Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (25 page)

We fled, I say, so shaken that it was only by a supreme effort of will that we were able to take flight in the right direction. And behind us the voice rose, the blasphemous voice of Nyarlathotep, the Blind, Faceless One, the Mighty Messenger, even while there rang in the channels of memory the frightened words of the half-breed, Old Peter—
It was a Thing—didn’t have no face, hollered there till I thought my eardrums ’d bust, and them things that was with it—Gawd!
—echoed there while the voice of that Being from outermost space shrieked and gibbered to the hellish music of the hideous attending flute-players, rising to ululate through the forest and leave its mark forever in memory!

Y’gnaiih! Ygnaiih! EEE-yayayayayaaa-haaahaaahaaahaaa-ngh’aaa-ngh’aaa-ya-va-yaaa!

Then all was still.

And yet, incredible as it may seem, the ultimate horror awaited us.

For we had gone but halfway to the lodge when we were simultaneously aware of something following; behind us rose a hideous, horribly suggestive
sloshing
sound, as if the amorphous entity had left the slab which in some remote time must have been erected by its worshippers, and was pursuing us. Obsessed by abysmal fright, we ran as neither of us has ever run before, and we were almost upon the lodge before we were aware that the sloshing sound, the trembling and shuddering of the earth—as if some gigantic being walked upon it—had ceased, and in their stead came only the calm, unhurried tread of footsteps.

But the footsteps were not our own! And in the aura of unreality, the fearsome outsideness in which we walked and breathed, the suggestiveness of those footsteps was almost maddening!

We reached the lodge, lit a lamp, and sank into chairs to await whatever it was that was coming so steadily, unhurriedly on, mounting the verandah steps, putting its hand on the knob of the door, swinging the door open.…

It was Professor Gardner who stood there!

Then Laird sprang up, crying, “Professor Gardner!”

The professor smiled reservedly and put one hand up to shade his eyes. “If you don’t mind, I’d like the light dimmed. I’ve been in the dark so long.…”

Laird turned to do his bidding without question, and he came forward into the room, walking with the ease and poise of a man who is as sure of himself as if he had never vanished from the face of the earth more than three months before, as if he had not made a frantic appeal to us during the night just past, as if.…

I glanced at Laird; his hand was still at the lamp, but his fingers were no longer turning down the wick, simply holding to it, while he gazed down unseeing. I looked over at Professor Gardner; he sat with his head turned from the lights, his eyes closed, a little smile playing about his lips; at that moment he looked precisely as I had often seen him look at the University Club in Madison, and it was as if everything that had taken place here at the lodge were but an evil dream.

But it was not a dream!

“You were gone last night?” asked the professor.

“Yes. But, of course, we had the dictaphone.”

“Ah. You heard something then?”

“Would you like to hear the record, sir?”

“Yes, I would.”

Laird went over and put it on the machine to play it again, and we sat in silence, listening to everything upon it, no one saying anything until it had been completed. Then the professor slowly turned his head.

“What do you make of it?”

“I don’t know what to make of it, sir,” answered Laird. “The speeches are too disjointed—except for yours. There seems to be some coherence there.”

Suddenly, without warning, the room was surcharged with menace; it was but a momentary impression, but Laird felt it as keenly as I did, for he started noticeably. He was taking the record from the machine when the professor spoke again.

“It doesn’t occur to you that you may be the victim of a hoax?”

“No.”

“And if I told you that I had found it possible to make every sound that was registered on that record?”

Laird looked at him for a full minute before replying in a low voice that, of course, Professor Gardner had been investigating the phenomena of Rick’s Lake woods for a far longer time than we had, and if he said so.…

A harsh laugh escaped the professor. “Entirely natural phenomena, my boy! There’s a mineral deposit under that grotesque slab in the woods; it gives off light and also a miasma that is productive of hallucinations. It’s as simple as that. As for the various disappearances—sheer folly, human failing, nothing more, but with the air of coincidence. I came here with high hopes of verifying some of the nonsense to which old Partier lent himself long ago—but—” He smiled disdainfully, shook his head, and extended his hand. “Let me have the record, Laird.”

Without question, Laird gave Professor Gardner the record. The older man took it and was bringing it up before his eyes when he jogged his elbow and, with a sharp cry of pain, dropped it. It broke into dozens of pieces on the floor of the lodge.

