The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies (7 page)

Seeing that my efforts to attract their attention were fruitless, I left the platform and wandered along the streets toward the harbor. The strangeness and inexplicability of it all was too much for me: more and more, I felt that I was being alienated from the realms of all rational experience or conjecture; that I had fallen into some unearthly limbo of confoundment and unreason, into the
cul-de-sac
of an ultra-terrestrial dimension. These beings were so palpably astray and bewildered; it was so obvious that they knew as well as I that there was something wrong with the geography, and perhaps with the chronology, of their island.

I spent the rest of the day roaming around; but nowhere could I find anyone who was able to perceive my presence; and nowhere was there anything to reassure me, or resolve my ever-growing confusion of mind and spirit. Everywhere there were men, and also women; and though comparatively few of them were grey and wrinkled, they all conveyed to my apprehension a feeling of immemorial eld, of years and cycles beyond all record or computation. And all were troubled, all were feverously intent, and were perusing maps or reading ancient pells
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and volumes, or staring at the sea and sky, or studying the brazen tablets of astronomical parapegms
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along the streets, as if by so doing they could somehow find the flaw in their reckonings. There were men and women of mature years, and some with the fresh, unlined visages of youth; but in all the place I saw but one child; and the face of the child was no less perplexed and troubled than those of its elders. If anyone ate or drank or carried on the normal occupations of life, it was not done within my scope of vision; and I conceived the idea that they had lived in this manner, obsessed with the same problem, through a period of time which would have been practically eternal in any other world than theirs.

I came to a large building, whose open door was dark with the shadows of the interior. Peering in, I found that it was a temple; for across the deserted twilight, heavy with the stale fumes of burnt-out incense, the slant eyes of a baleful and monstrous image glared upon me. The thing was seemingly of stone or wood, with gorilla-like arms and the malignant features of a sub-human race. From what little I could see in the gloom, it was not pleasant to look upon; and I left the temple, and continued my perambulations.

Now I came to the water-front, where the vessels with orange sails were moored at a stone mole. There were five or six of them in all: they were small galleys, with single banks of oars and figure-heads of metal that were graven with the likeness of primordial gods. They were indescribably worn by the waves of untold years; their sails were rotting rags; and no less than all else on the island, they bore the impress of a dread antiquity. It was easy to believe that their grotesquely carven prows had touched the aeon-sunken wharves of Lemuria.
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I returned to the town; and once again I sought to make my presence known to the inhabitants, but all in vain. And after awhile, as I trudged from street to street, the sun went down behind the island, and the stars came swiftly out in a heaven of purpureal velvet. The stars were large and lustrous and were innumerably thick: with the eye of a practiced mariner, I studied them eagerly; but I could not trace the wonted constellations, though here and there I thought that I perceived a distortion or elongation of some familiar grouping. All was hopelessly askew, and disorder crept into my very brain, as I tried once more to orient myself, and noticed that the inhabitants of the town were still busied with a similar endeavor. . . .

I have no way of computating the length of my sojourn on the island. Time didn't seem to have any proper meaning there; and, even if it had, my mental state was not one to admit of precise reckoning. It was all so impossible and unreal, so much like an absurd and troublesome hallucination; and half the time, I thought that it was merely a continuation of my delirium—that probably I was still drifting in the boat. After all, this was the most reasonable supposition; and I don't wonder that those who have heard my story refuse to entertain any other. I'd agree with them, if it weren't for one or two quite material details. . . .

The manner in which I lived is pretty vague to me, also. I remember sleeping under the stars, outside the town; I remember eating and drinking, and watching those people day after day, as they pursued their hopeless calculations. Sometimes I went into the houses and helped myself to food; and once or twice, if I remember rightly, I slept on a couch in one of them, without being disputed or heeded by the owners. There was nothing that could break the spell of their obsession or force them to notice me; and I soon gave up the attempt. And it seemed to me, as time went on, that I myself was no less unreal, no less doubtful and insubstantial, than their disregard would appear to indicate.

