The Ultimate Weird Tales Collection - 133 stories - Clark Ashton Smith (Trilogus Classics) (66 page)

So I went up to Benares, with full instructions and certain papers hidden securely in an inner pocket which were to be handed over to Lalji Chatterji.

My identity I deemed it best to conceal. So it was not in the person of Albert Holden that I reached Benares, but I stepped off the train as Fulsi Lal, and to all outward appearances a baboo of the deepest dye.

A baboo is an indigenous production; he belongs exclusively to India and there is nothing resembling him in all the world. From his spectacles to his English, which last is truly marvelous, he is individual.

How the son of Shaitan, who was representing a Central Indian Rajah, a gentleman much interested in my negotiations with Lalji Chatterji, discovered my identity I do not pretend to know. But it is a fact that he did.

When I arrived at Benares, and stepped out of a third class carriage into the teeming, seething station, I discovered a blue-turbaned, side whiskered, Rajput at my elbow, whose general description tallied essentially with that of a man whom I had been warned to avoid; namely, the agent of Baghwan Deos, the Central India Rajah.

Endeavors to lose this man in the crowd were in vain; it was not until I had traversed half the city of Benares and ended up eventually in the Monkey Temple, that I lost sight of the blue Turban and the side whiskers. I thanked Allah devoutly, emerged at the rear entrance, followed by all the monkeys in the neighborhood who evinced a most sociable disposition, and set off toward the Ganges.

Near the Burning-Ghats I again met Baghwan Deos's representative. We exchanged glances of mutual distrust. Once more I tried to shake my tenacious follower.

It was his mission I know, to keep the papers which I carried from reaching Lalji Chatterji. For certain reasons, into which I cannot here enter, Baghwan Deos did not wish this, and to this end had sent his agent to Benares. This man, I was aware, would not scruple at anything; he would kill me if necessary to gain possession of the papers.

About midday he was joined by another Rajput, and intuition told me that several more of these gentry probably lurked in the neighborhood of Lalji Chatterji's house, with instructions to prevent a certain specified baboo from entering. So, for a time, I abandoned hope of reaching the Bengali, and, entering a Khan, sat down to think.

The outcome of this was that Lalji Chatterji shortly afterwards received a letter instructing him to be at the Golden Temple at nine precisely the following morning. There he would receive some important papers from a Moslem horse-merchant.

At the appointed time he arrived. I had been waiting in the person of the aforesaid merchant about half-an-hour, and the local priests were getting suspicious. I had begun to fear that he had not received my letter, or that some accident had occurred, when Lalji Chatterji, a sleek, smiling, clean-shaven Bengali, entered, and looking about him sharply, at length perceived me. He came over, and we exchanged greetings.

"What a disguise, sahib," he said, "You are a perfect horse-trader; the very odor of the serai seems to emanate from you. Truly, I should never have suspected. And you have the papers? Ah, that is good. Now Baghwan Deos's emissaries can wait in vain. They have been hanging about my house for the last three days, following me everywhere, and making great nuisances of themselves. It was with the utmost difficulty that I this morning evaded their surveillance. But I know Benares like a book: her tangled streets are an open page and somewhere near Manikaranika Ghat two Rajputs are doubtless, at this moment, calling down curses on all Bengalis."

He laughed heartily, and I was about to pull the papers from my inner pocket when three men entered hastily, and seeing us, stopped. In one of them I recognized Baghwan Deos's agent. The other two I had not heretofore seen.

They looked at us keenly, and then about the temple in a furtive manner. The priests had disappeared. We were alone, and I felt a bit uneasy as to what would happen. The Rajputs were looking ugly, and I saw that they were armed. I had unfortunately left my revolver at the Khan, and was without weapons. Lalji Chatterji was also unarmed.

The three men began to edge towards us, in a casual manner, and sought, though they doubtless knew that we were aware of their identity, to appear oblivious of our presence, and totally without intentions toward us.

At last the Rajah's agent drew a revolver, and advancing to within a few steps, leveled it in my direction. His two companions stood just behind him in case he should need assistance.

"Sahib," he said, "you have in your possession certain documents which I have been ordered to secure. I request that you hand them over to me. If you do not—"

Here his words were interrupted by the entrance of a priest. He dropped the revolver for a moment and hesitated. In that moment I looked about for some weapon, and perceiving a small bronze image of Ganesha in a niche in the temple wall, snatched it up, and hurled it straight at the Rajput's head. There was a dull impact, a shriek, and image and Rajput struck the ground together, the latter with a crushed skull.

There is very little more to tell. The other Rajputs upon perceiving the fall of their leader, rushed from the temple, and Lalji Chatterji and myself followed close upon their heels. In the resultant confusion we made our escape, and did not pause until we had reached the Ghats. There, after a hasty consultation, we parted, Lalji Chatterji and the papers leaving shortly for Cawnpore, where it was in intention to hide for some time, and myself, having reassumed the baboo disguise, for Calcutta.

Baghwan Deos, I believe, used all his influence to keep the affair quiet. The death of his agent set down officially as an accident, and attracted but little attention. The bronze image which you possess is the same that crushed the skull of the Rajah's agent.

THE CHAIN OF AFORGOMON

It is indeed strange that John Milwarp and his writings should have fallen so speedily into semi-oblivion. His books, treating of Oriental life in a somewhat flowery, romantic style, were popular a few months ago. But now, in spite of their range and penetration, their pervasive verbal sorcery, they are seldom mentioned; and they seem to have vanished unaccountably from the shelves of book-stores and libraries.

Even the mystery of Milwarp's death, baffling to both law and science, has evoked but a passing interest, an excitement quickly lulled and forgotten.

