Parker Winfield smirked. “Not me! Know next to nothing about that sort of stuff. But my grandfather, now, he collected all sorts of oddities, from all over.”
“Indeed. Was your grandfather born to wealth, or did he establish the family income?” asked Zarnak.
“Gramps? He was in the China trade; all over the Pacific—Indonesia, the Carolines—”
“Ponape?” hazarded Doctor Zarnak.
“Most likely. Not sure where they are, the Carolines, but if they’re in the Pacific, Gramps was there. Brought home a load of junk, Gramps did. Been in storage for years and years, since we closed the country estate and sold it off. Odd you should mention Gramps and his collection; I’ve been unpacking some of it, now that I’ve opened my new apartment. Got an extra room I’ve fitted out for his collection; nothing else to put in there.”
“How very interesting! I should like to visit, just to compare: one antiquarian collection with another. May I call tomorrow morning?”
Winfield looked uneasy. “Thought you’d have some surefire way to get rid of my bad dreams,” he complained. “Muriel said—”
Zarnak spoke soothingly. “There are one or two things I could try, but I need more information. There is nothing that I can do at this late hour, and, besides, I am expecting another visitor. But permit me to call on you tomorrow morning, and explore your new residence. There may be something about the apartment that has been causing you to have these dreams of a city in the sea.”
“Ghosts, you mean!” demanded Winfield scornfully. “Think the place is haunted, do you?”
Zarnak spread his hands. “Who can say what psychic residue may have been left by former residents? I am sensitive to atmospheres; give me a chance to help you.”
He rose, touched a bell. “My servant will see you out.”
“Hindu, ain’t he?” asked Winfield.
“Ram Singh is a Rajput,” replied Zarnak. “They are a princely race of noble warriors.”
“Where do you find a servant like that? My man Rufus is all right, but I’d give plenty for a fellow like the one you’ve got working for you—”
Zarnak asked, without expression: “Have you ever heard much of werewolves?”
Winfield stared at him. “Like in those old Lon Chaney movies, you mean? Certainly! But what’s that got to do with India?”
“In India, they have were-tigers,” said Zarnak tonelessly. “I was able to save Ram Singh from one. To reply to your question, you cannot hire a Rajput servant; but you can earn their lifelong gratitude and service. A Rajput chooses his own master, and not the other way around.”
“Your hat and coat, sir,” said Ram Singh from the doorway.
When Parker Winfield had left, Zarnak sat down at his desk to look at his notes.
After a moment, under the line of “gibberish” his visitor had heard from the chanting in his dreams, Zarnak wrote in a precise hand: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wqaw’nagl fhtagn.
Under the name of the sea-drowned city, which Winfield had given him, phonetically, as “Arlyah,” he wrote a single name: R’lyeh.
Ram Singh appeared in the doorway.
“Sahib, the Doctor de Grandin is arriving.”
An expression of pleasure crossed the saturnine features, as Zarnak rose to greet his very old friend.
CHAPTER 3.
Something from Down There
At ten o’clock in the morning of the next day, a car pulled up before a fashionable condominium off Fifth Avenue, and Zarnak carrying a black leather briefcase that seldom left his side, emerged.
At the door of Winfield’s apartment he was greeted by a young black man neatly attired in a somber gray suit, white shirt and narrow black tie.
“I am Doctor Anton Zarnak. I believe Mr. Winfield is expecting me.” The black man smiled and opened the door wider.
“Surely! Mr. Winfield is having breakfast right now but if you’d like to join him—?”
The apartment was discreetly furnished in good modern taste, obviously by an expensive interior decorator and not the resident. The furniture was of blond wood in Swedish Modern, and the carpet was an excellent Rya. The bric-a-brac was polished aluminum and the pictures were signed lithographs.
Rufus—for that must have been his name—led Zarnak into a sunny breakfast-nook where he found Parker Winfield, his face more pouched than before, with bleary, red-rimmed eyes, hunched over a table. Apparently, the younger man had indulged in a bit of alcoholic beverage after leaving China Alley. He waved a feeble hand.
