Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (61 page)

What, in the last analysis, is the Voynich manuscript? It is a fragment of a work that professes to be a complete scientific account of the universe: its origin, history, geography (if I may use the term), mathematical structure, and hidden depths. The pages I possessed contained a preliminary digest of this material. In parts, it was terrifyingly knowledgeable; in other places, it seemed to be a typical mediaeval melange of magic, theology, and pre-Copernican speculation. I got the impression that the work may have had several authors, or that the
part I possessed was a digest of some other book that was imperfectly understood by Martin the Gardener. There are the usual references to Hermes Trismegistus and the Emerald Tablet, to Cleopatra’s book on gold making, the
Chrysopeia
, to the gnostic serpent Ouroboros, and to a mysterious planet or star called Tormantius, which was spoken of as the home of awe-inspiring deities. There were also many references to a “Khian language” which, from their context, obviously have no connection with the Aegean island of Chios, Homer’s birthplace.

It was this that set me upon the next stage of my discovery. In Lovecraft’s
Supernatural Horror in Literature
, in the short section on Arthur Machen, I came across a reference to the “Chian language,” connected in some way with a witchcraft cult. It also mentioned “Dôls,” “voolas,” and certain “Aklo letters.” The latter caught my attention; there had been a reference in the Voynich manuscript to the “Aklo inscriptions.” I had at first supposed Aklo to be some kind of corruption of the Kabbalastic “Agla,” a word used in exorcism; now I revised my opinion. To appeal to coincidence beyond a certain point is a sign of feeble-mindedness. The hypothesis that now presented itself to my mind was this: that the Voynich manuscript was a fragment or a summary of a much longer work called the
Necronomicon
, perhaps of Kabbalistic origin. Complete copies of the book exist, or have existed, and word-of-mouth tradition may have been kept alive by secret societies such as Naundorff’s infamous Church of Carmel, or the Brotherhood of Tlön described by Borges. Machen, who spent some time in Paris in the 1880s, almost certainly came into contact with Naundorff’s disciple, the Abbé Boullan, who is known to have practised black magic. (He appears in Huysman’s
Là-Bas
.) This could explain the traces of the
Necronomicon
to be found in his work. As to Lovecraft—he may have come across it or the verbal traditions concerning it, on his own, or perhaps even through Machen.

In that case, there might be copies of the work hidden away in some garret, or perhaps in another chest in an Italian castle. What a triumph if I could locate it, and publish it together with my translation of the Voynich manuscript! Or even if I could definitely prove that it had existed.

This was the daydream that preoccupied me during my five days on the Atlantic. And I read and reread my translation of the manuscript, hoping to discover some clue that might lead me to the complete work. But the more I read, the less clear it became. On a first reading, I had sensed an over-all pattern, some dark mythology, never stated openly, but deducible from hints. As I reread the work, I began to wonder whether all this had not been my imagination. The book seemed to dissolve into unrelated fragments.

In London, I spent a futile week in the British Museum, searching for references to the
Necronomicon
in various magical works, from Basil Valentine’s
Azoth
to Aleister Crowley. The only promising reference was a footnote in E. A. Hitchcock’s
Remarks upon Alchemy
(1865) to “the now unattainable secrets of the Aklo tablets.” But the book contained no other reference to these tablets. Did the word “unattainable” mean that the tablets were known to be destroyed? If so, how did Hitchcock come to know about it?

The gloom of a London October, and the exhaustion that came from a persistent sore throat, had almost persuaded me to take a plane back to New York, when my luck changed. In a bookshop in Maidstone I met Fr. Anthony Carter, a Carmelite monk and editor of a small literary magazine. He had met Machen in 1944—three years before the writer’s death, and had later devoted an issue of his magazine to Machen’s life and work. I accompanied Fr. Carter back to the Priory near Sevenoaks, and as he drove the baby Austin at a sedate thirty miles an hour, he talked to me at length about Machen. Finally, I asked him whether, to his knowledge, Machen had ever had contact with secret societies or black magic. “Oh, I doubt it,” he said, and my heart sank. Another false trail …“I suspect he picked up various odd traditions near his birthplace, Melincourt. It used to be the Roman Isca Silurum.”

