The Chinaman’s lower lip trembled convulsively. “I hid back of big white lady.”
In spite of the gravity of the situation Algernon couldn’t repress a smile. The “big white lady” was a statue of Venus Erycine and so enormous was it that it occupied almost the whole of Alcove K. It was a perfect sanctuary, but there was something ludicrously incongruous in a Chinaman’s seeking refuge in such a place.
One of the detectives, however, confirmed the absurdity. “That’s where we found him, sir. He was lying on his back, wailing and groaning and making faces at the ceiling. He’s our man, all right. We’ll have the truth out of him in ten minutes.”
The chief sergeant nodded. “You bet we will. Put the bracelets on him, Jim.”
Reluctantly Algernon surrendered Hsieh Ho to his captors. “I suggest you treat him kindly,” he said. “He had the misfortune to witness a ghastly and unprecedented exaggeration of what Eddington would call the random element in nature. But he’s as destitute of criminal proclivities as Mr. Scollard here.”
The detective raised his eyebrows. “I don’t get it, sir. Are you suggesting we just hold him as a material witness?” Algernon nodded. “If you try any of your revolting third-degree tactics on that poor little man you’ll answer in court to my lawyer. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll have a look at Alcove K.”
The detective scowled. He wanted to tell Algernon to go to hell, but somehow the inflection of authority in the latter’s voice glued the invective to his tongue, and with a surly shrug he escorted the group into the presence of Chaugnar Faugn.
Sanguinary baptism becomes some gods. Were the gracious figures of the Grecian pantheon to appear to us with blood upon their garments we should recoil in horror, but we should think the terrible Mithra or the heart- devouring Huitzilopochitli a trifle unconvincing if they came on our dreams untarnished by the ruddy vintage of sacrifice.
Algernon did not at first look directly at Chaugnar Faugn. He studied the tiled marble floor about the base of the idol and tried to make out in the gloom the precise spot where Cinney had lain. The attempt proved confusing. There were dark smudges on almost every other tile and they were nearly all of equal circumference.
“Right there is where we found the corpse,” said the detective impatiently. “Right beneath the trunk of the elephant.”
Algernon’s blood ran cold. Slowly, very slowly, for he feared to confront what stood before him, he raised his eyes until they were level with the detective’s shoulders. The detective’s shoulders concealed a portion of Chaugnar Faugn, but all of the thing’s right side and the extremity of its trunk were hideously visible to Algernon as he stared. He spoke no word. He did not even move. But all of the blood drained out of his lips, leaving them ashen.
Mr. Scollard was staring at his subordinate with frightened eyes. “You act as though—as though—good God, man, what is it?”
“It has moved its trunk!” Algernon’s voice was vibrant with horror. “It has moved its trunk since—since yesterday. And most hideously. I can not be mistaken. Yesterday it was vertical—today it is in a slightly upraised position.”
Mr. Scollard gasped. “Are you sure?” he muttered. “Are you absolutely certain that the trunk wasn’t in that position when the god arrived here?”
“Yes, yes. Not until today. In the excitement no one has
noticed it, but if you will call the attendants—wait!”
The president had started to do that very thing, but Algernon’s admonition brought him up short. “I shouldn’t have suggested that,” he murmured in Scollard’s ear. “The attendants mustn’t be questioned. It’s all too unutterably ghastly and inexplicable and—and mad. We’ve got to keep it out of the papers, seek a solution secretly. I know someone who may be able to help us. The police can’t. That’s obvious.”
The detective was staring at them pityingly. “You gentlemen better get out of here,” he said. “You aren’t used to sights like this. When I was new at this game I made a lot of mistakes. I could hardly stand the sight of a dead man, for instance. Used to hurry things along when there was no real need for haste, which is just about the worst mistake you can make at the preliminary examination stage.”
With an effort Algernon mastered his agitation. “You’re right, sergeant,” he said. “Mr. Scollard and I realize that this business is a little too disturbing for sane contemplation. So we’ll retire, as you suggest. But I must warn you again that you’d better think twice about treating poor Hsieh Ho as a convicted murderer.”
