He flung himself into the house and I slammed and locked the door.
Shrill, unearthly cries were coming from all directions now, as though the things were calling and answering one another. I thought I sensed a new note in the cries—a note of expectation, of triumph.
The window-shade rolled up with a rattle and a snap, and the fog began to move past the pane, coiling and twisting fantastically. At a sudden gust the window shook in its casing. Hayward said under his breath, “Atmospheric disturbances—oh, my God! Poor Mason— watch the door, Gene!” His voice was strangled.
For a moment I saw nothing. Then the door bulged inward as though frightful pressure had been applied from without. A panel cracked with a rending sound, and I caught my breath. Then—it was gone.
The metal doorknob had a white rime of frost on it. “This—this isn’t real,” I said madly, although I was shuddering in the icy cold.
“Real enough. They’re breaking through——”
Then Hayward said something so strange that it brought me around sharply, staring at him. Gazing vacantly at me, like a man in a hypnagogic state, he muttered in a queer guttural voice:
“The fires burn on Nergu-K’nyan and the Watchers scan the night skies for the Enemies—ny’ghan tharanak grii——”
“Hayward!” I seized his shoulders, shook him. Life came back into his eyes.
“Blind spot,” he muttered. “I remembered something—now it’s gone....”
He flinched as a new outburst of the mewing cries came from above the house.
But a strange, an incredible surmise, had burst upon my brain. There was a way out, a key of deliverance from evil—Hayward had it and did not know it!
“Think,” I said breathlessly. “Think hard! What was it—that memory?”
“Does that matter now? This—” He saw the expression on my face, its meaning flashed across to him and he answered, not quickly, not slowly, but dreamily: “I seemed to be on a mountain peak, standing before the altar of Vorvadoss, with a great fire flaming up into the darkness. Around me there were priests in white robes— watchers——”
“Hayward,” I cried. “Vorvadoss—look here!” I snatched up the half-page of manuscript, read from it hastily. “ ‘The gods friendly to man were arrayed against the invaders——’ ”
“I see what you mean!” Hayward cried. “We triumphed—then. But now——”
“Hayward!” I persisted desperately. “Your flash of memory just now! You were standing on a mountain while the Watchers scanned the night skies for the Enemies, you said. The Enemies must have been those creatures. Suppose the Watchers saw them?”
Suddenly the house shook under an impact that was not the work of the screaming wind. God! Would my efforts bear fruit too late? I heard an outburst of the shrill cries, and the door creaked and splintered. It was dreadfully cold. We were flung against the wall, and I staggered, almost losing my balance. Again the house rocked under another battering-ram impact. My teeth were chattering, and I could hardly speak. A black dizziness was creeping up to overwhelm me, and my hands and feet had lost all feeling. Out of a whirling sea of darkness I saw Hayward’s white face.
“It’s a chance,” I gasped, fighting back the blackness. “Wouldn’t there—have been some way of summoning the gods, the friendly gods—if the Watchers saw the Enemies? You—you were high priest—in that former life. You’d know—how—to summon——”
The door crashed, broke. I heard wood being torn ruthlessly apart, but I dared not turn.
“Yes!” Hayward cried. “I remember—there was a word!”
I saw his frightened gaze shift past me to the horror that I knew was ripping at the broken door. I fumbled for his shoulders, managed to turn him away. “You must! Think, man——”
Abruptly a light flared in his eyes. He was reacting at last.
He flung up his arms and began a weird, sonorous chant. Strangely archaic-sounding words flowed from his tongue fluently, easily. But now I had no eyes for him—I was glaring at the horror that was squeezing itself through the splintered gap it had torn in the wall.
It was the thing Hayward had sketched, revealed in all its loathsome reality!
My dizziness, my half-fainting state, saved me from seeing the thing too clearly. As it was, a scream of utter horror ripped from my throat as I saw, through a spinning whirlpool of darkness, a squamous, glowing ball covered with squirming, snake-like tentacles— translucent ivory flesh, leprous and hideous—a great faceted eye that held the cold stare of the Midgard Serpent. I seemed to be dropping, spinning, falling helplessly down toward a welter of writhing, glossy tentacles . . . and dimly I could hear Hayward still chanting....
