VIII
That my strange sense of compulsion
was deep and overwhelming is shewn by its conquest of my fear. No rational
motive could have drawn me on after that hideous suspicion of prints and
the creeping dream-memories it excited. Yet my right hand, even as it shook
with fright, still twitched rhythmically in its eagerness to turn a lock
it hoped to find. Before I knew it I was past the
heap of lately fallen cases and
running on tiptoe through aisles of utterly unbroken dust toward a point
which I seemed to know morbidly, horribly well.
My mind was asking itself questions
whose origin and relevancy I was only beginning to guess. Would the shelf
be reachable by a human body? Could my human hand master all the aeon-remembered
motions of the lock? Would the lock be undamaged and workable? And what
would I do - what dare I do with what - as I now commenced to realise -
I both hoped and feared to
find? Would it prove the awesome,
brain-shattering truth of something past normal conception, or shew only
that I was dreaming?
The next I knew I had ceased my
tiptoed racing and was standing still, staring at a row of maddeningly
familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They were in a state of almost perfect preservation,
and only three of the doors in this vicinity had sprung open.
My feelings toward these shelves
cannot be described - so utter and insistent was the sense of old acquaintance.
I was looking high up at a row near the top and wholly out of my reach,
and wondering how I could climb to best advantage. An open door four rows
from the bottom would help, and the locks of the closed doors formed possible
holds for hands and feet. I would grip the torch between my teeth, as I
had in other places where both hands were needed. Above all I must make
no noise.
How to get down what I wished to
remove would be difficult, but I could probably hook its movable fastener
in my coat collar and carry it like a knapsack. Again I wondered whether
the lock would be undamaged. That I could repeat each familiar motion I
had not the least doubt. But I hoped the thing would not scrape or creak
- and that my hand could work it properly.
Even as I thought these things I
had taken the torch in my mouth and begun to climb. The projecting locks
were poor supports; but, as I had expected, the opened shelf helped greatly.
I used both the swinging door and the edge of the aperture itself in my
ascent, and managed to avoid any loud creaking.
Balanced on the upper edge of the
door, and leaning far to my right, I could just reach the lock I sought.
My fingers, half numb from climbing, were very clumsy at first; but I soon
saw that they were anatomically adequate. And the memory-rhythm was strong
in them.
Out of unknown gulfs of time the
intricate, secret motions had somehow reached my brain correctly in every
detail - for after less than five minutes of trying there came a click
whose familiarity was all the more startling because I had not consciously
anticipated it. In another instant the metal door was slowly swinging open
with only the faintest grating sound.
Dazedly I looked over the row of
greyish case ends thus exposed, and felt a tremendous surge of some wholly
inexplicable emotion. Just within reach of my right hand was a case whose
curving hieroglyphs made me shake with a pang infinitely more complex than
one of mere fright. Still shaking, I managed to dislodge it amidst a shower
of gritty flakes, and ease it over toward
myself without any violent noise.
Like the other case I had handled,
it was slightly more than twenty by fifteen inches in size, with curved
mathematical designs in low relief. In thickness it just exceeded three
inches.
Crudely wedging it between myself
and the surface I was climbing, I fumbled with the fastener and finally
got the hook free. Lifting the cover, I shifted the heavy object to my
back, and let the hook catch hold of my collar. Hands now free, I awkwardly
clambered down to the dusty floor, and prepared to inspect my prize.
Kneeling in the gritty dust, I swung
the case around and rested it in front of me. My hands shook, and I dreaded
to draw out the book within almost as much as I longed - and felt compelled
- to do so. It had very gradually become clear to me what I ought to find,
and this realisation nearly paralysed my faculties.
If the thing were there - and if
I were not dreaining - the implications would be quite beyond the power
of the human spirit to bear. What tormented me most was my momentary inability
to feel that my surroundings were a dream. The sense of reality was hideous
- and again becomes so as I recall the scene.
