Cartaret followed his silent conductor.
“Look!” flashed the lights.
Cartaret’s eyes grew glassy. His head throbbed. The gleaming of the lights was mesmeric; they hypnotized with their allure.
“Look!”
Would this great hall never end? No; there were thousands of feet to go.
“Look!” challenged the leaping lights.
Red serpent eyes in the underground dark; eyes of tempters, bringers of black knowledge.
“Look! Wisdom! Know!” winked the lights.
They flamed in Cartaret’s brain. Why not look—it was so easy? Why fear?
Why? His dazed mind repeated the question. Each following flare of fire weakened the question.
At last, Cartaret looked.
5
Mad minutes passed before he was able to speak. Then he mumbled in a voice audible only to himself.
“True,” he whispered. “All true.”
He stared at the towering wall to his left, limned in red radiance. It was an interminable Bayeux tapestry carved in stone. The drawing was crude, in black and white, but it frightened. This was no ordinary Egyptian picture-writing; it was not in the fantastic, symbolical style of ordinary hieroglyphics. That was the terrible part: Nephren-Ka was a realist. His men looked like men, his buildings were buildings. There was nothing here but a representation of stark reality, and it was dreadful to see.
For at the point where Cartaret first summoned sufficient courage to gaze he stared at an unmistakable tableau involving Crusaders and Saracens.
Crusaders of the Thirteenth Century—yet Nephren-Ka had then been dust for nearly two thousand years!
The pictures were small, yet vivid and distinct; they seemed to flow along quite effortlessly on the wall, one scene blending into another as though they had been drawn in unbroken continuity. It was as though the artist had not stopped once during his work; as though he had untiringly proceeded to cover this gigantic hall in a single supernatural effort.
That was it—a single supernatural effort!
Cartaret could not doubt. Rationalize all he would, it was impossible to believe that these drawings were trumped up by any group of artists. It was one man’s work. And the unerring horrid consistency of it; the calculated picturization of the most vital and important phases of Egyptian history could have been set down in such accurate order only by a historical authority or a prophet. Nephren-Ka had been given the gift of prophecy. And so . . .
As he ruminated in growing dread, Cartaret and his guide proceeded. Now that he had looked, a Medusian fascination held the man’s eyes to the wall. He walked with history tonight; history and red nightmare. Flaming figures leered from every side.
He saw the rise of the Mameluke Empire, looked on the despots and the tyrants of the East. Not all of what he saw was familiar to Cartaret, for history has its forgotten pages. Besides, the scenes changed and varied at almost every step, and it was quite confusing. There was one picture interspersed with an Alexandrian court motif which depicted a catacomb evidently in some vaults beneath the city. Here were gathered a number of men in robes which bore a curious similarity to those of Cartaret’s present guide. They were conversing with a tall, white-bearded man whose crudely drawn figure seemed to exude an uncanny aura of black and baleful power.
“Ludvig Prinn,” said the guide, softly, noting Cartaret’s stare. “He mingled with our priests, you know.”
For some reason the depiction of this almost legendary seer stirred Cartaret more deeply than any other hitherto revealed terror. The casual inclusion of the infamous sorcerer in the procession of actual history hinted at dire things; it was as though Cartaret had read a prosaic biography of Satan in Who’s Who.
Nevertheless, with a sort of heartsick craving his eyes continued to search the walls as they walked onward to the still indeterminate end of the long red-illumined chamber in which Nephren-Ka was interred. The guide—priest, now, for Cartaret no longer doubted— proceeded softly, but stole covert glances at the white man as he led the way.
Captain Cartaret walked through a dream. Only the walls were real now: the Walls of Truth. He saw the Ottomans rise and flourish, looked on forgotten battles and unremembered kings. Often there recurred in the sequence a scene depicting the priests of Nephren-Ka’s own furtive cult. They were shown amidst the disquieting surroundings of catacombs and tombs, engaged in unsavory occupations and revolting pleasures. The camera-film of time rolled on; Captain Cartaret and his companion walked on. Still the walls told their story.