“Iä! Rhyn tharanak—Vorvadoss of Bel-Yarnak! The Troubler of the Sands! Thou Who waiteth in the Outer Dark, Kindler of the Flame—n’gha shugg y’haa——”
He pronounced a Word. A Word of power, which my stunned ears could scarcely hear. Yet hear it I did. And I felt that beyond the borders of human consciousness and understanding, that Word was flashing and thundering, through the intergalactic spaces to the farthest abyss. And in primeval night and chaos Something heard, and rose up, and obeyed the summons.
For, with the suddenness of a thunderclap, blackness fell on the room, hiding from my sight the monstrous glowing thing that was plunging toward us. I heard a dreadful skirling cry—and then there was utter silence, in which I could not even hear the recurrent crashing of the surf. The abysmal cold sent sharp flashes of pain through me.
Then, out of the darkness, there rose up before us a Face. I saw it through a haze of silvery mist that clung about it like a veil. It was utterly inhuman, for the half-seen features were arranged in a pattern different to mankind, seeming to follow the strange pattern of some unfamiliar and alien geometry. Yet it did not frighten, it calmed.
Through the silver mist I made out strange hollows, fantastic curves and planes. Only the eyes were clear, unmistakable—black as the empty wastes between the stars, cold in their unearthly wisdom.
There were tiny dancing flames flickering in those eyes, and there were little flames, too, playing over the strange, inhuman countenance. And although not a shadow of emotion passed over those brooding, passionless eyes, I felt a wave of reassurance. Suddenly all fear left me. Beside me, unseen in the darkness, I heard Hayward whisper, “Vorvadoss! The Kindler of the Flame!”
Swiftly the darkness receded, the face faded to a shadowy dimness. I was looking, not at the familiar walls of the cottage, but at another world. I had gone down with Hayward into the profundities of the past.
I seemed to be standing in a vast amphitheatre of jet, and around me, towering to a sky sprinkled with an infinite multitude of cold stars, I could see a colossal and shocking city of scalene black towers and fortresses, of great masses of stone and metal, arching bridges and cyclopean ramparts. And with racking horror I saw teeming loathsomely in that nightmare city the spawn of that alien dimension.
Hundreds, thousands—surging multitudes of them, hanging motionless in the dark, clear air, resting quiescent on the tiers of the amphitheatre, surging across the great cleared spaces. I caught glimpses of glittering eyes, cold and unwinking; pulpy, glowing masses of semitransparent flesh; monstrous reptilian appendages that swam before my eyes as the things moved loathsomely. I felt contaminated, defiled. I think I shrieked, and my hands flew up to shut out that intolerable vision of lost Abaddon—the dimension of the Invaders.
And abruptly that other-world vision snapped out and vanished.
I saw the godlike, alien Face fleetingly, felt the cool glance of those strange, omniscient eyes. Then it was gone, and the room seemed to rock and sway in the grip of cosmic forces. As I staggered and almost fell I saw again around me the walls of the cottage.
The unbearable chill was no longer in the air; there was no sound but the pounding of the surf. The wind still sent the fog twisting past the window, but the brooding, oppressive feeling of age-old evil had utterly vanished. I sent a
n apprehensive glance at the shattered door, but there was no trace of the horror that had burst into the cottage.
Hayward was leaning limply against the wall, breathing in great gasps. We looked at each other dumbly. Then, moved by a common impulse, we went, half staggering, to the splintered gap where the door had been, out on to the sand.
The fog was fading, vanishing, torn into tatters by a cool, fresh wind. A starlit patch of night sky glittered above the cottage.
“Driven back,” Hayward whispered. “As they were once before— back to their own dimension, and the gateway locked. But not before a life was taken by them . . . the life of our friend . . . may Heaven forgive me for that....”
Suddenly he turned, went stumbling back into the cottage, great dry sobs racking him.
And my cheeks, too, were wet.