At length I tremblingly pulled the
book from its container and stared fascinatedly at the well-known hieroglyphs
on the cover. It seemed to be in prime condition, and the curvilinear letters
of the title held me in almost as hypnotised a state as if I could read
them. Indeed, I cannot swear that I did not actually read them in some
transient and terrible access of abnormal memory.
I do not know how long it was before
I dared to lift that thin metal cover. I temporized and made excuses to
myself. I took the torch from my mouth and shut it off to save the battery.
Then, in the dark, I collected my courage finally lifting the cover without
turning on the light. Last of all, I did indeed flash the torch upon the
exposed page - steeling myself in advance to suppress
any sound no matter what I should
find.
I looked for an instant, then collapsed.
Clenching my teeth, however, I kept silent. I sank wholly to the floor
and put a hand to my forehead amidst the engulfing blackness. What I dreaded
and expected was there. Either I was dreaming, or time and space had become
a mockery.
I must be dreaming - but I would
test the horror by carrying this thing back and shewing it to my son if
it were indeed a reality. My head swam frightfully, even though there were
no visible objects in the unbroken gloom to swirl about me. Ideas and images
of the starkest terror - excited by vistas which my glimpse had opened
up - began to throng in upon me and cloud my senses.
I thought of those possible prints
in the dust, and trembled at the sound of my own breathing as I did so.
Once again I flashed on the light and looked at the page as a serpent's
victim may look at his destroyer's eyes and fangs.
Then, with clumsy fingers, in the
dark, I closed the book, put it in its container, and snapped the lid and
the curious, hooked fastener. This was what I must carry back to the outer
world if it truly existed - if the whole abyss truly existed - if I, and
the world itself, truly existed.
Just when I tottered to my feet
and commenced my return I cannot be certain. It comes to me oddly - as
a measure of my sense of separation from the normal world - that I did
not even once look at my watch during those hideous hours nderground.
Torch in hand, and with the ominous
case under one arm, I eventually found myself tiptoeing in a kind of silent
panic past the draught - giving abyss and those lurking suggestions of
prints. I lessened my precautions as I climbed up the endless inclines,
but could not shake off a shadow of apprehension which I had not felt on
the downward journey.
I dreaded having to repass through
the black basalt crypt that was older than the city itself, where cold
draughts welled up from unguarded depths. I thought of that which the Great
Race had feared, and of what might still be lurking - be it ever so weak
and dying - down there. I thought of those five-circle prints and of what
my dreams had told me of such prints - and of strange winds and whistling
noises associated with them. And I thought of the tales of the modern blackfellows,
wherein the horror of great winds and nameless subterrene ruins was dwelt
upon.
I knew from a carven wall symbol
the right floor to enter, and came at last after passing that other book
I had examined - to the great circular space with the branching archways.
On my right, and at once recognisable, was the arch through which I had
arrived. This I now entered, conscious that the rest of my course would
be harder because of the tumbled state of the masonry
outside the archive building. My
new metal-eased burden weighed upon me, and I found it harder and harder
to be quiet as I stumbled among debris and fragments of every sort.
Then I came to the ceiling-high
mound of debris through which I had wrenched a scanty passage. My dread
at wriggling through again was infinite, for my first passage had made
some noise, and I now - after seeing those possible prints - dreaded sound
above all things. The case, too, doubled the problem of traversing the
narrow crevice.
But I clambered up the barrier as
best I could, and pushed the case through the aperture ahead of me. Then,
torch in mouth, I scrambled through myself - my back torn as before by
stalactites.
As I tried to grasp the case again,
it fell some distance ahead of me down the slope of the debris, making
a disturbing clatter and arousing echoes which sent me into a cold perspiration.
I lunged for it at once, and regained it without further noise - but a
moment afterward the slipping of blocks under my feet raised a sudden and
unprecedented din.
