We watched, expecting him to make motions with his hands and pronounce commands: he did neither. He fixed his eyes upon Colby and the latter stiffened as if struck by lightning, then, eyes staring blankly ahead of him, he rose slowly, standing on the narrow strip of black that ran diagonally down through the center of the rug.
My mind ran back to the day I caught Norden in the act of destroying some papers and apparatus, the latter which had been constructed, with such assistance as I had been able to give, over a period of several months. His eyes were terrible and I could see doubt in them. Not long after this event, Dureen had made his appearance: could there have been a connection, I wondered?
My reverie was broken abruptly by the sound of Dureen’s voice commanding Colby to speak, telling us where he was and what he saw around him. When Colby obeyed, it was as if his voice came to us from a distance.
He was standing, he said, on a narrow bridgeway overlooking a frightful abyss, so vast and deep that he could discern neither floor nor boundary. Behind him this bridgeway stretched until it was lost in a bluish haze; ahead, it ran toward what appeared to be a plateau. He hesitated to move because of the narrowness of the path, yet realized that he must make for the plateau before the very sight of the depths below him made him lose his balance. He felt strangely heavy, and speaking was an effort.
As Colby’s voice ceased, we all gazed in fascination at the little strip of black in the blue rug. This, then, was the bridge over the abyss . . . but what could correspond to the illusion of depth? Why did his voice seem so far away? Why did he feel heavy? The plateau must be the workbench at the other end of the room: the rug ran up to a sort of dais upon which was set Norden’s table, the surface of this being some seven feet above the floor. Colby now began to walk slowly down the black swath, moving as if with extreme caution, looking like a slow-motion camera-shot. His limbs appeared weighted; he was breathing rapidly.
Dureen now bade him halt and look down into the abyss carefully, telling us what he saw there. At this, we again examined the rug, as if we had never seen it before and did not know that it was entirely without decoration save for that single black strip upon which Colby now stood.
His voice came to us again. He said, at first, that he saw nothing in the abyss below him. Then he gasped, swayed, and almost lost his balance. We could see the sweat standing out on his brow and neck, soaking his blue shirt. There were things in the abyss, he said in hoarse tones, great shapes that were like blobs of utter blackness, yet which he knew to be alive. From the central masses of their beings he could see them shoot forth incredibly long, filamentine tentacles. They moved themselves forward and backward—horizontally, but could not move vertically, it seemed. They were, he thought, nothing but living shadows.
But the things were not all on the same plane. True, their movements were only horizontal in relation to their position, but some were parallel to him and some diagonal. Far away he could see things perpendicular to him. There appeared now to be a great deal more of the things than he had thought. The first ones he had seen were far below, unaware of his presence. But these sensed him, and were trying to reach him. He was moving faster now, he said, but to us he was still walking in slow-motion.
I glanced sidewise at Norden; he, too, was sweating profusely. He arose now, and went over to Dureen, speaking in low tones so that none of us could hear. I knew that he was referring to Colby and that Dureen was refusing whatever it was Norden demanded. Then Dureen was forgotten momentarily as Colby’s voice came to us again, quivering with fright. The things were reaching out for him. They rose and fell on all sides; some far away; some hideously close. None had found the exact plane upon which he could be captured; the darting tentacles had not touched him, but all of the beings now sensed his presence, he was sure. And he feared that perhaps they could alter their planes at will, though it appeared that they must do so blindly, seemingly like two-dimensional beings. The tentacles darting at him were threads of utter darkness.
A terrible suspicion arose in me, as I recalled some of the earlier conversations with Norden, and remembered certain passages from the Song of Yste. I tried to rise, but my limbs were powerless: I could only sit helplessly and watch. Norden was still speaking with Dureen and I saw that he was now very pale. He seemed to shrink away—then he turned and went over to a cabinet, took out some object, and came to the strip of rug upon which Colby was standing. Norden nodded to Dureen and now I saw what it was he held in his hand: a polyhedron of glassy appearance. There was in it, however, a glow that startled me. Desperately I tried to remember the significance of it—for I knew—but my thoughts were being short-circuited, it seemed, and, when Dureen’s eyes rested upon me, the very room seemed to stagger.