“Good to see you, Doc! Help yourself…I don’t have much appetite this morning.” Zarnak inspected the sideboard: selected a rasher of Canadian bacon, an English muffin dripping with Devonshire butter and clover honey, eggs Florentine, and asked the servant for a cup of black coffee.
“More of those dreams last night?” Zarnak asked of his host, who nodded dejectedly.
“Worse than ever. Doc; I got closer to that hellish portal than ever before. Don’t know how much more of this I can take before my nerves are entirely shot. Think you can help?”
“I will try,” said Zarnak.
After breakfast, he asked Winfield to show him around. The apartment was a sumptuous one, comprised of eight rooms, of which two held the cook and Rufus. A terrace gave a sunny view of Central Park. In none of the rooms did Zarnak experience that chill frisson along the nerves that would have signaled, to a Sensitive, the presence of malign forces. The building, it appeared, was too newly erected to have had time to acquire the psychic residue that ordinary people call “ghosts.”
Nothing that Zarnak experienced alarmed or disturbed him, until his host led him into a side room where reposed Grandfather Winfield’s relics of his South Sea voyages. The room was crowded with uncouth artworks, chiseled from stone or carved from wood. Most of these were obviously antiques and worth considerable sums of money. Zarnak examined them with thoughtful care.
There were pieces of tapa-cloth from the Tonga Islands, charged with an odd motif like repeated five-pointed stars, curiously froglike idols of wood or stone from the Cook Islanders, A Sepik River Valley figure from New Guinea with an odd, kraken-like fringe of waving tentacles, pendants of carven shell from Papua shaped into octopoidal heads, wooden masks from the New Hebrides with a mane of writhing serpents instead of hair, a basalt image from Easter Island depicting a peculiarly loathsome combination of frog and fish, and the fragment of a lava bas-relief from South Indochina upon which Zarnak’s eyes did not linger.
His very worst suspicions were confirmed. Grimly, he went on, examining exhibit after exhibit, until he found one which arrested him in his tracks. He lingered before it staring unwinkingly.
“Ugly creature, isn’t it?” asked Parker Winfield at his elbow. “Maybe I should donate the whole lot somewhere; some of ’em give me the creeps.”
“I suggest that you do,” murmured Zarnak distractedly. “And I could recommend the Sanbourne Institute in Santiago, California; they have an admirable collection of this kind of…art.”
The piece upon which Anton Zarnak’s attention was fixed seemed to have been hewn from jadeite. It was about eleven inches tall, and depicted a bipedal monstrosity whose hind legs resembled those of a batrachian, with forelimbs uplifted almost as if in menace, sucker-tipped, webbed hands extended towards the viewer. The head of the image was a seething mass of pseudopods or tentacles, amidst which a single glaring eye could be discerned.
The symbols carven in the idol’s base were in a language long vanished from human knowledge; few human beings on earth could have read them. Zarnak was one of the few.
“Ythogtha,” he breathed.
“That’s the thing’s name?” inquired Winfield cheerfully.
Zarnak nodded somberly. “I don’t suppose you have ever happened to look into a
ny of the late Professor Copeland’s books about the prehistoric Pacific civilizations?”
Winfield chuckled. “Not me! Not much of a reader, I’m afraid. What is it about this bugger that interests you?”
“It is quite unique. I should like to study it at length. May I borrow it for a time?”
“Well…valuable, is it?”
“Priceless, I should say. It is probably the only piece of its kind on earth…fortunately for us. In my opinion, you will sleep much more soundly without it on the premises, and enjoy much more wholesome dreams,” said Zarnak.
Winfield looked skeptical; nevertheless he insisted that Doctor Zarnak take the piece with him and keep it as long as he wished.
“Grandfather said that thing was found by a native diver somewhere in the waters off Easter Island,” he remarked. “Maybe it would have been a lot better if it had stayed down below, eh?”
