But before he advanced to follow his guide, he glanced back, and saw that the fissure through which he had entered was now closed, and that the prodigious vault was suffused with a greenish haze traversed by rays and bands of sulfur blue. And as he followed the Most Ancient, he perceived that the vault was not untenanted as he had at first thought. In the haze that hung low along the curved wall, he noted an assemblage of bearded men who sat on hexagonal prisms of obsidian. And when he approached closely enough to see the details of the carvings of the hexagonal thrones, he began to realize consciously what he had for some moments felt: that he was in the presence of those who were not entirely men. Carter wondered how they had assumed the shapes of men. But Carter was beyond terror now. A desperate resolve inflamed him.
“Had I not aspired to this quest,” he replied, as his feet sank into the metallically glistening blue sand grains of the vault floor, “my body would have lived years after my soul perished. Therefore it is good to face this venture, for to what purpose does a man save his soul if it rot miserably in the chains riveted fast by priests and doctors? A soul were better lost in this high venture, if only that I may say in the end that none was ever before lost in this wise.”
He saw that those who sat had long beards, cut square, and curled in a fashion not entirely unfamiliar; and the tall gray mitres that they wore were strangely suggestive of the figures that a forgotten sculptor had chiseled on the everlasting cliffs of that high mountain in Tartary. He remembered whom they served, and the price of their service; yet Carter was still content, for at one mighty venture he was to learn all. And damnation is but a word bandied about by those whose blindness leads them to condemn him who sees clearly even with one eye.
Each had in his hand a scepter whose carven head represented an archaic mystery, yet even then, Carter was glad that he had advanced, though he knew beyond all doubt who they were, and whence they came.
Carter wondered at the colossal conceit of those who babble of the malignant Ancient Ones; as if THEY could pause from their everlasting dreams to wreak a wrath upon mankind. It seemed, as he gazed upon their faces, that a dinosaur would as well pursue in frantic vengeance an angle worm.
They were greeting him with a gesture of those oddly carven scepters. Then they raised their voices, speaking in unison.
“We salute you, Most Ancient One, and you, Randolph Carter, for your temerity has made you one of us.”
Whereupon Carter perceived that a prismatic throne had been reserved for him, and the Most Ancient was with a gesture indicating that he be seated. The glistening metallically blue sands crunched under his feet as he strode to his throne. And then he saw the Most Ancient seating himself upon a similar, but loftier eminence, in the center of the crescent of Ancient Ones.
’Umr at-Tawil then leaned forward and plucked from the sand at the foot of his throne a chain of iridescent metal whose last link was fastened to a globe encircled by a band of silver. He extended his arm, and held the device for the Companions to regard. Then he began chanting in that obscure, sonorous tongue in which he had addressed Carter.
The chant was addressed to the Ancient Ones on the obsidian thrones, rather than to Carter. He saw their glittering eyes glow with a terrific, unearthly-splendid phosphorescence as they contemplated the globe that burned and flamed and throbbed at the end of the chain that the master grasped. They were swaying to the cadence of the chant; and one by one, they lifted their voices until there was a full throated harmony that surged and thundered through the vault like the roll of drums and the blare of trumpets. Halos of greenish flame played about their heads as they nodded to the beat of the Master’s chant, and beams of light played across their features.
And then, one by one, they resumed their silence, until finally only the Master’s voice was heard. Carter perceived that the Ancient Ones were asleep; and he wondered what they were dreaming in that slumber from which they had been awakened to free him. Then for the first time, Carter began to understand the sense as well as the words that the Master was pronouncing to his Companions.
He knew that the Most Ancient had chanted them into that deep sleep from whose profundity they were contemplating unplumbed vastnesses. He knew how they were to accomplish that which his presence had demanded of them. The Most Ancient was chanting to their ears an image of that which he wished them to envision; and Carter knew that as each of the Ancient Ones pictured the thought that ’Umr at-Tawil was prescribing, there would be a manifestation visible to his eyes. When they had achieved a oneness, the impact of their concentration would materialize that which he required.
Carter had seen, in Hindustan, how a thought concentration can become an entity with tangible presence and material existence, taking substance from the projected will of a circle of adepts. And these Ancient Ones were by their will vortex projecting him.
The Silver Key was in his hand. But the blank wall he faced was still adamantine firmness. There was not a vestige of a keyhole. There was scarcely a trace of the line which marked the meeting of the door with its jamb.
The Most Ancient had ceased chanting. For the first time Carter realized how terrific silence may be. The earlier quiet of the grotto had been enlivened by the earth pulse, that low pitched vibration which, though inaudible, nevertheless prevents a sense of utter silence. But now Carter’s own breathing was no longer perceptible. The silence of the abyss hovered like a presence in the vault. The eyes of the Most Ancient were now fixed upon the globe he held, and about his head there likewise glowed a nimbus of fire, greenish, shot with flashes of sulfur blue.