Again Colby’s voice came through, this time despairingly. He was afraid he would never reach the plateau. (Actually he was about a yard and a half away from the end of the black strip and the dais upon which stood Norden’s workbench.) The things, said Colby, were close now: a mass of thread-like tentacles had just missed him.
Now Norden’s voice came to us; it, too, seemingly far away. He called my name. This was more, he said, than mere hypnotism. It was—but then his voice faded and I felt the power of Dureen blanking out the sound of his words. Now and then, I would hear a sentence or a few disjointed words. But, from this I managed to get an inkling of what was going on.
This was not mere hypnotism, but actually trans-dimensional journeying. We just imagined we saw Norden and Colby standing on the rug—or perhaps it was through Dureen’s influence.
The nameless dimension was the habitat of these shadow-beings. The abyss, and the bridge upon which the two stood, were illusions created by Dureen. When that which Dureen had planned was complete, our minds would be probed, and our memories treated so that we recalled no more than Dureen wished us to remember. He, Dureen, was a being of incredible power, who was using Colby and the rest of us for a nameless purpose. Norden had succeeded in forcing an agreement upon Dureen, one which he would have to keep; as a result, if the two could reach the plateau before the shadow-beings touched them, all would be well. If not—Norden did not specify, but indicated that they were being hunted, as men hunt game. The polyhedron contained an element repulsive to the things.
He was but a little behind Colby; we could see him aiming with the polyhedron. Colby spoke again, telling us that Norden had materialized behind him, and had brought some sort of weapon with which the things could be held off.
Then Norden called my name, asking me to take care of his belongings if he did not return, telling me to look up the “adumbrali” in the Song of Yste. Slowly, he and Colby made their way toward the dais and the table. Colby was but a few steps ahead of Norden; now he climbed upon the dais, and, with the other’s help, made his way onto the bench. He tried to assist Norden, but, as the latter mounted the dais, he stiffened suddenly and the polyhedron fell from his hands. Frantically he tried to draw himself up, but he was being forced backward and I knew that he had lost....
There came to us a single cry of anguish, then the lights in the room faded and went out. Whatever spell had been upon us now was removed; we rushed about like madmen, trying to find Norden, Colby, and the light switch. Then, suddenly, the lights were on again and we saw Colby sitting dazedly on the bench, while Norden lay on the floor. Chalmers bent over the body, in an effort to resuscitate him, but when he saw the condition of Norden’s remains he became so hysterical that we had to knock him cold in order to quiet him.
Colby followed us mechanically, apparently unaware of what was happening. We took Graf Norden’s body out into the November night and destroyed it by fire, telling Colby later that he had apparently suffered a heart attack while driving up the mountain road; the car had gone over and his body was almost completely destroyed in the holocaust.
Later, Chalmers, Granville, and I met in an effort to rationalize what we had seen and heard. Chalmers had been all right after he came around, had helped us with our gri
sly errand up the mountain road. Neither, I found, had heard Norden’s voice after he had joined Colby in the supposed hypnotic state. So, it was as I thought: Dureen’s power had blanked out the sound of Norden’s voice for them completely. Nor did they recall seeing any object in Norden’s hand.
But, in less than a week, even these memories had faded from them. They fully believed that Norden had died in an accident after an unsuccessful attempt on the part of Dureen to hypnotize Colby. Prior to this, their explanation had been that Dureen had killed Norden, for reasons unknown, and that we had been his unwitting accomplices. The hypnotic experiment had been a blind to gather us all together and provide a means of disposing of the body. That Dureen had been able to hypnotize us, they did not doubt then. The illusion of the abyss, they said, was just a cruel joke....
It is no use telling them what I learned a few days later, what I learned from Norden’s notes which explain Dureen’s arrival. Or to quote sections from the Song of Yste to them. Yet, I must set these things down. In that accursed book is a section dealing with an utterly alien race of entities known as the adumbrali.
