It was the first reference of any sort to the research project that either of us had made since our meeting and it shook me strangely, but he appeared not to notice and continued with, “You know, Mr. Fischer, I’m tempted to get a reading with Atwood and Pabodie’s infernal black box right here. Would you object?”
I told him certainly not and to go right ahead, but warned him there was only solid rock under the house (I had told him about my father’s dowsing and even had mentioned Harley Warren, whom it turned out Wilmarth had heard of through a Randolph Carter).
He nodded, but said, “I’ll take a shot at it nonetheless. We must start somewhere, you know,” and he proceeded to set up the geo-scanner carefully so it was standing vertically on its three stubby legs right in the middle of the carving. He took off his shoes first so as not to risk damaging the rather fine stonework.
Then he opened the top of the geo-scanner. I glimpsed two dials and a large eyepiece. He knelt and applied his eye to it, drawing out a black hood and draping it over his head, very much like an old-fashioned photographer focusing for a picture. “Pardon me, but the indications I must look for are difficult to see,” he said muffledly. “Hello, what’s this?”
There was a longish pause during which nothing happened except his shoulders shifted a bit and there were a few faint clicks. Then he emerged from under the hood, tucked it back in the black box, closed the latter, and began to put on and relace his shoes.
“The scanner’s gone crankish,” he explained in answer to my inquiry, “and is seeing ghost vacuities. But not to worry—it only needs new warm-up cells, I fancy, which I have with me, and will be right as rain for tomorrow’s expedition! That is, if—?” He rolled his eyes up at me in smiling inquiry.
“Of course I’ll be able to show you my pet trails in the hills,” I assured him. “In fact, I’m bursting to.”
“Capital!” he said heartily.
But as we left the basement, its rock floor rang out a bit hollowly, it sounded to me, under his high-laced leather-soled and -heeled shoes (I was wearing sneakers).
It was getting dark, so I started dinner after giving him some iced tea, which he took with lots of lemon and sugar. I cooked eggs and small beefsteaks, figuring from his haggard looks he needed the most restorative sort of food. I also built a fire in the big fireplace against the almost invariable chill of evening.
As we ate by its dancing, crackling flames, he regaled me with brief impressions of his trip west—the cold, primeval pine woods of southern New Jersey with their somberly clad inhabitants speaking an almost Elizabethan English; the very narrow dark roads of West Virginia; the freezing waters of the Ohio flooding unruffled, silent, battleship gray, and ineffably menacing under lowering skies; the profound silence of Mammoth Cave; the southern Midwest with its Depression-spawned, but already legendary, bank robbers; the nervous Creole charms of New Orleans’s restored French Quarter; the lonely, incredibly long stretches of road in Texas and Arizona that made one believe one was seeing infinity; the great, long, blue, mystery-freighted Pacific rollers (“so different from the Atlantic’s choppier, shorter-spaced waves”) which he’d watched with George Goodenough Akeley, who’d turned out to be a very solid chap and knowing more about his father’s frightening Vermont researches than Wilmarth had expected.
When I mentioned finding The Shadow Over Innsmouth he nodded and murmured, “The original of its youthful hero has disappeared and his cousin from the Canton asylum. Down to Y’ha-nthlei? Who knows?” But when I remembered his accumulated mail he merely nodded his thanks, wincing a little, as though reluctant to face it. He really did look shockingly tired.
When we’d finished dinner, however, and he’d taken his black coffee (also with lots of sugar) and the fire was dancing flickeringly, both yellow and blue now, he turned to me with a little, venturesomely friendly smile and a big, wonderingly wide lifting of his eyebrows, and said quietly, “And now you’ll quite rightly be expecting me to tell you, my dear Fischer, all the things about the project that I’ve been hesitant to write, the answers I’ve been reluctant to give to your cogent questions, the revelations I’ve been putting off making until we should meet in person. Really, you have been very patient, and I thank you.”
