But Urquart’s theory about Mu had an extremely original touch. He told me that there was one major difference between the Lloigor and human beings. The Lloigor were deeply and wholly pessimistic. Urquart pointed out that we could hardly imagine what this meant. Human beings live on hopes of various kinds. We know we have to die. We have no idea where we came from, or where we are going to. We know that we are subject to accident and illness. We know that we seldom achieve what we want; and if we achieve it, we have ceased to appreciate it. All this we know, and yet we remain incurably optimistic, even deceiving ourselves with absurd, patently nonsensical, beliefs about life after death.
“Why am I talking to you,” said Urquart, “although I know perfectly well that no professor has an open mind, and every one I’ve had any dealings with has betrayed me? Because I think that you might be the exception—you might grasp the truth of what I’m saying. But why should I want it known, when I have to die like everyone else? Absurd, isn’t it? Yet we’re not reasonable creatures. We live and act on an unreasonable reflex of optimism—a mere reflex, like your knee kicking when someone taps it. It’s obviously completely stupid. Yet we live by it.”
I found myself impressed by him, in spite of my conviction that he was slightly mad. He was certainly intelligent.
He went on to explain that the Lloigor, although infinitely more powerful than men, were also aware that optimism would be absurd in this universe. Their minds were a unity, not compartmentalised, like ours. There was no distinction in them between conscious, subconscious, and superconscious mind. So they saw things clearly all the time, without the possibility of averting the mind from the truth, or forgetting. Mentally speaking, the closest equivalent to them would be one of those suicidal romantics of the nineteenth century, steeped in gloom, convinced that life is a pit of misery, and accepting this as a basis for everyday life. Urquart denied that the Buddhists resemble the Lloigor in their ultimate pessimism—not merely because of the concept of Nirvana, which offers a kind of absolute, equivalent to the Christian God, but because no Buddhist really lives in the constant contemplation of his pessimism. He accepts it intellectually, but does not feel it with his nerves and bones. The Lloigor lived their pessimism.
Unfortunately—and here I found it hard to follow Urquart—the earth is not suitable for such pessimism, on a subatomic level. It is a young planet. All its energy processes are still in the uphill stage, so to speak; they are evolutionary, making for complexification, and therefore, the destruction of negative forces. A simple example of this is the way that so many of the romantics died young; the earth simply will not tolerate subversive forces.
Hence the legend that the Lloigor created men as their slaves. For why should all-powerful beings require slaves? Only because of the active hostility, so to speak, of the earth itself. To counteract this hostility, to carry out their simplest purposes, they needed creatures who worked on an optimistic basis. And so men were created, deliberately short-sighted creatures, incapable of steadily contemplating the obvious truth about the universe.
What had then happened had been absurd. The Lloigor had been increasingly weakened by their life on earth. Urquart said that the documents offer no reasons for the Lloigor’s leaving their home, probably situated in the Andromeda nebula. They had gradually become less and less an active force. And their slaves had taken over, becoming the men of today. The Naacal tablets and other works that have come down from Mu are the creation of these men, not of the original “gods.” The earth has favoured the evolution of its ungainly, optimistic children, and weakened the Lloigor. Nevertheless, these ancient powers remain. They have retreated under the earth and sea, in order to concentrate their power in stones and rocks, whose normal metabolism they can reverse. This has enabled them to cling to the earth for many thousands of years. Occasionally, they accumulate enough energy to erupt once again into human life, and the results are whole cities destroyed. At one time, it was the whole continent—Mu itself—and later still, Atlantis. They had always been particularly virulent when they had been able to find traces of their previous slaves. They are responsible for many archaeological mysteries—great ruined cities of South America, Cambodia, Burma, Ceylon, North Africa, even Italy. And then, according to Urquart, the two great ruined cities of North America, Grudèn Itzà, now sunk beneath the swampland around New Orleans, and Nam-Ergest, a flourishing city that once stood on the land where the Grand Canyon now yawns. The Grand Canyon, Urquart said, was not created by earth erosion, but by a tremendous underground explosion followed by a “hail of fire.” He suspects that, like the great Siberian explosion, it was produced by some kind of atomic bomb. To my question of why there were not signs of an explosion around the Grand Canyon, Urquart had two replies: that it had taken place so long ago that most signs of it had been destroyed by natural forces, and second, that to any unprejudiced observer, it is plain enough that the Grand Canyon is an immense and irregular crater.