“Traditions?” I tried to keep my voice casual. “What sort of traditions?”

“Oh, you know. The sort of thing he describes in
The Hill of Dreams
. Pagan cults and that sort of thing.”

“I thought that was pure imagination.”

“Oh, no. He once hinted to me that he’d seen a book that revealed all kinds of horrible things about the area of Wales.”

“Where? What kind of a book?”

“I’ve no idea. I didn’t pay too much attention. I believe he saw it in Paris—or it might have been Lyons. But I remember the name of the man who showed it to him. Staislav de Guaita.”

“Guaita!” I couldn’t keep my voice down, and he almost steered us off the road. He looked at me with mild reproach.

“That’s right. He was involved in some absurd black-magic society. Machen pretended to take it all seriously, but I’m sure he was pulling my leg.…”

Guaita was involved in the black-magic circle of Boullan and Naundorff. It was one more brick in the edifice.

“Where is Melincourt?”

“In Monmouthshire, I believe. Somewhere near Southport. Are you thinking of going?”

My train of thought must have been obvious. I saw no point in denying it.

The priest said nothing until the car stopped in the tree-shaded yard behind the Priory. Then he glanced at me and said mildly: “I wouldn’t get too involved if I were you.”

I made a noncommittal noise in my throat, and we dropped the subject. But a few hours later, back in my hotel room, I remembered his comment and was struck by it. If he believed that Machen had been pulling his leg about his “pagan cults,” why warn me not to get too involved? Did he really believe in them, but prefer to keep this to himself? As a Catholic, of course, he was bound to believe in the existence of supernatural evil.…

I had checked in the hotel’s Bradshaw before going to bed. There was a train to Newport from Paddington at 9:55, with a change for Caerleon at 2:30. At five minutes past ten, I was seated in the dining car, drinking coffee, watching the dull, soot-coloured houses of Ealing give way to the green fields of Middlesex, and feeling a depth and purity of excitement that was quite new to me. I cannot explain this. I can only say that, at this point in my search, I had a clear intuition that the important things were beginning. Until now, I had been slightly depressed, in spite of the challenges of the Voynich manuscript. Perhaps this was due to a faint distaste for the subject matter of the manuscript. I am as romantic as the next man—and I think most people are healthily romantic at bottom—but I suppose all this talk of black magic struck me ultimately as degrading nonsense—degrading to the human intellect and its capacity for evolution. But on this grey October morning, I felt something else—the stirring of the hair that Watson used to experience when Holmes shook him awake with “The game’s afoot, Watson.” I still had not the remotest idea what the game might consist of. But I was beginning to experience an odd intuition of its seriousness.

When I grew tired of looking at the scenery, I opened the book bag and took out a
Guide to Wales
, and two volumes of Arthur Machen; some selected stories, and the autobiographical
Far Off Things
. This latter led me to expect to find a land of enchantment in Machen’s part of Wales. He writes: “I shall always esteem it as the greatest piece of fortune that has fallen to me, that I was born in the heart of Gwent.” His descriptions of the “mystic tumulus,” the “giant rounded billow” of the Mountain of Stone, the deep woods and the winding river, made it sound like the landscape of a dream. And in fact, Melincourt is the legendary seat of King Arthur, and Tennyson sets his
Idylls of the King
there.

The
Guide to Wales
, which I had picked up at a secondhand bookshop
in the Charing Cross Road, described Southport as a little country market town “amid a pleasant, undulating, and luxuriant landscape of wood and meadow.” I had half an hour to spare between trains, and decided to look at the town. Ten minutes was enough. Whatever may have been its charms in 1900 (the date of the
Guide
), it is now a typical industrial town with cranes on the skyline and the hooting of trains and boats. I drank a double whisky in the hotel next to the station, to fortify myself in the event of a similar disappointment in Caerleon. And even this did little to relieve the impact of the dreary, modernised little town in which I found myself an hour later, after a short journey through the suburbs of Southport. The town is dominated by an immense red brick monstrosity, which I guessed correctly to be a mental institution. And Chesterton’s “Usk of mighty murmurings” struck me as a muddy stream whose appearance was not improved by the rain that now fell from the slate grey sky.

