Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (51 page)

Meanwhile I’d nerved myself to go down in the basement. The floor did ring much more hollowly than it had last night—it made me hesitate to tread upon it—but otherwise nothing appeared changed. Nevertheless it gave me a curious feeling of unreality, as if there were no real
objects left in the world, only flimsy scenery, a few stage properties including a balsa sledgehammer, a registered parcel with nothing in it, and a cyclorama of nighted hills, and two actors.

I hurried back upstairs, took the steaks off the grill and set them on the table in front of the softly roaring fire (for they were done), and headed after Albert.

But he anticipated me, stepping back inside the door, looking at me sharply—his eyes were still wide and staring—and demanding, “Why aren’t you packed?”

I said to him steadily, “Now look here, Albert, I thought last night the cellar floor sounded hollow, so that is not entirely a surprise. And any way you look at it, we can’t drive to Arkham on nervous energy. In fact, we can’t get even decently started driving east without some food inside us. You say yourself it’s dangerous everywhere, even at Miskatonic, and from what we (or at least I) saw at my father’s grave there may be at least one of the things loose already. So let’s eat dinner—I have a hunch terror hasn’t taken away your appetite entirely—and have a look inside Rodia’s package, and then leave if we must.”

There was a rather long pause. Then his expression relaxed into a somewhat wan smile and he said, “Very well, Georg, that does make sense. I’m frightened all right, make no mistake of that, in fact I’ve walked in terror for the past ten years. But in this case, to speak as honestly as I’m able, I have been even more concerned for you—it suddenly seemed such a pity, such a disservice, that I should have dragged you into this dreadful business. But as you say, one must bow to necessity, bodily and otherwise … and try to show a little style about it,” he added with a rather doleful chuckle.

So we sat down before the dancing, golden fire and ate our steaks and fixings (I had some burgundy, he stayed with his sweet black coffee) and talked of this and that—chiefly of Hollywood, as it turned out. He’d glimpsed a bookstore on our headlong drive, and now he asked about it and that led to other things.

Our dinner done, I refilled his cup and my glass, then cleared a space and opened Rodia’s parcel, using the carving knife to cut its cords and slit its seals. It contained, carefully packed in excelsior, the casket of embossed copper and German silver which sits before me now. I recognized my father’s handiwork at once, which reproduced quite closely in beaten metal his stone carving in the basement, though without the “Gate of Dreams” inscription. Albert’s finger indicated the Cutlu eyes, though he did not speak the name. I opened the casket. It contained several sheets of heavy bond paper. This time it was my father’s handwriting I recognized. Standing side by side, Albert and I read the document, which I append here:

At any other time that document would have moved and shaken me profoundly. Truth to tell, it did so move and shake me, but I had been already so moved and shaken by today’s climactic events that my first thought was of how the letter applied to them.

I echoed from the letter, “Now burst the gate of dreams,” and then added, suppressing another interpretation, “That means I should take Morgan’s drug tonight. Let’s do it, Albert, as you proposed this morning.”

“Your father’s last command,” he said heavily, clearly much impressed by that aspect of the letter. Then, “Georg, this is a most fantastic, shattering missive! That sign he got—sounds like migraine. And his references to the rare-earth elements—that could be crucial. And colors in the earth perceived perhaps by extrasensory perception! The Miskatonic project should have started investigating dowsing years ago. We’ve been blind—” He broke off. “You’re right, Georg, and I am strongly tempted. But the danger! How to choose? On the one hand a supreme parental injunction and our raging curiosities—for mine’s a-boil. On the other hand Great Cthulhu and his minions. Oh, for an indication of how to decide!”

There was a sharp knocking at the door. We both started. After a moment’s pause I moved rapidly, Albert following. With my hand on the latch I paused again. I had not heard a car stop outside. Through the stout oak came the cry, “Telegram!” I opened it.

There was revealed a skinny, somewhat jaunty-looking youth of pale complexion scattered with big freckles and with carrot red hair under his visored cap. His trousers were wrapped tightly around his legs by bicycle clips.

“Either of you Albert N. Wilmarth?” he inquired coolly.

“I am he,” Albert said, stepping forward.

“Then sign for this, please.”

Albert did so and tipped him, substituting a dime for a nickel at the last instant.

The youth grinned widely, said, “G’night,” and sauntered off. I closed the door and turned quickly back.

Albert had torn open the flimsy envelope and drawn out and spread the missive. He was pale already, but as his eyes flashed across it, he
grew paler still. It was as if he were two-thirds of a ghost already and its message had made him a full one. He held the yellow sheet out to me wordlessly:

I looked up. Albert’s face was still as ghostly white, but its expression had changed from uncertainty and dread to decision and challenge.

“That tips the balance,” he said. “What have I more to lose? By George, Georg, we’ll have a look down into the abyss on whose edge we totter. Are you game?”

“I proposed it,” I said. “Shall I fetch your valise from the car?”

