Haggopian and Other Stories (53 page)

My exit from that square can only properly be described as panic-stricken, but brief though my visit had been I had seen more than enough to strenghthen that first resolve of mine to do something about the loathsome and insidious invasion of the traders. Backtracking, bounding through the night streets I went, with the houses and taverns towering blackly on both sides, seeing in my mind’s eye that horrible haunting picture which I had but glimpsed in the main square. There had been the four guards with great knives fastened in their belts, the dais with pyramid steps to its flat summit, four hugely flaring torches in blackly forged metal holders, and, atop the basalt altar itself, a great reddish mass pulsing with inner life, its myriad facets catching and reflecting the fire of the torches in a mixture with its own evil radiance. The hypnotic horror—the malignant monster—the great ruby!

Then the vision changed as I heard close behind me a weird, ululant cry—a definite
alert
—which carried and echoed in Dylath-Leen’s canyon alleys. In rampant revulsion I pictured myself linked by an iron anklet to the long chain of mute, unprotesting people which I had seen only minutes earlier being led in the direction of the docks and the black galleys, and this monstrous mental image drove my feet to a frenzied activity that sent me speeding headlong down the dark passages between the city’s basalt walls. But fast and furious though my flight was it soon became apparent that my pursuers were gaining on me. A faint padding came to my ears as I ran, causing me to accelerate, forcing my feet to pump even faster. The effort was useless—if anything,
worse
than useless—for I soon tired and had to slow up. Twice I stumbled and the second time, as I struggled to rise, the fumbling of slimy fingers at my feet lent them wings and shot me out in front again. It became as one of those nightmares (which indeed it was), where you run and run through vast vats of subconscious molasses, totally unable to increase the distance between yourself and your ethereal pursuer; the only difference being, dream or none, that I knew for a certainty I was running for my life!

It was a few moments later, when an added horror had just about brought me to the verge of giving up hope, that I found an unexpected but welcome reprieve. Slipping and stumbling, panting for air, I had been brought up short by a mad fancy that the soft padding of alien feet now came from the very direction in which I was heading, from somewhere in
front
of me! And as those sounds of demon footfalls came closer, closing in on me, I flattened myself to the basalt wall, spreading my arms and groping desperately with my hands at the bare, rough stone; and there, beneath my unbelieving fingers—
an opening!
—a narrow crack or entry, completely hidden in jet shadows, between two of the street’s bleak bindings. I squeezed myself in, trying to get my breathing under control, fighting a lunatic urge to cry out in my terror. It was pitch black, the blackness of the pit, and a hideous thought suddenly came to me. What if this tunnel of darkness—this possible doorway to sanity—what if it were closed, a dead end? Then, as if in answer to my silent, frantic prayers, even as I heard the first squawk of amazed frustration from somewhere behind me, I squirmed from the other end of the division to emerge in a street mercifully void of the evil aliens.

My flight had carried me in a direction well away from Bo-Kareth’s house; but in any case, now that my worst fears were realized and the alarm raised, it would have been completely idiotic to think of hiding anywhere in the city. I had to get away, to Ulthar or Nir, as far as possible—and as fast as possible—until I could try to find a way to rid Dylath-Leen of its inhuman curse.

Less than an hour later, with the city behind me, I was in an uninhabited desert area heading in a direction which I hoped would eventually bring me to Ulthar. It was cool beneath that full, cloud-floating moon, yet a long while passed before the fever of my panic-flight left me. When it did I was almost sorry, for soon I found myself shivering as the sweat of my body turned icy chill, and I wrapped my cloak more tightly about me for I knew it must grow still colder before the dawn. I was not particularly worried about food and water, there are many water-holes and oases between Dylath-Leen and Ulthar; no, my main cause for concern lay in orientation. I did not want to end up wandering in one of the many great parched deserts! My sense of direction in open country had never been very good.

Before long great clouds came drifting in from a direction I took to be the South, obscuring the moon until only the stars in the sky ahead gave any light by which to travel. Then, it seemed, the dune-cast shadows grew blacker and longer and an eerie sensation of not being alone waxed in me. I found myself casting sharp, nervous glances over my shoulder and shuddering to an extent not entirely warranted by the chill of the night. There came fixed in my mind an awful suspicion which I had to resolve one way or the other.

