Wilmarth hated to leave at this time, he wrote, in particular he was worried about Lovecraft’s failing health, but nevertheless he was on his way!
The next weeks (which dragged out to two months) were a time of particular tension, anxiety, and anticipatory excitement for me. Wilmarth had many more people and places to visit and investigations to make (including readings with the geo-scanner) than I’d ever imagined. Now he sent mostly postcards, some of them scenic, but they came thick and fast (except for a couple of worrisome hiatuses) and with his minuscule handwriting he got so much on them (even the scenic ones) that at times I almost felt I was with him on his trip, worrying about the innards of his Austin, which he called the Tin Hind after Sir Francis Drake’s golden one. I on my part had only a few addresses he’d listed for me where I could write him in advance—Baltimore; Winchester, Virginia; Bowling Green, Kentucky; Memphis; Carlsbad, New Mexico; Tucson; and San Diego.
First he had to stop in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, with its quaintly backward farm communities, to investigate some possibly pre-Colonial ruins and hunt for a rumored cave, using the geo-scanner. Next, after Baltimore, there were extensive limestone caverns to check out in both Virginias. He crossed the Appalachians Winchester to Clarsksburg, a stretch with enough sharp turns to satisfy even him. Approaching Louisville, the Tin Hind was almost swallowed up in the Great Ohio Flood (which preoccupied the radio news for days; I hung over my superheterodyne set) and he was unable to visit a new correspondent of Lovecraft’s there. Then there was more work for the geo-scanner near Mammoth Cave. In fact, caves seemed to dominate his journey, for after a side trip to New Orleans to confer with some occult scholar of French extraction, there were the Carlsbad Caverns and nearby but less well-known subterranean vacuities. I wondered more and more about my tunnels.
The Tin Hind held up very well, except she blew out a piston head crossing Texas (“I held her at high speed a little too long”) and he lost three days getting her mended.
Meanwhile, I was finding and reading new Lovecraft stories. One, which turned up in a secondhand but quite recent science-fiction pulp, fictionalized the Australian expedition most impressively—especially the dreams old Peaslee had that led to it. In them, he’d exchanged personalities with a cone-shaped monster and was forever wandering through long stone passageways haunted by invisible whistlers. It reminded me so much of my nightmares in which I’d done the same thing with a winged worm that buzzed, that I airmailed a rather desperate letter to Tucson, telling Wilmarth all about it. I got a reply from San Diego, full of reassurances and more temporizings, and referring to old Akeley’s son and some sea caverns they were looking into, and (at last!) setting a date (it would be soon!) for his arrival.
The day before that last, I made a rare find in my favorite Hollywood hunting-ground. It was a little, strikingly illustrated book by Lovecraft called The Shadow Over Innsmouth and issued by Visionary Press, whoever they were. I was up half the night reading it. The narrator found some sinister, scaly human beings living in a deep submarine city off New England, realized he was himself turning into one of them, and at the end had decided (for better or worse) to dive down and join them. It made me think of crazy fantasies I’d had of somehow going down into the earth beneath the Hollywood Hills and rescuing or joining my dead father.
Meanwhile mail addressed to Wilmarth care of me had begun to arrive. He’d asked my permission to include my address on the itinerary he’d sent other correspondents. There were letters and cards from (by their postmarks) Arkham and places along his route, some from abroad (mostly England and Europe, but one from Argentina), and a small package from New Orleans. The return address on most of them was his own—118 Saltonstall, so he’d eventually get them even if he missed them along his route. (He’d asked me to do the same with my own notes.) The effect was odd, as though Wilmarth were the author of everything—it almost re-aroused my first suspicions of him and the project. (One letter, though among the last to come, a thick one bearing extravagantly a six-cent airmail stamp and a ten-cent special delivery, had been addressed to George Goodenough Akeley, 176 Pleasant St., San Diego, Cal., and then forwarded care of my own address in the upper-left-hand corner.)
Late the next afternoon (Sunday, April 14—the eve of my twenty-fifth birthday, as it happened) Wilmarth arrived very much as I’d imagined it occurring when I’d finished reading his first letter, except the Tin Hind was even smaller than I’d pictured—and enameled a bright blue, though now most dusty. There was an odd black case on the seat beside him, though there were a lot of other things on it too—maps, mostly.
