Then Carter began to perceive, dimly and terrifyingly, the background of the riddle of that loss of individuality which had at first shaken him with horror. His intuition integrated the truth fragments which the Space Presence had poured upon him. And yet he could not quite see the summation.
“There was once an I,” he finally said, “and even that has been destroyed by this negation of time and change. And if there be neither past nor future, then what of all those Carters before me, all of whom I sense that I am, and yet am not....”
As he proposed the question, his voice trailed to a thin nothingness; for while he sensed, he could not yet express that which staggered and bewildered him. He dared not face the certainty, as it now seemed to him, that there had never been a Carter who fought before the walls of Ascalon, a Carter who had dabbled in black magic in the days of Queen Elizabeth, a Carter who had strangely vanished near the snake den, and one whose forbidden studies had brought him perilously close to the scaffold. These had been his heritage and the bulwark of his ego; and even they had been destroyed by this merciless Presence who had spared neither God, nor Time, nor Change.
“All those Carters,” replied the voice to his question, “are one Carter in this ultra-spatian domain; and this multivariated Carter is eternal as we are. And those you deemed the ancestors whose heritage of soul you have are but cross sections in three directional space of that one of our Companions who is all Carters in one. And you—you are but a projection. A different plane of section, so to speak, is responsible for your manifestation, than was the cause of that ancestor who vanished so strangely.
“And he vanished when his ruling plane turned edgewise simultaneously to the three directions of your senses.
“Listen again, Randolph Carter of Arkham: you who have been so terrifyingly bewildered at the destruction of your ego, you are but one of the sections, even as any one ellipse is but one of an infinity of sections of a cone.”
Carter pondered in the mighty silence that followed that statement; and bit by bit, its implications became explicit. And he knew that if he had understood aright, he would in his very body be able to do that which theretofore he had done but in dreams.
He sought to test his understanding by putting it into words.
“Then if my section-plane be shifted in its angle, can I become any of those Carters who have ever existed? That Carter, for instance, who was imprisoned eleven years in the fortress of Alamut, on the Caspian Sea, in the hands of that one who falsely claimed to be the Keeper of the Keys? That Geoffrey Carter, who at last escaped from his cell, and with his bare hands strangled that false master, and took from him the silver key which even now I hold in my hands?”
“That, or any other Carter,” pronounced the Presence. “They are all—but that you know, now. And if that is your choice, you shall have it, here and now....”
Then came a whirring, and drumming, that swelled to a terrific thundering. Once again Carter felt himself the focal point of an intense concentration of energy that smote and hammered and seared unbearably, until he could not say whether it was unbelievably intense heat or the all-congealing cold of the abyss. Bands and rays of color utterly alien to any spectrum of this world played and wove and interlaced before him; and he was conscious of an awful velocity of motion....
He caught one fleeting glimpse of one who sat alone on a hexagonal throne of basalt.
Then he realized that he was sitting among crumbled ruins of a fortress that had once crowned this mountain that commanded the southernmost end of the sombre Caspian Sea.
Geoffrey Carter, strangely, retained some few vestigial memories of that Randolph Carter who would appear some 550 years later. And it was not utterly outrageous to him, this thought of remembering someone who would not exist until five centuries after the Lord Timur had torn the castle of Alamut to pieces, stone by stone, and put to the sword each of its garrison of outlaws.
Carter smiled thinly at human fallibility. He knew now why that castle of Alamut was in ruins. He realized, too late, the error that Randolph Carter had made—or, would make?—in having demanded a shift of the Carter-plane without a corresponding shift of the earth-plane, so that Geoffrey-Randolph Carter might seek this time to do what he had once failed of doing: riding in the train of that brooding, sombre Timur who had terribly destroyed Alamut, and liberated him.
Geoffrey Carter remembered enough of Randolph Carter to make his anomalous position not entirely unbearable. He had all the memories that Randolph Carter was to have, five centuries hence; and what was most outlandish of the paradox was that he, Geoffrey Carter, was alive, in a world five hundred years older than it should be. He sat down on a massive block of masonry, and pondered. At last he rose, and set out on foot, and empty-handed.
“This,” said one of those assembled in a certain house in New Or-leans, “is plausible to a degree, despite the terrifically incomprehensible be-scramblement of time and space and personality, and the blasphemous reduction of God to a mathematical formula, and time to a fanciful expression, and change to a delusion, and all reality to the nothingness of a geometrical plane utterly lacking in substance. But it still does not settle the matter of Randolph Carter’s estate, which his heirs are clamoring to divide.”
The old man who sat cross-legged on the Bokhara rug muttered, and poked absently at the almost dead bed of charcoal that had glowed in the bowl of the wrought-iron tripods.
And then he spoke: “Randolph Carter succeeded in groping into the riddle of time and space, to a degree, yet his success would have been greater had he taken with him not only the silver key, but also the parchment. For had he but pronounced its phrases, the earth-plane would have shifted with the Carter-plane, and he would have achieved the unattained desire of the Geoffrey Carter that he became, instead of returning to the world-section 550 years after the time he wished.”