In the midst of my bewilderment, however, I found myself wondering if it would be possible to get away from the island. I remembered my boat, and remembered also that I had no oars. And forthwith I made tentative preparations for departure. In broad daylight, before the eyes of the townspeople, I took two oars from one of the galleys in the harbor, and carried them across the ridge to where my boat was hidden. The oars were very heavy, their blades were broad as fans, and their handles were fretted with hieroglyphs of silver. Also, I appropriated from one of the houses two earthen jars, painted with barbaric figures, and bore them away to the lagoon, intending to fill them with fresh water when I left. And also I collected a supply of food. But somehow the brain-muddling mystery of it all had paralyzed my initiative; and even when everything was ready, I delayed my departure. I felt, too, that the inhabitants must have tried innumerable times to get away in their galleys, and had always failed. And so I lingered on, like a man in the grip of some ridiculous nightmare.

One evening, when those distorted stars had all come out, I became aware that unusual things were going on. The people were no longer standing about in groups, with their customary porings and discussions, but were all hastening toward the temple-like edifice. I followed them, and peered in at the door.

The place was lit with flaring torches that flung demoniac shadows on the crowd and on the idol before whom they were bowing. Perfumes were burnt, and chants were sung in the myriad-vowelled language with which my ear had become familiarized. They were invoking that frightful image with gorilla-like arms and half-human, half-animal face; and it was not hard for me to surmise the purpose of the invocation. Then the voices died to a sorrowful whisper, the smoke of the censers thinned, and the little child I had once seen was thrust forward in a vacant space between the congregation and the idol.

I had thought, of course, that the god was of wood or stone; but now, in a flash of terror and consternation, I wondered if I had been mistaken. For the oblique eyes opened more widely, and glowered upon the child, and the long arms, ending in knife-taloned fingers, lifted slowly and reached forward. And arrow-sharp fangs were displayed in the bestial grin of the leaning face. The child was still as a bird beneath the hypnotic eyes of a serpent; and there was no movement, and no longer even a whisper, from the waiting throng. . . .

I cannot recall what happened then: whenever I try to recall it, there is a cloud of horror and darkness in my brain. I must have left the temple and fled across the island by starlight; but of this, too, I remember nothing. My first recollection is of rowing sea-ward through the narrow chasm by which I had entered the lagoon, and of trying to steer a course by the wried
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and twisted constellations. After that, there were days and days on a bland, unrippling sea, beneath a heaven of dazzling incandescence; and more nights below the crazy stars; till the days and nights became an eternity of tortured weariness; and my food and water were all consumed; and hunger and thirst and a feverous calenture with tossing, seething hallucinations, were all that I knew.

One night, I came to myself for a little while, and lay staring up at the sky. And once more the stars were those of the rightful heavens; and I gave thanks to God for my sight of the Southern Cross, ere I slid back into coma and delirium. And when I recovered consciousness again, I was lying in a ship's cabin, and the ship's doctor was bending over me.

They were all very kind to me, on that ship. But when I tried to tell them my tale, they smiled pityingly; and after a few attempts, I learned to keep my silence. They were very curious about the two oars with silver-fretted handles, and the painted jars which they found with me in the boat; but they were all too frank in refusing to accept my explanation. No such island and no such people could possibly exist, they said: it was contrary to all the maps that had ever been made, and gave the direct lie to all the ethnologists and geographers.

Often I wonder about it, myself, for there are so many things I can't explain. Is there a part of the Pacific that extends beyond time and space—an oceanic limbo into which, by some unknowable cataclysm, that island passed in a bygone period, even as Lemuria sank beneath the wave? And if so, by what abrogation of dimensional laws was I enabled to reach the island and depart from it? These things are beyond speculation. But often in my dreams, I see again the incognizably distorted stars, and share the confusion and bafflement of a lost people, as they pore above their useless charts, and take the altitude of a deviated sun.