A dizziness overcame Carter, a whirling of all his senses, and an utter lack of orientation such as he had never known in the most impenetrable blacknesses heaped upon blackness. He could see the Most Ancient Ones on each side of his throne of obsidian, yet there was a terrifying isolation. Then he felt himself floating through immeasurable depths. Waves of perfumed warmth lapped against his face as though he swam in a torrid rose-tinctured sea. It seemed that it was a sea of drugged wines whose waves broke foaming against shores of brazen fire. A great fear clutched Carter as he saw that vast expanse of surging sea lapping against its far off coast.
“The man of truth is beyond Good and Evil,” intoned a great voice that filled the vault. “The man of Truth has learned that Illusion is the only reality, and that substance is an imposter.”
The outline of the gate was now very clearly visible. Carter at last realized that the Key was a symbol rather than that wherewith to open any lock; for that rose-drunken sea that lapped his cheeks was the adamantine mass of the granite wall yielding before the thought vortex the Ancient Ones had directed against it.
His advance through that prodigious bulk of eternal granite was a falling through the immeasurable abysses between the stars. From a great distance, he heard the triumphant, godlike surges of deadly sweetness. Then, as that tremendous fanfare died out, he heard the rustling of wings, and strange chirpings and murmurings. He glanced over his shoulder, he saw that which clamored at the gate; and he was glad that its granite had no keyhole, and that he alone held the Key.
Carter’s bewildered mind, as it recovered from the momentary horror of those that clamored in vain at the door they could not open, received a shock more stunning than that which his backward glance had given him. He realized of a sudden that he was at one time many persons.
The body and mind of Randolph Carter, of Arkham, still sat on that hexagonal block of obsidian with its terrific carvings that a man’s mind would have named grotesquely obscene. And this which he considered his ego, this entity at whose outrunning those who clamored at the gate had so pleased him, this was still not his ego. Even as that which sat enthroned among the Ancient Ones was not.
Randolph Carter now felt a supreme horror such as had not been hinted even at the height of that dreadful evening when two had ventured into a tomb, and but one had emerged. No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair aroused by a loss of identit
y. Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to exist, to be aware of existence and yet to know that one no longer retains an identity that will serve as a distinction from every other entity; to know that one no longer has a self——
He knew that there had been a Randolph Carter of Arkham; but in his terrific confusion, he knew not if he had been that one, or some other Carter. In his terror, he had the wild, outrageous sense of being at one time a multiplicity of Carters. His self had been annihilated, and yet he—if indeed there could, in view of that utter nullity of individual existence, be anything such as he—was aware of being, in some inconceivable way, a legion of selves. It was as though his body had suddenly been transformed into one of those many-limbed and many-headed effigies sculptured in Indian temples, and he contemplated the aggregation in a bewildered attempt to discern which was the original, and which the additions; save that this which assailed the individuality of his self was a terror towering stupendously over all other outrages. Then Carter’s devastating terror itself became trifling before that which confronted and surrounded the personality-integration whereof Randolph Carter of Arkham had become an infinitesimal. It was at once a BEING, a force, an unlimited completeness of space, and a personal presence; nor was there any incongruity in that blending of heretofore unrelated concepts. In the face of that awful wonder, the quasi-Carter forgot the horror of destroyed individuality. The space-presence was addressing the element of that summation of Carters. It emanated prodigious waves that smote and burned and thundered an energy concentration that blasted Carter with unendurable violence. It was as though suns and worlds and universes had converged upon one point whose very position in space they had conspired to annihilate with an impact of resistless fury.
Carter understood, as, finally, it singled him out from the summation of Carters.
“Randolph Carter,” IT said, “my manifestations, the Ancient Ones, have sent you as one who would reign on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, whose fabulous towers and innumerable domes rise mightily toward a single red, lurid star that glows in that alien firmament whose vault shelters the realm of Illusion.
“But it shall be otherwise. The ultimate mystery is about to be unveiled, rather than any throne which is but the transfiguration of an earthly fancy, and the refuge of one who is not pleased by that which he deems is reality. Yet before you gaze full at that last and first of secrets, you may, as before, exercise a free choice, and return to the other side of the Border without having the final veil stripped from your eyes.”
Then the resistless surges of super-cosmic energy subsided. There was a negation of vibration that left Carter in an awful stillness and loneliness. He was in an illimitable vastness and a void. And after a moment, Carter addressed the void:
“I accept, and I will not retreat.”
Whereupon the Space Presence returned and Carter understood what it said.
“You, Randolph Carter, have gone through the nethermost gulfs of horror, and you have plumbed the uttermost abyss of space. We will therefore enlighten you.
“You have come from a world wherein each entity has a self, an individuality, a personality; and where all is limited by three directions, up-down, forward-backward, right-left. There are those among your scholars who have vaguely hinted that there may be other directions than those which your senses acknowledge. But none has pierced the veils and seen what you have viewed.
“In your three-dimensional cosmos of length, breadth, and thickness you have set up gods with three-dimensional fury, and hatred, and vengeance and vanity and craving for adulation.