After two hours of this, and several helpings of his excellent whisky, I felt so confused that I had completely lost track of the questions I wanted to ask. I said I had to go to bed and think about it all, and the Colonel offered to run me home in his car. One of my questions came back to me as I climbed into the passenger seat of the ancient Rolls-Royce.
“What did you mean about the Welsh being survivors of Mu?”
“What I said. I am certain—I have evidence to prove—that they are descendents of the slaves of the Lloigor.”
“What kind of evidence?”
“All kinds. It would take another hour to explain.”
“Couldn’t you give me some hint?”
“All right. Look in the paper in the morning. Tell me what strikes you.”
“But what am I to look for?”
He was amused by my refusal to “wait and see.” He should have known that old men are less patient than children.
“The crime figures.”
“Can’t you tell me more?”
“All right.” We were parked outside the hotel by now, and it was still raining heavily. At this hour of the night, there was no sound but the fall of rain and the gurgling of water in the gutters. “You’ll find that the crime rate in this area is three times that of the rest of England. The figures are so high that they’re seldom published. Murder, cruelty, rape, every possible kind of sexual perversion—this area has the highest figures in the British Isles.”
“But why?”
“I’ve told you. The Lloigor achieve the strength to reappear every now and then.” And to make it clear that he wanted to go home, he leaned over and opened my door for me. Before I had reached the door of the hotel, he had driven off.
I asked the caretaker on duty if I could borrow a local newspaper; he produced me one from his cubbyhole, which he said I could keep. I went up to my cold room, undressed and climbed into bed—there was a hot-water bottle in it. Then I glanced through the newspaper. At first sight, I could see no evidence for Urquart’s assertion. The headline was about a strike in the local dockyard, and the lead stories were about a local cattle show in which the judges had been accused of accepting bribes, and about a Southport girl swimmer who had almost broken the record for the cross-Channel swim. On the middle page, the editorial was on some question of Sunday observance. It looked innocent enough.
Then I began to notice the small paragraphs, tucked away next to the advertisements or among the sports news. The headless body that had been found floating in the Bryn Mawr reservoir has been tentatively identified as a teenage farm girl from Llandalffen. A fourteen-year-old boy sentenced to a corrective institution for inflicting injuries on a sheep with a hatchet. A farmer petitioning for divorce on the grounds that his wife seemed to be infatuated with her imbecile stepson. A vicar sentenced to a year in prison for offences against choirboys. A father who had murdered his daughter and her boyfriend out of sexual jealousy. A man in the old-folks’ home who had incinerated two of his companions by pouring paraffin on their beds
and setting them alight. A twelve-year-old boy who had offered his twin sisters, age seven, ice cream with rat poison sprinkled on it, and then laughed uncontrollably in the juvenile court. (The children luckily survived with bad stomach-aches.) A short paragraph saying that the police had now charged a man with the three Lovers’ Lane murders.
I jotted these down in the order I read them. It was quite a chronicle for a peaceful rural area, even allowing that Southport and Cardiff, with their higher crime rates, were fairly close. Admittedly, it was not too bad a record compared to most places in America. Even Charlottesville can produce a crime record that would be regarded as a major crime wave in England. Before falling asleep, I pulled on my dressing gown, and found my way down to the lounge, where I had seen a copy of Whitaker’s Almanac, and looked up the English crime rate. A mere 166 murders in 1967—three murders to every million people of the population; America’s murder rate is about twenty times as high. Yet here, in a single issue of a small local newspaper, I had found mention of nine murders—although admittedly, some of them dated back a long way. (The Lovers’ Lane murders were spread over eighteen months.)
