The Last Hieroglyph

by Clark Ashton Smith

  However, the bravado of many Martinis had only half evaporated. He said aloud: “What can you do for me, shadow?”

  “More than you think,” rejoined the whisper. “You have seen the foreshadowing of the crime that your partner meditates: the crime that he will attempt tonight. If you wish I can prevent him.”

  “You’re only a shadow,” protested Jones, wondering if the fantastic dialogue were part of some insidious but growing delirium. “You’re an ugly bastard: but I’m the only one that can see you. How could you prevent anything?”

  “You have made me strong,” averred the whisper. “And I have power now over other shadows, both seen and unseen, and can exert myself in the world of physical causes and effects.”

  “I don’t believe it,” sneered Jones, feeling even as he spoke a weird horripilation in the mid‑region of his back. Something—perhaps a hand or a hoof—was pressing his chest lightly through the bed‑clothes. The pressure deepened by almost imperceptible gradations till it became an incubus‑like burden that seemed to flatten his ribs and breast‑bone and lungs against his spine. He gasped and agonized for breath; and the dreadful weight was withdrawn with insupportable slowness.

  “Do you wish further proof of my power?” resumed the whisper, close above him now in the opaque darkness.

  Jones was thoroughly terrified by this time; and his terror was complicated by a feeling of nightmare impotence and muddlement.

  “No, no!” he cried. “Go away, shadow. Do whatever you want, but don’t bother me.”

  It seemed that a ponderable presence was gone suddenly from the room. There was no repetition of the thin, rustling whispers, no return of the crushing encumbrance. Jones listened awhile with the curious intentness of which only an alcoholic is capable. His fear lightened; his drunkenness came flooding back upon him; and he lapsed by degrees into a slumber without dreams or untoward interruptions.

  He awoke only once during the remainder of the night. His mouth and throat were parched with the all‑consuming thirst that ensues heavy drinking. He rose and groped his way to the bathroom where, after much fumbling, he found the switch. As he poured himself a second glass of water, he perceived with senses still drugged and sluggish, that no shadow, either natural or unnatural, was cast by his body on the basin and faucets and wall in the light that streamed directly from behind.

  “Damn good riddance,” he rumbled, as he went back to bed. “Christ, what a nightmare that was!”

  A reiterated buzzing, like that of a badgered rattlesnake, awakened Jones to the horrid realities of daylight. It was the telephone on the stand beside his bed.

  He lifted the receiver with a none too steady hand. Immediately a feminine voice, shrill with agitation and hysteria, began to babble in his ear.

  “Mr. Jones? This is Miss Lamont, in the office next to yours. Come down at once…. Something horrible has happened.”

  “What? What?” stammered Jones.

  “Your partner, Caleb Johnson… dead… found by the janitor… crushed to death…. No one can figure how it happened. Miss Owens… stark mad… in your office….” The babbling became wholly incoherent, till Jones could distinguish only an occasional word or syllable that conveyed nothing of further information to his bewildered mind.

  The sun was nearly halfway to its meridian when he emerged on the street. Plainly he had overslept following the strange experience, whether nightmare or hallucination, that had plagued his homecoming.

  Heedless, for once, of whatever shadow might ensue or proceed his steps, he reached his office, to find a state of bedlam for which the babbling voice had prepared him all too inadequately with its intimations of horror.

  It seemed that all other offices in the three‑story edifice had voided their tenants into the hall outside his door. The door itself stood open, with people milling in and out. They made way for Jones, and the hubbub sank to a temporary hush. He entered his office, feeling himself the cynosure of eyes in which some ghastliness beyond belief was reflected.

  There were two policeman and a doctor amid the crowd that filled the room as buzz‑flies fill an abattoir. Miss Lamont, typist of the real‑estate firm in the office next door, detached herself from the clustered group and fluttered toward Jones, still babbling. Jones heard little, and understood less, of what she was trying to say.

