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 s
hocking 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.
The Hunted
Angus McIntyre
The War Office had sent an escort for Rachel, a young army officer who met her at the Glasgow landing field and summoned a hansom cab to carry her and her trunk to the railway station. After the smoothness and silence of her flight from London, the lurching and jolting of the cab and the din of its wheels on the cobbles left her feeling battered.
“I don’t suppose you can tell us where we’re going,” she said.
Her escort, whose name and rank she had already forgotten, shook his head.
“No, miss,” he said. “Orders.”
He looked very young, his khaki battledress crisp and neat. She thought he might be a lieutenant, or perhaps a sergeant. She tried to remember whether either of those ranks was higher than captain, the only other military rank she could remember.
She saw almost nothing of Glasgow, her eyes still dazzled by the miraculous visions she had seen from the window of the flying machine: houses and fields shrunk to the size of toys, ragged streamers of white cloud over the Midlands, sunlight glinting on the silver ribbon of a river. Amidst the beauty were uglier reminders of the recent fighting: the ragged black wasteland that had been Birmingham before the Martians burned it, clusters of shell craters marking the site of some futile battle, patches of lingering red weed like open wounds in the green landscape.
At the station, the soldier led her directly to the platform and the waiting train. She had hoped he might let slip the name of their destination when he bought tickets, but evidently he had the tickets or something like them already in his pocket. A board at the platform entrance had a list of stops written on it in precise chalked capitals, but she could only make out a handful of names – Dumbarton, Bridge of Orchy, Fort William – before he hurried her past. None of them meant anything to her.
The carriage was shabby and the seats bore a patina of grime. Too few people left to clean, she supposed. Even eight months on, Britain still seemed a land populated mostly by ghosts, the survivors too few to fill the nation’s once-bustling cities. Each face she saw still bore the mark of those weeks of terror and the long months of privation that followed.
The train whistle sounded and she felt again that residual frisson of fear, hearing in the familiar sound an evil echo of the hooting of the Martian hunting machines. She saw her companion start in his seat and guessed that he heard it the same way. The train jolted into motion.
She had some papers with her, drafts of a monograph on ancient Akkadian that she had been writing before the invasion. It seemed absurd to be still working on it when so many of her colleagues had died, when the university itself was a blackened shell. It might be decades before anyone cared about logosyllabic cuneiform again. Yet she found that immersing herself in her studies calmed her. Besides, she suspected that their journey was going to be long and it would be good to have something to occupy her.
As they passed through Clydebank, the soldier touched her sleeve and pointed out the window. A trio of fighting machines had been pressed into service as cranes. She watched one step into the water with that spindly, menacing stride she remembered too well. A pallet laden with cargo dangled beneath it, destined for a schooner berthed at a nearby wharf.
It was only right, she thought, that the machines that had wrought so much devastation should be used to rebuild the world, alien swords beaten into plowshares. Yet she would have been happier not to see them at all.
The train picked up speed, the panting of the engine settling into a steady rhythm. The city dwindled and fell away behind.
“Now,” said Rachel with a touch of acerbity. “Where are we going?”
The soldier glanced up and down the almost empty carriage as if to assure himself that the other passengers were too far away to hear him.
“Mallaig,” he said.
“And what, pray, is at Mallaig?”
He leaned closer. “A cylinder,” he whispered. “They found a cylinder.”
* * *
Mallaig was not much more than a row of white houses facing a broad bay tucked into a curve of green hills. Late afternoon sunlight glinted on the gray sea and gilded the low islands offshore.
To the north of the harbor lay a military camp, with regular lines of long khaki tents drawn up between barbed wire fences. A pair of fighting machines towered over the camp, monstrous insects straddling the fence line.
“Those are ours,” Rachel’s escort said. He pointed to the Union Jacks dangling from flagstaffs attached to the hull of each machine. “See?”
Rachel liked the look of them no better for that. She suppressed a shudder at the sight of the black funnels hanging from the machines, the projectors of the terrible heat-ray. Domesticated they might be, but they were still killers.
At the edge of the camp stood a long building of new red brick, roofed with gleaming sheets of tin. It was built right on the shore with a ramp at one end sloping down to the water’s edge. A tall chimney puffed smoke into the clear summer sky.
“That’s the laboratory,” the soldier told her, answering her unspoken question. “That’s where they keep the creatures.”
“Creatures,” Rachel said. “Do you mean –”
“Yes,” he said. “Martians. Three of them. Alive, alive-oh.”
* * *
“I imagine you must be wondering what you’re doing here, Miss Thompson,” Colonel Porter said.
He was a stout man in his fifties with a florid complexion and a gray mustache. From the way the flesh sagged from his face and neck, Rachel guessed that he must have been a good deal stouter before the Martians landed and food ran scarce.
“I confess to a certain curiosity,” she said, injecting as much ice into the words as possible.
On arrival, her escort had handed her over to a second officer and disappeared. Her new guardian had been even less forthcoming than his colleague, answering her questions only with the assurance that “the colonel will explain everything in the morning”. He showed her to her lodgings, a small, very clean room in one of the houses overlooking the harbor, with a narrow bed and a basin and ewer for washing. Then he too vanished, leaving her to stew alone. Later, an old woman with a cast in one eye brought her food – floury bap rolls with luncheon meat for supper, a bowl of salted
porridge and a mug of tea for breakfast. Aside from that, she saw no one and spoke to no one until nine the next morning when the officer came back to take her to the colonel.
“You were highly recommended,” the colonel said. “As an expert in languages ancient and modern. I was told –”
“What is it you want from me?” Rachel cut in.
The colonel stiffened. She guessed that he was unaccustomed to being interrupted, especially by a woman.
“You have studied the Martian language,” he said.
“I’ve looked at samples of their writing system. I suppose that makes me as much of an authority as anyone else.”
“Could you speak to a Martian?”
She shook her head, frustrated. “Colonel, I –”
He held up his hand. “Let me put it another way. I need you to speak to a Martian for me.”
She had suspected it, of course, even before the lieutenant had told her about the cylinder. But suspicion and confirmation were two different things.
“Six weeks ago, we discovered a cylinder that had landed in shallow water,” the colonel continued. “The scientists tell me that the accident of its landing in water probably prevented the Martians inside from emerging and left them in the state of hibernation in which they made the crossing from Mars.”
And you brought it ashore, Rachel thought. You should have dragged it into deeper water or blown it up, but instead you opened it up and let them out.
“We opened the cylinder yesterday morning. The Martians inside were overpowered before they could assemble their weapons. As far as we know, they are the last living Martians anywhere on Earth.”
She thought of the two fighting machines that she had seen, their weapons trained on the laboratory building. There had been a battery of guns too, and grim-faced Tommies with rifles and bayonets patrolling the barbed wire fence surrounding the building. She wondered if it was enough.
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