In the corridor he drew Mr. Scollard aside and conversed for a moment urgently in a low voice. Then he approached the detective and handed him a card. “If you want me within the next few hours you’ll find me at this address,” he said. “Mr. Scollard is returning to his home in Brooklyn. You’ll find his phone number in the directory, but I hope you won’t disturb him unless something really grave turns up.”
The detective nodded and read aloud the address on Algernon’s card. “Dr. Henry C. Imbert, F.R.S., F.A.G.S.”
“A friend of yours?” he asked impertinently.
Algernon nodded. “Yes, sergeant. The foremost American ethnologist. Ever hear of him?”
To Algernon’s amazement the sergeant nodded. “Yes. I got kind of interested in eternalogy once. I was on a queer case about two years ago. An old lady got bumped off by a poisoned arrow and we had him in for a powwow. He’s clever all right. He gave us all the dope soon as he saw the corpse. Said a little negro had done it—one of those African pigmies you read about. We followed up the tip and caught the murderer just as he was giving the little fellow a cyanide cigarette to smoke. He was a shrewd Italian. He got the pigmy in Africa, hid him in a room down on Houston Street and sent him out to rob and bump off old ladies. He was as spry as a monkey and could shinny up a drainpipe on the side of a house in ten seconds. If it hadn’t been for Imbert we’d never have got our hands on the guy that owned him.”
Mr. Scollard and Algernon descended the stairs together. But in the vestibule they parted, the president proceeding down the still crowded outer steps in the direction of a bus whilst Algernon sought his office in Wing W.
“When Imbert sees this,” Algernon murmured, as he extracted a photograph of Chaugnar Faugn from his chaotically littered desk, “he’ll be the most disturbed ethnologist that this planet has harbored since the Pleistocene Age.”
***
3.An Archeological Digression
“The Figure is totally unfamiliar,” said Doctor Imbert. “Nothing even remotely resembling it occurs in Asian or African mythology.”
He scowled and returned the photograph to his youthful visitor, who deposited it on the arm of his chair.
“I confess,” he continued, “that it puzzles and disturbs me. It’s preposterously archeological, if you get what I mean. It isn’t the sort of thing that one would—imagine.”
Harris nodded. “I doubt if I could have imagined it from scratch. Without imaginative prompting or guidance from someone who had actually set eyes on it, it would be very difficult to conceive of anything so—so—”
“Racial,” put in Doctor Imbert. “I believe that is the word you were groping for. That thing is a symbolic embodiment of the massed imaginative heritage of an entire people. It’s a composite—like the Homeric epics or the Sphinx of Giza. It’s the kind of art manifestation you would expect a primitive people to produce collectively. It’s so perversely diabolical and contradictory in conception that one can scarcely conceive of a mere individual anywhere in the world deliberately sitting down and creating it out of his own imagination. I will concede that an unusually gifted artist might be capable of imagining it, but I doubt if such an obscenity would ever form in the human brain without a raison d'tre. And no individual living in a civilized state would experience the need, the desire to imagine such a thing, and least of all, to give it objective expression.
“Mental illness, of course, might account for it, but the so- called interpretative reveries of
psychotics are nearly always of predictable nature. Grotesque and absurd as they, may sometimes be, certain images occur in them again and again and these images are definitely meaningful. They follow prescribed patterns, are crude and distorted representations of familiar objects and people. The morbidities out of which they arise have been studied and classified and a psychiatrist who knows his business can usually decipher them. If you have ever examined a batch of drawings from a mental institution you will have noticed how the same motifs occur repeatedly and how utterly unimaginative such things are from a sane and sophisticated point of view.
“It is of course true that the folk creations of primitive peoples usually embody or symbolize definite human preoccupations, but more boldly and imaginatively, and occasionally they depart from the predictable to such an extent that even our expert is obliged to throw up his hands.