  Miss Owens, sitting flaccidly in a chair, was moaning and sobbing with the mindless reiteration of a phonograph record. Her eyes were vacant, her face was drawn and distorted as if by some sudden mysterious stroke. The doctor, whom Jones knew by sight as a practitioner in the same neighborhood, was standing solicitously beside her, a hypodermic still in his hand. Plainly he had given her an injection of some soporific drug: her noisy hysteria began to subside, with lengthening intervals of drowsy silence.

  Jones gave her only a passing attention. The group of people before the big iron safe had drawn back, turning toward him as if with one accord. Seized and held by an abominable fascination, he gazed at the strange thing that was now revealed.

  The legs and hips of a man, wearing the rakish, broad‑checked suit that Caleb Johnson had affected recently, protruded at a sharp, stiff angle from the safe door, which had closed on the body like a huge trap. It seemed that the body had been cut virtually in two by this inexplicable closing: since the heavy door was now nearly plumb with its iron and concrete frame. Johnson’s coat‑tails and trousers were streaked darkly with the blood that had run down and coagulated in a broad pool about his nattily shod feet. It was evident that he had been dead for several hours.

  People began to talk all at once, vociferating and expostulating. Bemused with a sense of horror and unreality, Jones gathered by fragments the information they were trying to give him.

  The janitor, coming late to work that morning, had heard the cries and sobbing of a woman in Jones’ office. Finding the door unlocked, he had entered, to discover Johnson caught like a trapped rat in the safe door, and Miss Owens in a state of shock or seizure that seemingly unhinged her mind. He had been unable to budge the ponderous door of the safe; unable to learn anything from the mouthings of the madwoman; and had promptly called the police and a doctor. The local coroner had also been summoned, but was delayed in coming.

  Other people had appeared from the neighboring offices that began to fill at that hour. Many attempts had been made to release the dead and almost bisected body, identified beyond a doubt as that of Johnson by letters in one of his hip pockets. Crowbars had been employed; but nothing could loosen the grip of the massive metal jaws that had closed so unaccountably upon their victim. No one could conjecture what force or agency had caused their closing; certainly no human power could have been responsible. Why they should so obstinately refuse to open was an equal mystery.

  As he listened, Jones recalled the eerie nocturnal dialogue in which he had seemed to take part. Could the thin, whispering voice have been more than a figment of dream or delirium? Had someone, or something, offered to prevent the crime that had been apparently foreshown by a pantomime of shadows? Had the frightfully crushing pressure in his chest been something other than a cacodemon of slumber or alcohol?

  It seemed all too patent that Johnson, with the connivance of Miss Owens, had planned to rob the safe, and had opened it with the combination known only to himself and Jones. There was no legitimate reason why the pair should have visited the office during what, from all evidence, must have been the late night or early morning hours. What hellish thing had overtaken them, had slain Johnson so hideously in his act of embezzlement, and had driven his companion to madness? Jones stood aghast before the gulf that was opened by such questions and surmises.

  At this moment he heard the familiar whispering voice: “You alone can open that which I have closed.”

  Jones put his fingers into the inch or more of space that remained between the door’s edge and the frame. The dialled mass of metal swung outward easily and without sound, and Johnson’s body, compressed at the waist to a ghas
tly hour‑glass attenuation, slumped forward into the safe. It lay face downward amid stacks of currency and standard bonds. A rubber‑banded roll of twenty‑dollar bills was still clutched in the right hand, which had already stiffened a little with premature rigor mortis.

  An hour later, Jones locked the empty office in which nothing could have induced him to linger. His feelings were those of one who has just escaped from some inquisitorial ordeal, but is still dogged by more than inquisitorial terrors. The inquest had been a tedious daymare, from which nothing had emerged conclusively except the irrefutable fact that Johnson was dead. No reason, or suspicion of a reason, could be found for holding anyone in connection with his death. His car had been located in an alley back of the building. In it were valises belonging both to Johnson and Miss Owens. Indications were that the pair had planned to elope for parts unknown following the safe‑robbery.