I slept very badly that night, my mind running constantly on invisible monsters, awful cataclysms, sadistic murderers, demoniac teenagers. It was a relief to wake up to bright sunlight and a cup of morning tea. Even so, I found myself stealing a look at the maid—a pale-faced little thing with dull eyes and stringy hair—and wondering what irregular union had produced her. I had breakfast and the morning paper sent up to my room, and read it with morbid interest.
Again, the more lurid news was carefully tucked away in small paragraphs. Two eleven-year-old schoolboys were accused of being implicated in the murder of the headless girl, but claimed that a tramp “with smouldering eyes” had actually decapitated her. A Southport druggist forced to resign from the town council when accused of having “carnal knowledge” of his fourteen-year-old assistant. Evidence suggesting that a deceased midwife had been a successful baby farmer in the manner of the infamous Mrs. Dyer of Reading. An old lady of Llangwm seriously injured by a man who accused her of witchcraft—of causing babies to be born with deformities. An attempt on the life of the mayor of Chepstow by a man with some obscure grudge.… I omit more than half of the list, for the crimes are as dull as they are sordid.
There was no doubt that all this brooding on crime and corruption was having its effect on my outlook. I had always liked the Welsh, with their small stature and dark hair and pale skins. Now I found myself looking at them as if they were troglodytes, trying to find evidence of secret vices in their eyes. And the more I looked, the more I saw it. I observed the number of words beginning with two L’s, from Lloyd’s Bank to Llandudno, and thought of the Lloigor with a shudder. (Incidentally, I thought the word familiar, and found it on page 258 of the Lovecraft Shuttered Room volume, listed as the god “who walks the winds among the star-spaces.” I also found Ghatanothoa, the Dark God, mentioned there, although not as the chief of the “star dwellers.”)
It was almost intolerable, walking along that sunlit street, looking at the rural population going about their everyday business of shopping and admiring one another’s babies, to feel this awful secret inside me, struggling to get out. I wanted to dismiss the whole thing as a nightmare, the invention of one half-crazed mind; then I had to acknowledge that it all followed logically from the Voynich manuscript and the Lovecraft gods. Yes, there could hardly be any doubt: Lovecraft and Machen had simply obtained some knowledge of an ancient tradition that may have existed before any known civilisation on earth.
The only other alternative was some elaborate literary hoax, organised between Machen, Lovecraft, and Voynich, who must be regarded as a forger, and that was impossible. But what an alternative! How could I believe in it and still feel sane, here in this sunlit high street, with the lilting sound of Welsh in my ears? Some evil, dark world, so alien from ours that human beings cannot even begin to understand it; strange powers whose actions seem incredibly cruel and vengeful, yet who are simply driven by abstract laws of their being that would be incomprehensible to us. Urquart, with his reptilian face and his morose intelligence. And above all, unseen forces bending the minds of these apparently innocent people around me, making them corrupt and depraved.
I had already decided what I would do that day. I would get Mr. Evans to drive me out to the “Grey Hills” mentioned by Machen, and take some photographs, and make some discreet enquiries. I even had a compass with me—one I usually kept in my car in America—in case I managed to lose my way.
There was a small crowd gathered outside Mr. Evans’s garage and an ambulance stood by the pavement. As I approached, two attendants came out, carrying a stretcher. I saw Mr. Evans standing gloomily inside the small shop attached to the garage, watching the crowd. I asked him:
“What happened?”
“Chap upstairs committed suicide in the night. Gassed himself.”
As the ambulance pulled away, I asked, “Don’t you think there’s rather a lot of that around here?”
“Of what?”
“Suicides, murders, and so on. Your local paper’s full of it.”
“I suppose so. It’s the teenagers nowadays. They do what they like.”
I saw there was no point in pursuing the subject. I asked him whether he was free to drive me to the Grey Hills. He shook his head.
