I rushed over and helped shove the wardrobe towards the door. 'There's something living out there!' I gasped.
Cartwright looked half-relieved, half-disgusted. 'It's the thing from the picture,' he said breathlessly. 'I saw it before, when I went outside. You've got to look into the lake at a certain angle, otherwise you can't see anything. Down on the bottom, among the weeds — stagnant water, everything dead, except… There's a city down there, all black spiralling steeples and walls at obtuse angles with the streets. Dead things lying on the streets — they died with the journey through space — they're horrible, hard, shiny, all red and covered with bunches of trumpet-shaped things… And right at the centre of the city is a transparent trapdoor. Glaaki's under there, pulsing and staring up — I saw the eye-stalks move towards me—' His voice trailed off.
I followed his gaze. He was looking at the front door; and, as I watched, the door bulged inward from pressure from outside. The hinge-screws were visibly tearing free of the door frame. That alien throbbing cry sounded somehow triumphant.
'Quick, upstairs!' Cartwright shouted. 'Can't get the wardrobe there now — upstairs, I'll follow you.'
I was nearest the stairs, and jumped for them. Halfway up I heard a rending crash behind me, and turning I saw with horror that Cartwright was not behind me. He was standing by the hall table, clutching the hatchet.
Through the front door came the dead servants of Glaaki, skeletal arms outstretched to grab him. And behind them a shape towered, pulsing and shaking with deafening vibration. The dead ones were only a few feet from Cartwright when he ran — straight into their midst. Their arms swung slowly in ineffectual attempts to stop him. He reached the front door, but at that moment one of them stepped in front of him. Cartwright did not stop; he swung the hatchet-blade up between its legs until it cut free.
Now he was beyond the slowly turning corpses, and he plunged towards the pulsing shape of Glaaki. A spine stiffened towards him. As he ran on to the point of the spine Cartwright brought the hatchet down and severed it from the body. The throbbing became a discordant shrieking, and the oval body thrashed in agony back into the lake. The dead creatures made purposeless movements for a while, then shuffled away towards the trees. Cartwright, meanwhile, had fallen on the pavement and did not move. I could stand no more; I rushed into the first upstairs room and locked the door.
The next morning, when I was sure it was daylight, I left the house. Outside I picked up Cartwright's body and left it in the front seat of the car. I did not look back at what lay near the front door; the walking corpse he had destroyed. It had been exposed to daylight. I managed not to vomit until I reached the car. Some time passed before I was able to begin walking to Brichester.
The police did not believe all I told them. The bookcase had gone from the back of the car, and nothing could be seen among the trees — or in the lake, though this was too deep to be dragged. The estate agent on Bold Street could tell them nothing of a 'haunting' of the lake. There was the painting in the car — a painting which has since been pronounced Cartwright's most powerful — but it was only the product of an artist's imagination. Of course, there was that metal spine embedded in his chest, but that could have been an ingeniously contrived murder weapon.
When I had the Brichester University professors examine the spine, however, the results were very different. The case was hushed up in the newspapers, and while the professors have not yet got a permit to fill the lake in, they agree with me that something very strange happened that night in the hollow. For the spine, with its central orifice running through it, was formed not only of a metal completely unknown on this planet; that metal had recently been composed of living cells.
The Plain of Sound
Verily do we know little of the other universes beyond the gate which YOG-SOTHOTH guards. Of those which come through the gate and make their habitation in this world none can tell; although Ibn Schacabao tells of the beings which crawl from the Gulf of S'glhuo that they may be known by their sound. In that Gulf the very worlds are of sound, and matter is known but as an odor; and the notes of our pipes in this world may create beauty or bring forth abominations in S'glhuo. For the barrier between haply grows thin, and when sourceless sounds occur we may justly look to the denizens of S'glhuo. They can do little harm to those of Earth, and fear only that shape which a certain sound may form in their universe.
