by Jerry
On, on they went. Slowly, tortuously, the road curved inward, as if it were coiled about the interior of a blind and cosmic Babel. The earthmen felt that they must have circled the abyss many times in that terrific spiral; but the distance they had gone, and the actual extent of the stupefying gulf, were inconceivable. Except for their torches, the night was absolute, unchangeable.
Somewhere, as if after the lapse of nocturnal ages, the pitward rushing had ceased. Bellman, Chivers and Maspic felt the pressure of crowded bodies relax; felt that they were standing still, while their brains continued to beat the unhuman measure of that terrible descent.
Reason—and horror—returned to them slowly. Bellman lifted his flashlight, and the circling ray recovered the throng of Martians, many of whom were dispersing in a huge cavern where the road had now ended. Others of the beings remained, however, as if to keep guard over the earthmen. They quivered alertly at Bellman’s movements, as if aware of them through an unknown sense.
Close at hand, on the right, the level floor ended abruptly; and stepping to the verge, Bellman saw that the cavern was an open chamber in the perpendicular wall. Far, far below in the blackness, a phosphorescent glimmer played to and fro. A slow, fetid wind blew upon him; and he heard the weird sighing of waters about the sunken cliffs.
He turned giddily away. His companions were examining the cave’s interior. It seemed that the place was of artificial origin; for, darting here and there, the torch-beams brought out enormous columnations lined with deeply graven bas-reliefs. Who had carved them or when, were problems no less insoluble than the origin of the cliff-hewn road. Their details were obscene as the visions of madness; they shocked the eye like a violent blow, conveying an extra-human evil, a bottomless malignity.
The place was overpowering, it oppressed the senses, crushed the brain. The very stone was like an embodiment of darkness; and light and vision were ephemeral intruders in this demesne of the blind. Somehow, the earthmen were weighed down by a conviction that escape was impossible. A strange lethargy claimed them. They did not even discuss their situation, but stood listless and silent.
From the filthy gloom, a number of the Martians reappeared. With the same suggestion of controlled automatism that had marked all their actions, they gathered about the men once more, and urged them into the yawning cavern.
• Step by step, the three were borne along in that weird and leprous procession. The obscene columns multiplied, the cave deepened before them with endless vistas. Faintly at first but more strongly as they went on, there came to them an insidious feeling of drowsiness. They rebelled against it, for the drowsiness was somehow dark and evil. It grew heavier upon them—and then they came to the core of the horror.
Between the thick and seemingly topless pillars, the floor ascended in an altar of seven oblique and pyramidal tiers. On the top, there squatted an image of pale metal: a thing no larger than a hare, but monstrous beyond all imagining.
The queer, unnatural drowsiness seemed to increase upon the earthmen as they stared at the image. Behind them, the Martians thronged with a restless forward movement, like worshippers who gather before an idol. Bellman felt a clutching hand on his arm. Turning, he found at his elbow an astounding and wholly unlooked-for apparition. Though pale and filthy as the cave-dwellers, and with gaping orbits in lieu of eyes, the being was, or had formerly been, a man!
He was barefooted, and was clad only in a few rags of khaki that had seemingly rotted away with use and age. His white beard and hair were matted with slime, were full of unmentionable remnants. Once, he had been tall as Bellman; but now he was bowed to the height of the dwarfish Martians, and was dreadfully emaciated. He trembled, and an almost idiotic look of hopelessness and terror was stamped on the wreck of his lineaments.
“My God! who are you?” cried Bellman, shocked into full wakefulness.
For a few moments, the man gibbered unintelligibly, as if he had forgotten the words of human speech, or could no longer articulate them. Then he croaked feebly, with many pauses and incoherent breaks:
“You are earthmen! earthmen! They told me you had been captured . . . even as they captured me . . . I was an archaeologist once . . . My name was Chalmers . . . John Chalmers. It was years ago . . . I don’t know how many years. I came into the Chaur to study some of the old ruins. They got me—these creatures of the pit . . . I have been here ever since. There is no escape . . . The Dweller takes care of that.”