It was after the commission of the deed, and during his nation-wide flight from its legal consequences, that Edgar Sylen began to develop an aversion for rivers, and a dread of women's faces. It had never occurred to him before that so many rivers resembled the Sacramento; nor had he imagined that anything sinister could attach itself to the leaning willows and alders along their banks. Now, wherever he went, by some macabre coincidence he was always coming at afterglow of a sullen sunset to the edge of tree-fringed running waters, from which he would recoil with guilty fright and repulsion. Also, he saw resemblances to the dead woman everywhere, in the girls that he passed on the streets of unfamiliar towns and cities. He had never thought, even before he began to see her with the altered vision of enamorment, that Elise belonged to a frequently encountered type. But now, with observational powers that were morbidly sharpened in this one regard, he found that her short oval face with its pallor untouched by rouge, her high, faintly pencilled brows above eyes of deep violet-grey, her full, petulant mouth, or her slender but well-curved figure, were seemingly to be met on every pavement and in every train, street-car, shop, restaurant and hotel.

Sylen was not aware of any consuming remorse for his act, in the usual sense of the word. But certainly he had reason to regret it as a piece of overwhelming and irremediable folly, into which he had been driven by the goading of some devilish fatality. Elise had been his stenographer: the propinquity of business association had drawn them into a more intimate relationship; and he had loved her for awhile, till she became too exacting, too exorbitant in her demands. He was not brutal or cold-blooded, he had never dreamed of killing her at any time; and even when he had tired of her, and even in that last walk at twilight by the river, when she had threatened with bitter, hysterical reproaches to tell his wife of their affair, he had not really wanted to harm the girl. His feeling had been a mixture of alarm at the menace to his domestic security, and a sudden, mad desire to still the intolerable, shrewish clamor of her tedious voice. He hardly knew that he had gripped her by the throat, that he was choking her with ferocious fingers. Such an action was totally foreign to his own conception of himself; and when he realized what he was doing, he had loosed her and pushed her away from him. All he could see at that moment was her frightened face, her throat with the visible marks of his fingers—white as an apparition in the dusk, and appallingly distinct in every detail. He had forgotten that they were so close to the river's edge, had forgotten that the water was very deep below the bank at that particular place. These things he had remembered when he heard the splash of her fall; and he had also remembered, with a numb sense of terror, that neither he nor Elise could swim. Perhaps she had lost consciousness when she fell: for she had sunk immediately, and had not risen to the surface again. The whole scene was dim and confused in Sylen's mind, apart from that final glimpse of her face on the shore. His flight from California was vague to him also; and his first clear memory was that of a newspaper he had seen the next morning in a neighboring state, with pictures of Elise and himself above a lurid conjectural description of the crime. The horror of those headlines, in which he seemed to meet the accusing eyes of a vast multitude of people, was branded ineffaceably upon his brain. Henceforth it was a perpetual miracle to him that he could manage to evade arrest. Like most criminals, he felt that the world was pre-occupied with himself and his crime; and did not realize its manifold oblivion, its absorption in multiform pursuits and interests.

He was stunned by the consequences of the deed, by the break that it entailed with his whole past life, with everything and everyone he had known. His flourishing business, the respectable place he had won in his community, his wife and two children—all were lost beyond recovery through something which, as he had soon persuaded himself, was no more than a fatal accident. The idea of himself as a fugitive from justice, as a vulgar murderer in the eyes of the world, was alien and confusing to the last degree. He retained enough wit, however, to disguise himself with a touch of subtlety, and to double upon his trail in a manner that baffled the police. He bought some second-hand clothing, of the type that would be worn by a laboring-man, and disposed of his neat tailor-made suit by leaving it at night beneath a pile of old lumber. He allowed his beard to grow, and purchased a pair of heavy-rimmed spectacles. These simple measures transformed him from a well-to-do realtor to a socialistic carpenter out of work. In trying to conceal his furtiveness, his perennial fear of observation, he acquired a rough and fierce air that was quite compatible with the role of a discontented workman.