There was one small division of the wall which portrayed the priests conducting a man in Elizabethan costume through what seemed to be a pyramid. It was eery to see the gallant in his finery pictured amidst the ruins of ancient Egypt, and it was very dreadful indeed to almost watch, like an unseen observer, when a stealthy priest knifed the Englishman in the back as he bent over a mummy-case.
What now impressed Cartaret was the infinitude of detail in each pictured fragment. The features of all the men were almost photographically exact; the drawing, while crude, was life-like and realistic. Even the furniture and background of every scene were correct. There was no doubting the authenticity of it all, and no doubting of the veracity thereby implied. But—what was worse—there was no doubting that this work could not have been done by any normal artist, however learned, unless he had seen it all.
Nephren-Ka had seen it all in prophetic vision, after his sacrifice to Nyarlathotep.
Cartaret was looking at truths inspired by a demon....
On and on, to the flaming fane of worship and death at the end of the hall. History progressed as he walked. Now he was looking at a period of Egyptian lore that was almost contemporary. The figure of Napoleon appeared.
The battle of Aboukir . . . the massacre of the pyramids . . . the downfall of the Mameluke horsemen . . . the entrance to Cairo . . .
Once again, a catacomb with priests. And three figures, white men, in French military regalia of the period. The priests were leading them into a red room. The Frenchmen were surprised, overcome, slaughtered.
It was vaguely familiar. Cartaret was recalling what he knew of Napoleon’s commission; he had appointed savants and scientists to investigate the tombs and pyramids of the land. The Rosetta stone had been discovered, and other things. Quite likely the three men shown had blundered onto a mystery the priests of Nephren-Ka had not wanted to have unveiled. Hence they had been lured to death as the walls showed. It was quite familiar—but there was another familiarity which Cartaret could not place.
They moved on, and the years rushed by in panorama. The Turks, the English, Gordon, the plundering of the pyramids, the World War. And every so often, a picture of the priests of Nephren-Ka and a strange white man in some catacomb or vault. Always the white man died. It was all familiar.
Cartaret looked up, and saw that he and the priest were very near to the blackness at the end of the great fiery hall. Only a hundred steps or so, in fact. The priest, face hidden in his burnoose, was beckoning him on.
Cartaret looked at the wall. The pictures were almost ended. But no—just ahead was a great curtain of crimson velvet on a ceiling-rack which ran off into the blackness and reappeared from shadows on the opposite side of the room to cover that wall.
“The future,” explained his guide. And Captain Cartaret remembered that the priest had told how each day he drew back the curtain a bit so that the future was always revealed just one day ahead. He remembered something else, and hastily glanced at the last visible section of the Wall of Truth next to the curtain. He gasped.
It was true! Almost as though gazing into a miniature mirror he found himself staring into his own face!
Line for line, feature for feature, posture for posture, he and the priest of Nephren-Ka were shown standing together in this red chamber just as they were now.
The red chamber . . . familiarity. The Elizabethan man with the priests of Nephren-Ka were in a catacomb when the man was
murdered. The French scientists were in a red chamber when they died. Other later Egyptologists had been shown in a red chamber with the priests, and they too had been slain. The red chamber! Not familiarity but similarity! They had been in this chamber! And now he stood here, with a priest of Nephren-Ka. The others had died because they had known too much. Too much about what—Nephren-Ka?
A terrible suspicion began to formulate into hideous reality. The priests of Nephren-Ka protected their own. This tomb of their dead leaders was also their fane, their temple. When intruders stumbled onto the secret, they lured them down here and killed them lest others learn too much.
Had not he come in the same way?
The priest stood silent as he gazed at the Wall of Truth.
“Midnight,” he said softly. “I must draw back the curtain to reveal yet another day before we go on. You expressed a wish, Captain Cartaret, to see what the future holds in store for you. Now that wish shall be granted.”
With a sweeping gesture he flung the curtain back along the wall for a foot. Then he moved, swiftly.
