The Horror in the Museum (68 page)

II.

“So you have the snapshots?” Theunis drawled. I met his gray eyes across the breakfast table. Three days had slipped by since my return from Hell’s Acres. I had told him about the dream beneath the tree, and he had laughed.

“Yes,” I replied. “They came last night. Haven’t had a chance to open them yet. Give ‘em a good, careful study—if they aren’t all failures. Perhaps you’ll change your mind.”

Theunis smiled; sipped his coffee. I gave him the unopened envelope and he quickly broke the seal and withdrew the pictures. He glanced at the first one, and the smile faded from his leonine face. He crushed out his cigarette.

“My God, man! Look at this!”

I seized the glossy rectangle. It was the first picture of the tree,
taken at a distance of fifty feet or so. The cause of Theunis’ excitement escaped me. There it was, standing boldly on the hill, while below it grew the jungle of grass where I had lain. In the distance were my snow-capped mountains!

“There you are,” I cried. “The proof of my story—”

“Look at it!” Theunis snapped. “The shadows—there are three for every rock, bush, and tree!”

He was right…. Below the tree, spread in fanlike incongruity, lay three overlapping shadows. Suddenly I realized that the picture held an abnormal and inconsistent element. The leaves on the thing were too lush for the work of sane nature, while the trunk was bulged and knotted in the most abhorrent shapes. Theunis dropped the picture on the table.

“There is something wrong,” I muttered. “The tree I saw didn’t look as repulsive as that—”

“Are you sure?” Theunis grated. “The fact is, you may have seen many things not recorded on this film.”

“It shows more than I saw!”

“That’s the point. There is something damnably out of place in this landscape; something I can’t understand. The tree seems to suggest a thought—beyond my grasp…. It is too misty; too uncertain; too unreal to be natural!” He rapped nervous fingers on the table. He snatched the remaining films and shuffled through them, rapidly.

I reached for the snapshot he had dropped, and sensed a touch of bizarre uncertainty and strangeness as my eyes absorbed its every detail. The flowers and weeds pointed at varying angles, while some of the grass grew in the most bewildering fashion. The tree seemed too veiled and clouded to be readily distinguished, but I noted the huge limbs and the half-bent flower stems that were ready to fall over, yet did not fall. And the many, overlapping shadows…. They were, altogether, very disquieting shadows—too long or short when compared to the stems they fell below to give one a feeling of comfortable normality. The landscape hadn’t shocked me the day of my visit…. There was a dark familiarity and mocking suggestion in it; something tangible, yet distant as the stars beyond the galaxy.

Theunis came back to earth. “Did you mention
three
suns in your dreaming orgy?”

I nodded, frankly puzzled. Then it dawned on me. My fingers trembled slightly as I stared at the picture again. My dream! Of course—

“The others are just like it,” Theunis said. “That same uncertain-ness; that
suggestion.
I should be able to catch the mood of the thing; see it in its real light, but it is too…. Perhaps later I shall find out, if I look at it long enough.”

We sat in silence for some time. A thought came to me, suddenly, prompted by a strange, inexplicable longing to visit the tree again. “Let’s make an excursion. I think I can take you there in half a day.”

“You’d better stay away,” replied Theunis, thoughtfully. “I doubt if you could find the place again if you wanted to.”

“Nonsense,” I replied. “Surely, with these photos to guide us—”

“Did you see any familiar landmarks in them?”

His observation was uncanny. After looking through the remaining snaps carefully, I had to admit that there were none.

Theunis muttered under his breath and drew viciously on his cigarette. “A perfectly normal—or nearly so—picture of a spot apparently dropped from nowhere. Seeing mountains at this low altitude is preposterous … but wait!”

He sprang from the chair as a hunted animal and raced from the room. I could hear him moving about in our makeshift library, cursing volubly. Before long he reappeared with an old, leather-bound volume. Theunis opened it reverently, and peered over the odd characters.

“What do you call that?” I inquired.

