The Cthulhu Mythos Megapack (40 Modern and Classic Lovecraftian Tales) (80 page)

That’s what Gregorias said, and he was dead.

Later, Ulrich and I rose from troubled sleep and made our way out into the corridor, into the darkness, where we battled stone giants, ancient warriors turned to stone yet still alive, the days of their lives having been devoured by the
Chronophagos
. Now they were mere dreams given form by the sleeping monster, and we battled them, breaking our swords and our axes upon them, until stone hands seized us by our throats, crushing the life out of us both.

Father Gregorias, awakening suddenly from some half-remembered nightmare, sat up on the ash-strewn hearth. He put his hand to his throat, remembering it crushed, and to his gut, where the sword went in.

He, who was dead, remembered us.

Christ have mercy.

But we were not godly men, any of the company of twelve.

V

…and I awoke, to tear the world to pieces.

The boy Jon, he of the almost luminous, pale hands and face was beside me. We heard shouting in the corridor outside, the sound of metal striking on stone, curses, cries of pain.

“If we were brave men,” I said, “we would go out and assist our comrades, and die alongside them rather than hide from combat.”

“But the world has enough heroes already,” said Jon.

And I remembered all that he was going to say, as if we were rehearsing a litany we already knew.

“If we were godly men,” I said, “we would pray to Christ for forgiveness for our many sins, for his power alone may lead us out of the darkness into which we, like all men, have fallen.”

“Father Gregorias said the same thing at table.”

“Yes, he did.”

“Did you believe it?”

We knelt, holding our swords before us like crosses, as men who dedicate themselves to the Crusade often do, and we prayed that all our sins might be washed away in the blood of our foes, that we might emerge triumphant for the glory of God, but as we prayed, Jon wept, and it was then that some answer came to me, enlightenment from within my
own
memory.

I saw him as a child, still, and innocent. I
remembered
him as a child, barefoot, muddy, playing at his mother’s feet in some dank hovel like a tomb.
I
was that child too. He and I were the same, which meant that his sins and mine were shared, and I saw that his sins were not very great. Not yet.

It was a strange feeling, something I, in all my tens of thousands of years of sleeping in the earth, had never before experienced.

We rose, swords in hand, and went out the door, into the darkness.

Someone shuffled away from us, muttering a Greek phrase over and over. Jon would have pursued. I caught him by the shoulder and said, “No, wait.”

“Wait?”

“Put your sword away,” I said, and, bewildered, he sheathed it. “Jon, I want you to leave this place. You alone shall escape and tell our tale. No more fighting for you.”

“I cannot desert you, Lord,” he said.

“Don’t call me that. I release you from whatever oaths may bind you. Go!”

“How is it possible? You know it is not.”

“If I create a diversion, the
Chronophagos
will not notice when you get away. If but a single morsel falls from his table.”

“I would stay with you, my master. It is what a true knight would do.”

I took him by both his shoulders, turned him around, and shoved him away from me, into the corridor down which Father Gregorias had fled. “If I’m your master, then I command you. Obey for once. It’s what a true knight would do. Go! Save yourself, boy, because I wish it. Go!”

I think that long ago, before things went so terribly wrong, when we two dedicated ourselves to God and God’s holy Crusade and were filled with high-sounding ideals like flies buzzing inside our heads, I had thought to be as a father to him.

That we two had once loved one another, as brothers, as comrades, even as we loved and dedicated ourselves to God was the incomprehensible mystery at the heart of all mysteries.

We had fallen so very far into the darkness. Now he alone had a chance to get out. My parting gift to him, and to God.

When he had gone, or when I had at least managed to lose him in the darkness, I ventured forth, sword in hand, groping my way into the very heart of the castle, drawn by my own mounting instinct of dread, turning again and again in the direction I feared most. I
remember
doing battle with warriors of stone. I
remember
many deaths, including my own, my several deaths, my thousand deaths, the deaths of more than a dozen rogue knights and hangers-on, but of actual
heroes
, the oldest of whom fought alongside Achilles. Even then the
Chronophagos
lay ancient and dreaming in the earth, having fallen from the stars.

