Writing
on what the doctor tells me is my deathbed, my most hideous fear is that
the man is wrong. I suppose I shall seem to be buried next week,
but...
In London
there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all
alone with his streaked cat in Gray's Inn, and people call him harmlessly
mad. His room is filled with books of the tamest and most puerile
kind, and hour after hour he tries to lose himself in their feeble pages.
All he seeks from life is not to think. For some reason thought is
very horrible to him, and anything which stirs the imagination he flees
as a plague. He is very thin and grey and wrinkled, but there are
those who declare he is not nearly as old as he looks. Fear has its
grisly claws upon him, and a sound will make him start with staring eyes
and sweat-beaded forehead. Friends and companions he shuns, for he
wishes to answer no questions. Those who once knew him as scholar
and aesthete say it is very pitiful to see him now. He dropped them
all years ago, and no one feels sure whether he left the country or merely
sank from sight in some hidden byway. It is a decade now since he
moved into Gray's Inn, and of where he had been he would say nothing till
the night young Williams bought the Necronomicon.
Williams
was a dreamer, and only twenty-three, and when he moved into the ancient
home he felt a strangeness and a breath of cosmic wind about the grey wizened
man in the next room. He forced his friendship where old friends
dared not force theirs, and marvelled at the fright that sat upon this
gaunt, haggard watcher and listener. For that the man always watched
and listened no one could doubt. He watched and listened with his
mind more than with his eyes and ears, and strove every moment to drown
something in his ceaseless poring over gay, insipid novels. And when
the church bells rang he would stop his ears and scream, and the grey cat
that dwelt with him would howl in unison till the last peal died reverberantly
away.
But
try as Williams would, he could not make his neighbor speak of anything
profound or hidden. The old man would not live up to his aspect and
manner, but would feign a smile and a light tone and prattle feverishly
and frantically of cheerful [trifles'] his voice every moment rising and
thickening till at last it would split in a piping and incoherent falsetto.
That his learning was deep and thorough, his most trivial remarks made
abundantly clear; and Williams was not surprised to hear that he had been
to Harrow and Oxford. Later it developed that he was none other than
Lord Northam, of whose ancient hereditary castle on the Yorkshire coast
so many odd things were told; but when Williams tried to talk of the castle,
and of its reputed Roman origin, he refused to admit that there was anything
unusual about it. He even tittered shrilly when the subject of the
supposed under-crypts, hewn out of the solid crag that frowns on the North
Sea, was brought in.
So matters
went till that night when Williams brought home the infamous Necronomicon
of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. He had known of the dreaded volume
since his sixteenth year, when his dawning love of the bizarre led him
to ask queer questions of a bent old bookseller in Chandos Street; and
he had always wondered why men paled when they spoke of it. The old
bookseller had told him that only five copies were known to have survived
shocked edicts of the priests and lawgivers against it and that all of
these were locked up with frightful care by custodians who had ventured
to begins a reading of the hateful black-letter. But now, at last,
he had not only found an accessible copy but had made it his own at a ludicrously
low figure. It was at a Jew's shop in the squalid precincts of Clare
Market, where he had often brought strange things before, and he almost
fancied the gnarled old Levite smiled amidst the tangles of beard as the
great discovery was made. The bulky leather cover with the brass
clasp had been so prominently visible, and the price so absurdly slight.
The
one glimpse he had had of the title was enough to send him into transports,
and some of the diagrams set in the vague Latin text excited the tensest
and most disquieting recollections in his brain. He felt it was highly
necessary to get the ponderous thing home and begin deciphering it, and
bore it out of the shop with such precipitate hast that the old Jew chuckled
disturbingly behind him. But when at last it was safe in his room
he found the combination of black-letter and debased idiom too much for
his powers as a linguist, and reluctantly called on his strange frightened
friend for help with the twisted, mediaeval Latin. Lord Northam was
simpering inanities to his streaked cat, and started violently when the
young man entered. Then he saw the volume and shuddered wildly, and
fainted altogether when Williams uttered the title. It was when he
regained his senses that he told his story; told his fantastic figment
of madness in frantic whispers lest his friend be not quick to burn the
accursed book and give wide scattering to its ashes.
There
must, Lord Northam whispered, have been something wrong at the start; but
it would never have some to a head if he had not explored too far.
He was the nineteenth Baron of a line whose beginnings went uncomfortably
far back into the past - unbelievably far, if vague tradition could be
heeded, for there were family tales of a descent from pre-Saxon times,
when a certain Luneus Gabinius Capito, military tribune in the Third Augustan
Legion then stationed at Lindum in Roman Britain, had been summarily expelled
from his command for participation in certain rites unconnected with any
known religion. Gabinius had, the rumour ran, come upon the cliffside
cavern where strange folk met together and made the Elder Sign in the dark;
strange folk whom the Britons knew not save in fear, and who were the last
to survive from a great land in the west that had sunken, leaving only
the islands with the [roaths] and circles and shrines of which Stonehenge
was the greatest. There was no certainty, of course, in the legend
that Gabinius had built an impregnable fortress over the forbidden cave
and founded a line which Pict and Saxon, Dane and Norman were powerless
to obliterate; or in the tacit assumption that from this line sprang the
bold companion and lieutenant of the Black Prince whom Edward Third created
Baron of Northam. These things were not certain, yet they were often
told; and in truth the stonework of Northam Keep did look alarmingly like
the masonry of Hadrian's Wall. As a child Lord Northam had had peculiar
dreams when sleeping in the older parts of the castle, and had acquired
a constant habit of looking back through his memory for half-amorphous
scenes and patterns and impressions which formed no part of his waking
experiences. He became a dreamer who found life tame and unsatisfying;
a searcher for strange realms and relationships once familiar, yet lying
nowhere in the visible regions of the Earth.
Filled
with a feeling that our tangible world is only an atom in a fabric vast
and ominous, and that unknown demesnes press on and permeate the sphere
of the known at every point, Northam in youth and young manhood drained
in turn the founts of formal religion and occult mystery. Nowhere, however,
could he find ease and content; and as he grew older the staleness and
limitations of life became more and more maddening to him. During
the 'nineties he dabbled in Satantism, and at all times he devoured avidly
any doctrine of theory which seemed to promise escape from the close vistas
of science and the dully unvarying laws of Nature. Books like Ignatious
Donnelly's chimerical account of Atlantis he absorbed with zest, and a
dozen obscure precursors of Charles Fort enthralled him with their vagaries.
He would travel leagues to follow up a furtive village tale of abnormal
wonder, and once went into the desert of Araby to seek a Nameless City
of faint report, which no man had ever beheld. There rose within
him the [tantalising] faith that somewhere an easy gate existed, which
if one found would admit him freely to those outer deeps whose echoes rattled
so dimly at the back of his memory. It might be in the visible world,
yet it might be only in his mind and soul. Perhaps he held within
his own half-explored brain that cryptic link which would awaken him to
elder and future lives in forgotten dimensions; which would bind him to
the stars, and to the infinities and eternities beyond them.