. . . And these be none other than the adumbrali, the living shadows, beings of incredible power and malignancy, which dwell without the veils of space and time such as we know it. Their sport it is to import into their realm the inhabitants of other dimensions, upon whom they practice horrid pranks and manifold illusions....
. . . But more dreadful than these are the seekers which they send out into other worlds and dimensions, beings of incredible power which they themselves have created and guised in the form of those who dwell within whatever dimension,or upon whichever worlds where these seekers be sent....
. . . These seekers can be detected only by the adept, to whose trained eyes their too-perfectness of form and movement,their strangeness, and aura of alienage and power is a suresign....
. . . The sage, Jhalkanaan, tells of one of these seekers who deluded seven priests of Nyaghoggua into challenging it to a duel of the hypnotic arts. He further tells how two of these were trapped and delivered to the adumbrali, their bodies being returned when the shadow-things had done with them....
. . . Most curious of all was the condition of the corpses, being entirely drained of all fluid, yet showing no trace of a wound, even the most slight. But the crowning horror was the eyes, which could not be closed, appearing to stare restlessly outward, beyond the observer, and the strangely-luminousmarkings on the dead flesh, curious designs which appeared to move and change form before the eyes of the be-holder....
Music of the Stars
Duane W. Rimel
There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through.
—H. P. LOVECRAFT, “The Thing on the Door-Step”
I am called a murderer because I destroyed my best friend; killed him in cold blood. Yet I will try to prove that in so doing I performed an act of mercy—removed something that never should have broken through into this three-dimensional world, and saved my friend from a horror worse than death.
Men will read this and laugh and call me mad, because much that happened cannot be labeled and proven in a court of law. Indeed, I often wonder if I beheld the truth—I who saw the ghastly finish. There is much in this world and in other worlds that our five senses do not perceive, and what lies beyond is found only in wild imagination and dream.
I only hope that I killed him in time. If I can believe what I see in my dreams, I failed. And if I waited too long before I fired that last bullet, I shall welcome the fate that threatens to devour me.
Frank Baldwyn and I were comrades for eleven long years. It was a friendship that intensified as time went on, nourished by avid mutual interests in weird music and literature. We were born and raised in the same village, and it was—as a cultured author and correspondent of ours who lived in Providence often remarked—unusual to find two people with such bizarre interests in a village whose population was less than six hundred. It was fortunate, yes; but now I wish we had never probed so far into spheres of the awful unknown.
The trouble began April 13, 1940. I was visiting my friend that day, and during a rambling conversation he hinted that he had discovered on the piano several combinations of musical tones that disturbed him. It was evening and we were alone in the huge, two-story house that stands there today, mouldy and empty beneath a giant maple, gaunt reminder of the horror we unleashed within it.
Baldwyn was a pianist of great ability, and I admired the talent which dwarfed my own musical skill. The wild, weird music he loved often drove me into fits of melancholy I could not fathom. It is indeed a pity that none of those original manuscripts were saved, for many of them were classics of horror, and others so fantastic that I would hesitate to call them music at all.
His statement troubled me; heretofore he had had utter confidence in his mad keyboard wanderings. I offered assistance. Saying nothing, he went to the piano, switched on a nearby floor-lamp and sat down. His dark eyes fastened on the keys; his lithe, white fingers poised above them for an instant, and descended.
There was a weird cascade of sound as he ran the whole-tone scales from one end of the piano to the other, followed by a series of intricate variations that startled and amazed me. I had never heard anything to compare with it; it was utterly “out of the world.” I listened, entranced, as his flying fingers wove a curious symphony of horror. I cannot describe that music any other way. The strains were eerie and unearthly, and stirred the very reaches of my soul. It resembled no standard classical music such as Rachmaninoff’s “Isle of the Dead,” or Saint-Saens’ “Danse Macabre.” It was tortuous, musical madness.
