I fairly screamed into the receiver. "Courage, man! Do not let them suspect that you are afraid. Make the sign again and again. I will come at once."
Howard's voice came again, more hoarsely this time. "The shape is growing clearer and clearer. And there is nothing I can do! Frank, I have lost the power to make the sign. I have forfeited all right to the protection of the sign. I've become a priest of the Devil. That story—I should not have written that story."
"Show them that you are unafraid!" I cried.
"I'll try! I'll try! Ah, my God! The shape is..."
I did not wait to hear more. Frantically seizing my hat and coat, I dashed down the stairs and out into the street. As I reached the curb a dizziness seized me. I clung to a lamp-post to keep from falling, and waved my hand madly at a fleeing taxi. Luckily the driver saw me. The car stopped, and I staggered out into the street and climbed into it.
"Quick!" I shouted. "Take me to 10 Brooklyn Heights!"
"Yes, sir. Cold night, ain't it?"
"Cold!" I shouted. "It will be cold indeed when they get in. It will be cold indeed when they start to..."
The driver stared at me in amazement. "That's all right, sir," he said. "We'll get you home all right, sir. Brooklyn Heights, did you say, sir?"
"Brooklyn Heights," I groaned, and collapsed against the cushions.
As the car raced forward I tried not to think of the horror that awaited me. I clutched desperately at straws. It is conceivable, I thought, that Howard has gone temporarily insane. How could the horror have found him among so many millions of people} It cannot be that they have deliberately sought him out. It cannot be that they would deliberately choose him from among such multitudes. He is too insignificant—all human beings are too insignificant. They would never deliberately angle for human beings. They would never deliberately trawl for human beings—but they did seek Henry Wells. And what did Howard say ("I have become a priest of the Devil." Why not their priest! What if Howard has become their priest on Earth) What if his story has made him their priest!
The thought was a nightmare to me, and I put it furiously from me. He will have courage to resist them, I thought. He will show them that he is not afraid. "Here we are, sir. Shall I help you in, sir?"
The car had stopped, and I groaned as I realized that I was about to enter what might prove to be my tomb. I descended to the sidewalk and handed the driver all the change that I possessed. He stared at me in amazement.
"You've given me too much," he said. "Here, sir..."
But I waved him aside and dashed up the stoop of the house before me. As I fitted a key into the door I could hear him muttering: "Craziest drunk I ever seen! He gives me four bucks to drive him ten blocks, and doesn't want no thanks or nothin'..."
The lower hall was unlighted. I stood at the foot of the stairs and shouted. "I'm here, Howard! Can you come down?"
There was no answer. I waited for perhaps ten seconds, but not a sound came from the room above.
"I'm coming up!" I shouted in desperation, and started to climb the stairs. I was trembling all over. They've got him, I thought. I'm too late. Perhaps I had better not—great God, what was that!
I was unbelievably terrified. There was no mistaking the sounds. In the room above, someone was volubly pleading and crying aloud in agony. Was it Howard's voice that I heard? I caught a few words indistinctly. "Crawling—ugh! Crawling—ugh! Oh, have pity! Cold and clear. Crawling—ugh! God in heaven!"
I had reached the landing, and when the pleadings rose to hoarse shrieks I fell to my knees, and made against my body, and upon the wall beside me, and in the air—the sign. I made the primal sign that had saved us in Mulligan Wood, but this time I made it crudely, not with fire, but with fingers that trembled and caught at my clothes, and I made it without courage or hope, made it darkly, with a conviction that nothing could save me.
And then I got up quickly and went on up the stairs. My prayer was that they would take me quickly, that my sufferings should be brief under the stars.
The door of Howard's room was ajar. By a tremendous effort I stretched out my hand and grasped the knob. Slowly I swung it inward.
For a moment I saw nothing but the motionless form of Howard lying upon the floor. He was lying upon his back. His knees were drawn up and he had raised his hand before his face, palms outward, as if to blot out a vision unspeakable.
Upon entering the room I had deliberately, by lowering my eyes, narrowed my range of vision. I saw only the floor and the lower section of the room. I did not want to raise my eyes. I had lowered them in self-protection because I dreaded what the room held.