“Oh!” cried the professor. “I’m sorry.” He turned his eyes on Laird. “But then—since I can duplicate it any time for you from what I’ve learned about the lore of this place, by way of Partier’s mouthings—” He shrugged.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Laird quietly.

“Do you mean to say that everything on that record was just your imagination, Professor?” I broke in. “Even that chant for the summoning of Cthugha?”

The older man’s eyes turned on me; his smile was sardonic. “Cthugha? What do you suppose he or that is but the figment of someone’s imagination? And the inference—my dear boy, use your head. You have before you the clear inference that Cthugha has his abode on Fomalhaut, which is twenty-seven light-years away, and that, if this chant is thrice repeated when Fomalhaut has risen Cthugha will appear to somehow render this place no longer habitable by man or outside entity. How do you suppose that could be accomplished?”

“Why, by something akin to thought-transference,” replied Laird doggedly. “It’s not unreasonable to suppose that if we were to direct thoughts toward Fomalhaut that something there might receive them—granting that there might be life there. Thought is instant. And that they in turn may be so highly developed that dematerialization and rematerialization might be as swift as thought.”

“My boy—are you serious?” The older man’s voice revealed his contempt.

“You asked.”

“Well, then, as the hypothetic answer to a theoretical problem, I can overlook that.”

“Frankly,” I said again, disregarding a curious negative shaking of Laird’s head, “I don’t think that what we saw in the forest tonight was just hallucination—caused by a miasma rising out of the earth or otherwise.”

The effect of this statement was extraordinary. Visibly, the professor made every effort to control himself; his reactions were precisely those of a savant challenged by a cretin in one of his classes. After a few moments he controlled himself and said only, “You’ve been there then. I suppose it’s too late to make you believe otherwise.…”

“I’ve always been open to conviction, sir, and I lean to the scientific method,” said Laird.

Professor Gardner put his hand over his eyes and said, “I’m tired. I noticed last night when I was here that you’re in my old room, Laird—so I’ll take the room next to you, opposite Jack’s.”

He went up the stairs as if nothing had happened between the last time he had occupied the lodge and this.

The rest of the story—and the culmination of that apocalyptic night—are soon told.

I could not have been asleep for more than an hour—the time was one in the morning—when I was awakened by Laird. He stood beside my bed fully dressed and in a tense voice ordered me to get up and dress, to pack whatever essentials I had brought, and be ready for anything. Nor would he permit me to put on a light to do so, though he carried a small pocket-flash, and used it sparingly. To all my questions, he cautioned me to wait.

When I had finished, he led the way out of the room with a whispered, “Come.”

He went directly to the room into which Professor Gardner had disappeared.
By the light of his flash, it was evident that the bed had not been touched; moreover, in the faint film of dust that lay on the floor, it was clear that Professor Gardner had walked into the room, over to a chair beside the window, and out again.

“Never touched the bed, you see,” whispered Laird.

“But why?”

Laird gripped my arm, hard. “Do you remember what Partier hinted—what we saw in the woods—the protoplasmic, amorphousness of the thing? And what the record said?”

“But Gardner told us—” I protested.

Without a further word, he turned. I followed him downstairs, where he paused at the table where we had worked and flashed the light upon it. I was surprised into making a startled exclamation which Laird hushed instantly. For the table was bare of everything but the copy of
The Outsider and Others
and three copies of
Weird Tales
, a magazine containing stories supplementing those in the book by the eccentric Providence genius, Lovecraft. All Gardner’s notes, all our own notations, the photostats from Miskatonic University—everything gone!

“He took them,” said Laird. “No one else could have done so.”

“Where did he go?”

“Back to the place from which he came.” He turned on me, his eyes gleaming in the reflected glow of the flashlight. “Do you understand what that means, Jack?”

I shook my head.

“
They
know we’ve been there,
they
know we’ve seen and learned too much.…”

“But how?”

“You told them.”

“I? Good God, man, are you mad? How could I have told them?”

“Here, in this lodge, tonight—you yourself gave the show away, and I hate to think of what might happen now. We’ve got to get away.”

For one moment all the events of the past few days seemed to fuse into an unintelligible mass; Laird’s urgence was unmistakable, and yet the thing he suggested was so utterly unbelievable that its contemplation even for so fleeting a moment threw my thoughts into the extremest confusion.

Laird was talking now, quickly. “Don’t you think it odd—how he came back? How he came out of the woods
after
the hellish thing we saw there—not before? And the questions he asked—the drift of those questions. And how he managed to break the record—our one scientific proof of something? And now, the disappearance of all the notes—of everything that might point to substantiation of what he called ‘Partier’s nonsense’?”