Then he shook his head thoughtfully, his eyes growing distant, as he slowly and rather sinuously and somehow unwillingly shrugged his shoulders, which paradoxically were both frail and wide, and grimaced slightly, as if tasting something strangely bitter, and said even more quietly, “if only I had more to tell you that’s been definitely proved. Somehow we always stop just short of that. Oh, the artifacts are real enough and certain—the Innsmouth jewelry, the Antarctic soapstones, Blake’s Shining Trapezohedron, though that’s lost in Narragansett Bay, the spiky baluster knob Walter Gilman brought back from his witchy dreamland (or the nontemporal fourth dimension, if you prefer), even the unknown elements, meteoric and otherwise, which defy all analysis, even the new magneto-optic probe which has given us virginium and alabamine. And it’s almost equally certain that all, or almost all, those weird extraterrestrial and extra-cosmic creatures have existed—that’s why I wanted you to read the Lovecraft stories, despite their lurid extravagances, so you’d have some picture of the entities that I’d be talking to you about. Except that they and the evidence for them do have a maddening way of vanishing upon extinction and from all records—Wilbur Whateley’s mangled remains, his brother’s vast invisible cadaver, the Plutonian old Akeley killed and couldn’t photograph, the June 1882 meteor itself which struck Nahum Gardner’s farm and which set old Armitage (young then) studying the Necronomicon (the start of everything at Miskatonic) and which Atwood’s father saw with his own eyes and tried to analyze, or what Danforth saw down in Antarctica when he looked back at the horrible higher mountains beyond the Mountains of Madness—he’s got amnesia for that now that he has regained his sanity…all, all gone!
“But whether any of those creatures exist today—there, there’s the rub! The overwhelming question we can’t answer, though always on the edge of doing so. The thing is,” he went on with gathering urgency, “that if they do exist, they are so unimaginably powerful and resourceful, they might be” —and he looked around sharply—“anywhere at the moment!
“Take Cthulhu,” he began.
I couldn’t help starting as I heard that word pronounced for the first time in my life; the harsh, dark, abysmal monosyllabic growl it came to was so very like the sound that had originally come to me from my imagination, or my subconscious, or my otherwise unremembered dreams, or….
He continued, “If Cthulhu exists, then he (or she, or it) can go anywhere he wants through space, or air, or sea, or earth itself. We know from Johansen’s account (it turned his hair white) that Cthulhu can exist as a gas, be torn to atoms, and then recombine. He wouldn’t need tunnels to go through solid rock, he could seep through it—‘not in the spaces we know, but between them.’ And yet in his inscrutability he might choose tunnels—there’s that to be reckoned with. Or—still another possibility—perhaps he neither exists nor does not exist but is in some half state—‘waits dreaming,’ as Angell’s old chant has it. Perhaps his dreams, incarnated as your winged worms, Fischer, dig tunnels.
“It is those monstrous underground cavern-and-tunnel worlds, not all from Cthulhu by any means, that I have been assigned to investigate with the geo-scanner, partly because I was the first to hear of them from old Akeley and also—Merciful Creator! —from the Plutonian who masked as him—‘great worlds of unknown life down there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N’kai,’ which was Tsathoggua’s home, and even stranger inner spaces litten by colors from space and from Earth’s nighted core. That’s how I guessed the colors in your childhood dreams or nightmares (or personality exchanges), my dear Fischer. I’ve glimpsed them also in the geo-scanner, where they are, however, most fugitive and difficult to discern….”
His voice trailed off tiredly, just as my own concern became m
ost feverishly intense with his mention of “personality exchanges.”
He really did look shockingly fatigued. Nevertheless I felt impelled to nerve myself to say, “Perhaps those dreams can be repeated, if I take Dr. Morgan’s drug. Why not tonight?”
“Out of the question,” he replied, shaking his head slowly. “In the first place, I wrote too hopefully there. At the last minute Morgan was unable to supply me with the drug. He promised to send it along by mail, but hasn’t yet. In the second place, I’m inclined to think now that it would be much too dangerous an experiment.”
“But at least you’ll be able to check those dream colors and the tunnels with your geo-scanner?” I pressed on, somewhat crestfallen. “If I can repair it…” he said, his head nodding and slumping to one side. The dying flames were all blue now as he whispered mumblingly, “…if I am permitted to repair it….”