I
remember
how it ended, how I emerged, like one awakening from a dream, into a vast chamber in the heart of the castle, deep down, I think, in the core of the Earth, which is like a sphere within a sphere within a sphere. I passed through realms of stone and ice and fire, and suffered many torments and many deaths, yet, sword in hand, I came to a great hall, which was also a cavern, made of black ice, yet lurid with heatless fires. There, seated at table were numerous men, Ulrich Bloody-Axe and Jehan the French knight and Father Gregorias, and so many more, even those who had marched to battle alongside Achilles. I searched among their company, and was relieved at last to discover that the boy Jon, who had been my squire and companion in my adventures, was not there. I sat down among strangers, whose dreams and memories I already shared.

Then she who presided over the feast bade us eat and drink, and we did so.

At the head of the table, upon a dais, was set a throne, whereon sat a queen, clad all in white, her exquisite face pale like a luminous paper cutout adrift on a black stream, her eyes grey, her hair, it seemed, stirring slightly of its own accord like the serpent-hair of the ancient medusae.

I rose from my place, sword in hand.

I leapt boldly onto the dais. No one made to stop me, even as I seized her by the living, wriggling hair.

“Are you the
Chronophagos?
” I demanded.

She smiled at me, revealing nothing. In her eyes there was no expression at all.

I struck off her head, and her body collapsed like a thing of dust and crumpled paper, and I held my sword in one hand, nothing in the other.

I felt the blade pass though my own neck, then. Some ruffian had struck off my head while asking ridiculous questions.

“Come and I will show you,” someone said.

I beheld another dais at the other end of the table, and another throne, on which sat an ancient king, his face more lined and weary with age that it is possible to describe or imagine, his tattered, dusty robes like cerements, his crown of gold so pale it was almost the color of bone.

Only his eyes were alive, with a kind of fire.

I made my way through the company of the feasting heroes,
through
them, as a child might pass a stick through the swirling mass of darker mud he has stirred up from the bottom of a still pool.

He
heard their thousand voices, like a whispering tide.

I remembered them all.

I descended into another void, the space within space, the core within core, into the earth where a great stone thing lay dreaming, its form shaped only by human fancies into something describable at all, something with serpentine hair or the face of a king or a queen or the knight called Ulrich Bloody Axe, but not like that at all. Not really.

Its vast mouth gaped wide. My guide and I floated within like inhaled motes of dust. We walked through long, dark, winding corridors, through a labyrinth I knew would never end. We came to a feasting hall, and
I, who had been called Erec of Brittany and Ulrich and Father Gregorias, and who had marched to war with Achilles and who reigned now, in darkness, as an ancient and weary king
, I sat down on my throne and watched the ghosts of warriors feasting, and listened as a company of twelve knights arrived at my gate, having lost their way.

I closed my eyes, and contemplated the incomprehensible stone face which had fallen from the stars and lay in the earth. It opened its eyes, and they were mine, and I looked out through all my memories and accumulated, stolen dreams, and understood that
I
was the
Chronophagos.

I felt one small satisfaction, that Jon was not there.

VI

I am Jon, who was a squire and gave up the sword for the harp and learned it but a little, and came to sing only one song that no one wants to hear. I have been driven from place to place, cast stones more often than bread, left to sleep in ditches rather than by warm hearths; I who am ragged and filthy and starving and no longer young, remember my adventure like a dream from which I have
never
awakened. I am afraid, when I lie in darkness, that the
Chronophagos
has
already
devoured the whole world, so that all our lives, all our histories and wars, are just the dreams of the
Chronophagos
stirring, as a child with a stick stirs mud on the bottom of a pool.

Who can say that it is not so?

UBBO-SATHLA, by Clark Ashton Smith

For Ubbo-Sathla is the source and the end. Before the coming of Zhothaqquah or Yok-Zothoth or Kthulhut from the stars, Ubbo-Sathla dwelt in the steaming fens of the newmade Earth: a mass without head or members, spawning the grey, formless efts of the prime and the grisly prototypes of terrene life… And all earthly life, it is told, shall go back at last through the great circle of time to Ubbo-Sathla.