“Your deities have demeaned themselves by craving sacrifices, and compelling the belief of that which is repugnant to the bit of you which has retained its contact with the realm wherein you alone have penetrated. The chief worship in your three-directioned world is that of a trinity whose anthropophagous cravings are satiated by your symbolic eating of the body of a god who was also a man.
“You are a race of idolaters who have made god after your own image.
“You have denied your heritage.”
For a moment Carter was amazed at the implications of that which he had heard; and then he perceived that which theretofore in his terror and awe he had not noted: that he was in a space of dimensions beyond those conceivable to the eye and sense of man. He saw now in the brooding shadows of that which had been first a vortex of power, and then an illimitable void, a sweep of creation that dizzied his senses. From his vantage point, he looked upon prodigious forms whose dimensions transcended the three that limited that far off form which he knew still sat motionlessly squatting on a hexagonal prism of basalt. Yet, though far off, it also had its counterpart in this super-space whose dismaying directions baffled him. Then the voice rose, and aided his groping for that enlightenment which was filtering into his being, and reconciling him to the multitudinous personality of which he was an infinitesimal element.
“In your world you have a space form which is a square. And your geometers have explained that this form is but the result of cutting a cube with a plane. And that which you call a circle is but the result of passing a plane through a sphere. So that every flat, length-breadth figure which you know is but the projection of a three dimensional form. And there you have stopped.
“Yet even as a circle is a section of a sphere, so likewise is a sphere a section of a higher form whereof your senses can have no vision. And thus your world with its three dimensional men and gods is but the cross section of this super-space which you have entered. A projection, and a shadow, no more, of Reality. And this shadow you have, all save yourself, considered reality, and the substance you have named illusion.
“Perversely enough, in your world you have claimed that Time is fleeting. You consider time as possessed of motion, and as the cause of change. But that is wrong; time is motionless, and literally without beginning or end. More truly, time is an illusion, and is non-existent, in the sense that there is a so-called flight of time which produces the fantasy and the delusions you name future and past and present.
“There is neither future nor past nor present!”
Those last words were spoken with a solemnity that left Carter without the ability to doubt. He believed, yet he could not, even in the multitude of his personalities, conceive that which had been set before him.
“Then if not Time, since there be no Time, what is it that causes change?” he finally said, baffled at the paradox.
“There is no change. All that was and all that is to be, have a simultaneous existence. Change is an illusion that has begotten yet another illusion.
“There would be no time in your world were it not for that which you call change.”
As the voice paused, Carter pondered, and saw that he could accept that last statement intellectually, as well as merely at the solemn affirmation of the Space Presence. Obviously, if nothing ever changed, then there would be no earthly sense of time. Time was marked in its flight by the course of stars, by the motion of the hands of a clock; and if neither these nor any other thing changed then surely there would be no time.
“But they do change!” he protested. “And therefore there must be time. My hair is gray, and my skin is wrinkled—I have changed. And my soul is weary with the recollection of that which was once, but no longer is. I am eaten with the grief that came of friendships which died before the body of him who was a friend, and I exult, betimes, at the memory of those whose spiritual presence has survived the change in their bodies. There is change, and it has marked me, and every man! Is all that, then, illusion?” demanded Carter, as a mighty despair corroded him.
“There is no change,” pronounced the voice with a solemn majesty that made Carter believe, though he could not understand. “Look, you, Carter, and see that your universe is but the projection of a higher-dimensioned cosmos.
“And consider, in your own limited terms, the form you call a cone. Your geometers cut it with a plane. The section is a circle. They cut it with a plane tha
t passes at a different angle, and the section is an ellipse. And again, it is a parabola whose branches sweep out through the uttermost limits of your space. And yet, it is the same cone, and there has been no change. You have but cut it at a different angle. And all, if you will, simultaneously. You have at the end no more, no less than at the beginning; and thus the ellipses, and parabolae, and hyperbolae, are illusions you call change, forgetting that their parent form is an unalterable spatial figure.
“Your world is but a section of super-space,” repeated the Space Presence, as the enlightenment sank into Carter. “And time and change are but the illusions caused in that phantom existence of yours by the shifting angle of the plane which cuts the world of reality.”
“Then there is change!” cried Carter triumphantly, as he saw that he had at last forced the Space Presence into a contradiction. “The angle of cutting changes!”
Then before the more than godlike, indulgent smile of the Presence, Carter felt very small and childish, and his triumph even more inane, as he heard the answer.
“If you must still in human fashion split hairs, Randolph Carter,” said the voice, “we will grant your point, and not remind you that that angle and that plane are of this world rather than yours. And it is strange,” continued the voice, “that a member of a race credulous enough to believe that a God ordered the slaughter of his other self, as an object lesson in gentleness, could quibble about an angle of section!”
The monstrous multi-dimensional space quivered with a laughter such as Carter had in his earthly imaginings attributed to the mirth of young gods as they romped childishly about, discarding worlds whereof they had tired. Yet there was a brooding note of solemnity behind that more than divine mirth which made the jest older than time itself, and mordant with grimness tinged with . . . regret, Carter finally realized. Regret at his monumental stupidity.
Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos Page 20