One hand leapt from the burnoose. A gleaming knife flashed through the air, drawing red fire from the lamps, then sank into Cartaret’s back, drawing redder blood.
With a single groan, the white man fell. In his eyes there was a look of supreme horror, not born of death alone. For as he fell, Captain Cartaret read his future in the Walls of Truth, and it confirmed a madness that could not be.
As Captain Cartaret died he looked at the picture of his next hours of existence and saw himself being knifed by the priest of Nephren-Ka .
The priest vanished from the silent tomb, just as the last flicker of dying eyes showed to Cartaret the picture of a still white body— his body—lying in death before the Wall of Truth.
The Invaders
Henry Kuttner
"Oh—it’s you,” said Hayward. “You got my wire?” The light from the doorway of the cottage outlined his tall, lean figure, making his shadow a long, black blotch on the narrow bar of radiance that shone across the sand to where green-black rollers were surging.
A sea-bird gave a shrill, eerie cry from the darkness, and I saw Hayward’s silhouette give a curious little jerk.
“Come in,” he said quickly, stepping back.
Mason and I followed him into the cottage.
Michael Hayward was a writer—a unique one. Very few writers could create the strange atmosphere of eldritch horror that Hayward put into his fantastic tales of mystery. He had imitators—all great writers have—but none attained the stark and dreadful illusion of reality with which he invested his oftentimes shocking fantasies. He went far beyond the bounds of human experience and familiar superstition, delving into uncanny fields of unearthliness. Blackwood’s vampiric elementals, M. R. James’ loathsome liches—even the black horror of de Maupassant’s Horla and Bierce’s Damned Thing—paled by comparison.
It wasn’t the abnormal beings Hayward wrote about so much as the masterly impression of reality he managed to create in the reader’s mind—the ghastly idea that he wasn’t writing fiction, but was simply transcribing on paper the stark, hellish truth. It was no wonder that the jaded public avidly welcomed each new story he wrote.
Bill Mason had telephoned me that afternoon at the Journal, where I worked, and had read me an urgent telegram from Hayward asking—in fact, begging us—to come at once to his isolated cottage on the beach north of Santa Barbara. Now, beholding him, I wondered at the urgency.
He didn’t seem ill, although his thin face was more gaunt than usual, and his eyes unnaturally bright. There was a nervous tension in his manner, and I got the odd impression that he was intently listening, alert for some sound from outside the cottage. As he took our coats and motioned us to chairs, Mason gave me a worried glance.
Something was wrong. Mason sensed it, I sensed it. Hayward filled his pipe and lit it, the smoke wreathing about his stiff black hair. There were bluish shadows in his temples.
“What’s up, old man?” I hazarded. “We couldn’t make head nor tail of your wire.”
He flushed. “I guess I was a little flurried when I wrote it. You see, Gene—oh, what’s the use—something is wrong, very wrong. At first I thought it might be my nerves, but—it isn’t.”
From outside the cottage came the shrill cry of a gull, and Hayward turned his face to the window. His eyes were staring, and I saw him repress a shudder. Then he seemed to pull himself together. He faced us, his lips compressed.
“Tell me, Gene—and you, Bill—did you notice anything— odd—on your way up?”
“Why, no,” I said.
“Nothing? Are you sure? It might have seemed unimportant— any sounds, I mean.”
“There were the seagulls,” Mason said, frowning. “You remember, I mentioned them to you, Gene.”
Hayward caught him up sharply. “Seagulls?”
“Yes,” I said. “That is, birds of some kind—they didn’t sound quite like seagulls. We couldn’t see them, but they kept following the car, calling to each other. We could hear them. But aside from the birds——”
I hesitated, astonished at the look on Hayward’s face—an expression almost of despair. He said, “No—that’s it, Gene. But they weren’t birds. They’re something—you won’t believe,” he whispered, and there was fright in his eyes. “Not till you see them—and then it’ll be too late.”
