 1930-31-32 was indeed tenanted by a strange Hindoo, but he left shortly before the date of the New Orleans conference and has never been seen since. He was said to be dark, expressionless, and bearded, and his landlord thinks the swarthy mask -- which was duly exhibited -- looked very much like him. He was never, however, suspected of any connection with the nightmare apparitions whispered of by local Slavs.
The hills behind Arkham were searched for the "metal envelope," but nothing of the sort was ever found. However, a clerk in Arkham"s First National Bank does recall a queer turbaned man who cashed an odd bit of gold bullion in October, 1930.
De Marigny and Phillips scarcely know what to make of the business. After all, what was proved?
There was a story. There was a key which might have been forged from one of the pictures Carter had freely distributed in 1928. There were papers -- all indecisive. There was a masked stranger, but who now living saw behind the mask? Amidst the strain and the olibanum fumes that act of vanishing in the clock might easily have been a dual hallucination. Hindoos know much of hypnotism. Reason proclaims the "Swami" a criminal with designs on Randolph Carter"s estate. But the autopsy said that Aspinwall had died of shock. Was it rage alone which caused it? And some things in that story...
In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and filled with olibanum fumes, Etienne Laurent de Marigny often sits listening with vague sensations to the abnormal rhythm of that hieroglyphed, coffin-shaped clock.
What the Moon Brings
By H.P. Lovecraft
Written 5 June 1922 Published May 1923 in The National Amateur, Vol. 45, No. 5, page 9
I hate the moon - I am afraid of it - for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous.
It was in the spectral summer when the moon shone down on the old garden where I wandered; the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams. And as I walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those placid waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in the world. Silent and sparkling, bright and baleful, those moon-cursed waters hurried I knew not whither; whilst from the embowered banks white lotos-blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate night-wind and dropped despairingly into the stream, swirling away horribly under the arched, carven bridge, and staring back with the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces.
And as I ran along the sh.o.r.e, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and maddened ever by the fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that the garden had no end under that moon; for where by day the walls were, there stretched now only new vistas of trees and paths, flowers and shrubs, stone idols and paG.o.das, and bendings of the yellow-litten stream past gra.s.sy banks and under grotesque bridges of marble. And the lips of the dead lotos-faces whispered sadly, and bade me follow, nor did I cease my steps till the stream became a river, and joined amidst marshes of swaying reeds and beaches of gleaming sand the sh.o.r.e of a vast and nameless sea.
Upon that sea the hateful moon shone, and over its unvocal waves weird perfumes breeded. And as I saw therein the lotos-faces vanish, I longed for nets that I might capture them and learn from them the secrets which the moon had brought upon the night. But when that moon went over to the west and the still tide ebbed from the sullen sh.o.r.e, I saw in that light old spires that the waves almost uncovered, and white columns gay with festoons of green seaweed. And knowing that to this sunken place all the dead had come, I trembled and did not wish again to speak with the lotos-faces.
Yet when I saw afar out in the sea a black condor descend from the sky to seek rest on a vast reef, I would fain have questioned him, and asked him of those whom I had known when they were alive. This I would have asked him had he not been so far away, but he was very far, and could not be seen at all when he drew nigh that gigantic reef.
So I watched the tide go out under that sinking moon, and saw gleaming the spires, the towers, and the roofs of that dead, dripping city. And as I watched, my nostrils tried to close against the perfume-conquering stench of the world"s dead; for truly, in this unplaced and forgotten spot had all the flesh of the churchyards gathered for puffy sea-worms to gnaw and glut upon.
Over these horrors the evil moon now hung very low, but the puffy worms of the sea need no moon to feed by. And as I watched the ripples that told of the writhing of worms beneath, I felt a new chill from afar out whither the condor had flown, as if my flesh had caught a horror before my eyes had seen it.
Nor had my flesh trembled without cause, for when I raised my eyes I saw that the waters had ebbed very low, shewing much of the vast reef whose rim I had seen before. And when I saw that the reef was but the black basalt crown of a shocking eikon whose monstrous forehead now shown in the dim moonlight and whose vile hooves must paw the h.e.l.lish ooze miles below, I shrieked and shrieked lest the hidden face rise above the waters, and lest the hidden eyes look at me after the slinking away of that leering and treacherous yellow moon.
And to escape this relentless thing I plunged gladly and unhesitantly into the stinking shallows where amidst weedy walls and sunken streets fat sea-worms feast upon the world"s dead.
Within the Walls of Eryx
By H. P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling
Written Jan 1936 Published October 1939 in Weird Tales, Vol. 34, No. 4, p. 50-68.
Before I try to rest I will set down these notes in preparation for the report I must make. What I have found is so singular, and so contrary to all past experience and expectations, that it deserves a very careful description.
I reached the main landing on Venus, March 18, terrestrial time; VI, 9 of the planet"s calendar. Being put in the main group under Miller, I received my equipment - watch tuned to Venus"s slightly quicker rotation - and went through the usual mask drill. After two days I was p.r.o.nounced fit for duty.
Leaving the Crystal Company"s post at Terra Nova around dawn, VI, 12, I followed the southerly route which Anderson had mapped out from the air. The going was bad, for these jungles are always half impa.s.sable after a rain. It must be the moisture that gives the tangled vines and creepers that leathery toughness; a toughness so great that a knife has to work ten minutes on some of them. By noon it was dryer - the vegetation getting soft and rubbery so that my knife went through it easily - but even then I could not make much speed. These Carter oxygen masks are too heavy - just carrying one half wears an ordinary man out. A Dubois mask with sponge-reservoir instead of tubes would give just as good air at half the weight.