At last the thing ended with a crash of discord, and a strained silence fell over the shadowy room. Baldwyn turned, face taut, and put his fingers to his lips. He pointed at the wall beyond the piano. At first I thought he was jesting, but when I saw his pale, handsome face drawn and worried, I glanced at the darkened walls and listened.
For a while I heard nothing; then a faint, insidious rustling disturbed the silence. It could have been a mouse running across the floor upstairs. But this sound came from the walls. The patter of tiny claws on wood, the rustle of small bodies . . . rats! Many rats scrambling in the walls. Gradually the squeaking and scratching diminished and became a trickle of sound that faded away in the direction of the cellar.
I stood up, trembling. Baldwyn faced me, eyes gleaming, jaw set.
“I’ve done it, Rambeau; I always thought I could. There’s a music that stirs every kind of beast, even ourselves. Look at the Pied Piper.... I’ve made history repeat itself! But I’m going further; I’m going to compose the music that makes men go mad, learn the music of the stars . . . even if I have to use special instruments to do it.”
I tried to pass it off as a joke, but he was quite serious. Baldwyn had always been willful, and I knew that argument was futile. However, I will admit that the very idea began to fascinate me, and what mental barriers I had built were weakening as I listened further to his strange plan. For the weird and macabre are as much a part of me as they were a part of him, and the odd music had cast a curious spell over me. Yet I was skeptical, and told him so. I failed to grasp his ultimate ambition; perhaps he hadn’t thought of it then, but the possibilities of the thing were staggering.
We had read that strange story of Erich Zann and the fate he met tinkering with musical threads of the ultimate void. Nor were we ignorant of the savage music with which certain tribes in Haiti summon their evil Gods.
We had tried for years to find copies of various forbidden tomes of ancient lore; the Necronomicon by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, the strange Book of Eibon, and Ludvig Prinn’s hideous De Vermis Mysteriis—but in vain. We had lived the simpler weird excitements— nights in haunted houses and mouldy graveyards . . . digging corpses by candle-light. . . . But we wanted the real thing, though always it was just beyond our fingertips. Even our learned friend in Providen
ce could not help us. He had read passages from a few of the less terrible books, and cautioned us time and again. Now I am glad we never found them, for what we did unearth was bad enough. I am tempted to believe that our friend, with his wide influence among the fantaisiste, made an effort to keep those selfsame books from reaching us. Certainly, several good leads vanished into thin air.
On one of my rounds of book-shops in Spokane I had found, by sheer accident, an English translation of the Chronike von Nath by the blind German mystic, Rudolf Yergler, who in 1653 finished his momentous work just before his sight gave out. The first edition sent its author to a madhouse in Berlin, and earned for itself a public suppression. Although modified by the translator, James Sheffield (1781), the text was wild beyond imagination.
As Baldwyn gradually disclosed his scheme for composing the music of the stars, he referred again and again to passages in the Chronicle of Nath. And this frightened me, for I too had read it, and knew that it contained odd musical rhythm patterns designed to summon certain star-born monsters from the earth’s core and from other worlds and dimensions. For all that, Yergler had not been a musician, and whether he had copied the formulae from older tomes or was himself their father, I was never able to find out. Surely Baldwyn had dreamed a strange dream.
He said the preliminary work would require solitude for a week, at least. That would give him sufficient time to decipher the sinister formulae in the ancient book, and to make adjustments on his Lunachord upstairs. He was a master technician, and had found on his instrument tonal combinations that baffled fellow musicians. Milt Herth, of radio fame, has done the same thing on a Hammond Organ, which the Lunachord closely resembles. Since a Lunachord’s tones are actually electrical impulses, controlled by fifteen dials on the intricate panel above the two keyboards, and capable of imitating anything from a bass horn to a piccolo, the variations are endless. Baldwyn estimated that there were roughly over a million tonal possibilities, although many would possess no distinction. I wondered at first how he had planned to invent such outré music on a mere piano; but here, ready-made, was the solution—a scientific achievement awaiting exploration.
Tales of the Lovecraft Mythos Page 38