—The Book of Eibon.

* * * *

Paul Tregardis found the milky crystal in a litter of oddments from many lands and eras. He had entered the shop of the curio-dealer through an aimless impulse, with no particular object in mind other than the idle distraction of eyeing and fingering a miscellany of far-gathered things. Looking desultorily about, his attention had been drawn by a dull glimmering on one of the tables; and he had extricated the queer orblike stone from its shadowy, crowded position between an ugly little Aztec idol, the fossil egg of a dinornis, and an obscene fetish of black wood from the Niger.

The thing was about the size of a small orange and was slightly flattened at the ends, like a planet at its poles. It puzzled Tregardis, for it was not like an ordinary crystal, being cloudy and changeable, with an intermittent glowing in its heart, as if it were alternately illumed and darkened from within. Holding it to the wintry window, he studied it for awhile without being able to determine the secret of this singular and regular alternation. His puzzlement was soon complicated by a dawning sense of vague and irrecognizable familiarity, as if he had seen the thing before under circumstances that were now wholly forgotten.

He appealed to the curio-dealer, a dwarfish Hebrew with an air of dusty antiquity, who gave the impression of being lost to commercial considerations in some web of cabbalistic revery.

“Can you tell me anything about this?”

The dealer gave an indescribable, simultaneous shrug of his shoulders and his eyebrows.

“It is very old—palaeogean, one might say. I cannot tell you much, for little is known. A geologist found it in Greenland beneath glacial ice, in the Miocene strata. Who knows? It may have belonged to some sorcerer of primeval Thule. Greenland was a warm, fertile region beneath the sun of Miocene times. No doubt it is a magic crystal, and a man might behold strange visions in its heart, if he looked long enough.”

Tregardis was quite startled, for the dealer’s apparently fantastic suggestion had brought to mind his own delvings in a branch of obscure lore; and in particular had recalled
The Book of Eibon,
that strangest and rarest of occult forgotten volumes, which is said to have come down through a series of manifold translations from a prehistoric original written in the lost language of Hyperborea. Tregardis, with much difficulty, had obtained the medieval French version—a copy that had been owned by many generations of sorcerers and Satanists—but had never been able to find the Greek manuscript from which his version was derived.

The remote, fabulous original was supposed to have been the work of a great Hyperborean wizard, from whom it had taken its name. It was a collection of dark and baleful myths, of liturgies, rituals, and incantations both evil and esoteric. Not without shudders, in the course of studies that the average person would have considered more than singular, Tregardis had collated the French volume with the frightful
Necronomicon
of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred. He had found many correspondences of the blackest and most appalling significance, together with much forbidden data that was either unknown to the Arab or omitted by him…or by his translators.

Was this what he had been trying to recall, Tregardis wondered? The brief, casual reference, in
The Book of Eibon
, to a cloudy crystal that had been owned by the wizard Zon Mezzamalech, in Mhu Thulan? Of course, it was all too fantastic, too hypothetic, too incredible—but Mhu Thulan, that northern portion of ancient Hyperborea, was supposed to have corresponded roughly with modern Greenland, which had formerly been joined as a peninsula to the main continent. Could the stone in his hand, by some fabulous fortuity, be the crystal of Zon Mezzamalech?

Tregardis smiled at himself with inward irony for even conceiving the absurd notion. Such things did not occur—at least, not in present-day London; and in all likelihood,
The Book of Eibon
was sheer superstitious fantasy, anyway. Nevertheless, there was something about the crystal that continued to tease and inveigle him. He ended by purchasing it at a fairly moderate price. The sum was named by the seller and paid by the buyer without bargaining.

