by Brian Lumley
At about 6.30 p.m., I went to the above address in Marske and interviewed the housekeeper, one Mrs. White, who provided me with a statement (attached at Annex “C”) in respect of her partial employer, Robert Krug. Mrs. White also gave me two envelopes, one of which contained the manuscript attached to this report at Annex “A.” Mrs. White had found this envelope, sealed, with a note asking her to deliver it, when she went to the house on the afternoon of the 20th about half an hour before I arrived. In view of the enquiries I was making and because of their nature, i.e. an investigation into the possible suicide of Mr. Krug, Mrs. White thought it was best that the envelope be given to the police. Apart from this she was at a loss what to do with it because Krug had forgotten to address it. As there was the possibility of the envelope containing a suicide note or dying declaration I accepted it.
The other envelope, which was unsealed, contained a manuscript in a foreign language and is now in the property room at Dilham.
In the two weeks since the alleged suicide, despite all my efforts to trace Robert Krug, no evidence has come to light to support the hope that he may still be alive. This, plus the fact that the clothing found in the cave has since been identified by Mrs. White as being that which Krug was wearing the night before his disappearance, has determined me to request that my report be placed in the “unsolved” file and that Robert Krug be listed as “missing.”
~ * ~
note:
Sir,
Do you wish me to send a copy of the manuscript at Annex “A”—as requested of Mrs. White by Krug— to the Secretary of the North-East Coal Board?
Inspector I. L. Ianson
Yorks. County Constabulary
Radcar
Yorks.
~ * ~
Dear Sgt. Miller,
In answer to your note of the 7th. Take no further action on the Krug case. As you suggest, I have had the man posted as missing, believed a suicide. As for his document; well, the man was either mentally unbalanced or a monumental hoaxer, possibly a combination of both! Regardless of the fact that certain things in his story are matters of indisputable fact, the majority of the thing appears to be the product of a diseased mind.
Meanwhile I await your progress-report on that other case. I refer to the baby found in the church pews at Eely-on-the-Moor last June. How are you going about tracing the mother?
~ * ~
V
CORRELATION
[From the Notebooks of Professor Ewart Masters]
I left the police station about an hour before midnight, but I was awake until at least three in the morning. My mind was working overtime, so feverishly in fact that sleep—until I had thought on certain things and sorted them out somewhat—was simply out of the question.
The next day I was up at a correspondingly late hour, walking back down to the police station before lunch. My purpose was to ask the duty constable to put me in telephone contact with Inspector Ianson in Radcar—but here a setback. The young policeman seemed quite well informed, and he was able to tell me that two years previously the inspector (apparently a man of substantial independent means) had abruptly quit his job to go off with a woman! The couple were thought to have gone abroad. A pity, because of course Ianson would have been able to tell me what he had meant by “matters of indisputable fact,” with regard to Krug’s statement.
All right; I would have to find out on my own!
No doubt about it, Krug’s document was an astonishing thing, and I was in full agreement with Ianson’s assessment; yet for a man I had never previously heard of, this Krug—hoaxer and all—seemed damnably erudite, formidable, in ancient lore. There seemed to be so many parallels between his work and mine. Perhaps we had simply followed similar leads towards our mutual “discovery” of apparently like civilizations in the ancient lands of East and West. And why not? Gordon Walmsley, too, had obviously stumbled across just such leads not long before his oddly circumstanced death.
Certainly many of Krug’s source books had been the same as mine—but where could the man possibly have gained his knowledge concerning the Brick Cylinders of Kadatheron? And again, this before those relics had officially been discovered! This was positively astonishing! Had I slipped up somewhere? Had Angstrom known specifically what he was looking for before he left for the East, and had he publicized the fact? No, I knew and had followed his work too closely for that, and I was perfectly sure that such had not been the case. Oh! I was not infallible. I had missed the original discovery of the moors figurine, true, but that had been pardonable. For some reason the thing had received but a minimum of publicity. Angstrom’s expedition had been a different thing entirely.
The deeper I dug the more puzzling the whole thing became. There were in Krug’s manuscript, for instance, those references to R’lyeh and Mnar. Now, I had heard of legendary Atlantis, of course, and of fictional Shangri-la, the Land of Eternal Youth—but R’lyeh? And yet the name rang a bell! Yes, and after a moment’s thought I knew where I had heard it before. Many years earlier I had been allowed a glimpse—only a glimpse—into the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in the library at Miskatonic University in America. And something else had stayed in my mind following that peep into those blasphemous pages: for although even in my youth I had never been a frequent dreamer, I remembered having seen horrors in my sleep for many a night after my glance into the pages of that work. The thing that had bothered me so had been Alhazred’s vague description of a creature called a Shoggoth, a monstrous thing not bearing studied description. And Walmsley, at some time, must also have seen a copy of the Necronomicon somewhere— that much was obvious. He had mentioned “Shoggoth-tissue,” in some connection or other, in his death notes.
Then there was that mention of Sarnath. That made twice I had heard of the place: once in the translation from The Ilarnek Papyri and again in Krug’s document.
