Voodoo Tales: The Ghost Stories of Henry S Whitehead (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (43 page)

‘All right!’ interrupted Meredith. ‘Where does he live? I might as well go through with the thing now as later.’

Dr Gatefield showed traces of sympathy under his rather frosty professional exterior. He dropped the diagnostician, became the obliging, courteous gentleman. He telephoned to his colleague, the psychiatrist, and then surprised both Meredith and Cavanagh by accompanying them to Dr Cowlington’s. The psychiatrist proved to be a tall, thin, and rather kindly person, with heavy, complex spectacles on a prominent nose, and then, sand-colored wisps of hair in a complication of cowlicks. He showed marked interest in the case from the start. After hearing Meredith’s story and the aurist’s report he subjected Meredith to an examination of more than an hour from which, feeling more or less as though he had been dissected, he nevertheless derived a considerable sense of relief.

It was decided that Meredith should arrange at once to take several days off, come to Dr Cowlington’s house, and remain ‘under observation’.

He arrived at the doctor’s the next morning and was given a pleasant, upstairs room, with many books and a comfortable davenport on which, in a recumbent position, the psychiatrist suggested, he should spend most of his waking hours reading.

During Monday and Tuesday, Meredith, now after Dr Cowlington’s skillful reassurances no longer upset at ‘hearing’ the strange sounds, listened carefully for whatever might reach him from what seemed like another – and very restless – world! He ‘heard’ as he ‘listened’ for long periods uninterrupted by any aural distractions, the drama of a great community in the paralyzing grip of fear – fighting for its corporate life – against irresistable, impending, dreadful doom.

He began, about this time, at Dr Cowlington’s suggestion, to write down some of the syllabification of the cries and shouts as well as he could manage it, on a purely phonetic basis. The sounds corresponded to no language known to him. The words and phrases were blurred and marred by the continuous uproar of the fury of waters. This was invariably, and continued to be, the sustained, distinctive background for every sound he heard during the periods while he remained passive and quiet. The various words and phrases were entirely unintelligible. His notes looked like nothing which either he or Cowlington could relate to any modern or ancient tongue. When read aloud they made nothing but gibberish.

The strange terms were studied over very carefully by Dr Cowlington, by Meredith himself, and by no less than three professors, of Archaeology and Comparative Philology, one of whom, the Archaeologist, was a friend of Cowlington’s and the other two called in by him. All of these experts on ancient and obsolete languages listened with the greatest courtesy to Meredith’s attempt to explain the apparent setting of the sounds – most of them were in the nature of battle-cries and what Meredith took to be fragments of desperately uttered prayer – some of the material having come to him in the form of uncouth, raucous howls – and with the greatest interest to his attempts at reproducing them orally. They studied his written notes with the most meticulous care. The verdict was unanimous, even emphatic on the part of the younger and more dogmatic philologist. These sounds were quite utterly at variance with, entirely different from, any known speech, including Sanskrit, Indo-Iranian and even the conjectural Akkadian and Sumerian spoken tongues. The transcribed syllables corresponded to nothing in any known language, ancient or modern. Emphatically they were not Japanese.

The three professors took their departure, the younger philologist showing almost plainly his opinion that Meredith was either slightly demented or trying to put something over on him!

Meredith and the psychiatrist Dr Cowlington went over the list again after the experts had taken their departure. They had to agree that the words heard were probably unique in the history of human speech.

Meredith had written: ‘Iï, Iï, Iï, Iï – R’ly-eh! – Ieh nya – Ieh nya – Zoh, zoh-an-nuh!’ These strange words and various others quite as uncouth occurred mostly as monosyllabic exclamations. There was only one grouping of the words which formed anything like a section of continuous speech, or sentence, and which Meredith had been able to capture more or less intact and write down – ‘Ióth, Ióth – Natcal-o, do yan kho thút-thut.’