He greeted me very warmly and began to talk a blue streak almost at once, with many a jest and frequent little laughs.
The thing that really shocked me was that although I knew he was only in his thirties, his hair was white and the haunted (or hunted) look I’d remembered was monstrously intensified. And he was extremely nervous—at first he couldn’t stay still a moment. It wasn’t long before I became certain of something I’d never once suspected before—that his breeziness and jauntiness, his jokes and laughs, were a mask for fear, no, for sheer terror, that otherwise might have mastered him entirely.
His actual first words were, “Mr. Fischer, I presume? So glad to meet you in the flesh!—and share your most salubrious sunlight. I look as if I need it, do I not?—a horrid sight! This landscape hath a distinctly cavish, tunnelly aspect—I’m getting to be an old hand at making such geological judgements. Danforth writes that Blackfellow has quite recovered from his indisposition. But Lovecraft is in the hospital—I do not like it. Did you observe last night’s brilliant conjunction?—I like your clear, clear skies. No, I will carry the geo-scanner (yes, it is that); it’s somewhat crankish. But you might take the small valise. Really, so very glad!”
He did not comment on or even seem to notice my twisted right foot (something I hadn’t mentioned in my letters, though he may have recalled it from six years back) or imply its or my limp’s existence in any way, as by insisting on carrying the valise also. That warmed me toward him.
And before going into the house with me, he paused to praise its unusual architecture (another thing I hadn’t told him about) and seemed genuinely impressed when I admitted that my father had built it by himself. (I’d feared he’d find it overly eccentric and also question whether someone could work with his hands and be a gentleman.) He also commented favorably on my father’s stone carvings wherever they turned up and insisted on pausing to study them, whipping out his notebook to make some quick jottings. Nothing would do, but I must take him on a full tour of the house before he’d consent to rest or take refreshments. I left his valise in the bedroom I’d assigned him (my parents’, of course), but he kept lugging the black geo-scanner around with him. It was an odd case, taller than it was wide or long, and it had three adjustable stubby legs, so that it could be set up vertically anywhere.
Emboldened by his approval of my father’s carvings, I told him about Simon Rodia and the strangely beautiful towers he was building in Watts, whereupon the notebook came out again and there were more jottings. He seemed particularly impressed by the marine quality I found in Rodia’s work.
Down in the basement (he had to go there too) he was very much struck by my father’s floor-set “Gate of Dreams” stone carving and studied it longer than any of the others. (I’d been feeling embarrassed about its bold motto and odd placement.) Finally he indicated the octopus eyes staring over the castle and observed, “Cutlu, perchance?”
It was the first reference of any sort to the research project that either of us had made since our meeting and it shook me strangely, but he appeared not to notice and continued with, “You know, Mr. Fischer, I’m tempted to get a reading with Atwood and Pabodie’s infernal black box right here. Would you object?”
I told him certainly not and to go right ahead, but warned him there was only solid rock under the house (I had told him about my father’s dowsing and even had mentioned Harley War
ren, whom it turned out Wilmarth had heard of through a Randolph Carter).
He nodded, but said, “I’ll take a shot at it nonetheless. We must start somewhere, you know,” and he proceeded to set up the geo-scanner carefully so it was standing vertically on its three stubby legs right in the middle of the carving. He took off his shoes first so as not to risk damaging the rather fine stonework.
Then he opened the top of the geo-scanner. I glimpsed two dials and a large eyepiece. He knelt and applied his eye to it, drawing out a black hood and draping it over his head, very much like an old-fashioned photographer focusing for a picture. “Pardon me, but the indications I must look for are difficult to see,” he said muffledly. “Hello, what’s this?”
There was a longish pause during which nothing happened except his shoulders shifted a bit and there were a few faint clicks. Then he emerged from under the hood, tucked it back in the black box, closed the latter, and began to put on and relace his shoes.
“The scanner’s gone crankish,” he explained in answer to my inquiry, “and is seeing ghost vacuities. But not to worry—it only needs new warm-up cells, I fancy, which I have with me, and will be right as rain for tomorrow’s expedition! That is, if—?” He rolled his eyes up at me in smiling inquiry.