  Miss Owens had been removed to a local hospital for observation. Reporters had beleaguered Jones with questions that he was, for the most part, honestly unable to answer. Apparently they, as well as the coroner and the police, were satisfied that the whole affair was no less a mystery to Jones than to others. Nevertheless, he was pursued by dark apprehensions, and his feelings of physical shock and spectral horror were tinged by something that bordered on guilt. Walking along the sunbright street with inattentive eyes, he thought that he was not alone—that a presence walked beside him, step by step.

  It was the shadow. The thing had changed overnight, assuming new properties. Opaque and tri‑dimensional, it paced between Jones and the sun like a sable quadruped, rising nearly waist‑high above the pavement. It was independent both of Jones and the light: a self‑existent entity, a black and bestial doppelganger.

  [Typescript of “I Am Your Shadow” ends with this page.]

  APPENDIX SIX:

  ALTERNATE ENDING TO

  “NEMESIS OF THE UNFINISHED”

  [This version begins following the paragraph that ends “He sat down at the typewriter, determined that he would finish the story to his satisfaction.”]

  For a while he wrote steadily, without hesitating over variant words or divergencies of plot development. It seemed that some magic lamp illumined his brain, clarifying all that had baffled and eluded him heretofore. The sorcerer, Guillaume de la Coudraie, had procured an ancient chart of mouldy parchment, giving the location of a ghoul‑guarded tomb in which were hidden the essential formulæ that he had long vainly sought. The formulæ contained the words of power, the secret names by which the dread kings of the four infernal quarters, as well as many lesser spirits, could be summoned, constrained and dismissed. The procuring of the parchment itself had entailed many obscure perils both to soul and body. The path to the designated tomb, moreover, was fraught with preternatural dangers and deadfalls.

  At this point La Porte’s inspiration became once more confused and indecisive. He wrote page after page, only to discard them as unsatisfactory. The magic light, illumining the story so briefly, had dimmed and gone out like a necromancer’s lantern in smoky darkness.

  The day wore on in this frustrating, brain‑fettering labor; only to leave La Coudraie still conning the musty, worm‑frayed parchment in his tower chamber lined with ponderous tomes of goety and demonology.

  At last La Porte abandoned the fruitless task in something that bordered upon despair. It was nearly sunset; perhaps a walk to the neighboring village would refresh his jaded brain.

  It was many hours later when he wandered homeward rather unsteadily by the rays of a cloud‑strangled moon. Forgetting his usual strict economy, he had consumed numerous brandies at a local bar. He did not care for the people who frequented such places; but he had been reluctant to leave and face again the unsolved problems of his sorcerer, in a cabin peopled with half‑written and unwritten fantasies.

  He entered, lit the lamp, and seated himself resolutely once more before the typewriter. Removing a partly finished sheet from the roller, he crumpled it, cast it aside, and inserted a fresh one. Then, groping foggily for a sentence with which to resume the tale, he slid into drunken slumber.

  Wild dreams came to visit him anon. Eldritch voices shrieked and muttered in his ears, conspiring against his peace and safety; indistinct but nightmarish figures milled around him like the dancers of some demonian Sabbat, swirling and leaning ever nearer with gestures of hideous menace.

  In one of the dreams, he was Guillaume de la Coudraie, sitting in his tower with the time‑fretted chart, stained with nameless corruption, unrolled before him. He was girt for the journey to the hidden tomb; his scrip was packed with such impediments of magic as he might require; and the arthame, the wizard sword of consecrated metal, potent for defense against demons and liches and phantoms, glittered unsheathed on the table close to his right hand. But still he lingered, pondering the chart, whose lines and drawings and letterings, inscribed in the blood of vipers, seemed to shift and change beneath his anxious scrutiny till the route they indicated was another than the one that he had longed yet feared to follow.

  By this sign, La Coudraie knew that the powers he had sought to control were working against him. He was mocked by those whom he had dreamt to dominate. He trembled, and peered fearfully about his chamber, seeing now that other signs had begun to manifest themselves.

  Curious red and nacarat flames, in the form of reptilian salamanders, had sprung up from the unlit, cinder‑choked brazier that the wizard used in his incantations. They seemed to lengthen and lean toward him in uncoiled menace, with heads whitening to intolerable brightness. Pallid vapors, flat as papery tongues, issued from the piled grimoires and swelled interminably, darkening and thickening to the semblance of malign genii whose eye‑sockets seethed with lurid fire under night‑black brows.