There were many other cries and, as he believed, desperately uttered prayers quite as strange and off the beaten tracks of recognized human speech as those noted down.

It was quite possibly because of his concentration on this affair of the remembered words – his own interest in them being naturally enhanced by Dr Cowlington’s and that of the three experts – that Meredith’s dream-state impressions just at this time, and suddenly, became markedly acute. These dreams had been continuous and consecutive since their beginning several nights before, but on this night after the rather elaborate investigation of the words and syllables, Meredith began in earnest, so to speak, upon getting the affair of his environment in the strange city of the flames and conflicts and confusion and of a roaring ocean, cleared up with a startling abruptness. His dream impression that night was so utterly vivid; so acutely identical with the terms of the waking state; so entirely free of the blurred penumbras which accompany nightmares, as to cause him suddenly to feel the cold sweat running down his back when he paused on the way to his shower-bath, in the middle of his bedroom floor, confronted without warning with the unexpected question which sprang into his mind: ‘Which of these two is my real life!!!’

Everything that he had derived mentally out of that night’s sleep was clearly and definitely present in his mind. It seemed to him precisely as though he had not been asleep; that he had not emerged from an ordinary night’s rest into the accustomed circumstances of an early morning’s awakening. It was, rather, as though he had very abruptly passed out of one quite definite life into another; as though, as it came to him afterwards, he had walked out of a theatre (where his interest in a scene being enacted had so thoroughly absorbed his attention as to identify him with it as an active participant), into the wholly unrelated after-theatre life of Times Square.

One of the radical phases of this situation was not only that the succession of dream experiences had been continuous, with time-allowances for the intervening periods of those days-in-between which he had spent here in Dr Cowlington’s quiet house; not only that, extraordinary as this realization seemed to him. The nearly consecutive dream experiences
had been the events of the past few days in a life of thirty-two years
, spent in that same environment and civilization of which the cataclysmic conditions which he had been envisaging appeared to presage a direful end.

He was, to set out plainly what he had brought out of that last night’s dream-experience, one Bothon, general of the military forces of the great district of Ludekta, the south-westerly provincial division of the continent of Atlantis, which had been colonized, as every Atlantean school child was well aware, some eighteen hundred years before by a series of emigrations from the mother continent. The Naacal language – with minor variations not unlike the differences between American speech and ‘English English’ – was the common language of both continents. From his native Ludekta the General Bothon had made several voyages to the mother land. The first of these had been to Ghua, the central eastern province, a kind of grand tour made just after his finishing, at the age of twenty-two, his professional course in the Ludekta College of Military Training. He was thus familiar by experience, as were many other cultivated Atlanteans of the upper classes, with the very highly developed civilization of the mother continent. These cultural contacts had been aided by his second visit, and further enhanced not long before the present period of the dream-experiences when, at the age of thirty-one, Bothon, already of the rank of general, had been sent out as Ambassador to Aglad-Dho, joint capital of the confederated south-eastern provinces of Yish, Knan, and Buathon, one of the most strategic diplomatic posts and the second most important provincial confederation of the mother continent.

He had served in his ambassadorial capacity for only four months, and then had been abruptly recalled without explanation, but, as he had soon discovered upon his arrival home, because of the privately communicated request of the Emperor himself. His diplomatic superiors at home offered him no censure. Such Imperial requests were not unknown. These gentlemen were, actually, quite unaware of the reasons behind the Imperial request. No explanations had been given them, but there had been no Imperial censure of any kind.

But the General, Bothon, knew the reasons very well, although he kept them strictly to himself. There was, indeed, only one reason, as he was acutely and very well aware.

The requirements of his office had taken him rather frequently to Alu, the continental capital, metropolis of the civilized world.