“Of course I’ll be able to show you my pet trails in the hills,” I assured him. “In fact, I’m bursting to.”
“Capital!” he said heartily.
But as we left the basement, its rock floor rang out a bit hollowly, it sounded to me, under his high-laced leather-soled and -heeled shoes (I was wearing sneakers).
It was getting dark, so I started dinner after giving him some iced tea, which he took with lots of lemon and sugar. I cooked eggs and small beefsteaks, figuring from his haggard looks he needed the most restorative sort of food. I also built a fire in the big fireplace against the almost invariable chill of evening.
As we ate by its dancing, crackling flames, he regaled me with brief impressions of his trip west—the cold, primeval pine woods of southern New Jersey with their somberly clad inhabitants speaking an almost Elizabethan English; the very narrow dark roads of West Virginia; the freezing waters of the Ohio flooding unruffled, silent, battleship gray, and ineffably menacing under lowering skies; the profound silence of Mammoth Cave; the southern Midwest with its Depression-spawned, but already legendary, bank robbers; the nervous Creole charms of New Orleans’s restored French Quarter; the lonely, incredibly long stretches of road in Texas and Arizona that made one believe one was seeing infinity; the great, long, blue, mystery-freighted Pacific rollers (“so different from the Atlantic’s choppier, shorter-spaced waves”) which he’d watched with George Goodenough Akeley, who’d turned out to be a very solid chap and knowing more about his father’s frightening Vermont researches than Wilmarth had expected.
When I mentioned finding The Shadow Over Innsmouth he nodded and murmured, “The original of its youthful hero has disappeared and his cousin from the Canton asylum. Down to Y’ha-nthlei? Who knows?” But when I remembered his accumulated mail he merely nodded his thanks, wincing a little, as though reluctant to face it. He really did look shockingly tired.
When we’d finished dinner, however, and he’d taken his black coffee (also with lots of sugar) and the fire was dancing flickeringly, both yellow and blue now, he turned to me with a little, venturesomely friendly smile and a big, wonderingly wide lifting of his eyebrows, and said quietly, “And now you’ll quite rightly be expecting me to tell you, my dear Fischer, all the things about the project that I’ve been hesitant to write, the answers I’ve been reluctant to give to your cogent questions, the revelations I’ve been putting off making until we should meet in person. Really, you have been very patient, and I thank you.”
Then he shook his head thoughtfully, his eyes growing distant, as he slowly and rather sinuously and somehow unwillingly shrugged his shoulders, which paradoxically were both frail and wide, and grimaced slightly, as if tasting something strangely bitter, and said even more quietly, “if only I had more to tell you that’s been definitely proved. Somehow we always stop just short of that. Oh, the artifacts are real enough and certain—the Innsmouth jewelry, the Antarctic soapstones, Blake’s Shining Trapezohedron, though that’s lost in Narragansett Bay, the spiky baluster knob Walter Gilman brought back from his witchy dreamland (or the nontemporal fourth dimension, if you prefer), even the unknown elements, meteoric and otherwise, which defy all analysis, even the new magneto-optic probe which has given us virginium and alabamine. And it’s almost equally certain that all, or almost all, those weird extraterrestrial and extra-cosmic creatures have existed—that’s why I wanted you to read the Lovecraft stories, despite their lurid extravagances, so you’d have some picture of the entities that I’d be talking to you about. Except that they and the evidence for them do have a maddening way of vanishing upon extinction and from all records—Wilbur Whateley’s mangled remains, his brother’s vast invisible cadaver, the Plutonian old Akeley killed and couldn’t photograph, the June 1882 meteor itself which struck Nahum Gardner’s farm and which set old Armitage (young then) studying the Necronomicon (the start of everything at Miskatonic) and which Atwood’s father saw with his own eyes and tried to analyze, or what Danforth saw down in Antarctica when he looked back at the horrible higher mountains beyond the Mountains of Madness—he’s got amnesia for that now that he has regained his sanity … all, all gone!
“But whether any of those creatures exist today—there, there’s the rub! The overwhelming question we can’t answer, though always on the edge of doing so. The thing is,” he went on with gathering urgency, “that if they do exist, they are so unimaginably powerful and resourceful, they might be”—and he looked around sharply—”anywhere at the moment!
