There was now a pause, while I watched leaves scuttling along the oiled walk in the growling wind. Then a sound like a sigh came from my companion. It seemed to me that the wind and the sea spoke loudly of a sudden, as tho approaching some dire climax. The sea wind chilled me as it had not before, I wanted to leave.
“Dare I tell you? Dare I!” His white face turned upward. It was as though he questioned some spirit in the winds.
I was silent; curious, yet fearful of what it might be he might not be allowed to tell me. The winds were portentously still.
“Were you ever told, as a child, that you must not attempt to count the stars in the sky at night—that if you did you might lose your mind?”
“Why, yes. I believe I’ve heard that old superstition. Very reasonable, I believe—based on the assumption that the task would be too great for one brain. I—”
“I suppose it never occurred to you,” he interrupted, “that this superstition might hold even more truth than that, truth as malignant as it is vast. Perhaps the cosmos hold secrets beyond comprehension of man; and what is your assurance that these secrets are beneficent and kind? Is nature rather not terrible, than kind? In the stars are patterns—designs which if read, might lure the intrepid miserable one who reads them out of earth and beyond…beyond, to immeasurable evil.…Do you understand what I am saying?” His voice quivered metallically, was vibrant with emotion.
I tried to smile, but managed only a sickly grin. “I understand you, sir, but I am not in the habit of accepting nebulous theories such as that without any shred of evidence.”
“There is, sad to say, only too much evidence. But do you believe that men have lost their minds from incessant study of the stars?”
“Perhaps some have, I don’t know,” I returned. “But in the South of this state in one of the country’s leading observatories, I have a friend who is famous as an astronomer. He is as sane as you or I. If not saner.” I tacked the last sentence on with significant emphasis.
The fellow was muttering something into his muffler, and I fancied I caught the words “danger…” and “fools…” We were silent again. Low dark clouds fled over the roaring sea and the gloom intensified.
Presently, in his clipped speech, the stranger said, “Do you believe that life exists on other planets, other stars? Have you ever wondered what kind of life might inhabit the other stars in this solar system, and those beyond it?” His eyes were near mine as he spoke, and they bewitched me. There was something in them, something intangible and awful. I sensed that he was questioning me idly, as an outlander might be questioned about things with which the asker is familiar, as I might ask a New Yorker, “What do you think of the Golden Gate Bridge?”
“I wouldn’t attempt to guess, to describe, for instance, a Martian man,” I said. “Yet I read with interest various guesses by writers of fiction.” I was striving to maintain a mood of lightness and ease, but inwardly I felt a bitter cold, as one on the rim of a nightmare. I suddenly realized, with childish fear, that night was falling.
“Writers of fiction! And what if they were to guess too well? What then? Is it safe for them to have full rein over their imaginations? Like the star-gazers…”
I said nothing, but smiled.
He went on, “Perhaps, man, there have been those whose minds were acute beyond most earthly minds—those who have guessed too closely to truth. Perhaps those who are Beyond are not yet ready to make themselves known to Earthlings? And maybe THEY, are annoyed with the puny publicity they receive from imaginative writers.… Ask yourself, what is imagination? Are earth-minds capable of conceiving that which is not and has never been; or is this imagination merely a deeper insight into worlds you know not of, worlds glimpsed dimly in the throes of dream? And whence come these dreams? Tell me, have you ever awakened from a dream with the sinister feeling that all was not well inside your mind?—that while you, the real you, were away in Limbo—someone—something was probing in your mind, invading it and reading it. Might not THEY leave behind them in departure shadowy trailings of their own minds?”
Now I was indeed speechless. For a strange nothing had started my neck-hairs to prickling. Authors who might have guessed too well.… Two, no three, writers whose stories had hinted at inconceivable yet inevitable dooms; writers I had known; had recently died, by accident.
He continued, “What of old legends? Of the serpent who shall one day devour the sun. That legend dates back to Mu and Atlantis. Who, man, was and is Satan? Christ? And Jehovah? benevolent and all-saving, were but a monstrous jest fostered by THEY to keep man blindly content, and keep him divided among himself so that he strove not to unravel the stars?”
He paused, and when I said nothing, he said: “Man, in my foolish youth I studied by candleflame secrets that would scorch your very soul. Of women who with their own bare hands have strangled the children they bore so that the world might not know.… Disease and sickness at which physicians throw up their hands in helpless bafflement. When strong men tear at their limbs and heads and agony—seeking to drive forth alien forces that have netted themselves into their bodies. I need scarcely recount them all, each with its own abominable significance. It is THEM. Who are eternal and nameless, who send their scouts down to test earth-man. Don’t you realize that they have watched man creep out of primal slimes, take limbs and shamble, and finally walk? And that they are waiting, biding their time….”
I shivered with a fear beyond name. I tried to laugh and could not. Then, bold with stark horror, I shouted quite loudly: “How do you know this? Are you one of them?”
He shook his head violently. “No, no!”
I made as to go, feeling an aching horror within me.