I hid behind a dune and waited, peering back the way I had come. Soon I saw a darting shadow moving swiftly over the sand, following my trail—and that shadow was endowed with twin points at its top and chuckled obscenely as it came. My hair stood on end as I saw the creature stop to study the ground, then lift its wide-mouthed face to the night sky. I heard again that weird, ululant cry of alert and I waited no longer.

In a passion of fear even greater than that I had known in the streets of Dylath-Leen I fled—racing like a madman over the night sands, gibbering and mumbling in my flight, scrambling and often falling head over heels down the sides of the steeper sandhills—until my head struck something hard in the shadow of a dune and I passed into the even deeper darkness of lower unconsciousness.

This time I was far from sorry when I leapt screaming awake at my home in Norden; and in the sanity of the waking world I recognised the fact that all those horrors of dream and the night had existed only in my slumbers; so that in a few days my second visit to Dylath-Leen was all but forgotten. The mind soon forgets that which it cannot bear to remember.

III

I was forty-three when next—when last—I saw Dylath-Leen. Not that my dream took me straight to the basalt city; rather I found myself first on the outskirts of Ulthar, the City of Cats! Ulthar is well named, for in that city an ancient law decrees that no man may kill a cat, and the streets crowd with many a variety of soft-furred feline. I stooped to pet a fat tom lazily sunning himself in the street, and an ancient shopkeeper seated outside his store beneath a great shade called out to me in a friendly, quavering voice:

“It is good, stranger—it is good when a stranger pets the cats of Ulthar! Have you journeyed far?”

“Far,” I affirmed, “from the waking world—but even there I stop to play when I see a cat. Tell me, Sir—can you direct me to the house of Litha, daughter of Bo-Kareth of Dylath-Leen?’

“Indeed, I know her well,” he nodded his old head, “‘for she is one of the few in Ulthar with as many years to count as I. She lives with her husband and family not far from here. Until some years ago her father—who was ancient beyond belief, second only in years to Atal, climber of Hatheg-Kla and priest and patriarch of Ulthar’s Temple of the Elder Ones—also lived at his daughter’s house. He came out of Dylath-Leen mazed and mumbling, and did not live long here in Ulthar. Now no man goes to Dylath-Leen.”

But the old man had soured at the thought of Dylath-Leen and did not wish to talk any longer. I took his directions and started off with mixed feelings along the street he had indicated; but only half-way up that street I cut off down a dusty alley and made for the Temple of the Elder Ones instead. It could do no good to see Litha now. What use to wake old memories?—if indeed she were capable of remembering anything of those Elysian days of her youth—and it was not as though she might help me solve my problem—that same problem of thirteen waking years ago: how to avenge the outraged peoples of Dylath-Leen; and how to rescue those of them—if any such existed—still enslaved. For there was still a feeling of yearning in me for the black-towered city and its peoples of yore. I remembered the friends I had known and my many walks through the high-walled streets and along the farm lanes of the outskirts. Yet even in Elysian S’eemla the knowledge that certain offensive black galleys moored in the docks had somehow always sufficed to dull my appetite for living, had even impaired the happiness I had known with dark-eyed Litha, in the garret of Bo-Kareth’s house, with the bats of night clustered thick and chittering beneath the sill without my window.

As quickly as the vision of Litha the girl came I put it out of my mind, striding out more purposefully for the Temple of the Elder Ones. If any man could help me in my bid for vengeance against the turbaned traders Atal, the Priest of the Temple, was that man. Atal had even climbed the forbidden peak, Hatheg-Kla, in the stony desert, and had come down again alive and sane! It was rumoured that in the temple he had keep of many incredible volumes of sorcery. His great knowledge of the darker mysteries was, in fact, my main reason for seeking his aid. I could hardly hope to engage the forces of the hell-traders with physical means alone.

It was then, as I left the little green cottages and neatly fenced farms and shady shops of the suburbs behind me, as I pressed more truly into the city proper, that I received a shock so powerful my soul almost withered within me.