I was well acquainted with Milwarp over a term of years. But my recollection of the man is becoming strangely blurred, like an image in a misted mirror. His dark, half-alien personality, his preoccupation with the occult, his immense knowledge of Eastern life and lore, are things I remember with such effort and vagueness as attends the recovery of a dream. Sometimes I almost doubt that he ever existed. It is as if the man, and all that pertains to him, were being erased from human record by some mysterious acceleration of the common process of obliteration.

In his will, he appointed me his executor. I have vainly tried to interest publishers in the novel he left among his papers: a novel surely not inferior to anything he ever wrote. They say that his vogue has passed. Now I am publishing as a magazine story the contents of the diary kept by Milwarp for a period preceding his demise.

Perhaps, for the open-minded, this diary will explain the enigma of his death. It would seem that the circumstances of that death are virtually forgotten, and I repeat them here as part of my endeavor to revive and perpetuate Milwarp's memory.

Milwarp had returned to his house in San Francisco after a long sojourn in Indo-China. We who knew him gathered that he had gone into places seldom visited by Occidentals. At the time of his demise he had just finished correcting the typescript of a novel which dealt with the more romantic and mysterious aspects of Burma.

On the morning of April 2nd, 1933, his housekeeper, a middle-aged woman, was startled by a glare of brilliant light which issued from the half-open door of Milwarp's study. It was as if the whole room were in flames. Horrified, the woman hastened to investigate. Entering the study, she saw her master sitting in an armchair at the table, wearing the rich, somber robes of Chinese brocade which he affected as a dressing-gown. He sat stiffly erect, a pen clutched unmoving in his fingers on the open pages of a manuscript volume. About him, in a sort of nimbus, glowed and flickered the strange light; and her only thought was that his garments were on fire.

She ran toward him, crying out a warning. At that moment the weird nimbus brightened intolerably, and the wan early dayshine, the electric bulbs that still burned to attest the night's labor, were alike blotted out. It seemed to the housekeeper that something had gone wrong with the room itself; for the walls and table vanished, and a great, luminous gulf opened before her; and on the verge of the gulf, in a seat that was not his cushioned armchair but a huge and rough-hewn seat of stone, she beheld her master stark and rigid. His heavy brocaded robes were gone, and about him, from head to foot, were blinding coils of pure white fire, in the form of linked chains. She could not endure the brilliance of the chains, and cowering back, she shielded her eyes with her hands. When she dared to look again, the weird glowing had faded, the room was as usual; and Milwarp's motionless figure was seated at the table in the posture of writing.

Shaken and terrified as she was, the woman found courage to approach her master. A hideous smell of burnt flesh arose from beneath his garments, which were wholly intact and without visible trace of fire. He was dead, his fingers clenched on the pen and his features frozen in a stare of tetanic agony. His neck and wrists were completely encircled by frightful burns that had charred them deeply. The coroner, in his examination, found that these burns, preserving an outline as of heavy links, were extended in long unbroken spirals around the arms and legs and torso. The burning was apparently the cause of Milwarp's death: it was as if iron chains, heated to incandescence, had been wrapped about him.

Small credit was given to the housekeeper's story of what she had seen. No one, however, could suggest an acceptable explanation of the bizarre mystery. There was, at the time, much aimless discussion; but, as I have hinted, people soon turned to other matters. The efforts made to solve the riddle were somewhat perfunctory. Chemists tried to determine the nature of a queer drug, in the form of a gray powder with pearly granules, to whose use Milwarp had become addicted. But their tests merely revealed the presence of an alkaloid whose source and attributes were obscure to Western science.

Day by day, the whole incredible business lapsed from public attention; and those who had known Milwarp began to display the forgetfulness that was no less unaccountable than his weird doom. The housekeeper, who had held steadfastly in the beginning to her story, came at length to share the common dubiety. Her account, with repetition, became vague and contradictory; detail by detail, she seemed to forget the abnormal circumstances that she had witnessed with overwhelming horror.

The manuscript volume, in which Milwarp had apparently been writing at the time of death, was given into my charge with his other papers. It proved to be a diary, its last entry breaking off abruptly. Since reading the diary, I have hastened to transcribe it in my own hand, because, for some mysterious reason, the ink of the original is already fading and has become almost illegible in places.

The reader will note certain lacunae, due to passages written in an alphabet which neither I nor any scholar of my acquaintance can transliterate. These passages seem to form an integral part of the narrative, and they occur mainly toward the end, as if the writer had turned more and more to a language remembered from his ancient avatar. To the same mental reversion one must attribute the singular dating, in which Milwarp, still employing English script, appears to pass from our contemporary notation to that of some premundane world.

I give hereunder the entire diary, which begins with an undated footnote:

This book, unless I have been misinformed concerning the qualities of the drug souvara, will be the record of my former life in a lost cycle. I have had the drug in my possession for seven months, but fear has prevented me from using it. Now, by certain tokens, I perceive that the longing for knowledge will soon overcome the fear. Ever since my earliest childhood I have been troubled by intimations, dim, unplaceable, that seemed to argue a forgotten existence. These intimations partook of the nature of feelings rather than ideas or images: they were like the wraiths of dead memories. In the background of my mind there has lurked a sentiment of formless, melancholy desire for some nameless beauty long perished out of time. And, coincidentally, I have been haunted by an equally formless dread, an apprehension as of some bygone but still imminent doom.

Such feelings have persisted, undiminished, throughout my youth and maturity, but nowhere have I found any clue to their causation. My travels in the mystic Orient, my delvings into occultism have merely convinced me that these shadowy intuitions pertain to some incarnation buried under the wreck of remotest cycles.