“But if we are to believe what he told us.…”

He broke in before I could finish. “One of them was right. Either the voice on the record calling to me—or the man who was here tonight.”

“The man …”

But whatever I wanted to say was stilled by Laird’s harsh,
“Listen!”

From outside, from the depths of the horror-haunted dark, the earth-haven of the Dweller in Darkness, came once more, for the second time that night, the weirdly beautiful, yet cacophonous strains of flute-like music, rising and falling, accompanied by a kind of chanted ululation, and by the sound as of great wings flapping.

“Yes, I hear,” I whispered.

“Listen closely!”

Even as he spoke, I understood. There was something more—the sounds from the forest were not only rising and falling—
they were approaching!

“Now do you believe me?” demanded Laird.
“They’re coming for us!”
He turned on me. “The chant!”

“What chant?” I fumbled stupidly.

“The Cthugha chant—do you remember it?”

“I took it down. I’ve got it here.”

For an instant I was afraid that this, too, might have been taken from us, but it was not; it was in my pocket where I had left it. With shaking hands, Laird tore the paper from my grasp.

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthugha Fomalhaut n’gha-ghaa naf’l thagn! Iä! Cthugha!”
he said, running to the verandah, myself at his heels.

Out of the woods came the bestial voice of the dweller in the dark.
“Ee-ya-ya-haa-haahaaa! Ygnaiih! Ygnaiih!”

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthugha Fomalhaut n’gha-ghaa naf’l thagn! Iä! Cthugha!”
repeated Laird for the second time.

Still the ghastly melee of sounds from the woods came on, in no way diminished, rising now to supreme heights of terror-fraught fury, with the bestial voice of the thing from the slab added to the wild, mad music of the pipes, and the sound as of wings.

And then, once more, Laird repeated the primal words of the chant.

On the instant that the final guttural sound had left his lips, there began a sequence of events no human eye was ever destined to witness. For suddenly the darkness was gone, giving way to a fearsome amber glow; simultaneously the flute-like music ceased, and in its place rose cries of rage and terror. Then, there appeared thousands of tiny points of light—not only on and among the trees, but on the earth itself, on the lodge and the car standing before it. For still a further moment we were rooted to the spot, and then it was borne in upon us that the myriad points of light were
living entities of flame
! For wherever they touched, fire sprang up, seeing which, Laird rushed into the
lodge for such of our things as he could carry forth before the holocaust made it impossible for us to escape Rick’s Lake.

He came running out—our bags had been downstairs—gasping that it was too late to take the dictaphone or anything else, and together we dashed toward the car, shielding our eyes a little from the blinding light all around. But even though we had shielded our eyes, it was impossible not to see the great amorphous shapes streaming skyward from this accursed place, nor the equally great being hovering like a cloud of living fire above the trees. So much we saw, before the frightful struggle to escape the burning woods forced us to forget mercifully the other details of that terrible, maddened flight.

Horrible as were the things that took place in the darkness of the forest at Rick’s Lake, there was something more cataclysmic still, something so blasphemously conclusive that even now I shudder and tremble uncontrollably to think of it. For in that brief dash to the car, I saw something that explained Laird’s doubt, I saw what had made him take heed of the voice on the record and not of the thing that came to us as Professor Gardner. The keys were there before, but I did not understand; even Laird had not fully believed. Yet it was given to us—we did not know. “It is not desired by the Old Ones that mere man shall know too much,” Partier had said. And that terrible voice on the record had hinted even more clearly:
Go forth in his form or in whatever form chosen in the guise of man, and destroy that which may lead them to us.…
Destroy that which may lead them to us! Our record, the notes, the photostats from Miskatonic University, yes, and even Laird and myself! And the thing had gone forth, for it was Nyarlathotep, the Mighty Messenger, the Dweller in Darkness who had gone forth and who had returned into the forest to send his minions back to us. It was he who had come from interstellar space even as Cthugha, the fire being, had come from Fomalhaut upon the utterance of the command that woke him from his eon-long sleep under that amber star, the command that Gardner, the living-dead captive of the terrible Nyarlathotep, had discovered in those fantastic travelings in space and time; and it was he who returned whence he had come, with his earth-haven now forever rendered useless for him with its destruction by the minions of Cthugha!