I did not want to raise my eyes, but there were forces, powers at work in the room, which I could not resist. I knew that if I looked up, the horror might destroy me, but I had no choice.
Slowly, painfully, I raised my eyes and stared across the room. It would have been better, I think, if I had rushed forward immediately and surrendered to the thing that towered there. The vision of that terrible, darkly shrouded shape will come between me and the pleasures of the world as long as I remain in the world.
From the ceiling to the floor it towered, and it threw off blinding light. And pierced by the shafts, whirling around and around, were the pages of Howard's story.
In the center of the room, between the ceiling and the floor, the pages whirled about, and the light burned through the sheets, and descending in spiraling shafts entered the brain of my poor friend. Into his head, the light was pouring in a continuous stream, and above, the Master of the light moved with a slow swaying of its entire bulk. I screamed and covered my eyes with my hands, but still the Master moved—back and forth, back and forth. And still the light poured into the brain of my friend.
And then there came from the mouth of the Master a most awful sound. ... I had forgotten the sign that I had made three times below in the darkness. I had forgotten the high and terrible mystery before which all of the invaders were powerless. But when I saw it forming itself in the room, forming itself immaculately, with a terrible integrity above the downstreaming light, I knew that I was saved.
I sobbed and fell upon my knees. The light dwindled, and the Master shriveled before my eyes.
And then from the walls, from the ceiling, from the floor, there leapt flame—a white and cleansing flame that consumed, that devoured and destroyed forever.
But my friend was dead.
The Horror from the Hills
***
1. The Coming of the Stone Beast
In a long, low-ceilinged room adorned with Egyptian, Graeco-Roman, Minoan and Assyrian antiquities a thin, careless-seeming young man of twenty-six sat jubilantly humming. As nothing in his appearance or manner suggested the scholar—he wore gray tweeds of Ivy League cut, a pin-striped blue shirt with a buttoned-down collar and a ridiculously brilliant necktie—the uninitiated were inclined to regard him as a mere supernumerary in his own office. Strangers entered unannounced and called him “young man” at least twenty times a week, and he was frequently asked to convey messages to a non-existent superior. No one suspected, no one dreamed until he enlightened them, that he was the lawful custodian of the objects about him; and even when he revealed his identity people surveyed him with distrust and were inclined to suspect that he was ironically pulling their legs.
Algernon Harris was the young man’s name and postgraduate degrees from Yale and Oxford set him distinctly apart from the undistinguished majority. But it is to his credit that he never paraded his erudition, nor succumbed to the impulse—almost irresistible in a young man with academic affiliations—to put a Ph. D. on the title page of his first book.
It was this book which had endeared him to the directors of the Manhattan Museum of Fine Arts and prompted their unanimous choice of him to succeed the late Halpin Chalmers as Curator of Archeology when the latter retired in the fall of the previous year.
In less than six months young Harris had exhaustively familiarized himself with the duties
and responsibilities of his office and was becoming the most successful curator that the museum had ever employed. So boyishly ebullient was he, so consumed with investigative zeal, that his field workers contracted his enthusiasm as though it were a kind of fever and sped from his presence to trust their scholarly and highly cultivated lives to the most primitive of native tribes in regions where an outsider was still looked upon with suspicion, and was always in danger of bringing down the thunder.
And now they were coming back—for days now they had been coming back—occasionally with haggard faces, and once or twice, unfortunately, with something radically wrong with them. The Symons tragedy was a case in point. Symons was a Chang Dynasty specialist, and he had been obliged to leave his left eye and a piece of his nose in a Buddhist temple near a place called Fen Chow Fu. But when Algernon questioned him he could only mumble something about a small malignant face with corpsy eyes that had glared and glared at him out of a purple mist. And Francis Hogarth lost eighty pounds and a perfectly good right arm somewhere between Lake Rudolph and Naivasha in the Anglo Egyptian Sudan.