He called, “Stay only a moment more, man. I will have pity on you and will not tell you all. I will not describe them. And I will not assay that which, when upon first seeing you here by the sea, I first intended….” I listened. Not daring to look at him; as in the grip of daemonaic dream. My fingers clutched at the edges of the bench so tightly that I have been unable to write with them until now. He concluded thus:
“So you see that I am everywhere a worldless alien. Sometimes this secret is too great for one mind to contain, and I must talk. I must feel the presence of someone human near me, else I shall attempt to commit suicide and again fail. It is without end—my horror. Have pity on me, man of earth, as I have had pity on you.”
It was then that I gripped him by the shoulders and looked with pleading desperation into his staring eyes. “Why have you told me? What—” My voice broke. My hands fell to my sides. I shuddered.
He understood. Shrieked one word: “Pity!” into my insensible ear, and was gone.
That was three nights ago and each night since has been hell. I cannot remember how long it was after the stranger left that I found myself able to move, to rise, hobble home, suddenly ancient with knowledge. And I cannot—will not—reveal to you all that I heard.
I thought myself insane, but after an examination, a physician pronounced me that I had been strained mentally. I am competent. But I wonder if he is wrong.
I view the silken stars tonight with loathing. He sought to master their inscrutable secret meaning, and succeeded. He imagined, he dreamed; and he fed his sleep with potions, so that he might learn where his mind might be during sleep, and himself probe into the mind that wandered from space into his resting body-shell. I am no scientist, no bio-chemist, so I learned little of his methods. Only that he did succeed in removing his mind from Earth, and soaring to some remote world over and beyond this universe—where they dwell. And they knew him to be a mind of Earth, he told me. He but hinted of the evil he beheld, so potent with dread that it shattered his mind. And they cured him, and sent him back to earth.…“They are waiting!” he shrieked, in his grating skeleton of a voice. “They are contemptuous of man and his feeble colonies. But they
fear that some day, like an overgrown idiot child, he may do them harm. But before this time—when Man has progressed into a ripeness—they will descend! Then they will come in hordes to exploit the world as they did before!”
Of his return, and his assuming the role of a man, the Alien spoke evasively. It was to be assured that this talk of his was not some repulsive caprice; to know that all of it was true, that I gripped him and beheld him.
To my everlasting horror, I must know. Little in itself, what I saw, but sufficient to cause me to sink down on the stone bench in a convulsive huddle of fear. Never again in life can I tear this clutching terror from my soul. Only this: That when I looked into his staring eyes in the dimness of murky twilight, and before he understood and quickly avaunted, I glimpsed with astoundment and repugnance that between the muffling of his coat and black scarf the intruder wore a meticulously painted metal mask—to hide what I must not see….
OUT OF THE JAR, by Charles A. Tanner
Originally published Stirring Science Stories, February 1941.
I am presenting here, at the insistence of my friend, James Francis Denning, an account of an event or series of events which, he says, occurred to him during the late summer and early fall of 1940. I do so, not because I concur in the hope which Denning has that it may arouse serious investigation of the phenomena he claims took place, but merely that a statement of those phenomena may be placed on record, as a case history for future students of occult phenomena or—psychology. Personally, I am still unpersuaded under which head this narration should be placed.
Were my mind one of those which accepts witches, vampires and werewolves in the general scheme of things, I would not doubt for a moment the truth of Denning’s tale, for certainly the man believes it himself; and his lack of imagination and matter-of-fact mode of living up until the time of the occurrence speak strongly in his favor. And then too, there is the mental breakdown of the brilliant young Edward Barnes Halpin, as added evidence. This young student of occult history and the vague lesser known cults and religions was a fairly close acquaintance of Denning’s for years, and it was at Denning’s home that he suffered the stroke which made him the listless, stricken thing that he is today.
That much is fact and can be attested to by any number of people. As to Denning’s explanation, I can only say that it deserves a thorough investigation. If there is any truth in it at all, the truth should certainly be verified and recorded. And so, to the story.
* * * *
It began, Denning says, in the summer of last year, when he attended a sale disposing of the stock of one of those little secondhand stores that call themselves antique shops and are known to most people as junk shops. There was the usual hodge-podge of Indian curios, glassware, Victorian furniture and old books; and Denning attended it as he did every event of this kind, allowing himself to indulge in the single vice which he had—that of filling his home with a stock of cheap and useless curios from all parts of the world.
At this particular sale he emerged triumphantly with a carved elephant tusk, an Alaskan medicine man’s mask and—an earthenware jar. This jar was a rather ordinary thing, round-bodied, with a very short cylindrical neck and with a glazed band around its center, blue glaze, with curious angular characters in yellow that even the rather illiterate Denning could see bore a certain relation to Greek characters. The auctioneer called it very old, said it was Syraic or Samaritan and called attention to the seal which was affixed to the lid. This lid was of earthenware similar to the jar and was set in the mouth after the manner of a cork and a filling of what seemed to be hard-baked clay sealed it in. And on this baked clay, or whatever it was, had been stamped a peculiar design—two triangles interwoven to form a six-pointed star, with three unknown characters in the center. Although the auctioneer was as ignorant as Denning as to the real significance of this seal, he made a mystery of it and Denning was hooked. He bought the thing and brought it home, where it found a place, in spite of his wife’s objections, on the mantle in the living room.