“No need,” he said, whipping from his inside breast pocket the small paper packet from Dr. Morgan he’d shown me that morning. “I had the hunch that we were going to use it, until that apparition at your father’s tomb shattered my nerves.”

I fetched small glasses. He split evenly between them the small supply of white powder, which dissolved readily in the water I added under his direction. Then he looked at me quizzically, holding his glass as if for a toast.

“No question of to whom we drink this,” I said, indicating the telegram he was still holding in his other hand.

He winced slightly. “No, don’t speak his name. Let’s rather drink to
all
our brave comrades who have perished or suffered greatly in the Miskatonic project.”

That “our” really warmed me. We touched glasses and drained them. The draft was faintly bitter.

“Morgan writes that the effects are quite rapid,” he said. “First drowsiness, then sleep, and then hopefully dreams. He’s tried it twice himself with Rice and doughty old Armitage, who laid the Dunwich Horror with him. The first time they visited in dream Gilman’s Walpurgis hyperspace; the second, the inner city at the two magnetic poles—an area topologically unique.”

Meanwhile I’d hurriedly poured a little more wine and lukewarm coffee and we’d settled ourselves comfortably in our easy chairs before the fire, the dancing flames of which became both a little blurred and a little dazzling as the drug began to take effect.

“Really, that was a most amazing missive from your father,” he chatted on rapidly. “Spinning a rainbow web under the Pacific, the lines those weirdly litten tunnels—truly most vivid. Would Cthulhu be the spider? No, by Gad, I’d liefer your father’s goddess Nature any day. She’s kindlier at least.”

“Albert,” I said somewhat drowsily, thinking of personality exchanges,
“could those creatures possibly be benign, or at least less malevolent than we infer?—as my father’s subterranean visionings might indicate. My winged worms, even?”

“Most of our comrades did not find them so,” he replied judiciously, “though of course there’s our
Innsmouth
hero. What has he really found in Y’ha-nthlei? Wonder and glory? Who knows? Who can say he knows? Or old Akeley out in the stars—is his brain suffering the tortures of the damned in its shining metal cylinder? Or is it perpetually exalted by ever-changing true visions of infinity? And what did poor shoggoth-stampeded Danforth really think he saw beyond the two horrific mountain chains down there before he got amnesia? And is that last a blessing or a curse? Gad, he and I are suited to each other … the mind-smitten helping the nerve-shattered … fit nurses for felines.…”

“That was surely heavy news he sent you,” I observed with a little yawn, indicating the telegram about Lovecraft, which he still held tightly between finger and thumb. “You know, before that wire came, I had the craziest idea—that somehow you and he were the same person. I don’t mean Danforth but—”

“Don’t say it!” he said sharply. Then his voice went immediately drowsy as he continued, “But the roster of the perished is longer far … poor Lake and poor, poor Gedney and all those others under their Southern Cross and Magellanic shroud … the mathematical genius Walter Gilman who lost heart most terribly … the nonagenarian street-slain Angell and lightning-frozen Blake in Providence … Edward Pickman Derby, Arkham’s plump Shelley deliquescing in his witch-wife’s corpse.… Gad, this is hardly the cheerfulest topic.… You know, Georg, down in San Diego young Akeley (G.G.) showed me a hidden sea-cave bluer than Capri and on its black beach of magnetite the webbed footprint of a merman … one of the Gnorri?… and then … oh yes, of course … there’s Wilbur Whateley, who was almost nine feet tall … though he hardly counts as a Miskatonic researcher … but the whippoorwills didn’t get him either … or his big brother.…”

I was still looking at the fire, and the dancing points of light in and around it had become the stars, thick as the Pleiades and Hyades, through which old Akeley journeyed eternally, when unconsciousness closed on me too, black as the wind-stirred, infinite gulf of darkness which Robert Blake saw in the Shining Trapezohedron, black as N’kai.

I awoke stiff and chilled. The fire at which I’d been staring was white ashes only. I felt a sharp pang of disappointment that I had not dreamed at all. Then I became aware of the low, irregular, inflected humming or buzzing that filled my ears.

I stood up with difficulty. My companion slumbered still, but his
shut-eyed, death-pale face had a hideously tormented look and he writhed slowly and agonizedly from time to time as if in the grip of foulest nightmare. The yellow telegram had fallen from his fingers and lay on the floor. As I approached him I realized that the sound filling my ears was coming from between his lips, which were unceasingly a-twitch, and as I leaned my head close to them, the horridly articulate droning became recognizable words and phrases:

“The pulpy, tentacled head,” I heard in horror, “
Cthulhu fhtagn
, the
wrong
geometry, the polarizing miasma, the prismatic distortion,
Cthulhu R’lyeh
, the positive blackness, the living nothingness …”

I could not bear to watch his dreadful agony or listen to those poisonous,
twangy
words an instant longer, so I seized him by the shoulders and shook him violently, though even as I did so there sprang into my mind my father’s stern injunction never to do so.