On the morning of April twenty-seventh a fresh rat-bole
appeared in the room where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it
up during the day. The poison was not having much effect, for scratchings
and scurryings in the walls were virtually undiminished.
Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for
him. He did not wish to go to sleep in a room alone - especially since
he thought he had glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman
whose image had become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered
who she was, and what had been near her rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap
at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed to notice him
and leer evilly at him - though perhaps this was merely his imagination.
The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they
would sleep like logs when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed
the mathematical studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully
engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancient magic and
folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah Mason,
and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for thinking
she might have stumbled on strange and significant information. The hidden
cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down surprising
secrets from elder, forgotten eons; and it was by no means impossible that
Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates.
Tradition emphasizes the uselessness of material barriers in halting a
witch's notions, and who can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick
rides through the night?
Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers
from mathematical research alone, was still to be seen. Suceess, Gilman
added, might lead to dangerous and unthinkable situations, for who could
foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible
dimension? On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous.
Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining
in such a belt one might preserve one's life and age indefinitely; never
suffering organic metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts
incurred during visits to one's own or similar planes. One might, for example,
pass into a timeless dimension and emerge at some remote period of the
earth's history as young as before.
Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could
hardly conjecture with any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and
ambiguous, and in historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps
seem complicated by strange and terrible alliances with beings and messengers
from outside. There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger
of hidden and terrible powers - the "Black Man" of the witch-cult, and
the "Nyarlathotep" of the Necronomicon. There was, too, the baffling
problem of the lesser messengers or intermediaries - the quasi-animals
and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches' familiars. As Gilman
and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue further, they heard Joe Mazurewicz
reel into the house half drunk, and shuddered at the desperate wildness
of his whining prayers.
That night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream
he had heard a scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that
someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the
small furry thing advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The beldame's
face was alight with inhuman exultation, and the little yellow-toothed
morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the heavily-sleeping form
of Elwood on the other couch across the room. A paralysis of fear stifled
all attempts to cry out. As once before, the hideous crone seized Gilman
by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space. Again the
infinitude of the shrieking abysses flashed past him, but in another second
he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odors with
the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.
Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked
space in the other dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was
beckoning and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with
a kind of affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man,
which the deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on
the right, to which the black man silently pointed. Into this the grinning
crone started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeves. There were
evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the old
woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door leading
off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and pushed the door open,
motioning to Gilman to wait, and disappearing inside the black aperture.
The youth's over-sensitive ears caught a hideous strangled
cry, and presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless
form which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The
sight of this form, and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still
too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase
and into the mud outside, halting only when seized and choked by the waiting
black man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill tittering
of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.
On the morning of the twenty-ninth Gilman awaked into
a maelstrom of horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something
was terribly wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting
wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching
inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with growing
fright that his feet and pajama bottoms were brown with caked mud. For
the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at least
that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in
slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints,
but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The more
Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to
those he could recognize as his there were some smaller, almost round markings
- such as the legs of a large chair or a table might make, except that
most of them tended to be divided into halves. There were also some curious
muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter
bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the
door and saw that there were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered
of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation
to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors below.
Descending to Elwood's room he roused his still-sleeping
host and began telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form
no idea of what might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been,
how he got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how
the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret
chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid
marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He put his
hands up to them, but found that they did not even approximately fit. While
they were talking, Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard a terrific
clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there had been no one
on the stairs after midnight, though just before midnight he had heard
faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did not
like. It was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman
had better be sure to wear the circifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even
the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds
in the house - especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but
was wholly unable to fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension
and expectancy had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of
some annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the University spa, picking
up a paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he never ate
that dessert; for an item on the paper's first page left him limp, wild-eyed,
and able only to pay his check and stagger back to Elwood's room.
There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in
Orne's Gangway, and the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker
named Anastasia Wolejko had completely vanished from sight. The mother,
it appeared, had feared the event for some time; but the reasons she assigned
for her fear were so grotesque that no one took them seriously. She had,
she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place now and then ever since early
in March, and knew from its grimaces and titterings that little Ladislas
must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis Night. She
had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room and try to protect
the child, but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the police, for they
never believed such things. Children had been taken that way every year
ever since she could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would not help
because he wanted the child out of the way.
But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the
report of a pair of revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the
gangway just after midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both
vowed they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark
passageway. There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old
woman in rags, and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old woman
had been dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a tame
rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.
Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood - who
had meanwhile seen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them
- found him thus when he came home. This time neither could doubt but that
something hideously serious was closing in around them. Between the phantasms
of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a monstrous and unthinkable
relationship was crystallizing, and only stupendous vigilance could avert
still more direful developments. Gilman must see a specialist sooner or
later, but not just now, when all the papers were full of this kidnapping
business.
Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure,
and for a moment both Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of
the wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously succeeded better than he knew
in his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside
our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where - if anywhere -
had he been on those nights of demoniac alienage? The roaring twilight
abysses - the green hillside - the blistering terrace - the pulls from
the stars - the ultimate black vortex - the black man - the muddy alley
and the stairs - the old witch and the fanged, furry horror - the bubble-congeries
and the little polyhedron - the strange sunburn - the wrist-wound - the
unexplained image - the muddy feet - the throat marks - the tales and fears
of the superstitious foreigners - what did all this mean? To what extent
could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?
There was no sleep for either of them that night, but
next day they both cut classes and drowsed. This was April thirtieth, and
with the dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners
and the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o'clock
and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis revels would
be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone
stands in a place queerly devoid of all plant-life. Some of them had even
told the police and advised them to look there for the missing Wolejko
child, but they did not believe anything would be done. Joe insisted that
the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman put
it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.
Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs,
lulled by the praying of the loom-fixer on the floor below. Gilman listened
as he nodded, his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for
some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome
recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled
up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to
the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the
time and space we comprehend.
Presently he realized what he was listening for - the
hellish chant of the celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he
know so much about what they expected? How did he know the time when Nahab
and her acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the
black cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and
tried to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat.
He was not his own master. Had he signed the black man's book after all?
Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant,
windborne notes. Over miles of hill and field and alley they came, but
he recognized them none the less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers
must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? What was it
that had enmeshed him? Mathematics - folklore - the house - old Keziah
- Brown Jenkin ... and now he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in the
wall near his couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer praying
of Joe Mazurewicz came another sound - a stealthy, determined scratching
in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights would not go out. Then
he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole - the accursed little
face which he at last realized bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance
to old Keziah's - and heard the faint fumbling at the door.
The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and
he felt himself helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries.
Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron and all through the churning
void there was a heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern
which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He
seemed to know what was coming - the monstrons burst of Walpurgis-rhythm
in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time
seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break
forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer
of entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain
dreaded periods.
But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the
cramped, violet-litten peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases
of ancient books, the bench and table, the queer objects, and the triangular
gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure - an infant boy,
unclothed and unconscious - while on the other side stood the monstrous,
leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right
hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal bowl covered with curiously
chased designs and having delicate lateral handles in her left. She was
intoning some croaking ritual in a language which Gilman could not understand,
but which seemed like something guardedly quoted in the Necronomicon.
As the scene grew clearer he saw the ancient crone bend
forward and extend the empty bowl across the table - and unable to control
his own emotions, he reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing
as he did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting
form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black
gulf on his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain
position while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above the small white
victim as high as her right hand could reach. The fanged, furry thing began
tittering a continuation of the unknown ritual, while the witch croaked
loathsome responses. Gilman felt a gnawing poignant abhorrence shoot through
his mental and emotional paralysis, and the light metal bowl shook in his
grasp. A second later the downward motion of the knife broke the spell
conpletely, and he dropped the bowl with a resounding bell-like clangour
while his hands darted out frantically to stop the monstrous deed.
In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around
the end of the table and wrenched the knife from the old woman's claws;
sending it clattering over the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In
another instant, however, matters were reversed; for those murderous claws
had locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled
face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix
grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the sight of the
object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength was altogether
superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his shirt
and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.
At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic,
and her grip relaxed long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely.
He pulled the steel-like claws from his neck, and would have dragged the
beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received a fresh access
of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to reply in kind,
and his own hands reached out for the creature's throat. Before she saw
what he was doing he had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck,
and a moment later he had tightened it enough to cut off her breath. During
her last struggle he felt something bite at his ankle, and saw that Brown
Jenkin had come to her aid. With one savage kick he sent the morbidity
over the edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on some level far below.
Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know,
but he let her rest on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned
away, he saw on the table a sight which nearly snapped the last thread
of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny hands of
demoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and
his efforts had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from doing
to the victim's chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had done
to a wrist - and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full beside the
small lifeless body.
In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish alien-rhythmed
chant of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black
man must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics,
and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed
to guide him back to the normal world alone and unaided for the first time.
He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room,
but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-stooped
egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft
bring him merely into a dream-house - an abnormal projection of the actual
place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream
and reality in all his experiences.
The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful,
for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have
to hear that hitherto-veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded.
Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected
all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the
worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the
Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly
ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too,
whether he could trust his instincts to take him back to the right part
of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside
of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled
monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy or in the spiral black vortices of
that ultimate void of Chaos where reigns the mindless demon-sultan Azathoth?
Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out
and left him in utter blackness. The witch - old Keziah - Nahab - that
must have meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat
and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard
another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz - the prayers
against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek
- worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream -
Iä!
Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young...
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