And there it rested, in a questionable obscurity, for a matter of four or five months. I say questionable obscurity, for as near as I can gather it was the bone of contention, during most of that time, between Denning and his wife. It was but natural, I think, that this estimable lady should object to having the best room in their little home filled with what were to her a mass of useless objects. Yet nothing was done about it. In the light of Denning’s story of subsequent events, it seems almost incredible that that frightful thing could sit there, day after day, in that commonplace living room, being taken down and dusted now and then, and carelessly placed back.
Yet such was the case, and such remained the case until the first visit of young Halpin. This young man was an acquaintance of Denning’s of long standing, and their friendship had been slowly ripening during the last year, owing to the fact that Halpin was able to add much to Denning’s knowledge of the curios which he accumulated. Both of them worked for the same company and seeing each other every day, it was not unusual that they had become quite friendly in spite of the fact that neither had ever visited the other’s home. But Denning’s description of certain carvings on the elephant’s tusk which he had bought interested young Halpin sufficiently to cause him to pay a visit to Denning’s home to make a personal examination of the tusk.
Halpin, at this time, was still under thirty, yet he had become already a recognized authority in this country of that queer borderland of mystic occult study that Churchward, Fort, Lovecraft and the Miskatonic school represent. His articles on some of the obscure chapters of d’Erlette’s “Cultes des Goules” has been accepted favorably by American occult students, as well as his translation of the hitherto expurgated sections of the Gaelic “Leabhar Mor Dubh.” In all, he was a most promising student and one in whom the traits of what now seem to have been incipient dementia praecox were conspicuous by their absence. Indeed, one of his strongest characteristics, Denning tells me, was a pronounced interest in almost everything about him.
* * * *
“He was like that, the night that he first visited me,” says Denning. “He looked over the tusk, explained all the curious carvings that he could and made little sketches of the remaining figures, to take away and study. Then his eyes began roving about the room and pretty soon they noticed some other little thing, I don’t remember just what, and he began talking about that. I had a couple of Folsom points—those curious flints that are supposed to be much older than any other American artifacts—and he spoke about them for nearly twenty minutes.
“Then he laid them down and was up and around the room again; and presently he picked up something else and was talking about that. I used to learn an awful lot from Ed Halpin, but I think I learned more that night than I ever did at any other one time. And at last his eyes lit on that jar.”
* * * *
Yes, his eyes lit on the jar, and started the series of happenings that at last made this story necessary. For Halpin was stricken with a sudden curiosity, picked up the jar and glanced over it, and then suddenly became wildly excited. “Why, it’s old!” he ejaculated. “It’s ancient Hebrew, Jim. Where in the world did you get it?”
Denning told him, but his curiosity was unappeased. He spent several minutes trying to extract from Denning a knowledge which it became obvious that the latter did not possess. It was easy to see that Halpin already knew more concerning the jar than did Denning, and so his questions ceased.
“But surely you know what it is supposed to be, don’t you?” quizzed Halpin. “Didn’t the auctioneer tell you anything about it? Didn’t you see the previous owner? Lord, Denning! How can you find interest in these things, if you don’t learn all you can of them?”
Denning was rendered apologetic by his evident exasperation, and Halpin suddenly relented, laughed and started to explain.
“That six-pointed star, Jim, is know
n as Solomon’s seal. It has been a potent sign used in Hebraic cabala for thousands of years. What has me interested is its use in connection with Phoenician characters around the body of the vase. That seems to indicate a real antiquity. It might just be possible that this is actually the seal of Solomon himself! Jim,” his attitude suddenly changed, “Jim, sell me this thing, will you?”
Now, it seems incredible that Denning saw no slightest gleam of light in this guarded explanation of Hatpin’s. The young student certainly was aware of much of the importance of the jar, but Denning insists that the explanation meant nothing whatever to him. To be sure, Denning was no student, he had probably never heard of the Cabala, nor of Abdul Alhazred or Joachim of Cordoba, but surely, in his youth he had read the “Arabian Nights.” Even that should have given him a clue. Apparently not—he tells me that he refused Halpin’s offer to buy the vase, simply because of a collector’s vagary. He felt that, well, to use his own words: “If it was worth ten dollars to him, it was worth ten dollars to me.”
And so, though Halpin increased the offer which he first made, Denning was obdurate. Halpin left with merely an invitation to come back at any time and examine the vase to his heart’s content.
* * * *
During the next three weeks, Halpin did return, several times. He copied down the inscription on the blue band, made a wax impression of the seal, photographed the vase and even went so far as to measure it and weigh it. And all the time his interest increased and his bids for the thing rose higher. At last, unable to raise his offer further, he was reduced to pleading with Denning that he sell it, and at this, Denning grew angry.
The Second Cthulhu Mythos MEGAPACK® Page 36