I had allowed myself to become interested in the old peaked roofs, the overhanging upper storeys, numberless chimney-pots and narrow, old cobbled streets of the city, so that my attention had been diverted from the path my feet followed, causing me to bump rudely into someone coming out of the narrow door of a shop. Of a sudden the air was foul with shuddersome, well-remembered odours of hideous connection, and my hackles rose as I backed quickly away from the strangely turbaned, squat figure I had chanced into. The slightly tilted eyes regarded me curiously and a wicked smile played around the too wide mouth.

One of
Them
! Here in Ulthar?

I mumbled incoherent apologies, slipped past the still evilly grinning figure, and ran all the rest of the way to the Temple of the Elder Ones. If there had been any suggestion of half-heartedness to my intentions earlier there was certainly none now! It seemed obvious to me the course events were taking. First it had been Dylath-Leen, now an attempt at Ulthar—where next? Nowhere, if I had anything to say of it.

The Temple of the Elder Ones stands round and towering, of ivied stone, atop Ulthar’s highest hill; and there, in the Room of Ancient Records, I found the patriarch I sought—Atal of Hatheg-Kla; Atal the Ancient. He sat, in flowing black and gold robes, at a centuried wooden bench, fading eyes studiously lost in the yellowed pages of a great aeon-worn book, its metal hasps dully agleam in a stray beam of sunlight striking in from the single high window.

He looked up, starting as if in shock as I entered the musty room with its myriad book-shelves. Then he pushed his book away and spoke:

“The Priest of the Temple greets you, stranger. You
are
a stranger, are you not?”

“I have seen Ulthar before,” I answered, “but, yes, I am a stranger here in the Temple of the Elder Ones. I come from the waking world, Atal, to seek your help…”

“You—you
surprised
me. You are not the first from the waking world to ask my aid. I thought at first sight that I knew you of old. How are you named and in what manner might I serve you?”

“My name is Grant Enderby, Atal, and the help I ask is not for myself. I come in the hope that you might be able to help me rid Dylath-Leen of a certain contagion; but since coming to Ulthar today I have learned that even here the sores are spreading. Are there not even now in Ulthar strange traders from no clearly named land? Is it not so?”

“It is so,” he nodded his venerable head. “Say on.”

“Then you should know that they are those same traders who brought Dylath-Leen to slavery—an evil, hypnotic slavery—and I fancy that they mean to use the same black arts here in Ulthar to a like end. Do they trade rubies the like of which are found in no known mine in the whole of dreamland?”

Again he nodded: “They do; but say no more—I am already aware. At this very moment I search for a means by which the trouble may be put to an end. But I work only on rumours, and I am unable to leave the temple to verify those rumours. My duties are all important, and in any case, these bones are too old to wander far. Truly, Dylath-Leen did suffer an evil fate; but think not that her peoples had no warning! Why, even a century ago the city’s reputation was bad, through the presence of those very traders you have mentioned! Another dreamer before you saw the doom in store for the city, speaking against those traders vehemently and often; but his words were soon forgotten by all who heard them and people went their old ways as of yore. No man may help him who will not help himself! But it is the presence of those traders here in Ulthar which has driven me to this search of mine. I cannot allow the same doom to strike here—whatever that doom may be—yet it is difficult to see what may be done. No man of this town will venture anywhere near Dylath-Leen. It is said that the streets of that city have known no human feet for more than twenty years, nor can any man say with any certainty where the city’s peoples have gone.”

“I can say!” I answered. “Not
where
, exactly; but
how
at least! Enslaved, I said, and told no lie. I had it first from Bo-Kareth, late of DyIath-Leen, who told me that when those traders had taken all the fat black slaves of Parg in exchange for those evil stones of theirs, they brought to the city the biggest ruby ever seen—a boulder of a gem—leaving it on a pedestal in the main square as a false token of esteem. It was the evil influence of this great jewel that bewitched the people of Dylath-Leen, bemusing them to such a degree that in the end they, too, became slaves to be led away to the black galleys of the traders. And now, apparently, those traders have…
used up
…all the peoples of that ill-omened city and are starting their monstrous game here! And Bo-Kareth’s story was true in every detail, for with my own eyes—”