“This is an early English translation of the
Chronicle of Nath,
written by Rudolf Yergler, a German mystic and alchemist who borrowed some of his lore from Hermes Trismegistus, the ancient Egyptian sorcerer. There is a passage here that might interest you— might make you understand why this business is even further from the natural than you suspect. Listen.”

“So in the year of the Black Goat there came unto Nath a shadow that should not be on Earth, and that had no form known to the eyes of Earth. And it fed on the souls of men; they that it gnawed being lured and blinded with dreams till the horror and the endless night lay upon them. Nor did they see that which gnawed them; for the shadow took false shapes that men know or dream of, and only freedom seemed waiting in the Land of the Three Suns. But it was told by priests of the Old Book that he who could see the shadow’s true shape, and live after the seeing, might shun its doom and send it back to the starless gulf of its spawning. This none could do save through the Gem; wherefore did Ka-Nefer the High-Priest keep that gem sacred in the temple. And when it was lost with Phrenes, he who braved the horror and was never seen more, there was weeping in Nath. Yet did the Shadow depart sated at last, nor shall it hunger again till the cycles roll back to the year of the Black Goat.”

Theunis paused while I stared, bewildered. Finally he spoke. “Now, Single, I suppose you can guess how all this links up. There is no need of going deep into the primal lore behind this business, but I may as well tell you that according to the old legends this is the so-called Tear of the Black Goat’—when certain horrors from the fathomless Outside are supposed to visit the earth and do infinite harm. We don’t know how they’ll be manifest, but there’s reason to think that strange mirages and hallucinations will be mixed up in the matter. I don’t like the thing you’ve run up against—the story or the pictures. It may be pretty bad, and I warn you to look out. But first I must try to do what old Yergler says—to see if I can glimpse the matter as it is. Fortunately the old Gem he mentions has been rediscovered—I know where I can get at it. We must use it on the photographs and see what we see.

“It’s more or less like a lens or prism, though one can’t take photographs with it. Someone of peculiar sensitiveness might look through and sketch what he sees. There’s a bit of danger, and the looker may have his consciousness shaken a trifle; for the real shape of the shadow isn’t pleasant and doesn’t belong on this earth. But it would be a lot more dangerous not to do anything about it. Meanwhile, if you value your life and sanity, keep away from that hill— and from the thing you think is a tree on it.”

I was more bewildered than ever. “How can there be organized beings from the Outside in our midst?” I cried. “How do we know that such things exist?”

“You reason in terms of this tiny earth,” Theunis said. “Surely you don’t think that the world is a rule for measuring the universe. There are entities we never dream of floating under our very noses. Modern science is thrusting back the borderland of the unknown and proving that the mystics were not so far off the track—”

Suddenly I knew that I did not want to look at the picture again; I wanted to destroy it. I wanted to run from it. Theunis was suggesting something beyond…. A trembling, cosmic fear gripped me and drew me away from the hideous picture, for I was afraid I would recognize some object in it….

I glanced at my friend. He was poring over the ancient book, a strange expression on his face. He sat up straight. “Let’s call the
thing off for today. I’m tired of this endless guessing and wondering. I must get the loan of the gem from the museum where it is, and do what is to be done.”

“As you say,” I replied. “Will you have to go to Croydon?”

He nodded.

“Then we’ll both go home,” I said decisively.

III.

I need not chronicle the events of the fortnight that followed. With me they formed a constant and enervating struggle between a mad longing to return to the cryptic tree of dreams and freedom, and a frenzied dread of that selfsame thing and all connected with it. That I did not return is perhaps less a matter of my own will than a matter of pure chance. Meanwhile I knew that Theunis was desperately active in some investigation of the strangest nature—something which included a mysterious motor trip and a return under circumstances of the greatest secrecy. By hints over the telephone I was made to understand that he had somewhere borrowed the obscure and primal object mentioned in the ancient volume as “The Gem,” and that he was busy devising a means of applying it to the photographs I had left with him. He spoke fragmentarily of “refraction,” “polarization,” and “unknown angles of space and time,” and indicated that he was building a kind of box or camera obscura for the study of the curious snapshots with the gem’s aid.