The crystal-detector seemed to function well, pointing steadily in a direction verifying Anderson"s report. It is curious how that principle of affinity works - without any of the fakery of the old "divining rods" back home. There must be a great deposit of crystals within a thousand miles, though I suppose those d.a.m.nable man-lizards always watch and guard it. Possibly they think we are just as foolish for coming to Venus to hunt the stuff as we think they are for grovelling in the mud whenever they see a piece of it, or for keeping that great ma.s.s on a pedestal in their temple. I wish they"d get a new religion, for they have no use for the crystals except to pray to. Barring theology, they would let us take all we want - and even if they learned to tap them for power there"d be more than enough for their planet and the earth besides. I for one am tired of pa.s.sing up the main deposits and merely seeking separate crystals out of jungle river-beds. Sometime I"ll urge the wiping out of these scaly beggars by a good stiff army from home. About twenty ships could bring enough troops across to turn the trick. One can"t call the d.a.m.ned things men for all their "cities" and towers. They haven"t any skill except building - and using swords and poison darts - and I don"t believe their so-called "cities" mean much more than ant-hills or beaver-dams. I doubt if they even have a real language - all the talk about psychological communication through those tentacles down their chests strikes me as bunk. What misleads people is their upright posture; just an accidental physical resemblance to terrestrial man.
I"d like to go through a Venus jungle for once without having to watch out for skulking groups of them or dodge their cursed darts. They may have been all right before we began to take the crystals, but they"re certainly a bad enough nuisance now - with their dart-shooting and their cutting of our water pipes.
More and more I come to believe that they have a special sense like our crystal-detectors. No one ever knew them to bother a man - apart from long-distance sniping - who didn"t have crystals on him.
Around 1 P.M. a dart nearly took my helmet off, and I thought for a second one of my oxygen tubes was punctured. The sly devils hadn"t made a sound, but three of them were closing in on me. I got them all by sweeping in a circle with my flame pistol, for even though their colour blended with the jungle, I could spot the moving creepers. One of them was fully eight feet tall, with a snout like a tapir"s. The other two were average seven-footers. All that makes them hold their own is sheer numbers - even a single regiment of flame throwers could raise h.e.l.l with them. It is curious, though, how they"ve come to be dominant on the planet. Not another living thing higher than the wriggling akmans and skorahs, or the flying tukahs of the other continent - unless of course those holes in the Dionaean Plateau hide something.
About two o"clock my detector veered westward, indicating isolated crystals ahead on the right. This checked up with Anderson, and I turned my course accordingly. It was harder going - not only because the ground was rising, but because the animal life and carnivorous plants were thicker. I was always slashing ugrats and stepping on skorahs, and my leather suit was all speckled from the bursting darohs which struck it from all sides. The sunlight was all the worse because of the mist, and did not seem to dry up the mud in the least.
Every time I stepped my feet sank down five or six inches, and there was a sucking sort of blup every time I pulled them out. I wish somebody would invent a safe kind of suiting other than leather for this climate. Cloth of course would rot; but some thin metallic tissue that couldn"t tear - like the surface of this revolving decay-proof record scroll - ought to be feasible sometime.
I ate about 3:30 - if slipping these wretched food tablets through my mask can be called eating. Soon after that I noticed a decided change in the landscape - the bright, poisonous-looking flowers shifting in colour and getting wraith-like. The outlines of everything shimmered rhythmically, and bright points of light appeared and danced in the same slow, steady tempo. After that the temperature seemed to fluctuate in unison with a peculiar rhythmic drumming.
The whole universe seemed to be throbbing in deep, regular pulsations that filled every corner of s.p.a.ce and flowed through my body and mind alike. I lost all sense of equilibrium and staggered dizzily, nor did it change things in the least when I shut my eyes and covered my ears with my hands. However, my mind was still clear, and in a very few minutes I realized what had happened.
I had encountered at last one of those curious mirage-plants about which so many of our men told stories. Anderson had warned me of them, and described their appearance very closely - the s.h.a.ggy stalk, the spiky leaves, and the mottled blossoms whose gaseous, dream-breeding exhalations penetrate every existing make of mask.
Recalling what happened to Bailey three years ago, I fell into a momentary panic, and began to dash and stagger about in the crazy, chaotic world which the plant"s exhalations had woven around me. Then good sense came back, and I realized all I need do was retreat from the dangerous blossoms - heading away from the source of the pulsations, and cutting a path blindly - regardless of what might seem to swirl around me - until safely out of the plant"s effective radius.
Although everything was spinning perilously, I tried to start in the right direction and hack my way ahead. My route must have been far from straight, for it seemed hours before I was free of the mirage-plant"s pervasive influence.
Gradually the dancing lights began to disappear, and the shimmering spectral scenery began to a.s.sume the aspect of solidity. When I did get wholly clear I looked at my watch and was astonished to find that the time was only 4:20.
Though eternities had seemed to pa.s.s, the whole experience could have consumed little more than a half-hour.
Every delay, however, was irksome, and I had lost ground in my retreat from the plant. I now pushed ahead in the uphill direction indicated by the crystal-detector, bending every energy toward making better time. The jungle was still thick, though there was less animal life. Once a carnivorous blossom engulfed my right foot and held it so tightly that I had to hack it free with my knife; reducing the flower to strips before it let go.
In less than an hour I saw that the jungle growths were thinning out, and by five o"clock - after pa.s.sing through a belt of tree-ferns with very little underbrush - I emerged on a broad mossy plateau. My progress now became rapid, and I saw by the wavering of my detector-needle that I was getting relatively close to the crystal I sought. This was odd, for most of the scattered, egg-like spheroids occurred in jungle streams of a sort not likely to be found on this treeless upland.