Abdul Alhazred: Necronomicon
* * *
When Frank Nuttall, Tony Roles, and I reached the Inn at Severnford, we found that it was closed. It was summer of 1958, and as we had nothing particular to do at Brichester University that day we had decided to go out walking. I had suggested a trip to Goatswood — the legends there interested me — but Tony had heard things which made him dislike that town. Then Frank had told us about an advertisement in the Brichester Weekly News about a year back which had referred to an inn at the centre of Severnford as "one of the oldest in England." We could walk there in the morning and quench the thirst caused by the journey; afterward we could take the bus back to Brichester if we did not feel like walking.
Tony was not enthusiastic. "Why go all that way to get drunk," he inquired, "even if it is so old? Besides, that ad in the paper's old too — by now the place has probably fallen down?" However, Frank and I wanted to try it, and finally we overruled his protests.
We would have done better to agree with him, for we found the inn's doors and windows boarded up and a nearby sign saying: "Temporarily closed to the public." The only course was to visit the modern public house up the street. We looked round the town a little; this did not occupy us long, for Severnford has few places of interest, most of it being dockland. Before two o'clock we were searching for a bus-stop; when it eluded us, we entered a newsagent's for directions.
"Bus t' Brichester? No, only in the mornin's," the proprietor told us. "Up from the University, are you?"
"Then how do we get back?" Tony asked.
"Walk, I s'pose," suggested the newsagent. "Why'd you come up anyway — oh, t'look at the Inn? No, you won't get in there now — so many o' them bloody teenagers've been breakin' the winders an' such that Council says it'll only open t' people with special permission. Good job, too — though I'm not sayin' as it's kids like you as does it. Still, you'll be wantin' t' get back t' Brichester, an' I know the shortest way."
He began to give us complicated directions, which he repeated in detail. When we still looked uncertain he waited while Frank got out notebook and pencil and took down the route. At the end of this I was not yet sure which way to go, but, as I remarked: "If we get lost, we can always ask."
"Oh, no," protested our informant. "You won't go wrong if you follow that."
"Right, thanks," Frank said. "And I suppose there will be passers-by to ask if we do go wrong?"
"I wouldn't." The newsagent turned to rearrange papers in the rack. "You might ask the wrong people."
Hearing no more from him, we went out into the street and turned right toward Brichester. Once one leaves behind the central area of Severnford where a group of archaic buildings is preserved, and comes to the surrounding red-brick houses, there is little to interest the sight-seer. Much of Severnford is dockland, and even the country beyond is not noticeably pleasant to the forced hiker. Besides, some of the roads are noticeably rough, though that may have been because we took the wrong turning — for, an hour out of Severnford, we realised we were lost.
"Turn left at the signpost about a mile out, it says here," said Frank. "But we've come more than a mile already — where's the signpost?"
"So what do we do — go back and ask?" Tony suggested.
"Too far for that. Look," Frank asked me, "have you got that compass you're always carrying, Les? Brichester is almost southeast of Severnford. If we keep on in that direction, we won't go far wrong."
The road we had been following ran east-west. Now, when we turned off into open country, we could rely only on my compass, and we soon found that we neede
d it. Once, when ascending a slope, we had to detour round a thickly overgrown forest, where we would certainly have become further lost. After that we crossed monotonous fields, never seeing a building or another human being. Two and a half hours out of Severnford, we reached an area of grassy hillocks, and from there descended into and clambered out of miniature valleys. About half-a-mile into this region, Tony signalled us to keep quiet.
"All I can hear is the stream," said Frank. "Am I supposed to hear something important? You hear anything, Les?"
The rushing stream we had just crossed effectively drowned most distant sounds, but I thought I heard a nearby mechanical whirring. It rose and fell like the sound of a moving vehicle, but with the loudly splashing water I could distinguish no details.
"I'm not sure," I answered. "There's something that could be a tractor, I think—"
"That's what I thought," agreed Tony. "It's ahead somewhere — maybe the driver can direct us. If, of course, he's not one of that newsagent's wrong people!"