Sylen was well supplied with money. Even when prolonged security had diminished his fear of arrest, he did not dare to linger in any place. A queer, morbid restlessness impelled him to go on. And always, it seemed to him, there was a willow-bordered river to remind him of the scene of his act; and always there were women who resembled Elise. The mere sight of a stream, or a girl with the fancied likeness, even in one feature or detail of costume, would send him toward the nearest railroad station. He tried not to think of Elise, and sometimes succeeded; but any chance resemblance was too much for his nerves. The damnable frequency of such resemblances became one of his chief worries. He could not account for them as part of the natural order of things.

Often, with apparitional suddenness and irrelevance, he would remember Elise as he had seen her in that last moment, when her face had emerged from the twilight with such preternatural pallor and vividness. Even when he managed to forget her, there was a sense of some troublous haunting in the background of his mind. He developed also a physical feeling that he was not alone—that an unseen presence accompanied him wherever he went. But at first he did not connect this feeling with Elise, nor did he associate with her the earliest beginnings of the actual visual hallucination from which he eventually came to suffer.

Sylen was well aware of his growing nervousness, and made desultory efforts to overcome it. He knew, or had been told, that such a condition might lead to insanity. He tried by means of auto-suggestion to dismiss the irrational fears and impressions that dogged him in his wanderings. He felt that he was succeeding to some extent, that his haunting obsessions were growing fainter. Then, simultaneously with this, he began to think that there was something wrong with his eye-sight. He was troubled by a small, blurred image, somewhat to one side in his field of vision—an image that he could not seize or define, and which followed him everywhere, maintaining always the same position. He could even see it when he lay awake in the darkness—as if it were possessed of a pale luminosity. It occurred to him that the glasses he wore were injuring his eyes; and forthwith he discarded them; but the unaccountable blurring still persisted. For some reason, other than his natural fear of optical disease, it made him horribly uneasy. But, for the time being, he did not think so often of Elise. Also, he was not quite so afraid of rivers and women as he had formerly been.

One evening, in a strange city far from the state he had left, Sylen deliberately went for a walk by the shore of a tree-fringed river. He wanted to reassure himself, wanted to feel that he was mastering his old terrors.

It was still twilight when he neared the water—that deceptive half light which alters the position and proportion of objects in a manner so illusory. All at once, Sylen became aware that the strange blur in his field of vision was now directly before him instead of at one side. Also, the blur had defined itself to a human face, seen as in some diminished perspective, at an interval of vague distance. But the face was unnaturally clear in every feature, and was outlined in luminous pallor against the dark flowing of the stream. It was the face of Elise, even as Edgar Sylen had last seen her . . .

Sylen was unable afterward to recollect the circumstances of his flight from the apparition. Any real consciousness of his actions was drowned for awhile by a primordial tide of unreasoning terror. When he came to himself, trembling like an ague patient, he was sitting in the lighted smoker of a moving train. He could not even remember where he was going, till he looked at the ticket which he held in his hand. He no longer saw the face of Elise; but, even as before, there was a blurred image in his field of vision—perhaps not so far to one side as it had been at first.

For several days, it was only at twilight that the image became definite. But all the time it was moving nearer to the center of his vision. Then he saw the face at various hours during the day, and also at night. It was always pale and luminous, it was detached and disembodied, like a face that has been superimposed on a photographic plate. But the clearness of detail was abnormal; even at the remote perspective which it maintained for many days, he could see the horror-widened eyes, the parted lips, and the livid marks of his fingers on the white throat. It appeared to him on the streets, in trains, in restaurants and hotel-lobbies; it came between him and the visages of people when he passed; he saw it in the foliage of trees, and among the faces of actors in the plays or films to which he had gone in the hope of temporary distraction. But at first the haunting was not continual; the face came and went at varying intervals, and left him always with the same paralyzing horror, which would wear off in some slight degree before the next appearance.