“But who are these creatures? And what do they want with us?” queried Bellman.
Chalmers seemed to collect his ruined faculties. His voice became clearer and steadier.
“They are a degenerate remnant of the Yorhis, the old Martian race that flourished before the Aihais. Everyone believes them to be extinct. The ruins of some of their cities are still extant in the Chaur. As far as I can learn (I am able to speak their language now) this tribe was driven underground by the dehydration of the Chaur; and they followed the ebbing waters of a sub-Martian lake that lies at the bottom of this gulf.
“They are little more than animals now; and they worship a weird monster that lives in the lake . . . The Dweller . . . the thing that walks on the cliff. The small idol that you see on the altar is an image of that monster. They are about to hold one of their religious ceremonies; and they want you to take part in it. I am to instruct you . . . It will be the beginning of your initiation into the life of the Yorhis.”
Bellman and his companions, listening to the strange declaration of Chalmers, felt a mixture of nightmarish revulsion and wonder. The white, eyeless, filthy-bearded face of the creature before them seemed to bear a hint of the same degradation that they saw in the cave-dwelling people. Somehow, the man was hardly human. But, no doubt, he had broken down through the horror of his long captivity in darkness, amid an alien race.
“What is this ceremony?” said Bellman, after an interval.
“Come, and I’ll show you.” There was a queer eagerness in Chalmers’ broken voice. He plucked at Bellman’s sleeve, and began to ascend the pyramid with an ease and sureness of footing that bespoke a long familiarity. Like dreamers in a dream, Bellman, Chivers and Maspic followed him.
The image resembled nothing they had ever seen on the red planet—or elsewhere. It was carven of a strange metal that seemed whiter and softer even than gold, and it represented a humped animal with a smooth and overhanging carapace from beneath which its head and members issued in tortoise fashion. The head was venomously flat, triangular—and eyeless. From the drooping corners of the cruelly slitted mouth, two long proboscides curved upward, hollow and cuplike at the ends. The thing was furnished with a series of short legs, issuing at uniform intervals from under the carapace; and a curious double tail was coiled and braided beneath its crouching body. The feet were round and had the shape of small, inverted goblets.
The Image of the Dweller
• Unclean and bestial as a figment of madness, the idol seemed to drowse on the altar. It troubled the mind with a slow, insidious horror; it assailed the senses with an emanating stupor.
“And this thing really exists?” Bellman seemed to hear his own voice through a creeping film of slumber, as if another than himself had spoken, and had roused him.
“It is the Dweller,” mumbled Chalmers. He leaned toward the image, and his outstretched fingers trembled above it in the air, moving to and fro as if he were about to caress the white horror. “The Yorhis made the idol long ago,” he went on. “I don’t know how it was made . . . And the metal they moulded it from is like nothing else . . . a new element . . . Do as I am doing . . . and you won’t mind the darkness so much . . . You won’t miss your eyes or need them here. You’ll drink the putrid water of the lake, you’ll eat the raw slugs, the raw blind-fish and lake-worms, and find them good . . . And you won’t know if the Dweller comes and gets you.”
Even as he spoke, he began to caress the image, running his hands over the carapace, the flat reptilian head. His blind face took on the
dreamy languor of an opium-eater, his voice died to inarticulate murmurs. About him, there was an air of strange subhuman depravity.
Bellman, Chivers and Maspic, watching him in amazement, became aware that the altar swarmed with the white Martians. Several of them crowded forward on the side opposite Chalmers, around the oval summit, and also began to fondle the eidolon, as if in some fantastic ritual of touch. They traced its loathsome outlines with lank fingers, their movements appearing to follow a strictly prescribed order from which none of them deviated. They uttered sounds that were like the cheepings of sleepy bats. Upon their brutal faces a narcotic ecstasy was imprinted.