“I have always believed that most of the major and minor monstrosities that figure so conspicuously in the pantheons of barbarian races—feathered serpents, animal-headed priests, grimacing sphinxes, etc., are synthetic conceptions. Let us suppose, for instance, that a tribe of reasonably enlightened barbarians is animated by the unique social impulse of co-operative agriculture and is moved to embody its ideals in some colossal fetish designed to suggest both fertility and brotherhood—in, let us say, a great stone Magna Mater with arms outstretched to embrace all classes and conditions of men. Then let us suppose that co-operative agriculture falls into disrepute and the tribe becomes obsessed by dreams of martial conquest. What happens? To an obbligato of tomtoms and war drums the Mother Goddess is transfigured. A spear is placed between her extended arms, the expression of her face altered from benignity to ferocity, great gashes chiseled in her cheeks, red paint smeared on her arms, breasts and shoulders and her ears lopped off. Let another generation pass and the demoniac goddess of war will be transformed into something else—perhaps into a symbol of the most abandoned kind of debauchery.
“In a hundred years the original fetish will have become a monstrous caricature, a record in stone of the thoughts and emotions of generations of men.
“It is the business of the ethnologist and the archeologist to decipher such records, and if our scientist is sufficiently learned and diligent he can, as you know, supply a reason for every peculiarity of configuration. Competent scholars have traced, in a rough way, the advance or retrogression of racial groups in ethical and esthetic directions merely by studying and comparing their objects of worship and there does not exist a more fruitful science than idolography.
“But occasionally our ethnologist encounters a nut that he cannot crack, a god or goddess so diabolical or grotesque or loathsome in conformation that it is impossible to link it associatively with even the most revolting of tribal retrogressions. It is a notorious fact that human races are less apt to advance than circle back on the course of evolution, and that idols and fetishes that were originally conceived in a comparatively noble spirit very often become, in the course of time, embodiments of the bestial and the obscene. Some of the degraded objects of worship now employed by African bushmen and Australian aborigines may conceivably have been considerably less revolting ten or fifteen thousand years ago. It is impossible to predict the depths to which a race may descend and the appalling transformation which may occur in its ‘sacred’ imagery.
“And so occasionally we encounter shapes that we scarcely like to speculate about, shapes so complicatedly vile that they haven’t even analogous counterparts in comparative mythology. Your fetish is of that nature. It is, as I say, preposterously archeological and it differs unmistakably— although I am willing to concede a superficial resemblance— from the distorted dream images conjured up by psychotics and surrealistic artists. Only racial dissolution and decay extending over wide wastes of years could, in my opinion, account for such a ghastly anomaly.”
He leaned forward and tapped Algernon significantly upon the knee. “You haven’t told me its history,” he admonished. “Reticence is an archeologist’s prerogative, and in our work it is always an asset, but for a young man you’re almost abnormally addicted to it.”
Algernon blushed to the roots of his hair. “I’m seldom actually reticent,” he said. “At the Museum they all think I talk too much. I’ve an exuberant, officious way at times that positively appalls Mr. Scollard. But this affair is so—so outside all normal experience that I’ve been dreading to tax your credulity with a resume of it.”
Doctor Imbert smiled. “Your books reveal that you are a very cautious and honest scholar,” he said. “I don’t believe I’d be inclined to question the veracity of whatever you may choose to tell me.”
“Very well,” said Algernon. “But I must entreat that you suspend judgment until you’ve heard all of the evidence. One can adduce rational explanations for each of the incidents I shall describe, but when one views them in the sequence in which they occurred they resolve themselves into a devastatingly hideous enigma.”
Very tersely, without self-consciousness or affectation, Algernon then related all that he knew and all that he surmised and suspected about the thing whose image spread defilement on the paper before him.
Doctor Imbert heard him out in silence. But his eyes, as he listened, grew bright with horror.
“I doubt if I can help you,” he said, when Algernon was done. “This thing transcends all of my experience.”
There ensued a silence. Then Algernon said in a tone of desperate urgency, “But what are we to do? Surely you’ve something to suggest!”