“Quite so,” said Zarnak fervently. And he had never spoken more sincerely in his life…
CHAPTER 4.
To Dream No More
Once back in China Alley, Zarnak examined the stony image more closely. It was made of a greasy gray stone, mottled with dark green splotches like fungus or lichen. He weighed the image, and it was abnormally heavy—heavier than lead, far heavier than any terrene mineral was supposed to be. The phrase “star-quarried stone” passed through his mind briefly.
Zarnak consulted the books in his library. First he looked into a slim, cheaply-produced pamphlet which bore the title The Zanthu Tablets, and read of Great Ythogtha, the Abomination in the Abyss, imprisoned by the Elder Gods in Yhe. Then he consulted Von Junzt, and found the following passage of interest:
Of the Spawn of Cthulhu, only Ythogtha lies prisoned in regions contiguous to sunken R’lyeh, for Yhe was once a province of Mu, and R’lyeh is not far off the submerged shores of that riven, drowned continent; and Yhe and R’lyeh are close nigh unto each other, along dimensions not numbered among the three we know.
Zarnak studied the stony image with some of the scientific instruments in his laboratory. It seemed to possess a powerful electromagnetic charge: at least, contact with the image wilted the gold leaves of the electroscope. Zarnak meditated: such images, he knew, brought down from the stars when the earth was young, may be fashioned of an unearthly and abnormal amalgam of stone and metal, which would account for the unusual weight of the object. And that such figures may be impregnated with thought-waves, even as a strip of magnetic tape can be recorded with sound-waves, was also known to him from his researches. Was that the secret of the image, or did it somehow serve as the transmitter of thought-waves from the lair of Ythogtha’s awful Sire?
All the while, the froglike image squatted on the laboratory table, regarding him unwinkingly with that one Medusa-like eye of cold malignancy…
The thing seemed virtually alive in some uncanny way. Almost, it seemed, the gray-green mineral surged with vitality and the writhing tendrils that mercifully masked its hideous visage seemed almost to flicker with furtive motion, when glimpsed from the corners of his eye.
At length, completing his notes, Zarnak rose and went to a steel cabinet against one wall, whose topmost drawer he unlocked with a small key. He drew forth a tray lined with black velvet whereupon reposed a number of curious objects shaped like five-pointed stars. Some had been carved from a stony mineral, either slate-gray or dull green. But the bottom row were of ceramic, taffy-colored, baked in a kiln and heavily glazed. These last had been manufactured for Zarnak by a sculptor friend in Seattle, and Zarnak himself had consecrated them, had energized them with power, according to an old formula he had discovered in Clithanus.
Thoughtfully, he weighed the star-shaped amulet of the Elder Gods in the palm of one hand, while his gaze brooded upon the stone image. It would be interesting to discover whether the statuette of Ythogtha had so impregnated the mind of Parker Winfield with its malign and sinister influence that the dreams continued even without the eidolon being present as a sort of “conductor.”
It would also be interesting to learn what happened when one of the star-stones came in physical contact with the image from Outside…
* * * *
The dream began as all the dreams began: he was sinking slowly down through luminous water that dimmed and darkened around him into blackest gloom, lit only with that eerie emerald radiance from the ruin. He was vaguely conscious of stifling pressure from the many tons of water above him, of wet cold, of utter helplessness…
Parker Winfield felt his body drift without volition over the murky vista of tumbled stone blocks that were matted with pallid weed and thick with slime…the broken stone ruin came closer, ever closer. The weird green luminance waxed in strength, pulsing like the beating of some enormous heart…
Now his dream-form was floating up the mossy, mud-thick stone steps; now the very portal of the ruin filled his vision, immense, of unthinkable antiquity, concealing God alone knew what horrible abnormality, what monstrous dweller in the depths…
The portal opened: throbbing green radiance smote Parker Winfield full in the face, blinding, dazzling him—then his dreamer’s vision adjusted to the unwholesome light, and he strove to see the source of that lambent glow, which seemed throned in some vast and oddly-angled chair—
Then a flash of clear, pure golden light wiped the dreamscape away!