“Mike,” I said. “You’ve been overworking. You’ve——”
“No,” he interrupted. “I’m not losing my grip. Those weird stories of mine—they haven’t driven me mad, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m as sane as you are. The truth is,” he said very slowly, choosing his words with care, “I am being attacked.”
I groaned inwardly. Delusions of persecution—a symptom of insanity. Was Hayward’s mind really crumbling? Why, I wondered, were his eyes so unnaturally bright, and his thin face so flushed? And why did he keep shooting quick, furtive glances at the window?
I turned to the window. I started to say something and stopped.
I was looking at a vine. That is, it resembled a thick, fleshy vine more than anything else, but I had never seen any plant quite similar to the rope-like thing that lay along the window-ledge. I opened the window to get a better look at it.
It was as thick as my forearm, and very pale—yellowish ivory. It possessed a curious glossy texture that made it seem semi-transparent, and it ended in a raw-looking stump that was overgrown with stiff, hair-like cilia. The tip somehow made me think of the extremity of an elephant’s trunk, although there was no real similarity. The other end dangled from the window-ledge and disappeared in the darkness toward the front of the house. And, somehow, I didn’t like the look of the thing.
“What is it?” Mason asked behind me.
I picked up the—the—whatever it was. Then I got a severe shock, for it began to slip through my hand! It was being pulled away from me, and as I stared the end slipped through my fingers and whipped into the darkness. I craned out the window.
“There’s somebody outside!” I flung over my shoulder. “I saw——”
I felt a hand seize me, shove me aside. “Shut that window,” Hayward gasped. He slammed it down, locked it. And I heard a gasping inarticulate cry from Mason.
He was standing in the open doorway, glaring out. His face was changing, becoming transfigured with amazement and loathing. From outside the portal came a shrill, mewing cry—and a blast of great winds. Sand swirled in through the doorway. I saw Mason stagger back, his arm flung up before his eyes.
Hayward leaped for the door, slammed it. I helped the now shuddering Mason to a chair. It was terrible to see this usually imperturbable man in the grip of what could only be called panic. He dropped into the seat, glaring up at me with distended eyes. I gave him my flask; his fingers were white as they gripped it. He took a hasty gulp. His breathing was rapid and uneven.
Hayward came up beside me, stood looking down at Mason, pity in his face.
&nbs
p; “What the devil’s the matter?” I cried. But Mason ignored me, had eyes only for Hayward.
“G-God in heaven,” he whispered. “Have I—gone mad, Hayward?”
Hayward shook his head slowly. “I’ve seen them, too.”
“Bill,” I said sharply. “What’s out there? What did you see?”
He only shook his head violently, trying to repress the violent paroxysms of trembling that were shaking him.
I swung about, went to the door, opened it. I don’t know what I expected to see—some animal, perhaps—a mountain-lion or even a huge snake of some kind. But there was nothing there—just the empty white beach.
It was true there was a disk-shaped area of disturbed sand nearby, but I could make nothing of that. I heard Hayward shouting at me to close the door.
I shut it. “There’s nothing there,” I said.
“It—must have gone,” Mason managed to get out. “Give me another drink, will you?”
I handed him my flask. Hayward was fumbling in his desk. “Look here,” he said after a moment, coming back with a scrap of yellow paper. He thrust it at Mason, and Bill gasped out something incoherent. “That’s it,” he said, getting his voice under control. “That’s the—the thing I saw!”
I peered over his shoulder, scrutinizing the paper. It bore a sketch, in pencil, of something that looked as if it had emerged from a naturalist’s nightmare. At first glance I got the impression of a globe, oddly flattened at the top and bottom, and covered with what I thought at first was a sparse growth of very long and thick hairs. Then I saw that they were appendages, slender tentacles. On the rugose upper surface of the thing was a great faceted eye, and below this a puckered orifice that corresponded, perhaps, to a mouth. Sketched hastily by Hayward, who was not an artist, it was nevertheless powerfully evocative of the hideous.
“That’s the thing,” Mason said. “Put it away! It was all—shining, though. And it made that—that sound.”
“Where did it go?” Hayward asked.
Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos Page 10