The mechanical throbbing loudened as we crossed two hills and came onto a strip of level ground fronting a long, low ridge. I was the first to reach the ridge, climb it and stand atop it. As my head rose above the ridge, I threw myself back.
On the other side lay a roughly square plain, surrounded by four ridges. The plain was about four hundred yards square, and at the opposite side was a one-story building. Apart from this the plain was totally bare, and that was what startled me most. For from that bare stretch of land rose a deafening flood of sound. Here was the source of that mechanical whirring; it throbbed overpoweringly upward, incessantly fluctuating through three notes. Behind it were other sounds; a faint bass humming which hovered on the edge of audibility, and others — whistling and high-pitched twangs which sometimes were inaudible and sometimes as loud as the whirring.
By now Tony and Frank were beside me, staring down.
"Surely it can't be coming from that hut?" Frank said. "It's no tractor, that's certain, and a hut that size could never contain anything that'd make that row."
"I thought it was coming from underground somewhere," suggested Tony. "Mining operations, maybe."
"Whatever it is, there's that hut," I said. "We can ask the way there."
Tony looked down doubtfully. "I don't know — it might well be dangerous. You know driving over subsidence can be dangerous, and how do we know they're not working on something like that here?"
"There'd be signs if they were," I reassured him. "No, come on — there may be nowhere else we can ask, and there's no use keeping on in the wrong direction."
We descended the ridge and walked perhaps twenty yards across the plain.
It was like walking into a tidal wave. The sound was suddenly all around us; the more overpowering because though it beat on us from all sides, we could not fight back — like being engulfed in jelly. I could not have stood it for long — I put my hands over my ears and yelled "Run!" And I staggered across the plain, the sound which I could not shut out booming at me, until I reached the building on the other side.
It was a brown stone house, not a hut as we had thought. It had an arched doorway in the wall facing us, bordered by two low windows without curtains. From what we could see the room on the left was the living-room, that on the right a bedroom, but grime on the windows prevented us from seeing more, except that the rooms were unoccupied. We did not think to look in any windows at the back. The door had no bell or knocker, but Frank pounded on a panel.
There was no answer and he knocked harder. On the second knock the door swung open, revealing that it opened into the living-room. Frank looked in and called: "Anybody at home?" Still nobody answered, and he turned back to us.
"Do you think we'd better go in?" he asked. "Maybe we could wait for the owner, or there might be something in the house that'd direct us."
Tony pushed past me to look. "Hey, what — Frank, do you notice anything here? Something tells me that whoever the owner is, he isn't house-proud."
We could see what he meant. There were wooden chairs, a table, bookcases, a ragged carpet — and all thick with dust. We hesitated a minute, waiting for someone to make a decision; then Frank entered. He stopped inside the door and pointed. Looking over his shoulder we could see there were no footprints anywhere in the dust.
We looked round for some explanation. While Frank closed the door and cut off the throbbing from outside, Tony — our bibliophile — crossed to the bookcases and looked at the spines. I noticed a newspaper on the table and idly picked it up.
"The owner must be a bit peculiar… La Strega, by Pico della Mirandola," Tony read, " — Discovery of Witches — The Red Dragon—hey, Revelations of Glaaki; isn't that the book the University can't get for their restricted section? Here's a diary, big one, too, but I hadn't better touch that."
When I turned to the front page of the newspaper, I saw it was the Camside Observer. As I looked closer, I saw something which made me call the others. "Look at this — December 8, 1930! You're right about this man being peculiar — what sort of person keeps a newspaper for twenty-eight years?"
"I'm going to look in the bedroom," Frank declared. He knocked on the door off the living-room, and, when we came up beside him, opened it. The room was almost bare: a wardrobe, a hanging wall-mirror, and a bed, were the only furnishings. The bed, as we had expected, was empty; but the mark of a sleeping body was clearly defined, though filled with dust. We moved closer, noting the absence of footprints on the floor; and bending over the bed, I thought I saw something besides dust in the hollows left by the sleeper — something like ground glass, sparkling greenly.