Doctor Imbert rose shakingly to his feet. “I have—yes. I know someone who can, perhaps, help. He’s a recluse, a psychic—a magnificent intellect obsessed by mysteries and mysticisms. I put little faith in such things—to me it’s a degradation. But I’ll take you to him. I’ll take you anyway. God knows you’re in trouble—that is obvious to me. And this man may be able to suggest something. Roger Little is his name. No doubt you’ve heard of him. He used to be a criminal investigator. A good one—a psychologist—discerning, erudite, shrewd—no mere detective-novel sleuth.” Algernon nodded understandingly. “Let us go to him at once,” he said.
***
4. The Horror On the Hills
It was while Algernon and Doctor Imbert were journeying in the subway toward Roger Little’s residence in the Borough of Queens that the Horror was announced to the world. An account of its initial manifestation had been flashed from Spain at midday to a great American news syndicate and all of the New York papers had something about it in their evening editions. The News-Graphic's account was perhaps the most ominously disturbing in its implications. A copywriter on that enterprising sheet had surmised that the atrocities were distinguished by something outre, something altogether inexplicable, and by choosing his diction with unusual care he had succeeded in conveying to his unappreciative readers a tingling intimation of shockingness, of terror.
Beneath half-inch headlines which read: HIDEOUS MASSACRE IN THE PYRENEES, he had written:
“The authorities are completely baffled. Who would wish to assassinate fourteen simple peasants? They were found at sundown on the mountain’s crest. All in a row they lay, very still, very pale—very silent and pale beneath the soft Spanish sky. All about them stretched new-fallen snow and beside them on the white expanse were marks, peculiar and baffling. Men do not make footprints a yard wide. And why were all the victims laid so evenly in a row? What violence was it that could deprive them of their heads, drain the blood from their bodies and lay them stark and naked in a row upon the snow?”
***
5. Little's Dream
“Someone has been murdered and so you wish my advice,” murmured Roger Little wearily. “You wish the advice of a retired and eccentric recluse, well on in years, who has ceased to traffic with crime. I am quoting from a profile which did not appear in the New Yorker." He was staring into the fire and the bright radiance which streamed roomward from the grate so illumed the sharp outlines of his profile that
Algernon was struck silent with awe.
“A positively Satanic presence,” he murmured, to himself. “The exact facsimile of a sorcerer from the Malleus Maleficarum. They would have burned him in the Fifteenth Century.”
“Murder,” resumed Little, “has become a shabbily synthetic art and even the most daring masterpieces of the contemporary school are composed of inferior ingredients clumsily combined. Men no longer live in fear of the unknown, and that utter and absymal disintegration of soul which the wise still call psychic evil no longer motivates our major atrocities. Anger, jealousy, and a paltry desire for material gain are pitiful emotional substitutes for the perverse and lonely egoism which inspired the great crimes of the Twelfth, Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. When men killed with the deliberate certainty that they were jeopardizing their immortal souls and when the human body was regarded as a tabernacle for something more—or less— than human the crime of murder assumed epic and unholy proportions. The mere discovery of a mutilated cadaver in an age when men still believed in something—at least in something—filled everyone with terror and with awe. Men, women and children took refuge behind barricaded doors and the more devout fell upon their knees, crossed themselves, lighted candles and chanted exorcisms.
“But in this decadent age when a human being is assassinated society merely shrugs it's shoulders and relinquishes the sequel to the police. What have the police to do with a sacrament of evil in our midst? The sense of virtually immitigable evil, of stark unreasoning fear which murder once left in its wake, and the intense esthetic enjoyment which certain individuals derived from merely studying such crimes as works of perverse and diabolical art have no parallels in contemporary experience. Hence it is that all modern murderers commit commonplace crimes—kill prosaically and almost indifferently without any suspicion that they are destroying more than lives of their unfortunate victims. And people go calmly about their business and are apparently not displeased to rub shoulders with the unholy ones in theaters, restaurants and subways!”
Mythos and Horror Stories Page 10