Then said another: “It is all plausible, though fantastic. Yet unless Randolph Carter returns from his hexagonal throne, his estate must be partitioned among his heirs.”
The old man who sat cross-legged glanced up; his eyes glittered, and he smiled strangely.
“I could very readily settle the dispute,” he said, “but no one would believe me.” He paused, stroked his chin for a moment, and then resumed, “While I am Randolph Carter, come back from the ruins of Alamut, I am also so much Geoffrey Carter that I would be mistaken for an imposter. And thus while my due is the estate of two Carters, my portion unhappily is neither.”
We stared, regarding him intently; and then the learned chronicler, who stared the longest, said half aloud, half to himself, “And I thought that a new king reigned, in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai, on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad.”
The Warder of Knowledge
Richard F. Searight
The following record has been compiled from various sources, of which the most important are Doctor Whitney’s elaborate journal and the remarkable psychic impressions received in Whitney’s bedroom by Professor Turkoff of the university psychology department. The contents of the neatly typed manuscript, found in a drawer of Whitney’s library desk, may be dismissed as the ravings of an unbalanced intellect, or the fantastic flights of a gruesome imagination. In spite of the nature of Turkoff ’s clairvoyant impressions, the shocking allusions and appalling inferences with which its pages are filled can hardly receive the credence of an impartial reader. Indeed, those members of the university faculty who saw it were unanimous in their opinion that it was the work of a madman familiar with peculiarly repellent variants of primitive folklore and certain ancient legends; and while these members did not have access to Whitney’s journal, which I appropriated at the time for fear its disclosures might indeed reflect positively on the sanity of my friend, I shall not attempt to refute their conclusions.
It seems that even as a young child Gordon Whitney had been oddly different from his associates. From the age when reason assumed control, an insatiable desire for knowledge had obsessed him. Of cours
e, this was partly the normal, questioning curiosity of childhood—but it went further. He was not satisfied by sketchy outlines of facts; his craving was for the most complete and detailed information available on every subject that his busy mind encountered. Even at this early age he was harassed by a restless, driving urge, without motive or practical goal, to crowd into one mind all the vast aggregation of discovered scientific fact as well as the limitless secrets still undisclosed to research. And as he grew older, and absorbed what seemed to him the superficial teachings of orthodox education, the urge within him clamored more and more loudly.
There was no especial reason behind his selection of chemistry as a life work. He might have chosen any one of half a dozen sciences, particularly paleography, into which he probed as deeply as his diffused energies would permit. But organic chemistry, with its incredibly huge store of proven fact and the staggering array of half-guessed and wholly unsuspected truths which he felt must still be unrevealed, offered an inexhaustible outlet for his ambitions. The tireless enthusiasm with which he threw himself into these studies impressed his instructors; and when he received his doctor’s degree, he was offered an instructorship at Beloin University, the small mid-western seat of his education. This he accepted gladly, since it provided an atmosphere in harmony with his longings as well as the material means of pursuing them.
It was during the period immediately ensuing that he began his delving into the occult. The strange quirk in his nature that would not let him rest was responsible for this series of studies, also; and it had been suggested and stimulated by ambiguous references and obscure quotations in the more standard writings. Thus it was that he spent shuddering, horror-ridden hours perusing the Latin version of the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Al-Hazred. Later he read with revolted fascination the equivocal disclosures and incredible inferences of the Book of Eibon; and finally terminated the studies on a gusty November night by turning white-lipped and shaking from his uncompleted translation of the cryptic and half-decipherable Eltdown Shards. After that his leisure was again directed into conservative channels; but the outrageous suggestions implanted in his mind had left an ineradicable imprint.
While Whitney was not entirely a recluse, the bulk of the time he could spare from routine lectures and paleographic studies—which continued to be an extensive avocation—was still devoted to chemical experiments. He achieved a certain reputation and in time was promoted to the chair of chemistry at Beloin; and thereafter his new facilities were used wholeheartedly for research—for a great dream had taken shape in his mind.
It was an absurd dream whose possibility of fulfillment was so fantastic that he would never have dared to confide it to another; yet so poignantly appealing that he finally embraced it with a passionate, blind acceptance, directing all his thoughts and actions to its realization. Before the dream had crystallized as a potential reality, he had half unconsciously selected and catalogued various data relating to it; and perhaps this segregated information itself suggested the use to which it might be put. And so, at the age of forty-five, Gordon Whitney entered unreservedly upon his great quest for omniscience in fact.
His plan was daring enough but not, he fondly insisted, impossible. Yet after five years of intensive research he had not realized his objective, although he had achieved a number of radical developments in the field of mental stimulants. Profound familiarity with cellular structure and characteristics, coupled with a minute knowledge of pertinent drugs and compounds, had given him a great advantage; but a series of cautious experiments convinced him that the ultimate refinement of his formulae could offer no more than a temporary and perhaps dangerous stimulus. And he finally accepted, regretfully enough, the fact that he had been evading from the first—that no drug by itself could endow his brain with the extraordinary clarity and capacity and superhuman retentiveness that he wished.