The din was my undoing. For, falsely
or not, I thought I heard it answered in a terrible way from spaces far
behind me. I thought I heard a shrill, whistling sound, like nothing else
on earth, and beyond any adequate verbal description. If so, what followed
has a grim irony - since, save for the panic of this thing, the second
thing might never have happened.
As it was, my frenzy was absolute
and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my hand and clutching feebly at the
case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead with no idea in my brain beyond
a mad desire to race out of these nightmare ruins to the waking world of
desert and moonlight which lay so far above.
I hardly knew it when I reached
the mountain of debris which towered into the vast blackness beyond the
caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself repeatedly in scrambling up its
steep slope of jagged blocks and fragments.
Then came the great disaster. Just
as I blindly crossed the summit, unprepared for the sudden dip ahead, my
feet slipped utterly and I found myself involved in a mangling avalanche
of sliding masonry whose cannon-loud uproar split the black cavern air
in a deafening series of earth-shaking reverberations.
I have no recollection of emerging
from this chaos, but a momentary fragment of consciousness shows me as
plunging and tripping and scrambling along the corridor amidst the clangour
- case and torch still with me.
Then, just as I approached that
primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came. For as the echoes
of the avalanche died down, there became audible a repetition of that frightful
alien whistling I thought I had heard before. This time there was no doubt
about it - and what was worse, it came from a point not behind but ahead
of me.
Probably I shrieked aloud then.
I have a dim picture of myself as flying through the hellish basalt vault
of the elder things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up from
the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses. There was a wind,
too - not merely a cool, damp draught, but a violent, purposeful blast
belching savagely and frigidly from that abominable gulf whence the obscene
whistling came.
There are memories of leaping and
lurching over obstacles of every sort, with that torrent of wind and shrieking
sound growing moment by moment, and seeming to curl and twist purposefully
around me as it struck out wickedly from the spaces behind and beneath.
Though in my rear, that wind had
the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding my progress; as if it acted
like a noose or lasso thrown around me. Heedless of the noise I made, I
clattered over a great barrier of blocks and was again in the structure
that led to the surface.
I recall glimpsing the archway to
the room of machines and almost crying out as I saw the incline leading
down to where one of those blasphemous trap-doors must be yawning two levels
below. But instead of crying out I muttered over and over to myself that
this was all a dream from which I must soon awake. Perhaps I was in camp
- perhaps I was at home in Arkham. As these hopes bolstered up my sanity
I began to mount the incline to the higher level.
I knew, of course, that I had the
four-foot cleft to re-cross, yet was too racked by other fears to realise
the full horror until I came almost upon it. On my descent, the leap across
had been easy - but could I clear the gap as readily when going uphill,
and hampered by fright, exhaustion, the weight of the metal case, and the
anomalous backward tug of that daemon wind? I thought of these things at
the last moment, and thought also of the nameless entities which might
be lurking in the black abysses below the chasm.
My wavering torch was growing feeble,
but I could tell by some obscure memory when I neared the cleft. The chill
blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling shrieks behind me were for the
moment like a merciful opiate, dulling my imagination to the horror of
the yawning gulf ahead. And then I became aware of the added blasts and
whistling in front of me - tides of abomination surging up through the
cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable.
Now, indeed, the essence of pure
nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed - and, ignoring everything except
the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled and plunged upward over
the incline's debris as if no gulf had existed. Then I saw the chasm's
edge, leaped frenziedly with every ounce of strength I possessed, and was
instantly engulfed in a pandaemoniae vortex of loathsome
sound and utter, materially tangible
blackness.
This is the end of my experience,
so far as I can recall. Any further impressions belong wholly to the domain
of phantasmagoria delirium. Dream, madness, and memory merged wildly together
in a series of fantastic, fragmentary delusions which can have no relation
to anything real.