It was on the sixteenth day that I received the startling message from the hospital in Croydon. Theunis was there, and wanted to see me at once. He had suffered some odd sort of seizure; being found prone and unconscious by friends who found their way into his house after hearing certain cries of mortal agony and fear. Though still weak and helpless, he had now regained his senses and seemed frantic to tell me something and have me perform certain important duties. This much the hospital informed me over the wire; and within half an hour I was at my friend’s bedside, marveling at the inroads which worry and tension had made on his features in so brief a time. His first act was to move away the nurses in order to speak in utter confidence.

“Single—I saw it!” His voice was strained and husky. “You must destroy them all—those pictures. I sent it back by seeing it, but the pictures had better go. That tree will never be seen on the hill again
—at least, I hope not—till thousands of eons bring back the Year of the Black Goat. You are safe now—mankind is safe.” He paused, breathing heavily, and continued.

“Take the Gem out of the apparatus and put it in the safe—you know the combination. It must go back where it came from, for there’s a time when it may be needed to save the world. They won’t let me leave here yet, but I can rest if I know it’s safe. Don’t look through the box as it is—it would fix you as it’s fixed me. And burn those damned photographs …. the one in the box and the others…. “ But Theunis was exhausted now, and the nurses advanced and motioned me away as he leaned back and closed his eyes.

In another half-hour I was at his house and looking curiously at the long black box on the library table beside the overturned chair. Scattered papers blew about in a breeze from the open window, and close to the box I recognized with a queer sensation the envelope of pictures I had taken. It required only a moment for me to examine the box and detach at one end my earliest picture of the tree, and at the other end a strange bit of amber-colored crystal, cut in devious angles impossible to classify. The touch of the glass fragment seemed curiously warm and electric, and I could scarcely bear to put it out of sight in Theunis’ wall safe. The snapshot I handled with a disconcerting mixture of emotions. Even after I had replaced it in the envelope with the rest I had a morbid longing to save it and gloat over it and rush out and up the hill toward its original. Peculiar line-arrangements sprang out of its details to assault and puzzle my memory … pictures behind pictures … secrets lurking in half-familiar shapes…. But a saner contrary instinct, operating at the same time, gave me the vigor and avidity of unplaceable fear as I hastily kindled a fire in the grate and watched the problematic envelope burn to ashes. Somehow I felt that the earth had been purged of a horror on whose brink I had trembled, and which was none the less monstrous because I did not know what it was.

Of the source of Theunis’ terrific shock I could form no coherent guess, nor did I dare to think too closely about it. It is notable that I did not at any time have the least impulse to look through the box before removing the gem and photograph. What was shown in the picture by the antique crystal’s lens or prism-like power was not, I felt curiously certain, anything that a normal brain ought to be called upon to face. Whatever it was, I had myself been close to it— had been completely under the spell of its allurement—as it brooded
on that remote hill in the form of a tree and an unfamiliar landscape. And I did not wish to know what I had so narrowly escaped.

Would that my ignorance might have remained complete! I could sleep better at night. As it was, my eye was arrested before I left the room by the pile of scattered papers rustling on the table beside the black box. All but one were blank, but that one bore a crude drawing in pencil. Suddenly recalling what Theunis had once said about sketching the horror revealed by the gem, I strove to turn away; but sheer curiosity defeated my sane design. Looking again almost furtively, I observed the nervous haste of the strokes, and the unfinished edge left by the sketcher’s terrified seizure. Then, in a burst of perverse boldness, I looked squarely at the dark and forbidden design—and fell in a faint.

I shall never describe fully what I saw. After a time I regained my senses, thrust the sheet into the dying fire, and staggered out through the quiet streets to my home. I thanked God that I had not looked through the crystal at the photograph, and prayed fervently that I might forget the drawing’s terrible hint of what Theunis had beheld. Since then I have never been quite the same. Even the fairest scenes have seemed to hold some vague, ambiguous hint of the nameless blasphemies which may underlie them and form their masquerading essence. And yet the sketch was so slight—so little indicative of all that Theunis, to judge from his guarded accounts later on, must have discerned!