I had to help him to bed and then retire to my own, shaken and unsatisfied, my mind a whirl. Wilmarth’s alternating moods of breezy optimism and a seemingly frightened dejection were hard to adjust to. But now I realized that I was very tired myself—after all, I’d been up most of the previous night reading Innsmouth—and soon I slumbered.
(The voices stridently groan, “The pit of primal life, the Yellow Sign, Azathoth, the Magnum Innominandum, the shimmering violet and emerald wings, the cerulean and vermilion claws, Great Cthulhu’s wasps…” Night has fallen. I have limpingly paced the house from the low attic with its circular portholes to the basement, where I touched my father’s sledge and eyed “The Gate of Dreams.” The moment draws nigh. I must write rapidly.)
I awoke to bright sunlight, feeling totally refreshed by my customary twelve hours of sleep. I found Wilmarth busily writing at the table that faced the north window of his bedroom. His smiling face looked positively youthful in the cool light, despite its neatly brushed thatch of white hair—I hardly recognized him. All his accumulated mail except for one item lay open and face downward on the far left-hand corner of the table, while on the far right-hand corner was an impressive pile of newly written and addressed postcards, each with its neatly affixed, fresh, one-cent stamp.
“Good morrow, Georg,” he greeted me (properly pronouncing it GAY-org), “if I may so address you. And good news!—the scanner is recharged and behaving perfectly, ready for the day’s downward surveying, while that letter George Goodenough forwarded is from Francis Morgan and contains a supply of the drug against tonight’s inward researches! Two dosages exactly—Georg, I’ll dream with you!” He waved a small paper packet.
“That’s wonderful, Albert,” I told him, meaning it utterly. “By the way, it’s my birthday,” I added.
“Congratulations!” he said joyfully. ‘We’ll celebrate it tonight with our drafts of Morgan’s drug.”
And our expedition did turn out to be a glorious one, at least until almost its very end. The Hollywood Hills put on their most youthfully winning face; even the underlying crumbling, wormeaten corruptions seemed fresh. The sun was hot, the sky bright blue, but there was a steady cool breeze from the west and occasional great high white clouds casting enormous shadows. Amazingly, Albert seemed to know the territory almost as well as I did—he’d studied his maps prodigiously and brought them along, including the penciled ones I’d sent him. And he instantly named correctly the manzanita, sumac, scrub oak, and other encroaching vegetation through which we wended our way.
Every so often and especially at my favorite pausing places, he would take readings with the geo-scanner, which he carried handily, while I had two canteens and a small backpack. While his head was under the black hood, I would stand guard, my stick ready. Once I surprised a dark and pinkly pale, fat, large serpent, which went slithering into the underbrush. Before I could tell him, he said correctly, “A king snake, foe of the crotaloids—a good omen.”
And…on every reading, Albert’s black box showed vacuities of some sort—tunnels or caves—immediately below us, at depths varying from a few to a few score meters. Somehow this did not trouble us by bright outdoor day. I think it was what we’d both been expecting. Coming out from under the hood, he’d merely nod and say, “Fifteen meters” (or the like) and note it down in his little book, and we’d tramp on. Once he let me try my luck under the hood, but all I could see through the eyepiece was what seemed like an intensification of the dancing points of colored light one sees in the dark with the eyes closed. He told me it took considerable training to learn to recognize the significant indications.
High in the Santa Monicas we lunched on beef sandwiches and the tea-flavored lemonade with which I’d filled both canteens. Sun and breeze bathed us. Hills were all around and beyond them to the west the blue Pacific. We talked of Sir Francis Drake and Magellan and of Captain Cook and his great circumpolar voyagings, and of the fabulous lands they’d all heard legends of-and of how the tunnels we were tracing were really no more strange. We spoke of Lovecraft’s stories almost as if they were no more than that. Daytime viewpoints can be strangely unworrying and unconcerned.
Halfway back or so, Albert began looking very haggard once more—frighteningly so. I got him to let me carry the black box. To do that I had to abandon my flat backpack and empty canteens—he didn’t seem to notice.