There was a hideous fall through
incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient darkness, and a babel of noises
utterly alien to all that we know of the earth and its organic life. Dormant,
rudimentary senses seemed to start into vitality within me, telling of
pits and voids peopled by floating horrors and leading to sunless crags
and oceans and teeming cities of windowless, basalt towers
upon which no light ever shone.
Secrets of the primal planet and
its immemorial aeons flashed through my brain without the aid of sight
or sound, and there were known to me things which not even the wildest
of my former dreams had ever suggested. And all the while cold fingers
of damp vapor clutched and picked at me, and that eldritch, damnable whistling
shrieked fiendishly above all the alternations of babel and silence in
the whirlpools of darkness around.
Afterward there were visions of
the Cyclopean city of my dreams - not in ruins, but just as I had dreamed
of it. I was in my conical, non-human body again, and mingled with crowds
of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried books up and down the
lofty corridors and vast inclines.
Then, superimposed upon these pictures,
were frightful, momentary flashes of a non-vistial consciousness involving
desperate struggles, a writhing free from clutching tentacles of whistling
wind, an insane, bat-like flight through half-solid air, a feverish burrowing
through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a wild stumbling and scrambling over
fallen masonry.
Once there was a curious, intrusive
flash of half sight - a faint, diffuse suspicion of bluish radiance far
overhead. Then there came a dream of wind - pursued climbing and crawling
- of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight through a jumble of debris
which slid and collapsed after me amidst a morbid hurricane. It was the
evil, monotonous beating of that maddening moonlight which at last told
me of the return of what I had once known as the objective, waking world.
I was clawing prone through the
sands of the Australian desert, and around me shrieked such a tumult of
wind as I had never before known on our planet's surface. My clothing was
in rags, and my whole body was a mass of bruises and scratches.
Full consciousness returned very
slowly, and at no time could I tell just where delirious dream left off
and true memory began. There had seemed to be a mound of titan blocks,
an abyss beneath it, a monstrous revelation from the past, and a nightmare
horror at the end - but how much of this was real?
My flashlight was gone, and likewise
any metal case I may have discovered. Had there been such a case - or any
abyss- or any mound? Raising my head, I looked behind me, and saw only
the sterile, undulant sands of the desert.
The daemon wind died down, and the
bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west. I lurched to my feet
and began to stagger southwestward toward the camp. What in truth had happened
to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-racked
body over miles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to
live any longer?
For, in this new doubt, all my faith
in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved once more into the hellish
older doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race was real -
and its blasphemous reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of
time were no myths or nightmares, but a terrible, soul-shattering actuality.
Had I, in full, hideous fact, been
drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred and fifty million years ago
in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present body been the
vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time?
Had I, as the captive mind of those
shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in its primordial
heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the loathsome shape
of my captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the
offspring of stark, monstrous memories?
Had I once veritably talked with
minds from reachless corners of time and space, learned the universe's
secrets, past and to come, and written the annals of my own world for the
metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others - those shocking
elder things of the mad winds and daemon pipings - in truth a lingering,
lurking menace, waiting and slowly weakening in black
abysses while varied shapes of
life drag out their multimillennial courses on the planet's age-racked
surface?
I do not know. If that abyss and
what I held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies
upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time. But,
mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases
of my myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would
have been a proof, and so far those subterrene corridors
have not been found.
If the laws of the universe are
kind, they will never be found. But I must tell my son what I saw or thought
I saw, and let him use his judgment as a psychologist in gauging the reality
of my experience, and communicating this account to others.
I have said that the awful truth
behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges absolutely upon the actuality
of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean, buried ruins. It has been hard
for me, literally, to set down that crucial revelation, though no reader
can have failed to guess it. Of course, it lay in that book within the
metal case - the case which I pried out of its lair amidst the dust of
a million centuries.
No eye had seen, no hand had touched
that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed
my torch upon it in that frightful abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented
letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any
nameless hieroglyphs of earth's youth. They were, instead, the letters
of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the
English language in my own handwriting.
Finis