With the crystal in his pocket, Paul Tregardis hastened back to his lodgings instead of resuming his leisurely saunter. He installed the milky globe on his writing table, where it stood firmly enough on one of its oblate ends. Then, still smiling at his own absurdity, he took down the yellow parchment manuscript of
The Book of Eibon
from its place in a somewhat inclusive collection of
recherché
literature. He opened the vermiculated leather cover with hasps of tarnished steel and read over to himself, translating from the archaic French as he read, the paragraph that referred to Zon Mezzamalech:

“This wizard, who was mighty among sorcerers, had found a cloudy stone, orblike and somewhat flattened at the ends, in which he could behold many visions of the terrene past, even to the Earth’s beginning, when Ubbo-Sathla, the unbegotten source, lay vast and swollen and yeasty amid the vaporing slime… But of that which he beheld, Zon Mezzamalech left little record; and people say that he vanished presently, in a way that is not known; and after him the cloudy crystal was lost.”

Paul Tregardis laid the manuscript aside. Again there was something that tantalized and beguiled him, like a lost dream or a memory forfeit to oblivion. Impelled by a feeling which he did not scrutinize or question, he sat down before the table and began to stare intently into the cold, nebulous orb. He felt an expectation which, somehow, was so familiar, so permeative a part of his consciousness, that he did not even name it to himself.

Minute by minute he sat and watched the alternate glimmering and fading of the mysterious light in the heart of the crystal. By imperceptible degrees, there stole upon him a sense of dreamlike duality, both in respect to his person and his surroundings. He was still Paul Tregardis—and yet he was someone else; the room was his London apartment—and a chamber in some foreign but well-known place.
And in both milieus he peered steadfastly into the same crystal.

After an interim, without surprise on the part of Tregardis, the process of re-identification became complete. He knew that he was Zon Mezzamalech, a sorcerer of Mhu Thulan, and a student of all lore anterior to his own epoch. Wise with dreadful secrets that were not known to Paul Tregardis, amateur of anthropology and the occult sciences in latter-day London, he sought by means of the milky crystal to attain an even older and more fearful knowledge.

He had acquired the stone in dubitable ways from a more than sinister source. It was unique and without fellow in any land or time. In its depths, all former years, all things that have ever been, were supposedly mirrored and would reveal themselves to the patient visionary. And through the crystal, Zon Mezzamalech had dreamt to recover the wisdom of the gods who died before the Earth was born. They had passed to the lightless void, leaving their lore inscribed upon tablets of ultra-stellar stone; and the tablets were guarded in the primal mire by the formless, idiotic demiurge, Ubbo-Sathla. Only by means of the crystal could he hope to find and read the tablets.

For the first time, he was making trial of the globe’s reputed virtues. About him an ivory-panelled chamber, filled with his magic books and paraphernalia, was fading slowly from his consciousness. Before him, on a table of some dark Hyperborean wood that had been graven with grotesque ciphers, the crystal appeared to swell and deepen, and in its filmy depth he beheld a swift and broken swirling of dim scenes, fleeting like the bubbles of a millrace. As if he looked upon an actual world, cities, forests, mountains, seas and meadows flowed beneath him, lightening and darkening as with the passage of days and nights in some weirdly accelerated stream of time.

Zon Mezzamalech had forgotten Paul Tregardis—had lost the remembrance of his own entity and his own surroundings in Mhu Thulan. Moment by moment, the flowing vision in the crystal became more definite and distinct, and the orb itself deepened till he grew giddy, as if he were peering from an insecure height into some never-fathomed abyss. He knew that time was racing backward in the crystal, was unrolling for him the pageant of all past days; but a strange alarm had seized him, and he feared to gaze longer. Like one who has nearly fallen from a precipice, he caught himself with a violent start and drew back from the mystic orb.

Again, to his gaze, the enormous whirling world into which he had peered was a small and cloudy crystal on his rune-wrought table in Mhu Thulan. Then, by degrees, it seemed that the great room with sculptured panels of mammoth ivory was narrowing to another and dingier place; and Zon Mezzamalech, losing his preternatural wisdom and sorcerous power, went back by a weird regression into Paul Tregardis.