And Winfield awoke, gasping, saturated with cold perspiration, hands shaking like willows in a wind. He stared about him with wild and haunted gaze, seeing only his own darkened bedroom, nothing more. A wave of sheer relief sluiced through him, washing away the residue of night-fear—
The telephone rang. With nerveless hands, Winfield snatched up the instrument.
“Yes?”
“Doctor Zarnak here,” said the familiar voice. “Have you had another of those sea-dreams?”
“I certainly have, and worse than the ones before, although it ended differently from the others—”
Zarnak listened carefully to his client’s description of the nightmare. From time to time he made small, precise notes in the book on his desk before him. When the other was finished with his recital:
“Very good. I believe I have isolated and eradicated the source of the infection, as you might call it. You shall dream no more; or, rather, such dreams as you experience from henceforward will be only the healthy dreams of normal sleep…ah, one thing more. I regret to tell you that the jadeite image from your grandfather’s collection of artifacts met with severe damage during the testing process, and I will be unable to return it. Yes; very good. And you are shipping the remainder of the collection to the Institute? Very satisfactory. Good day to you.”
Zarnak replaced the instrument in its cradle, made a final note in his book, rose and stepped silently from the room.
On the asbestos mat atop the small steel and porcelain table which had borne the jadeite image and the star-stone, now reposed only a heap of fine gray ash. The sharp stench of ozone hovered in the air.
It was much better so…and the case was one that had, after all a happy ending.
THE WINFIELD HERITENCE, by Lin Carter
Originally published in Weird Tales #3, 1981.
Statement of Winfield Phillips
In the event of my death or disappearance, I herewith request of the person into whose hands this statement shall come that he mail it without delay to Dr. Seneca Lapham, care of the Anthropology Department of Miskatonic University in the city of Arkham, Massachusetts. And, for his own safety, if not indeed his sanity of mind, I beg him to send it unread.
My name is Winfield Phillips, and I reside at number 86 College Street in Arkham. I am a graduate of Miskatonic University, where I majored in American literature and took for my minor the study of anthropology. Since my freshman year I have been in the employ of Dr. Lapham in the capacity of a priva
te secretary, and have continued thereafter in that position in order to support myself while researching for a book on the Decadent movement in recent art and literature. I am twenty-nine years old, and consider myself to be sound of mind and body.
As for my soul, I am not so certain.
Chapter I
On the morning of June 7th, 1936, having obtained a brief leave of absence from my employer, I boarded the train for California at the B & O Station on Water Street. My purpose in undertaking a journey of such length as to traverse the entirety of the continent was partially business and partially pleasure. And, in part, from a sense of family duty.
Due to the recent death of my Uncle, Hiram Stokely of Durnham Beach, California, I felt obligated to attend his funeral and to take my place at the obsequies in order that the Eastern branch of the family might be represented on this solemn occasion. Uncle Hiram had been, after all, my Mother’s favorite brother; and, even though I had never met him, had, in fact, never even seen him to my knowledge, I knew that she would have wished me to attend his burial. My late Mother was a Winfield of New Hampshire, but my Father was a Phillips, sprung from ancient Massachusetts stock which can be traced back to 1670, if not further. I am a descendant of the celebrated, and ever so slightly notorious, Reverend Ward Phillips, former pastor of the Second Congregationalist Church in Arkham, author of an obscure but psychologically fascinating bit of New England eccentricity called Thaumaturgical Prodigies in the New-English Canaan, first published at Boston in 1794 and later reprinted in rather expurgated form in 1801. It is an old family joke that the reverend doctor, in this his only known venture into the fine art of letters, literally did his “damndest” to out-do in hellfire and brimstone mad old Cotton Mather’s hellish Magnalia and the even more nightmarish Wonders of the Invisible World. If so, he succeeded admirably.
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