“I promised I’d wait around to make a statement to the police. You’re welcome to use the car if you want it.”
And so I bought a map of the area, and drove myself. I stopped for ten minutes to admire the mediaeval bridge, mentioned by Machen, then drove slowly north. The morning was windy, but not cold, and the sunlight made the scene look totally different from the previous afternoon. Although I looked out carefully for signs of Machen’s Grey Hills, I saw nothing in the pleasant, rolling landscape that seemed to answer that description. Soon I found myself passing a signpost that announced Abergavenny ten miles away. I decided to take a look at the place. By the time I arrived there, the sunlight had so far dispelled the night vapours from my head that I drove round the town—unremarkable enough architecturally—and then walked up to look at the ruined castle above it. I spoke to a couple of natives, who struck me as more English than Welsh in type. Indeed, the town is not many miles away from the Severn Valley and A. E. Housman’s Shropshire.
But I was reminded of the myth of the Lloigor by a few sentences in the local guidebook about William de Braose, Lord of Brecheiniog (Brecon), “whose shadow broods darkly over the past of Abergavenny,” whose “foul deeds” had apparently shocked even the lawless English of the twelfth century. I made a mental note to ask Urquart how long the Lloigor had been present in South Wales, and how far their influence extended. I drove on northwest, through the most attractive part of the valley of the Usk. At Crickhowell, I stopped in a pleasantly old-fashioned pub and drank a cool pint of mild ale, and fell into conversation with a local who proved to have read Machen. I asked him where he supposed the “Grey Hills” to be situated, and he told me confidently that it was directly to the north, in the Black Mountains, the high, wild moorland between the valleys of Usk and the Wye. So I drove on for another half hour, to the top of the pass called the Bwlch, where the scenery is among the finest in Wales, with the Brecon Beacons to the west, and woodland and hills to the south, with glimpses of the Usk reflecting the sunlight. But the Black Mountains to the east looked anything but menacing, and their description did not correspond to the page in Machen that I was using as a guide. So I turned south once again, through Abergavenny (where I ate a light lunch), and then through minor roads to Llandalffen, the road climbing steeply again.
It was here that I began to suspect that I was approaching my objective. There was a barrenness about the hills that suggested the atmosphere of “The Novel of the Black Seal.” But I kept an open mind, for the afternoon had become cloudy, and I suspected it might be pure imagination. I stopped the car by the roadside, close to a stone
bridge, and got out to lean on the parapet. It was a fast-flowing stream, and the glassy power of the current fascinated me until I felt almost hypnotised by it. I walked down by the side of the bridge, digging in my heels to keep my balance on the steep slope, and went down to a flat rock beside the stream. This was almost an act of bravado, for I felt a distinct discomfort, which I knew to be partly self-induced. A man of my age tends to feel tired and depressed after lunch, particularly when he has been drinking.
I had my Polaroid camera round my neck. The green of the grass and the grey of the sky made such a contrast that I decided to take a picture. I adjusted the light meter on the front of the camera, and pointed the camera upstream; then I pulled out the photograph, and slipped it under my coat to develop. A minute later, I stripped off the negative paper. The photograph was black. Obviously, it had somehow been exposed to light. I raised the camera and took a second shot, tossing the first one into the stream. As I pulled the second photograph from the camera, I had a sudden intuitive certainty that it would also be black.
I looked nervously around, and almost tripped into the stream as I saw a face looking down at me from the bridge above. It was a boy, or a youth, leaning on the parapet, watching me. My timing device stopped buzzing. Ignoring the boy, I stripped the paper off the photograph. It was black. I swore under my breath, and tossed it into the stream. Then I looked up the slope to calculate the easiest way back, and saw the youth standing at the top. He was dressed in shabby brown clothes, completely nondescript. His face was thin and brown, reminding me of gypsies I had seen on the station in Newport. The brown eyes were expressionless. I stared back at him without smiling, at first only curious as to what he wanted.
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Page 47