And yet not wholly, it seemed, was he able to return. Tregardis, dazed and wondering, found himself before the writing table on which he had set the oblate sphere. He felt the confusion of one who has dreamt and has not yet fully awakened from the dream. The room puzzled him vaguely, as if something were wrong with its size and furnishings; and his remembrance of purchasing the crystal from a curio-dealer was oddly and discrepantly mingled with an impression that he had acquired it in a very different manner.

He felt that something very strange had happened to him when he peered into the crystal; but just what it was he could not seem to recollect. It had left him in the sort of psychic muddlement that follows a debauch of hashish. He assured himself that he was Paul Tregardis, that he lived on a certain street in London, that the year was 1932; but such commonplace verities had somehow lost their meaning and their validity; and everything about him was shadowlike and insubstantial. The very walls seemed to waver like smoke; the people in the streets were phantoms of phantoms; and he himself was a lost shadow, a wandering echo of something long forgotten.

He resolved that he would not repeat his experiment of crystal-gazing. The effects were too unpleasant and equivocal. But the very next day, by an unreasoning impulse to which he yielded almost mechanically, without reluctation, he found himself seated before the misty orb. Again he became the sorcerer Zon Mezzamalech in Mhu Thulan; again he dreamt to retrieve the wisdom of the antemundane gods; again he drew back from the deepening crystal with the terror of one who fears to fall; and once more—but doubtfully and dimly, like a failing wraith—he was Paul Tregardis.

* * * *

Three times did Tregardis repeat the experience on successive days, and each time his own person and the world about him became more tenuous and confused than before. His sensations were those of a dreamer who is on the verge of waking; and London itself was unreal as the lands that slip from the dreamer’s ken, receding in filmy mist and cloudy light. Beyond it all, he felt the looming and crowding of vast imageries, alien but half-familiar. It was as if the phantasmagoria of time and space were dissolving about him, to reveal some veritable reality—or another dream of space and time.

There came, at last, the day when he sat down before the crystal—and did not return as Paul Tregardis. It was the day when Zon Mezzamalech, boldly disregarding certain evil and portentous warnings, resolved to overcome his curious fear of falling bodily into the visionary world that he beheld—a fear that had hitherto prevented him from following the backward stream of time for any distance. He must, he assured himself, conquer this fear if he were ever to see and read the lost tablets of the gods. He had beheld nothing more than a few fragments of the years of Mhu Thulan immediately posterior to the present—the years of his own lifetime—and there were inestimable cycles between these years and the Beginning.

Again, to his gaze, the crystal deepened immeasurably, with scenes and happenings that flowed in a retrograde stream. Again the magic ciphers of the dark table faded from his ken, and the sorcerously carven walls of his chamber melted into less than dream. Once more he grew giddy with an awful vertigo as he bent above the swirling and milling of the terrible gulfs of time in the worldlike orb. Fearfully, in spite of his resolution, he would have drawn away; but he had looked and leaned too long. There was a sense of abysmal falling, a suction as of ineluctable winds, of maelstroms that bore him down through fleet unstable visions of his own past life into antenatal years and dimensions. He seemed to endure the pangs of an inverse dissolution; and then he was no longer Zon Mezzamalech, the wise and learned watcher of the crystal, but an actual part of the weirdly racing stream that ran back to re-attain the Beginning.

He seemed to live unnumbered lives, to die myriad deaths, forgetting each time the death and life that had gone before. He fought as a warrior in half-legendary battles; he was a child playing in the ruins of some olden city of Mhu Thulan; he was the king who had reigned when the city was in its prime, the prophet who had foretold its building and its doom. A woman, he wept for the bygone dead in necropoli long-crumbled; an antique wizard, he muttered the rude spells of earlier sorcery; a priest of some pre-human god, he wielded the sacrificial knife in cave-temples of pillared basalt. Life by life, era by era, he re-traced the long and groping cycles through which Hyperborea had risen from savagery to a high civilization.

He became a barbarian of some troglodytic tribe, fleeing from the slow, turreted ice of a former glacial age into lands illumed by the ruddy flare of perpetual volcanoes. Then, after incomputable years, he was no longer man, but a manlike beast, roving in forests of giant fern and calamite, or building an uncouth nest in the boughs of mighty cycads.