The 11th Golden Age of Weird Fiction

by E. Hoffmann Price

  “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 that 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.

  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 somber 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, somber 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 Orleans, “is plausible to a degree, despite the terrifically incomprehensible bescramblement 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.”

  PALE HANDS

  Originally published in The Magic Carpet Magazine, October 1933.

  As Davis Lawton glanced up from the tall glass before him to gaze across the plaza just outside the gray-walled city of Bayonne, he saw that his friend Georges Joubert was approaching the table. Joubert was now a member of the Sûreté Générale; but instead of avoiding him, Lawton cultivated their wartime friendship. A subtle and audacious touch, that, maintaining cordial relations with a member of the French Secret Service!

  “Sit down and have a drink,” invited Lawton.

  Although he declined the drink, as he usually did, Joubert accepted a place at Lawton’s table.

  “My friend,” he began abruptly, after a marked and awkward silence, “there has been very much surmise about your connections, here in Bayonne, and elsewhere—in Morocco, for instance—”

  Joubert paused again, groping for words. But further speech was not necessary to tell Lawton that his connections in Morocco were about to lead him to a stone wall in a courtyard, and a firing-squad primed with a stiff drink of cognac and grumbling with forced gruffness at small-arms practice at sunrise. Lawton knew that the Sûreté never made an open move until it had enough evidence to condemn a man. The trial would be only a matter of form. But Lawton eyed Joubert very calmly: for in the beginning. Lawton had been a soldier and he would be one again, in the end.

  “Very well, Georges,” he replied. “Read me the papers.”

  “Mon ami,” came the answer, “I have no papers. That is, not yet. But I know that in twenty-four hours I shall have them. Maybe tomorrow morning. Some one has babbled. Not much, but more than enough. As for your being an agent of Abd el Krim, that is nothing to me, for personally, I don’t think France has any right in Morocco. But once the information reaches me officially I shall be compelled to forget that day on the front, when you carried me safety through that hell of machine-gun fire.

  “So get out of Bayonne and across the border as soon after sunrise as you can. There is an early express to Spain.

  “Yesterday’s paper,” he continued, “told all about Abd el Krim’s successful advance all along the front. So if I have to arrest you it will be either a firing-squad, or Devil’s Island, which is much worse. Au revoir, mon ami!”

 
Then Joubert released Lawton’s hand, turned, and abruptly strode across the plaza toward the Bridge of Saint Esprit.

  * * * *

  “Someone has babbled…”

  Joubert’s words still burned into Lawton’s brain like hot irons. But before making his escape, he would have to find out what or who had betrayed him. Perhaps Madeleine had said too much in a careless moment. At the very most, she knew very little; but that would suffice. Perhaps, in a flare of jealousy—but that simply couldn’t be the case! Of all lovers, Lawton had been the most devoted. Madeleine wouldn’t have betrayed him, though she might have been indiscreet. And even though he escaped the Sûreté, thanks to Joubert, he would have to face the unforgiving wrath of Abd el Krim for blundering and wasting time. The problem of the moment was to find out who had betrayed him. Only the evening remained: but the Gray Goddess would tell him. She knew everything.

  The law in France prohibited the sale of absinthe; but the Gray Goddess was subtle, so that she now materialized when the contents of two separate and distinct bottles, each in itself legal, were suitably blended. First a pony of anis del oso, then one of cordiale gentiane; and then the tall glass was filled with seltzer, which clouded, becoming gray and pearly. The result was insipid to taste, but when one had an abundance of time in which to court the lady of fancies, the innocuous flavor was worth enduring for the glamour that came stealing over one’s senses.

  Lawton paid for the afternoon’s drinking, and then crossed the street to go up rue Port Neuf. He halted at a store near the corner, and after regarding its window display for a moment, stepped in. In a few minutes he emerged with a basket laden with all manner of exotic delicacies; and, among the several bottles of Oporto and Malaga, whose necks projected from their nest of parcels, there were as many more whose contents would insure the presence of the Gray Goddess during his last night in Bayonne.