But a few inexplicable and hence, from a scientific point of view, unfortunate occurrances were more than compensated for by the archeological treasures that the successful explorers brought back and figuratively dumped at Algernon’s feet. There were mirrors of Graeco-Bactrian design and miniature tiger-dragons or too-tiehs from Central China dating from at least 200 B.C., enormous diorite Sphinxes from the Valley of the Nile, “Geometric” vases from Mycenaean Crete, incised pottery from Messina and Syracuse, linens and spindles from the Swiss Lakes, sculptured lintels from Yucatan and Mexico, Mayan and Manabi monoliths ten feet tall, Paleolithic Venuses from the rock caverns of the Pyrenees, and even a series of rare bilingual tablets in Hamitic and Latin from the site of Carthage.
It is not surprising that so splendid a garnering should have elated Algernon immoderately and impelled him to behave like a college junior at a fraternity-house jamboree. He addressed the attendants by their names, slapped them boisterously upon their shoulders whenever they had occasion to approach him, and went roaming haphazardly about the building immersed in ecstatic reveries. So far indeed did he descend from his pedestal that even the directors were disturbed, and it is doubtful if anything short of the arrival of Clark Ulman could have jolted him out of it.
Ulman may have been aware of this, for he telephoned first to break the news mercifully. He had apparently heard of the success of the other expeditions and hated infernally to intrude his skeleton at the banquet. Algernon, as we have seen, was humming, and the jingling of a phone-bell at his elbow was the first intimation he had of Ulman’s return. Hastily detaching the receiver he pressed it against his ear and injected a staccato “What is it?’ into the mouthpiece.
There ensued a silence. Then Ulman’s voice, disconcertingly shrill, forced him to hold the receiver a little further from his ear. “I’ve got the god, Algernon, and I’ll be over with it directly. I’ve three men helping me. It’s four feet high and as heavy as granite. Oh, it’s a strange, loathsome thing, Algernon. An unholy thing. I shall insist that you destroy it!"
“What’s that?” Algernon raised his voice incredulously.
“You may photograph it and study it, but you’ve got to destroy it. You’ll understand when you see what—what I have become!"
There came a hoarse sobbing, whilst Algernon struggled to comprehend what the other was driving at.
“It has wreaked its malice on me—on me…”
With a frown Algernon re-cradled the receiver and began agitatedly to pace the room. “The elephant-god of Tsang!" he muttered to himself. “The horror Richardson drew before—before they impaled him. It’s unbelievable. Ulman has crossed the desert plateau on foot—he’s crossed above the graves of Steelbrath, Talman, McWilliams, Henley and Holmes. Richardson swore the cave was guarded night and day by hideous yellow abnormalities. I’m sure that’s the phrase he used—abnormalities without faces—subhuman worshippers only vaguely manlike, in thrall to some malign wizardry. He averred they moved in circles about the idol on their hands and knees, and participated in a rite so foul that he dared not describe it.
"His escape was a sheer miracle. He had displayed extraordinary courage and endurance when they had tortured him, and it was merely because they couldn’t kill him that the priest was impressed. A man who can curse valiantly after three days of agonizing torture must of necessity be a great magician and wonder-worker. But it couldn’t have happened twice. Ulman could never have achieved such a break. He is too frail—a day on their cross would have finished him. They would never have released him and decked him out with flowers and worshipped him as a sort of subsidiary elephant-god. Richardson predicted that no other white man would ever get into the cave alive. And as for getting out...
“I can’t imagine how Ulman did it. If he encountered even a few of Richardson’s beast-men it isn’t surprising he broke down on the phone. ‘Destroy the statue!’ Imagine! Sheer insanity, that. Ulman is evidently in a highly nervous and excitable state and we shall have to handle him with gloves.”
There came a knock at the door.
“I don’t wish to be disturbed,” shouted Algernon irritably.
“We’ve got a package for you, sir. The doorman said for us to bring it up here.”
“Oh, all right. I’ll sign for it.”
The door swung wide and in walked three harshly- breathing, shabbily dressed men staggering beneath a heavy burden.
“Put it down there,” said Algernon, indicating a spot to the rear of his desk.