Here in the great city of Alu were assembled from all known parts of the terrestrial globe the world’s diplomats, artists, philosophers, traders and ship-masters. Here in the great ware-houses of solid stone and along the innumerable wharves were piled the world’s goods – fabrics and perfumes; strange animals for the delectation of the untravelled curious. Here in the endless stalls and markets were dyed stuffs and silks; tubas and cymbals and musical rattles and lyres; choice woods and implements for the toilet – strigils, and curiously carved hand-fitting little blocks of soap-stone, and oils innumerable for the freshening of beards and the anointing of bodies. Here were tunics and sandals and belts and thongs of soft-tanned, variously perfumed leathers. Here were displayed carved and cunningly wrought pieces of household furniture – glowing, burnished wall-mirrors of copper and tin and steel, bedsteads of an infinite range and design, cushions of swans’ feathers, tables of plain and polished artizanship and of intarsia with metal scrolls set flush to their levels; marquetry work of contrasting woods – chairs and stools and cupboards and chests and foot-rests. Here were ornaments innumerable – fire-screens, and spindles for parchment-rolls, and tongs, and shades for lamps made of the scraped skins of animals; metal lamps of every design, and vegetable oils for the lamps in earthenware jars of many sizes and shapes. Here were foods and wines and dried fruits, and honey of many flavors; grains and dried meats and loaves of barley and wheat-meal past computation. Here in the great street of the armorers were maces and axes and swords and daggers of all the world’s varieties and designs; armor of plate and chain – hauberks, and greaves, and bassinets, and shelves with rows and rows of the heavy plate and helmets standardized for the use of such fighting men as Bothon himself commanded in their thousands.

Here were to be seen and examined costly canopies and the elaborate litters in which the slaves of the rich carried their masters through the narrow streets and broad, airy avenues of Alu. Rugs there were in an endless profusion of size and shape and design; rugs from distant Lemuria and from Atlantis and from tropical Antillea, and from the mountainous interior regions of the mother continent itself, where thousands of cunning weavers of fabrics worked at their looms; ordinary rugs of pressed felt, and gorgeous glowing rugs of silk from the southern regions where the mulberry trees grew; rugs, too, and thin, soft draperies of complex patterns made of the wool of lambs and of the long, silk-like hair of the mountain sheep.

Here in Alu, center of the world’s culture, were philosophers with their groups of disciples, small or great, propounding their systems on the corners of streets and in the public squares, wrangling incessantly over the end of man, and the greatest good, and the origin of material things. Here were vast libraries containing the essence of all that had been written down concerning science and religion and engineering and the innumerable fine arts, of the civilization of forty thousand years. Here were the temples of religion where the hierarchs propounded the principles of life, colleges of priests studying incessantly more and more deeply into the mysteries of the four principles; teaching the people the endless applications of these esoteric affairs to their conduct and daily lives.

Into this fascinating treasure house of a great civilization the ambassador Bothon had penetrated as often as possible. The excellence of his family background, his own character and personal qualities, and his official position, all combined to make him a welcome guest in the mansions of the members of the emperor’s court and of the highest stratum of social life in Alu.

An impressionable young man, most of whose life previous to his appointment as ambassador had been spent in hard training for his military duties and in the rigorous prosecution of those as he rose rapidly grade by grade by hard man’s work in camp and field during his many campaigns in the standing army of Ludekta, the general, Bothon, revelled in these many high social contacts. Very soon he found within himself and growing apace, the strong and indeed natural desire for a type of life to which his backgrounds and achievements had amply entitled him, but of which he had been, so far, deprived because of the well-nigh incessant demands upon him of his almost continuous military service.

In short, the ambassador from Ludekta very greatly came to desire marriage, with some lady of his own caste, and, preferably, of this metropolitan city of Alu with its sophistication and wide culture; a lady who might preside graciously over his ambassadorial establishment; who, when his term of office was concluded, would return with him to his native Ludekta in Atlantis, there permanently to grace the fine residence he had in his mind’s eye when, a little later, he should retire from the Ludektan army and settle down as a senator into the type of life which he envisaged for his middle years.