It was in the reaction of disappointment after his long-sustained efforts had definitely failed, that he turned to the past for aid. Certainly, he had never given a calculated, unbiased belief to the incredible inferences and revoltingly plausible assumptions which had fascinated him during his early studies. But the bitterness of seeing the fulfillment of his cherished dream beyond his reach made him ready to investigate anything that offered even the remotest likelihood of help, no matter how fantastic—or terrible—it might be.
It was in this connection that the nineteenth of the carefully catalogued Eltdown Shards returned insistently to his mind. He had not made a complete translation of this shard during his study of the series; but he had begun one and had never forgotten the all but unintelligible opening with its ambiguous reference to what, freely translated, he believed meant “the Warder of Knowledge.” Now he welcomed the possibility of some long-forgotten material bearing on his problem, entombed in this shard.
That night he assigned his lectures for the next few days to assistants. In the morning he hurried across the undulating campus, drab and grey and swept by the winds of late autumn, to the small red-brick museum, whose ivy-clad walls sat back among ancient, towering oaks in an obscure corner of the grounds. Here, in the musty, half-lit depths of the building, he found the old curator, Doctor Carr, and induced him to unlock the high cabinet of black walnut which held the collection of the Shards. Carr did this with his usual reluctance. For him the contents of the cabinet had always held a peculiar repugnance; and he had occasionally hinted that they were better left alone.
After Carr had left, Whitney ran an appraising eye over the shelves. Arranged along them were the ticketed slabs of iron-hard grey clay, of all shapes, and ranging in size from the fifth shard, an oblong piece about four inches by eight, to the fourteenth, a jagged, roughly triangular tablet nearly twenty inches across. Most of them were incomplete and some were mere fragments. Eons of time, geologic disturbances, and unknowable mishaps, had cracked them and split off portions, some of which had not been found in the early Triassic stratum of the gravel pit near Eltdown where the discovery had been made. The nineteenth shard, which Whitney presently selected and laid on a scarred oak table by the window, presented an odd exception to the others. Its lower edge had been sheared away as cleanly as if by the stroke of a scimitar; and the unbroken line of cleavage, differing so markedly from the ragged indentures and smooth, roundly worn edges of the other tablets, suggested a deliberate mutilation when the clay had been fresh and comparatively soft. In other respects the shard, which was roughly a foot square, was in rather better condition than the average. Its smoothly rounded edges were broken only occasionally by unimportant chippings, and none of the writing was obliterated.
The writing or carving—it was useless to speculate regarding the means used to produce it—consisted of intricate, delicately proportioned characters confined within a surrounding margin about an inch wide; a style of delineation followed in all twenty-three of the shards. Fine, symmetrical symbols writhed over the entire space within this border. They stood out sharply under a magnifying glass, and Whitney found it expedient to use one during most of his work. Examinations had revealed that the writing surface was sunk slightly below the marginal level—a circumstance which, together with the extreme hardness of the material, probably accounted for the specimens being found in as legible a state as they were.
Whitney sat at the table and began the translation, a task demanding the most specialized skill. The geologic stratum in which the shards had lain indicated an antiquity antedating by millions of years the earliest inscriptions previously known; and translation was made possible only by the suggestive similarity of various symbols to certain primitive Amharic and Arabic word roots, whose prototypes they appeared to be. But to the best equipped student the task was complicated and difficult; for in an attempt to interpret word roots only the nicest judgment and most scholarly background could serve to discover a close approximation of the original meaning.
Whitney worked through the grey November day. Then he induced the reluctant curator to
lend him the piece for a few days, using the plea of convenient access to the reference works in his library. Holding it carefully wrapped beneath his arm, he crossed the dusky campus to the high stone house at the edge; the house he had purchased shortly after beginning his duties at the University. He placed the shard on his flat-topped walnut desk in the spacious book-lined study which opened off the modest drawing-room, and resumed his work.
He had made encouraging progress and had no doubt of achieving a reasonably accurate translation. His supposition regarding the root combination tentatively believed “The Warder of Knowledge” seemed correct—at least to the extent that no other interpretation appeared plausible. But further deciphering had proved disquieting. The character of the eon-old entity, or principle, to which the term was applied was apparently of a most disturbing nature. While the references to it were marked by an ambiguity of expression distinct from the natural difficulties of translation, the only possible conclusions were quite as alarming as his former work on the shards could have led him to anticipate.
He repressed a shudder as he reviewed the fine script, covering several sheets, which he had written with his fountain pen: the draft of the shard’s contents. He remembered reading how, some forty-four years before, the first examiners of the Shards, Doctors Dalton and Woodford, had announced them to be untranslatable. He recalled their published statements disparaging the importance of the discovery; and the odd haste with which the specimens had been shunted to this obscure museum and locked away. And, thinking of how completely these fragments had been forgotten by scientific men, he wondered if enough could have been deciphered of the half-obliterated symbols to provide a hint of the appalling nature of the meaning—enough to make the translators guess at the authorship of these elaborately worked tablets found in a geologic stratum deposited long before man’s anthropoid ancestors had evolved from lower orders. He had never seriously suspected that the Shards had been deliberately discarded because of their contents, for he attributed his own success with them to certain recondite documents that had suggested the key. But now he wondered.
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