He came out. I stood at his side as he threw the time-pellets into the sea. Never again would he go back to the past. He would live henceforth in the present, and a little in the future—as was more fitting, decenter, for human beings to do....
Bells of Horror
Henry Kuttner
A great deal of curiosity has been aroused by the strange affair of the lost bells of Mission San Xavier. Many have wondered why, when the bells were discovered after remaining hidden for over a hundred and fifty years, they were almost immediately smashed and the fragments buried secretly. In view of the legends of the remarkable tone and quality of the bells, a number of musicians have written angry letters asking why, at least, they were not rung before their destruction and a permanent record made of their music.
As a matter of fact, the bells were rung, and the cataclysmic thing that happened at that time was the direct reason for their destruction. And when those evil bells were shrieking out their mad summons in the unprecedented blackness that shrouded San Xavier, it was only the quick action of one man that saved the world—yes, I do not hesitate to say it—from chaos and doom.
As secretary of the California Historical Society, I was in a position to witness the entire affair almost from its inception. I was not present, of course, when the bells were unearthed, but Arthur Todd, the president of the society, telephoned me at my home in Los Angeles soon after that ill-fated discovery.
He was almost too excited to speak coherently. “We’ve found them!” he kept shouting. “The bells, Ross! Found them last night, back in the Piños Range. It’s the most remarkable discovery since— since the Rosetta Stone!”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, groping in a fog of drowsiness. The call had brought me from my warm bed.
“The San Xavier bells, of course,” he explained jubilantly. “I’ve seen them myself. Just where Junipero Serra buried them in 1775. A hiker found a cave in the Piños, and explored it—and there was a rotting wooden cross at the end, with carving on it. I brought—”
“What did the carving say?” I broke in.
“Eh? Oh—just a minute, I have it here. Listen: ‘Let no man hang the evil bells of the Mutsunes which lie buried here, lest the terror of the night rise again in Nueva California.’ The Mutsunes, you know, were supposed to have had a hand in casting the bells.”
“I know,” I said into the transmitter. “Their shamans were supposed to have put a magic spell on them.”
“I’m—I’m wondering about that,” Todd said. “There have been some very unusual things happening up here. I’ve only got two of the bells out of the cave. There’s another, you know, but the Mexicans won’t go in the cave any more. They say—well, they’re afraid of something. But I’ll get that bell if I have to dig it up myself.”
“Want me to come up there?”
“If you will,” Todd said eagerly. “I’m phoning from a cabin in Coyote Canyon. I left Denton—my assistant—in charge. Suppose I send a boy down to San Xavier to guide you to the cave?”
“All right,” I assented. “Send him to the Xavier Hotel. I’ll be there in a few hours.”
San Xavier is perhaps a hundred miles from Los Angeles. I raced along the coast and within two hours I had reached the little mission town, hemmed in by the Piños Range, drowsing sleepily on the edge of the Pacific. I found my guide at the hotel, but he was oddly reluctant to return to Todd’s camp.
“I can tell you how to go, Señor. You will not get lost.” The boy’s dark face was unnaturally pale beneath its heavy tan, and there was a lurking disquiet in his brown eyes. “I don’t want to go back——”
I jingled some coins. “It’s not as bad as all that, is it?” I asked. “Afraid of the dark?”
He flinched. “Sí, the—the dark—it’s very dark in that cave, Señor.”
The upshot was that I had to go alone, trusting to his directions and my own ability in the open.
Dawn was breaking as I started up the canyon trail, but it was a strangely dark dawn. The sky was not overcast, but it held a curious gloom. I have seen such oppressively dark days during dust storms, but the air seemed clear enough. And it was very cold, although even from my height I could see no fog on the Pacific.
I kept on climbing. Presently I found myself threading the gloomy, chill recesses of Coyote Canyon. I shivered with cold. The sky was a dull, leaden color, and I found myself breathing heavily. Though I was in good physical condition, the climb had tired me unduly.
Yet I was not physically tired—it was rather an aching, oppressive lethargy of mind. My eyes were watering, and I found myself shutting them occasionally to relieve the strain. I wished the sun would come over the top of the mountain.