Sylen had never been a believer in the supernatural. But he knew a little about brain diseases and morbid hallucinations. His fear of the dead woman was more than doubled by a fear of madness. He felt that he was unquestionably headed for some sort of lunacy. At first he tried to reason with himself in the interludes of his panic. Among other things, he went to a public library with the idea of consulting various medical volumes on brain-pathology. He did not repeat his visit: for while he was reading one of the pages in a work of this type, the letters suddenly began to blur and fade; and it seemed to him that he was looking through and beyond them into a shadowy gulf, in which swam the face of Elise.

From that time onward, the appearances of the face were more frequent day by day; till the hour came when he saw it continually. For awhile, he drank soddenly; he sought the anodyne of drugs; but without losing the specter even in the ultimate delirium of his intoxication. Then his mind succumbed to a fear that was utterly beyond reason; and he dwelt henceward in a hell of fantasmal and superstitious terrors. The thing was no longer a mere hallucination, it had come back from the cryptic realms of the dead, from a gulf beyond mortal perception, to freeze his blood and his brain with ghastly intimations of all that is hidden in the depths of death. Perhaps his mind had already given way; for he soon lost the fear of madness in a greater and more abysmal fear of the woman herself, and the unknown world into which he had precipitated her by his crime. In his heedlessness of anything but the apparition, he would stumble against people on the street; and he was often in danger from passing vehicles. But in some miraculous manner, like a somnambulist, he would avoid them without ever knowing his peril or his escape.

The face was nearer now. It sat opposite him at every table, it moved before him along the pavements, it stood at the feet of his bed through the night-time. It was always the same, with widely staring eyes, and lips that were parted in an eternal gasp. Sylen was no longer conscious of what he did or where he went. It was some automatic portion of his brain which enabled him to continue the daily movements and actions of life. He was wholly obsessed by the image of Elise, he lived in a kind of mental catalepsy. Held by a dreadful hypnosis, he watched all day in open sun or rain or shadowy rooms, the thing that was stamped upon his vision; and he watched it during the night, by lamplight or in utter darkness. He slept very little, and when he did sleep, Elise hovered before him in the vistas of his dreams. It was mostly at night, lying awake, that he became aware of the abyss that lay behind and beneath her face—an abyss in which he could see the slow sinking of dim, macabre forms, of corpse-like or skeleton-like things that appeared always to fall and decompose in unfathomable gloom. But the face itself never sank into the abyss.

Sylen knew nothing of time. The moment in which he had last seen Elise was re-lived by him in a virtual eternity through the perpetuation of her visual image. And he knew nothing of the cities through which he passed, nor the route by which he returned on a latter evening, still oblivious of his whereabouts, to the city and the river-side of his crime. He knew only that the face was leading him somewhere, to an end which his palsied faculties could not even imagine.

He stared about him with sightless eyes. Here, in the dusk, beneath the unheeded willows, beside the unrecognized flowing of the Sacramento, the face drew nearer still. The phantom throat was within arms' length for the first time—even as when he had loosed his fingers from the living throat of Elise and had pushed her back toward the water in a sullen twilight many months before.

Sylen did not perceive that he was standing close to the river-brink. He saw only the features of Elise, knew only that her throat was within seeming reach of his fingers once more. It was a mad impulse of frantic fear, of ultimate desperation, which made him clutch at the white phantom, with its changeless eyes and mouth, and the livid, never-fading marks below its chin. . . .

He still saw the face for a little while, when he sank beneath the water. It seemed to swim on a fathomless abyss, where human bones and cadavers were slowly drowning in a darkness that was like the deliquescence of the world and of all past years and eras. The face was very close to him as he went down . . . and then it began to recede in a lessening perspective . . . and then, suddenly, he saw it no longer.