Almost home, we paused at my father’s memorial. The sun had westered most of this way, and there were dark shadows and also shafts of ruddy light almost parallel to the ground. Albert, very weary now, was fumbling for phrases to praise Rodia’s work, when there swiftly glided out of the undergrowth behind him what I first took to be a large rattlesnake. But as I lunged lurchingly toward it, lashing at it with my stick, and as it slid back into thick cover with preternatural rapidity, and as Albert whirled around, the sinuous, vanishing thing looked for an instant to me as if it were all shimmering violet-green above with beating wings and bluish-scarlet below with claws while its minatory rattle was more a skirling hum.
We raced home, not speaking of it at all, each of us concerned only that his comrade not fall behind. Somewhere mine found the strength.
His postcards had been collected from the box by the road and there were a half dozen new letters for him—and a notification of a registered package for me.
Nothing must do then but Albert must drive me down to Hollywood to pick up the package before the post office closed. His face was fearfully haggard, but he seemed suddenly flooded with a fantastic nervous energy and (when I protested that it could hardly be anything of great importance) a tremendous willpower that would brook no opposition.
He drove like a veritable demon and as though the fate of worlds depended on his speed—Hollywood must have thought it was Wallace Reid come back from the dead for another of his transcontinental racing pictures. The Tin Hind fled like a frightened one indeed, as he worked the gear lever smartly, shifting up and down. The wonders were that we weren’t arrested and didn’t crash. But I got to the proper window just before it closed and I signed for the package—a stoutly wrapped, tightly sealed, and heavily corded parcel from (it really startled me) Simon Rodia.
Then back again, just as fast despite my protests, the Tin Hind screeching on the corners and curves, my companion’s face an implacable, watchful death’s-mask, up into the crumbling and desiccated hills as the last streaks of the day faded to violet in the west and the first stars came out.
I forced Albert to rest then and drink hot black coffee freighted with sugar while I got dinner—when he’d stepped out of the car into the chilly night he’d almost fainted. I grilled steaks again—if he’d needed restorative food last night, he needed it doubly now after our exhausting hike and our Dance of Death along the dry, twisting roads, I told him roughly. (“Or Grim Reaper’s Tarantella, eh, Georg?” he responded with a feeble but unvanquishable little grin.) Soon he was prowling around again—he wouldn’t stay still—and peering out the windows and then lugging the geo-scanner down into the basement, “to round out our readings,” he informed me. I had just finished building and lighting
a big fire in the fireplace when he came hurrying back up. Its first white flare of flame as the kindling caught showed me his ashen face and white circled blue eyes. He was shaking all over, literally.
“I’m sorry, Georg, to be such a troublesome and seemingly ungrateful guest,” he said, forcing himself with a great effort to speak coherently and calmly (though most imperatively), “but really you and I must get out of here at once. There’s no place safe for us this side of Arkham—which is not safe either, but there at least we’ll have the counsel and support of salted veterans of the Miskatonic project whose nerves are steadier than mine. Last night I got (and concealed from you—I was sure it had to be wrong) a reading of fifteen down there under the carving—centimeters, Georg, not meters. Tonight I have confirmed that reading beyond any question of a doubt, only it’s shrunk to five under the carving. The floor there is the merest shell—it rings as hollow as a crypt in New Orleans’s St. Louis One or Two—they have been eating at it from below and are feasting still. No, no arguments! You have time to pack one small bag—limit yourself to necessities, but bring that registered parcel from Rodia, I’m curious about it.”
And with that he strode to his bedroom, whence he emerged in a short while with his packed valise and carried it and the black box out to the car.
Meanwhile I’d nerved myself to go down in the basement. The floor did ring much more hollowly than it had last night—it made me hesitate to tread upon it—but otherwise nothing appeared changed. Nevertheless it gave me a curious feeling of unreality, as if there were no real objects left in the world, only flimsy scenery, a few stage properties including a balsa sledgehammer, a registered parcel with nothing in it, and a cyclorama of nighted hills, and two actors.
I hurried back upstairs, took the steaks off the grill and set them on the table in front of the softly roaring fire (for they were done) and headed after Albert.
The Book of Cthulhu 2 Page 43