Then I saw something extraordinary—and horrible. It was a toad—gray, fat, ugly. It was squatting beside a rock at the side of the trail, rubbing itself against the rough stone. One eye was turned toward me—or, rather, the place where the eye should have been. There was no eye—there was only a slimy little hollow.
The toad moved its ungainly body back and forth, sawing its head against the rock. It kept uttering harsh little croaks of pain— and in a moment it had withdrawn from the stone and was dragging itself across the trail at my feet.
I stood looking at the stone, nauseated. The gray surface of rock was bedaubed with whitish streaks of fetor, and the shredded bits of the toad’s eye. Apparently the toad had deliberately ground out its protruding eyes against the rock.
It crept out of sight beneath a bush, leaving a track of slime in the dust of the trail. I involuntarily shut my eyes and rubbed them— and suddenly jerked down my hands, startled at the roughness with which my fists had been digging into my eye-sockets. Lancing pain shot through my temples. Remembering the itching, burning sensation in my eyes, I shuddered a little. Had the same sort of torture caused the toad deliberately to blind itself? My God!
I ran on up the trail. Presently I passed a cabin—probably the one from which Todd had telephoned, for I saw wires running from the roof to a tall pine. I knocked at the door. No answer. I continued my ascent.
Suddenly there came an agonized scream, knife-edged and shrill, and the rapid thudding of footsteps. I stopped, listening. Some one was running down the trail toward me—and behind him I could hear others racing, shouting as they ran. Around a bend in the trail a man came plunging.
He was a Mexican, and his black-stubbled face was set in lines of terror and agony. His mouth was open in a square of agony, and insane screams burst horribly from his throat. But it wasn’t that that sent me staggering back out of his path, cold sweat bursting out of my body.
His eyes had been gouged out, and twin trickles of blood dripped down his face from black, gaping hollows.
As it happened, there was no need for me to halt the blinded man’s frantic rush. At the curve of the trail he smashed into a tree with frightful force, and momentarily stood upright against the trunk. Then very slowly he sagged down and collapsed in a limp huddle. There was a great splotch of blood on the rough bark. I went over to him quickly.
Four men came running toward me. I recognized Arthur Todd and Denton, his assistant. The other two were obvi
ously laborers. Todd jerked to a halt.
“Ross! Good God—is he dead?”
Swiftly he bent over to examine the unconscious man. Denton and I stared at each other. Denton was a tall, strongly-built man, with a shock of black hair and a broad mouth that was generally expanded in a grin. Now his face bore a look of horrified disbelief.
“God, Ross—he did it right before our eyes,” Denton said through pale lips. “He just let out a scream, threw up his hands and tore his eyes out of their sockets.” He shut his own eyes at the memory.
Todd got up slowly. Unlike Denton, he was small, wiry, nervously energetic, with a lean, brown face and amazingly alert eyes. “Dead,” he said.
“What’s happened?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. “What’s wrong, Todd? Was the man insane?”
And all the while I had a picture of that fat toad tearing out its eyes against a rock.
Todd shook his head, his brows drawn together in a frown. “I don’t know. Ross, do your eyes feel—odd?”
A shiver ran through me. “Damned odd. Burning and itching. I’ve been rubbing them continually on the way up.”
“So have the men,” Denton told me. “So have we. See?” He pointed to his eyes, and I saw that they were red-rimmed and inflamed.
The two laborers—Mexicans—came over to us. One of them said something in Spanish. Todd barked a sharp order, and they fell back, hesitating.
Then, without further parley, they took to their heels down the trail. Denton started forward with an angry shout, but Todd caught his arm. “No use,” he said quickly. “We’ll have to get the bells out ourselves.”
“You found the last one?” I asked, as he turned back up the trail.
“We found them—all three,” Todd said somberly. “Denton and I dug up the last one ourselves. And we found this, too.”
He drew a dirt-encrusted, greenish metal tube from his pocket and gave it to me. Within the cylinder was a sheet of parchment in a remarkably good state of preservation. I puzzled over the archaic Spanish script.
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