  Lowering his gaze in terror, the necromancer saw that the changing lines and ciphers had been wholly erased from the chart before him. In their stead, on the blank surface, appeared the lineaments of a baleful and infernal visage. Though the livid eyelids were shut, the face was that of Alastor, demon of vengeance…. Slowly, dreadfully, it emerged from the flatness of the parchment, rearing on a python‑like neck till it confronted La Coudraie on a level with his own face. Slowly, horribly, the eyes opened….

  La Porte awakened, or seemed to awaken, from his necromantic nightmare. At least, he was conscious of being back in his cabin, seated before the typewriter just as he had fallen asleep. The profound terror of the sorcerer La Coudraie still possessed him; nor, in the circumstances of his awakening, was there anything to mitigate the terror.

  By the light of the oil‑lamp, burning stilly beside his Remington, he found himself staring into the same Satanic face that had risen from the sorcerer’s chart and had opened its basilisk eyes upon him in his dream. The face was mounted on the same scaled ophidian neck. Algae‑green, with ashen mottlings, the neck thickened downward, seeming to issue from the blank sheet of paper, newly inserted, that curved back across the Remington’s roller. Clear and rigid as icicles, twin shafts of light poured from the unpupilled eyes, transfixing his very marrow, filling the darkest cells of his brain with their searching, searing illumination.

  Inch by tedious inch, like one half‑paralyzed, he turned from the direct gaze of the apparition—only to confront the shapes and faces of Pandemonium. Like those that had sprung from the wizard’s brazier, burning elementals rose amid the charred logs in his fireplace, breathing smoke and heat as they serpentined outward into the room. Endless vapory scrolls unfurled from between the leaves of his massed manuscripts, dilating into Powers and Dominations. Bloated incubi swam toward him on the air, levitating themselves pronely, quivering like obscene jellies, and lolling their fulsome vermillion tongues from taurine mouths.

  Out of all these shapes, that seethed and fumed in perpetual agitation, there pulsed an insufferable horror that centered upon La Porte: a horror older than man, older than the world, deeper than the earth’s caverns or the crypts of the brain.

  It
seemed that he had not awakened from his dream: that he was still the sorcerer La Coudraie, facing the vengeful demons over whom he had secured an incomplete power. And yet he was still Francis La Porte who, metaphorically, had summoned such beings; had imagined and described them in stories that were like unfinished incantations, lacking the spells of compulsion and dismission.

  Whether awake or dreaming, he knew the deadly peril in which he stood. A frenzy beyond the frenzy of nightmares mounted within him, and his reason seemed to drown in some abyss of primordial fears. Without knowing whence they came, from what volume of dubious lore he had remembered them, he began to declaim the words of a cabalistic exorcism.

  “I adjure ye by the living God, El, Ehome, Etrha, Ejel aser, Ejech Adonay Iah Tetragrammaton Saday Agios other Agla ischiros athanatos—”

  The long and orotund formula came to an end. It seemed that the specters had drawn back a little, facing La Porte in a sort of semi‑circle. But, without turning, he knew that other visitants had gathered behind him. They guarded the door; they hemmed him in; they barred him from all hope of egress. Truly, he was no sorcerer to dismiss them, entrenched with intricate circles and pentagrams, and armed with the magnetized rod and the cross‑hilted knife.

  The pulsing horror deepened; the menace quickened like tightening coils.... And yet, among all these formidable shapes, there was nothing that he had not conceived and depicted in his half‑abortive tales. They were, he tried to tell himself, mere images and ideas that he had never wholly discharged from his mind. Perhaps there was another mode of exorcism, surer and more potent than the one that magicians had employed.

  Trying to disregard his visitors, he stooped over the Remington and his fingers began to seek the familiar keys…. [The typescript of “Nemesis of the Unfinished” ends here. The last page appears to be missing.]

  APPENDIX SEVEN:

  BIBLIOGRAPHY