“Take Cthulhu,” he began.
I couldn’t help starting as I heard that word pronounced for the first time in my life; the harsh, dark, abysmal monosyllabic growl it came to was so very like the sound that had originally come to me from my imagination, or my subconscious, or my otherwise unremembered dreams, or.…
He continued, “If Cthulhu exists, then he (or she, or it) can go anywhere he wants through space, or air, or sea, or earth itself. We know from Johansen’s account (it turned his hair white) that Cthulhu can exist as a gas, be torn to atoms, and then recombine. He wouldn’t need tunnels to go through solid rock, he could seep through it—‘not in the spaces we know, but between them.’ And yet in his inscrutability he might choose tunnels—there’s that to be reckoned with. Or—still another possibility—perhaps he neither exists nor does not exist but is in some half state—‘waits dreaming,’ as Angell’s old chant has it. Perhaps his dreams, incarnated as your winged worms, Fischer, dig tunnels.
“It is those monstrous underground cavern-and-tunnel worlds, not all from Cthulhu by any means, that I have been assigned to investigate with the geo-scanner, partly because I was the first to hear of them from old Akeley and also—Merciful Creator!—from the Plutonian who masked as him—‘great worlds of unknown life down there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N’kai,’ which was Tsathoggua’s home, and even stranger inner spaces litten by colors from space and from Earth’s nighted core. That’s how I guessed the colors in your childhood dreams or nightmares (or personality exchanges), my dear Fischer. I’ve glimpsed them also in the geo-scanner, where they are, however, most fugitive and difficult to discern.…”
His voice trailed off tiredly, just as my own concern became most feverishly intense with his mention of “personality exchanges.”
He really did look shockingly fatigued. Nevertheless I felt impelled to nerve myself to say, “Perhaps those dreams can be repeated, if I take Dr. Morgan’s drug. Why not tonight?”
“Out of the question,” he replied, shaking his head slowly. “In the first place, I wrote too hopefully there. At the last minute Morgan was unable to supply me with the drug. He promised to send it along by mail, but hasn’t yet. In the seco
nd place, I’m inclined to think now that it would be much too dangerous an experiment.”
“But at least you’ll be able to check those dream colors and the tunnels with your geo-scanner?” I pressed on, somewhat crestfallen.
“If I can repair it …” he said, his head nodding and slumping to one side. The dying flames were all blue now as he whispered mumblingly, “… if I am permitted to repair it.…”
I had to help him to bed and then retire to my own, shaken and unsatisfied, my mind a-whirl. Wilmarth’s alternating moods of breezy optimism and a seemingly frightened dejection were hard to adjust to. But now I realized that I was very tired myself—after all, I’d been up most of the previous night reading Innsmouth—and soon I slumbered.
(The voices stridently groan, “The pit of primal life, the Yellow Sign, Azathoth, the Magnum Innominandum, the shimmering violet and emerald wings, the cerulean and vermilion claws, Great Cthulhu’s wasps …” Night has fallen. I have limpingly paced the house from the low attic with its circular portholes to the basement, where I touched my father’s sledge and eyed “The Gate of Dreams.” The moment draws nigh. I must write rapidly.)
I awoke to bright sunlight, feeling totally refreshed by my customary twelve hours of sleep. I found Wilmarth busily writing at the table that faced the north window of his bedroom. His smiling face looked positively youthful in the cool light, despite its neatly brushed thatch of white hair—I hardly recognized him. All his accumulated mail except for one item lay open and face downward on the far-left-hand corner of the table, while on the far-right-hand corner was an impressive pile of newly written and addressed postcards, each with its neatly affixed, fresh, one-cent stamp.
“Good morrow, Georg,” he greeted me (properly pronouncing it GAY-org), “if I may so address you. And good news!—the scanner is recharged and behaving perfectly, ready for the day’s downward surveying, while that letter George Goodenough forwarded is from Francis Morgan and contains a supply of the drug against tonight’s inward researches! Two dosages exactly—Georg, I’ll dream with you!” He waved a small paper packet.
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Page 37