Now, I had seen a Sarnath. I had actually walked in the ruins of a Sarnath! But my Sarnath and Krug’s were two entirely different places! The ruins I knew stood in the Deer Park in Benares, where Buddha preached his first sermon; and they were not, I knew, covered by any leprous, stagnant pool! Nor did my ruins exist in two distinctly separate units, as Krug had suggested with his “nearby lb” statement. Besides, he had quite clearly stated that “no man knows the whereabouts of Sarnath,” which was perhaps simply his way of saying that no such place as his city had ever existed! On the other hand, his reconstruction of the newspaper article—-regarding the discovery of the moors figurine and its subsequent donation to the museum—was perfectly authentic. His mention of “Cthulhu,” too, was something from the Necronomicon, but Cthulhu’s aeon-extinct cult was not a thing I knew a great deal about; I had always preferred to keep my researches and studies within the realms of possibility. Still, it went to show how remarkably well read the man had been in this sort of thing.
Now, I have said I agreed with Inspector Ianson’s assessment of Krug as a madman; yet for the life of me I could not see why he had taken so negative an attitude. Would there have been any serious harm in sending the NECB a copy of Krug’s so-called “statement?” And for that matter, the inspector must have been a singularly short-sighted man not to have seen a sinister and rather ominous link between the Krug case and that other he had mentioned—that of the abandoned baby found in the church pews at Eeley. But ho, on second thought that was unfair. Each to his own game, and a man holding so high a position in the police force is no fool. The fault was mine in that here I was trying to read significance into insignificant data, data of quite unproven relevance. Nonetheless I would dearly have loved to see that manuscript in “a foreign language” mentioned by Sgt. Miller in his report, but apparently the thing had been lost. Similarly the “animal hide” had also disappeared in the half-dozen years since its discovery in the cave near Devil’s Pool.
That brings me up to date in my notes. There are many tangled skeins here, and I promise myself that later I shall look to the unravelling of the more obscure
and uncertain matters brought to light by my reading of the Krug case, not the least of them being that mention of certain inmates at Oakdeene! But for the moment, that will have to wait...
~ * ~
VI
DEVIL’S POOL
[The Masters Case: from the Recordings of Dr. Eugene T. Thappon]
First thing the next morning I drove out to Dilham and from the village proper made my way on foot across the moors to the fenced-off area at the base of a line of steep hills called Ellison’s Heights.
There, behind a tall, semicircular curve of warning fencing, swirled the treacherous waters of Devil’s Pool. The pool marked in fact the end of the surface route of an unimportant outlet of the River Swale. But the quiet waters of the rivulet seemed to gather strength as they approached and passed beneath the fencing, swelling and surging forward, gradually commencing the circular movements which terminated in the unknown sucking vortex of the whirlpool at the foot of the hills.
Devil’s Pool, into which—if there was anything at all in the strange manuscript I had read—one Robert Krug, madman, had plunged himself in the lunatic belief that he was a “God” returning to his rightful seat beneath the moors. Devil’s Pool, beneath which, at some watery, lightless place, lay the lost remains of three professional speleologists who had vainly tried—using aqualungs and all the usual paraphernalia of the caver—to map the underground path of the disappearing stream.
I ignored the warning notices pasted to the high fence, and not without a deal of difficulty climbed it to have a closer look at the pool. The blackly swirling water reminded me greatly of a huge gramophone record on a massive turntable, spinning half out in the open, half gurgling away beneath the undermined face of the steep hill, and I found myself strangely disturbed by its almost mesmeric motion.
An ominous place, this—a jumping-off place from the comparative congeniality of the moors into the dank darkness of ancient stygia...
Suddenly there flashed into my mind something I saw as being particularly relevant yet at the same time paradoxically obscure: some lines by E. P. Derby, from his book of nightmare lyrics, Azathoth and Other Horrors.
...for cleverer Gods by far
dream ‘neath the moorland moss;
Whose kin the night-things are,
who scorn the Christ-Child’s cross;
Who journeyed from afar
when earth was young and gross
Whose ken is on a par
with Daemo’n Azathoth’s...
Who fear the Pentik Star...!
These lines had no sooner passed before my mind’s eye than I found myself reeling helplessly at the edge of the rushing waters, tottering on the brink of the known world, and I flailed desperately with my arms as the foreign entity which had been my mind spun me dizzily away into vortices of its own conjuring ...
~ * ~
VII
UNDERGROUND: DREAM-PHASE ONE
[The Masters Case: from the Recordings of Dr. Eugene T. Thappon]
I do not know how long the attack lasted. I think I must have gone straight from the pool back to Dilham for the car, and from there to Bleakstone, but I cannot be sure. I seem to remember walking— certainly some sort of physical movement—and a terrible fear, but of what I am likewise incapable of saying. The thought is indeed a fearsome one that I actually drove my nephew’s car during that phase of mental instability; yet it seems I must have done so. Certainly there later remained a picture in my mind of taking a drink in the bar of The George and of talking with the barman again about the figurine, but no more than that...