Completing their bizarre ceremony, the foremost devotees fell back from the image. But Chalmers, with slow and sleepy movements, his head lolling on his tattered bosom, continued to caress it. With a queer mingling of revulsion, curiosity and compulsion, the other earthmen, prompted by the Martians behind them, went nearer and laid their hands on the idol. The whole proceeding was highly mysterious, and somehow revolting, but it seemed wise to follow the custom of their captors.
The thing was cold to the touch, and clammy as if it had lain recently in a bed of slime. But it seemed to live, to throb and swell under their finger-tips.
From it, in heavy, ceaseless waves, there surged an emanation that could be described only as an opiate, magnetism or electricity. It was as if some powerful alkaloid, affecting the nerves through superficial contact, was being given off by the unknown metal. Quickly, irresistibly, Bellman and the others felt a dark vibration course through all their members, clouding their eyes, and filling their blood with slumber.
Musing drowsily, they tried to explain the phenomenon to themselves in terms of terrene science; and then, as the narcotism mounted more and more like an overwhelming drunkenness, they forgot their speculations.
With senses that swam in a strange darkness, they were vaguely aware of the pressure of thronging bodies that displaced them at the altar-summit. Anon, certain of these, recoiling as if satiate with the drug-like effluence, bore them along the oblique tiers to the cavern-floor, together with the limp and sodden Chalmers. Still retaining their torches in nerveless fingers, they saw that the place teemed with the white people, who had gathered for that unholy ceremony. Through blackening blurs of shadow, the men watched them as they seethed up and down on the pyramid like a leprous, living frieze.
Chivers and Maspic, yielding first to the influence, slid to the floor in utter sopor. But Bellman, more resistant, seemed to fall and drift through a world of lightless dreams. His sensations were anomalous, unfamiliar to the last degree. Everywhere there was a brooding, palpable Power for which he could find no visual image.
In those dreams, by insensible graduations, forgetting the last glimmer of his human self, he somehow identified himself with the eyeless people; he lived and moved as they, in profound caverns, on nighted roads.
Whether he passed from these obscure nightmares into dreamless slumber, he could not know. His awakening was like a continuation of the dreams at first. Then, opening his sodden lids, he saw the shaft of light that lay on the floor from his fallen torch. The light poured against something that he could not recognize in his drugged awareness. Yet it troubled him; and a dawning horror touched his faculties into life.
• By degrees, it came to him that the thing he saw was the half-eaten body of Chalmers. There were rags of rotten cloth on the gnawed members; and though the head was gone, the remaining bones and viscera were those of an earthman.
Bellman rose unsteadily and looked about with eyes that still held a web-like blurring of shadow. Chivers and Maspic lay beside him in heavy stupor; and along the cavern and upon the seven-tiered altar were sprawled the devotees of the image.
His other senses began to awake from their lethargy, and he thought that he heard a noise that was somehow familiar: a sharp slithering, together with a measured sucking. The sound withdrew among the massy pillars, beyond the sleeping bodies.
A smell of rotten water tinged the air, and he saw that there were many curious rings of wetness on the stone, such as might be made by the rims of inverted cups. Preserving the order of footprints, they led away from the half-devoured body of Chalmers, into the shadows of that outer cave which verged upon the abyss.
In Bellman’s mind a mad terror rose and struggled with the spell that still benumbed him. He stooped down above Maspic and Chivers, and shook them roughly in turn, till they opened their eyes and began to protest with drowsy murmurs.
“Get up, damn you,” he admonished them. “If we’re ever to escape from this hell-hole, now’s the time.”
By dint of many oaths and much muscular effort, he succeeded in getting his companions to their feet. In their stupor, they did not seem to notice the remnants of that which had been the unfortunate Chalmers. Lurching drunkenly, they followed Bellman among the sprawled Martians, away from the pyramid on which the white eidolon still brooded.