The men complied with a celerity that amazed him.
“Did Mr. Ulman send you?” he demanded curtly.
“Yes, sir.” The spokesman’s face had formed into a molding of relief. “The poor guy said he’d be here himself in half an hour.”
Algernon started. “What kind of talk is that?” he demanded. “He doesn’t happen to be a ‘guy’ but I’ll pretend you didn’t say it. Why the ‘poor’? That’s what I’m curious about.”
The spokesman shuffled his feet. “It’s on account of his face. There’s something wrong with it. He keeps it covered and won’t let nobody look at it.”
“Good God!” murmured Algernon. “They’ve mutilated him!”
“What’s that, sir? What did you say?”
Algernon collected himself with an effort. “Nothing. You may go now. The doorman will give you a dollar. I’ll phone down and tell him.”
Silently the men filed out. As soon as the door closed behind them Algernon strode into the center of the room and began feverishly to strip the wrappings from the thing on the floor. He worked with manifest misgivings, the distaste in his eyes deepening to disgust and horror as the massive idol came into view.
Words could not adequately convey the repulsiveness of the thing. It was endowed with a trunk and great, uneven ears, and two enormous tusks protruded from the corners of its mouth. But it was not an elephant. Indeed, its resemblance to an actual elephant was, at best, sporadic and superficial, despite certain unmistakable points of similarity. The ears were webbed and tentacled, the trunk terminated in a huge flaring disk at least a foot in diameter, and the tusks, which intertwined and interlocked at the base of the statute, were as translucent as rock crystal.
The pedestal upon which it squatted was of black onyx: the statue itself, with the exception of the tusks, had apparently been chiseled from a single block of stone, and was so hideously mottled and eroded and discolored that it looked, in spots, as though it had been dipped in sanies.
The thing sat bolt upright. Its forelimbs were bent stiffly at the elbow, and its hands—it had human hands—rested palms upward on its lap. Its shoulders were broad and square and its breasts and enormous stomach sloped outward, cushioning the trunk. It was as quiescent as a Buddha, as enigmatical as a sphinx, and as malignantly poised as a gorgon or cockatrice. Algernon could not identify the stone out of which it had been hewn, and its greenish sheen dis
turbed and puzzled him.
For a moment he stood staring uncomfortably into its little malign eyes. Then he shivered, and taking down a woolen scarf from the coatrack in the corner he cloaked securely the features which repelled him.
Ulman arrived unannounced. He advanced unobtrusively into the room and laid a tremulous hand on Algernon’s shoulder. “Well, Algernon, how are you?” he murmured. “I—I’m glad to get back. Just to see—an old friend—is a comfort. I thought—but, well it doesn’t matter. I was going to ask—to ask if you knew a good physician, but perhaps— I—I…
Startled, Algernon glanced backward over his shoulder and straight into the other’s eyes. He saw only the eyes, for the rest of Ulman’s face was muffled by a black silk scarf. “Clark!” he exclaimed. “By God, but you gave me a start!” Rising quickly, he sent his chair spinning against the wall and gripped his friend affectionately by the shoulders. “It’s good to see you again, Clark,” he said, with a warm cordiality in his voice. “It’s good—why, what’s the matter?” Ulman had fallen upon his knees and was choking and gasping for breath.
“I should have warned you not to touch me,” he moaned. “I can’t stand—being touched.”
“But why...”
“The wounds haven’t healed,” he sobbed, "It doesn’t want them to heal. Every night it comes and lays—the disk on them. I can’t stand being touched.”
Algernon nodded sympathetically. “I can imagine what you’ve been through, Clark,” he said. “You must take a vacation. I’ll have a talk with the directors about you tomorrow. In view of what you’ve done for us I’m sure I can get you at least four months. You can go to Spain and finish your Glimpses into Pre-History. Paleontological anthropology is a soothing science, Clark. You’ll forget all about the perplexities of mere archeological research when you start poking about among bones and artifacts that haven’t been disturbed since the Pleistocene.”
Ulman had gotten to his feet and was staring at the opposite wall.
Mythos and Horror Stories Page 6