I checked into my hotel—an unpretentious place, without central heating—at half past three, looked at the flowered wallpaper in my bedroom—at least one survival from 1900—and decided to walk out in the rain.

A hundred yards along the main street, I passed a garage with a hand-printed notice
CARS FOR HIRE
. A short, bespectacled man was leaning over the engine of a car. I asked him whether there was a driver available.

“Oh yes, sir.”

“This afternoon?”

“If you like, sir. Where did you want to go?”

“Just to look at the countryside.”

He looked incredulous. “You are a tourist, are you, sir?”

“I suppose so, in a way.”

“I’ll be right with you.”

His air as he wiped his hands suggested that he thought this was too good to miss. Five minutes later, he was waiting in front of the building, wearing a leather motoring jacket of a 1920ish vintage, and driving a car of the same period. The headlights actually vibrated up and down to the chatter of its engine.

“Where to?”

“Anywhere. Somewhere towards the north—towards Monmouth.”

I sat huddled in the back, watching the rain, and feeling distinct signs of a cold coming on. But after ten minutes, the car warmed up, and the scenery improved. In spite of modernisation and the October drizzle, the Usk valley remained extremely beautiful. The green of the fields was striking, even compared to Virginia. The woods were, as Machen said, mysterious and shadowy, and the scenery looked almost too picturesque to be genuine, like one of those grandiose romantic
landscapes by Asher Durand. And to the north and northeast lay the mountains, hardly visible through the smokey clouds; the desolate landscape of “The White People” and “The Novel of the Black Seal”—both very fresh in my mind. Mr. Evans, my driver, had the tact not to speak, but to allow me to soak up the feeling of the landscape.

I asked my driver whether he had ever seen Machen, but I had to spell the name before Mr. Evans ever recognised it. As far as I could tell, Machen seemed completely forgotten in his native town.

“You studyin’ him, are you, sir?”

He used the word “studying” as if it were some remote and ritualistic activity. I acknowledged that I was; in fact, I exaggerated slightly and said that I thought of writing a book on Machen. This aroused his interest; whatever might have been his attitude to dead writers, he had nothing but respect for living ones. I told him that several of Machen’s stories were set in these desolate hills that lay ahead of us, and I added casually:

“What I really want to find out is where he picked up the legends he used in his stories. I’m fairly sure he didn’t invent them. Do you know of anyone around here who might know about them—the vicar, for example?”

“Oh, no. The vicar wouldn’t know anythin’ about legends.” He made it sound as if legends were a thoroughly pagan activity.

“Can you think of anyone who might?”

“Let’s see. There’s the Colonel, if you could get on the right side of him. He’s a funny chap, is the Colonel. If he don’t like you, you’d be wastin’ your breath.”

I tried to find out more about this Colonel—whether he was an antiquary, perhaps; but Evans’s statements remained Celtically vague. I changed the subject to the scenery, and got a steady stream of information that lasted all the way back to Melincourt. At Mr. Evans’s suggestion, we drove as far north as Raglan, then turned west and drove back with the Black Mountains on our right, looking bleaker and more menacing at close quarters than from the green lowlands around Melincourt. In Pontypool, I stopped and bought a book about the Roman remains at Melincourt, and a secondhand copy of Giraldus Cambrensis, the Welsh historian and geographer, a contemporary of Roger Bacon.

Mr. Evans’s taxi rates proved to be surprisingly reasonable, and I agreed to hire him for a whole day as soon as the weather improved. Then, back in the hotel, with a potation called grog, consisting of brown rum, hot water, lemon juice, and sugar, I read the London newspapers, and made cautious enquiries about the Colonel. This line of approach proving barren—the Welsh are not forthcoming with strangers—I looked him up in the phone book. Colonel Lionel Urquart,
The Leasowes, Melincourt. Then, fortified by my grog, I went into the icy phone kiosk and dialled his number. A woman’s voice with an almost incomprehensible Welsh accent said the Colonel was not at home, then said he might be, and she would go and look.

After a long wait, a harsh British upper-class voice barked into the phone: “Hello, who is it?” I identified myself, but before I could finish, he snapped: “I’m sorry, I never give interviews.” I explained quickly that I was a professor of literature, not a journalist.