A clouding heaviness hung upon Bellman; but somehow there was a relaxation of the opiate spell. He felt a revival of volition and a great desire to escape from the gulf and from all that dwelt in its darkness. The others, more deeply enslaved by the drowsy power, accepted his leadership and guidance in a numb, brute-like fashion.
He felt sure that he could retrace the route by which they had approached the altar. This, it seemed, was also the course that had been taken by the maker of the ringlike marks of fetid wetness. Wandering on amid the repugnantly carven columns for what seemed an enormous distance, they came at last to the sheer verge, from which they could look down on its ultimate gulf.
Far beneath, on those putrefying waters, the phosphorescence ran in widening circles, as if troubled by the plunge of a heavy body. To the very edge, at their feet, the watery rings were imprinted on the rock.
They turned away. Bellman, shuddering with halfmemories of his blind dreams, and the terror of his awakening, found at the cave’s corner the beginning of that upward road which skirted the abyss; the road that would take them back to the lost sun.
At his injunction, Maspic and Chivers turned off their flashlights to conserve the batteries. It was doubtful how much longer these would last; and light was their prime necessity. His own torch would serve for the three till it became exhausted.
There was no sound or stirring of life from that cave of lightless sleep where the Martians lay about the narcotizing image. But a fear such as he had never felt in all his adventurings caused Bellman to sicken and turn faint as he listened at its threshold.
The gulf, too, was silent; and the circles of phosphor had ceased to widen on the waters. Yet somehow the silence was a thing that clogged the senses, retarded the limbs. With dragging effort Bellman began the ascent, hauling, cursing and kicking his companions till they responded like drowsy animals.
On and up they toiled, along the monotonous, imperceptibly winding grade where all measure of distance was lost. The night lowered before Bellman’s feeble shaft of light; it closed behind like an all-engulfing sea.
The minor urges of hunger, thirst, fatigue, had been trod under by the fear that impelled him. From Maspic and Chivers, very slowly, the clogging stupor lifted, and they too were conscious of a terror vast as the night itself. The blows and kicks of Bellman were no longer needed to drive them on.
Out of that silence, after the lapse of apparent years, a twofold and familiar sound arose and overtook the fugitives: the sound of something that slithered over stone far down in the abyss; the sucking noise of a creature that withdrew its feet as if from a quagmire. Inexplicable, and arousing mad, incongruous ideas, like a sound heard in delirium, it quickened the earthmen’s terror into sudden frenzy.
“God! what is it?” breathed Bellman. He seemed to remember sightless things, abhorrent, palpable shapes of primal night, that were no legitimate part of human recollections. His dreams, and his nightmare awakening in the cave—the narcotic idol—the half-eaten body of Chalmers—the hints that Chalmers had let drop�
�the rings of wetness, leading toward the gulf—all returned like the figments of a teeming madness.
• His question was answered only by a continuation of the noise. It seemed to grow louder—to ascend the wall beneath. Maspic and Chivers, snapping on their lights, began to run with frantic leaps; and Bellman, losing his last remnant of control, followed suit.
It was a race with unknown horror. Above the labored beating of their hearts, the measured thudding of their feet, the men still heard that sinister, unaccountable sound. They seemed to race on through leagues of blackness; and yet the noise drew steadily nearer, climbing below them, as if its maker were a thing that walked on the sheer cliff.
Now the sound was appallingly close—and a little ahead. It ceased abruptly. The running lights of Maspic and Chivers, who moved abreast, discovered the crouching thing that filled and rested on a wide shelf above the two-yard path.
Hardened adventurers though they were, the men would have shrieked aloud with hysteria, or would have hurled themselves from the precipice, if the sight had not induced a kind of catalepsy. It was as if the pale idol of the pyramid, swollen to mammoth proportions, and loathsomely alive, had come up from the abyss and was squatting above them!
Here, plainly, was the creature that had served as a model for that atrocious image: the creature that Chalmers had called the Dweller. The humped, enormous carapace, vaguely recalling the armor of the glyptodon, shone with a luster as of wet metal.