If I had thought my dreams of the first night at The George protracted and strange, what was I to make of those which were yet to come? The trouble was that this time there was no dividing line, no passage from the waking world into that of dream, so that I could not really tell if what next occurred was in fact a long-drawn-out dream or simply an extension of the lapse that began at Devil’s Pool—that lapse which was nothing less than the harbinger of my brain’s rapidly advancing deterioration.
I had suddenly found myself in nighted, chill, and rushing waters! I had not even attempted to swim. Up-rushing currents had kept me on the surface of the water, bobbing me along like a cork down a rain-washed gutter; and though I had taken in an incredible amount of water my lungs still functioned, and I knew that my stomach, in normal reaction to my near-drowning, had been at work for a long time pumping its unwanted contents back into a crooning, unseen stream from which I must somehow have dragged myself.
There had been dank darkness, suffocating silence, the deafness of unconsciousness... then water sounds, whispering wetness, the cold gurglings of ancient, weirdly articulate subterranean sumps. It was completely real... the black blindness, the lingering lightlessness, the almost amorous, caressing amaurosis ...
And then I knew that I was underground... beneath the moors!
But in fact my prison was not the place of utter darkness I first thought it; for while on coming to my senses (is the expression pardonable?) the blackness had seemed complete, after a while, as my eyes gradually grew accustomed to the deep gloom, I made out high above me what appeared to be a pinprick of light, and it was purely by token of that unknown, crevicelike entry in some equally unknown gorge on the wild moors that my underground prison had any light at all. That thin, filtered glimmer groping down from the safe, sane world above, possibly saved me in my first “conscious” moments from panic and madness.
My position was straight from Poe, yet to me infinitely worse than any premature burial, for a man entombed in a coffin at least knows the extent of his prison and must soon mercifully suffocate; but a man lost underground in limitless depths, yet with ample air and water, might linger on for weeks in a slow torture of starvation and stygian horror!
That minimum of God’s light, sent down through what might have been light-years from the high hole in the roof of the cavern, gave my eyes at least something to cling to, and my mind a point on which to conjecture. I suppose I must have “slept” through that first night, for I remember seeing the friendly, dim point of light slowly fade until the darkness was truly complete, and then no more until quite suddenly I found myself “awake,” conscious, and with a gnawing hunger inside me.
I had slept within my sleep obviously, for again I had known dreams within dreams, and they had been quite as mad as those I had experienced previously at Bleakstone. There had been crooning voices, or at least sounds, noises made by living things at any rate (or were they simply disturbances on the invisible ether of my mind?) which had left me with impressions of great mystery and age, of limitless alienage, of an antiquity beyond conjecture, and an almost supernatural holiness akin to that feeling in the heart—more an ethereal than a physical thing—which one knows when listening to the reverberating echoes of a powerful choir within the sounding walls of a great cathedral.
These voices had at first seemed to be far away, in time as well as space, but they had drifted closer, ululant and throbbing until the stagnant air of my hole in the earth had seemed vibrant with their chanting ... and then they had ceased. I had known the momentary tumblings of strange hands—or paws—and had felt upon me the scrutiny of eyes unlike the eyes of men.
No lights had illuminated my visitors, yet I had known and recognized them—those habitants of lb and Lh-yib, those minions of Bokrug—and then, even dreaming, I had been doubly sure I only dreamed, for nothing like these creatures of Earth’s youth could possibly remain extant anywhere in the normal waking world. Eventually I had been left alone again to my exhausted slumbers, and thus it remained until I awoke.
I say “I awoke,” and yet I simply moved from one level of nightmare to another, for outside, high above, it was “day” again, and the friendly beam once more was flickering down to me in my cold stone prison. And in that prison, cold and hungry, I was as far removed as ever from my comfortable room at The George.
It was hunger that prompted me to drag my cramped body from th
e stream side, to stumble near-blind about the confines of my great coffin.
“Coffin,” indeed! When first I found the mushrooms I was so lost in morbid reverie, a reverie completely in keeping with the chill damp of the place, that I thought they were great grave worms— fat, white, and squamous—waiting for my flesh to die. But the fatness was only their lush depth, and the scales were not scales but the mottling of the pileus-covered domes.
I ate some of them, ravenously, and then I “slept” once more ...
~ * ~
VIII
BOKRUG: DREAM-PHASE TWO
[The Masters Case: from the Recordings of Dr. Eugene T. Thappon]
The period of comparative lucidity—if a condition such as I was in may be couched in any such terms—in which I eventually found myself following my meal of mushrooms in the cave of the stream was one that I found completely contrary to any previously conceived ideas of mine concerning delusions or dream-obsessions. Of the fact that the condition was psychotic, there could be little doubt, and yet everything had a quality to it of the real and solid. There was none of the fuzziness of dream or nightmare to the edges of the clearly defined visions I saw, none of fever’s repetitious phrasing of words and sentences in conversation (oh, yes, this latter still to come!) and when I moved, each motion I made produced a corresponding ache in those areas of my body bruised by my whirling dream-rush through heaven-only-knows what distances of subterranean waterway and by my blundering about the cave. And yet the things I saw, heard, and felt—indeed all my sensations throughout that odd period—were certainly fantasies and figments of my own disorganized mental processes. In short, I was still dreaming ... and my condition was rapidly worsening!