"What's happened?" Tony asked in a rather frightened tone.
"Oh, probably nothing out of the ordinary," said Frank. "Maybe there's another entrance round the back — maybe he can't stand all the noise, whatever it is, and has a bedroom on the other side. Look, there's a door in that wall; that may be it."
I went across and opened it, but only a very primitive lavatory lay beyond.
"Wait a minute, I think there was a door next to the bookcase," recollected Tony. He returned to the living-room and opened the door he had noticed. As we followed him, he exclaimed: "My God—now what?"
The fourth room was longer than any of the others, but it was the contents that had drawn Tony's exclamation. Nearest us on the bare floor was something like a television screen, about two feet across, with a blue-glass light bulb behind it, strangely distorted and with thick wires attached. Next to it another pair of wires led from a megaphone-shaped receiver. In between the opposite wall and these instruments lay a strange arrangement of crystals, induction coils, and tubes, from which wires hung at each end for possible attachment to the other appliances. The far corner of the ceiling had recently collapsed, allowing rain to drip onto a sounding-board carrying a dozen strings, a large lever and a motor connected by cogs to a plectrum-covered cylinder. Out of curiosity I crossed and plucked a string; but such a discord trembled through the board that I quickly muffled it.
"Something very funny is going on here," Frank said. "There's no other room, so where can he sleep? And the dust, and the newspaper — and now these things — I've never seen anything like them?"
"Why don't we look at his diary?" suggested Tony. "It doesn't look like he'll be back, and I for one want to know what's happened here."
So we went back into the living-room and Tony took down the heavy volume. He opened it to its last entry: December 8,1930. "If we all try and read it, it'll take three times as long," he said. "You two sit down and I'll try and read you the relevant bits." He was silent for a few minutes, then:
"Professor Arnold Hird, ex-Brichester University: never heard of him — must've been before our time.
"Ah here we are—
" 'January 3, 1930: Today moved into new house (if it can be called a house!). Noises are queer — suppose it's only because there's so much superstition about them that nobody's investigated before. Intend to make full study
— meteorological conditions, &c: feel that winds blowing over ridges may vibrate and cause sounds. Tomorrow to look round, take measurements, find out if anything will interrupt sounds. Peculiar that sound seems to be deafening in certain radius, relatively faint beyond — no gradual fading.'
" 'January 4: Sleep uneasy last night — unaccustomed dreams. City on great mountain — angled streets, spiraling pillars and cones. Strange inhabitants; taller than human, scaly skin, boneless fingers, yet somehow not repulsive. Were aware of me, in fact seemed to await my arrival, but each time one approached me I awoke. Repeated several times.
" 'Progress negative. Screens on top of ridges did not interrupt sound; undiminished though little wind. Measurements — northwest ridge 423 yards?' Well, there's a lot more like that."
"Make sure you don't miss anything important," Frank said as Tony turned pages.
" 'January 6: Dreams again. Same city, figures as though waiting. Leader approached. Seemed to be communicating with me telepathically: I caught the thought—Do not be afraid; we are the sounds. Whole scene faded.
" 'No progress whatever. Unable to concentrate on findings; dreams distracting.'
" 'January 7: Insane perhaps, but am off to British Museum tomorrow. In last night's dream was told: Check Necronomicon — formula for aiding us to reach you. Page reference given. Expect and hope this will be false alarm — dreams taking altogether too much out of me. But what if something on that page? Am not interested in that field — impossible to know in normal way?'
" 'January 9: Back from London. Mao rite — on page I looked up — exactly as described in dream! Don't know what it will do, but will perform it tonight to find out. Strange no dreams while away — some influence existing only here?'
" 'January 10: Didn't wake till late afternoon. Dreams began as soon as sleep after rite. Don't know what to think. Alternatives both disturbing: either brain receiving transmission, or subconsciously inventing everything — but wd. sane mind act thus?
The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants Page 14
